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The Toyota Production System has been studied for its business success for several decades. Many companies have tried to imitate but have not achieved Toyota-like results. Failure in the ability to replicate Toyota's supportive culture has been suggested as a cause for the lack of success. Studies on lean implementation have been conducted from external views focusing on visible indicators, but few seek the employee's perception of lean initiatives. The authors propose a Toyota Production System – Toyota Way (TPS-TW) model approach using employee perception and quantitative performance metrics.

This research represents an improvement of a lean assessment instrument using quantifiable performance metrics for validation and testing it in the Chinese automotive industry. A survey was developed and executed in the Chinese automotive industry with participants involved with lean implementation. Experts helped examine the content validity, and reliability analysis was used to study the structure of the assessment instrument and evaluate internal consistency. Confirmatory factor analysis and structured equation modeling were used to test the construct validity. Finally, survey results and actual performance were analyzed.

The results of this research validated the TPS-TW model and assessment instrument in the Chinese automotive industry.

This research validates an employee perception survey that can be utilized by organizations to understand the state of their lean implementation. The research supports the use of employee perception to reflect the reality of a lean initiative and proves the TPS-TW model is an effective theoretical framework for assessment.

Few companies have had the success that Toyota Motor Corporation has experienced over the past 70 years. Many give credit for Toyota's success to the company's famous Toyota Production System. Companies outside of Toyota have tried to implement versions of Toyota's system as Lean production; however, few companies have experienced the success of Toyota, and none have experienced Toyota's sustained success. In 2001, Toyota released a publication entitled The Toyota Way 2001 as a set of globalized standards of the culture that drives the success of the Toyota Production System.

This research examines the effect of the Toyota Way on the implementation of Lean production outside of Toyota. A survey was developed and a study was performed on a sample of 349 participants with Lean experience. Structural equation modeling was used to test the relationship between the Toyota Way culture, Lean production, and achieving the desired Lean production system results.

The results of this research discovered that the existence of the Toyota Way culture has a significant and positive mediating effect on a Lean production system achieving the desired Lean results.

This research created a validated survey instrument that can be used to evaluate and understand the status of a Lean implementation initiative based upon employee perception. The results of this study support assertions made by Lean practitioners and previous research stating that culture affects the level of success of Lean production system implementation. While this may not seem like breaking news, prior to this study no statistically validated research supporting such an assertion could be found. Furthermore, this research defines culture very specifically as the Toyota Way culture as outlined in The Toyota Way 2001.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) states in 2018 that safeguarding “civil liberties is critical” to their official duties. The Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties within DHS, as its website explains,

reviews and assesses complaints from the public in areas such as: physical or other abuse; discrimination based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or disability; inappropriate conditions of confinement; infringements of free speech; violation of right to due process … and any other civil rights or civil liberties violation related to a Department program or activity.

My chapter tracks the centrality of deportability in shaping the civil liberties and rights that DHS is tasked with enforcing. Over the course of the twentieth century, people on US soil saw an expanding list of civil liberties and civil rights. Important scholarship concentrates on the role of the courts, state and federal governments, advocacy groups, social movements, and foreign policy driving these constitutional and cultural changes. For instance, the scholarship illustrates that coming out of World War I, the US Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment did not protect something the Justices labeled “irresponsible speech.” The Supreme Court soon changed course, opening up an era ever since of more robust First Amendment rights. What has not been undertaken in the literature is an examination of the relationship of deportability to the sweep of civil liberties and civil rights. Starting in the second decade of the twentieth century, federal immigration policymakers began multiplying types of immigration statuses. A century later, among many others, there is the H2A status for temporary low-wage workers, the H2B for skilled labor, and permanent residents with green cards. The deportability of each status constrains access to certain liberties and rights. Thus, in 2016, when people from the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties within DHS act, they are not enforcing a uniform body of rights and liberties that applies equally to citizens and immigrants, or even within the large category of immigrants. Instead, they do so within a complicated matrix of liberties and rights attenuated by deportability, which has been shaped by the history of the twentieth century.

Review of O’Brien, D. P., & Creedy, J. (Eds.). (2010). Darwin's clever neighbor: George Warde Norman and his circle. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. ISBN: 978-1848445574. $165.00.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a methodology to support the Hoshin Kanri (HK) process taking into account the variance of senior managers’ perspective regarding the relationships among objectives, key performance indicators and continuous improvement (CI) projects.

A four-step methodology incorporates the A3 report into the HK, whose deployment was weighted by the variability among managers’ perception about the importance of each decision. This methodology was applied in a market-leader Mexican auto parts manufacturing company that is undergoing a Lean Manufacturing (LM) implementation.

The results indicate that the proposed methodology provides an easier approach to consolidate different perspectives and weight the importance of CI projects. Moreover, it minimizes the possibility of managerial conflicts or the influence of a determined senior manager on others’ opinions during the deployment and prioritization.

This work may be of great interest to managers, consultants and professionals who deal with the implementation of LM and wish to prioritize the importance of CI projects within the perspective of HK.

HK provides a systematic approach to integrate strategic management with daily routine management through an adequate deployment of organizational policies to all levels. However, companies usually struggle with several issues such as the style of senior managers and consensus establishment among different opinions, which emphasizes the relevance of the proposed methodology in this study.

Having a shared vision is crucial for innovation. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of individual propensity to collaborate and innovate on the development of a shared vision.

The authors build a network in which each node represents the vision of one individual and link the network structure to individual propensity of collaboration and innovativeness. During organizational workshops in four multinational organizations, the authors collected individual visions in the form of images as well as text describing the approach to innovation from 85 employees.

The study maps individual visions for innovation as a cognitive network. The authors find that individual propensity to innovate or collaborate is related to different network centrality. Innovators, individuals who see innovation as an opportunity to change and grow, are located at the center of the cognitive network. Collaborators, who see innovation as an opportunity to collaborate, have a higher closeness centrality inside a cluster.

This paper analyses visions as a network linking recent research in psychology with the managerial longing for a more thorough investigation of group cognition. The study contributes to literature on shared vision creation, suggesting the role which innovators and collaborators can occupy in the process.

This paper proposes how an approach based on a cognitive network can inform innovation management. The findings suggest that visions of innovators summarize the visions of a group, helping the development of an overall shared vision. Collaborators on the other hand are representative of specific clusters and can help developing radical visions.

Presents Chapter I of Laughlin Currie's PhD thesis in which he discusses the history of bank assets and banking theory.

The recent years have been marked by the increasing participation of women in the labour force internationally. Especially in the industrialised countries of Western Europe and North America, this labour force participation is now well over 40%. Globally, however, the estimate is around 33%. A large number of these women are still found in the agriculture sector and the informal sector of industry. For those working in the formal industrial sector, a significant portion work in the shopfloor of assembly line operations for products ranging from electronics to textiles. Women in management comprise less than 1% of all economically active women. For the purposes of this paper, a “manager” is defined as a person who has latitude in decision making as to the allocation and use of organisational resources, including physical, financial, and human resources.