And then came complex project management (revised)

The subject of management is renowned for its addiction to fads and fashions. Project Management is no exception. The issue of interest for this paper is the establishment of standards in the area, specifically the 'College of Complex Project Managers' and their 'competency standard for complex project managers'. Both the college and the standard have generated significant interest in the Project Management community. Whilst the need for development of the means to manage complex projects is acknowledged, a critical evaluation show significant flaws in the definition of complex in this case, the process by which the College and its standard have emerged, and the content of the standard. If Project Management is to continue to develop as a profession, it will need an evidence-based approach to the generation of knowledge and standards. The issues raised by the evaluation provide the case for a portfolio of research that extends the existing bodies of knowledge into large-scale complicated (or major) projects. We propose that it would be owned by the practitioner community, rather than focused on one organization. Research questions are proposed that would commence this stream of activity towards an intelligent synthesis of what is required to manage in both complicated and truly complex environments. This is a revised paper previously presented at the 21st IPMA World Congress on Project Management Cracow, Poland

Understanding the temperature and the chemical potential using computer simulations

Several Monte Carlo algorithms and applications that are useful for understanding the concepts of temperature and chemical potential are discussed. We then introduce a generalization of the demon algorithm that measures the chemical potential and is suitable for simulating systems with variable particle number.Comment: 23 pages including 6 figure

Family Bonding with Universities

One justification offered for legacy admissions policies at universities is that that they bind entire families to the university. Proponents maintain that these policies have a number of benefits, including increased donations from members of these families. We use a rich set of data from an anonymous selective research institution to investigate which types of family members have the most important effect upon donative behavior. We find that the effects of attendance by members of the younger generation (children, children-in-law, nieces and nephews) are greater than the effects of attendance by older generations (parents, parents-in-law, aunts and uncles). Previous research has indicated that, in a variety of contexts, men and women differ in their altruistic behavior. However, we find that there are no statistically discernible differences between men and women in the way their donations depends on the alumni status of various types of relatives. Neither does the gender of the various types of relatives who attended the uni-versity seem to matter. Thus, for example, the impact of having a son attend the university is no different from the effect of a daughter.college legacy administion

The Impact of Athletic Performance on Alumni Giving: An Analysis of Micro Data

An ongoing controversy in the literature on the economics of higher education centers on whether the success of a school’s athletic program affects alumni donations. This paper uses a unique data set to investigate this issue. The data contain detailed information about donations made by alumni of a selective research university as well as a variety of their economic and de-mographic characteristics. One important question is how to characterize the success of an athlet-ic program. We focus not only on the performance of the most visible teams, football and bas-ketball, but also on the success of the team on which he or she played as an undergraduate. One of our key findings is that the impact of athletic success on donations differs for men and women. When a male graduate’s former team wins its conference championship, his dona-tions for general purposes increase by about 7 percent and his donations to the athletic program increase by about the same percentage. Football and basketball records generally have small and statistically insignificant effects; in some specifications, a winning basketball season reduces do-nations. For women there is no statistically discernible effect of a former team’s success on cur-rent giving; as is the case for men, the impacts of football and basketball, while statistically sig-nificant in some specifications, are not important in magnitude. Another novel result is that for males, varsity athletes whose teams were successful when they were undergraduates subsequent-ly make larger donations to the athletic program. For example, if a male alumnus’s team won its conference championship during his senior year, his subsequent giving to the athletic program is about 8 percent a year higher, ceteris paribus.

The ABCs of Charitable Solicitation

The “iron law of fundraising” says that people do not donate to a charity unless they are asked. We test the iron law using observational data on alumni giving at an anonymous research university, which we refer to as Anon U. At Anon U, volunteers use lists provided by the Devel-opment Office to telephone classmates and solicit them for donations. The names on these lists are always in alphabetical order. The volunteers who do the soliciting often run out of time be-fore they reach the end of their lists, and conditional on reaching the end of their lists, the solici-tations are likely to be done with less energy and enthusiasm. These observations suggest a sim-ple strategy for testing whether solicitation matters, viz., examine whether alumni with names toward the end of the alphabet are less likely to give than alumni with names toward the begin-ning, ceteris paribus. If so, then solicitation matters. Our main finding is that location in the alphabet--and hence, solicitation-- has a strong ef-fect on probability of making a gift, but not on the amount given, conditional on donating. This result is consistent with a theoretical model of charitable behavior developed by Andreoni and Payne [2003], in which solicitation reduces the transaction cost of making a gift. Our finding is also in line with a model in which individuals donate to charities in order to avoid the solicitor’s disapproval. In this case, the donation per se is perceived as eliminating the stigma; the amount given, conditional on giving, has no additional impact. We also find that women respond more strongly to solicitation than men. This is consistent with a robust result in the psychology litera-ture, that women find it more difficult than men to refuse requests that they perceive as being legitimate.

Insurance, Health, and the Utilization of Medical Services

Most data sets indicate a positive correlation between having health insurance and good health, and between having health insurance and utilizing health care services. Yet the direction of causality is not at all clear. If we observe a positive correlation between the utilization of health care services and insurance status, we do not know if this is be-cause people who anticipate poor health buy more insurance (or take jobs with generous medical coverage), or because insurance lowers the cost of health care, increasing the quantity demanded. The direction of causation between health status and insurance is similarly unclear. While a few attempts have been made to implement an instrumental variables (IV) strategy to deal with endogeneity, the instruments chosen have not been entirely convinc-ing. In this paper we revisit the IV estimation of the reduced form relationships between insurance and both health care utilization and health status taking advantage of what we argue is a good instrument – the individual’s self-employment status. We find that IV estimates of the impact of insurance on the utilization of a variety of health care services are greater than estimates that ignore endogeneity. However, instrumental variables leads to a small and statistically insignificant estimate of the impact of insurance on health status. The validity of this exercise depends on the extent to which self-employment status is a suitable instrument. To make this case, we analyze panel data on transitions from wage-earning into self-employment and show that individuals who select into self-employment do not differ systematically from those who remain wage-earners with re-spect to either the utilization of health care or health status. That is, there appear to be no underlying differences that might lead to self-employment per se affecting health status or health services utilization.health, insurance, self-employment

Agency, Delayed Compensation, and the Structure of Executive Remuneration

In this paper we examine the factors affecting the structure of executives' compensation packages. We focus particularly on the role of various types of delayed compensation as means of "bonding" executives to their firms. The basic problem is to design a compensation package that rewards actions that are in the long-run interest of the stockholders. Firms must take into account (1) their ability to discern unfortunate circumstances from mismanagement; (2) the extent to which a compensation package forces the executive to face risks, beyond his control; and (3) the willingness of a given executive to bear this risk. We use our theory to interpret some executive compensation data from the early 1970's. The results are generally in line with the theoretical predictions.

Nothing about us without us! Utilising experiences of disability in higher education

Inspired by the famous slogan ‘nothing about us without us’, this paper draws upon the experience of the author to explore the issue of how to navigate a disability studies curriculum in the contemporary University. Experience of university both as a student and as a lecturer has informed the writing of this article. The article begins by exploring the use of autoethnographic/ auto/biographical accounts, before exploring some of the important elements of planning and assessing disability-focused courses in higher education in the UK and concludes by offering some suggestions as to the value of theoretically generated personal observations in higher education provision