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An examination of Motorola′s experience of TQM, illustrating the reasons for considering TQM, the barriers to TQM introduction, how they can be overcome and the measures taken by Motorola to ensure continued quality implementation.

A forward thrust drives the theoretical narrative of disability-in-society, as told by scholars of recent decades. Consider these titles (with emphases added): From Stigma to Identity Politics: Political Activism among the Physically Disabled and Former Mental Patients by Anspach (1979); From Good Will to Civil Rights by Scotch (1984); Moving Disability Beyond Stigma a collection edited by Asch and Fine (1988); The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity to Confrontation by Fleischer and Zames (2001). Each title is like a revved-up engine. Together, they convey a message of forward movement in the status of people with disabilities. The road they all travel starts from a negative starting point and ends at a clear and a more desirable, if not yet perfect, destination. The starting point is the subordinated and powerless status of persons with disabilities – a status based on stigma wrapped in pity. The destination: empowerment. These analyses focus on the United States; their authors, while not all sociologists, are close enough for our purpose. The road they all cover starts (chronologically speaking) around the 1940s, and extends – in the case of the earliest – up to the late 1970s; two others cover up to the mid- and late 1980s; and the last one, to the current century.

The purpose of this paper, based on reflections from practice, is to shed light on the realities of using walking as a tool for learning and development. This is done through an initial analysis of longitudinal reflective data spanning seven years and connecting these reflections to the concepts: being-in-the-world, belonging and Ba.

This research takes a practice based phenomenological and reflective approach. The value of this approach is to seek a new understanding, through three distinct conceptual frames, of the effective use of walking within management development.

The findings connect three conceptual approaches of being-in-the-world, belonging and “Ba” to the practicalities of delivery, thus encouraging practitioners and designers to deeply reflect on the role of walking in management development.

A limitation is that this is largely a personal story exploring the impact of an intuitively developed set of interventions. Despite this, the paper represents a unique and deep interpretation of walking as a mechanism for management development.

The paper concludes with three recommendations to practitioners wanting to use walking in management development programmes. These are: facilitators need to be familiar with their surroundings; they should look for spaces and places where participants can connect and build relationships; and organisers and sponsors need to recognise how walking not only consolidates knowledge but can help create knowledge too.

This is a unique, seven-year longitudinal study that broadens the theoretical focus of walking as a mechanism for management and leadership development that combines the theoretical lenses of being-in-the-world, belonging and “Ba”, the authors believe, for the first time in research on management development.

Q‐analysis is a methodology for investigating a wide range of structural phenomena. Structures are defined in terms of relations between members of sets and their salient features are revealed using techniques of algebraic topology. However, the basic method can be mastered by non‐mathematicians. Q‐analysis has been applied to problems as diverse as discovering the rules for the diagnosis of a rare disease and the study of tactics in a football match. Other applications include some of interest to librarians and information scientists. In bibliometrics, Q‐analysis has proved capable of emulating techniques such as bibliographic coupling, co‐citation analysis and co‐word analysis. It has also been used to produce a classification scheme for television programmes based on different principles from most bibliographic classifications. This paper introduces the basic ideas of Q‐analysis. Applications relevant to librarianship and information science are reviewed and present limitations of the approach described. New theoretical advances including some in other fields such as planning and design theory and artificial intelligence may lead to a still more powerful method of investigating structure.

A report on the empirical findings of a research project examining the marketing practices, strategies and organisational characteristics of a sample of 23 banks and other companies in the UK retail financial services market. The better performing companies, which were identified by peer admiration, could be distinguished from the less successful companies by wealthier customers and greater skill at controlling the costs of supplying their services. The implications of these findings for banks and other financial companies are discussed.

Poor eating habits established during adolescence are likely to lead to negative long-term health consequences. The childhood obesity epidemic is a growing public health concern, largely attributed to obesogenic environments. This study aims to explore the multiple factors contributing positively or negatively to young consumers’ attitudes towards their food consumption.

