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The exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) control charts are widely used in industries for monitoring small and moderate process shifts. The purpose of this paper is to develop an algorithm for the optimization design of the EWMA chart (known as MD‐EWMA chart).

The design algorithm adjusts the sample size n, sampling interval h, lower and upper control limits LCL and UCL, and the EWMA weight factor λ of the chart in an optimal manner in order to minimize the mean number of defective units (denoted as MD) produced per out‐of‐control case. The probability distribution of the random process shift (e.g. mean shift δ) is taken into account that may be modeled by a Rayleigh distribution based on the sample data acquired during the operation of the control chart.

The results of the comparison studies and an example show that the proposed MD‐EWMA chart is significantly superior to the Shewhart‐type MD‐X¯ chart and the other EWMA charts in terms of the overall mean defective MD.

As the economic charts, the proposed MD‐EWMA chart aims at reducing the quality cost. But the design of this chart only requires limited number of specifications that can be easily determined. Consequently, the MD chart provides the control chart designers with an alternative choice between the statistical design and the economic design. Specifically, the mean shift δ is handled as a random variable by using a parametric or nonparametric approach to manipulate the sample data of δ acquired during the operation of the control chart. The MD counts the number of defective units produced per out of control case; so the design of control chart based on MD is more realistic from a practical viewpoint. In addition, the design of MD‐EWMA chart combines forecasting with controlling methods of quality management.

This paper sets out to describe and illustrate an emerging shift in the conceptualisation of value creation in business, namely the emergence of value ecology thinking.

This paper examines shifts in the understanding of value creation in key business, economic and innovation literature and focuses on developments in creative industries at the forefront of technology and innovation – film, TV, computer games, e‐business, mobile phones – to illustrate how business increasingly creates value through ecologies.

This paper identifies five important shifts in the conceptualization of value creation by highlighting a growing prevalence in the literature of several ecological metaphors used to explain business processes, namely: the shift from thinking about consumers to co‐creators of value; the shift from thinking about value chains to value networks; the shift from thinking about product value to network value; the shift from thinking about simple co‐operation or competition to complex co‐opetition; and the shift from thinking about individual firm strategy to strategy in relation to value ecologies.

This paper synthesizes emerging trends in the literature in relation to value creation and defines the concept of a value‐creating ecology. In the process it sheds light on the structure of next generation business systems.

Measuring the efficacy of workplace culture-shift efforts presented a substantial challenge in the author's research exploring how culture shifts during deliberate change initiatives. In response to this challenge this conceptual article proposes that the relative value participants attribute to desired culture outcomes can function as a proxy for measuring culture shift over time, providing applied researchers and practitioners with a simple way to measure efficacy of change initiatives.

This conceptual article reviews the difficulties of defining and measuring workplace culture using widely known, contemporary models and instruments. It then builds an argument for using differential measurement of the relative value attributed to culture shift outcomes (valuing) as a proxy for workplace culture shift, followed by discussion of how to conduct measurement.

This article deductively demonstrates that parsimonious measurement of culture shift is not only simple and feasible, but that practitioners and researchers alike can use a valuing approach to determine the efficacy of efforts to shift workplace culture.

Used to complement existing methods and instruments, or on its own, this approach to measurement can build deeper insights into what is going on during deliberate change initiatives, while answering the reflexive questions “are we doing the right things,” and “are we doing those things the right way?”

The author believes that business leaders and writers are increasingly exploring a fundamental rethinking of the basic tenets of management. This paper aims to address this issue.

The paper analyzes five shifts: the firm's goal (a shift from inside‐out to outside‐in); role of managers (a shift from controller to enabler); mode of coordination (from command and control to dynamic linking); values practiced (a shift from value to values); and communications (a shift from command to conversation).

Among the most important changes being proposed are five basic shifts in management practice.

This paper offers a creative analysis of current business thinking.

The raison d'être of the firm shifts from reducing transaction costs to scalable collaboration, learning and innovation.

