Control system design is considered for attitude control and vibration suppression of flexible space structures. The problem addressed is that of controlling both the zero-frequency rigid-body modes and the elastic modes. Model-based compensators, which employ observers tuned to the plant parameters, are first investigated. Such compensators are shown to generally exhibit high sensitivity to the knowledge of the parameters, especially the elastic mode frequencies. To overcome this problem, a class of dynamic dissipative compensators is next proposed which robustly stabilize the plant in the presence of unmodeled dynamics and parametric uncertainties. An analytical proof of robust stability is given, and a method of implementing the controller as a strictly proper compensator is described. Methods of designing such controllers to obtain optimal performance and robust stability are presented. Numerical and experimental results of application of the methods are presented, which indicate that dynamic dissipative controllers can simultaneously provide excellent performance and robustness.>
The self-organizing diagnosis has been studied by applying the idea of autonomous and decentralized systems extracted from the concept of immune network. The model implements network-level recognition by connecting information from local recognition units by dynamical evaluation chain. The model has been further elaborated for engineering concerns of identifying not only sensor faults but process faults. The sensor faults will be identied by evaluating reliability of data from sensor, while the process faults will be identied by evaluating that of constraints that must be satised among these data. We have demonstrated that the extended sensor network will work against both sensor faults and process faults by an illustrative example.
The socio-economic reforms launched in China in the late 1970s led to rapid economic growth and, with it, health sector resources expanded rapidly. The rural health services have benefited from the policies of economic reform, but not in an optimal way, particularly in poor areas. This article uses a case study of a poor county--Donglan--to illustrate that the fiscal decentralization combined with the financial responsibility system have resulted in a weakening of financing and provision of rural health services in poor areas. The need for health facilities to generate revenue has had unfortunate consequences for the style of medical care, such as over-prescription. In addition, the collapse of the cooperative medical system and the weakening of the three-tier network of rural health care in Donglan have jeopardized preventive programs and threaten access to basic health care for the peasants, especially the poor. The study found evidence that preventive programs have deteriorated over the past years, the poor had financial difficulty in access to services, particularly hospital care, health facilities at township and village levels have been run down, and less training and supervision have been provided by upper-level health facilities. The article concludes with recommendations for a strategy for rebuilding and strengthening the three-tier network of rural health care, and for establishing a cooperative medical and health care scheme to ensure that the majority of peasants in Donglan can be guaranteed access to basic health services. Limited health resources will therefore be better used.
All decentralized testing is regulated according to the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments of 1988. Two organizations, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations and the College of American Pathologists, have received deemed status for their voluntary standards from the Health Care Financing Administration. Deemed status means that the organizations' voluntary standards meet or exceed the federal requirements. The decentralized testing sites can exercise several options in determining which organization, and hence which set of standards, will be used to regulate their testing processes. In this article, the authors outline the various regulatory requirements, provide insight into the relationship of each, and offer a framework for decentralized testing sites to follow to meet the requirements.
We study a credit model where, because of adverse selection, unprofitable projects may nevertheless be financed. Indeed they may continue to be financed even when shown to be low-quality if sunk costs have already been incurred. We show that credit decentralization offers a way for creditors to commit not to refinance such projects, thereby discouraging entrepreneurs from undertaking them initially. Thus, decentralization provides financial discipline. Nevertheless, we argue that it puts too high a premium on short-term returns. The model seems pertinent to two issues: âsoft budget constraintâ problems in centralized economies, and differences between âAnglo-Saxonâ and âGerman-Japaneseâ financing practices.
