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The purpose of this paper is to introduce management historians to the long‐forgotten work of Frank George Woollard (1883‐1957), who in the mid‐1920s established flow production in the British motor industry, and its remarkable similarity to current‐day production principles and practices used by Toyota Motor Corporation, also known as lean production.

Overview of Frank Woollard's life and work obtained from newly discovered journal papers, his 1954 book, Principles of Mass and Flow Production, newly discovered archives, and new first‐hand testimony from a close friend and from a long‐time family friend.

Frank Woollard was a pioneer in the establishment of flow production in the British motor industry in the mid‐1920s and the principal developer of automatic transfer machinery. His accomplishments are comparable to Taiichi Ohno, regarded as the architect of Toyota's production system.

Woollard's accomplishments in flow production are a fruitful area for future research given the speed and completeness with which flow production was established at Morris Motors Ltd, Engines Branch. Newly discovered papers describing his flow production system have yet to be studied in detail by academics.

Woollard's application of flow production beginning in 1923 means that timelines for discoveries and attributions of key accomplishments in lean management must be reexamined and revised.

Woollard's work fills important gaps in the literature on the history of flow production generally and in the British motor industry in particular. His work constitutes an early application of current‐day lean principles and practices, and is therefore noteworthy and relevant to management historians and the operations and production management community. It is hoped that this paper will inspire management historians to study Woollard's work and place him in the context of other early twentieth‐century pioneers in industrial management and flow production.

This paper analyzes the influence of HR function on organizational performance through the effective deployment of high-performance work practices. Although researchers have examined the relationship between these constructs, extant literature demonstrates contradictory findings. Thus, building on contemporary strategic HRM literature this study expands previous frameworks adopting a system thinking perspective, namely the concept of maturity of HRM system.

It is a cross-sectional study, having collected primary data from 424 managers and employees working in 135 organizations. The research model and hypotheses were tested at unit level using structured equation modelling.

The results support a positive impact of the HR function on perceived organizational performance. Furthermore, demonstrating that the mediation through high-performance work practices is partial, supporting that the HR function has an incremental value over HR practices on organizational performance. Inspired by system thinking, this study tested an integrated model that combines the HRM system, HR function and organizational performance. Overall, it contributes to the literature by providing additional evidence to the influence of HR Function for organizational performance.

The data were collected using a questionnaire at a single point in time, and thus, not allowing cause-effect inferences.

The results provide guidance to organizational leaders interested in designing and implementing effective HRM systems and building successful HR departments.

This study advances the understanding of the mechanisms by which HR function, HR practices and HRM system interact to explain organizational performance. Furthermore, it suggests that organizational decision-makers to benefit the most from high-performance work practices should embedded them on mature HRM systems.

Against a British policy backdrop, which places an ever- increasing emphasis on workplace learning in pre-service professional programmes, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the contribution of the mentor to professional knowledge development in nursing, paramedicine, social work and teaching.

Taking the form of a literature review, it explores the influence of policy, professional and theoretical conceptualisations of the mentor role, and structural factors influencing the mentor’s contribution to professional knowledge.

Where there are clearly delineated policy obligations for the mentor to “teach”, mentors are more likely to make connections between theoretical and practical knowledge. When this responsibility is absent or informal, they are inclined to attend to the development of contextual knowledge with a consequent disconnect between theory and practice. In all four professions, mentors face significant challenges, especially with regard to the conflict between supporting and assessor roles, and the need to attend to heavy contractual workloads, performance targets and mentoring roles in tandem.

The authors argue first for the need for more attention to the pedagogy of mentoring, and second for structural changes to workload allocations, career progression and mentoring education. In order to develop more coherent and interconnected professional knowledge between different domains, and the reconciliation of different perspectives, it would be useful to underpin mentoring pedagogy with Bhabba’s notion of “third space”.

The paper makes a contribution to the field since it considers new obligations incumbent on mentors to assist mentees in reconciling theoretical and practical knowledge by the consequence of policy and also takes a multi-professional perspective.

