The purpose of this research is to investigate the innovation process in municipal personnel offices by answering three questions. What factors are related to the innovativeness of personnel offices? What factors are involved in the diffusion of personnel innovations from one city to another? What intraorganizational processes are involved in the decision to adopt personnel innovations? This research focuses on ten innovations selected by a panel of both personnel academicians and practitioners. Data collection involved a mail survey sent to all cities over 25,000 in the Chicago and Dallas federal regions and in-depth interviews with personnel directors in twenty-two cities. The implications of this research are both practical and theoretical. Officials interested in more complete innovation diffusion would do well to stress the nonradicalness of the change and any applicable governmental mandates. Federal, state, and regional governments can obviously improve both the availability and applicability of personnel information. In terms of theory, the research offers support to both the rational and power-based models of decision making and change, although the latter seems most appropriate in explaining radical change.

This study hypothesizes that the major barriers to expanded trade between the U.S. and Eastern Europe are systemic in nature. Using this approach, each political/ economic system is examined in an attempt to define the obstacles to foreign trade expansion, to describe the most important systemic and political factors at work, and to demonstrate how they have determined and will continue to shape the economic relationships between the U.S. and the countries of Eastern Europe. A final synthesis presents the two systems in a unified picture of the economic environment and concludes that significant trade expansion is unlikely in the near future due to basic systemic incompatibilities which impede the resolution of key foreign trade problems.

This study examines the consequences of interdependence between Saudi Arabia and the United States from 1960 to 1978 as it relates to the concepts of cooperation and conflict. Research on interdependence focuses primarily on relations among Western countries and on whether interdependence is increasing or decreasing between them. It has rarely addressed relations between countries with different levels of economic development or the consequence of interdependence for international relations in terms of conflict and cooperation. Specifically, this study examines the following question: Does the level of interdependence between Saudi Arabia and the United States have any affect on the level of bilateral conflict and cooperation between the two countries? The hypotheses are tested using regression analysis. The primary conclusion is that increases in bilateral interdependence between Saudi Arabia and the United States from 1960 to 1978 produced increased cooperation as well as conflict.

This paper addresses the influence of a mechanistic world view of East-West relations. The "classic" model of mechanism orders reality into a relationship akin to a simple clock or pump. In the model, discrete and unmodifiable parts, with no natural functional relationship to each other, are balanced and engineered into functional unity. This study shows how "environmental" conditions at the international level (ambiguity, complexity, and prolonged conflict) limit the ability of policy makers to define objective limits to containment, influencing them instead to follow the universal application of the "logic" of mechanism--that any imbalance must be checked by the container.