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This study frames the international disability movement – NGOs, foreign donors, and transnational networks focused on promoting the 2006 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities – as an organizational environment. As the movement expands into the Global South, it actively pressures local grassroots associations to adopt a new organizational model in order to become membership-based advocacy organizations. Many groups, however, are embedded in local civic environments that expect them to act as self-help and social support organizations. As such, grassroots associations are caught between two organizational environments, each promoting different models and practices.

This analysis draws upon 18 months of participant observation and 69 interviews gathered from a local coalition of seven grassroots disability associations in Nicaragua. This ethnographic approach is combined with sociological institutionalism, an analysis that emphasizes the way organizations conform to organizational models that spread across a field.

The local associations responded in a variety of ways to the advocacy model promoted by the international movement. Organizations either conformed, resisted, or developed hybrid organizational models on the basis of internal characteristics that determined how they straddled the two organizational environments.

This paper highlights the way international models may be ineffective in local environments that have civic traditions and lower levels of governmental capacity than found in the West. Some disability associations, however, will creatively combine local and international models to create new initiatives that make a positive impact in the lives of persons with disabilities at the grassroots.

In this chapter, I propose an integrative framework for theorizing and empiricizing about talent management, based on the notion of “talent philosophies.” I believe that current debates about whether talent management should be inclusive or exclusive create the risk that our field will become fragmented, thereby undermining its social-scientific legitimacy. Nonetheless, this debate is absolutely correct in identifying the tensions between inclusive and exclusive approaches to talent management as a phenomenon. This, however, creates issues for talent management as a construct for scientific inquiry, as we need clear definitions and measures to create a cumulative body of research as a community. I propose that the solution lies in an expansion of our vocabulary as talent management researchers and identify four constructs that can help us structure and categorize our collective work: giftedness, talent, potential, and strength. Each of these constructs map logically onto different talent philosophies and talent management practices. In establishing “unity in diversity,” I believe talent management could finally make the transition into a more mature field of academic inquiry – although clearly phenomenon driven – characterized in equal parts by construct clarity, rigor, and relevance.

Purpose: The purpose of this chapter is to scrutinize the apparent alliance between international and local disability rights movements by contextualizing the process in which the disability rights model is being diffused globally. It seeks to critically examine the transplantation and promotion of the international disability rights movement's rights-based model in China.

Approach: This chapter draws from 18 in-depth interviews with local and international disability rights activists through multisite ethnographic fieldwork in China in 2019.

Findings: This chapter finds that despite opening up spaces for resistance and emancipation locally, the international disability rights movement nevertheless constitutes what I call an enclave of rights that insulates the international rights model from the political, social, and economic realities on the ground. In the case of China, the authoritarian politics that define the relationship between the state and civil society, as well as the economic vulnerability of people with disabilities in the post-socialist market economy, limit, if not invalidate, the rights model espoused by the international disability rights movement.

Implications: The findings of this chapter challenge and complicate the current scholarship of the transnational disability rights movement beyond its normative claims of emancipation. They also explore potential spaces and direction for building a new transnational alliance that takes into account the local experience of disability in a rapidly globalized world.

Purpose: Researchers and advocates alike have noted that persons with disabilities and older persons are the two groups most marginalized by neoliberal economic policies and therefore could come together as a broad-based movement against the roll back of their rights. Yet, these two groups fail to collaborate, and instead compete against one another for an ever-shrinking pool of benefits. This chapter explores the barriers to their collaboration within the context of structural adjustment in Jamaica.

Methods/Approach: The author engages in a critical analysis of neoliberalism's effect on the advocacy strategies of the disability and older persons' movements in Jamaica based on 32 semi-directed depth interviews, participant observation of numerous events, and a survey of media written by local advocates.

Findings: The disability movement makes claims on behalf of their members by focusing on the potential returns that society will gain by providing the opportunities that will make young persons with disabilities productive employees over their lifetime. The older persons' movement advocates by portraying themselves as “vibrant” and worthy of social investment because of the contributions they make. Both of these arguments for inclusion are also exclusionary. The disability movement excludes older persons as potential contributors and the older persons' movement similarly excludes persons with disabilities.

Implications: The only way neoliberalism will successfully be rolled back and universal rights returned is if the disability movement and older persons' movements build an alliance that is more inclusive, including of one another, by rejecting the language of investment and productivity, and instead focus on rights and inherent dignity.

This study seeks to present a simple assembly line design and its balance for a low‐volume manufacturing company.

The study presents experiences with the design and implementation of a simple assembly line. The implementation concerns three aspects; design and construction of the assembly line, the assembly analysis of the product, and then balancing of the line. It also discusses construction and implementation difficulties of this tactical tool in the case company.

The study presents some outcomes from the design, implementation, and balancing of an assembly line for SMEs.

The study is limited by the case company and its experience.

This study is not pure theoretical study, it has application stages for industry, and it provides some real interface for the people from SMEs.

The approach has an original value in respect of implementation of assembly line for a small manufacturing company which has many limitations.

The conclusion of the Cold War rivalry between the United States and former Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s created new areas of opportunity and concern for U.S. national security policy. No longer menaced by the threat of nuclear war from Soviet military might, the United States emerged from the Cold War as the world's preeminent military power. Successful developments such as this often produce elation in the pronouncements of U.S. officials as a recent Clinton administration declaration demonstrates:

A quantitative theoretical model is proposed to measure how productivity performance can be affected by strategic decisions related to specific competitive priorities.

This study proposes the Primary Transformation Model (PTM) and an equation to measure cause-and-effect relationships between productivity and competitive priorities.

The interdependence between productivity and competitive priorities was studied using the PTM and the proposed model indicates that strategies that improve external performance also impact internal productivity. It was also observed that the compatibility between competitive priorities depends on the initial manufacturing conditions and the implementation method adopted.

The proposed model is theoretical and, as such, is an abstraction of reality and does not consider all possible aspects. It consists of a novel approach that still requires further empirical testing. The PTM provides insights about the trade-offs between productivity and strategic objectives, as well, contributes to the ongoing research on manufacturing strategy and can be further developed in future studies.

The main practical implication is to allow companies to relate their strategic decisions to their productivity performance.

This research also contributes to societal issues by enabling firms to better align strategic objectives and operations, which ultimately allows offering products more suited to the needs of customers, thus making better use of the required resources and favoring economic growth.

The model proposed allows objective assessment of actions aiming at operational efficiency and effectiveness, in addition to providing insights into cause-and-effect relationships between productivity and competitive priorities. The model can also be used in empirical investigations on manufacturing strategy.