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This research was prompted by work undertaken by the author on the efficiency of shipping operations in the Suez Canal. The physical limitations of the Canal allow only one-way movement of ships for the greater part of its length, and thus ships are organised in convoys. These convoys have fixed starting times, with normally just one convoy per day operating in each direction. When traffic is heavy in the southbound direction, a second (smaller) relief convoy is organised to reduce waiting times which can otherwise exceed 24 hours. The process can be analysed by means of a bulk-service queueing model, where convoys of ships correspond to service batches of customers.

The model has application in the many other fields of transport where relief services are supplied. For example, a coach or train operator will often provide a relief service when customer demand is high. The process may be extended to cover cases where relief is provided for the relief service, resulting in a “cascade” of relief service queues.

On August 26, 1971, OCLC introduced the online union catalog and shared cataloging system. During the 1970s, OCLC focused its efforts on creating and expanding the online cataloging system and telecommunications network. It added an online interlibrary loan system in 1979. In the 1980s, OCLC began adapting distributed computing and microcomputing technologies as its product and service lines expanded to some 60 offerings. The organization also began looking at ways to move beyond bibliography by furnishing information not only to library staffs, but also to library patrons. In the 1990s, OCLC launched a new core business in reference services. (Smith, 1998, pp. 251–252). Now, in the 21st century, OCLC is introducing tools, services and infrastructure to manage the life cycle of digital content in libraries.

Although the concept of ‘social capital’ is not a new concept, its rise coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic. This concept of sociology, left in a controversial and secondary position, was reborn both in the social, political and economic fields and in the scientific world, with the increase of the COVID-19 outbreak cases. Social capital is a form of socialisation and a way of performing social relationships. The COVID-19 outbreak led to the understanding that physical capital and human capital would not be sufficient to sustain social life, and, therefore, social capital started to rise. The expected private earning from social capital is not individual profit, but collective welfare and mutual benefit. In short, social capital is the capital spent on society and is for common good. On the other hand, social capital has a volume in proportion to the density of the capitals in the society. Social capital, with its intensity, has attracted the attention of different disciplines on Corona days and has exceeded the limits of sociology. Another issue to be emphasised in this study is the relationship between social capital and democracy. In societies where tutelary democracy is dominant, civil society cannot become functional enough. In this difficult environment, social capital is shaped as paternal (tutelary) and a healthy social network cannot be functionalised in society. On the one hand, the horrors of the pandemic are experienced, and, on the other hand, a social capital model that is ineffective in healing social wounds emerges.

The paper presents final results of a comparative research on young Brazilian collegians in the 18–24-year-old age bracket. The objective was to understand the interactions and ways in which they transit within the physical and digital Web spaces and, within their transits, set up “circulatory territories,” deepen and enrich their secondary socialization setups and sociability, as well as their processes of individuation within the historic condition in which youth lives.

The study is supported by conceptual contributions offered by the sociology of youth, circulatory territory, socialization, sociability, and individuation. Research was carried out with students of two different universities: a public/state one and a public/municipal/foundational one situated in different urban centers of the southeastern region of the country. Procedures were qualitative and quantitative – closed questions forms, interviews, registries in field notebooks, etc.

The results of the investigation demonstrate: (a) that the representatives of the two student collectives studied circulate in physical and digital territories, setting up circulatory territories; (b) there are also different youth lifestyles, either due to social positions and the fact that they possess social capital, or because of differences and inequalities referring to gender, race/ethnicity (whites and non-whites), living situations.

In this manner, the study indicates the importance of questioning the homogenized image of connected youth since some collegians’ lives are limited due to their condition as young workers, while others live their youth condition as a social moratorium, being able to produce other manners of being and of living in the world.

Theeuwes and Adriaansen (1994), among others, have asserted that activity-based costing (ABC) is inappropriate for operational decision-making. In this article, ABC is modified to reflect separate flexible and committed cost driver rates for an activity. This enables the model to reflect the difference in the behavior of an activity’s flexible and committed costs needed for operational planning decisions. The modified ABC facilitates determining the resources required to produce the product mix developed from the firm’s strategic plan and the excess capacity that will result. The modifications made to ABC aid in determining an optimal product mix when the firm has excess capacity, while the traditional ABC may not. Equally important, it facilitates measuring the financial implications of the resource allocation decisions that comprise the firm’s operational plan. As the operational plan is implemented, operational control is used to ensure that it is performed in an efficient and effective manner. The modified ABC enables the firm’s managers to compute the different types of deviations that arise from using flexible and committed resources at the unit, batch, and product levels of the firm’s operations. This aids in understanding problematic aspects of the firm’s operations and identifying where management resources are needed to improve operational efficiency.

Product mix and the acquisition of the assets needed for their production are interdependent decisions. However, these decisions are frequently evaluated independently of each other and with conceptually different decision models. This article expands activity-based costing (ABC) to incorporate the cost of capital. The resulting model traces the cost of capital to products and thereby measures the economic value added (EVA) from their production. The discounted value of a product’s EVA over its life is equivalent to its net present value (Hartman, 2000; Shrieves & Wachowicz, 2001). The discounted EVA of a product also equals the net present value of the assets used to manufacture the product. Consequently, evaluating products with an ABC model incorporating the cost of capital enables product mix and capital budgeting decisions to be evaluated simultaneously. The article also examines the role of ABC when product mix decisions are made at the product and portfolio levels of the firm’s operations.

This chapter develops a conceptual framework to help us position and understand the increasing importance of project-based innovation for industrial organization in the 21st century. It builds on and extends Joan Woodward's (1958 and 1965) pioneering research, which classifies industrial organizations according to the complexity of production technology and volume of output. We suggest that a radical revision of Woodward's framework is required to account for the extensive use of project-based organizations to gain competitive advantage through accelerated innovation and growth in new technologies and markets.