Evolving forms of manufacturing strategy development:evidence and implications

This paper outlines, using evidence from several case studies, the use of alternative forms of manufacturing strategy processes. Our investigation shows that the manufacturing strategy development practices of manufacturers are evolving in many directions; we found several alternatives to the formal top-down planning process. Manufacturers use one or more of the following alternatives with or without the top-down manufacturing strategy process: a coherent pattern of actions; manufacturing/process improvement programs; or the pursuit of core manufacturing capabilities. It appears that the various manufacturing strategy development processes may be tied to the strategic role of manufacturing in a company. This paper offers a framework that captures the relationship between the strategic role of manufacturing and the process of manufacturing strategy development. An in-depth case from a UK company illustrates the evolving forms of manufacturing strategy development processes.

Show bizz becomes show buzz:how viral diffusion changes the traditional meaning-making process of a rising star

Studying the case of a young French rapper called Kamini, the authors show how the viral diffusion of a new creative product, such as a song, radically changes traditional meaning-making processes. Instead of the top-down approach in which product positioning is carefully constructed and transferred to consumers, marketers are faced with a bottom-up trend in which consumers increasingly participate in blogs and online forums to talk about products (thus, creating and diffusing meaning) before any marketing action is undertaken. Our study aims to understand the interactions and tensions between market forces that result from this pro-active role of the consumer.

Social network theory and the sales manager role:engineering the right relationship flows

Sales leadership research has typically taken a leader-focused approach, investigating key questions from a top-down perspective. Yet considerable research outside sales has advocated a view of leadership that takes into account the fact that employees look beyond a single designated individual for leadership. In particular, the social networks of leaders have been a popular topic of investigation in the management literature, although coverage in the sales literature remains rare. The present paper conceptualizes the sales leadership role as one in which the leader must manage a network of simultaneous relationships; several types of sales manager relationships, such as the sales-manager-to-top-manager and the sales-manager-to-sales manager relationships, have received limited attention in the sales literature to date. Taking an approach based on social network theory, we develop a conceptualization of the sales manager as a "network engineer," who must manage multiple relationships, and the flows between them. Drawing from this model, we propose a detailed agenda for future sales research. © 2012 PSE National Educational Foundation. All rights reserved.

Sustainable development, shock and awe? London 2012 and Civil Society

There is a disconnection between the top-down, elite, nature of sports mega-events and the ostensible redistributive and participatory sustainable development agendas staked out by BINGOs (Business-based International Non-Governmental Organizations) such as the contemporary International Olympic Committee (IOC). Focusing specifically on the London 2012 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games, we argue that, for all the environmental technology advances offered by sports mega-events, their dominant model remains one of a hollowed-out form of sustainable development. Despite significant technical and methodological innovations in environmental stewardship, the development model of the London Olympics remains predicated on the satisfaction of transnational investment flows. We discuss what this means for claims about the staging of a ‘green’ Olympic Games.

Team working in intensive care:current evidence and future endeavors

Purpose of review: It has recently been argued that the future of intensive care medicine will rely on high quality management and teamwork. Therefore, this review takes an organizational psychology perspective to examine the most recent research on the relationship between teamwork, care processes, and patient outcomes in intensive care. Recent findings: Interdisciplinary communication within a team is crucial for the development of negotiated shared treatment goals and short-team patient outcomes. Interventions for maximizing team communication have received substantial interest in recent literature. Intensive care coordination is not a linear process, and intensive care teams often fail to discuss how to implement goals, trigger and align activities, or reflect on their performance. Despite a move toward interdisciplinary team working, clinical decision-making is still problematic and continues to be perceived as a top-down and authoritative process. The topic of team leadership in intensive care is underexplored and requires further research. Summary: Based on findings from the most recent research evidence in medicine and management, four principles are identified for improving the effectiveness of team working in intensive care: engender professional efficacy, create stable teams and leaders, develop trust and participative safety, and enable frequent team reflexivity.

