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The paper begins with a reexamination of claims regarding the welfare-theoretical efficiency of various modes of non-hierarchical policy coordination which Charles Lindblom (1965) had subsumed under the label of "Partisan Mutual Adjustment". It is argued that these claims are implausible if Lindblom’s mechanisms of horizontal self-coordination are examined one at a time. They either will not assure significant welfare gains in the general case, or the attempt to raise the level of general welfare through self-coordination will encounter rapidly escalating transaction costs. As Lindblom had pointed out, however, several coordination methods will often be combined in real-world policy processes. The intuition that this might significantly increase the welfare efficiency of self-coordination is explored in a computer simulation study based on the game-theoretical reformulation of five simple coordination mechanisms. We can show that, in a given population of interdependent actors, "Positive Coordination" within relatively small coalitions who are required to obtain the agreement of outside actors through "Negative Coordination " and "Bargaining", are able to achieve relatively high welfare gains while economizing on transaction costs. This pattern is by no means unusual in real-world policy processes.

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This paper attempts to establish the applicability of the Miles and Snow typology of strategic orientation to small, entrepreneurial organisations. It posits that congruence between strategic orientation and decision making comprehensiveness of the strategic planning process is a superior determinant of firm performance to planning alone. An empirical study in the Regional Airline industry was conducted to investigate this proposition. Results support the importance of the congruence construct in determining performance in small, entrepreneurial ventures. Keywords:

The goal of economic development is to increase growth and eliminate poverty. Recently, the goal has been broadened to include promoting participatory governance. Arguably, participation — such as in community water committees, neighborhood organizations, and school associations — produces two desirable outcomes. One is democracy itself; the other, less ambitious, is better targeted and more efficiently delivered public services. Once a shout from the radical fringe, the call for participation has re-surfaced as a dominant voice in development thinking. 1 But the new truth may be flawed. Participation is desirable as an end in itself, as a means of sharing resources, control, and responsibility within the social group. Yet participation is not always related to democracy — fascism was a participatory and grassroots-based political movement. Moreover, historically, social rights were not necessarily the product of participatory democracy; in fact, participation in itself fails to resolve the classic economic dilemma of ordering social choices. Because participation is a social act that springs from a preexisting set of social relations it is more readily applied in situations that condone and reinforce that set of social relations. Though it may be used for “radical ” (e.g., redistributive) outcomes, it is essentially a conservative, pragmatic form of social action. When

As business activities have become international and most recently global, and geographical borders between countries are vanishing, there will be more frequent and closer interactions among organizations, firms, institutions and industries both within and between countries. One of the means through which these social interactions take place is

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Using Multi-Attribute Tradespace Exploration for the

This is a programmatic paper, marking out two directions in which the study of social media can contribute to broader problems of social science: understanding cultural evolution and understanding collective cognition. Under the first heading, I discuss some difficulties with the usual, adaptationist explanations of cultural phenomena, alternative explanations involving network diffusion effects, and some ways these could be tested using social-media data. Under the second I describe some of the ways in which social media could be used to study how the social organization of an epistemic community supports its collective cognitive performance. Let me begin by considering two 1 senses in which we might speak of human thought as being “social”, and how they might orient the study of social information processing and social media. The first sense is a common-place of many schools in the social sciences and humanities: our thought relies on the cultural transmission of cognitive tools. Every individual thinker, no matter how innovative or even lonely they may be, depends crucially on a vast array of cognitive tools (concepts, procedures, languages, assumptions, values,...) which they did not devise themselves, and could not have devised for themselves. Instead they inherited these cognitive tools from interacting with other people, who for the most part themselves did not invent them. (Dewey 1927; Vygotsky 19341986;