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

Employment struggles and the commodification of time: Marx and the analysis of working time flexibility

This paper explores new working time arrangements around a critique of the ‘commodification of time’ to illuminate the contradictions of such new flexibilities. Two features of these new arrangements are seen as relevant for evaluating the Marx/Engels analysis. Firstly, those arguing the commodification of time represent all [can you suggest a wording that will make clear what this ‘all’ refers to?] having become a commodity outside of the processes of exchange for labour power. Significantly – and central in all working time arrangements – it is labour power that is sold, be it for a particular period of time, rather than the time itself. Hence, working time arrangements set boundaries against ‘free’ time or time in which labour power is not sold as a commodity, that ‘free’ time which was recognised in the traditional arrangements – fought over in early industrialism – which set premium payments against anti-social hours within ‘overtime’. New working time arrangements tend to blur the boundaries between ‘free’ and ‘working’ time, assuming an availability of labour power to capital. While much of the promotion of flexibility stresses the possibility of making adjustment to suit social and domestic requirements it is more usually the means for altering working time to meet the demands of capital

The Dirt

With the mission to make words sweat, this MPHIL encompasses the writing of a metaphoric text for an hour-long solo performance in which physicality and movement are crucial elements, and an academic essay on the practice and challenges involved in the communication of text in embodied live performance. In this context, how does the material of words relate to the body in movement? How can the differences between the two be identified in order for performers and performance makers to use them to their expressive and communicative potential? These questions were explored through active research consisting of practical time spent in the studio (working alone or with colleagues), facilitating workshops in professional, vocational and participative contexts, the development of the solo The Dirt, creative writing and academic research and writing. The project has exposed areas of apparent contradiction in the artistic approaches expressed in words on the one hand and movement on the other. Rather than thinking of ‘dance’ or ‘movement’ therefore I prefer to research and then present states of physicality which run parallel to the text. This produces both resonances and dissonances and has the effect of making the text more expressive when it is experienced alongside the physicality of performing bodies. The Dirt, a one-woman-show, uses these explorations of form to ask ‘[In the context of the climate emergency] is it still OK to have children?’ Physicality is what carries the cumulative narrative structure and underpins its communication through language. The Dirt, encompassing the perspectives of multiple characters and voices, bounces between the literal and the surreal, observations from my everyday life in Berlin (drawing particularly on the experience of working as a babysitter and as a neighbour to the feminist-anarchist squat Liebig34), and abstract dreamlike material

Employee forums in the UK: friend or foe of trade unions?

"With a tradition of informing and consulting employees resting on a single union channel, the 2002 EU Information and Consultation (ICE) Directive was bound to have a significant impact on employee relations in the UK Undoubtedly, the works council as an institution, or employee forum as it is often referred to in the UK, represents a totally new departure in UK employment relations. The article specifically focuses on the repercussions employee forums might have for trade unions. We focus on two companies which have both recently founded employee forums to comply with ICE regulation. We ask whether such forums should be considered as posing a threat to British trade unions, or platform for revitalising their position within the workplace." (author's abstract

An Excited-State-Specific Projected Coupled-Cluster Theory

We present an excited-state-specific coupled-cluster approach in which both the molecular orbitals and cluster amplitudes are optimized for an individual excited state. The theory is formulated via a projection of the traditional coupled-cluster wavefunction that allows correlation effects to be introduced atop an excited state mean field starting point. The approach shares much in common with ground state CCSD, including size consistency and an N^6 cost scaling. Preliminary numerical tests show that the method can improve over excited-state-specific second order perturbation theory in valence, charge transfer, and Rydberg states.Comment: 41 pages, 2 figures, 5 table

Teaching Environmental Management Competencies Online: Towards “Authentic” Collaboration?

Environmental Management (EM) is taught in many Higher Education Institutions in the UK. Most this provision is studied full-time on campuses by younger adults preparing themselves for subsequent employment, but not necessarily as environmental managers, and this experience can be very different from the complexities of real-life situations. This formal academic teaching or initial professional development in EM is supported and enhanced by training and continuing professional development from the major EM Institutes in the UK orientated to a set of technical and transferable skills or competencies expected of professional practitioners. In both cases there can be a tendency to focus on the more tractable, technical aspects of EM which are important, but may prove insufficient for EM in practice. What is also necessary, although often excluded, is an appreciation of, and capacity to deal with, the messiness and unpredictability of real world EM situations involving many different actors and stakeholders with multiple perspectives and operating to various agendas. Building on the work of Reeves, Herrington and Oliver (2002), we argue that EM modules need to include the opportunity to work towards the practice of authentic activities with group collaboration as a key pursuit. This paper reports on a qualitative study of our experiences with a selected sample taken from two on-line undergraduate EM modules for second and third year students (referred to respectively as Modules A and B) at the Open University, UK where online collaboration was a key component. Our tentative findings indicate that on-line collaboration is difficult to ensure as a uniform experience and that lack of uniformity reduces its value as an authentic experience. Whilst it can provide useful additional skills for EM practitioners the experience is uneven in the student body and often requires more time and support to engage with than originally planned