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A continuous reorientation towards quality by US firms should be facilitated by the infusion of business and engineering school graduates having a solid conceptual foundation of quality and quality management. Examines a sample of the textbooks used in the standard under‐graduate course in production and operations management to assess the coverage and orientation provided towards quality and quality management. While the traditional quality model is still dominant, expanded coverage providing a more balanced view of the operational and strategic faces of quality is seen.

Quality will continue to be an issue to the business community in the 1990s. Firms facing the changing demands from their customer groups as well as from their competitors must come to terms as to what “quality” means to there overall business in order to achieve it through their strategies and operating systems. This article looks at two basic areas of this quality concern: the quality‐strategy connection and the quality‐management connection. Each firm′s approach to quality should be unique. The dilemma is matching the firm′s competences and abilities with its customers′ needs within its competitive market. This dilemma can be overcome by providing equal attention to design quality and conformance quality to ensure the strongest link possible between quality and strategy. Then use the Quality‐Management connection to develop a strong customer orientation, integrate quality goals and facilitating mechanisms throughout the process, and focus on prevention of non‐conformance.

In the decade since Tillery, Rutledge and Inman reviewed the treatment of quality management in leading US production and operations management (P/OM) textbooks, attention to quality, once the watchword and driving force in world business, has faded in both the practitioner and popular press. The ultimate purpose of the present research was to establish the progress, current status, and relevancy of the treatment of quality in current US P/OM textbooks, which remain the principal source of quality information in the undergraduate P/OM core course, preparing most future US managers as well as many international managers of tomorrow. Results of the present study indicate that over the last decade US P/OM textbooks have begun to reflect a more proactive and less reactive approach to quality management. However, results also indicate that current US P/OM textbooks lack relevancy of their quality content to practitioner needs, treat TQM and other holistic approaches to quality management superficially, and have little consistency concerning quality emphases.

The debate over ‘judicial activism’ has flourished in recent decades, but the term was in fact coined 70 years ago, by the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. The legal academy has bemoaned the term as perpetually ill-defined, but can this be attributed to its equivocal beginnings on the pages of Fortune magazine? This chapter investigates the circumstances in which the term was produced and the early meanings given to it in scholarly work. It is argued that there was very little effort on the part of legal academics and political scientists to gather a consensus as to definition, or otherwise to treat the terminology with caution, before the term was wrested from the university cloisters and captured by the popular media in the mid-1960s.

WHILE there is no doubt that the system of issuing books at “net” prices is of great benefit to booksellers, there is also no doubt that, unless care is taken, it is a serious drain upon a limited book‐purchasing income. A few years ago the position had become so serious that conferences were held with a view to securing the exemption of Public Libraries from the “net” price. The attempt, as was perhaps to be expected, failed. Since that time, the system has been growing until, at the present time, practically every non‐fictional book worth buying is issued at a “net price.”

For many of the current leadership theories, models, and approaches, the answer to the question posed in the title, “Is leadership more than ‘I like my boss’?,” is “no,” as there appears to be a hierarchy of leadership concepts with Liking of the leader as the primary dimension or general factor foundation. There are then secondary dimensions or specific sub-factors of liking of Relationship Leadership and Task Leadership; and subsequently, tertiary dimensions or actual sub-sub-factors that comprise the numerous leadership views as well as their operationalizations (e.g., via surveys). There are, however, some leadership views that go beyond simply liking of the leader and liking of relationship leadership and task leadership. For these, which involve explicit levels of analysis formulations, often beyond the leader, or are multi-level in nature, the answer to the title question is “yes.” We clarify and discuss these various “no” and “yes” leadership views and implications of our work for future research and personnel and human resources management practice.

The contemporary nature of careers has changed significantly in Western societies, yet studies on the nature of this change in different cultures are sparse. The aim of this paper is to explore how career theories and concepts from Western origin fit the Middle East, particularly within the emerging Arabian Gulf economy, putting in context explanatory propositions expanding the Western view of career theory and applying it to the environment of a rapidly changing society.

This research uses a conceptual analysis approach.

Owing to demographic changes, and increasing awareness of the societal, economic and political concerns, the country cannot maintain that implicit promise. The old psychological contract has been breached as the country cannot keep offering similar jobs to the growing number of young people entering the labour market.

This paper is the first aiming to explain emerging Middle Eastern countries' labour markets in their entirety, using existing Western career theories and concepts. Implications for individuals and employers in the global private sector who may consider a move to the Gulf are offered.