Measuring and Assessing Perceptions of Success in a Transit Agency's Stakeholder Involvement Program

Stakeholder involvement is often a legally required activity for transit agencies. Optimally this process begins at the earliest stages of any given project and involves two-way communication and interaction that can be reflected in the resulting plans or project designs. Despite federal statutes and regulations mandating meaningful public input for federal capital funding consideration, approaches to fulfill these mandates successfully remain difficult, and stakeholder involvement practices often fail to have a deep impact on planning outcomes. A gap often exists between implementation plans and the satisfaction of stakeholders. Guided by prior research and applying cognitive mapping methods, this study uses a rail line reconstruction project of the Chicago Transit Authority in Illinois as a case study to systematically understand the gap in expectations and interpretations of success among stakeholders. Findings identify four important categories of goal nonalignment that act as barriers to optimal interaction that can lead to mistrust. Conclusions identify potential solutions for bridging the gaps

Shaping of Strategic Behavior: Global Practices of Listing on the US NASDAQ Stock Exchange

This article suggests that by explicitly addressing issues of the macro environment, scholars will be better able to understand and predict strategic behavior. A wide range of macro-environmental forces affects firm behavior. Economic factors have been widely discussed in the literature but less attention has been paid to other critical exogenous forces. In particular, the role of wider systems of meaning (shared understandings by a variety of actors) in determining firm activity is largely ignored, although they have been discussed in the organizations literature in a variety of ways. Specifically, we examine the effects of national culture, legal system, political system, and colonial heritage level variables on the equity acquisition process by countries with firms listed on the United States NASDAQ stock exchange from 1991 to 2002. We find that combining perspectives and using variables from the macro-environment allows us to better predict and understand firm strategy