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This paper outlines some strategic considerations in the transition of an organization from essentially a research and development or design environment to an operational or production environment. We propose a transition life cycle model that is in agreement with the existing life cycle models. The building blocks of the research are the results of an extensive literature search and a series of industrial interviews. The desired expectation of this effort was to find methods for moving NASA’s space shuttle program into an era of routine, timely operations. Proposes utilizing some existing concepts of change for achieving a smooth transformation under various levels of technical, political, cultural, managerial and economic uncertainties. Recommends an initial planning stage followed by various possible courses of actions and considerations for the transition. We hope that the framework presented in this paper will serve the individuals and organizations considering a major transition, especially those from a research and development to an operational one.

For over thirty years, one of the most overt forms of employer opposition to unionization has been anti-union campaigns conducted by union avoidance consultants. As a result, both union and employer associations have attempted to influence the provisions of the LMRDA that cover consultant activities. This article provides the first comprehensive historical analysis of the LMRDA's reporting and disclosure requirements covering employers and consultants. The first section examines consultant reporting policy from the late 1950s to the late 1970s, a period when unions filed relatively few complaints and the DOL initiated few investigations, but the consultant industry expanded significantly. Section two examines developments in the 1980s – the period of greatest congressional and judicial activity on consultant reporting since the 1950s. The final section looks at post-1980s events and examines why organized labor has persisted with its campaign to reform government policy on consultant reporting, despite its inability to make progress on the issue over the past four decades.

The results of a research project investigating the changing of jobs, or mobility, of American engineers are presented. The aim of the survey was to determine how often and why individuals in high technical positions change companies. It was also designed to determine any differences in the job‐changing habits between individuals with different employers, different education levels or different age levels.

Change readiness (CR) is viewed as a multidimensional behavior that reflects the firm's competencies to do three things in response to environmental opportunities and threats in its industry: trigger identification; gearing up to take action (preparation); and the action's degree of novelty. The main purpose of this study is to propose and test an alternative conceptualization for CR.

Data were collected from 217 organizations in 14 countries. All respondents were in charge of, or involved with, their firms' strategic decisions and implementations thereof and filled out a structured questionnaire.

It was found that CR is influenced by both internal and external variables, including management orientation (entrepreneurial, centralization), environmental barriers, and technology and innovation roles in firms' business strategies. In addition, a higher degree of CR was correlated with better performance and with higher management evaluation of success in coping with environmental triggers.

The size and selection of the sample may pose limits in generalizing the study findings. Future studies may increase the number of interviews per firm, use objective assessments of performance and provide more specific information about threats and opportunities, as well as the type of industry.

The proposed CR concept is based on specific behavior rather than on attitude. CR is perceived as a strategy‐oriented construct that demonstrates the capacity of an organization to respond effectively to new developments in its environment.

This paper studies the preemptive scheduling problem of independent jobs on identical machines. The purpose of this paper is to minimize the makespan under the imposed constraints, namely, the ones that relate the transportation delays which are required to transport a preempted job from one machine to another. This study considers the case when the transportation delays are variable.

The contribution is twofold. First, this study proposes a new linear programming formulation in real and binary decision variables. Then, this study proposes and implements a solution strategy, which consists of two stages. The goal of the first stage is to obtain the best machines order using a local search strategy. For the second stage, the objective is to determine the best possible sequence of jobs. To solve the preemptive scheduling problem with transportation delays, this study proposes a heuristic and two metaheuristics (simulated annealing and variable neighborhood search), each with two modes of evaluation.

Computational experiments are presented and discussed on randomly generated instances.

The study has implications in various industrial environments when the preemption of jobs is allowed.

This study proposes a new linear programming formulation for the problem with variable transportation delays as well as a corresponding heuristic and metaheuristics.

In a systemic approach, a ship is a system in which people and organizations interact directly and indirectly in all processes from construction, during the route and at the destination, throughout its useful life, until eventual scrapping or disposal process. The purpose of this paper is to take on the UN 2030 Agenda ‒ Goal 14 to propose a management model that meets environmental guidelines for assessing impacts caused by the cruise ships.

To verify the proposed model, a quantitative survey using non-probability purposive sampling was conducted among ports, environmental sustainability experts and ocean cruise companies. The empirical data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and structural equation modeling.

Findings have confirmed five environmental requirements that shipping companies must manage on their cruise ships to meet Goal 14: input management, waste management, air quality, energy management and water management. Adopting and disseminating sustainable development models provides transparent information about actions taken and results of environmental management, and it may change the perception of the organization’s image, which is relevant to win and maintain environment-friendly customers, adding intangible value to the tourism product.

One of the limitations of the study is the research sample, especially ocean cruise companies, which can have biased results, as they are potential sources of environmental impacts. However, this was not the case, since the answers were similar to those of the other two groups surveyed.

The originality of the study is justified by researchers who argue that information provided by shipping companies on sustainability is very limited, as according to previous research, the convergence between strategy formulation model and environmental sustainability as a principle to be incorporated into the management of oceangoing vessels has not been studied.