A New Look at Institutional Food Service Management

Institutional food service management, especially by contract management companies, offers unrecognized career opportunities for many of today's hospitality students. It is one of the best kept secrets in the food service industry. This article endeavors to provide a new look at and overview of the industry as it has evolved and now stands.

Three essays on hospital efficiency

This dissertation analyzes hospital efficiency using various econometric techniques. The first essay provides additional and recent evidence to the presence of contract management behavior in the U.S. hospital industry. Unlike previous studies, which focus on either an input-demand equation or the cost function of the firm, this paper estimates the two jointly using a system of nonlinear equations. Moreover, it addresses the longitudinal problem of institutions adopting contract management in different years, by creating a matched control group of non-adopters with the same longitudinal distribution as the group under study. The estimation procedure then finds that labor, and not capital, is the preferred input in U.S. hospitals regardless of managerial contract status. With institutions that adopt contract management benefiting from lower labor inefficiencies than the simulated non-contract adopters. These results suggest that while there is a propensity for expense preference behavior towards the labor input, contract managed firms are able to introduce efficiencies over conventional, owner controlled, firms. Using data for the years 1998 through 2007, the second essay investigates the production technology and cost efficiency faced by Florida hospitals. A stochastic frontier multiproduct cost function is estimated in order to test for economies of scale, economies of scope, and relative cost efficiencies. The results suggest that small-sized hospitals experience economies of scale, while large and medium sized institutions do not. The empirical findings show that Florida hospitals enjoy significant scope economies, regardless of size. Lastly, the evidence suggests that there is a link between hospital size and relative cost efficiency. The results of the study imply that state policy makers should be focused on increasing hospital scale for smaller institutions while facilitating the expansion of multiproduct production for larger hospitals. The third and final essay employs a two staged approach in analyzing the efficiency of hospitals in the state of Florida. In the first stage, the Banker, Charnes, and Cooper model of Data Envelopment Analysis is employed in order to derive overall technical efficiency scores for each non-specialty hospital in the state. Additionally, input slacks are calculated and reported in order to identify the factors of production that each hospital may be over utilizing. In the second stage, we employ a Tobit regression model in order to analyze the effects a number of structural, managerial, and environmental factors may have on a hospital’s efficiency. The results indicated that most non-specialty hospitals in the state are operating away from the efficient production frontier. The results also indicate that the structural make up, managerial choices, and level of competition Florida hospitals face have an impact on their overall technical efficiency.

Financial Planning by Contract Food Service Management Companies

Drugs in the workplace is a growing problem that threatens a valuable human resource - the employee. Managers in the hospitality industry can take a proactive stance in meeting the problem head on. The authors discuss what managers can do.

Current State of Management/Union Relations in Hospitality Sector

Labor management relations in the hospitality sector is an important aspect of effective management. Increasingly, unions are becoming proactive in organizing hospitality workers. This manifests itself in strikes, boycotts, picketing, sexual harassment complaints, and complaints to OSHA regarding safety and health workplace violations. This research monitors the current scene with respect to labor management relations and analyzes work issues that have been brought up for third-party resolution by NLRB staff or arbitrators. The study reports on 66 NLRB cases and 104 arbitration cases. Issues brought before the NLRB include mostly contract interpretations. In arbitration, there were mostly discipline issues, including work rule violations, disorderly conduct, poor performance and employee theft. Quite often, the proposed job action on the part of the employer was discharge. In NLRB cases, the employee usually prevailed, while in arbitration the employer usually prevailed.