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During recent years integration has been the key issue for many manufacturing organisations. The authors review recent developments and ongoing research work and propose a methodology based on existing tools and techniques which would allow integration of the material flow system with the supporting information system.

The performance management process is seen as a closed loop control system which deploys policy and strategy, and obtains feedback from various levels in order to manage the performance of the business. The performance measurement system is the information system which is at the heart of the performance management process and it is of critical importance to the effective and efficient functioning of the performance management system. Research identifies two critical elements with respect to the content and structure of the performance measurement system. These are: integrity and deployment. The viable systems model (VSM) provides a framework for assessing the integrity of the performance measurement system. The reference model developed for integrated performance measurement systems provides a framework against which performance measurement systems can be designed and audited.

The performance management process is seen as a closed loop control system which deploys policy and strategy, and obtains feedback from various levels in order to manage the performance of the business. The performance measurement system is the information system which is at the heart of the performance management process and it is of critical importance to the effective and efficient functioning of the performance management system. Research identifies two critical elements with respect to the content and structure of the performance measurement system: integrity and deployment. The viable systems model (VSM) provides a framework for assessing the integrity of the performance measurement system, while the reference model developed for integrated performance measurement systems provides a framework against which performance measurement systems can be designed and audited.

As manufacturing becomes a truly global affair, the basis of competition will switch from individual companies and their supply chains to regional clusters. Large multi‐nationals can relocate operations to any part of the world, with significant impact on the regions into and out of which they move. This will introduce new considerations for managers seeking to achieve agile manufacture. In particular, they must recognise the interdependence of all the stakeholders in the economic infrastructure of their part of the world. This contribution discusses the nature of clusters giving some examples. It comments on the role of governmental agencies in economic development.

My early life was punctuated by turning points and transformations that gradually led to a surprising and late-blooming academic career – my first “real” sociology position began when I was 44. Here I trace six different trajectories of scholarly work which have compelled me: feminist women's health and technoscience studies; social worlds/arenas and the disciplinary emergence of reproductive sciences; the sociology of work and scientific practices; biomedicalization studies; grounded theory and situational analysis as qualitative research methods; and symbolic interaction-ists and -isms. I have circled back across them multiple times. Instead of seeing a beautifully folded origami of a life, it feels more like a crumpled wad of newspapers from various times. Upon opening and holding them up to the light in different ways, stories may be slowly discerned. I try to capture here some of the sweetness and fragility of these moments toward the end of an initially stuttering but later wondrously gratifying career.

The Witcher (Netflix, 2019) premiered seven months after Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011–2018) concluded. Given the similarities of genre (historical/high fantasy) and audience (indicated by nudity, violence and profanity), comparisons were quickly drawn. Game of Thrones earned criticism for the ‘sexist’ outcomes for some of its female characters, and so early analysis of The Witcher often evaluated its female representation and feminist values.

This chapter argues that the female representations in season one of The Witcher offers prominent female characters who are imbued with agency, institutional power and well-developed narrative arcs. These representations are somewhat at odds with some initial reaction to the show as sexist. Notably, it uses a dialectic approach to women who are framed by males as villainous (as Stregobor characterizes Renfri in ‘The End's Beginning’). However, the spectator positioning challenges this through devices such as its unrestricted, non-linear narrative structure.

Nevertheless, The Witcher encodes female characters with power as ‘other’, enhancing this otherness through magical abilities. Its archetypal male protagonist further emphasizes the difference of the female deuteragonists, placing him at various times in opposition to characters such as Ciri, Yennefer and Calanthe. This chapter also considers the issues of intersectionality in relation to Yennefer, whose transformative narrative arc has provoked ableist criticism, and how her representation is also impacted by the racial discourse in the series.

Through textual analysis and with reference to relevant folkloric, feminist and media scholarship, this chapter interrogates the representations the significant women of The Witcher through the lenses of gendered authorship, essentialist ‘female’ concerns, such as motherhood, the dynamics of the gaze and the varieties of responses to the female characters evident in online discourse.

The IDEF techniques have been developed in projects sponsored by the US Air Force in order to describe, specify and model manufacturing systems in a structured graphical form. These techniques can be classified in two categories: the “modelling” and the “descriptive” varieties. Compares two IDEF methods (one of the modelling type and one of the descriptive type) in order to represent (model or describe) two different aspects of an industrial organization. The methods compared are IDEF0, function modelling method, and IDEF3, process flow description capture method. Concludes that when considering the sequencing of the activities in process, aiming at highlighting their eventual simultaneity, then IDEF3 is more suitable, for its capability of splitting the flow of control from a single stream into several branches or joining several branches into a single stream. However, when it is necessary to direct attention on the objects which participate in the process, whether control, input, output or mechanism, then the use of IDEF0 is preferable.

WE begin a new year, in which we wish good things for all who work in libraries and care for them, in circumstances which are not unpropitious. At times raven voices prophesy the doom of a profession glued to things so transitory as books are now imagined to be, by some. Indeed, so much is this a dominant fear that some librarians, to judge by their utterances, rest their hopes upon other recorded forms of knowledge‐transmission; forms which are not necessarily inimical to books but which they think in the increasing hurry of contemporary life may supersede them. These fears have not been harmful in any radical way so far, because they may have increased the librarian's interest in the ways of bringing books to people and people to books by any means which successful business firms use (for example) to advertise what they have to sell. The modern librarian becomes more and more the man of business; some feel he becomes less and less the scholar; but we suggest that this is theory with small basis in fact. Scholars are not necessarily, indeed they can rarely be, bookish recluses; nor need business men be uncultured. For men of plain commonsense there need be few ways of life that are so confined that they exclude their followers from other ways and other men's ideas and activities. And, as for the transitoriness of books and the decline of reading, we ourselves decline to acknowledge or believe in either process. Books do disappear, as individuals. It is well that they do for the primary purpose of any book is to serve this generation in which it is published; and, if there survive books that we, the posterity of our fathers, would not willingly let die, it is because the life they had when they were contemporary books is still in them. Nothing else can preserve a book as a readable influence. If this were not so every library would grow beyond the capacity of the individual or even towns to support; there would, in the world of readers, be no room for new writers and their books, and the tragedy that suggests is fantastically unimaginable. A careful study, recently made of scores of library reports for 1951–52, which it is part of our editorial duty to make, has produced the following deductions. Nearly every public library, and indeed other library, reports quite substantial increases in the use made of it; relatively few have yet installed the collections of records as alternatives to books of which so much is written; further still, where “readers” and other aids to the reading of records, films, etc., have been installed, the use of them is most modest; few librarians have a book‐fund that is adequate to present demands; fewer have staffs adequate to the demands made upon them for guidance by the advanced type of readers or for doing thoroughly the most ordinary form of book‐explanation. It is, in one sense a little depressing, but there is the challenging fact that these islands contain a greater reading population than they ever had. One has to reflect that of our fifty millions every one, including infants who have not cut their teeth, the inhabitants of asylums, the illiterate—and, alas, there are still thousands of these—and the drifters and those whose vain boast is that “they never have time to read a book”—every one of them reads six volumes a year. A further reflection is that public libraries may be the largest distributors, but there are many others and in the average town there may be a half‐dozen commercial, institutional and shop‐libraries, all distributing, for every public library. This fact is stressed by our public library spending on books last year at some two million pounds, a large sum, but only one‐tenth of the money the country spent on books. There are literally millions of book‐readers who may or may not use the public library, some of them who do not use any library but buy what they read. The real figure of the total reading of our people would probably be astronomical or, at anyrate, astonishing.