Embracing, Ambiguities. EMBRACING, AMBIGIDTIES. by Laura Levitt Laura Levitt works as an Assistant Professor of Religion at Temple University, teaching also in the Women's Studies Program. Her writing attends to feminist theory and contemporary Jewish culture. She is the author of the forthcoming book Ambivalent Embraces: Jewish Feminist Identities as Home (New York: Routledge). 131 Perhaps "embrace" is an odd way to explain a methodological turn in one's work, but it captures well the way I work with texts. According to·The American Heritage Dictionary, to "embrace" means: To clasp or hold with arms, usually as an expression of affection.... To surround; enclose.... To twine around. . .. To include as part of something broader. . . . To take up willingly or eagerly. . . . An act of holding close with the arms, usually as an expression ofaffection; a hug.... An enclosure or encirclement. . . . Eager acceptance.1 Implicit in this definition is a desire, an attraction that calls for a response. An embrace is such a response. But in acting on such a desire, there is already a tension. Although an embrace can be a loving gesture, a tender act of affection, or protection, it has other connotations. To hold is also to assume control over another, even, and perhaps especially, the other who is the object of one's affection. In the American Heritage to "embrace" is to surround or enclose. One may hold on too tight, not allowing the other enough space to breathe and to grow on their own. When I think about being entwined I worry about the damage done by vines like kudzu that take over all that comes into their grasp. These vines kill the trees and bushes within their embrace. lThe American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition, (Boston, Houghton, Mimin Company, 1992). 132 SHOFAR Fall 1995 Vol. 14, No.1 Reading is about desire, and about different kinds of embraces. In reading a text, something brings you in, captures your imagination, hooks you. To embrace a text is to give yourself to these desires. This is a joy, but with dangers. One danger is holding on too tightly; the text loses its distinct character and becomes a reflection of the reader. The reader takes the text into herself. It becomes an extension of her. Another danger, an inversion of the first: the reader loses herself in the text. Whereas in the first danger, the text gets swallowed, here the reader's difference dissolves. She is reduced to another instance ofthe text's argument. In becoming the text, she loses her own voice by taking on that of the text. Both of these forms ofreading blur boundaries. Distinctions between reader and text are lost. This blurring of distinctions gets tricky when such reading is accompanied by, and part of, one's writing. In writing we stake out positions and this feels risky. Yet, what goes on in forms of writing-such as academic scholarship-that depend on citations of other writers' texts? Sometimes finding and staking out one's own positions happens in response, while reading texts with similar commitments. Their similarities offer a kind of (em)brace. They hold us up as we attempt to take a stand, especially for the first time. Citations of other people's writing can brace our own argument. They provide weight, authority, and precedent. But sometimes in this process, one of the writers gets lost. As readers who write about other people's writing, we can lose our own voices, holding on too tightly to the authority of other people's writing. And so in writing this essay, I find myself a bit wobbly. There are texts that I want to bring into this discussion, passages I want to cite as proof for what I am saying. For the moment, I will resist the temptation. I will let my words stand alone. I have been able to find my voice as a writer by reading and engaging with the texts of others. The text that speaks to me right now-pushing through the seams of my essay with such force that I can barely keep myself from quoting it at length-is Susan Rubin Suleiman's Risking Who...
I. INTRODUCTION TO REAL ESTATE MARKETS. 1. The Property and Capital Markets. 2. The Operation of Property Markets: A Micro and Macro Approach. II. MICROECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF PROPERTY MARKETS. Residential Real Estate. 3. The Urban Land Market: Rents and Prices. 4. The Urban Housing Market: Structural Attributes and Density.Non-Residential Property Markets. 5. Firm Site Selection, Employment Decentralization and Multi-Centered Cities. 6. Retail Location and Market Competition. III. MACROECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF PROPERTY MARKETS. 7. Economic Growth and Metropolitan Real Estate Markets. Residential Real Estate. 8. The Market for Housing Units: Households, Prices, and Financing. 9. The Market for Housing Services: Moving, Sales and Vacancy.10. The Cyclical Behavior of Metropolitan Housing Markets.Nonresidential Property Markets. 11. The Operation of Non-Residential Property Markets.12. Econometric Analysis of Metropolitan Office and Industrial Markets. IV. THE IMPACT OF LOCAL GOVERNMENTS ON REAL ESTATE MARKETS. 13. Local Governments, Property Taxes and Real Estate Markets. 14. Public Goods, Externalities and Development Regulation. Index.
During the 1980s, Colombia embarked on an ambitious program to decentralize responsibilities for planning, financing, and delivering public goods and services. Despite concerns that municipal governments did not have the capacity to undertake these functions, initial findings suggest that municipal governments had substantial latent capacity. In many cases, they were able to improve significantly the volume and quality of services delivered.
