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Article
Publication date: 1 October 1998

Adrienne Curry and David Herbert

There are a number of approaches to service quality. Rather than discussing their individual merits and demerits, it is perhaps more fruitful to look to their integration and the…

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Abstract

There are a number of approaches to service quality. Rather than discussing their individual merits and demerits, it is perhaps more fruitful to look to their integration and the extent to which they can be linked and serve one another. This paper aims to do just that. Inevitably the techniques considered have to be limited, but their interrelationship is made clear and their development potential highlighted. The particular quality tools illustrated are the Servqual model and quality function deployment (QFD), with process mapping serving as an intermediary tool for QFD. Three public service case examples are used to illustrate their successful use to date. Servqual measures both external customer/service provider expectations and perceptions and the existence or not of (in)formal standards, whilst QFD translates these results and measurements into organisational solutions in terms of product/service design, ensuring organisational standards to deliver what is required and helping to define a strategic planning process. Both of these quality management tools have been tested and used to positive advantage in the private sector. Their applicability to the public sector is being increasingly confirmed and they do offer a way forward for the future in terms of achieving the difficult and never‐ending task of continuous improvement in public services.

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Managing Service Quality: An International Journal, vol. 8 no. 5
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0960-4529

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Article
Publication date: 7 October 2014

Jean-François Chanlat

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the relationship between language, thinking and society for explaining the degree of visibility of the French organizational studies (OS…

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the relationship between language, thinking and society for explaining the degree of visibility of the French organizational studies (OS) production.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper proposes a sociological analysis based on Bourdieu field to understand the variation of reception the French OS production have had among the Anglo-Saxon field. The paper aims to underline some key elements, which can explain the differences of reception experienced by the French OS scientists. The paper opted for a general review using historical data; reviews of OS literature; and Google scholar, Web of Science and major OS Journal data.

Findings

The paper provides some evidence about how the degree of visibility of the French OS production is related to translation, cognitive and social resonance, producer place in the scientific network and relationship between the fields. It suggests that the degree of visibility is the result of a complex set of socio-cognitive schemes, social issues raised by the scholar and the place occupied by the researcher in the field.

Originality/value

The paper brings interesting ideas concerning the international development of the OS field, the degree of visibility of diverse contributions coming from non-English speaking researchers, notably the French ones, and how the dialogue between different linguistic and social universes can be ameliorated.

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International Journal of Organizational Analysis, vol. 22 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1934-8835

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Article
Publication date: 1 January 1975

George S. Rousseau and Roger A. Hambridge

DAVID HERBERT (1830–99), classical tutor, journalist and aficionado of eighteenth‐century literature and history, was born on 15 April 1830 in Glasgow, at the home of his parents…

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Abstract

DAVID HERBERT (1830–99), classical tutor, journalist and aficionado of eighteenth‐century literature and history, was born on 15 April 1830 in Glasgow, at the home of his parents on Castle Street. He spent his early life in Glasgow where his father, James Herbert, worked in a shop.

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Library Review, vol. 25 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0024-2535

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Book part
Publication date: 13 November 2023

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Festschrift in Honor of David R. Maines
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83753-486-9

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Publication date: 9 May 2011

Gary A. Cook

This chapter seeks to evaluate the charges made by a number of Herbert Blumer's critics who claim that he has in various ways misconstrued or misapplied the social psychological…

Abstract

This chapter seeks to evaluate the charges made by a number of Herbert Blumer's critics who claim that he has in various ways misconstrued or misapplied the social psychological ideas of George Herbert Mead. My examination of these charges leads me to conclude that numerous passages in which Blumer discusses Mead's thought are in fact open to several legitimate objections: Blumer seldom documents or supports his discussions of Mead's ideas by means of specific references to relevant passages in Mead's lectures or writings; he fails to note that his own theoretical project typically begins where Mead's project ends; he often uses the concepts of meaning, interpretation, and “taking the role of the other” in ways that differ somewhat from the uses Mead makes of these notions in his theorizing. Nevertheless, these shortcomings and differences by no means support the arguments of those critics who exaggerate the significance of Mead's so-called behaviorism or of Blumer's alleged subjectivism; nor do they justify the claims of those who fail to see how Blumer's theory of experiential objects, despite its inadequate formulation and development, is a legitimate attempt to extend the account of such objects one finds in Mead's later writings. Blumer, in short, may not always have been a completely accurate interpreter of Mead, but he was in most important respects a faithful, creative, and effective champion of Mead’s social psychological ideas.

