For management?

Over the past decades there have been persistent radical critiques of management. Previously the goal was to apply forms of Marxian analysis to the world of management and organizations, usually seeing it as a sphere of false consciousness, distorted and unreflective practices, and three-dimensional power or hegemony. Surprisingly, even after the Marxist scaffoldings that supported such claims have been deconstructed - both practically and theoretically - there are still current contributions to management thought that seek to resuscitate the same critiques, often under the rubric of Critical Management Studies. These representations seem increasingly bizarre, given the theoretical currents emanating from post-structuralist and postmodern thought that have been emergent in recent years, associated ideas such as polyphony, difference, deconstruction and translation. In this article we draw on these sources to produce a different representation of management - one that we would argue acts as an effective counter-factual to that which provides support to some of the central tendencies manifest in critical approaches to management. Rather than seeing modern management as necessarily a totalitarian practice, one that should necessarily be subject to a negative critique, we would argue that, at its best, it enables polyphony rather than tyranny, and the possibility to be both critical and for management. Copyright © 2006 Sage Puplications

Panel. Understanding Slavery and its Legacies at Robert Sheegog\u27s Estate

Uncovering Antebellum Slavery and Jim Crow-Era Service at William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak / Jillian E. Galle, Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery at Monticello; Jeffrey T. Jackson, Tony Boudreaux, and Maureen Meyers, University of MississippiBefore Rowan Oak was Faulkner’s Rowan Oak, it was a fashionable townhouse built in the early 1840s for Robert Sheegog, an Irish immigrant cotton planter with large planation holdings in northern Mississippi and southern Tennessee. Sheegog kept between eight and ten enslaved people at his town home in Oxford, some of whom he regularly hired out to the University of Mississippi. A complex landscape of labor surrounded Rowan Oak, including domestic structures that housed enslaved African Americans and, after emancipation, free Blacks who labored in the main house. This paper discusses the recent collaboration between the University of Mississippi’s Slavery Research Group, the University’s Center for Archaeological Research, and Monticello’s Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (www.daacs.org) to archaeologically document the lives of enslaved laborers during Sheegog’s antebellum occupation at Rowan Oak, their transition to freedom, and the later service of Caroline Barr, Faulkner’s lifelong care giver. This collaborative archaeological project is part of a larger architectural and historical survey of slavery at the University of Mississippi and in the town of Oxford. Faulkner’s Architecture, Family, and Race at Rowan Oak / Edward Chappell, Colonial Williamsburg FoundationFaulkner’s buildings at Rowan Oak richly express his evolving attitudes toward race relations and his own family. The long lives of surviving slave quarters in northern Mississippi reflect continued use over a century following their short decades of habitation by enslaved people. Virtually all were remodeled after the Civil War, in varying degrees, as ex-slaves demanded improvements. The Sheegogs’ brick quarter was one such building, reconditioned before c.1900. That quarter and other old buildings at Rowan Oak charmed Faulkner, who harbored romantic beliefs about their great age, but he chose to build a new house for Narcissus McEwen, Jack Oliver, Caroline Barr, and other domestic workers. Faulkner, then, engaged in his own effort at improvement of domestic workers’ accommodation, albeit small and further buffered from the main house. This structure, which he called his “servants’ house”, was one of a number of building projects at Rowan Oak that mirror William and Estelle Faulkner’s emotional and familial state. The first enlargement of the main house was a collaborative restoration by the couple, including defined black and white space, though the races constantly overlapped within them. Subsequent enlargements were emphatically different, intended to separate Faulkner from the family and express his disdain for esthetics of the old regime.The Architecture of Urban Slave Quarters in Northern Mississippi / Carl Lounsbury, Colonial Williamsburg FoundationStanding a few yards behind the main house at Rowan Oak is a one-story brick slave quarter. Obscured by a privet hedge and scarred by badly repaired brickwork, the unoccupied building is scarcely recognized as rare survivor, the home of enslaved and free black residents who lived and worked there for more than half a century. This paper examines the form and function of the Rowan Oak quarter as a building type that appeared in a number of towns in northern Mississippi in the 1850s and how it was transformed in the postbellum period to accommodate new social and economic realities

Energy efficiency in extrusion-related polymer processing: a review of state of the art and potential efficiency improvements

Energy saving and industrial pollution have become increasingly important issues, therefore the identification and adoption of more energy efficient machines and industrial processes are now industrial priorities, and worthy topics for further development through academic research. Polymeric materials are a major raw material, finding widespread application to a range of current industrial machine components as well as multiple products and packaging found in our daily life. Polymer extrusion serves as a particular example of polymer processing techniques, representative of others in as much as there are analogous intermediate stages in the processing. Processing techniques which require such intermediate stages include the manufacture of blown film, blow moulding, thermo-forming, and injection moulding. Hence, the study of polymer extrusion is a representative paradigm for a wider range of processing techniques. Since polymer processing is an energy intensive process and accounts for a huge share (maybe more than 1/3) of the materials processing sector, any improvement to the process would contribute significantly to global energy savings. This work presents a review of studies, which focus on, or appertain to, the energy consumption of extrusion related polymer processing applications. Typical energy demand and losses during processing are considered, and possible approaches for improving the process energy efficiency while maintaining the required end product quality are considered. Overall, this work provides a detailed discussion about how and where energy is utilised; how, where and why energy losses occur; and sets out approaches for optimising the process energy efficiency