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doi: 10.3233/HSM-1991-10303pmid: N/A
The paper shows how current corporations are deficient in their ability to promote economic efficiency, justice, self-governance, social accountability and environmental sustainability. To ameliorate these deficiencies it is proposed that the static, perpetual and monopoly property rights of stockholders be replaced with dynamic, time-limited, co-ownership rights. This would create Ownership Transfer Corporations (OTC's) which could be used to reduce the ability of investors to obtain profits in excess of the incentive required to attract their investment. The excess incentive or ‘surplus profits’ could then be shared with corporate stakeholders by making them co-owners. As the stakeholders would include employees, customers, and suppliers, the general adoption of OTC's would produce a universal income. National income could be re-distributed without work or welfare and taxes. OTC's would extend the self-governing attributes of Mondragon co-operatives and provide a simpler and more effective way than Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOP's) for either capitalising socialism and/or democratising the wealth of nations.
\u{C}uba, Franti\u{s}ek ; Divila, Emil
doi: 10.3233/HSM-1991-10304pmid: N/A
‘Slu\u{s}ovice, Czechoslovakia, is the last expected place of one of the most successful experiments of the socialist entrepreneurship. Agricultural agrocombine Slu\u{s}ovice is a community of several thousands of workers with absolutely atypical interest in up-to-date technologies’. The above characteristic of presumably the most up-to-date enterprise in Czechoslovakia before the November ‘velvet’ revolution (1989) was published in 1988 in an American magazine Genetic Engineering News. At approximately the same time, the Vienna TV called this Czechoslovak enterprise a capitalist oasis in the communist desert. Similar definitions of this dynamic enterprise could be found with respect to both its past and present. In this article, a leading member of the original Slu\u{s}ovice Agrocombine and of the present DAK MOVA Slu\u{s}ovice, the successor of its entrepreneurial tradition, and his expert partner from economic research, deal with a topical theme on possible way of transformation of the present state economy to the market basis. This concept resulted from a practical effort to develop an active entrepreneurial system in the Slu\u{s}ovice Agrocombine. Its potential value could have a wider social-economic application.
doi: 10.3233/HSM-1991-10305pmid: N/A
During the past decade, numerous data have been collected and analyzed relating to group performance in organizing knowledge for decision-making purposes. These data reveal results that have been viewed as surprising by scholars. Generally speaking, the data provide new insights into necessary conditions for groups to arrive at cognitive equilibrium in relation to complex issues. The data further provide insights that show how poorly past conceptualizations related to group activity have been conceived; and especially the inadequacy (and sometimes the irrelevancy) of the assumptions that have justified past approaches to group activity. When these experimental results and their interpretations are combined with prior research results of Bales, Tuckman, Miller, Simon, Argyris, Janis, and others; a new paradigm for people working together on complex issues emerges in clear perspective.
doi: 10.3233/HSM-1991-10306pmid: N/A
The growing acceptance and emphasis on interactive decision support systems (DSSs), and executive support systems (ESSs) built with expert systems software, has brought forward a need to better understand how managers actually go about producing or constructing their decisions. This is an exciting development because the DSSs show the need for a new management research paradigm. DSSs are constructed to show the essence of the decision and planning problems we try to solve with computer support; this is sometimes described as modelling the internal logic of the problems, which is a straightforward application of the analysis paradigm well known from operations research. Experience with DSSs shows that the internal logic can be formulated only in what Simon called well-structured problems. Even if we normally manage to formulate problems in such a fashion that they appear well-structured, there still remains a growing uneasiness with the trade-off between precision and relevance. Zeleny recently suggested the metaphor of cognitive equilibrium as a basis for a better descriptive understanding of human decision making: a decision is an emergent pattern properly balancing all components of the decision. This metaphor is useful for dealing with semi- or ill-structured problems, for which no internal logic can be formulated. Without a logical pattern it is improper to tackle a problem with mathematical tools, as the resulting representation would induce a non-existing structure on the problem. We need a methodological framework for the cognitive equilibrium, and we need research instruments, which – unlike mathematical models – can deal with semi- or ill-structured problems. We will show that a proper methodological framework can be constructed around Vickers' appreciative systems concept, and that it can be implemented with expert systems.
doi: 10.3233/HSM-1991-10307pmid: N/A
Triple C is a new visual interactive system which supports the exploration of multicriteria decisions. The novelty of this sytem consists in an overall utilization of Visual Interaction for supporting all the information processing activities related to the task of incrementally defining and analyzing a multicriteria decision situation. This paper reports on how a visual interactive approach can be successfully applied to the design of systems matching the original objectives of Decision Support. Human judgement and creativity are neither substituted with a formal model nor restricted by an inflexible, prescriptive tool. On the contrary, the DSS aims at facilitating and stimulating a learning process in which decision-makers are enabled to incrementally (1) model and refine their views of a specific decision situation, (2) understand the impact of different problem components, (3) question and/or justify their individual choices and preferences, and finally (4) communicate them easily – a crucial factor in group decisions.
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