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Strategic planning: Contemporary viewpoints
110
Book Reviews
describes the emerging paradigm. Weick brilliantly elaborates the theme using among other concepts his famous concept of loosely coupled systems. Lincoln makes clear the implications for researchers such as: do research in natural settings, let your researchdesign emergein the interaction with the specific setting, use human beings as ‘measuring instruments’ and use qualitative methods. Sigismund Huff deals with the consequences for management. Among them we have: maintain an informal information network, play ‘what if’, manage premises rather than outcomes and be content with multiple and partial solutions. Needless to say that this book is worth reading if one has a serious interest in organisations. A.C.J. DE LEEUW State University of Groningen Groningen,Netherlands L.F. PAU (ed.) Artificial ment
Intelligence
in Economics and Manage-
North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1986, xv + 292 pages, Dfl.130.00 The International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence in Economics and Management was held March 12-14, 1985 in Ztirich, Switzerland. The International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) was the main sponsor. The workshop was attended by more than 140 persons. This volume is a collection of some of the papers written by some of the workshop participants after the event. This volume contains 32 papers arranged into 9 themes. The themes are: - Methodology: Reasoning, Fuzzy Representations (9 papers), - Project Planning and Decision Support Systems in Resource Allocation (3 papers), - Applications in Financial and Credit Analysis (4 papers), - Applications to Games and Multi-Criteria Pal-’ icy Analysis (3 papers), - Applications in Macro Economic Analysis and Modelling (3 papers), - Applications in Public Services(3 papers), - Applications in Business Management (3 papers),
- Applications in Office Automation (2 papers), - Applications in Manufacturing (2 papers). Moreover the editor has written a preface that gives an excellent introduction to the whole volume. Contributions are included from an international authorship, many of them leading experts in their field, that covers Europe, Asia and the United States. It is impossible to evaluate objectively the full range of papers contained in this volume in such a short appraisal. This volume shows the potential benefits of a better interplay between artificial intelligence (that is: knowledge based/expert systems, natural language analysis, and search,inference and planning procedures) and the fields of Economics, OR and other sister disciplines dealing with decision-malcing. I agree with the editor when he emphasizes: “There is still a long way to go, though, as the human resources,as well as software tools needed are not yet fully available”. Despite the actual problems with the technology and the slowness of OR groups to get into artificial intelligence, I believe that in the future the use of artificial intelligence will become an establishedpart of OR as it is the case with optimization, simulation, and statistics. There is enough evidence in this volume to suggest that artificial intelligence provides a useful method of developing decision support systems. Finally, this book will be of central interest to the OR community and to sister disciplines, not merely becauseof the content but also due to the detailed referencesprovided. R. V. V. VIDAL The Technical University of Denmark Lyngby, Denmark Marie S. ENSIGN and Laurie NOGG ADLER (eds.) Strategic Planning: Contemporary Viewpoints
The Dynamic Organization Series, Clio, Oxford, 1985, xxi + 231 pages, f32.90 This book, with a useful foreword from Donald F. Heany (an associate of the Strategic Planning Institute) is a bibliography of 502 contemporary articles on strategic planning. The articles were drawn from the leading businessdatabase,Data Courrier’s ABI / INFORM which
111
Book Reviews
consists of more than 300000 records. ABI/ INFORM was designed for business professionals who need timely information but are unable to scan the hundreds of journals that are important to them. To build this database,abstracters condense the international business literature into 200-word article summaries. The databasewas searchedfor articles on strategic planning. From the resulting list the editors chose abstracts of 502 significant articles of lasting interest published between 1980 and 1984. The editors aim to provide business persons, students and scholars with quick accessto business thoughts of the 1980’s. This is also the first volume in the ABC-Clio’s new contemporary viewpoints series focusing on topics of current importance. The editors arranged the articles in seven chapters for easy browsing by topic (the number between brackets shows the number of summaries concerned): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Strategic Planning Today (95), The Processof Strategic Planning (126), Planning for Growth (38), Techniques for Strategic Planning (102), Strategic Planning in Small Businesses(43), Strategic Planning in Non-Profit Organisations (2% 7. Examples of Strategic Planning (69).
