Total Quality Management in the African business community of Burkina Faso: a change in perspective on knowledge development

During the 1990s Total Quality Management (TQM) became diffused to Burkina Faso. The overarching logic of privatization due to Structural Adjustment Programs prepared the ground for far-reaching changes in management practices. TQM became exhorted as a new way of manufacturing. This new management concept was presented as a crucial part of new corporate success and put strong emphasis on empowerment of employers, customer service and charismatic leadership. Interviews with top and middle management in a range of Burkinabé companies showed a willingness for mimetic learning but it turned out that translating the concept into specific new practices by way of new routines remained a complex matter. Although this management concept sometimes became part of the dispositional practice of managers ? a new habitus ? company practices could be better characterized as improvisation on quality improvement.

Is Management Interdisciplinary? The Evolution of Management as an Interdisciplinary Field of Research and Education in the Netherlands

Management research and education are often characterized as being interdisciplinary. However, most discussions on what interdisciplinarity in management studies means have bogged down in ideological fixations. In this paper we alternatively take a historical perspective and analyze the evolution of the interdisciplinarity concept in management studies during the last decades in the Netherlands. We distinguish between two opposite versions of interdisciplinarity: a synoptic (conceptual) and an instrumental (pragmatic) one. Both versions resulted from different knowledge strategies (boundary-work) of competing and cooperating disciplines. We conclude that in the Netherlands instrumental versions of interdisciplinarity in management research and education prevailed.management science;Interdisciplinarity;disciplinarity;management education;history of management education

From a top-down to a bottom-up urban discourse: (re) constructing the city in a family-inclusive way

This paper focuses on urban discourses as powerful instruments intertwined with the dialectic of inclusion and exclusion. First, three dominant contemporary urban discourses developed in the field of urban planning are scrutinized on their inclusiveness of families and daily family life. The attractive city, the creative city and the city as an emancipation machine are examples of urban discourses communicated top-down via reports, debates and media attention. It is argued that these three discourses do not address families as urban citizens nor the very notion of reproduction and its daily manifestation. The exclusionary character of contemporary urban discourses does not only result in a neglect of urban families, it also legitimates non-intervention when it comes to family issues. This conclusion activated the search for an alternative discourse as expanded in the second part of the paper. This alternative discourse is constructed from the bottom-up and is rooted in the day-to-day experiences of urban families themselves. It is a refined discourse, with interrelated geographical scales including the city as a whole, the neighbourhood, the street and the home. This is a city that integrates—as families themselves do—the different domains of life. The city is appreciated for its qualities of proximity, the neighbourhood for its ethnically mixed children’s domains, the street as an urban haven and the house as the place that accommodates private life for each member of the family. This alternative discourse is called the balanced city. The empirical basis is drawn from middle-class urban families in Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Gravitational Lorentz anomaly from the overlap formula in 2-dimensions

In this letter we show that the overlap formulation of chiral gauge theories correctly reproduces the gravitational Lorentz anomaly in 2-dimensions. This formulation has been recently suggested as a solution to the fermion doubling problem on the lattice. The well known response to general coordinate transformations of the effective action of Weyl fermions coupled to gravity in 2-dimensions can also be recovered.Comment: 7 pages, late