On the hierarchical classification of G protein-coupled receptors

MOTIVATION: G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) play an important role in many physiological systems by transducing an extracellular signal into an intracellular response. Over 50% of all marketed drugs are targeted towards a GPCR. There is considerable interest in developing an algorithm that could effectively predict the function of a GPCR from its primary sequence. Such an algorithm is useful not only in identifying novel GPCR sequences but in characterizing the interrelationships between known GPCRs. RESULTS: An alignment-free approach to GPCR classification has been developed using techniques drawn from data mining and proteochemometrics. A dataset of over 8000 sequences was constructed to train the algorithm. This represents one of the largest GPCR datasets currently available. A predictive algorithm was developed based upon the simplest reasonable numerical representation of the protein's physicochemical properties. A selective top-down approach was developed, which used a hierarchical classifier to assign sequences to subdivisions within the GPCR hierarchy. The predictive performance of the algorithm was assessed against several standard data mining classifiers and further validated against Support Vector Machine-based GPCR prediction servers. The selective top-down approach achieves significantly higher accuracy than standard data mining methods in almost all cases.

Visual hallucinations in the psychosis spectrum and comparative information from neurodegenerative disorders and eye disease

Much of the research on visual hallucinations (VHs) has been conducted in the context of eye disease and neurodegenerative conditions, but little is known about these phenomena in psychiatric and nonclinical populations. The purpose of this article is to bring together current knowledge regarding VHs in the psychosis phenotype and contrast this data with the literature drawn from neurodegenerative disorders and eye disease. The evidence challenges the traditional views that VHs are atypical or uncommon in psychosis. The weighted mean for VHs is 27% in schizophrenia, 15% in affective psychosis, and 7.3% in the general community. VHs are linked to a more severe psychopathological profile and less favorable outcome in psychosis and neurodegenerative conditions. VHs typically co-occur with auditory hallucinations, suggesting a common etiological cause. VHs in psychosis are also remarkably complex, negative in content, and are interpreted to have personal relevance. The cognitive mechanisms of VHs in psychosis have rarely been investigated, but existing studies point to source-monitoring deficits and distortions in top-down mechanisms, although evidence for visual processing deficits, which feature strongly in the organic literature, is lacking. Brain imaging studies point to the activation of visual cortex during hallucinations on a background of structural and connectivity changes within wider brain networks. The relationship between VHs in psychosis, eye disease, and neurodegeneration remains unclear, although the pattern of similarities and differences described in this review suggests that comparative studies may have potentially important clinical and theoretical implications. © 2014 The Author.

Translation and peace:Arabic, English and Hebrew versions of Israeli-Palestinian peace initiatives

The present thesis examines Palestinian-Israeli peace initiatives as politically negotiated texts and their different Arabic, English and Hebrew language versions. Its aim is to make a contribution to a deeper understanding of the role of translation and recontextualization of politically negotiated texts in situations of ongoing contemporary conflict. In modern Translation Studies, although research exists on the translation of political texts following functional (e.g. Schäffner 2002) or systemic-linguistic (e.g. Calzada-Pérez 2001) approaches or applying narrative theory (Baker 2006), peace initiatives and politically negotiated texts are still a largely under-researched genre of political texts. The thesis – which takes 31 Arabic, English and Hebrew language versions of 5 different Palestinian-Israeli peace initiatives as its corpus – operates within the framework of product-oriented Descriptive Translation Studies (Lambert and Van Gorp 1985) and Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1992). For all of the peace initiatives analysed, there exist several language versions which were made available in different contexts by different institutions and for different readerships and purposes. The thesis pursues a top-down approach. It begins with presenting the socio-cultural and political contexts of the production of the original versions of the respective peace initiatives (the source texts) and their different language versions (target texts), focusing on their underlying functions and principles of audience design. It then moves to examine how the textual profiles of the language versions of peace initiatives reflect aspects of ideology, political affiliation and power relations at both the macro- and micro-structural levels. The final step is to account for these aspects in terms of socio-political and institutional conditions of the production of the translations. The overall textual analysis demonstrates that when translated, peace initiatives can be interpreted differently by different institutions in their attempt to promote their respective political interests and narratives. Also, it is very frequently that translations produced in one specific institutional context are recontextualised for use in another one. Such recontextualisation goes hand in hand with further textual amendments. To summarize, the thesis demonstrates how these translations – as products – are (re)framed and (re)contextualized in different institutional settings in order to serve different purposes. These texts, thus, play different roles in situations of ongoing contemporary conflict depending on the institutional context in which they are presented and the purposes they set to serve. These main findings make an original contribution to the discipline of Translation Studies in respect of emphasizing the need to study translations in their socio-political, historical and institutional contexts.

