Search results

This research investigates the study of service operations and information technology (IT) in order to observe the interaction between these two constructs. Phase I utilizes a Delphi study, involving 31 participants from 11 organizations, to provide initial specification of a service typology based on task requirements. Phase II of the research is a multiple case study that further refines the construct specifications and analyzes the dynamics of the interaction between components of the service task and IT. Results of the Delphi and case analysis suggest that differentiation within the service task construct occurs along an expertise‐based continuum that incorporates four primary task requirements. These requirements include knowledge‐base, level of standardization and two databased elements, data configuration and data interpretation. The case analyses further indicate the presence of three primary levels of task requirements – transaction processing, request fulfillment and problem resolution. Early results from the task‐IT interaction analysis suggest that the task‐IT relationship affects critical operations factors such as process innovation, IT diffusion rates, achievement of informational and operational advantage, performance measurement and elements of service quality.

This study examines the role that information technology plays in supporting relationships between customers and suppliers in the financial service industry. It traces the interrelationships among the different sectors of this industry – brokerage houses, retail banks, institutional banks, mutual funds, insurance underwriters, and others – and identifies roles that information technology and electronic service delivery can play in creating and supporting inter‐organizational integration across sector boundaries. It further identifies the opportunities for and threats to these relationships caused, in large part, by the continuing evolution of information technology. This study will help managers in the financial services to analyze the opportunities and assess the risks of building tighter relationships with their customers and suppliers through electronic commerce.

AT the request of the Director‐General of the International Labour Office Mr. Petre Lupu, Rumania's Minister of Labour, has described the benefits brought to his country through setting up a Management Development Centre.

This is an attempt to write an account of action learning that is as close to the ground on which it was practised as the author can make it. In that sense, the reader can read what follows below as a kind of autoethnography, a “representation as relationship” as Gergen and Gergen (2002, p. 11) call it. This is because in the opportunity of telling a story about his practice as an action learning facilitator, the author hopes to evoke that which is more akin to the contactful environment of quality action learning than any amount of abstract theorising.

This is an example of “narrative inquiry”, best judged, according to Sparkes (2002), in terms of the ability of such accounts to “contribute to sociological understanding in ways that, amongst others are self-knowing, self-respecting, self-sacrificing and self-luminous”.

As the author re-tells this partial account, he has a sense of the massive wider structures around him, but all he can see in his dim lamp is the fleeting glimpse of the local strata. The author traces his hand along the seams, not intending to dig them out, but simply to witness them, or even, in a spirit of yearning, to give them a witnessing of themselves.

To the author, this is about portraying what action learning feels like, rather than thinks like, for his own and for the benefit of other practitioners.

FOURTEEN years ago 16% of all employees in our manufacturing industries were what are commonly described as ‘white collar’ workers. They belonged to the group that includes clerical, technical and administrative staffs. If that seems a very high proportion what can be thought of the fact that by 1960 the figure had risen to 21%? The actual rate of growth is even more startling. During that 12 years the total number of employees in manufacturing industry increased by 12% but in the same period the ‘white collar’ workers in that section of the economy rose by 48%, according to figures issued by the Ministry of Labour.

FOURTEEN years ago 16% of all employees in our manufacturing industries were what are commonly described as ‘white collar’ workers. They belonged to the group that includes clerical, technical and administrative staffs. If that seems a very high proportion what can be thought of the fact that by 1960 the figure had risen to 21%? The actual rate of growth is even more startling. During that 12 years the total number of employees in manufacturing industry increased by 12% but in the same period the ‘white collar’ workers in that section of the economy rose by 48%, according to figures issued by the Ministry of Labour.

UNTIL now the field of clerical work is one which has been cultivated only marginally by work study methods. When the Prices and Incomes Board examined pay agreements in that sector of British business it was constrained to comment that ‘the application of measurement techniques to clerical work still has a long way to go’.

Tabletop ‘pen and paper’ role-play games (TTRPGs) can function as spaces of creative experimentation with gender identity through shared storytelling. The last decade has seen an explosion of Actual Play (AP) shows that broadcast recorded gameplay of TTRPGs to online audiences. Neverafter is the 15th season of well-known AP show Dimension 20 and is a horror-themed re-imagining of classic fairy tales through the rules of Dungeons and Dragons. Four of the six player characters are male, based individually on the fairy tales of Pinocchio, Puss in Boots, the Frog Prince, and a (gender-swapped) Mother Goose, adventuring together in a story-world called ‘The Neverafter’. Not only are these versions of the fairy tale characters shaped by the players' own explorations of identity, but as an AP show, this is also layered with the expectations produced by the show's wide fan base. Their diverse gender explorations and their subversion of fairy tale conventions are enabled by the fluency of the players and audience in freely flowing between the framing perspectives of player and character. This chapter will focus on non-binary player Ally Beardsley's creation and performance of Mother Timothy Goose as a gay, elderly, human man as a particularly meaningful case study. This analysis considers how heroic masculinity is reconceptualised in Neverafter through the horror-themed embodiment of fairy tale men in the context of contemporary gender issues.