A detailed subject index gives quick accessto specific topics and an author index will lead the reader to the variety of writers represented. The quality of a bibliography depends heavily on the quality of the selection processand on the quality of the summaries. ‘This selection process seemsto have been a fairly random one, regarding the number of magazinesthat has been used: the first 200 summaries have been drawn from over 80 journals. Only from Long Range Planning and Journal of Business Review more than 10 articles were quoted! Leading quality journals like Harvard Business Review, Sloan’s Management Review supplied only up to 4 articles. This is reinforced by the author index: in most cases each author is quoted for only one article. Even Michael Porter, probably the most famous writer on strategic planning, appearsonly once in this bibliography. Though we have seen a useful article published by him in the Harvard Business Review (july-august 1983) which would have en-
riched the contents of the book. The title is “Endgame strategies in declining industries” and it describes a subject which has got much attention lately. Alas nothing about this in the subject index. On the other hand a quick glance through the contents of Long Range Planning (1980-1984) makes sure that every article of importance is covered. Concerning the quality of the summaries: they are at a high level. But in my opinion they are only very useful if you have read the articles on which they are based. The style of the argument and the depth of the article are very important attributes of articles on strategic planning, but in 200-word summaries it is difficult to present these thoughts which in most casesdetermine the quality of an article. Therefore the editors offer the full text of an article at $8.25 per article plus $2.00 per article for shipment outside the USA. In my opinion this bibliography is a must for librarians and of great use to students on the subject of strategy. But to the novice in strategic planning I would rather recommend a good introduction to strategy. To keep your knowledge upto-date this book can be of use, but only if you have access to a well-selected library you can obtain the articles you want to have a closer look at. A. NAGEL and J. HENS Eindhoven University of Technology Eindhoven, Netherlands
Thomas L. SAATY and Keven P. KEARNS
’
Analytical Planning: The Organization of Systems Volume 7 in: International Series in Modern Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, Pergamon, Oxford, 1985, viii + 208 pages,$40.00 This book about planning is intended as an introduction to the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) for both practitioners and researchworkers. The AHP was introduced by the first author about 1980. (cf. T.L. Saaty: The Analytic Hierarchy Process: New York, McGraw-Hill, 1980, for a detailed exposition). From that time on the method has been applied to planning in a variety of problems, to set priorities, carry out benefit-cost analy-
Book Reviews
describes the emerging paradigm. Weick brilliantly elaborates the theme using among other concepts his famous concept of loosely coupled systems. Lincoln makes clear the implications for researchers such as: do research in natural settings, let your researchdesign emergein the interaction with the specific setting, use human beings as ‘measuring instruments’ and use qualitative methods. Sigismund Huff deals with the consequences for management. Among them we have: maintain an informal information network, play ‘what if’, manage premises rather than outcomes and be content with multiple and partial solutions. Needless to say that this book is worth reading if one has a serious interest in organisations. A.C.J. DE LEEUW State University of Groningen Groningen,Netherlands L.F. PAU (ed.) Artificial ment
Intelligence
in Economics and Manage-
North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1986, xv + 292 pages, Dfl.130.00 The International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence in Economics and Management was held March 12-14, 1985 in Ztirich, Switzerland. The International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) was the main sponsor. The workshop was attended by more than 140 persons. This volume is a collection of some of the papers written by some of the workshop participants after the event. This volume contains 32 papers arranged into 9 themes. The themes are: - Methodology: Reasoning, Fuzzy Representations (9 papers), - Project Planning and Decision Support Systems in Resource Allocation (3 papers), - Applications in Financial and Credit Analysis (4 papers), - Applications to Games and Multi-Criteria Pal-’ icy Analysis (3 papers), - Applications in Macro Economic Analysis and Modelling (3 papers), - Applications in Public Services(3 papers), - Applications in Business Management (3 papers),
