Kenneth W. Hollman

Turnover: The Real Bottom Line

Turnover is the rotation of workers around the labor market; between firms, jobs, and occupations; and between the states of employment and unemployment.1 “In-house engineering,” “revolving door policy,” and “management by turnover,” are a few of the many colorful and euphemistic terms used to describe this organizational phenomenon. By whatever name or form, labor turnover is one of the most significant causes of declining productivity and sagging morale in both the public and private sectors. Management theorists say it lies behind the failure of U. S. employee productivity to keep pace with foreign competition.2

Business Success in the Middle East

The Middle East has been overlooked by American companies as a region in which to explore market opportunities. Suggests that this is largely due to ignorance of, and bias towards, the culture and politics of the Middle East. Discusses aspects of Middle East culture and situational determinants which American companies would be wise to assimilate and suggests practices to carry out or avoid when attempting to form business relationships in the Middle East.

Dissent: An Important but Neglected Factor in Decision Making

Unless the question of decision making is encouraged disasters can occur. Several examples of bad decisions which have been compounded by a lack of dissent are outlined – from President Reagan′s “Irangate” scandal to the Ford Pinto to Coca‐Cola′s failed “New Coke”. Eight recommendations are made for encouraging dissent in decision making.

The Structure and Disciplinary Boundaries of Insurance: A Citational Analysis of JRI Articles

This paper provides a description of the nature, trends, and changing patterns of references cited in the Journal of Risk and Insurance (JRI) in three sample volumes: 1980, 1984, and 1988. Findings reveal that (1) over one-half of the references in the JRI are from noninsurance fields (primarily finance and economics), (2) journals are the most frequently cited communications media, and (3) authors of JRI articles cite it more than any other journal. An important conclusion is that insurance is a still emerging field without a strong identity or a strong bonding between the contributors to its literature. Scholars in the field of insurance often discuss and debate the structure and boundaries of their discipline. To a large extent, these introspective contributions have been of the normative-polemic type based on subjective views and casual empiricism. Participants in these discourses have shown little interest in factual evaluation of insurance source literature to ascertain the structure of the discipline and the changes that have taken place therein. In the matter of developing literature on the origins of its research, insurance is lagging behind other business disciplines. For example, the disciplines of accounting, marketing, economics, and finance have developed a research tradition based on analyses of research contributions of different authors, institutions, and forms of communication. Several citational analysis research articles have been reported in the top journals of each of these fields. This genre of articles has yielded valuable information about the structure and boundaries of the respective disciplines (see all references).