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This paper aims to describe an information model, the Canonical Robot Command Language (CRCL), which provides a high-level description of robot tasks and associated control and status information.

A common representation of tasks was used that is understood by all of the resources required for the job: robots, tooling, sensors and people.

Using CRCL, a manufacturer can quickly develop robotic applications that meet customer demands for short turnaround, enable portability across a range of vendor equipment and maintain investments in application development through reuse.

Industrial robots can perform motion with sub-millimeter repeatability when programmed using the teach-and-playback method. While effective, this method requires significant up-front time, tying up the robot and a person during the teaching phase.

The 1980s was a decade of far reaching change in the relations between management and the workforce. Flexibility can no longer be considered a ‘flash in the pan’, while the ‘Japanisation’ of production is probably the most influential concept since Fordism. Combining these two elements has enabled employers to introduce whole packages for the organisation of work and production where quality of product and process are no longer considered optional, rather a pre‐requisite for firms competing on a global scale.

Quality concerns for management was one of the key themes of the Fifth Annual British Academy of Management Conference which was held in Bath in September 1991. This brought together a number of writers from a range of disciplines including production management, marketing and industrial relations. The sessions were chaired by Barbara Lewis from Manchester School of Management, UMIST, and papers were a mixture of reporting empirical findings and those being more conceptual in their approach. This short review summarizes the papers based on the abstracts with the aim of encouraging those interested to contact the authors concerned and also make a few general remarks on the state of TQM research.

Following the assumption that studies of information inequality need to be based on precise discrimination between society’s information rich and poor and against the context that a mechanism for such discrimination is still lacking, the purpose of this paper is to explore the possibility of establishing a holistic informational measurement.

It does so by developing a measurement based on the conceptualization of the individual as an information agent and his/her information world as his/her characterization. The development procedure consists of four steps: operationalization of the theoretical constructs and the initial drafting of the questionnaire instrument; revisions of the questionnaire based on pilot tests with small groups of people; weighing of the questionnaire items for the purpose of calculating index-type variable scores; formal test of validity and reliability.

The resulting measurement consists of eight variables corresponding to eight theoretical constructs of an individual’s information world, each being measured by a group of questionnaire-based items which, in turn, generate an index-type score as the variable’s value. Validity and reliability tests show that the measurement is, on the whole, able to distinguish the information poor from the information rich and to measure individuals consistently.

The study demonstrates that it is possible to distinguish the information rich and poor by informational measurement in the same way as to distinguish economic groups by income, ethnic groups by race and intelligence groups by IQ; and that such a measurement has arguably multifaceted value for information inequality research.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the growth of the early ski market and the marketing strategies that the Union Pacific Railroad took in promoting Sun Valley ski resort, one of the most popular early destination ski resorts in the USA.

The paper uses primary and secondary source material, including ski periodicals, national magazines and the manuscript collection of W. Averell Harriman, the Chairman of the Union Pacific Railroad during the creation of Sun Valley.

This paper finds that Sun Valley pioneered the western ski vacation by conducting careful market research into not only the snow and weather conditions of western mountains, but also into the habits and economic potential of skiers and winter tourists.

Scholarly work on skiing has primarily looked at the sport from the social and cultural perspective of skiers. Work on entrepreneurial objectives of ski resort designers has largely focused on the period after the Second World War. This is among the first works to analyze entrepreneurial activities and marketing strategies in the ski industry before the Second World War. As a result, the paper challenges the idea that big business only began to shape the ski industry during the Cold War. Instead, this paper shows that large corporations like the Union Pacific Railroad were influential in growing the ski market by building resorts that illustrated the importance of market segmentation to the success of ski areas. In this way, the paper challenges the popular idea that Sun Valley was merely a media sensation and shows that it was a carefully designed business that exhibited a nuanced approach to changes in the ski market.

The purpose of this paper is to find an answer the question of whether an educational institution of a fair socio-economic mix of pupils, and an institution favoured with powerful political connections, made any difference to access, equity, and exclusivity in relation to the transition into secondary education. It undertakes this purpose as a historical investigation of Junction Park State School in the early twentieth century combined with statistical analysis of family backgrounds of scholarship holders and their cohorts from 1915 to 1932.