Outsourcing:an Irish perspective

This paper investigates three case studies with regards their outsourcing initiatives from an Irish perspective, the benefits and problems they encountered, the contracts they have constructed, and where they have outsourced and the reasons behind them. The research took place over a period of two years, and the information for the case studies was gleaned from a number of sources including: published papers about the companies, the company websites, annual financial reports, the questionnaire they filled out, and interviews with key decision making personnel in the company. Follow up interviews were conducted where it was felt they were required. Key findings were that: it is very important to have the outsourcing initiative driven from the top down, and it is imperative to construct a contract that promotes a relationship based on mutual trust and respect, the use of Ireland for outsourcing, and the benefits and problem companies have experienced.

Understanding data collection behaviour of mental health practitioners

Failure to detect patients at risk of attempting suicide can result in tragic consequences. Identifying risks earlier and more accurately helps prevent serious incidents occurring and is the objective of the GRiST clinical decision support system (CDSS). One of the problems it faces is high variability in the type and quantity of data submitted for patients, who are assessed in multiple contexts along the care pathway. Although GRiST identifies up to 138 patient cues to collect, only about half of them are relevant for any one patient and their roles may not be for risk evaluation but more for risk management. This paper explores the data collection behaviour of clinicians using GRiST to see whether it can elucidate which variables are important for risk evaluations and when. The GRiST CDSS is based on a cognitive model of human expertise manifested by a sophisticated hierarchical knowledge structure or tree. This structure is used by the GRiST interface to provide top-down controlled access to the patient data. Our research explores relationships between the answers given to these higher-level 'branch' questions to see whether they can help direct assessors to the most important data, depending on the patient profile and assessment context. The outcome is a model for dynamic data collection driven by the knowledge hierarchy. It has potential for improving other clinical decision support systems operating in domains with high dimensional data that are only partially collected and in a variety of combinations.

Partnering with governments and other institutions:driving change in diabetes care

The human and material cost of type 2 diabetes is a cause of increasing concern for health professionals, representative organisations and governments worldwide. The scale of morbidity and mortality has led the United Nations to issue a resolution on diabetes, calling for national policies for prevention, treatment and care. There is clearly an urgent need for a concerted response from all interested parties at the community, national and international level to work towards the goals of the resolution and create effective, sustainable treatment models, care systems and prevention strategies. Action requires both a 'bottom-up' approach of public awareness campaigns and pressure from healthcare professionals, coupled with a 'top-down' drive for change, via partnerships with governments, third sector (non-governmental) organisations and other institutions. In this review, we examine how existing collaborative initiatives serve as examples for those seeking to implement change in health policy and practice in the quest to alleviate the health and economic burden of diabetes. Efforts are underway to provide continuous and comprehensive care models for those who already have type 2 diabetes; in some cases, national plans extend to prevention strategies in attempts to improve overall public health. In the spirit of partnership, collaborations with governments that incorporate sustainability, long-term goals and a holistic approach continue to be a driving force for change. It is now critical to maintain this momentum and use the growing body of compelling evidence to educate, inform and deliver a long-term, lasting impact on patient and public health worldwide. © 2007 The Authors.

