Reading list

Abstract

BOOKSDavid I? Rest, ed. The Fourth Resource: Information and Its Management Aldershot, England: Ashgate, I996 I 8 I pages; $54.95This is a collection of important papers from British specialists that stakes out some fresh thinking about the role and management of information.The fourth resource in question is information, equal in importance to the other three: people, capital, and physical resources. Getting that idea accepted is apparently further along in Europe, where information management (IM) is better established as an important business process than it is in the United States. IM is defined as "effective production, storage, retrieval, and dissemination of information in any format and on any medium to support business objectives." The best companies, argues Best, have certain measures in place regarding IM: policies that determine ownership, standards to assure effective communication, procedures, and a technology strategy. It is also necessary to bridge the functional divisions among information technology specialists, librarians, publishing specialists, and other practitioners in the field.Among the most important selections are Elizabeth Orna's treatise on valuing information and Clive Holtham's effort to "resolve the imbalance" between technology and information. Information technology does not assure strategic advantage, regardless of the scope of the investment; a new information professional is called for to adequately exploit the new system. Orna thoughtfully outlines the need to transfer information into knowledge because hoarding destroys the value of the information, proper diffusion and use create its true value. The difficulty of relating this problem to that of assigning market value is also explored most usefully here. -JWM

Foreign divestments from Russia: An exploration of the mediating factors

“…The theory of bounded rationality posits that the decision of a rational agent cannot encompass all the potential information which is of utmost importance when making decisions (Herbert, ; Hyde, ; Marcum, Green, & Schaefer, ). This theory recognizes that decision‐makers are not just rational, but may have individualistic biases that influence decision results.…”