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Operations management, purchasing and procurement management, inventory management and supply chain.

Introductory courses in Operations Management; MBA level and final year undergraduates in management. Masters level in purchasing/procurement management, inventory management and supply chain management.

The case deals with strategic purchase decision of a basic raw material used in ketchups. Ketchups represent 15 per cent of annual sales at National Foods. Mohammad Iqbal, Head of Supply Chain at National Foods, is confronted with the decision of buying tomato paste for fiscal year 2007-2008. He needs to decide how much paste to order from National Foods' supplier in China and when. He has the demand forecast for the paste for 2008 available to help him make the decision.

The case will introduce the students to issues in strategic buying of a basic raw material that is crucial to production. The case is not designed to teach just the basic concept of trade-off between inventory holding and stock out cost. The students should bring these basic concepts of operations with them to understand how these concepts are combined with knowledge of other disciplines to tackle a complex raw material planning issue. Students learn how to plan for the purchase of a perishable yet important raw material for an organization.

Teaching note.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that rather than contest the artificial schism produced by social scientists between “qualitative” and “quantitative” research, we should to accept this binary, however, contingently, and use it productively. This would be an act of “strategic essentialism” that would allow us to be productive in the research and inquiry.

The paper uses postcolonial theory to make a case for contingent representation, i.e. using artificial categories to carve out a space for heterodox theoretical approaches.

Researchers devoted to qualitative research must resist thinking, speaking and evaluating that research using quantitative thinking. Also, while ethical considerations are paramount in qualitative research, we need to debunk the narrow understanding of ethics as “following rules.” Also, qualitative researchers need to be aware of the institutional pulls that the research will be subject to, and also be ready to resist them.

This paper discusses how good research resists the siren call of institutionalization. It challenges the “common sense” assumptions of the field and brings them into the realm of the questionable. It seeks to theorize the untheorizable, and anthropologize the dominant.

Strategy scholars have argued that microlevel behavioral decisions by firms play a disproportionate role in making a firm nimble. Central to this issue is the interplay among several factors, such as actions by individual actors, firm-level decisions and broader changes in the economic environment that lead to a firm being successful in a competitive environment. The purpose of this paper is to offer a theoretical exploration of microfoundations research and subject the idea to empirical analysis using the constructs of customer orientation, competitor orientation and technology orientation as microfoundations of strategy.

Data collected through a key informant survey of executives were tested through a hierarchical regression analysis.

The results of the study suggest that the microfoundations of strategy are located more in a firm’s customer and competitor focus, rather than a technological orientation. The findings also suggest that that customer orientation is a significant component of firm-level strategy and needs to be incorporated into decision-making in firms.

This study provides a framework that integrates the structural determinants of firm performance with microfoundations theory to refine our understanding of market knowledge capability.

This paper seeks to explore the impact of corporate offshoring moves on the economic and psychological contracts between firms and their employees.

The paper draws upon literature from diverse social sciences to explore the phenomena of social contracts and offshoring. Especially deploying the exit‐voice theory of Alfred Hirschman, it is argued here that offshoring decreases the regenerative power promised both by exit and voice in helping organizations recover from decline.

Organizational systems and processes designed to deal with the “post‐offshoring worker” only serve to accentuate the sense of alienation felt by workers at the way they are regarded. This scenario poses a serious challenge to researchers and practitioners who need to make sense of these effects and deal with them accordingly.

This paper highlights, honors and legitimates everyday relations at the workplace on both sides of the offshoring divide, as sites of class struggle, of worker alienation, of intra‐organizational bargaining and, sometimes, of relations of imperialism and cultural dislocation. Understanding the complexity of this context and managing the actions arising out of this are important challenges facing the managers.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the phenomenon of knowledge transfer within multinational corporations (MNCs), and how the imperatives of thought and action that constitute new knowledge are received in the terrain that constitutes the MNC subsidiary.

This study employs an ethnographic approach, and juxtaposes primary data collection with a variety of secondary data sources.

The data are analyzed in light of the theoretical construct of hegemony, and three themes theorized that underlie the process of knowledge transfer. These include knowledge loss at the local level, the coercive practices that ensure knowledge transfer, and the invocation of imperial subjectivities by the headquarters of the MNC when dealing with subsidiaries from poorer nations.

This paper goes beyond the mainstream approaches into organizational knowledge transfer, by analyzing these issues in light of political economy, and the changing landscape of industrial accumulation. It offers in some measure, the building blocks of a different organizational theory, one that is sensitive to those subjects who are consigned to the periphery of mainstream organizing.

This paper seeks to analyze the manner in which an immigrant community (South Asian Shia Muslims) deploys religious institutions as a coping mechanism to survive in a demanding and culturally alien environment.

The analysis is derived from an ethnographic examination of a community of South Asian Shia Muslims in the United States.

The paper focuses on three elements of organizational coping. First, communities struggle with the promises and perils of transnationalism. Second, the coming of age of children, whose life experiences do not involve dislocation, produce interesting generational engagements. Finally, the community is often challenged by the nuanced task of political engagement with the broader society.

An in‐depth focus on employment‐related experiences of Shia Muslim diaspora in the West may be a fruitful area for future research.

Employers and governments ought to pay attention to internal heterogeneity of Muslims in understanding and managing diversity.

This is a seminar paper on Shia Muslim diaspora in the USA and relates the study to the realm of workplace diversity.

The aim of my chapter is to draw on conceptualisations of sexism, racism, epistemology of white ignorance and critical race theorists’ critiques of white feminism to examine critical management studies (CMS) practices. The purpose of the chapter is to acknowledge the contribution of CMS feminists and look to how we can go beyond current practices to include antiracism in our feminisms. In particular, I show how sexism, racism and white ignorance are collectively produced in CMS and operate through mundane, and avoidable, organisational and pedagogical processes. I respond to the editors’ call for chapters by offering a practical politics through the idea of a killjoy manifesto, taking inspiration from the writings of Sara Ahmed. An important part of is that is for white feminism in CMS to attend to critiques from racially minoritised academics, activists and workers. Whilst challenging, I hope the chapter provides practical and theoretical resources and encouragement.

The purpose of this paper is to present a short note on postcolonialism as a field of critical inquiry in the business management field, and enable the guest editors to introduce the contents of a special issue entitled “Critical reflections on management and organization: a postcolonial perspective”.

The paper states that postcolonial theory seeks to critique and analyze the complex and multifaceted dynamics of modern Western colonialism and to develop an in‐depth understanding of the ongoing significance of the colonial encounter for people's lives both in the West and the non‐West.

The paper finds that modern western colonialism – a phenomenon with a history of roughly 500 years and a geographical reach that at one point spanned approximately 90 percent of the entire earth – is an episode of particular significance in human history.

The paper shows that the special issue contents reflect different aspects of contemporary issues in postcolonialism. In terms of postcolonial geographies, the special issue papers cover regions as diverse as Africa, Australia, China, India, Jordan, Malaysia, Poland, and the UK.