An absorptive capacity interpretation of Six Sigma

Purpose – The Six Sigma approach to business improvement has emerged as a phenomenon in both the practitioner and academic literature with potential for achieving increased competitiveness and contributing. However, there is a lack of critical reviews covering both theory and practice. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to critically review the literature of Six Sigma using a consistent theoretical perspective, namely absorptive capacity.

Design/methodology/approach – The literature from peer-reviewed journals has been critically reviewed using the absorptive capacity framework and dimensions of acquisition, assimilation, transformation, and exploitation.

Findings – There is evidence of emerging theoretical underpinning in relation to Six Sigma borrowing from an eclectic range of organisational theories. However, this theoretical development lags behind practice in the area. The development of Six Sigma in practice is expanding mainly through more rigorous studies and applications in service-based environments (profit and not for profit). The absorptive capacity framework is found to be a useful overarching framework within which to situate existing theoretical and practice studies.

Research limitations/implications – Agendas for further research from the critical review, in relation to both theory and practice, have been established in relation to each dimension of the absorptive capacity framework.

Practical implications – The paper shows that Six Sigma is both a strategic and operational issue and that focussing solely on define, measure, analyse, improve control-based projects can limit the strategic effectiveness of the approach within organisations.

Originality/value – Despite the increasing volume of Six Sigma literature and organisational applications, there is a paucity of critical reviews which cover both theory and practice and which suggest research agendas derived from such reviews.

Transaction Costs and Organizational Learning in Strategic Oursourcing Relationships

The present paper examines the role of organisational learning and transaction costs economics in strategic outsourcing decisions. Interorganisational learning is critical to competitive success, and organisations often learn more effectively by collaborating with other organisations. However, learning processes may also complicate the process of forming interorganisational partnerships which may increase transaction costs. Based on the literature, the authors develop refutable implications for outsourcing supply chain logistics and a sample of 121 firms in the supply chain logistics industry is used to test the hypotheses. The results show that trust and transaction costs are significant and substantial drivers of strategic outsourcing of supply chain logistics (a strategic flexibility action). Learning intent and knowledge acquisition have no significant influence on the decision to outsource supply chain logistics. The paper concludes with a discussion of the different and often conflicting implications for managing interorganisational learning processes.

‘Towards a Concrete Utopian Model of Green Political Economy’

Much of the thinking about the appropriate ‘political economy’ to underpin sustainable development has been either utopian (as in some ‘green’ political views) or ‘business as usual’ approaches. This article suggests that ‘ecological modernisation’ is the dominant conceptualisation of ‘sustainable development’ within the UK and other ‘developed’ Northern polities and most corporate/business interests, and illustrates this by looking at some key ‘sustainable development’ policy documents from the UK Government. While critical of the reformist ‘policy telos’ of ecological modernisation, supporters of a more radical version of sustainable development need to also be aware of the strategic opportunities of this policy discourse. In particular, the article suggests that the discourse of ‘economic security’, which can be attached to a radicalised notion of ecological modernisation, ought to be used as a way of articulating a radical, robust and principled understanding of sustainable development, which offers a normatively compelling and policy-relevant path to outlining aspects of a ‘green political economy’ to underpin sustainable development.

User behaviour, best practice and the risks of non-target exposure associated with anticoagulant rodenticide use

Usage of anticoagulant rodenticides (ARs) is an integral component of modern agriculture and is essential for the control of commensal rodent populations. However, the extensive deployment of ARs has led to widespread exposure of a range of non-target predatory birds and mammals to some compounds, in particular the second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides (SCARS). As a result, there has been considerable effort placed into devising voluntary best practice guidelines that increase the efficacy of rodent control and reduce the risk of non-target exposure. Currently, there is limited published information on actual practice amongst users or implementation of best practice. We assessed the behaviour of a typical group of users using an on-farm questionnaire survey. Most baited for rodents every year using SGARs. Most respondents were apparently aware of the risks of non-target exposure and adhered to some of the best practice recommendations but total compliance was rare. Our questionnaire revealed that users of first generation anticoagulant rodenticides rarely protected or checked bait stations, and so took little effort to prevent primary exposure of non-targets. Users almost never searched for and removed poisoned carcasses and many baited for prolonged periods or permanently. These factors are all likely to enhance the likelihood of primary and secondary exposure of non-target species. (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Private equity, the minimalist organization and the quality of employment relations

This article develops a firm-level analysis of how the quality of employment relations following acquisition by private equity firms (PEFs) is contingent upon the strategic intent of those firms and the post-acquisition organizational choices they make. The efficiency gains that PEFs seek in acquired companies are expected to encourage restructuring towards a minimalist organization. However, the form such an organization takes is seen to depend on whether PEF strategy is oriented primarily towards extracting short-term value from acquired assets rather than towards renewing and developing those assets. Contrasts in the process of restructuring and in organizational form associated with these two strategies will have different implications for the quality of employment relations. The way in which PEFs restructure the companies or units they acquire is the key intervening factor between the strategic intent of PEFs and impact they have on the quality of employment relations. © The Author(s) 2010.

