Four different approaches for operationalizing organization slack
through secondary financial data have been proposed (Bourgeois,
1981; Dimick & Murray, 1978; Marino & Lange, 1982; Wolf, 1971).
In this paper these measures are organized into two types of oper
ations: relative and absolute; and each is applied to a common group
of firms. The relative measures agree to a significant degree on the
classification of firms into high and low slack groups. The absolute
measures do not, however, converge. Intertype comparisons (relative
vs. absolute) indicate that the proposed operations do discriminate
between these two aspects of the slack construct.
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