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East Texas Oxygen (ETOX) delivered high-pressure cylinders of gases such as oxygen and nitrogen to twelve wholly-owned branches scattered throughout East Texas and Louisiana. Employees loaded and unloaded individual high-pressure cylinders off of and onto trailers manually and the firm had never had a related accident. Robert Jenkins had been challenged to decrease the cost of supplying the branches with cylinders and other supplies. He was considering recommending the palletization of delivery operations which required numerous changes within the organization. This case required students to determine the best routing for the delivery truck(s) and to determine whether or not the number of trucks and drivers could be reduced under palletization. Students were then required to do a capital budgeting analysis and make a recommendation of whether or not to palletize.

The linguistic and computational complexities of machine translation are not always apparent to all users or potential purchasers of systems. As a consequence, they are sometimes unable to distinguish between the failings of particular systems and the problems which the best system would have. In this article I shall attempt to outline the difficulties encountered by computers in translating from one natural language into another. This is an introductory paper for those unfamiliar with what computers can and cannot achieve in this field.

In the 1980s the dominant framework of MT was essentially ‘rule‐based’, e.g. the linguistics‐based approaches of Ariane, METAL, Eurotra, etc.; or the knowledge‐based approaches at Carnegie Mellon University and elsewhere. New approaches of the 1990s are based on large text corpora, the alignment of bilingual texts, the use of statistical methods and the use of parallel corpora for ‘example‐based’ translation. The problems of building large monolingual and bilingual lexical databases and of generating good quality output have come to the fore. In the past most systems were intended to be general‐purpose; now most are designed for specialized applications, e.g. restricted to controlled languages, to a sublanguage or to a specific domain, to a particular organization or to a particular user‐type. In addition, the field is widening with research under way on speech translation, on systems for monolingual users not knowing target languages, on systems for multilingual generation directly from structured databases, and in general for uses other than those traditionally associated with translation services.

Secchi and Cowley (2016, 2018) propose a Radical approach to Organizational Cognition (ROC) as a way of studying cognitive processes in organizations. What distinguishes ROC from the established research on Organizational Cognition is that it remains faithful to radical, anti-representationalist principles of contemporary cognitive science. However, it is imperative for proponents of ROC to legitimize their approach by considering how it differs from the established research approach of Distributed Cognition (DCog). DCog is a potential contender to ROC in that it not only counters classical approaches to cognition but also provides valuable insights into cognition in organizational settings.

The paper adopts a conceptual/theoretical approach that expands Secchi and Cowley's introduction of ROC.

The paper shows that DCog research presupposes a task-specification requirement, which entails that cognitive tasks are well-defined. Consequently, DCog research neglects cases of organizational becoming where tasks cannot be clearly demarcated for the or are well-known to the organization. This is the case with the introduction of novel tasks or technical devices. Moreover, the paper elaborates on ROC's 3M model by linking it with insights from the literature on organizational change. Thus, it explores how organizing can be explored as an emergent phenomenon that involves micro, meso and macro domain dynamics, which are shaped by synoptic and performative changes.

The present paper explores new grounds for ROC by not only expanding on its core model but also showing its potential for informing organizational theory and radical cognitive science research.

BABS AUTUMN CONFERENCE 1992 — The Joining Environment. Date: 14–15 October 1992 Venue: Post House, Coventry The BABS 1992 Autumn Conference The Joining Environment, to be held at the Forte Posthouse Coventry on 14–15 October 1992, will provide a venue for discussion of advances in joining technology, focusing in particular on soldering, brazing and diffusion bonding practices which may also involve environmental considerations.

By one of those coincidences that seem to abound in academic life and are probably not coincidences at all, we have recently found ourselves, quite suddenly, in possession of a very great deal of information about the language barrier and about the information requirements of the social sciences. This is a consequence of two recent publications: the Sheffield report on two years of intensive work on the language barrier in an academic community and Bath University Library's INFROSS report. The former looks at the language barrier from the point of view of all disciplines, including the social sciences; the latter looks at the information requirements and problems of social scientists from a very comprehensive point of view and includes amongst the problems that of the language barrier. The two reports therefore complement one another very well, and in my paper this evening I propose to draw on both of them, in an attempt to look at the language barrier from the social scientist's point of view. I shall normally draw more heavily on the Sheffield report than that of Bath—mainly because it is the one with which I am most familiar—though when I came to look at possible solutions, the Bath findings will certainly carry a good deal of weight, as you will see.

This paper aims to examine the role of learning orientation in building brand equity for B2B firms. The present research proposes that learning orientation contributes to the development of innovation and marketing capabilities and, in turn, leads to enhanced industrial brand equity. Furthermore, the moderating effect of firm size in these processes is investigated.

The hypotheses are tested by administering a survey with a set of managers of manufacturing firms in China.

Innovation capability and marketing capability serve as the mediators between learning orientation and industrial brand equity. The mediating path through innovation capability is stronger for small firms than for large firms.

Learning orientation provides a cultural base for B2B firms to cultivate brand equity. Measurement of industrial brand equity and contingency of its effect requires further investigation.

To transform learning-oriented culture into brand equity, firms need to develop and manage innovation and marketing capabilities. The learning orientation–innovation capability route is more beneficial for small firms.

While a majority of prior literature ignores the impact of organizational culture in driving industrial brand equity, the present research explores learning orientation as a key cultural antecedent of industrial brand equity. A more refined industrial-brand-equity-building mechanism from learning orientation to corporate capabilities and then to brand equity is proposed and tested. The mechanism varies with firm size.