Deconstructing national leadership: Politicians’ accounts of electoral success and failure in the Irish Lisbon Treaty referenda

The Self Categorization approach to national leadership proposes that leaders rhetorically construct national identity as essentialized and inevitable in order to consensualize and mobilize the population. In contrast, discursive studies have demonstrated how national politicians flexibly construct the nation to manage their own accountability in local interactions, though this in turn has neglected broader leadership processes. The present paper brings both approaches together to examine how and when national politicians construct versions of national identity in order to account for their failure as well as success in mobilizing the electorate. Eight semi-structured conversational style interviews were conducted with a strategic sample of eight leading Irish politicians on the subject of the 2008/2009 Irish Lisbon Treaty referenda. Using a Critical Discourse Psychology approach, the hegemonic repertoire of the ‘settled will’
of the informed and consensualized Irish nation was identified across all interviews. Politicians either endorsed the ‘settled will’ repertoire as evidence of their successful leadership, or rejected the repertoire by denying the rationality or unity of the populace to account for their failure. Our results suggest national identity is only constructed as essentialized and inevitable to the extent that it serves a strategic political purpose.

Public health interventions in midwifery: a systematic review of systematic reviews

Background: Maternity care providers, particularly midwives, have a window of opportunity to influence pregnant women about positive health choices. This aim of this paper is to identify evidence of effective public health interventions from good quality systematic reviews that could be conducted by midwives.

Methods: Relevant databases including MEDLINE, Pubmed, EBSCO, CRD, MIDIRS, Web of Science, The Cochrane Library and Econlit were searched to identify systematic reviews in October 2010. Quality assessment of all reviews was conducted.

Results: Thirty-six good quality systematic reviews were identified which reported on effective interventions. The reviews were conducted on a diverse range of interventions across the reproductive continuum and were categorised under: screening; supplementation; support; education; mental health; birthing environment; clinical care in labour and breast feeding. The scope and strength of the review findings are discussed in relation to current practice. A logic model was developed to provide an overarching framework of midwifery public health roles to inform research policy and practice.

Conclusions: This review provides a broad scope of high quality systematic review evidence and definitively highlights the challenge of knowledge transfer from research into practice. The review also identified gaps in knowledge around the impact of core midwifery practice on public health outcomes and the value of this contribution. This review provides evidence for researchers and funders as to the gaps in current knowledge and should be used to inform the strategic direction of the role of midwifery in public health in policy and practice.

How Much Multiuser Diversity is Required for Energy Limited Multiuser Systems?

Multiuser diversity (MUDiv) is one of the central concepts in multiuser (MU) systems. In particular, MUDiv allows for scheduling among users in order to eliminate the negative effects of unfavorable channel fading conditions of some users on the system performance. Scheduling, however, consumes energy (e.g., for making users' channel state information available to the scheduler). This extra usage of energy, which could potentially be used for data transmission, can be very wasteful, especially if the number of users is large. In this paper, we answer the question of how much MUDiv is required for energy limited MU systems. Focusing on uplink MU wireless systems, we develop MU scheduling algorithms which aim at maximizing the MUDiv gain. Toward this end, we introduce a new realistic energy model which accounts for scheduling energy and describes the distribution of the total energy between scheduling and data transmission stages. Using the fact that such energy distribution can be controlled by varying the number of active users, we optimize this number by either i) minimizing the overall system bit error rate (BER) for a fixed total energy of all users in the system or ii) minimizing the total energy of all users for fixed BER requirements. We find that for a fixed number of available users, the achievable MUDiv gain can be improved by activating only a subset of users. Using asymptotic analysis and numerical simulations, we show that our approach benefits from MUDiv gains higher than that achievable by generic greedy access algorithm, which is the optimal scheduling method for energy unlimited systems. © 2010 IEEE.

