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Florence Nightingale has long been known for her contributions to the nursing field, but her pioneering work in quality management has gone virtually undiscussed. This paper addresses the significant contributions of Nightingale to the field of quality management.

The paper begins with a brief biographical background and then discusses her work during the Crimean War. Florence's approach to addressing service quality issues and her use of statistical methods are detailed. The paper then extends to her work following the Crimean War and concludes with an interesting comparative commentary relating Florence Nightingale to Dr W. Edwards Deming. Quotes from Florence's writings are interjected liberally throughout.

This paper brings a new historical perspective to the field of quality management and reveals a nineteenth century apostle of quality. The current alarm regarding quality in health care practice bears more than a fleeting resemblance to Florence Nightingale's world, 150 years ago.

While many hospitals have already experimented with some kind of quality program based on Deming's ideas, the call is out afresh to analyze processes and eliminate mistakes and other quality problems.

This historical paper provides the reader with a unique perspective on Florence Nightingale's well deserved place in quality history and the relevance of her philosophies for today.

Describes the basic premises of three metatheories that represent important or emerging perspectives on information seeking, retrieval and knowledge formation in information science: constructivism, collectivism, and constructionism.

Presents a literature‐based conceptual analysis. Pinpoints the differences between the positions in their conceptions of language and the nature and origin of knowledge.

Each of the three metatheories addresses and solves specific types of research questions and design problems. The metatheories thus complement one another. Each of the three metatheories encourages and constitutes a distinctive type of research and learning.

Outlines each metatheory's specific fields of application.

The purpose of this paper is to identify important factors those which constrain implementation and sustenance of lean strategies in aviation sector and ways to avoid slow attrition within annals of lean.

This research is exploratory in nature and survey methodology is used for assessing the post lean management implementation environment. The focus of study is cross-sectional, within aircraft industry based on the information collected through survey and a case study.

The reasons for the weak sustenance of lean initiative have been identified. The measures as undertaken in the case study implied a successful turnaround of specific department. Comparison with automobile industry indicates suggestions and pitfalls to be avoided with suitable illustration.

The target of the study is the aircraft manufacturer and hence it has the limitation in terms of the scope. However, overall results are encouraging with the survey generating expected inputs and underline the need for similar research in the aerospace sector. The study has implications for managers in all types of industrial environment, especially in aviation, in the era of globalized lean supply chain establishment.

Inputs obtained are from both industrial research in a live environment and a case study which impacts lean management in industries.

This paper presents novel inputs regarding post lean implementation scenario in aviation sector, which has complicated internal processes. It also tries to establish factors relevant for any organization in assessing lean initiatives.

Although emotions are relevant for conflicted interactions, the role of emotions in organizational conflicts has remained understudied. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to this by looking at the role of nonverbal affective elements in conversations.

Bringing together organizational “becoming” and embodiment approaches, the study focused on a conflict which emerged during a multi-actor consulting conversation. The episode in question was analyzed via a detailed, micro-level discursive method which focused specifically on the participants’ use of prosodic and nonverbal behaviors.

Changes in prosody were found to have an important role in how the conflict between a consultant and an employee client emerged and was handled. Nonverbal and prosodic means had a central role in creating legitimate space for the employees’ feelings: they helped to validate the feelings and thus led the interlocutors to act in a more constructive manner in their handling of the conflicted situation.

Findings are based on a single case study. Multi-modal analysis proved effective in capturing the relevant interactions in a comprehensive manner.

Conversational “traps” may be observed by becoming alert to interactional patterns involving repeated chains of actions. A nonverbal response, validating the interlocutor as someone who is entitled to her/his feelings, can be sufficient in providing emotional help in consultancy.

Nonverbal elements of interactions are important in handling delicate issues in conflicts.

To the authors’ knowledge, no previous organizational research has provided a detailed description of a conflicted interaction “as it happened” between clients and a consultant.

Catheter related blood stream infection (CRBSI) remains an important complication of central venous catheters(CVCs). Educational programmes have been associated with CRBSI reduction but evidence in total parenteral nutrition (TPN) patients is limited, despite an increased risk of CRBSI. The effect of educational processes were evaluated and the value of different methods of expression of CRBSI incidence were assessed.

Study was performed in a 525‐bed tertiary university hospital over 12 years. A multidisciplinary TPN committee was created to examine CRBSI episodes and a parallel education programme was set up and maintained. Prospectively collected data were analysed from 1,392 patients in whom 2,565 CVCs were used over 15,397 CVC days. CRBSI incidence was expressed as CRBSI episodes per 1,000 CVC days, percentage patients or percentage CVCs infected.

CRBSI incidence fell from 33 to 7 episodes per 1,000 CVC days (p<0.01). Percentage of infected CVCs fell from 17 per cent to 5 per cent(p <0.05) and proportion of patients affected fell from 27 per cent to 7 per cent(p <0.01). The corresponding slopes of the lines expressing fall in CRBSI rate were −1.3‐0.63 and −1.4 respectively.

A sustained educational programme was associated with a significant fall in CRBSI in TPN patients. An incidence of 5‐7 episodes per 1,000 CVC days, a figure comparable with non‐TPN CVCs, was achievable.

Each method of expression of CRBSI incidence proved valid in this setting and contributed to the educational programme.

