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The purpose of this paper is to apply the statistical tolerancing technique to analyze the dual responses of APFA arm height deviation with respect to next stage of disk assembly process and simultaneously optimize and allocate the required tolerance of the responses onto its components at minimum cost of manufacturing and the quality loss.

The relationships between the dual responses of APFA heights and the geometric dimensions and tolerances of APFA components, and orientation of the assembled part with respect to disk assembly were first defined. The effects of the APFA orientation, and the component tolerances on the distributions and variations of the responses were derived and investigated in terms of resultant product/process performance, quality loss, and the cost of assembly. The tolerance cost-based objective function is then formulated as the combined manufacturing/assembly cost and the quality loss. Direct search method was used to find the best feasible tolerance solutions satisfying the required product performance at minimum cost.

The constructed relationship or transfer functions of the dual responses were probabilistic depending on the orientation of part with respect to the next assembly process. The Monte Carlo simulation is empirically suitable for the computation of the conditional distributions of the responses against the first-order linear approximation of component variances. The proposed solution of tolerance control plan increases the product performances, C _pm , from 0.6 to be at least 1. The proposed tolerance allocation plans will reduce the amount of rework currently as high as 5 percent to at most 0.01 percent with minimally increased assembly cost.

This proposed methodology to design and allocate component tolerances is suitable and applicable to the APFA assembly process. The derived assembly functions of probabilistic type relating the responses to the process and component characteristics can represent the actual dynamic of assembled part better than a traditional single deterministic function developed under static concept. This presented methodology can be applied to other assembly cases where quality characteristic depends on the part dynamic.

This research simultaneously optimized the dual APFA height deviation responses with minimum cost of tolerance and quality loss using two different conditional distributions and transfer functions of the resultant deviations generated from dynamic of APFA with respect to disk.

The purpose of this paper is to address the following research question: What are the perceptions of professionals and consumers regarding the antecedents of client referrals in the financial advice sector?

A total of 61 qualitative interviews were conducted, with the following three key groups: independent financial advisers (IFAs; 20 interviews), clients of IFAs (26 interviews) and consumers who manage their own financial affairs and do not use the services of an IFA (15 interviews).

The financial advisers interviewed believe that client referrals are important to their business success, that they can influence clients to become ambassadors who will consciously seek out new clients and that excellent service will motivate clients to provide referrals. However, the interviews with the clients painted a different picture. While advisers believe that they can influence client referral behavior, the clients did not believe that they were influenced by the adviser to make referrals.

The sampling method was non-random and relied on the professional contacts of the principal researcher as a starting point, from which a network of contacts was established to identify interviewees. The study casts doubt on the ability of professional service providers to influence client referral behavior. This novel finding deserves further research investigation.

There is clearly scope for greater measurement in connection with referrals in professional service businesses. The propensity for clients to refer should be included as a metric in the performance measurement of professional service providers, in addition to standard financial measures. This would encourage the service provider to consider referrals during client interactions.

The study reports on a substantial qualitative study involving both professional service providers and their clients. While the providers believe that client referrals are critical to their business success, the evidence collected provides little or no support for this belief. Clients report they are not motivated to refer. Advisers do not explicitly measure referrals. The reality of referrals seems not to match the mythology.

Zaleha Abdul Shukor is a Senior lecturer in Accounting at the School of Accounting, Universiti kebangsaan Malaysia. She obtained Masters of Commerce from Macquarie Uni, Australia and BSc (Acctg) from Syracuse Univ, NY. She is pursuing her PhD at Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. Her research interests include, financial reporting and capital market-based research.

Utilizing creative campus partnerships, alliances, and mergers, libraries can move from a traditional support role to a more participatory role that actively engages a university’s academic mission. Libraries, as centralizing, politically neutral hubs for information, can serve as catalysts for collaborative planning that paves the way for creating innovative campus spaces and services in conjunction with other academic or general campus units. By forging alliances and merging services and resources with campus partners, such as Information Technology (IT) and the English and Communication departments, the library can address student need and initiate transformational changes—changes that are broader in scope than those within traditional library functions. The case study in this chapter provides an exploration of the merging of library services with a writing center, an effort which was enhanced by adding an oral communication support service. It provides examples of what can be accomplished through visionary leadership and teamwork in 21st-century academic libraries, focusing on how student need and library use prompted institutional change at a mid-sized regional comprehensive university. The authors highlight the essential structural and operational mergers and alliances involved in integrating existing and developing library and campus initiatives to create a unique integrated service point for research, writing, and oral communication in the heart of the university’s main library. The case study also identifies continued partnership and collaboration, and briefly outlines methods through which libraries might initiate similar transformational changes and mergers at their own institutions, serving as a model for similar alliances in other settings.

