et cetera, et cetera 英文人行道: toolbox, ad hoc, adhocracy, half-baked, taxonomy of the leak

2020年3月17日星期二

toolbox, ad hoc, adhocracy, half-baked, taxonomy of the leak

‘It’s Totally Ad Hoc’: Why America’s Virus Response Looks Like a Patchwork

By ELLEN BARRY

For centuries, the United States has resisted a centralized public health policy. This week, as protective measures against the coronavirus varied county to county, Americans saw the cost.

In New York—famously “the city that never sleeps”—nightlife is a $10 billion industry, offering a staggering 100,000 jobs. London's after-hours economy generates £26.3 billion ($32.3 billion) every year

Nightlife is big business. Too big to be regulated in an ad hoc way

Cities benefit when the after-hours economy is properly catered to

ECONOMIST.COM

Yale Cancer Center researchers have designed a “toolbox” to modify multiple genes simultaneously, streamlining what used to be a very complicated process.

Genome-editing ‘toolbox’ targets multiple genes at once

NEWS.YALE.EDU

Under 5 million emails, 2 million PDFs and over a million images used to uncover tax evasion and the looting of public wealth

Panama tax papers: the taxonomy of the leak

An overview and breakdown of the hidden wealth exposed in “The Panama Papers”

ECON.ST

Obama's Stimulus: Something for Every Techie

It's costly, and has many parts, some of which don't seem fully baked. But you won't hear many complaints from high-tech executives about the economic stimulus package. Quite the contrary.

Another important shift is a court ruling last year making it easier for shareholders to challenge directors nominated by companies.

Shareholders toolboxes are getting more and more robust every year, said Ms. Minow of the Corporate Library.

Moreover, as the number of activist investors grows, a vast ad hoc network has formed that makes it more difficult for companies to win a fight. The universe of activist investors has expanded to include hedge funds like Pirate Capital, which is fighting to add its executives to the board of the security company Brink s, and investors like Carl C. Icahn, who failed to gain board seats after a public spat with Time Warner s chief executive, Richard D. Parsons.

half-baked
adjective INFORMAL DISAPPROVING
An idea or plan which is half-baked has not been considered carefully enough:
The government has set up some half-baked scheme for training teachers on the job.ad hoc 特別的、［臨時］特別為此

（為此目的-- For this purpose , with respect to this .）［

Wikipedia article "Adhocracy". 很值得參考我沒想到是在 {未來的衝擊} 這本書先提出的--70年代初的台灣翻譯暢銷書 (新潮譯者可能過世了呢)

ad hoc (ăd hŏk', hōk')
adv.
For the specific purpose, case, or situation at hand and for no other: a committee formed ad hoc to address the issue of salaries.
adj.

Formed for or concerned with one specific purpose: an ad hoc compensation committee.
Improvised and often impromptu: “On an ad hoc basis, Congress has . . . placed . . . ceilings on military aid to specific countries” (New York Times).

[Latin : ad, to + hoc, neuter accusative of hic, this.]

Adhocracy is a type of organization being an opposite of bureaucracy. The term was first popularized in 1970 by Alvin Toffler^[1], and has since become often used in the theory of management of organizations (particularly online organizations), further developed by academics such as Henry Mintzberg.

Etymology

The word is a portmanteau of the Latin ad hoc, meaning 'for purpose', and the suffix -cracy, from the Greek cratein, meaning 'to govern'^[1], and is thus a heteroclite. The term was first popularized in 1970 by Alvin Toffler^[1] and has since become often used in the theory of management of organizations, further developed by academics such as Henry Mintzberg.

Specifics

Robert H. Waterman, Jr. defined adhocracy as "any form of organization that cuts across normal bureaucratic lines to capture opportunities, solve problems, and get results."[1] For Henry Mintzberg, an adhocracy is a complex and dynamic organizational form.^[2] It is different from bureaucracy; like Toffler, Mintzberg considers bureaucracy a thing of the past, and adhocracy one of the future.^[1] Adhocracy is very good at problem solving and innovations^[1] and thrives in a changing environment^[2]. It requires sophisticated and often automated technical systems to develop and thrive.^[1]
Characteristics of an adhocracy:

highly organic structure^[2]
little formalization of behavior^[2]^[1]
job specialization based on formal training[2]
a tendency to group the specialists in functional units for housekeeping purposes but to deploy them in small, market-based project teams to do their work^[2]
a reliance on liaison devices to encourage mutual adjustment, the key coordinating mechanism, within and between these teams^[2]^[3]
low standarization of procedures, because they stifle innovation^[1]
roles not clearly defined^[1]
selective decentralization^[1]
work organization rests on specialized teams^[1]
power-shifts to specialized teams
horizontal job specialization^[3]
high cost of communication^[3]
culture based on democractic and non-bureaucratic work ^[3]

All members of an organization have the authority to make decisions and to take actions affecting the future of the organization. There is an absence of hierarchy.
Alvin Toffler noted in his book Future Shock that adhocracies will get more common and are likely to replace bureaucracy. He also wrote that they will most often come in form of a temporary structure, formed to resolve a given problem and dissolved afterwards. An example are cross-department task forces.
Downsides of adhocracies can include "half-baked actions", personnel problems stemming from organization's temporary nature, extremism in suggested or undertaken actions, and threats to democracy and legality rising from adhocracy's often low-key profile.^[3] To address those problems, researches in adhocracy suggest a model merging adhocracy and bureaucracy, the bureau-adhocracy.^[3]

Use in fiction

The term is also used to describe the form of government used in the science fiction novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, by Cory Doctorow. It is also an adequate description of the Chironian civilization in James P. Hogan's Voyage from Yesteryear.