Article

    The expenses related to sponsoring a conference can be immense. An organization sponsoring a conference can recoup these expenses through registration fees and partnership with the host hotel. As part of the partnership, the host hotel sets aside a block of rooms for conference attendees, with rooms available at a slightly higher-than-normal rate.

    While most conference attendees prefer to stay in the host hotel, they often follow an alternate strategy to avoid the extra cost of reserving a room within the block at the host hotel. Some attendees reserve rooms outside the host hotel—the ROHH strategy. Others reserve rooms outside the block—the ROB strategy.

    Conference sponsors have succeeded in countering these strategies by increasing the conference registration fee by a fixed amount and then offering an equivalent registration fee discount to attendees who book rooms in the block. A study has shown that if this registration discount is equal to at least half the potential savings of an attendee's particular cost-saving strategy, the attendee is much more likely to reserve a room within the block.

Weekend Conferences

    Ten conferences are scheduled for the same weekend in City X. For each conference, the table lists the conference sponsor, the registration fee, the discounted registration fee (if any), the host hotel, the rate for rooms in the block at the host hotel, and the lowest rate for an available room in the host hotel during that same weekend. Conference attendees will require two nights lodging, and all room rates are per guest, per night, assuming two guests per room. The lowest rate for an available room in City X on this same weekend is S65.

Height-for-age standards

The World Health Organization (WHO) has produced a comprehensive set of growth stan­dards for children. These standards are based on studies of children living in 6 nations on 5 continents under optimal conditions with respect to health and nutrition. The table dis­plays the percentile distribution of height, in centimeters, at 3-month intervals, for boys ages 2 through 5 according to the WHO model. In a model population—a large population of boys ages 2 through 5 that conforms to the WHO growth standards—for n = 3.15, 50. 85. and 97, the nth percentile in height for a given age is the unique height among boys of that age that is greater than or equal to n percent, and less than or equal to (100 - n) percent, of heights of boys of that age.

Weight-for-height standards

The graph shows the percentile distribution of weight, in kilograms, for heights from 80 cm to 120 cm. for boys ages 2 through 5, according to the WHO model. In a model population, for n = 3,15,50,85, and 97. the nth percentile in weight for a given height is the unique weight among boys of that height that is greater than or equal to n percent, and less than or equal to (100 - n) percent, of weights of boys of that age.

    A pressing need in the study of organizations is for more research into how an organization's values (anLine organization's guiding principles and beliefs as perceived by its members) affect managerial decision-making. Traditional theories have been based on a "rational model," which focuses on the decision-maker and either ignores the organizational value climate or conveniently assumes that the organization's values are consistent or clearly prioritized. In reality, however, decisions are shaped not only by a manager's own values, but also by those of the corporate culture and of organizational superiors. A recent study found that managers' most stressful decisions involved "valuecontention" (conflicts among any of these sets of values). Furthermore, different types of organizational value systems were associated with different frequencies of contending values as well as with different types of managerial response. Explicit corporate values, for example, produced a greater percentage of decisions that were stressful due to value contention. Hidden values (those that an organization practices but does not acknowledge or which a superior furtively pursues in opposition to the values of the organization) produced a lower level of value contention. Although explicit values created more value contention, they were nonetheless more likely to produce flexible, well-reasoned decisions. Conversely, managers perplexed by hidden values reported feeling unable to identify an appropriate range of options.

  Colonial historian David Allen's intensive study of five communities in seventeenth-century Massachusetts is a model of meticulous scholarship on the detailed microcosmic level, and is convincing up to a point. Allen suggests that much more coherence and direct continuity existed between English and colonial agricultural practices and administrative organization than other historians have suggested. However, he overstates his case with the declaration that he has proved ''the remarkable extent to which diversity in New England local institutions was directly imitative of regional differences in the mother country."
  Such an assertion ignores critical differences between seventeenth-century England and New England. First, England was overcrowded and land-hungry; New England was sparsely populated and labor-hungry. Second, England suffered the normal European rate of mortality; New England, especially in the first generation of English colonists, was virtually free from infectious diseases. Third, England had an all-embracing state church; in New England membership in a church was restricted to the elect. Fourth, a high proportion of English villagers lived under paternalistic resident squires; no such class existed in New England. By narrowing his focus to village institutions and ignoring these critical differences, which studies by Greven, Demos, and Lockridge have shown to be so important, Allen has created a somewhat distorted picture of reality.
  Allen's work is a rather extreme example of the ''country community" school of seventeenth-century English history whose intemperate excesses in removing all national issues from the history of that period have been exposed by Professor Clive Holmes. What conclusion can be drawn, for example, from Allen's discovery that Puritan clergy who had come to the colonies from East Anglia were one-third to one-half as likely to return to England by 1660 as were Puritan ministers from western and northern England? We are not told in what way, if at all, this discovery illuminates historical understanding. Studies of local history have enormously expanded our horizons, but it is a mistake for their authors to conclude that village institutions are all that mattered, simply because their functions are all that the records of village institutions reveal.