1. Which objectives do CDCs identify as means and ends?
2. Which of these objectives are common across CDCs?
3. Which of these objectives are contingent on the CDC’s characteristics and those
of its target community?
4. How is the degree of complexity in value hierarchies structuring of value
hierarchies contingent on the CDCs characteristics and those of its target
community?
Our second set of questions concerns CBO acceptance of OR-related methods.
Our conceptual framework for these questions (Fig. 2) builds on the original
technology acceptance model (TAM, Davis et al. 1989), which has been used to
study decision support technologies as well as empirical operations research
(Scudder and Hill 1998). The basic version of this model states that acceptance
of a technology will depend on the technology’s target users perceptions of its
usefulness and its ease of use. This framework generally refers to individual
users, but in our case, with small organizations, there is not much difference
between the decision makers and the users, so here we intend the framework to
refer to the organization’s overall response. Appended to the basic framework
are antecedents. Specifically, while TAM states that the perceptions of a
method’s impact drive its acceptance, we hypothesize that these perceptions
depend on the problem characteristics, the organization’s characteristics (e.g.,
its skills, mission), and the focus of the method. In Fig. 2, the arrows between
perceived ease, perceived usefulness and acceptance indicate a positive
association. The arrows from method, problem and organizational characteristics
are placeholders indicating that we hope to find some such characteristics
that have positive or negative association with the ease and usefulness.
The OR, soft OR and PSM literatures discuss various experiences, cases and
guidelines for practice in a range of organization types, and there is a general
understanding that different methods are appropriate for different situations.