The Influence of Technologists on Corporate Decision‐Making in the United Kingdom
One reason for the poor performance of UK industry in the management of technology is the rift between corporate decision‐making and technology as a discipline, creating a barrier to the influence of technologists on policy making. This paper presents evidence from recent secondary sources, which indicates the weak position of technologists by comparison with other specialists in organisational hierarchies. Reasons for this relative lack of organisational power can be found both in the aspirations and attitudes of technologists and in culturally‐induced organisational structures, which act to severely limit the participation of technologists in decision‐making at the highest levels. Some cross‐national comparisons are referred to. Suggestions are made for ways in which a more even balance between disciplines within UK companies might be achieved.
The Executive Profile of Engineering and Non-Engineering CEOs : US and Japan
To what extent CEO profiles may be held responsible for differences in company performance in two countries is only partially answered by data retrieved from a questionnaire sent to 1,081 CEOs in Japan and 893 in America. Within the Japanese group, engineering managers seem to fill a fairly generalised role, while the US group shows non‐engineering types to be the more generalist. The specialist oriented management style of the US companies is effective in a market situation which calls for rapid technological progress, while the generalist oriented style of the Japanese is particularly effective where the integrated efforts of marketing, production and finance are required to stimulate consumers' satiated demand. The correlation needs further study.
Using Fuzzy-Delphi technique to determine the concession period in BOT projects
BOT projects are affected by several risks and uncertainties. One of the most important issues in this type of contract is to determine the length of concession period considering these uncertainties. The previous studies have developed several models to determine the concession period. However, the uncertainties are not taking into account in most of the previous works. Moreover, none of the previous researches has the capability to aggregate the opinions of different experts being involved in a project regarding the values of the uncertain input parameters. In this research, a Fuzzy-Delphi technique is implemented to determine the length of concession period considering uncertainties. Using the proposed Fuzzy-Delphi technique, the values of different uncertain factors affecting a BOT project is determined considering opinions of a group of experts. The NPV value is calculated considering the resulted aggregated values of uncertain input parameters. Finally, the concession period is determined using fuzzy approach. A case study is conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed methodology. It is shown that the concession period is determined more effectively using the proposed approach.