The value of this study is that it demonstrates how implementing and sustaining an education programme can achieve reduced rates of infection. No published study utilising all methods of expressing CRBSI incidence could be found.

The purpose of the article is to contribute to the debate on organizational adaptation by providing both scholars and practitioners with reasoned observations as to where this research domain is and, perhaps, could be going, and as to what important questions and gaps still exist in this research area.

The article tries to inform the conversation through updating the lenses of the “determinism versus voluntarism” approach seminally used by Astley and Ven de Ven for commenting on the state of the art in the 1980s. In particular, the article aims at enhancing the debate through a timely critical discussion of the extant literature, whose comparative analysis starts from the 1960s.

The analysis mainly indicates that, since Astley and Van de Ven's milestone, the dichotomy between determinism and voluntarism has been reduced, although it still exists. The co‐evolutionary approach can constitute a promising tool for the further reducing of the dichotomy, but more research seems to be needed to improve its utility.

The key contribution of this article is that it tries to shed light on how and why the discussed schools of thought have been theoretically and empirically evolving, what issues they have mainly addressed and if some visible or invisible colleges can be found among them. Moreover, the article analyses what scholarly positions still remain dichotomous to date and what positions scholars have reconciled, either totally or partially. Finally, it also proposes some possible avenues for further investigations within this research domain.

This paper aims to explore how highly skilled women workers in Sri Lanka navigate organizational contexts via different modes of engagement in pursuit of hierarchical advancement. The purpose is to contribute new insights into existing understandings of women's careers in diverse socio‐cultural contexts.

This paper is based on one‐to‐one in‐depth interviews conducted with 24 Sri Lankan women in early, mid and late career.

The findings reveal how the women in this sample actively used eight modes of engagement to manage themselves in organizations and vertically advance in their careers. The implications of these modes for organizational contexts and women's careers are highlighted.

This paper contributes to the limited literature on women's careers in South Asia and develops existing understandings of modes of engagement individuals use to develop their careers.

The paper aims to propose an analytical framework for social influence and mathematical formulation for its main components: conformity and peer-pressure. The framework is conceived to explain why certain behaviours and beliefs propagate in a society and some others disappear. It can also be used to study the emergence and the evolution of the status of the norms in terms of their adoption by the population.

The paper is theoretical, making use of economic quantitative methods. The author proposes a new formulation for the evolutionary dynamics, increasingly borrowed by social scientists. Then, mathematically treating the equation, the author draws general conclusions in form of lemmas, which are proved.

The author's main contribution is to show that even behavioural rules and beliefs that emerge in a minority subset of the population, do not procure any benefit for the agents adopting them can under certain conditions, evolve into the consensus of a society, become a norm.

More general conclusion (theorems and lemmas) could be stated and proved. But given that the main contribution of the paper is to the fields of social and behavioural economics, along a number of disciplines less mathematical than economics, the author kept the analysis that required fairy advance mathematics for later.

The paper contributes to the evolutionary game theory, evolution of preferences, and evolution of beliefs and social norms. More precisely, the equation proposed in the paper can be used in the contexts the patterns of heterogeneity in a population are affected or caused by social influence. Or in the contexts, the social institutions are susceptible to affect an agent's sense of identity (e.g. voting, fashion industry, marketing).

In this paper, for the first time, a mathematical formulation is proposed for the social influence and its main psychological components (conformity and status seeking). Using the above, the author proposed a new parametric fitness function for the evolutionary dynamics. The author believes the paper matters to a multidisciplinary public. It answers a question that challenged and puzzled the economists (as well other social scientists): the reasons behind the emergence and the prevalence of social norms do not positively contribute to the utility or payoff of the agents adopting them (and at times they are costly).

This book focuses on the concept and role of relational practices as a way to understand, conceive, and study processes of organization, and subscribes to a processual view of organization that, since Weick's seminal book The Social Psychology of Organizing, has turned the study of organizations into one of organizing. More than 30 years later, the field of organizing has increasingly expanded Weick's interpretive framework of sense making, resulting in a rich palette of conceptual frameworks that vary between such diverse processual approaches as complexity theory, phenomenology, narration, dramaturgy, ethnomethodology, discourse (analysis), practice, actor-network theory, and radical process theory (Steyaert, 2007). These various theoretical approaches draw upon and give expression to a relational turn that has transformed conceptual thinking in philosophy, literature, and social sciences, and that increasingly inscribes the study of organization within an ontology of becoming.

This paper takes a social constructionist approach to explore how highly skilled women workers in Sri Lanka manage gender stereotyping in their workplaces. The purpose of this paper is to contribute new insights into existing understandings of women's careers in diverse socio‐cultural contexts.

This paper is based on one‐to‐one in‐depth interviews with 24 Sri Lankan women in early, mid and late career.

The findings reveal how the women in this sample used eight strategies to navigate through the various gender biases they perceived to impact on their careers. The implications of respondents' actions are highlighted.

This paper contributes to the limited literature on women's careers in South Asia and develops existing understandings of how women's actions contribute towards maintaining and/or redefining the gender biases they encounter (see Powell et al.). Furthermore, the empirical findings highlight differences in the ways women from public and private organisations manage gender biases, while illuminating the differential impact of gender stereotypes on women in early, mid and late career.