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Blue Ribbon Papers: Interactionism: The Emerging Landscape
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-85724-796-4

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Publication date: 17 February 2022

Shane Blackman and Robert McPherson

This study examines the connections between subculture theory, symbolic interaction and the work of David Matza with a special focus on exploring alcohol consumption by young…

Abstract

This study examines the connections between subculture theory, symbolic interaction and the work of David Matza with a special focus on exploring alcohol consumption by young adults in the UK. We apply Matza ideas of the “techniques of neutralization,” “subterranean values,” and “drift” within an ethnographic study on alcohol to suggest that young people's “calculated hedonism” can be understood as a strategy of agency in the context of a subcultural setting. This article adds to the literature of symbolic interaction, subculture and the discipline of sociology by critically focusing on the work of David Matza from its reception in the 1960s to today as a central element of the new paradigm of cultural criminology. For us the sociological imagination is “alive and well” through Matza's advocacy of naturalism whereby he sought to integrate the work Chicago School under Park and Burgess with his assessment of the so-called Neo-Chicago School. In the literature Matza's work is often defined as symbolic interactionist we see his ambition in a wider sense of wanting sociology to recover human struggle and the active creation of meaning. Our approach is to understand the calculated hedonism of young adult use of alcohol through their humanity.

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Article
Publication date: 1 February 2005

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Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology, vol. 77 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0002-2667

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Article
Publication date: 1 January 1989

Stuart Hannabuss

The management of children′s literature is a search for value andsuitability. Effective policies in library and educational work arebased firmly on knowledge of materials, and on…

1012

Abstract

The management of children′s literature is a search for value and suitability. Effective policies in library and educational work are based firmly on knowledge of materials, and on the bibliographical and critical frame within which the materials appear and might best be selected. Boundaries, like those between quality and popular books, and between children′s and adult materials, present important challenges for selection, and implicit in this process are professional acumen and judgement. Yet also there are attitudes and systems of values, which can powerfully influence selection on grounds of morality and good taste. To guard against undue subjectivity, the knowledge frame should acknowledge the relevance of social and experiential context for all reading materials, how readers think as well as how they read, and what explicit and implicit agendas the authors have. The good professional takes all these factors on board.

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Library Management, vol. 10 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0143-5124

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Book part
Publication date: 4 July 2003

Jonathan Rees

John Andrews Fitch spent a year studying labor conditions in the steel industry around Pittsburgh during 1907 and 1908. The results of his research became The Steel Workers, one…

Abstract

John Andrews Fitch spent a year studying labor conditions in the steel industry around Pittsburgh during 1907 and 1908. The results of his research became The Steel Workers, one of six volumes in the Pittsburgh Survey, a groundbreaking 1910 analysis of conditions faced by working people in a modern industrial city. Introducing his discussion of common employment practices in the steel industry, Fitch declared, “A repressive regime…has served since the destruction of unionism, to keep the employers in the saddle.” He traced the origins of management’s arbitrary power to the Homestead lockout of 1892, when Carnegie Steel destroyed the last stronghold of organized labor in the mills of western Pennsylvania. During his stay in Pittsburgh, Fitch saw the results of fifteen years of management domination. “The steel worker,” he wrote, “sees on every side evidence of an irresistible power, baffling and intangible. It fixes the conditions of his employment; it tells him what wages he may expect to receive and where and when he must work. If he protests, he is either ignored or rebuked. If he talks it over with his fellow workmen, he is likely to be discharged” (Fitch, 1989, pp. 206, 232–233).

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Advances in Industrial & Labor Relations
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-76231-028-9

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Book part
Publication date: 29 October 2013

Nicola Giocoli

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