The socio-economic study uses a published list of scholarship holders from Junction Park State School for the years 1924-1932. The study compares the scholarship groupings with their different school cohorts for the same years using the data on parental occupations, extracted from the Junction Park State School Admission Records 1915-1931. After refinement the study examines a cohort data set of 4,531 pupils which includes 287 scholarship holders. Parental occupations are categorised into socio-economic groupings with high and low occupational ends. There were 237 parental occupations described among the cohort, 1915-1931, from the admission records.

The statistical chance of obtaining scholarship is increased for a pupil from “commercial low” and “industrial low” background when the school starts with a cohort that has a large representation from such backgrounds. Pupils who were at the lower end of the socio-economic scale at Junction Park State School did much better in scholarship outcomes than for the state. However, pupils whose family background was at the high end of the professions did marginally better than the state result. For the school between 1915 and 1932, in most socio-economic groupings, the boys outperform the girls in the like-to-like comparisons.

The numeric value is excessively low for the primary producers (high) category and numbers in cohort groupings vary. This study deliberately applied like-to-like comparisons: the number of scholarship holders compared to their own gender for the same socio-economic cohort. Percentile in relation to the study’s total was not used due to numeric variations between cohort sizes. The study is a historical investigation of a formative period before Junction Park State School developed its reputation as a scholarship school in the 1940s, and historical factors relating to the post-Second World War era would have different results for a similar statistical analysis.

The paper presents a case study of particular historical significance; however, a generic principle that institutional status can change access and equity opportunities can be tested within the historical setting. The paper claims that historical investigation provides the groundwork to establish the distinctive actuality. Historical investigation picks up on unusual patterns over time, not necessarily to disprove the sociological model, but more to test the model against actual events.

The Queensland social history is connected to the study’s statistical analysis. The data are considered from a perspective that, first, Junction Park had a diverse population of pupils from different socio-economic backgrounds. Second, the school had a solid reputation as a leading school, partly from the political standing of the school leadership, and partly from the strength of its scholarship teachers. Together these factors suggest that pupils at Junction Park State School from the socio-economic backgrounds less inclined to foster educational values were given greater support to achieve better scholarship outcomes.

Statistical analysis is rarely brought to academic history work. There are greater risks in misinterpreting the data. There is also a difficult enterprise of extracting the required information. Nevertheless, the reward from this paper is an insightful view of a large and an innovating Queensland primary school, picking up the details in the life experience of pupils. In that historical process there is a greater degree of accuracy and better interpretive value which can be applied to the sociological model.

We re‐evaluate modern segmentation assumptions and methods by referencing several postmodern characteristics of consumers in global markets. Drawing on contributions from sociology, political sociology, social theory, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, consumer behavior, and international marketing, we posit three research questions, discussion of which leads to the formulation of research propositions. Real‐life consumer and marketing examples are quoted as evidence of the need to go beyond reliance on modern segmentation to incorporate postmodern thinking into consumer analysis as a necessary ‘second step.’ This paper invites reflection on how marketers should adapt to new, complex, and changing consumer realities, which are summarized as multi‐dimensionality, unpredictability, inconsistency, search for meaning, and peak experiences by means of consumption.

Open innovation (OI) has become increasingly popular as an enterprise strategy in both industry and academia, and has been adopted, at least in part, by many companies. Despite this popularity, there is a dearth of evaluation of OI efficiency and a lack of suitable quantitative indices. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

In this study, the authors used both data envelopment analysis (DEA) and Malmquist techniques to compare the pre- and post-transition levels of performance achievement of Procter & Gamble (P&G), a widely recognised and public early adopter of OI, with a group of its main competitors.

Most detailed analysis of the time-course revealed that the innovation efficiency of P&G improved rapidly and substantially after its embracing of OI, an effect we term the “open rise”. However, there is also a transient decline in R&D efficiency at the beginning of OI adoption (“open dip”) and an unexpected and marked decline (“open drop”) after the peak positive effect.

The quantitative methods appear to meet the needs identified in the preceding literature for more quantitative approaches to the measurement of OI.