Increasing formalization of disciplined management of UK universities over the last 30 years has been accompanied by moves to articulate universities' strategies, by attempts to connect organizations' plans and management of activity to those strategies and by a desire to measure how well outcomes are fitted to universities' goals. In this complex change in the orientation of universities' management, lessons have been drawn from the contemporary development of the analysis of strategy and strategic process in commercial and, latterly, in public sector settings. It is argued that there have been very significant errors and weaknesses in the importation of such models of strategy, especially in the stress on strategic planning rather than strategic process and in the insensitivity of universities' planning to the underlying strategy process of the typical university. Most universities, it is argued, mistake planning -and even budgeting -for strategy itself, having failed to make proper sense of their own organizations' processes of generating strategies and putting them into practice. They have typically missed the crucial context of strategy and change. It is argued that there are crucial lessons to be learned from recent advances in theorizing about strategy in the private or commercial sector, particularly in relation to the development of modelling complex and path-dependent systems; and it is argued strongly that universities' strategic process can fruitfully be analysed through the perspectives of real options analysis. This can also accommodate the richness of universities' traditions of strategy formation and implementation within 'loose-coupled ' organizations. Strategy and its place in university managementIn understanding how and why organizations are created and run, the management literature has tended to stratify their control and direction, segregating the operational activity of the organization -policy or tactics -from the direction and control of its purposes -strategy. 1 Thus strategy is associated with how the activities of the organization are selected to be consistent with its objectives and purposes. This 'higher-level' strategic management enables the organization to avoid infeasible management tasks, such as the appraisal of all potential activities using its resource endowment. It also permits the organization to identify the resources appropriate to desired strategies, without, again, testing their suitability against all feasible actions.Strategy, then, is fundamentally associated with how organizations confront and shape complex realities: with how they use 'bounded rationality' to solve otherwise infeasible problems (Cyert and March, 1963; see also Simon, 1996). The concept is universal in that, by default, all organizations have strategies by which complex environments are confronted. Survivor organizations, in this *The comments and insights of colleagues, especially
The effect of four lighting regimes: (1) continuous light (5 to 10 lux); (2) an intermittent system of 1 hr. of light (5 to 10 lux) and 3 hr. of darkness; (3) an intermittent system of 1 hr. of light (5 to 10 lux) and 3 hr. of darkness interrupted by 13 hr. of regular light (5 to 10 lux); (4) as with (3) but with low intensity light (less than 1 lux) during the 13 hr. period while the intermittent system continued, was studied in 2400 broilers of two commercial crosses over two trials. Lighting regime had a significant effect of body weight in trial 2 with birds on treatments 3 and 4 being lighter than those on treatments 1 and 2 which did not differ. Lighting regime had no significant effect on feed to gain ratio, percent crooked toes or mortality to 8 weeks. Birds grown on continuous light had significantly more leg abnormalities than those grown on any of the intermittent regimes. In trial 1 birds grown on continuous light had significantly higher plasma corticoid levels than those grown on any of the intermittent regimes. The same trend existed in trial 2, except that birds on treatment 3 had the highest plasma corticoid level.
The response to eight generations of selection for duration of fertility of frozen-thawed chicken semen, the correlated responses of other fertility parameters of frozen-thawed semen and the fertility of fresh semen, and the heritabilities of frozen-thawed and fresh semen were studied. The selected and control lines were derived from a base meat-type control male population developed at Peel's Poultry Farm Ltd., Port Perry, Ontario. Selection has improved duration of fertility of frozen-thawed semen significantly (P less than .01) with the mean increasing from 1 day in Generation 1 to 5 days in Generation 8 and an average improvement per generation of .29 day since Generation 3. There were significant (P less than .01) correlated increases in percent fertility for 2 to 8 days postinsemination and percent fertility for the duration of fertility of frozen-thawed semen as well as the fertility of fresh semen. Percent hatchability of fertile eggs of frozen-thawed semen did not change. In Generation 8, means and standard errors of fertility parameters of frozen-thawed semen in the selected and control lines, respectively, were: 38.54 +/- 1.39 and 25.58 +/- 1.77 for percent fertility for 2 to 8 days postinsemination, 47.73 +/- 3.54 and 32.02 +/- 2.17 for percent fertility for the duration of fertility, and 78.21 +/- 1.56 and 79.27 +/- 2.53 for percent hatchability of fertile eggs. For fertility of fresh semen, means and standard errors were: 12.69 +/- .20 and 11.54 +/- .42 for duration of fertility, 82.91 +/- 1.45 and 75.71 +/- 2.83 for percent fertility for 2 to 8 days postinsemination, and 71.89 +/- 1.25 and 69.22 +/- 2.06 for percent fertility for the duration of fertility. The means of the heritability estimates of the fertility of frozen-thawed and fresh semen, respectively, ranged from .01 to .31 and -.01 to .21. The realized heritability of duration of fertility of frozen-thawed semen, based on five generations, was .17 +/- .05. The phenotypic correlations of duration of fertility of frozen-thawed semen with percent fertility for 2 to 8 days postinsemination and percent fertility for the duration of fertility of frozen-thawed semen were high and positive and correlations between fertility of frozen-thawed and fresh semen were low but positive.
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