Use of SLAM and PVRL4 and Identification of Pro-HB-EGF as Cell Entry Receptors for Wild Type Phocine Distemper Virus

Signalling lymphocyte activation molecule (SLAM) has been identified as an immune cell receptor for the morbilliviruses, measles (MV), canine distemper (CDV), rinderpest and peste des petits ruminants (PPRV) viruses, while CD46 is a receptor for vaccine strains of MV. More recently poliovirus like receptor 4 (PVRL4), also known as nectin 4, has been identified as a receptor for MV, CDV and PPRV on the basolateral surface of polarised epithelial cells. PVRL4 is also up-regulated by MV in human brain endothelial cells. Utilisation of PVRL4 as a receptor by phocine distemper virus (PDV) remains to be demonstrated as well as confirmation of use of SLAM. We have observed that unlike wild type (wt) MV or wtCDV, wtPDV strains replicate in African green monkey kidney Vero cells without prior adaptation, suggesting the use of a further receptor. We therefore examined candidate molecules, glycosaminoglycans (GAG) and the tetraspan proteins, integrin β and the membrane bound form of heparin binding epithelial growth factor (proHB-EGF),for receptor usage by wtPDV in Vero cells. We show that wtPDV replicates in Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells expressing SLAM and PVRL4. Similar wtPDV titres are produced in Vero and VeroSLAM cells but more limited fusion occurs in the latter. Infection of Vero cells was not inhibited by anti-CD46 antibody. Removal/disruption of GAG decreased fusion but not the titre of virus. Treatment with anti-integrin β antibody increased rather than decreased infection of Vero cells by wtPDV. However, infection was inhibited by antibody to HB-EGF and the virus replicated in CHO-proHB-EGF cells, indicating use of this molecule as a receptor. Common use of SLAM and PVRL4 by morbilliviruses increases the possibility of cross-species infection. Lack of a requirement for wtPDV adaptation to Vero cells raises the possibility of usage of proHB-EGF as a receptor in vivo but requires further investigation.

Falls prevention and support:: translating research, integrating services and promoting the contribution of service users for quality and innovative programmes of care

Falls are a significant threat to the safety, health and independence of older citizens. Despite the substantial evidence that is available around effective falls prevention programmes and interventions, their translation into falls reduction programmes and policies has yet to be fully realised. While hip fracture rates are decreasing, the number and incidence of fall-related hospital admissions among older people continue to rise. Given the demographic trends that highlight increasing numbers of older people in the UK, which is broadly reflected internationally, there is a financial and social imperative to minimise the rate of falls and associated injuries. Falling is closely aligned to growing older (Slips, Trips and Falls Update: From Acute and Community Hospitals and Mental Health Units in England and Wales, Department of Health, HMSO, London, 2010). According to the World Health Organization, around 30% of older people aged over 65 and 50% of those over 80 will fall each year (Falls Fact Sheet Number 344, WHO, Geneva, 2010). Falls happen as a result of many reasons and can have harmful consequences, including loss of mobility and independence, confidence and in many cases even death (Cochrane Database Syst Rev 15, 2009, 146; Slips, Trips and Falls Update: From Acute and Community Hospitals and Mental Health Units in England and Wales, Department of Health, HMSO, London, 2010; Falling Standards, Broken Promises: Report of the National
Audit of Falls and Bone Health in Older People 2010, Health Care Quality
Improvement Partnership, London, 2011). What is neither fair nor correct is the
common belief by old and young alike that falls are just another inconvenience to put up with. The available evidence justifiably supports the view that well-organised services, based upon national standards and expert guidance, can prevent future falls among older people and reduce death and disability from fractures. This paper will draw from the UK, as an exemplar for policy and practice, to discuss the strategic direction of falls prevention programmes for older people and the partnerships that need to exist between researchers, service providers and users of services to translate evidence to the clinical setting. Second, it will propose some mechanisms for disseminating evidence to healthcare professionals and other stakeholders, to improve the quality and capacity of the clinical workforce.

The application of metabolomic biomarker screening tools for improved Bovine Respiratory Disease diagnosis and management

Bovine Respiratory Disease (BRD) is considered to be one of the most significant causes of economic loss in cattle worldwide. The disease has multifactorial aetiology, where viral induced respiratory damage can predispose animals to developing secondary bacterial infections. Accurate identification of viral infected animals prior to the onset of bacterial infection is necessary to reduce the overuse of antimicrobial treatments and minimize further economic losses from reduced production capacity and death. This research focuses on Bovine Parainfluenza Virus Type 3 (BPIV-3), one of the viruses involved in generating BRD. Vaccination measures for BPIV-3 can induce a level of immunity preventing disease progression, however, not all animals respond equally and immunization can complicate disease diagnosis. Alternative diagnostic approaches are required to identify animals which fail to respond to vaccination during infection outbreaks and are therefore likely to be more susceptible to secondary bacterial infections. Mass spectrometry based metabolomics was employed to identify plasma markers capable of differentiating between vaccinated and non-vaccinated calves after challenge with BPIV-3. Differentiation of vaccinated and non-vaccinated study groups (n=6) was possible as early as day 2 post-BPIV-3 challenge up until day 20 using a panel of potential metabolite markers. This study illustrates the potential for metabolomics to provide more detailed information on animal vaccination status that could be used to develop tools for improved herd health management, reduce economic loss through rapid identification and isolation of animals without immune protection (improving herd level immunity) and help reduce the usage of antimicrobial therapeutic treatments in animals.