In total, 42 11- to 13-years-old (24 men and 18 women) from three secondary schools in Wales participated in five focus group discussions. The process of thematic analysis resulted in several identified themes that influenced young consumers’ eating habits.

Extrapersonal factors compromised: education, peer pressure, parenting, availability and social media; and intrapersonal factors included: health consciousness, taste preferences, convenience and price consciousness. Contrary to previous research, the adolescent participants perceived their parents as more influential than their peer group, even during decision-making in the school canteen.

These research findings are beneficial for policy-makers working to develop an age-appropriate multi-factorial approach to promote healthful dietary practices amongst young consumers. For instance, increasing easily accessible food-to-go choices that are not only convenient to purchase and consume but also healthful could improve dietary intake.

A novel connection between peer pressure and convenience was discovered. Multiple factors contribute to young consumers’ attitudes towards food and their dietary habits.

The decision by the British Olympic Association to enter a soccer team into the Olympic Games of 2012, having not participated in the Olympic soccer competition since 1960, provided an opportunity to study representation as a predictor of fan identification. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Using a quasi-experimental research design, the authors empirically validated the value of representation by comparing the identity levels of homogeneous samples of English and Scottish respondents toward the Great Britain Olympic National Football, participating in the Olympic Games of 2012.

Only partial support for four sets of hypotheses was found. In general, there seemed to be low levels of identity of each of the samples with the football team, because neither English nor Scottish respondents perceived the team to be representative of them. Nevertheless, the results support the general notion that representation is a valuable predictor of consumer identification.

Representation has been proposed as a central component of a sport team’s ability to serve as a symbol to their community, which enables the team to benefit from existing fan identities and the community the team is associated with. Yet, an empirical assessment of this phenomenon is lacking.

The relationship between individuals and institutions is a core feature of the microfoundations of institutional theory. This chapter analyzes the role of conceptual metaphors, a standard ingredient of theory building, in shaping how we theorize this relationship. Using illustrations from the emergent literature on emotions in institutional theory, the author shows the significance of conceptual metaphors for theory building and argues for selecting conceptual metaphors that help craft a dynamic, recursive relationship between individuals and institutions, respecting core premises of institutional theory and offering new creative insights into this relationship.

Early research into Agile approaches explored particular practices or quantified improvements in code production. Less well researched is how Agile teams are managed. The project manager (PM) role is traditionally one of “command and control” but Agile methods require a more facilitative approach. How this changing role plays out in practice is not yet clearly understood. The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into how adopting Agile techniques shape the working practices of PMs and critically reflect on some of the tensions that arise.

An ethnographic approach was used to surface a richer understanding of the issues and tensions faced by PMs as Agile methods are introduced. Ethnographic fiction conveys the story to a wider audience.

Agile approaches shift responsibility and spread expert knowledge seeming to undermine the traditional PM function. However, the findings here show various scenarios that allow PMs to wrest control and become more of a “gate-keeper”. Ethnographic fiction communicates a sense of the PMs frustration with the conflict between the need to control and the desire for teams to take more responsibility.

Stories provide insight and communicate the experiential feel behind issues faced by PMs adopting Agile to surface useful knowledge. The objective is not how to measure knowledge, but how to recognize it. These reflections are valuable to fellow researchers as well as practitioners and contribute to the growing literature on Agile project management.

Looks at the 2000 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference held at the University of Cardiff in Wales on 6/7 September 2000. Spotlights the 76 or so presentations within and shows that these are in many, differing, areas across management research from: retail finance; precarious jobs and decisions; methodological lessons from feminism; call centre experience and disability discrimination. These and all points east and west are covered and laid out in a simple, abstract style, including, where applicable, references, endnotes and bibliography in an easy‐to‐follow manner. Summarizes each paper and also gives conclusions where needed, in a comfortable modern format.