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JIT manufacturing is a philosophy by which an organization seeks continually to improve its products and processes by eliminating waste. Organizations wanting to use the JIT approach to manufacturing must have several building blocks in place. The building blocks include: company‐wide commitment, proper materials at the right time, supplier relationships, quality, and personnel. The JIT system runs smoothly with no peaks or valleys. The typical inventory system, on the other hand, is fraught with peaks and valleys that represent costs to the organization in the form of inventory holding costs, back order and stock‐out costs, overtime and idle time labor costs, and waste of materials and space.

Supply chain management (SCM) encompasses all activities associated with a firm moving its composite flow of information, materials and services from the raw materials stage through production and on to the end customer. This includes sourcing and procurement, production scheduling, order processing, inventory management, transportation, manufacturing, warehousing, customer service and the information systems used to monitor these activities. The sudden increase in electronic commerce and the Internet have resulted in new opportunities to improve the performance of the supply chain. Potential internet‐based opportunities and problems related to SCM will be discussed.

Corporations want productivity and efficiency, while the work force is asking for more time with the family. The ability of management to juggle productivity requirements with employee demands can be difficult and requires creative solutions. The Analytical Central Call Management (CCM) group at Hewlett Packard recently piloted a compressed work week schedule, consisting of four ten‐hour work days (4 x 10). However this pilot schedule encountered many problems. After careful evaluation the key to successful implementation of this plan is cross‐training. Cross‐training will help solve some of the morale issues caused by this pilot schedule. Issues of unproductive time and lack of staff caused by absences would also be alleviated. If employers want to develop management tools more appropriate to the need of this decade’s work force and the competitive challenges of a global economy, they will have to learn to use work time and space in more appropriate ways.

Only about 5 per cent of the companies that could be doing EDI are doing EDI. Can the Internet change the mathematics with its lower costs and easy accessibility? The Internet is attractive, not only because it is free and can handle EDI, but because it affords even small retail concerns a new marketplace for linking with suppliers. The Internet has its own vulnerabilities. Unreliable Internet performance could result in message loss – totally unacceptable to trading partners. The Internet is perceived as an unsafe medium for the valuable and sensitive information in business transactions. Mass adoption of Internet/EDI will come when Web browser technology is married to forms‐based EDI. While Internet/EDI may be dark and dangerous, several firms are now conducting pilots or implementing production systems.

Outsourcing is defined as the procurement of products or services from sources that are external to the organization. Firms should consider outsourcing when it is believed that certain support functions can be completed faster, cheaper, or better by an outside organization. Tasks that are not core competencies of the organization are candidates for being contracted out. However, any skill or knowledge that allows you to serve your customer base better, that deals directly with the product or service you are trying to put out of the door, is one that must remain in‐house. Today, the outsourcing of selected organizational activities is an integral part of corporate strategy. For corporations, benefits of outsourcing are substantial: reduced costs, expanded services and expertise. Outsourcing allows companies to refocus their resources on their core business. Corporations can buy technology from a vendor that would be too expensive for them to replicate internally. For outsourcing to be successful the decision needs to be an informed one. Effective management of the outsourcing relationships is an organizational imperative.

Prevailing explanations of the US secession crisis trace the latter’s origins to slavery and slaveowners’ interests. The central problem with all such explanations, however, is that the Whig Party, the party of the largest slaveowners, opposed secession until the mid-1850s. Why did southern Whigs and their planter base resist secession through the political crisis over slavery only to fold by 1861? Drawing on archival electoral returns by precinct, party newspapers, speeches, and personal correspondence from antebellum Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, I argue for an institutional and sequential approach to the secession crisis that does not take social actors’ individual interests as given, but rather as naturalized and denaturalized in the back and forth struggle of political parties to advance competing solutions to the problem of preserving slavery.

The fast pace of business diversification, the “I and me” work ethic, and 1980s entrepreneurship have been superseded by downsizing, teaming, and total quality management. Some managers, who believe that finding the “right” or “strong” culture enhances corporate effectiveness, attempt to conceptualize the culture of organizations. This study examines employees’ perceptions of today’s organizational culture. The assumption here is that organizational culture in the 1990s has changed when compared to the 1980s era of diversification, mergers, and entrepreneurship. This study provides evidence that the emphasis on external stakeholders’ interest has led to so much downsizing that employee loyalty is adversely affected. As a result, organizations are not meeting the increased need for teamwork and problem‐solving.

The purpose of this paper is to examine public perception of factors relevant in sentencing decision making for juvenile school shooters with a history of familial abuse, peer victimization, and school intervention.

Through the use of school shooting vignettes, 298 college-aged participants were randomly assigned to one of eight experimental conditions which differed based on the inclusion of the independent variables.

Results revealed no significant differences among the groups on the sentencing recommendations (i.e. psychiatric placement and incarceration). However, correlational analyses indicated that participants’ generally perceived they were influenced by the perpetrator’s history of peer victimization and the level of intervention offered by school personnel when the shooter was bullied. Further regression analyses suggested that participant characteristics such as race, gender, and prior experiences with bullying were among the most powerful predictors of agreement with sentencing recommendations.

Implications of the current findings raise questions as to the influence of peer victimization in civil and criminal court proceedings and its associated impact on the juvenile justice system, the educational system, and society’s desire for justice.

This study ambitiously ventures into exploring and understanding the relevant sociological, academic, and legal factors in addressing acts of school violence.

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether teachers with high value‐added scores (as a measure of teacher quality) stay or left test grades and subjects in a medium‐sized school district.

Panel data for this paper encompass teachers providing math and reading instruction and link to individual students in grades 3‐10 from a single Florida school district (2000‐2001 to 2004‐2005). Value‐added modeling is used to estimate a measure of teacher quality, which is entered into binomial logistic regression models.

This paper finds a negative relationship between reading teachers' value‐added scores and attrition (p<0.05) – a finding consistent with the few that have examined the relationship between value added and teacher attrition. A significant relationship is not found between math value added and attrition. There is also no significant relationship between value added and transferring. Secondary and alternatively certified teachers are more likely to exit tested grades/subjects. Classroom percentages of students enrolled in the free/reduced lunch program (a proxy for poverty) are associated with leaving among math and reading teachers.

Not all turnover is negative. Evidence from this paper suggests that schools are not losing the best teachers from tested subjects and grades – those in which schools and school leaders are held accountable. While there are costs associated with turnover, it can serve as an important matching function between workers and employers.

Only, a few published studies have utilized value‐added scores as the measure of teacher quality and tested their relationship with teacher attrition.

This paper investigates the reasons underpinning the diverging adoption rates of different types of inter‐organisational systems (IOS) amongst small‐ to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs). It explores the evolution of IOS from traditional proprietary and closed systems to Internet‐based open, flexible systems. It illustrates, through the study of 25 SMEs, that the emergence of new Internet‐based IOS provides SMEs with a rich set of technologies that may fundamentally change the technological perspective of SMEs from reluctant, reactive, slow implementers of technology to enthusiastic, proactive, rapid innovators of technology. The paper suggests that positive experiences by SMEs of Web‐based electronic commerce and the continued desire of larger firms to achieve full compliance with their IOS will dramatically increase the adoption rate of Web‐enabled IOS.