Race to the Top: Colorado May Be Used to High Altitudes But Can It Compete in Race to the Top?

Outlines expected requirements for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act's funding to the states for education reform. Offers strategies for improving teacher quality in Colorado, as well as data infrastructure, low-performing schools, and standards

Interpreting the Impact of Culture on Structure: The Role of Change Processes

Research in multinational organizational structures has traditionally used either a rational, conscious perspective in which decision makers, through a single-loop change process, strategically choose to interpret the environmental culture to shape the organization’s structure or a nationalistic view, in which through a double-loop change process, organizational members of one culture impose their favored structures on organizational members of a different culture. This article considers a third perspective, one in which organizational culture and structure are socially constructed phenomena. Through a case study of a multinational office staffed by members of two distinct national cultures (Japanese and American), this research demonstrates how cultures and structures can be simultaneously created through single-, double-, and triple-loop change processes. These processes can lead to a third-order level of change. Ideas for “actionizing” this concept are discussed

Service-delivery Strategies: Three Approaches to Consulting for Hospitality

Effective consulting for hospitality involves going beyond applying mere expertise to solve a client\u27s particular problem to being an empowering expert who focuses on ensuring that clients obtain the tools and resources needed to solve their own problems

A Service Conundrum: Can Outstanding Service Be Too Good?

Many service operations espouse the need to provide exceptional service. But sometimes good enough is good enough—especially if the alternative is uneven service

The Role of Relational Expertise in Professional Service Delivery

[Excerpt] The service organization has become the literal mainstay of the U.S. economy. As the predominant form of U.S.-based business, by 1990 service organizations contributed more than 72% of our GNP (Bowen & Cummings, 1990). Yet, while service organizations have been growing in both size and significance in the United States, it was not until the 1980s that organizational researchers began to specifically examine the nature of services. Most of this research studied transactional service encounters between customers and employees, which are temporary, often impersonal, and sometimes nonrecurring interactions between consumers and many types of service providers, such as supermarket (Rafaeli, 1989) and convenience store cashiers (Sutton & Rafaeli, 1988), as well as flight attendants (Hochschild, 1983), waiters (Mars & Nicod, 1984), fast food clerks (Leidner, 1993) and bank tellers (Schneider, Parkington, & Buxton, 1980)

Reasons Internalism, Hegelian Resources

Are normative reasons based in our desires, or are they instead grounded in our rational faculties? A familiar way of approaching this question focuses on the fact that individuals are often motivated by very different concerns. Our desires seem to provide us with operative or motivating reasons that are not shared by others, and the question is whether desires can also provide us with different good or normative reasons. Reasons internalism is the view that an agent’s normative reasons for action must be within the reach of his or her interest and understanding. Many contemporary followers of Hume as well as Kant endorse this view, but their versions of internalism differ in one key respect. The Humean view is that reasons are relative to the particular motivations of individuals and thus not universally shared. In contrast, the Kantian view is that being fully rational involves converging on reasons that all agents share as such. But what is common to both of these versions of reasons internalism is a focus on the relative powers of the faculties of reason and desire. Hegel, however, introduces an interesting and distinctive way of approaching the question of the source or grounding of normative reasons. Instead of focusing exclusively on the relative powers of inner faculties, Hegel proposes that what we have reasons to do depends largely upon how we understand ourselves within an actual social space. We will consider three different versions of this claim, the most plausible of which sheds new light on reasons internalism. We need not think that there are only two possibilities: either reasons are universal or they are relative to subjective motivations. Instead, what distinguishes a Hegelian approach is the contention that what counts as normative depends in part upon fundamental self-conceptions that we share as participants in a complex social world

A Hegelian Critique of Desire Based Reasons

This paper approaches Humean accounts of desire from a perspective relatively unexplored in contemporary moral theory, namely Hegel’s ethical thought. I contend that Hegel’s treatment of desire is, ultimately, somewhat more Humean than Hegel himself recognized. But Hegel also goes further than contemporary Humeans in recognizing the sociality of the normative domain, and this difference has important implications for the Humean thesis of desire-based reasons (DBR). I develop a Hegelian critique of DBR and conclude by outlining a distinctively Hegelian approach to understanding the normative import of desire