Do public opinion and political sentiments expressed on Twitter during election campaign have a meaning and message? Are they inferential, that is, can they be used to estimate the political mood prevailing among the masses? Can they also be used to reliably predict the election outcome? To answer these in the Indian context, the 2014 general election was chosen.

Tweets posted on the leading parties during the voting and crucial campaign periods were mined and manual sentiment analysis was performed on them.

A strong and positive correlation was observed between the political sentiments expressed on Twitter and election results. Further, the Time Periods during which the tweets were mined were found to have a moderating effect on this relationship.

This study showed that the month preceding the voting period was the best to predict the vote share with Twitter data – with 83.9% accuracy.

Twitter has become an important public communication tool in India, and as the study results reinstate, it is an ideal research tool to gauge public opinion.

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a social issue that continues to haunt humans globally. Despite the magnitude of research that has been conducted, the Sustainable Developmental Goals target 5.2, and the South African proposed National Strategic Plan on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide, South Africa experiences high incidences of IPV. In heterosexual couples, violence incidences are a concern that requires further research by scholars because cohabiting relationships are an increasing phenomenon within the African context. This study attempts to theorize from an African philosophical stance, focusing particularly on the African psychological perspective. In this chapter, The authors illuminate the nature and forms of violence that manifest in cohabiting relationships. This research explores participants’ experiences of IPV in cohabiting relationships.

This enquiry has been conceptualized using a qualitative constructivism paradigm with in-depth, unstructured one-on-one interviews. Interviews were conducted with 10 participants between the ages of 18 and 24 years recruited from the Thohoyandou Victim Empowerment Programme in Vhembe District in Limpopo Province, South Africa. Thematic analysis was used to generate themes while narrative analysis was used for the participants’ stories. Participants shared their self-reflections on their IPV experiences, deciding to leave their relationships, and threats from their partners when they tried to leave the relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to offer an explanatory process model of stakeholder management. The model shows how and why path dependence is manifested in stakeholder management issues.

The paper integrates stakeholder theory with key ideas from path dependence literature. The resulting propositions are examined in the context of a longitudinal case study of the United Airlines and US Airways abandoned merger in 2000‐2001

The paper's analysis demonstrates that initial conditions are accentuated by the sequence of actions, offering a plausible explanation for process outcomes.

On the practical side, the paper provides a problem‐solving tool for stakeholder management to analyze the stakeholder linkages during strategic initiatives.

The paper addresses an important research gap, exploring how stakeholder‐related path dependencies influence the process of conflict escalation.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an approach to determine the optimal parameters and tolerances in concurrent product and process design in the early design stages utilizing fuzzy goal programming. A wheelchair design is provided for illustration.

The product design is developed on the basis of both customer and functionality requirements. The critical product components are then determined. The design and analysis of experiments are performed by using simulation, and then the probability distributions are adopted to determine the values of desired responses under each combination of critical product parameters and tolerances. Regression nonlinear models are then developed and inserted as constraints in the complete optimization model. Preferences on product specifications and process settings, as well as process capability index ranges, are also set as model constraints. The combined objective functions are finally formulated to minimize the sum of positive and negative deviations from desired targets and maximize process capability. The optimization model is applied to determine the optimal wheelchair design.

The results showed that the proposed approach is effective in determining the optimal values of the design parameters and tolerances of the critical components of the wheelchair with their related process means and standard deviations that enhance desired multiple quality responses under uncertainty.

This work provides a general methodology that can be applied for concurrent optimization of product design and process design in a wide range of business applications. Moreover, the methodology is beneficial when uncertainty exists in quality responses and the parameters and tolerances of product design and its critical processes.

The fuzziness is rarely considered in research and development stage. This research considers membership functions for parameters and tolerances of a product and its related processes rather than crisp values. Moreover, presented optimization model considers multiple objective functions, sum of deviations and process capability. Finally, the indirect quality responses are calculated from the best-fit probability distributions rather than assuming a normal distribution.