Search results

Success in the twenty‐first century will require many manufacturing enterprises to have the innovative flexibility to respond rapidly to market desires, to produce top quality products, to deliver almost instantaneously, and to provide superb service. Built on lean manufacturing, the agile manufacturing paradigm is an evolutionary step, partially based on a combination of flexible manufacturing, integrated product development and stratgic partnering. An agile manufactuing enterprice is a dynamically reconfigurable organization of independent companies which forms individual companies optimized for the specifics of each market opportunity. Key to the success of such a paradigm is the ability (for often geographically dispersed functions) to share fully the technical information required and used for product design, development, validation, production and service. Argues that CALS, a standardized approach to integrated product data management, has the strategies, approaches, technologies and neutral data formats as well as the growing international commitment to enable this data sharing.

When James Conant visited Australia in 1951 he unwittingly entered an existing, lengthy debate about the value of university‐based knowledge in Australia. The Second World War, with its significant reliance on academic expertise, had suggested that if knowledge could win wars, the labour of academic staff could be considered to normally have social and economic value to the nation. In 1951 Conant had no way of foreseeing that steps made, in this light, at Federal level during and after the war, would culminate in the 1957 Review of Universities in Australia, chaired by Sir Keith Murray, and the injection of a large amount of funding into the university system. Conant’s confidential report to the Carnegie Corporation does show that he saw the system in desperate need of funding, which wasa reality that everyone agreed upon.1 The long debate included options for university funding and the potential change to the character of universities if the community, rather than the cloister, was to determine the purpose and character of knowledge. Conant’s report reflects this debate, centring (as many other participants did as well) on the value universities would gain if they were more obviously useful and relevant to industry and if their reputation was less stained by elitism and arrogance. Conant could not gather sufficient data in his visit to identify the nuances of this long discussion nor could he see the depth and spread of its influence over the decade or so preceding his visit. As a result, his particular agenda seems to obscure the perception of the threat that change provoked to some of the traditional values associated with academic work. To consider the debate and the character of academic work in the university scene that Conant fleetingly visited, we need to look back just a few years to another, but very different, visitor to the Australian system.

To explicate the qualities of cooperation among leaders and their organizations during crisis, we studied the response to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. Through interviews and analysis, we discovered leaders successfully overcame obstacles that typically undermine collective crisis response. Qualitative analysis revealed five guiding behavioral principles that appeared to stimulate effective inter-agency leadership collaboration in high stakes. We draw upon concepts of collective leadership and swarm intelligence to interpret our observations and translate the findings into leader practices. We focus on replicable aspects of a meta- phenomenon, where collective action was greater than the sum of its parts; we do not evaluate individual leader behavior. Our findings provide a starting point for deeper exploration of how to bolster public safety by catalyzing enhanced inter-agency leadership behavior.

Bestsellers, the weekly Top 40, Fortune 500, Places Rated Almanac are just a few of the ranked lists available that fascinate and thrill almost every‐one. These lists often contribute to our decision making. A consumer looks for the best car, a college graduate hunts for jobs at the top companies, a student applies to the best law schools. Library patrons often ask for ratings of different items, but rankings, though a valuable source of information on various topics, can be very difficult to locate. This bibliography provides a list of selected sources of rankings covering the following areas: multi‐subject, consumer, education, film and television, geography, and music.

The CW’s long-running horror-drama series Supernatural (2005–) has been accused of undoing progressive advances for women made by Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1996–2003). While it’s hard to deny the truth in that claim, Supernatural also problematizes conventional gender roles from a very different approach, one that plays with perceptions of masculinity and social class.

Buffy Summers may initially seem to have more in common with Supernatural’s Sam Winchester, a chosen one with special powers who wants a normal life away from the supernatural. However, Buffy shares more in common with Dean Winchester. Embodying popular gendered stereotypes in their introductions, it’s gradually revealed that there is more complexity to each. Both form alliances with Others; both recognize elements of the Other in themselves. Both transgress conventional gender boundaries, complicating the notion of a binary gender system. Both series introduce the seemingly familiar only to alter it into the uncanny. See the little cute blonde virginal cheerleader? She can kick your ass. See the stupid cocky womanizing jock? All he wants is family and a home. This chapter explores the increasingly gender-blended, social-class-crossing behaviours of Supernatural’s Dean Winchester as an heir to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

No psychometrically sound measurement scale exists to effectively measure sports team reputation. The current study proposed and developed the Spectator-based Sports Team Reputation (SSTR) by considering the most important stakeholder groups - spectators. The results indicated that SSTR had a positive and direct impact on team identification and trust towards a team. The most significant theoretical contribution of this study is the conceptualisation and development of the SSTR scale, with a multi-dimensional approach from the spectator perspective.

Ember et al. (1992) addressed whether the “democracies rarely fight each other” hypothesis held true in the anthropological record of societies of various sizes and scales around the world. They indeed found that more participatory polities had less internal warfare – or warfare between one society’s territorial units (e.g. bands, villages, districts). The purpose of this paper is to examine when political participation would have similar effects in eastern Africa, and whether more participatory polities commit fewer atrocities against each other.

A cross-cultural sample of 46 societies from eastern Africa was used to retest the original Ember et al. (1992) multiple regression model and revised post-hoc models. The team read ethnographies to code for levels of political participation at the local and multilocal levels. Other variables came from previous research including warfare and atrocity variables (Ember et al., 2013).

The Ember et al. (1992) model did not replicate in eastern Africa, but analysis with additional variables (degree of formal leadership, presence of state-level organization, and threat of natural disasters that destroy food supplies) suggested that greater local political participation does predict less internal warfare. Also, more participatory polities were less likely to commit atrocities in the course of internal warfare.

This study demonstrates regional comparisons are important because they help us evaluate the generalizability of worldwide findings. Additionally, adding atrocities to the study of democracy and warfare is new and suggests reduced atrocities as an additional benefit of political participation.

This year’s annual bibliography includes materials reflecting various aspects of library instruction and information literacy. The academic literature continues to generate the greatest number of citations in these areas, but a small increase in the special libraries area was noted for 2000. The themes of standards for information literacy and assessment were apparent in all areas of the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the origins of tensions between the benefits (such as technologies and skills) and the substance of knowledge (often described as “pure inquiry”) in Australian universities. There are advantages to considering this debate in Australia, since its universities were tightly connected to scholarly networks in the British Empire. After the Second World War, those ties were loosened, enabling influences from American research and technological universities, augmented by a growing connection between universities, government economic strategy and the procedures of industry. This paper thus traces some of routes by which arguments travelled and the ways they were articulated in post‐war Australia.

Ideas do not travel on their own. In this paper, the author takes a biographical approach to the question of contrasting attitudes to university knowledge in the post‐war period, comparing the international scholarly and professional networks of two British scientists who travelled to Australia – contemporaries in age and education – both influencing Australian higher education policy in diametrically opposing ways.

This research demonstrates that the growing connection with economic goals in Australian universities after the Second World War was in part a result of the new international and cross‐sectoral networks in which some scholars now operated.

Australian historiography suggests that shifts in the emphases of post‐war universities were primarily the consequence of government policy. This paper demonstrates that the debates that shaped Australia's modern university system were also conducted among an international network of scholars.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.