In North America, delegated practice “medical direction” models are often used as a proxy for clinical quality and safety in paramedic services. Other developed countries favor a combination of professional regulatory boards and clinical governance frameworks that feature paramedics taking lead clinician roles. The purpose of this paper is to bring together the evidence for medical direction and clinical governance in paramedic services through the prism of paramedic self-regulation.

This narrative synthesis critically examines the long-established North American Emergency Medical Services medical direction model and makes some comparisons with the UK inspired clinical governance approaches that are used to monitor and manage the quality and safety in several other Anglo-American paramedic services. The databases searched were CINAHL and Medline, with Google Scholar used to capture further publications.

Synthesis of the peer-reviewed literature found little high quality evidence supporting the effectiveness of medical direction. The literature on clinical governance within paramedic services described a systems approach with shared responsibility for quality and safety. Contemporary paramedic clinical leadership papers in developed countries focus on paramedic professionalization and the self-regulation of paramedics.

The lack of strong evidence supporting medical direction of the paramedic profession in developed countries challenges the North American model of paramedics practicing as a companion profession to medicine under delegated practice model. This model is inconsistent with the international vision of paramedicine as an autonomous, self-regulated health profession.

This paper aims to document the development of cellular manufacturing at Scania-Vabis, thereby contributing to the history of an organizational idea.

The authors draw on published sources and interviews to reconstruct the development of cellular manufacturing at Scania-Vabis and its traces.

Cellular manufacturing was applied and further developed at Scania-Vabis in the 1940s and 1950s. Nevertheless, it seems to have fallen into oblivion. The key idea resurfaced in the 1970s.

The authors argue that such “proven technology” should be considered a classical insight in organization design rather than old and thus outdated.

The authors demonstrate that this form of flow-based organizing is much older than commonly assumed and point to barriers in accumulating knowledge on organizing.

Neo-institutional theory suggests that organisations change occurs when institutional contradictions, caused by exogenous and endogenous dynamics, increase over time to the point where change can no longer be resisted. Human praxis will result, but only when sufficiently powerful interests are motivated to act. This paper aims to examine the role that the accreditation of business schools can play in increasing institutional contradictions and hence fostering organisational change towards stakeholder engagement and engagement with social responsibility and sustainability issues. Numerous accreditations are promulgated within the higher education and business school contexts and a number of these relate to, or have aspects that relate to, ethics, social responsibility and sustainability.

The paper first analyses the take up of accreditations across UK business schools and then uses a case study to illustrate and explore stakeholder engagement and changes related to ethics, social responsibility and sustainability linked to accreditation processes.

Accreditations are found to be an increasingly common interest for UK business schools. Further, a number of these accreditations have evolved to incorporate issues related to ethics, social responsibility and sustainability that may cause institutional contradictions and may, therefore, have the potential to foster organisational change. Accreditation alone, however, is not sufficient and the authors find that sufficiently powerful interests need to be motivated to act and enable human praxis to affect change.

This paper draws on previous research that considers the role of accreditation in fostering change that has also been carried out in healthcare organisations, public and professional bodies. Its findings stem from an individual case study and as such further research is required to explore whether these findings can be extended and apply more generally in business schools and universities in different contexts.

This paper concludes by recommending that the newly established UK & Ireland Chapter of PRME encourages and supports signatory schools to further embed ethics, social responsibility and sustainability into all aspects of university life in the UK. This also provides an opportunity to engage with the accrediting bodies in order to further support the inclusion of stakeholder engagement and issues related to this agenda in their processes.

This paper contributes by introducing accreditation as an institutional pressure that may lead indirectly to organisational change and supports this with new evidence from an illustrative case study. Further, it draws on the role of institutional contradictions and human praxis that engender organisational change.

The paper aims to explore the nature and purpose of higher education (HE) in the twenty‐first century, focussing on how it can help fashion a green knowledge‐based economy by developing approaches to learning and teaching that are social, networked and ecologically sensitive.

The paper presents a discursive analysis of the skills and knowledge requirements of an emerging green knowledge‐based economy using a range of policy focussed and academic research literature.