Power and Energy Implications of the Number of Threads Used on the Intel Xeon Phi

Energy consumption has become an important area of research of late. With the advent of new manycore processors, situations have arisen where not all the processors need to be active to reach an optimal relation between performance and energy usage. In this paper a study of the power and energy usage of a series of benchmarks, the PARSEC and the SPLASH- 2X Benchmark Suites, on the Intel Xeon Phi for different threads configurations, is presented. To carry out this study, a tool was designed to monitor and record the power usage in real time during execution time and afterwards to compare the r

The emergence of bone technologies at the end of the pleistocene in Southeast Asia:Regional and evolutionary implications

For many decades Palaeolithic research viewed the development of early modern human behaviour as largely one of progress down a path towards the modernity of the present. The European Palaeolithic sequence the most extensively studied was for a long time the yard-stick against which records from other regions were judged. Recent work undertaken in Africa and increasingly Asia, however, now suggests that the European evidence may tell a story that is more parochial and less universal than previously thought. While tracking developments at the large scale (the grand narrative) remains important, there is growing appreciation that to achieve a comprehensive understanding of human behavioural evolution requires an archaeologically regional perspective to balance this. One of the apparent markers of human modernity that has been sought in the global Palaeolithic record, prompted by finds in the European sequence, is innovation in bonebased technologies. As one step in the process of re-evaluating and contextualizing such innovations, in this article we explore the role of prehistoric bone technologies within the Southeast Asian sequence, where they have at least comparable antiquity to Europe and other parts of Asia. We observe a shift in the technological usage of bone from a minor component to a medium of choice during the second half of the Last Termination and into the Holocene. We suggest that this is consistent with it becoming a focus of the kinds of inventive behaviour demanded of foraging communities as they adapted to the far-reaching environmental and demographic changes that were reshaping this region at that time. This record represents one small element of a much wider, much longerterm adaptive process, which we would argue is not confined to the earliest instances of a particular technology or behaviour, but which forms part of an on-going story of our behavioural evolution. © 2012 The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.

Fast Mining of Interesting Phrases from Subsets of Text Corpora

We address the problem of mining interesting phrases from subsets of a text corpus where the subset is specified using a set of features such as keywords that form a query. Previous algorithms for the problem have proposed solutions that involve sifting through a phrase dictionary based index or a document-based index where the solution is linear in either the phrase dictionary size or the size of the document subset. We propose the usage of an independence assumption between query keywords given the top correlated phrases, wherein the pre-processing could be reduced to discovering phrases from among the top phrases per each feature in the query. We then outline an indexing mechanism where per-keyword phrase lists are stored either in disk or memory, so that popular aggregation algorithms such as No Random Access and Sort-merge Join may be adapted to do the scoring at real-time to identify the top interesting phrases. Though such an approach is expected to be approximate, we empirically illustrate that very high accuracies (of over 90%) are achieved against the results of exact algorithms. Due to the simplified list-aggregation, we are also able to provide response times that are orders of magnitude better than state-of-the-art algorithms. Interestingly, our disk-based approach outperforms the in-memory baselines by up to hundred times and sometimes more, confirming the superiority of the proposed method.

Making Social Work Education App’ier : The Process of Developing Information-based Apps for Social Work Education and Practice

Mobile App technology in social work education remains in the embryonic stages of development with a few notable exceptions. The use of Apps in College and University settings has been reported in other sectors of higher education, although there is a paucity of research in relation to its relevance to social work education and practice. The following article describes the creation of four social work education and practice Apps by a team of social work educators. The primary focus is on the design process and the partnership approach to the creation of the tools. It also outlines the rationale for the App development, the working process and the theoretical framework underpinning mobile learning. Furthermore, it provides information on the level of usage of the Apps according to geographical location, download information and time spent on each section of the App. The article also incorporates a pragmatic summary of developmental guidelines which may aid social work educators in the development and implementation of specialist information-based Apps for education and practice.