Accountants, take note! information highway and more specifically, the Internet--or the Net, as Internet aficionados call it--is vital to the health of the profession and your future income. This article will tell you why the Internet is important to you and how to use it to your advantage. Internet is one of the major arteries of the information highway. But before most people can maneuver onto the highway's entrance ramp, they'll have to endure some sizable potholes and detours. (They'll also have to learn some new words and phrases. See the glossary on page 61.) Right now the Internet is three things: * A nearly free communications channel. For example, a Net user in New York can dash off an electronic letter (e-mail) to a business associate in Australia. In fact, with the right software, he or she can even conduct a voice conversation with that person half way around the world. only charge is the price of a local phone call. In addition, some groups, such as the American Institute of CPAs, have arranged places on the Net where users can dialog--ask questions and share information and opinions (for more on this see the sidebar The AICPA Online, page 62, and Answers to Some Frequently Asked Questions about the Accountants Forum, page 80). * A vast storehouse of information--from the history of abacuses to the physiology of zebras--including accounting and financial information. However, the Net's utility often is obscured by the way the data are stored--tucked away in electronic libraries all around the world. Many users see the Internet as a giant library that never closes, lacks a card catalog, has all its books shelved helter-skelter and often classifies titles in an esoteric code. However, those in the know, able and willing to decipher codes such as http://www.servtech.com/re/acct.html, find the Internet the single greatest source of data available today. * An electronic storefront. Businesses as diverse as flower shops and airlines are setting up virtual shops on the Net, and their cash registers are beginning to ring. Marketing-savvy CPAs and consultants also are setting up shop on the Net--offering both free services as loss leaders and advertisements for their consulting expertise. Slowly the barriers to accessing the Net, uncovering data hidden in its libraries and setting up shop, are coming down. One of the Internet's most powerful utilities, the World Wide Web (WWW), can now be accessed and navigated relatively easily with a mouse. key point is that the Internet is becoming both user friendly and user vital. And unless accounting professionals recognize that the future of their business is information--finding it, creating it, formatting it, using it and distributing it--and become involved in this emerging technology, they may find themselves fending off fierce new competitors. THE CPA MARKET For accountants, the Net represents yet another opportunity--or challenge, depending on one's point of view: Although it's only a trickle right now, in the near future a considerable amount of business information will be transmitted by online systems. For example, clients can e-mail their general ledger transactions to their accountants' bookkeeping systems. Net-wise CPAs today download marketing information, prospectuses and newsletters. They also view instantly Standard & Poor's data, Securities and Exchange Commission filings, analysts' reports, financial statement data and earnings data on various industries. In addition, for those businesses that sell merchandise or services on the Net, the virtual cash register data also will be transmitted via the Net. In fact, one accounting software publisher, SBT Accounting Systems, just introduced a module called the Web Trader that handles such data. These are just some of the resources and business opportunities available now on the Internet. There's no telling what it will be able to offer in the future. âŠ
What will the corporate finance department look like in the twenty-first century? Will it be staffed by CPAs, MBAs, computer information specialists? Will it even exist--absorbed instead by other departments? These were some of the tough questions 40 senior financial executives (from companies such as General Motors and Control Data), accounting educators (from schools such as Vanderbilt University, New York University and Senshu University in Japan) and CPAs (from accounting and consulting firms such as KPMG Peat Marwick, Price Waterhouse and Arthur Andersen & Co.) wrestled with for two days last April at a workshop in New York sponsored by the American Institute of CPAs management accounting executive committee. The goal of the workshop, mapping the future of financial management, was to help the committee envision the future of the finance function in businesses and thus help the Institute prepare its members for that future. As an opener, participants shared their views on the future of finance management by voting on various business management scenarios. Those with similar views were grouped in panels that constituted the management of a fictitious company; each panel member assumed a leading management role in the organization. Then each panel was asked to focus on its unique scenario, or endstate, and to develop a business plan for that endstate: the economic and business conditions that created and support it, the problems and opportunities it faces as it strives to survive, the tools it needs to prosper and the role of the finance department in this enterprise. Each panel then had to rationalize its end-state to the others in the workshop, defend its positions from challenges and report the weaknesses uncovered by working through the exercise. The five endstates were 1. Shareholder advocate--a back-to-basics focus on costs designed to boost shareholder wealth in the short run--even at the expense of future growth. The major role of the finance department is to root out activities that fail to produce immediate returns. 