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Article
Publication date: 12 November 2018

David E. Bowles and Lorraine R. Gardiner

The purpose of this paper is to study the effectiveness of combining process mapping and system dynamics (SD) in an organization’s ongoing business process improvement projects.

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to study the effectiveness of combining process mapping and system dynamics (SD) in an organization’s ongoing business process improvement projects.

Design/methodology/approach

Norfield Industries, designer and manufacturer of prehung door machinery, used process mapping and SD in a project targeting the improvement of its design document control process. The project team first used process mapping to document its current process and identify potential improvements. The team then developed an SD model to investigate the potential impacts of proposed process changes.

Findings

The case study supports the communication and transparency benefits of process mapping reported in earlier studies. Consistent with other case studies using simulation, SD provided useful insights into possible results of proposed process changes.

Research limitations/implications

The findings have limitations with respect to generalizability consistent with the use of a case study methodology.

Practical implications

Organizational managers desiring to include simulation modeling in process improvement efforts have a choice between discrete event simulation and SD. SD may prove able to consume less organizational resources than discrete-event simulation and provide similar benefits related to reducing the risks associated with process changes.

Originality/value

The current case study adds to the existing literature documenting the use of process mapping combined with simulation modeling in process improvement efforts. The case study supports existing literature regarding the value of process mapping in making system processes more transparent. The results also support previous findings regarding the value of SD for simulating the possible results associated with scenarios under consideration for process improvements.

Details

International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, vol. 67 no. 8
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1741-0401

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Book part
Publication date: 20 April 2022

Nancy Breen

David M. Gordon advanced labour economics with his theory of labour market segmentation, in which jobs rather than the marginal productivity of individual workers were the unit of

Abstract

David M. Gordon advanced labour economics with his theory of labour market segmentation, in which jobs rather than the marginal productivity of individual workers were the unit of analysis. He advanced economic historiography and macroeconomics by conceptualising social structures of accumulation – a framework built on the foundation of his institutionalist training and enriched by his study of Marxist economics. By appropriating methods from other social science disciplines into econometrics, he augmented empirical analysis in economics. He was a founding member of the Union of Radical Political Economics and its journal, the Review of Radical Political Economics – that advanced and promoted heterodox, radical, and Marxist economists in the United States. His contributions to economics, to organised labour, and to the New School for Social Research, where I studied with him, were stunning.

Part 1 lays out some context about the New School Graduate Faculty where Gordon taught. Part 2 explores what historical forces, including his family, led to his expansive creativity. Part 3 summarises how he expanded labour economics to include the relations as well as the technology of production, linked his understanding of the production process to a historical materialist view of labour in the United States, then extended that to econometric analyses of the US macroeconomy. Part 4 presents a bibliometric analysis to provide some idea of the impact of his work. I end with some concluding remarks.

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Article
Publication date: 1 January 1984

Leonard F.S. Wang and David Bowles

This article examines the behaviour of a labour‐managed firm operating in a world in which the output price is uncertain, but it varies betwen a price floor and a price ceiling…

106

Abstract

This article examines the behaviour of a labour‐managed firm operating in a world in which the output price is uncertain, but it varies betwen a price floor and a price ceiling. We show that risk aversion is sufficient to give the direct relationship between a change in uncertainty and the optimal level of output for the labour‐managed firm, which is weaker than the decreasing absolute risk aversion assumption imposed by Hawawini and Michel (1979), Hey and Suckling (1980), Hey (1981a) and Paroush and Kahana (1980).

Details

Journal of Economic Studies, vol. 11 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0144-3585

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Article
Publication date: 1 June 1985

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains…

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Abstract

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

Details

Management Decision, vol. 23 no. 6
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0025-1747

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Book part
Publication date: 30 December 2004

Tim Dant

The arrival of cheap video equipment would seem to have opened up a whole range of methodological opportunities for the social scientist, especially the sociologist. The poor…

Abstract

The arrival of cheap video equipment would seem to have opened up a whole range of methodological opportunities for the social scientist, especially the sociologist. The poor quality, expense and time-consuming clumsiness of film has over the last ten years been replaced with a flexible and easy to use technology, cheaply available in the high street that enables the researcher to record social action “au naturel.” As a social researcher who has been seduced by this opportunity I would like to comment on the process from the experience of a recent project. Without the breadth of experience to offer anything like a systematic methodology for using video in the social sciences, what I hope to do in this piece is to raise methodological issues that affect every research method but which take on a different quality with visual data. It is remarkable how little film and video data feature within the social sciences. Because of the capability of capturing the visible and hearable actions and interactions of people going about their ordinary life, it would seem to provide a rich source of data for those social scientists interested in studying local social situations. The flow and pattern of life as it is lived is recorded and retained in the moving picture with sound, to become available for close study and multiple replays. The action can be frozen, slowed down and instances separated in time and place easily compared.

