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Rapid advances in technology have conferred vast benefits upon modern societies. Money can be transferred by wire in an instant. The internet has dispensed with the need to send faxes across telephone wires. The days when it was necessary to carry multiple currencies across the international borders have all but disappeared. The day is fast approaching when societies will be cashless and people will be able to carry so‐called smart cards that contain all of their funds in the form of electronic cash. Smart cards have the technical ability to facilitate transfers of electronic cash from one smart card to another. Electronic cash can be used to shop on the internet and even gamble there. The shares of a company can be bought and sold on multiple stock exchanges through electronic cash transactions. When a London stock exchange is closed, for example, a person in the UK might transmit electronic cash to New York and buy publicly traded shares because the stock exchanges in New York will be open. If a citizen of one country loses faith in the national currency, he might use an electronic cash transaction to convert his assets into the stronger currency of another country in a foreign bank account. The examples of how modern technology will continue to benefit us are numerous.

Groups and group dynamics have been areas which have received considerable attention not only in Social Psychology and Sociology, but in the last thirty years, also in the field of managerial decision‐making. Many activities within organisations are performed in a group context. Budgets are compiled by committees, new products are evaluated by marketing teams and strategic plans constructed by top management team members. Much of the confidence in the use of groups in management decision‐making has its origins in the belief that “two heads are better than one” and from early research which in fact indicates that this is so.

When an audience mentally counterargues a spokesperson, the message is backfiring. In such cases, audience members are practically persuading themselves to take the opposite position advocated by the spokesperson. Yet spokespeople who are professional persuaders serving corporations often seem to instill counterargument. This paper examines the role of counterargument as the conduit through which a spokesperson's different message types affect a company during a crisis. The authors explore the paradox of spokespeople's (in)effectiveness by testing divides in research drawn from normative crisis communication theory, narrative persuasion theory and the theory of reporting bias.

Two controlled, randomized experiments are reported. Participants (total N = 828) watch video clips of media interviews of a company spokesperson fielding questions about a scandal.

In the first study, non-narrative information most effectively bolsters purchase intentions and reduces negative word-of-mouth. The effect is mediated by decreased counterargument. The second study replicates the results concerning on-topic narratives compared with spinning, while on-topic narratives and non-narratives perform equally well.

This study addresses conflicts between two distinct traditions of theory as well as between normative crisis communication and its frequent practice. Reducing counterargument matters in the context of non-narrative persuasion, and non-narratives can perform at least as well as narratives in crisis communication.

Veteran managers trained to respect hierarchical systems are daunted by the fundamental changes in thinking and culture that are required to implement the Agile continuous innovation approach to manufacturing. Though widely hailed by software developers it has been slow to catch on in manufacturing. This paper aims to address this issue.

To assuage managers concerns, ten prevalent myths about Agile are addressed along with a description of how the approach really works in practice.

The paper reveals that the Agile outside‐in orientation that maximizes customer value requires a reinvention of management roles, practices, values and communications to implement it.

If research is reported on in the paper this section must be completed and should include suggestions for future research and any identified limitations in the research process.

Agile is a way of forcing either high performance or change because results are apparent so quickly, not years later when the project runs out of money and the product flops in the marketplace.

The article dispels many myths about Agile and shows managers how to overcome resistance to adopting the Agile approach, which addresses the central problem at the very core of a hierarchical bureaucracy, namely, its limited ability to innovate.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of logistics capabilities in achieving supply chain agility through a multi‐disciplinary review of the relevant research. The systematic literature review aims to provide the basis for formulating a conceptual framework of the relationship.

A systematic, comprehensive review of the literature on manufacturing, organizational and supply chain agility from 1991 through 2010 was conducted. The literature on logistics capabilities was also examined to identify the various elements that contribute to supply chain agility.

Supply chain agility has primarily been explored in the literature through a focus on manufacturing flexibility, supply chain speed, or lean manufacturing. The role of logistics capabilities in achieving supply chain agility has not been addressed from a holistic conceptual perspective. This research addresses that gap using a multi‐disciplinary approach. As such, it is the first phase in theory building on the concept of supply chain agility. Further research is needed to empirically test the conceptualized relationships.

This research is a systematic, integrative review of the existing literature on the concept of agility and logistics capabilities. As such, the next phase of research needed for theory building will be the operationalization of constructs and testing of the hypothesized relationships proposed by the conceptual framework.

The level of agility in a supply chain can determine the efficiency and effectiveness of the collective efforts. It is important that firms become more knowledgeable about the role of logistics capabilities in achieving agility.

Through a systematic, comprehensive review of the literature in four distinct areas, the paper explores the relationship between logistics capabilities and supply chain agility.

A definition recently proposed by the Institute of Logistics states that: “Logistics is the time‐related positioning of resources”. Experience indicates that major benefits can be derived by focusing on the effective management of the key resources of the business. The key to success involves understanding what constitutes best practice in management of these resources with respect to time and how this can be applied, given the unique characteristics of a particular business. By viewing logistics as a time‐based strategy many benefits can be obtained. Presents an overview of the strategic issues based on experience with partner companies at the Warwick Manufacturing Group, University of Warwick. Discusses the tools and measures used for re‐engineering the supply chain through the use of time, and gives a brief example demonstrating the success of this approach.