2. Business team--the management style is team oriented and the corporate goal is gaining market leadership by responding to market demand and customer needs. The role of finance is to dismantle excessive controls that paralyze meaningful analysis. 3. Managing risk--management recognizes it must confront multiple risks, including swiftly changing technology and severe business cycle and financial market swings. The principal role of finance is to act as a combination of internal hedge- and venture-fund managers. 4. Outsourcing--many of the corporation's finance functions--from payroll to general ledger and tax--are handled by outside organizations. The role of the finance department is no longer routine processing; it now is focused on control and standard-setting. 5. Decentralization--core business units are run relatively independently. Finance provides high-level analytical support. When the exercise was over, some of the participants came away with more than their original vision. In developing strategies and then being forced to defend them, some participants found their finance management views had changed somewhat. Some recognized advantages in endstates they had dismissed before. Others felt their original views were bolstered. And still others said they were considering shifting their allegiances or seeking to combine some endstate features with others. The bottom line: For some participants, the two-day exercise forced them to lay down some long-held views, recognizing that the future often is not a straight-line extension of the past. COMING TO CONSENSUS As a final exercise, participants were reassigned to different panels so they had to work with new colleagues--most of whom supported different endstates. Their new assignment was to search for common ground and create accommodations for their divergent views so they could agree on a new endstate. âŠ
The autonomous decentralized systems (ADS) concept has been expanded to handle subsystem configuration on distributed computing environments effectively. The concept introduces the "group" as a logical set of subsystems based on application software or an organization. Subsystems on a "group" have an equal influence on the entire "group" and are hidden from the other subsystems. The "group" provides a simplified view of the system resource by hiding unrelated information from the users. Application management, monitoring and controlling services are provided on the basis of the "group". The expansion concept and a prototype tool ACP/EM are presented.>
Part 1 The arts: literature, Rachel Edwards literature engagee the Hussards the mode retro criticism the Nouveau Roman women writers a return to myth beur fiction poetry the theatre, Martin Sorrell from thelate 19th to the mid-20th century the theatre of the absurd - and the example of Rene de Obaldia Jean Genet - Anton Artaud Bertolt Brecht decentralization total theatre - Jean-Louse Barrault collective creation Jerome Savary and le grand magic circus Ariane Mnouchkine and le theatre du soleil the dominance of the director Peter Brook the re-emergence of the playwright French cinema since 1945, Keith Reader the beginnings the old and the new the new wave Godard and others women directors the return of quality Forum des Halles cinema conserving the cultural heritage of historic buildings and towns in France since 1945. Part 2 Popular culture: sport in France, A Greaves preamble - sports, games and pastimes administration participation - the gout de spectacle, media influence recent trends physical education in schoos and the Associations sportives physical education teachers - training, equipment status the media, Alan Pedley the decline of the Parisian daily press finance, production and distribution the Paris dailies radio television from state monopoly to privatization the rise of Frenc television advertizing and quotas from TFI to culture cable and satellite television - monster or panacea food and wine, Stephen Mennell the historical sociology of French haute cuisine nouvelle cuisine gastronomes and the gastronomic public domestic cookery conclusion popular music, G.Poulet. Part 3 Cultural debates: Paris versus the provinces - cultural decentralization since 1945 gender issues historical and social landmarks femmes, vous lui devez tout! women and language - the quest for a language autre conclusion the French language since 1945, D.A.Trotter.
