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In the global economy, transnational economic factors are affecting compensation schemes for both expatriates and local hires. Also affecting new thinking about multinational compensation issues is the issue of meshing corporate cultures with local cultures. Conventional thinking has emphasized that all multinationals-like all politics, in the words of former House speaker Tip O'Neill-are local. But the authors argue that the importance of national cultures is exaggerated when thinking about global strategy and compensation and reward systems. Business strategy and markets are more appropriate units of analysis, they say. Companies should adopt models that allow managers the opportunity to tailor the total compensation system to fit the context in which they compete within a framework of corporate principles.

A method for validating expert systems, based on validation approaches from psychology and Turing's "imitation game," is demonstrated using a flexible employee benefits expert system. Psychometric validation has three aspects: the extent to which the system and expert decisions agree (criterionrelated validity), the inputs and processes used by experts compared to the system (content validity), and differences between expert and novice decisions (construct validity). If these criteria are satisfied, then the system is indistinguishable from experts for its domain and satisfies the Turing Test.Personal Choice Expert (PCE) was designed to help employees of a Fortune 500 firm choose benefits in their flexible benefits system. Its recommendations do not significantly differ from those given by independent experts. Hence, if the system‐independent expert agreement (criterion‐related validity) were the only standard, PCE could be considered valid. However, construct analysis suggests that re‐engineering may be required. High intra‐expert agreement exists only for some benefit recommendations (e.g., dental care and long‐term disability) and not for others (e.g., short‐term disability, accidental death and dismemberment, and life insurance). Insights offered by these methods are illustrated and examined.

Academic pay plans are often so haphazard and unrealistic they become a source of campus discontent. What's needed is ...

Twenty-five years of economic reform has propelled China to the center of the world's economic stage. Based on current trends, in the foreseeable future China is likely to become the largest economy in the world. China's dramatic growth may be envied by other developing economies, but for management scholars it presents an exciting intellectual puzzle. In this paper we describe the empirical context of China today, review contemporary research on Chinese management and organizations, and describe the nine papers in this special issue of Organization Science. The papers provide a close examination of how massive corporate transformation in China has influenced interfirm relationships, affected opportunity structures and social processes, and modified individual behaviors within firms. We identify the many paradoxes in this intellectual terrain and present a guide to the challenging research agenda ahead. We recommend that scholars of organizations think deeply about China as a context and consider China as an empirical setting where the boundaries of existing knowledge on organizations can be extended.