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Scholars have long argued that churches play a critical role in mobilizing communities marginal to the political process, primarily by pooling resources, disseminating information, and providing opportunities for members to develop community networks, leadership, and civic skills. However, recent research suggests that churches only serve as effective mobilizing institutions when they engage in direct political discussion and recruitment. Even so, churches may face economic, legal, and institutional barriers to entering the political sphere, and explicit political speech and action remain rare. Through an analysis of two years of ethnographic fieldwork following faith-based community organizers attempting to recruit Spanish speakers throughout a Catholic Archdiocese into a campaign for immigrant rights, this paper explores the institutional constraints on church political mobilization, and how these are overcome to mobilize one of the most politically marginal groups in the United States today: Hispanic undocumented immigrants and their allies. I argue that scholars of political engagement must look beyond the structural features of organizations to consider the effects of their institutionalized domains and practices. While churches do face institutional barriers to political mobilization, activists who specialize their recruitment strategy to match the institutional practices of the organizations they target can effectively overcome these barriers to mobilize politically alienated populations.

City logistics is a challenge in many cities. Literature works focus on the analysis of large or local-scale solutions to increase the efficiency of freight transport. However, store deliveries from the perspective of practitioners, particularly retail stores, are still an issue. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to propose a decision framework to assist logistics managers in defining efficient re-shelving solutions for store deliveries, according to the emplacement characteristics, city administration constraints and social issues.

An iterative step-by-step decision framework is developed, which allows taking decisions in a clear and structured way, including the preferences of key stakeholders. Moreover, a “what if” procedure is proposed, aiming to modify some initial conditions of the target store to achieve more efficient solutions.

The proposed decision framework is applicable in practice and helps users (mainly logistics managers) to identify solutions for efficient re-shelving in urban settings.

The decision framework is applied by the logistics manager of two Spanish food retail stores, but it could be used in different logistics sectors and cities/regions, although adapting the decisions taken at each phase.

Logistics managers have a support tool when addressing re-shelving solutions for store deliveries.

A balance can be found between company interests (minimise costs) and citizens quality of life (less contamination, noise, traffic, etc.).

This study simultaneously deals with large- and local-scale decisions faced by logistics managers in their day-to-day activity, considering details about the store location, its surroundings and the company it belongs.

Simple assembly line balancing problem type 1 is the most studied assembly line problem and many procedures have been proposed to solve it. Ho and Emrouznejad proposed to add a novel set of constrains into a binary integer‐programming model that is useful for breaking symmetries between equivalent solutions. The purpose of this paper is to compare this way of breaking symmetries with the usual ones existing in the literature (by means of the objective function and by means of additional constraints) and propose two novel ways of breaking symmetries which improve the existing ones.

For the comparison, the authors solve the well‐known benchmark instances.

It was found that the most efficient model is one of the new models which has not been proposed in the literature to date. Moreover, the authors noticed that Ho and Emrouznejad attribute a mathematical model to Patterson and Albracht that is different from the original model proposed by Patterson and Albracht.

There is not, in the literature, a comparison between classical and new mathematical models. The authors give an empirical comparison between them, together with two new ones that the authors propose. Moreover, the authors point out the mistake about the attribution model in Ho and Emrouznejad's, work attributing a mathematical model to Patterson and Albracht, with the aim of preventing its possible propagation in future researches.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a bicriteria integer programming model for hierarchical workforce scheduling in which the first criterion is the cost and the second is the suitability of task assignment to individual employees. The model is based on the integer programming formulation for the hierarchical workforce scheduling problem published in 2007 by Seçkiner et al., which extends the model proposed by Billionnet in 1999.

The principal hypothesis of this paper is that, although an employee is capable of performing several different tasks with equal efficiency, the type of task to which he/she is assigned affects the overall suitability of the assignment configuration. Therefore, cost‐minimising solutions should also optimise task assignment when possible. This paper considers real cases and confirm that this approach to the problem is appropriate for dealing with common situations in personnel management.

The proposed idea is applied to the example problem used by Seçkiner et al. and the results are compared with Seçkiner et al.'s model results.

Consequently, the proposal is more general and a more faithful representation of the problems faced by personnel managers, which should help to bridge the gap between academic studies and practical cases.

This chapter deals with the Citizens’ Revolution in Ecuador facing US imperialism. It is divided into five parts. Firstly, the author gives some historical elements on the structure and dynamics of the Ecuadorian economy in the short medium and long term. Secondly, the author presents the project of transition to socialism of the Citizens’ Revolution as it occurred at the normative level and in public policies. The third part focuses especially on the economic dimension of this project and offers an overall critic of it. The fourth part provides a general explanation on the dynamics of the progressive cycle in Ecuador. Eventually the fifth part emphasizes the need to perform much more radical breaks to make a process of transition to socialism viable in this country.

The authors present the application of the López-Fresno approach in designing an integrated management system (IMS) for an aviation company to the development of an IMS in a government-run organization responsible for the medical evaluation of work disabilities. The purpose of this paper is to share the design process, with the intention of showing that this approach is applicable to other sectors and proposing generalization and applicability strategies to other smaller government entities.

The study involves two phases. Phase I applies the López-Fresno approach to design a basic IMS-I and ends with a European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) evaluation, whose suggestions were taken into consideration for the final design of IMS-II during phase II. The data were obtained from the organization's own functioning. There was a significant degree of personal involvement by the authors, external consultants and members of the management committee in areas ranging from the approach itself to the various components analyzed.

The approach led to a better use of human and material resources and produced various advances in both internal and external communication and significant progress in employee motivation in their dealings with users and stakeholders.

The study offers guidelines and recommendations for designing an IMS adapted to small, compact, administrative organizations that operate with stakeholders with highly disparate outlooks and interests, with different quality levels, in a context related to competitiveness and economic development.

“When James Boswell returned from a tour of Corsica in 1765 he wrote: ‘It is indeed amazing that an island so considerable, and in which such noble things have been doing, should be so imperfectly known.’ The same might be said today of Puerto Rico.” Thus began Millard Hansen and Henry Wells in the foreword to their 1953 look at Puerto Rico's democratic development. Four decades later, the same could again be said about the island.

The purpose of this article is to present how innovations in the social action program of a Spanish savings bank produce strategic changes in the organization.

The paper follows a historical approach, first studying Spanish savings banks in general and the Caja de Ahorros de Navarra (CAN) in particular. It then examines the strategic challenges that the CAN faced in 2002 and the organizational response through the “You choose, you decide” initiative. The implementation of the program is chronicled and results evaluated against strategic objectives.

In embodying the social action program of the CAN, the “You choose, you decide” campaign has successfully differentiated the bank. Customer‐stakeholders have acquired a high degree of identification with the bank since they now decide on the beneficiaries of the social action program as well as their level of prioritization.

This work is of special interest to bank managers who would like to incorporate CSR and increased stakeholder involvement into their strategic and differentiation objectives.