ConclusionsIn Spring, negligence again presents itself as the avenue through which judges reform private law.The emphasis throughout was on negligence, although the speeches of Lords Woolf and Slynn demonstrate that contract could have provided a remedy.It is somewhat surprising that the contractual analysis did not dominate the speeches, especially since Scally indicates that the contractual analysis should be preferred in cases involving harm arising from e m p l ~y m e n t .~~ Yet only Lord Woolf held that the 'primary source of any liability is contractual rather than tortious,' since the relationship with the defendants arose from the previous engagement;55 the other Law Lords did not address the point.We might also ask what would have happened if the plaintiff had brought the action in defamation.Would their Lordships have found a remedy by reforming the law of defamation?For example, would they have held that qualified privilege should not be available to employers or, if available, it should be rebuttable by proof of carelessness rather than malice?Certainly, Derbyshire County Council v Times Newspaperss6 suggests that the House of Lords is willing to take a fresh look at the rules of defamation where political values are at stake; would it do so where more personal or commercial values are at stake?It seems doubtfuls7; perhaps the employer's qualified privilege has stood too long in a tort 'beyond the redemption of the courts'58 for the judiciary to re-examine it.59And perhaps the return of a more liberal view of negligence makes it unnecessary. Agitating for Part-Time Workers' Rights Charlotte Villiers and Fidelma White"In 1994, progress was made for part-timers in the pursuit of their rights at work.In Equal Opportunities Commission v Secretary of State for Employment,' the House of Lords, having recognised the standing of the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC), granted a declaration that provisions of the Employment Protection (Consolidation) Act 1978 (EPCA) indirectly discriminate against women and therefore are incompatible with European Community law.This involved reversing the decisions of the Divisional Court and the Court of Appeal.This case is significant for a number of reasons.First, while the case recognises the need to protect part-time workers, the EOC was successful because it was held ~ 54 supra n 48, at pp 302-304 (per Lord Bridge).55 supra n 1, at p 390. Cf South Pacific Manufacturing Co Lid v New Zealand Security Consultants & Investigations Ltd, supra n 18, at p 297 (per Cooke P). 56 [1993] AC 534.57 But see Lord Woolf, supra n 1, at p 400: 'it by no means follows that so far as references are concerned the same view should be taken of public policy as was taken when Whiteley v A d a m was decided.' 58 Slim v Daily Telegraph Lid [1968] 2 QB 157 (per Diplock LJ).59 cf White v Jones, supra n 3, at p 216 (per Lord Mustill), and Hedley, 'Recovering Lost Legacies: White v Jones in the Lords' [1995] 1 Web JCLI: 'if we are truly convinced that the will admitted to probate does not reflect [the testator's] wishes at the time of his death, why admit it to probate at all?'
Local government and politics in Turkey have been under the tutelary control of the central state. Contrary to the Western republican tradition of autonomous local self-government, local politics in Turkey were created by and for the central state. More recently, however, a municipal movement with a social democratic coloring emerged to put an end to central governmental tutelage. This movement was followed by the rise of a new conservative perspective in the 1980s. A peculiar synthesis of technical reason and traditional nationalism was the main characteristic of Turkish new conservatism, which identified local political problems with technical problems of urban management. This approach has been adopted by the party of political Islam, now controlling major metropolitan areas and most smaller towns in central and eastern Turkey; this party tries to resynthesize technical reason and Islamic traditions. Whether Turkey will walk on the path toward more decentralized and participatory political organization or jump into a new and stronger authoritarianism depends on the respective political capabilities of these three trends.
While decentralization is on the forefront of the reform agenda of many developing countries, few studies have performed empirical analysis to provide a holistic picture of the important fiscal, efficiency, and equity issues. Specifically, decentralization nearly always involves fiscal and administrative decisions by both national and subânational governments, as well as intricate intergovernmental relations. Here, two empirical models are presented for the Mexican primary and secondary education sector. The first analyzes the efficiencyâequity tradeâoff implicit the Mexican Federal Government's educational fiscal transfers to states. Unlike most similar analyses, this model analyzes the distribution of outcomes not simply expenditures. The second model analyzes the relative productivity of separate expenditures by the Federal and state governments before Mexico's recent educational decentralization legislation. The findings show that before the decentralization, the Federal Government exhibited some concern for equity, but that in doing so also treated states unequally according to criteria that have little to do with either efficiency or equity. In addition, the results show that the Federal Government may indeed have been the more efficient provider of primary and secondary education, raising concern for the fiscal and administrative relationship set up by the decentralization legislation: the Federal Government will continue to pay, while the states have gained relative autonomy over expenditures.