The business opportunities that are emerging as a more sustainable world is developed requires the knowledge and skills that can capture and move then forward but in a complex and uncertain worlds learning needs to non‐linear, creative and emergent.

Sustainable learning and the attributes graduates will need to exhibit are prefigured in the activities and learning characterising the work and play facilitated by new media technologies.

Greater emphasis is required in higher learning understood as the capability to learn, adapt and direct sustainable change requires interprofessional co‐operation that must utlise the potential of new media technologies to enhance social learning and collective intelligence.

The practical relationship between low‐carbon economic development, social sustainability and HE learning is based on both normative criteria and actual and emerging projections in economic, technological and skills needs.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the manifold linkages connecting the Toyota Production System (TPS) back to the Gilbreths and others, and to determine how these have contributed to enterprise‐wide best practice. Industrial engineering (IE) theory rapidly subsumed method study and thereby made considerable contributions to output in World War II (WWII). The outcome is the positing of “contemporary” IE.

Consideration is given to the Japanese Management Association (JMA) personal handshake route originated by Frank Gilbreth in which experiences were handed down in lecture note format by successive generations of industrial engineers. His interaction with the FW Taylor Scientific Management movement is a second theme. The internationally recognised “softer” approach to teaching and coaching due to Lillian Gilbreth is then discussed. Finally the Gilbreth MOI2 Process Chart is examined.

TPS has evolved over an extended period of time to achieve continuous material flow. There has been no single procedure or technical breakthrough. Much of the detail would have been familiar to the Gilbreths. These became evident in the USA and the UK auto industries soon after the First World War. Elements of JIT are recognisable even earlier in the building of the UK Crystal Palace in 1851. However the scenario of the current TPS enterprise would be new to the Gilbreths. Similarly the various ways in which the systems approach has been successfully implemented throughout the organisation would appear strange. This becomes self‐evident via a three‐axis model representation of contemporary industrial engineering.

Newly appointed Toyota executives pursuing the shopfloor based Acclimatisation Course would immediately recognise the method study based waste elimination techniques at work. As Ohno remarked, such removal merely levels the playing field. Knowledge (and above all practice) in their use should be a pre‐requisite skill for employees at all levels. This is a sometimes “hidden” secret of TPS, but dates back to Lillian Gilbreth in 1914.

The paper supports the view that effective product delivery is best driven via sound industrial engineering expertise operating within an active learning organisation. The four level prism model applied to TPS highlights its system attributes.

The paper confirms there is a continuing role for well established method study techniques to be adapted to face new challenges, and output as “contemporary” industrial engineering.

The purpose is to provide an intellectual history of Operations Management, particularly noting recent developments and its underlying continuity with earlier systems and thinking. Operations Management as a discipline identifies its “modern” incarnation as dating from the 1960s when it became more rigorous and managerially focused. This re-invention constructed a “narrative” that the profession still follows, yet a critical perspective reveals significant, though under-appreciated continuity with earlier theory and practice.

This paper presents a comprehensive literature review and comparative analysis of historic developments in management and academia.

In the early 1900s, F. W. Taylor’s Shop Management established Operation Management, but its main component, Scientific Management, had stagnated by the 1950s. At that point, the rise of Management Science both reinvigorated Operations Management and threatened it with a competing new discipline. To compete Operations Management then modernized by redefining itself, reasserting its interest in several areas and co-opting Operational Research tools for those. It also contracted, withdrawing from areas considered vocational, or more suited to Industrial Engineering.

This historical overview shows the critical importance of drawing research agenda from practical managerial concerns.

Practitioners benefit from the intellectual rigor that academics provide and a historical perspective shows that the relationship has been mutually beneficial.

The disciplines of Operations Management, Operations Research and Industrial Engineering are complementary and competitive in addressing many problems that transcend their boundaries, and use common ideas and techniques. The demands of “academic rigor” have had a deleterious effect on the practical managerial relevance of these disciplines.

A long-term, cross-disciplinary perspective provides a unique understanding of the research interests and practical orientations of these disciplines.