By adopting a people‐centered goal, a people‐centered role for managers, a people‐centered coordination mechanism, people‐centered values and people‐centered communication the leaders of a firm can focus on the people who are its customers.

An increasing number of Danish municipalities wish to minimize tax avoidance due to profit shifting in their public procurement. To facilitate this effort, this study aims to develop a firm-level indicator to assess the potential risk of profit shifting (PS-risk) from Danish subsidiaries of multinational corporations to subsidiaries in low-tax jurisdictions.

Drawing from previous research, PS-risk is assumed to depend on the maximum difference in the effective corporate tax rate between the Danish subsidiary and other subsidiaries under the global ultimate owner, in conjunction with the tax regulations relevant to profit shifting. The top 400 contractors in Danish municipalities from 2017 to 2019 are identified and their relative PS-risk is estimated by combining information about corporate ownership structure with country-specific information on corporate tax rates, tax regulations and profit shifting from three independent data sets.

The PS-risk estimates are highly significantly positively correlated across the data sets and show that 17%–23% of the total procurement sum of the Danish municipalities has been spent on contracts with corporations having a medium to high PS-risk. On average, PS-risk is highest for large non-Scandinavian multinational contractors in sectors such as construction, health and information processing.

Danish public procurers may use the indicator to screen potential suppliers and, if procurement regulations permit, to ensure high-PS-risk bidders document their tax practices.

The PS-risk indicator is novel, and to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the analysis provides the first estimate of PS-risk in Danish public procurement.

The purpose of this study is to propose an effective unsupervised one-class-classifier (OCC) support vector machine (SVM)-based single multivariate control chart (OCC-SVM) to simultaneously monitor “location” and “scale” shifts of a manufacturing process.

The step-by-step approach to developing, implementing and fine-tuning the intrinsic parameters of the OCC-SVM chart is demonstrated based on simulation and two real-life case examples.

A comparative study, considering varied known and unknown response distributions, indicates that the OCC-SVM is highly effective in detecting process shifts of samples with individual observations. OCC-SVM chart also shows promising results for samples with a rational subgroup of observations. In addition, the results also indicate that the performance of OCC-SVM is unaffected by the small reference sample size.

The sample responses are considered identically distributed with no significant multivariate autocorrelation between sample observations.

The proposed easy-to-implement chart shows satisfactory performance to detect an out-of-control signal with known or unknown response distributions.

Various multivariate (e.g. parametric or nonparametric) control chart(s) are recommended to monitor the mean (e.g. location) and variance (e.g. scale) of multiple correlated responses in a manufacturing process. However, real-life implementation of a parametric control chart may be complex due to its restrictive response distribution assumptions. There is no evidence of work in the open literature that demonstrates the suitability of an unsupervised OCC-SVM chart to simultaneously monitor “location” and “scale” shifts of multivariate responses. Thus, a new efficient OCC-SVM single chart approach is proposed to address this gap to monitor a multivariate manufacturing process with unknown response distributions.

Content analysis of search engine user queries is an important task, since successful exploitation of the content of queries can result in the design of efficient information retrieval algorithms of search engines, which can offer custom‐tailored services to the web user. Identification of topic changes within a user search session is a key issue in content analysis of search engine user queries. The purpose of this study is to address these issues.

This study applies genetic algorithms and Dempster‐Shafer theory, proposed by He et al., to automatically identify topic changes in a user session by using statistical characteristics of queries, such as time intervals and query reformulation patterns. A sample data log from the Norwegian search engine FAST (currently owned by overture) is selected to apply Dempster‐Shafer theory and genetic algorithms for identifying topic changes in the data log.

As a result, 97.7 percent of topic shifts and 87.2 percent of topic continuations were estimated correctly. The findings are consistent with the previous application of the Dempster‐Shafer theory and genetic algorithms on a different search engine data log. This finding could be implied as an indication that content‐ignorant topic identification, using query patterns and time intervals, is a promising line of research.