Planning the neighbourhood economy:land-use plans and the economic potential of urban residential neighbourhoods in the Netherlands

This article investigates the relationship between zoning by-laws, as put forward in governmental land-use plans and the viability of urban residential neighbourhood economies. The Dutch planning tradition has long been characterized by strict separation of functions and top-down planning. We argue that profound changes in social and economic structures make land-use planning practices less suitable for the current policy formula of "mixed urban milieus". Although the residential neighbourhood might not be the location of large firms, it definitely attracts small ones, and facilitates starting businesses whose presence (and potential growth) can be beneficial to the city as a whole. We present a typology of spatial patterns of neighbourhood economies based on land-use plans and describe whether these are related to the distinctive economic development of the neighbourhood over the period 1999-2007. © 2013 Taylor & Francis.

Automatic maintenance of category hierarchy

Category hierarchy is an abstraction mechanism for efficiently managing large-scale resources. In an open environment, a category hierarchy will inevitably become inappropriate for managing resources that constantly change with unpredictable pattern. An inappropriate category hierarchy will mislead the management of resources. The increasing dynamicity and scale of online resources increase the requirement of automatically maintaining category hierarchy. Previous studies about category hierarchy mainly focus on either the generation of category hierarchy or the classification of resources under a pre-defined category hierarchy. The automatic maintenance of category hierarchy has been neglected. Making abstraction among categories and measuring the similarity between categories are two basic behaviours to generate a category hierarchy. Humans are good at making abstraction but limited in ability to calculate the similarities between large-scale resources. Computing models are good at calculating the similarities between large-scale resources but limited in ability to make abstraction. To take both advantages of human view and computing ability, this paper proposes a two-phase approach to automatically maintaining category hierarchy within two scales by detecting the internal pattern change of categories. The global phase clusters resources to generate a reference category hierarchy and gets similarity between categories to detect inappropriate categories in the initial category hierarchy. The accuracy of the clustering approaches in generating category hierarchy determines the rationality of the global maintenance. The local phase detects topical changes and then adjusts inappropriate categories with three local operations. The global phase can quickly target inappropriate categories top-down and carry out cross-branch adjustment, which can also accelerate the local-phase adjustments. The local phase detects and adjusts the local-range inappropriate categories that are not adjusted in the global phase. By incorporating the two complementary phase adjustments, the approach can significantly improve the topical cohesion and accuracy of category hierarchy. A new measure is proposed for evaluating category hierarchy considering not only the balance of the hierarchical structure but also the accuracy of classification. Experiments show that the proposed approach is feasible and effective to adjust inappropriate category hierarchy. The proposed approach can be used to maintain the category hierarchy for managing various resources in dynamic application environment. It also provides an approach to specialize the current online category hierarchy to organize resources with more specific categories.

Parsing mathematical constructs:results from a preliminary eye tracking study

The semantic model described in this paper is based on ones developed for arithmetic (e.g. McCloskey et al. 1985, Cohene and Dehaene 1995), natural language processing (Fodor 1975, Chomsky 1981) and work by the author on how learners parse mathematical structures. The semantic model highlights the importance of the parsing process and the relationship between this process and the mathematical lexicon/grammar. It concludes by demonstrating that for a learner to become an efficient, competent mathematician a process of top-down parsing is essential.

Top teams and strategy in a UK university

This paper reports on the results of an in-depth study of how a top management team (TMT) puts strategy into practice in a UK university. A study of the top team in Warwick University was conducted to analyse how strategy was formulated and implemented. The results suggest that a combination of two broad theoretical lenses provide useful analytical insight. These are strategy as practice and strategy as process. The main elements of this university’s strategy result from an interplay of localized routines and patterns of action within an organizational context, which both produces and is a product of such actions. The TMT itself was found to be clearly identifiable and stable in composition. The team exhibited identifiable patterns of strategic thinking and acting. However, the role of organizational structure was also found to be a key influence on the actions and processes of the TMT with strong central control tendencies in the team being counterbalanced by devolved operational control to individual departments. The data also reveal inter-relationships between organizational structures and the TMT in four key areas: direction-setting, monitoring and control, the allocation of resources, and processes of interaction. The overall conclusion is that to understand how strategy is practised, analysis needs to focus on how patterns of action are associated with the characteristics of both the team and the wider organization. The nature and characteristics of these patterns can be related to how strategy is put into practice.