The yellow brick road: total quality management and the restructuring of organizational culture

The paper offers a critique of Total Quality Management . It is essentially in three parts: the first examines the rise of TQM through the western experience of Japanese development, second it examine the nature of TQM's promised cultural change and, finally questioning the very notion of 'quality'. It explores this development as - taking a metaphor from the work of Philip Crosby one of the 'guru's of Total Quality - a journey down the yellow brick road. The development of TQM being rich in icons and symbolism it is argued that it acts both to legitimate current changes in organisation through the penetration of the market and also as a market model of organisation based on customer and supplier links. In contrast to the claim of TQM to challenge bureaucracy it argues that, while it might counter some of its dysfunction's, it can be located within a bureaucratization process

“More a Medicine than a Beverage”: “Demon Rum” and the Canadian Trench Soldier of the First World War

A couple of months before he was killed at Vimy Ridge, Private Ronald Mackinnon noted that he had to cut his letter to his father short because he heard “the joyful cry [of] ‘rum up’.” In the renches, everyone reacted when rum was issued. The rum ration was, in the words of Private E. Seaman of the 3rd Battalion, “the highlight of the day.” First Battalion infantryman Ralph Bell wrote that “When the days shorten, and the rain never ceases; when the sky is ever grey, the nights chill, and trenches thigh deep in mud and water; when the front is altogether a beastly place, in fact, we have one consolation. It comes in gallon jars, marked simply ‘S.R.D.’” That SRD was army issued Special Red Demerara rum

Just Purchasing? Practicing Our Faith at the Market

This document is part of a digital collection provided by the Martin P. Catherwood Library, ILR School, Cornell University, pertaining to the effects of globalization on the workplace worldwide. Special emphasis is placed on labor rights, working conditions, labor market changes, and union organizing.ilrf_just_purchasing.pdf: 232 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Spaces of observation and obscurity: cinematic prisons of light and dark

In The Eye of Power, Foucault delineated the key concerns surrounding hospital architecture in the latter half of the eighteenth century as being the ‘visibility of bodies, individuals and things'. As such, the ‘new form of hospital' that came to be developed ‘was at once the effect and support of a new type of gaze'. This was a gaze that was not simply concerned with ways of minimising overcrowding or cross-contamination. Rather, this was a surveillance intended to produce knowledge about the pathological bodies contained within the hospital walls. This would then allow for their appropriate classification. Foucault went on to describe how these principles came to be applied to the architecture of prisons. This was exemplified for him in the distinct shape of Bentham's panopticon. This circular design, which has subsequently become an often misused synonym for a contemporary culture of surveillance, was premised on a binary of the seen and the not-seen. An individual observer could stand at the central point of the circle and observe the cells (and their occupants) on the perimeter whilst themselves remaining unseen. The panopticon in its purest form was never constructed, yet it conveys the significance of the production of knowledge through observation that became central to institutional design at this time and modern thought more broadly. What is curious though is that whilst the aim of those late eighteenth century buildings was to produce wellventilated spaces suffused with light, this provoked an interest in its opposite. The gothic movement in literature that was developing in parallel conversely took a ‘fantasy world of stone walls, darkness, hideouts and dungeons…' as its landscape (Vidler, 1992: 162). Curiously, despite these modern developments in prison design, the façade took on these characteristics. The gothic imagination came to describe that unseen world that lay behind the outer wall. This is what Evans refers to as an architectural ‘hoax'. The façade was taken to represent the world within the prison walls and it was the façade that came to inform the popular imagination about what occurred behind it. The rational, modern principles ordering the prison became conflated with the meanings projected by and onto the façade. This confusion of meanings have then been repeated and reenforced in the subsequent representations of the prison. This is of paramount importance since it is the cinematic and televisual representation of the prison, as I argue here and elsewhere, that maintain this erroneous set of meanings, this ‘hoax'

Fish or Fowl: A Wizard of Oz Evaluation of Dialogue Strategies in the Restaurant Domain

Recent work on evaluation of spoken dialogue systems suggests that the information presentation phase of complex dialogues is often the primary contributor to dialogue duration. This indicates that better algorithms are needed for the presentation of complex information in speech. Currently however we lack data about the tasks and dialogue strategies on which to base such algorithms. In this paper, we describe a Wizard of Oz tool and a study which applies user models based on multi-attribute decision theory to the problem of generating tailored and concise system responses for a spoken dialogue system. The resulting Wizard corpus will be distributed by the LDC as part of our work on the ISLE project

The Tobacco Leaflet, February 2010.

The Newsletter of the Division of Tobacco Use Prevention and Control

Spartan Daily, November 8, 2007

Volume 129, Issue 42https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/10414/thumbnail.jp