This study aims to consider the role of emotions, especially those related to empathy, in promoting a more humane education that enables students to reach out across kinship chasms to promote the development of communities predicated on a shared value on mutual respect. This attention to empathy includes a review of the rational basis for much schooling, introduces skepticism about the façade of rational thinking, reviews the emotionally flat character of classrooms, attends to the emotional dimensions of literacy education, argues on behalf of taking emotions into account in developmental theories and links empathic connections with social justice efforts. The study’s main thrust is that empathy is a key emotional quality that does not come naturally or easily to many, yet is important to cultivate if social justice is a goal of education.

The author clicked Essay and Conceptual Paper. Yet the author required to write the research design.

The author clicked Essay and Conceptual Paper. Yet the author required to write the research design.

The author clicked Essay and Conceptual Paper. Yet the author required to write the research design.

The paper challenges the rational emphasis of schooling and argues for more attention to the ways in which emotions shape thinking.

The purpose of this article is to investigate the nature of the humanitarian aid supply chain and discuss the extent to which certain business supply chain concepts, particularly supply chain agility, are relevant to humanitarian aid.

The paper identifies elements of good practice in conventional business supply chains and applies them to the humanitarian aid supply chain, making use of published practice‐based literature and web sites associated with humanitarian aid. Particular emphasis is placed on the concept of “agility” in supply chain management. A model of an agile supply chain for humanitarian aid is developed.

Humanitarian supply chains have similarities with business supply chains, but there are significant differences. Many humanitarian supply chains have a short and unstable existence with an inadequate link between emergency aid and longer‐term developmental aid. Unlike many business supply chains, typical emergency aid appeals assign inventory to a particular destination at the supply chain source.

This research note is a starting‐point for empirical studies to test the agile humanitarian supply chain model.

This paper seeks to integrate humanitarian aid practice with concepts in the academic supply chain literature. In particular, proposes that humanitarian donors need convincing of the value of supply chain processes.

Any kind of production flow is obtained not from individual production organizations but from a more or less widespread Production Network of interconnected production modules located in different places and times. All of these modules are, consciously or not, necessarily connected, interacting and cooperating in a coordinated way to combine and arrange, step by step, the factors, materials, components, manpower, machines and equipment to obtain flows of products’ final goods, in particular’ and to sell these where there is a demand for them. The purpose of this paper is to determine, in logical and formal terms, the minimum conditions that bring about the formation of production networks and to discover the laws that explain their dynamics over time.

At the global level, the continuous and accelerated economic progress of mankind is witnessed. There is an increase in the quantity and quality of satisfied and yet to be satisfied needs, of attained and yet to be attained aspirations. The increase in productivity and in quality has become unstoppable and appears to guide the other variables in the system. It is natural to ask who produces and governs these phenomena. It does indeed seem there is a Ghost in the “Production” machine whose invisible hand produces growing levels of productivity and quality, increases the quality and quantity of satisfied needs and aspirations and reduces the burden of work, thus producing increasingly higher levels of progress in the entire economic system. This conceptual framework gives a simple answer: there is nothing metaphysical about this evolution towards unstoppable and irreversible progress, and it is produced by the spontaneous genesis and activity of selfish nodes and governed by the rules and laws of the production networks.

The author has identified ten “rules of selfish behavior” on the part of the nodes, whose application necessarily and inevitably produces three evolutionary dynamic processes “which refer to the network as an entity” which the author has called the “rules of the production networks” to emphasize their cogency: continual expansion, elasticity-resiliency and continual improvement in performance. The cognitive and creative processes that characterize the nodes do not allow us to predict the actual evolution of production networks; nevertheless, if it is assumed that nodes “consciously or not” follow the 10 “rules of selfish behavior”, then several typical trends, or behavioural schema, can be deduced which the author has called as the “laws of networks”, to highlight their apparent inevitability and cogency.

More than any other structure, Production Networks display Holland’s features and Arthur’s properties as their modules, viewed as autonomous entities with cognitive functions, represent a collectivity of agents that interact and exchange information with their environment to maintain over time their internal processes through adaptation, self-preservation, evolution and cognition, making individual and collective decisions as part of a network of micro behaviours.

This new conception of production through production networks, which takes into account the “rules” and “laws” regulating their behaviour, also sheds new light on the development of networks and their natural tendency to become globalized.

Although the concept of a network is becoming more popular in economic and business studies, it is yet to see an interpretation of production as deriving exclusively from the actions of increasingly larger networks. This paper presents an integrated view of production that does not discard the notion that production is carried out by organizations and companies but introduces the broader concept of the integration among organizations, which must be interpreted as nodes of a broader network that produces the flows of all the components needed to obtain the flow of a specific product. This represents an innovative view that will help us in understanding the difficulties policymakers encounter in governing production and controlling the basic variables that characterize it, specifically productivity, quality, quantity, prices and value. This perspective also allows to derive rules and laws for the behaviour of production networks that appear to be cogent and unvarying over time.