Studies an important dimension of user behavior in information retrieval.

Big 4 professional services firms increasingly lay claim to recruiting and including staff of diverse genders, cultures, ages and sexualities. Drawing on Foucauldian insights, this study explores how LGBTIQ+ staff navigated shifting technologies of client power, at the time marriage equality was legislated in Australia.

This article explores changing experiences of LGBTIQ+ staff and allies, through 56 semi-structured interviews undertaken through 2018–2019.

Technologies of client power were central to shaping workplace experiences for LGBTIQ+ staff. However, each firm was also keen to carve unique and bold responses to changing societal attitudes regarding sexuality and gender. These progressive moves did not sit comfortably with all clients, and so this article provides insight into the limitations of client privilege within professional services firms. For staff, this increasing complexity of sometimes opaque, contradictory and shifting technologies of client and firm power, enabled agency to explore a sense of self for some, but continued to exclude others.

Little attention has been directed to exploring challenges for staff of sexual and gendered diversity within professional services firms, or to exploring how staff navigate changing perceptions of client power.

The purpose of this article is to study the link between mean shift and inflation coefficient when the underlying null hypothesis is rejected in the analysis of variance (ANOVA) application after the preliminary test on the model specification.

A new approach is proposed to study the link between mean shift and inflation coefficient when the underlying null hypothesis is rejected in the ANOVA application. First, we determine this relationship from the general perspective of Six Sigma methodology under the normality assumption. Then, the approach is extended to a balanced two-stage nested design with a random effects model in which a preliminary test is used to fix the main test statistic.

The features of mean-shifted and inflated (but centred) processes with the same specification limits from the perspective of Six Sigma are studied. The shift and inflation coefficients are derived for the two-stage balanced ANOVA model. We obtained good predictions for the process shift, given the inflation coefficient, which has been demonstrated using numerical results and applied to case studies. It is understood that the proposed method may be used as a tool to obtain an efficient variance estimator under mean shift.

In this work, as a new research approach, we studied the link between mean shift and inflation coefficients when the underlying null hypothesis is rejected in the ANOVA. Derivations for these coefficients are presented. The results when the null hypothesis is accepted are also studied. This needs the help of preliminary tests to decide on the model assumptions, and hence the researchers are expected to be familiar with the application of preliminary tests.

After studying the proposed approach with extensive numerical results, we have provided two practical examples that demonstrate the significance of the approach for real-time practitioners. The practitioners are expected to take additional care before deciding on the model assumptions by applying preliminary tests.

The proposed approach is original in the sense that there have been no similar approaches existing in the literature that combine Six Sigma and preliminary tests in ANOVA applications.

The purpose of this paper is to report an attempt to quantitatively evaluate pedagogies designed to help learners clarify their personal values systems in a sustainability context.

A pre-test/post-test survey was used to assess shifts in values orientations among 113 undergraduates from the same discipline, following the completion of intensive values-based sustainability training workshops.

The results indicate that small but statistically significant shifts in participant perceptions of their personal values orientations occurred, particularly in relation to values correlating with sustainability.

The survey data were collated in six separate groups, potentially introducing unforeseen variables. As value types, rather than individual values, were used as the basis of the survey, there could be variations in participant perception and understanding of the value-type labels.

No control group was possible because the training intervention was a compulsory aspect of the participants’ degree programme, and the surveys were administered by the participants’ tutor, which could lead to “teacher” bias.

This research evaluates pedagogies aiming to allow individuals to clarify their values and better understand the motivational role these have in influencing “sustainable” behaviour. The research can inform the design and execution of “holistic” educational and training programmes seeking to help individuals understand their personal role in creating a more sustainable future.

The originality of this research lies in the quantitative analysis of values-specific education for sustainable development pedagogies. Findings point to the need for further research to assess the application of the pedagogies across different disciplines.