- Applications in Office Automation (2 papers), - Applications in Manufacturing (2 papers). Moreover the editor has written a preface that gives an excellent introduction to the whole volume. Contributions are included from an international authorship, many of them leading experts in their field, that covers Europe, Asia and the United States. It is impossible to evaluate objectively the full range of papers contained in this volume in such a short appraisal. This volume shows the potential benefits of a better interplay between artificial intelligence (that is: knowledge based/expert systems, natural language analysis, and search,inference and planning procedures) and the fields of Economics, OR and other sister disciplines dealing with decision-malcing. I agree with the editor when he emphasizes: “There is still a long way to go, though, as the human resources,as well as software tools needed are not yet fully available”. Despite the actual problems with the technology and the slowness of OR groups to get into artificial intelligence, I believe that in the future the use of artificial intelligence will become an establishedpart of OR as it is the case with optimization, simulation, and statistics. There is enough evidence in this volume to suggest that artificial intelligence provides a useful method of developing decision support systems. Finally, this book will be of central interest to the OR community and to sister disciplines, not merely becauseof the content but also due to the detailed referencesprovided. R. V. V. VIDAL The Technical University of Denmark Lyngby, Denmark Marie S. ENSIGN and Laurie NOGG ADLER (eds.) Strategic Planning: Contemporary Viewpoints
The Dynamic Organization Series, Clio, Oxford, 1985, xxi + 231 pages, f32.90 This book, with a useful foreword from Donald F. Heany (an associate of the Strategic Planning Institute) is a bibliography of 502 contemporary articles on strategic planning. The articles were drawn from the leading businessdatabase,Data Courrier’s ABI / INFORM which
111
Book Reviews
consists of more than 300000 records. ABI/ INFORM was designed for business professionals who need timely information but are unable to scan the hundreds of journals that are important to them. To build this database,abstracters condense the international business literature into 200-word article summaries. The databasewas searchedfor articles on strategic planning. From the resulting list the editors chose abstracts of 502 significant articles of lasting interest published between 1980 and 1984. The editors aim to provide business persons, students and scholars with quick accessto business thoughts of the 1980’s. This is also the first volume in the ABC-Clio’s new contemporary viewpoints series focusing on topics of current importance. The editors arranged the articles in seven chapters for easy browsing by topic (the number between brackets shows the number of summaries concerned): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Strategic Planning Today (95), The Processof Strategic Planning (126), Planning for Growth (38), Techniques for Strategic Planning (102), Strategic Planning in Small Businesses(43), Strategic Planning in Non-Profit Organisations (2% 7. Examples of Strategic Planning (69).
A detailed subject index gives quick accessto specific topics and an author index will lead the reader to the variety of writers represented. The quality of a bibliography depends heavily on the quality of the selection processand on the quality of the summaries. ‘This selection process seemsto have been a fairly random one, regarding the number of magazinesthat has been used: the first 200 summaries have been drawn from over 80 journals. Only from Long Range Planning and Journal of Business Review more than 10 articles were quoted! Leading quality journals like Harvard Business Review, Sloan’s Management Review supplied only up to 4 articles. This is reinforced by the author index: in most cases each author is quoted for only one article. Even Michael Porter, probably the most famous writer on strategic planning, appearsonly once in this bibliography. Though we have seen a useful article published by him in the Harvard Business Review (july-august 1983) which would have en-
riched the contents of the book. The title is “Endgame strategies in declining industries” and it describes a subject which has got much attention lately. Alas nothing about this in the subject index. On the other hand a quick glance through the contents of Long Range Planning (1980-1984) makes sure that every article of importance is covered. Concerning the quality of the summaries: they are at a high level. But in my opinion they are only very useful if you have read the articles on which they are based. The style of the argument and the depth of the article are very important attributes of articles on strategic planning, but in 200-word summaries it is difficult to present these thoughts which in most casesdetermine the quality of an article. Therefore the editors offer the full text of an article at $8.25 per article plus $2.00 per article for shipment outside the USA. In my opinion this bibliography is a must for librarians and of great use to students on the subject of strategy. But to the novice in strategic planning I would rather recommend a good introduction to strategy. To keep your knowledge upto-date this book can be of use, but only if you have access to a well-selected library you can obtain the articles you want to have a closer look at. A. NAGEL and J. HENS Eindhoven University of Technology Eindhoven, Netherlands
Thomas L. SAATY and Keven P. KEARNS
’
Analytical Planning: The Organization of Systems Volume 7 in: International Series in Modern Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, Pergamon, Oxford, 1985, viii + 208 pages,$40.00 This book about planning is intended as an introduction to the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) for both practitioners and researchworkers. The AHP was introduced by the first author about 1980. (cf. T.L. Saaty: The Analytic Hierarchy Process: New York, McGraw-Hill, 1980, for a detailed exposition). From that time on the method has been applied to planning in a variety of problems, to set priorities, carry out benefit-cost analy-