Morals, rights and practice in the human services : effective and fair decision-making in health, social care and criminal justice

Provides a synthesis of human rights theory and human services practice and offers a rights based model to aid professional decision making and practice.

Common sense versus intuition in management decision-making

The increasingly complex organisational environment has made certainty in decision-making difficult. Sometimes careful consideration comes before decisions, but sometimes rushed decisions are made. Successful outcomes can often follow from either process, but exactly why each approach works needs to be examined. A return to the epistemological bases of common sense and intuition can help to clarify the decision process for managers in the current environment. The paper starts with perspectives on the similarities and differences between common sense and intuition, drills down to the rational and empirical foundations of each, and then introduces a decision-making matrix that portrays the conceptual basis of intuition and common sense in the actions and reactions of the decision-makers. Primarily, this is a theoretical paper incorporating literature review and authors’ analysis of the interaction of common sense and intuition when making decisions. We conclude that it is pertinent to accept intuition as a valuable complement to common sense, and it is anticipated that the different perspective can facilitate the merging of critical countervailing concepts in the management decision-making process.

Use of aggregation functions in decision making

A key component of many decision making processes is the aggregation step, whereby a set of numbers is summarised with a single representative value. This research showed that aggregation functions can provide a mathematical formalism to deal with issues like vagueness and uncertainty, which arise naturally in various decision contexts.

Consumer decision making in telecommunications

The data analyses consumers' decision making processes in the telecommunications market. The dataset includes both autoethnographic videographies and experimental quantitative data.

The data comprises an extended autoethnographic methodology with 22 participants. Participants recorded video diaries, written diaries and extended interviews about their experiences looking for a mobile phone service. It also includes a quantitative experiment with 517 participants to examine, under close to real conditions, how consumers make decisions. This involved advertising and sales scenarios looking at the effect of bundling and limited time offers in advertising on consumer perceptions and purchase intentions; the effect of unit pricing and the presentation of terms and conditions information in advertising on consumer perceptions and purchase intentions; and the effect of information and the mode of its presentation in personal selling on consumers’ perceptions.

Family holiday decision making : the knowledge and influence of adolescent children and parents

This paper investigates the influence adolescent children have over their parents with regards to holiday decisions. A dyadic method of analysis was used to determine the level of influence young people have on the decision making oftheir parents. Our research shows that the families in general do not see their adolescent children as more knowledgeable than the parents when it comes to holidays. However, the level of knowledge the family perceives the child to have is strongly related to how much influence the child then has over the parent. Also, the level of 'expertness' the family attribute to the child is strongly related to the family's attitude towards the child as a socialisation agent for the parent. Parents knowledge on the other hand, is not related to how influenced they are by their children. Finally, daughters have a larger impact on their parents' holiday decisions than sons.