The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science

This article describes an organizational transformation effort involving one of the Chicago Tribune's printing facilities. In July 1985, a walkout strike affecting 1,000 workers occurred, which prompted management to seek to change the printing center to meet its vision of technological and managerial excellence. Consultants conducted a transformation effort that was conceptually similar to an organization development program, but differed in its focus on results and measures of attaining them. This effort produced statements of operating beliefs and key result areas (including implementing the operating beliefs, human resources development, and effective use of capital and resources) for performance measurement. The results include a 25% improvement in productivity in pages per hour and tens of millions of dollars in potential savings in annualized advertising revenues. The authors conclude that visions of organizations of the future must be grounded in clear, integrated action steps permitting measurable outcomes.

This article presents an evaluation of the construct validity of the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI). The authors base this critique on previously published findings and data collected through five studies carried out during an eight-year period, for which 328 social workers acted as respondents. Factor analyses and correlational studies designed to test predictions provided fairly consistent evidence for the utility of the MBI subscale measures of emotional exhaustion, personal accomplishment, and depersonalization. Additional analyses supported a reconceptualization of burnout and the MBI, one that regards exhaustion as the essence of burnout and treats accomplishment and depersonalization as related variables, but not as elements of burnout.

This article presents an overview and analysis of the complex organizational, racial, economic, and power issues associated with transracial adoptions whereby black children are placed in the homes of white families. The author discusses the historical and contemporary circumstances surrounding adoption, and discusses adoption policies in the context of Hasenfield's model of human service organizations. Arguments for and against transracial adoption are discussed, with emphasis on the unique cultural needs of black children and the desirability of inracial adoption. The article concludes that agencies must undergo organizational change to better serve black families willing to adopt children and black children in need of permanent homes.

Attempts to establish dialogue between conflicting identities usually focus on mutual understanding and the common, while downplaying the elements of the conflict and ignoring the element of otherness, which is especially important for conflicts in which the other is the opposite of the self. This article suggests real dialogue requires that the parties first acknowledge this otherness as the distance between them. Thus, the ability to not understand, rather than the ability to understand the other, is posited as crucial to the dialogic process. The author argues that only when the parties relinquish their previous understanding can dialogue address the nucleus of the opposition and conflict, and mobilize relations between the parties within the dialogic framework. Examples are given of attempts at dialogue, one by a group representing the religious and secular Israeli populations and one by a group representing Jews and Arabs in Israel, with their encounters described and analyzed in terms of the possibilities of understanding.

This article presents the major theoretical issues concerning "role taking" and "role making," particularly as these relate to relationships between majority and minority groups. The author examines the barriers researchers and others face when seeking to take the roles of others, and finds that we must recognize how ethnic and/or gender differences affect role taking. Three problem areas are examined: circumstances in which one group has more power than another, unexamined roles, and contradictory role expectations. The author concludes that role taking and role making have major methodological implications, and that further analysis of these concepts is essential to our understanding of the relationships among persons from different sectors of society.

This article discusses how nominal group technique (NGT) can be combined with a decision analysis (DA) technique-simple multi-attribute utility-to assist decision makers in dealing with strategic issues. The authors identify a stepwise means of guiding such complex, "messy" issues through multiple levels so that organization-level alternatives can be considered without sacrificing unit-specific needs. A detailed case study is presented in which an organization consisting of many independently functioning divisions and subdivisions used NGT + DA along with group decision methodology to devise and choose from among alternatives for an integrated computer system. The organization was able to achieve consensus as to the system adopted, and informal and survey feedback from participants indicates their satisfaction with the process. The authors conclude that NGT + DA is relatively easy and inexpensive to use and transparent to the user, and call for research to assess its relative strengths compared to other combined techniques using NGT.