Safety Policies; Guides to Action and Decision (Kilbourne,
August 19 2010 posting on safetydailyadvisor.blr.com)
Policies are guides to action and decision making
under a given set of circumstances.
Affirming Affirmative Action: Rejecting the "New" Racism (Welty,
1989)
General cultural values... serve to legitimate a social system, but do not
necessarily provide guides to action in that system.
Particularistic values... are guides to action
Issues in evolutionary epistemology (Hahlweg, Hooker)
p.70-71 Maps, too, are guides to action, and they can fulfill this
function only because they do depict genuine invariant relationships holding in the world... We select maps on the basis of
their capacity to guide us to our destination. Likewise we choose to employ theories that can serve as guides to
action. In doing so we indirectly select for theories that depict the genuine invariant relationships holding in the world.
p.77 the scientist and the scientific community select
for scientific practice and thereby indirectly select those theories that have proven to be useful guides to action.
Scientific knowledge gets translated into technical application.
Clifford’s Ethics of Belief http://www.philosophicalturn.net/intro/Faith/Clifford.pdf
Beliefs are guides to action individually and socially
Procedures are plans that prescribe the method how
activities are to be done, now and in future. They are guides to action, that give explicit details how certain
activities must be carried out.
Rules spell out specific required actions or non-actions
of the organizations employee- without exceptions. They allow no room for discretion, like in policies. They are the simplest
plans and are guides to action, without any time sequence as in procedures
[also,] Strategic planning in organizations, is based on the use of tactical
plans, as in military operations, to get the advantage over the enemy or competition. Strategy involves action plans, policies,
programs and resource mobilization, to achieve desired objectives effectively. The company may adopt a strategic line of business
activity, marketing strategy, growth strategy etc. However, strategies only provide a framework for guiding thinking and action-
not detailed plans to achieve enterprise objectives.
Some useful definitions of Business Policy
1) A business policy is an implied overall guide setting up boundaries that
supply the general limit and direction in which managerial action will take place.
2) A business policy is one, which focuses
attention on the strategic allocation of scarce resources. Conceptually speaking strategy is the direction of such resource
allocation while planning is the limit of allocation
3) A
business policy represents the best thinking of the company management as to how the objectives may be achieved in the prevailing
economic and social conditions
4) A business policy is the study of the nature and process of choice about the
future of independent enterprises by those responsible for decisions and their implementation
5) The purpose of
a business policy is to enable the management to relate properly the organization’s work to its environment.
Business policies are guides to action or channels to thinking.
Viewed
from a systems angle, policies form a hierarchy of guides to managerial thinking.
Rules and acquired wisdom, the stuff of culture, are guides to action
but do not dictate action. Instead, people make opportunistic choices
Essentials Of Management By Harold Koontz, Heinz Weihrich
p.79 Procedures are plans that establish a required
method of handling future activities. They are chronological sequences of required actions. They are guides to action,
rather than to thinking, and they detail the exact manner in which certain activities must be accomplished.
Thinking about the Family: Views of Parents and Children
(Ashmore, Brodzinsky, 1986)
p.55 Belief structures are not only organized on rational bases, but
are also bound by affect... Affect and knowledge are interdependent. The intensity of affect bound to knowledge probably influences
the readiness of beliefs to change (Siegel, 1985).
p.55 Beliefs are guides to action... Beliefs
guide not only the action, but also the "choice" of events to which to react. Beliefs "appear in the context of behavior"
(Sheibe, 1970, p. 35).
The Epistemology of Ethics, Salesmanship, and Basket Weaving
April 26, 2009
http://jerrykirkpatrick.blogspot.com/2009/04/epistemology-of-ethics-salesmanship-and.html
Values are guides to action... There are two aims
of science, but they are to explain and guide. Guidance specifies a goal and the actions necessary to reach the goal. All value theories are sciences of guidance.
Communication
in Our Lives, Julia T. Wood, 2009
p.32 Sometimes we deliberately influence what we notice.
Self-indication occurs when we point out certain things to ourselves. In many ways, education is a process of learning
to indicate to ourselves things we hadn't seen.
p.33 What we select to notice is also influenced by who we are and what
is going on inside us. Our motives and needs affect what we see and don't see.
p.33-34 Once we have selected what to notice, we must make sense
of it... we organize [perceptions] in ways that make them meaningful to us. The most useful theory for explaining
how we organize perceptions is constructivism, the theory that we organize and interpret experience by applying cognitive
structures called schemata
p.34 We use four types of cognitive schemata to make sense of
perceptions: prototypes, personal constructs, stereotypes, and scripts (Fehr, 1993; Hewes, 1995).
p.36 To organize perceptions, we also use scripts, which
are guides to action based on what we've experienced and observed. A script consists of a sequence of activities
that define what we and others are expected to do in specific situations. Many of our daily activities are governed
by scripts, although we're often unaware of them... in most of our activities, we use scripts to organize perceptions
into lines of action... scripts are cognitive schemata that we use to organize our perceptions of... situations.
They help us make sense of what we notice and help us anticipate how we and others will act in particular situations.
Inference to the Best Explanation (Lipton, 1991, 2004)
p. 21 Our inferred beliefs
are guides to action that help us to get what we want and to avoid trouble.
The Development of Children (Cole, Cole, Lightfoot, 2009)
p. 295 scripts represent generalized knowledge... Scripts are
guides to action. They are mental representations that children and adults use to figure out what is likely to happen next
in familiar circumstances. Until children have acquired a large repertoire of scripted knowledge from which they
can generalize in unfamiliar events, they must pay attention to the details of each new activity. As a consequence, they may
be less likely to distinguish between the essential and the superficial features of a novel context.
