Search results

Associated Newspapers have recently moved to a new £150m production facility in the London Docklands development area. The new production plant is one of the most modern printing plants in Europe for newspaper printing. With a “greenfield” site the Associated Newspapers management were able to plan and purchase state‐of‐the‐art technology for all phases of their production processes. These include a computer‐controlled press management system, a publishing system, automatically guided vehicles, an automated warehouse and a plate‐making system. These five different computer based systems were integrated using local area networks; and an Oracle based Management Information System (MIS) developed to collect data for management use. A number of reports are automatically generated at shift end, while other ad hoc enquiries can be made using the standard Oracle facilities at any time, as the database is updated frequently by the MIS. For the first time the Associated Newspapers management are able to examine and monitor their production processes in real‐time rather than many hours after the event.

Information Systems research on emotions in relation to using technology largely holds essentialist assumptions about emotions, focuses on negative emotions and treats technology as a token or as a black box, which hinders an in-depth understanding of distinctions in the emotional experience of using artificial intelligence (AI) technology in context. This research focuses on understanding employees' emotional experiences of using an AI chatbot as a specific type of AI system that learns from how it is used and is conversational, displaying a social presence to users. The research questions how and why employees experience emotions when using an AI chatbot, and how these emotions impact its use.

An interpretive case study approach and an inductive analysis were adopted for this study. Data were collected through interviews, documents review and observation of use.

The study found that employee appraisals of chatbots were influenced by the form and functional design of the AI chatbot technology and its organisational and social context, resulting in a wider repertoire of appraisals and multiple emotions. In addition to positive and negative emotions, users experienced connection emotions. The findings show that the existence of multiple emotions can encourage continued use of an AI chatbot.

This research extends information systems literature on emotions by focusing on the lived experiences of employees in their actual use of an AI chatbot, while considering its characteristics and its organisational and social context. The findings inform the emerging literature on AI.

The author feels haunted; troubled by the ethnography that the author conducted some years ago of a new partnership group that was attempting to set up a community learning centre. The author is aware that it doesn’t sound like a particularly alarming research topic, and perhaps that is where some of the issues began. The author did not expect an ethnographic haunting to occur. The partnership recruited the author less than a year into the creation of the project and spent two years as a sort of ‘researcher in residence’. The original idea was that the author would observe the initial development of the project and then, when the community learning centre was established, the author would research the centre’s activities and how they were experienced by village residents. However, fairly soon into the project, problematic dynamics developed within the group, leading to irreconcilable conflict between members. The community learning centre was never established and the author was left to piece together an ethnography of a failed partnership. Researching an increasingly dysfunctional partnership was an emotionally exhausting activity, especially when relationships between members became progressively hostile. Managing data collection and analysis at this time was difficult, but the author was shocked that, a number of months (and now years) later, revisiting the data for publication purposes remained uncomfortable. The author managed to produce the PhD thesis on the back of this study, but the author has not felt able to go back to the data, despite there being findings worthy of publication. This ethnography is in a state of limbo and is at risk of becoming lost forever. In this chapter, the author explores the reasons for this and discusses lessons learned for future projects.

OTHER FILMS, it is true, were more talked about in '74, notably The Exorcist and Last Tango, each arguably depicting a gadarene trend of our times. But The Sting, Gatsby, and The Way We Were probably tell us more about middle‐class, and perhaps middle‐aged, opinion, British and American, in that year of inflation and confusion; indeed, as New Society almost noticed wordily in November, about middle‐class reaction from just those trends Bertolucci and Friekdin exhibit. They deserve thus a clinical, although they ask insistently a roseate, retrospect.

Provides a critique of the present state of the art of productivity and performance measurement and management in logistics. The nature of logistics makes normal measures of productivity, based on an output/input concept, not always appropriate. Indicator or proxy approaches can be more suitable and would relate the quality of the system to total cost, complementing conventional total productivity thinking. Highlights the main ingredients of strategic logistics performance. Develops analytical frameworks and models to aid management in planning and decision making, both operationally and strategically. Discusses the challenges of such integrated approaches, accentuating the effectiveness of the productivity philosophy in logistics. The competitive key battlegrounds include quality, productivity, speed and innovation, all linked to good business ethics. Compares Japanese and Western logistics management approaches to productivity and performance.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the antecedents and consequences of the implementation of different customer feedback mechanisms with regard to their contribution to organisational learning that leads to service improvement.

A critical case organisation is chosen to explore the link between the implementation of customer feedback mechanisms and organisational learning from a middle management and employee perspective. Method triangulation is adopted, gathering qualitative and quantitative data.

Organisational learning in relation to service improvement is influenced by the interplay between the way data are gathered through customer feedback mechanisms and implemented at a branch or business unit level. The implementation depends on attitudes of middle management towards such mechanisms.

Future studies might investigate whether the findings can be replicated in other operational settings and triangulate the data with customer perceptions of service improvement.

Customer feedback mechanisms at an organisational and business unit level need better integration. To gather customer feedback that enables more meaningful decision‐making to improve services, middle management needs to have a stronger involvement in the design and implementation of customer feedback mechanisms. Central efforts have to be placed on the support of middle management in the interpretation and use of data that is gathered through organisation‐wide feedback initiatives.

This paper contributes to extant knowledge by integrating the fields of service performance management practices, in this case the implementation of customer feedback mechanisms, and organisational learning.

The purpose of this paper to investigate the major themes of operations management by analysing citations in IJOPM. It aims to discuss changes in the discipline's sub‐fields and identifies emerging topics.

The paper is an empirical analysis of citations and co‐citations from IJOPM. Network and factor analysis are used to analyse and group the data.

The study demonstrates that the persistent central ideas of operations management concern manufacturing strategy, with specific interests in strategy typologies, best practices, and the resource‐based view. Other central themes are performance measurement, the case study method, and process management. The plotting of subfield trajectories shows that recent studies are seeking a more subtle understanding of operations management by considering its practice in relation to strategy, context and resources. Emerging subjects within the field include supply chain management, lean management systems, theory building from quantitative data and sustainable resource limits to capability.

The study is unique in performing the analysis at the individual publication level rather than following the normal aggregated author co‐citation analysis (ACA) method. The potential problems with citation/co‐citation studies are discussed.

This article describes the results of a pilot project that linked teaching the principles of DNA with its application to the concept of crime prevention by marking property. It was directed at Year 9 pupils in two schools on the basis that young people in this age group are particularly vulnerable to personal victimisation. In addition, the requirements, and flexibility, of the curriculum at this stage were complementary to the teaching of the principles of DNA as part of the property‐marking project. The method and resource implications are described. Teachers and pupils reported favourable outcomes and there was a significant uptake of the property‐marking technique by pupils. The results may therefore be of considerable interest to practitioners.