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Quality Function Deployment (QFD) proposes to take into account the “voice of the customer,” through a list of customer needs, which are (qualitatively) mapped to technical requirements in House One. But customers do not perceive products in this space, nor do they not make purchase decisions in this space. Marketing specialists use statistical models to map between a simpler space of customer perceptions and the long and detailed list of needs. For automobiles, for example, the main axes in perceptual space might be categories such as luxury, performance, sport, and utility. A product’s position on these few axes determines the detailed customer requirements consistent with the automobiles’ position such as interior volume, gauges and accessories, seating type, fuel economy, door height, horsepower, interior noise level, seating capacity, paint colors, trim, and so forth. Statistical models such as factor analysis and principal components analysis are used to describe the mapping between these spaces, which we call House Zero.

This paper focus on House One. Two important steps of the product development process using House One are: (1) setting technical targets; (2) identifying the inherent tradeoffs in a design including a position of merit. Utility functions are used to determine feature preferences for a product. Conjoint analysis is used to capture the product preference and potential market share. Linear interpolation and the slope point formula are used to determine other points of customer needs. This research draws from the formal mapping concepts developed by Nam Suh and the qualitative maps of quality function deployment, to present unified information and mapping paradigm for concurrent product/process design. This approach is the virtual integrated design method that is tested upon data from a business design problem.

We expand the concept of time in the workplace by examining the different ways that time is discussed and the different meanings attached to time. Drawing upon observation, informal discussions, and focus groups, we examine worker discourse about clock time, work time, and family time, and argue that the meaning attached to each is related to workers’ ability to exercise some control over time. Using survey data collected from shift workers, we illustrate the connection between time and control by examining the predictors of job satisfaction and work–family conflict.

This chapter documents how eugenics, scientific racism, and hereditarianism survived at Harvard well into the interwar years. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Thomas Nixon Carver and Frank W. Taussig published works in which they established a close nexus between an individual’s economic position and his biological fitness. Carver, writing in 1929, argued that social class rigidities are attributable to the inheritance of superior and inferior abilities on the respective social class levels and proposed an “economic test of fitness” as a eugenic criterion to distinguish worthy from unworthy individuals. In 1932, Taussig, together with Carl Smith Joslyn, published American Business Leaders – a study that showed how groups with superior social status are proportionately much more productive of professional and business leaders than are the groups with inferior social status. Like Carver, Taussig and Joslyn attributed this circumstance primarily to hereditary rather than environmental factors. Taussig, Joslyn, and Carver are not the only protagonists of our story. The Russian-born sociologists Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin, who joined the newly established Department of Sociology at Harvard in 1930, also played a crucial role. His book Social Mobility (1927) exercised a major influence on both Taussig and Carver and contributed decisively to the survival of eugenic and hereditarian ideas at Harvard in the 1930s.

This article evaluates contemporary Cuban economic policy and development prospects after a decade of market experimentation in a socialist context. An introductory historical review assesses the successes and failures of Cuban development policy in the 1970s and 1980s and describes the staggering dimensions of the economic crisis triggered by the abrupt disruption of Cuba's relations with the Soviet bloc in 1989–1991. The next section, “To the market in the 1990s,” examines Cuban efforts to stabilize the economy in the early 1990s while maintaining a strong social safety net. The historic policy shift toward limited market liberalization within a state-dominated economy is analyzed and the key market concessions described. The economic turnaround of the late 1990s and Cuban macroeconomic and industrial performance over the past decade are then examined. The final part of the article evaluates the coherence and sustainability of Cuba's emerging economic model and assesses prospects for the survival of some form of Cuban socialism.