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Over the last several months, the cries to become lean and low cost have echoed all the way from the halls of government to the smallest company's back room. In times of severe economic challenge, the natural reaction is to make decisions that can make an organization become as lean and focused as possible. This paper aims to address these issues.

This paper discusses the benefits and pitfalls associated with lean manufacturing management starting from the kernel idea that pleasing the customer should be at the root of all effort leading through the ravages of overzealous application of “lean to the max.” Elements of lean discussed in this paper address organizational waste, human resources, distributed design, supply chain management, customer management, and the financial system.

Potential solutions and recommendations are made to help organizations become lean yet remain committed to being centered on the ultimate goal of customer satisfaction. These benefits and pitfalls may be seen as outcomes based on the degree to which lean is implemented.

This paper reviews the popular lean manufacturing environment and makes practical recommendations to new adopters to avoid failures due to the improper application of “lean” to their organization.

The coach−athlete relationship mediates the relationship between sports participation and student-athlete character, health and well-being outcomes. High school athletic administrators (AAs) can provide critical leadership, mentorship and direction for coaches to optimize student-athlete performance and human development. Social and emotional learning (SEL) is an evidence-based approach to developing adult and student competencies for holistic development across the lifespan that has been primarily performed and researched in the classroom. The purpose of this research is to capture the lived experiences of AAs applying a novel SEL-based curriculum (InSideOut Initiative, ISOI) with coaches and student-athletes in high school sports.

Interviews of 10 AAs captured their lived experiences of applying SEL-based leadership and coaching and their perception of its impact on coaches and student-athletes in high school athletics.

AAs described leadership and coaching that are characterized by (1) safety, support and mentorship; (2) skill and support-based behavior modeling; (3) trusting, loving and supportive relationships; (4) self-reflection of values/beliefs and behaviors that impact self, student-athlete and culture; (5) the influence of emotions on the aforementioned; (6) the ability to have a long-term, sustainable impact on student-athletes and (7) alignment with their immediate environmental context.

The data captured in this study suggest that ISOI-trained AAs practice SEL-competent leadership and coaching. Evaluation of the novel application of SEL-based interventions in athletics will be useful to understanding their effects on participant social and emotional competencies and outcomes traditionally associated with classroom-based SEL applications.

Athletic administrator interviews describe an approach to high school sports that requires a reconceptualization of the purpose of athletics. When the high school sport operates as a curriculum, integrated opportunity for its student-athletes and athletic administrator and coach leadership aligns with this overarching philosophy, there may be increased potential for positive youth development.

The results of this research are valuable in demonstrating preliminary evidence of how SEL-based leadership and coaching is applied and impacts adult and student-athletes in a unique sport context.

Alcohol, tobacco, marijuana and other drugs use typically increases in prevalence and frequency during middle and late adolescence. School health instruction often focusses on providing facts and rarely provides tools for addressing the psychosocial risk factors needed to prevent substance use. The purpose of this paper is to report about the effectiveness of a prevention programme delivered in US high school health classes. The intervention augments typical instruction by providing teachers with activities that can be infused in their daily teaching.

In total, 26 schools were randomly assigned to receive the intervention or serve as controls. Pupils were pretested near the beginning of the school year, posttest near the end of the school year and administered a final test near the beginning of the following school year. Teachers in treatment schools were provided with activities designed to target psychosocial variables known to mediate substance use onset and self-initiated cessation. These include normative beliefs, intentionality, lifestyle incongruence, beliefs about consequences of use, peer pressure resistance skills, decision-making skills, goal setting skills and stress management skills.

Hierarchical modelling analytic strategies revealed the intervention to have definable positive impacts on alcohol and cigarette use. Moreover, the intervention had strongest effects on alcohol and cigarette use among pupils who were identified at pretest as being lower-than-average risk.

This research provides support for providing teachers with a strategy for preventing alcohol, tobacco and other drugs that can be used in a flexible manner to augment the instruction they are already mandated to provide.

Within the past 20 years hiking and backpacking have enjoyed rapid growth among Americans as favorite outdoor activities. From 1965 to 1977 the number of hikers almost tripled, from 9.9 million to 28.1 million, while national forest visitor days among hikers and mountaineers increased from 4 million in 1966 to 11 million in 1979. Accompanying this growth in interest has been a boom in books about the sport. These include both “how‐to‐do‐it” volumes and guides to specific geographical areas. Each year brings another spate of books, yet to this compiler's knowledge no bibliography of hiking guides to the Rocky Mountains, one of North America's premier outdoor regions, has yet been attempted. This bibliography is an effort to correct that situation.

The purpose of this paper is to study the behaviour of glass reinforced epoxy tubes subjected to repeated indentation loads at two non-coincident indentations 180° apart.

Four geometrically scaled specimens ranging from 100 to 400 mm diameter were used in repeated indentation tests. Force, displacement and damage growth were recorded for loading and unloading until the indenter returned to its original starting point.

Similar scaled trends were observed between the non-coincidental loadings. Unlike reported response form coincidental loadings, the responses from non-coincidental loadings yield lower values for bending stiffness and peak load.

The differences in behaviour of the specimen between non-coincident loadings were attributed to reductions in fracture toughness and circumferential modulus.

Distant non-interacting damage and delamination around the circumference does reduce the structural performance.

Behaviour of composite tubes under different loading conditions, for example low speed impact or quasi static indentation, is widely studied, however little attention has been given to the repeated loading incidents.

This is a special issue introduction on cross-cultural and comparative diversity management (DM). The purpose of this paper is to present five articles that explore and examine some of the complexities of equality and DM in various countries around the world.

In this introductory paper, the authors provide an overview and the current state of literature on comparative research on equality and diversity. The authors also gathered a list of indices that is helpful as secondary data for informing comparative and cross-national research in this domain.

To date, comparative work involving two or more countries is scarce with Canada/USA comparisons first appearing in the 1990s, followed by other groupings of countries a decade later. Existing comparative work has started to uncover the dialectics of voluntary and mandated action: both complement each other, although the order in which they appear vary from context to context. This work also acknowledges that there are varying degrees of intensity in the way that legislations may constrain employer action in encouraging a more diverse workforce, and that there is more than a binary choice between blind equality of rights (identity blind) and quota-based policies (affirmative action) available to decision makers.

The comparative nature of these papers allows the reader to compare and contrast the different approaches to the adoption and implementation of DM. The authors also draw attention to several areas in cross-cultural DM research that have been understudied and deserve attention.