Richard P. McCormick and The Second American Party System Lex Renda (bio) In his American history survey lectures at Rutgers University, Richard P. McCormick often placed politicians at the center of history while irreverently poking fun at their inability to control long-term events. On the one hand, he argued that partisanship in the Jacksonian era originated in the contest for the presidency and politiciansâ manipulation of the electoral system, not in doctrinal disputes or social cleavages. On the other hand, politicians were at the mercy of fate. Neither the Whigsâ issueless, hoopla-dominated campaigns, replete with military hero candidates and absent of party platforms, nor the Democratsâ âJacksonian Strategyâ of laissez-faire government could withstand the sectional tensions that eventually sundered the parties as well as American society as a whole. The incredulity of Whigs toward one delegate at their 1840 national convention who daringly proposed a platform, the explosion on the U.S.S. Princeton, which took the life of John Tylerâs secretary of state and permitted his replacement, John C. Calhoun, to breach the hitherto stifled Texas annexation issue, the insulting rant of Michiganâs Charles Stuart at the 1860 Democratic convention, which precipitated the bolt of southern delegates and the subsequent break-up of the Democratic party â all figured prominently in McCormickâs humorous anecdotes about antebellum politics. Leaders created events, yet when structural changes and transcendent sectional animosities are factored in, their influence appears enigmatic, akin to that of the broker in a stock market that ultimately crashes. This role is most visible in McCormickâs The Second American Party System: Party Formation in the Jacksonian Era (1966), 1 a book which remains equally enigmatic in its seminal importance and ambiguous legacy. McCormick received his graduate training at the University of Pennsylvania under the tutelage of Roy F. Nichols, the preeminent âpoliticianâs political historianâ of his day. Nicholsâs account of the disruption of the Democratic party in the late 1850s provided an organizational interpretation of political history that challenged the âirrepressible conflictâ school of Civil [End Page 378] War causation. 2 Although McCormick would implicitly reject Civil War revisionism, Nicholsâs assumptions about the impact of politicians, especially their ability to exploit voter impulses, would permeate The Second American Party System. Nichols fostered in McCormick an enduring appreciation of the autonomous nature of political parties and the propensity of politicians to act with personal goals in mind. The genesis of McCormickâs interest in the development of the second party system lay in his own earlier study of voting patterns in New Jersey, as well as in his reading of Maurice Duvergerâs comparative analysis of the worldâs party systems. 3 Duverger concluded that the American political system deviated markedly from every model. American political parties were, in essence, electoral machines â institutions more adept at electing candidates than in articulating convictions, educating voters, or fulfilling policy goals. For McCormick, the proximate cause of American exceptionalism in this regard was structural. The decentralized system of government and the various constitutional provisions which by design frustrated majority rule ensured the creation of parties more capable of winning elections than of governing. Americansâ persistent ambivalence toward both, power and the legitimacy of political parties, undergirded these structural impediments. Of all the party systems in American history, the second was most clearly an electoral machine system, McCormick implied, for not only did its component parties abdicate their responsibility to govern, but they had to exist in defiance of the most divisive issue in American history: black slavery. 4 The complexity of the federal system of politics led McCormick to write The Second Party System in an unconventional manner. His account of political development was based on neither national nor local events exclusively. Instead, he traced party development in every state which entered the Union prior to 1824, excluding only South Carolina, where no state-wide elections were held before the Civil War. This comparative approach allowed McCormick to ask the same analytic questions and to deduce with reasonable accuracy the timing of party formation everywhere. 5 Indeed, the timing of party development was McCormickâs principal concern, and that too distinguished his book from others...
The Caiden and Wildavsky work of 1974 postulates a model of poverty-uncertainty: the governments of poor countries face disappearing and decremental budgets in financing public programs because of a lack of economic growth or poverty. The core argument is that economic development, as a critical variable, determines increments in budgeting practices. In other words, budgeting is incremental, and incremental budgeting results from the growth of GNP. This model has since become a set of principles with identifiable attributes to explain the budgetary processes in poor nations. \n \nThis study is about application of that model in China's budgeting. China has a unitary budget system. The central government used to draw most of its revenues from provinces and its budget includes those of 31 provinces. Provinces thus play a dual role of collecting revenues from within and remitting them to the center in the name of revenue sharing. In 1978 China decided to open to the world, reform its economy, and decentralize budget to provinces. But the original intent of decentralization was to give incentives so that provinces accumulate more resources for further central extraction. The decentralization, however, has led to fiscal decline not anticipated by the reformers.
This paper argues that within every organization there is a terrain which is not and cannot be managed, in which people, both individually and in groups, can engage in unsupervised, spontaneous activity. This is referred to as the unmanaged organization, a kind of organizational dreamworld in which desires, anxieties and emotions find expressions in highly irrational construc tions. The chief force in this terrain is fantasy and its landmarks include stories, myths, jokes, gossip, nicknames, graffiti and cartoons. In the organizational dreamworld, emotions prevail over rationality and pleasure over reality. The paper argues that fantasy offers a third possibility to organizational members, which amounts to neither conformity nor rebellion, but to a grudging material acceptance accompanied by a symbolic refashioning of events and official stor ies. Far from being a marginal terrain, it is suggested that the unmanaged organisation is rich, multidimensional and the natural habitat of subjectivity. Four different modes of subjectivity are identified and discussed in connection with different types of organizational narratives: (1) the subject as hero; (2) the subject as heroic survivor; (3) the subject as victim; (4) the subject as object of love.