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Over the past decade, the establishment and growth of quality awards has stimulated organizational self‐assessment using the award models. Four new methods developed from fieldwork in the UK can be used not only to support the gathering of data required by the models, but also in stand‐alone mode to assist managers to identify and recognize the symptoms, root causes and issues that are adversely affecting their improvement process in the areas of sustainability, tools and techniques, human resources and product design and development.

In this paper, I demonstrate an alternative explanation to the development of the American electricity industry. I propose a social embeddedness approach (Granovetter, 1985, 1992) to interpret why the American electricity industry appears the way it does today, and start by addressing the following questions: Why is the generating dynamo located in well‐connected central stations rather than in isolated stations? Why does not every manufacturing firm, hospital, school, or even household operate its own generating equipment? Why do we use incandescent lamps rather than arc lamps or gas lamps for lighting? At the end of the nineteenth century, the first era of the electricity industry, all these technical as well as organizational forms were indeed possible alternatives. The centralized systems we see today comprise integrated, urban, central station firms which produce and sell electricity to users within a monopolized territory. Yet there were visions of a more decentralized electricity industry. For instance, a geographically decentralized system might have dispersed small systems based around an isolated or neighborhood generating dynamo; or a functionally decentralized system which included firms solely generating and transmitting the power, and selling the power to locally‐owned distribution firms (McGuire, Granovetter, and Schwartz, forthcoming). Similarly, the incandescent lamp was not the only illuminating device available at that time. The arc lamp was more suitable for large‐space lighting than incandescent lamps; and the second‐generation gas lamp ‐ Welsbach mantle lamp ‐ was much cheaper than the incandescent electric light and nearly as good in quality (Passer, 1953:196–197).

Performance measurement and the balanced scorecard is becoming ubiquitous. However, this paper will argue that some of the early work on performance measurement and management conducted in the early part of the twentieth century has been overlooked by more recent writers. In particular, prediction in today’s literature is not the same concept as that developed by Dr Walter Shewhart in the 1920s. This paper traces the development of performance measurement from its accounting and operational roots until today and concludes that current use of performance measurement could benefit from earlier developments. In particular, the paper argues that the current obsession with testing success maps has limitations as they view the world as being static – relationships holding for all time. The paper proposes that a more dynamic view is taken to these relationships so managers do not become trapped in an outdated strategy map.

Dr W.A. Shewhart, “founder” of the modern quality movement and inventor of the control chart, was greatly influenced by the pragmatist philosopher, C.I. Lewis. However, Lewis's influence is less clear. Shewhart did not refer to Lewis in his 1931 book and it was not until the 1939 publication of his lectures that we find references to Lewis. While Shewhart's work has been read and understood by statisticians, this paper argues that to fully understand his work, one needs a background in philosophy of science. To make the point, this paper uncovers similarities between Lewis's pragmatism and Shewhart's invention of the control chart. Not least is a theory of prediction. The paper concludes that Shewhart had formed the core of his theory before reading Lewis, and that Mind and the World Order (Lewis, C.I., Mind and the World Order: Outline of a Theory of Knowledge, Dover Publications, New York, NY, 1929) provided a convenient post hoc rationalisation. The basis for a theory of management by prediction is a significant outcome of this paper.

This paper addresses issues met when designing, implementing, using and continuously updating performance measurement systems in manufacturing companies. The paper develops, from theory, a framework for analysing the implementation of a performance measurement system and uses this framework to interpret three longitudinal case studies. The paper concludes that specific processes are required to continuously align the performance measurement system with strategy. When these processes are combined with a well defined model of strategic success, the measurement system can enhance the strategic management process by challenging the assumptions and the strategy itself.

Presents a number of papers from the Performance Measurement Association conference held in July 2002. Reveals that all the papers investigate developments in the field of performance measurement and management since the Kaplan and Norton Balanced Scorecard was first introduced.