Details

Seeing is Believing? Approaches to Visual Research
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-84950-211-5

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Article
Publication date: 1 June 1998

Tony Morden and David Bowles

The purpose of this article is to analyse and illustrate selected aspects of management in South Korea. South Korean management is placed within its South East Asian context; but…

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Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyse and illustrate selected aspects of management in South Korea. South Korean management is placed within its South East Asian context; but western influences on it are also identified. Parallels with French management are drawn. The article describes the national and business culture of South Korea. It analyses prevailing approaches to organisation and communication. It discusses and illustrates the changing role of the taipan, the family, the clan, and professional management within the context of the ownership and management of Korean enterprises. It examines working practices and relations. It analyses and comments on style of management. It deals with issues of internationalisation and globalisation. The article concludes by analysing a number of issues that are likely to affect South Korean management after the crisis of 1997‐1998, and more generally in the foreseeable future. The analysis is illustrated by a variety of case examples.

Details

Management Decision, vol. 36 no. 5
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0025-1747

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Article
Publication date: 1 December 2002

Milan Zafirovski

The paper outlines and examines a social‐institutional conception of income inequality or economic distribution. The fundamental proposition of this conception is that income…

756

Abstract

The paper outlines and examines a social‐institutional conception of income inequality or economic distribution. The fundamental proposition of this conception is that income inequality/distribution is far from being the outcome of the operation of strictly market laws or economic forces but rather one of institutional arrangements or social structures. Of the latter particularly important have shown to be the institutional structure of the economy, particularly labour markets, as well as the degree of democracy of political systems. The results suggest transcending single‐factor economic explanations and predictions of income inequality, as implied in the Kuznets curve and its ramifications, in favour of an alternative multilevel sociological approach.

Details

International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 22 no. 11/12
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0144-333X

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Book part
Publication date: 11 June 2014

This chapter is about the modern (Western) educational regime, educational industry paradigm and schooling process, while focussing on statutorily imposed and legally enforced…

Abstract

This chapter is about the modern (Western) educational regime, educational industry paradigm and schooling process, while focussing on statutorily imposed and legally enforced schooling as the main aspect of the hidden curriculum within a globalizing world.

It is about children's productive labour through schooling, whereby children's labour power is consumed, produced and reproduced on behalf of social formations under the capitalist mode of production (CMP).

The claim that a well-educated population is essential for development so that all societies share an interest in having children participate in schooling as much as possible is the central element of the Western education industry paradigm, the global appeal of which is reflected in how compulsory schooling has been embraced almost everywhere in conjunction with being heavily promoted within the ‘international community’ and widely endorsed by researchers, scholars and similar observers.

Contrary to Bowles and Gintis's correspondence principle, the structure of schooling is not an identical to the structure of the workplace in that it entails compulsion, whereby schooling is as efficient and effective as possible in meeting the needs of the CMP.

The CMP benefits from the state having shifted confinement as a mechanism to force people to work onto schooling; or, from compulsory social enclosure, whereby schools increasingly resemble military and prison systems.

Compulsory social enclosure helps to ensure that children's productive capacity – or labour power – is enhanced to the benefit of the CMP, this being the major factor in accounting for its appeal and advance on the world stage, globally.

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Book part
Publication date: 11 June 2014

This chapter is about the modern, Western education system as an economic system of production on behalf of the capitalist mode of production (CMP) and globalization towards a…

Abstract

This chapter is about the modern, Western education system as an economic system of production on behalf of the capitalist mode of production (CMP) and globalization towards a single, global social space around market capitalism, liberal democracy and individualism.

The schooling process is above all an economic process, within which educational labour is performed, and through which the education system operates in an integrated fashion with the (external) economic system.

It is mainly through children’s compulsory educational labour that modern schooling plays a part in the production of labour power, supplies productive (paid) employment within the CMP, meets ‘corporate economic imperatives’, supports ‘the expansion of global corporate power’ and facilitates globalization.

What children receive in exchange for their appropriated and consumed labour power within the education system are not payments of the kind enjoyed by adults in the external economy, but instead merely a promise – the promise enshrined in the Western education industry paradigm.

In modern societies, young people, like chattel slaves, are compulsorily prevented from freely exchanging their labour power on the labour market while being compulsorily required to perform educational labour through a process in which their labour power is consumed and reproduced, and only at the end of which as adults they can freely (like freed slaves) enter the labour market to exchange their labour power.

This compulsory dispossession, exploitation and consumption of labour power reflects and reinforces the power distribution between children and adults in modern societies, doing so in a way resembling that between chattel slaves and their owners.

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Book part
Publication date: 20 April 2022

Jim Stanford

This chapter synthesizes two complementary streams in the economic thought of David M. Gordon, and explores their shared relevance to the rise of the “gig” economy in modern

Abstract

This chapter synthesizes two complementary streams in the economic thought of David M. Gordon, and explores their shared relevance to the rise of the “gig” economy in modern economies. Gordon made lasting contributions to the radical political-economic analysis of work and employment. At the microeconomic level of individual workplaces, he and his collaborators originally explained the factors affecting employers’ labor extraction strategies, through which they seek maximum work effort from waged employees while minimizing unit labor costs. At the macroeconomic or structural level, he linked that conflictual process to the broader institutional and structural features of the overall accumulation regime which is essential to any successful incarnation of capitalism. Employment practices and social structures have evolved considerably since Gordon’s passing, but his insights are still useful in understanding the rise of, and limits to, modern work arrangements. In particular, Gordon’s dual portrayal of the parameters of labor extraction, and their positioning within a broader structural and institutional context, provides a convincing explanation of both the recent rise of gig economy practices, and their potential limits.

Details

Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology: Including a Symposium on David Gordon: American Radical Economist
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80262-990-3

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