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With the increasing emphasis on improving service sector staff scheduling, many organisations have turned to employing part‐time staff in greater numbers. Operating managers need to schedule this staff in an efficient manner to cover the highly variable demand that is commonly present. This study demonstrates a number of important factors that influence how well staff schedules can be matched against variable demand. Four heuristic staff scheduling procedures are examined that provide optimal, or near optimal, staff schedules under different operating conditions. It is shown that variability in demand controls the number of excess staff hours scheduled, and that the smaller the number of daily shift hours and/or the number of days worked per week, the lower will be the level of excess staff hours scheduled.

Although research attention has been given to the modelling process for simultaneous demand‐output management in manufacturing systems, little interest has been demonstrated in service organisations despite the fact that such organisations face unique conditions that further complicate the demand‐output management issue. In response to this lack of emphasis, we review the relevant research from both marketing and operations management and present a cost‐effectiveness model for balancing demand and service output.

Examines an alternative approach to labour utilisation, based on the concept of simulated annealing, implemented on a microcomputer. Demonstrates the use of the new approach in a study of the potential labour utilisation effect of two types of scheduling flexibility: shift length flexibility and meal‐break placement flexibility. Finally, offers implications of the new approach for management.

Labour scheduling heuristic methods have been applied in service operating environments using both actual and synthetic demand patterns. Two important characteristics of these demand patterns are (1) demand smoothness and (2) mean demand. Investigates the effects of demand smoothness and mean demand on the solution quality associated with four prominent heuristic methods. Indicates that both characteristics can affect the performance of the heuristic methods. An especially important finding is that the two methods which use information from linear programming solutions are far more robust to changes in the degree of demand smoothness. Concludes that managers should consider linear programming methods as an alternative or supplement for making their scheduling decisions. Also recommends that labour scheduling researchers use multiple levels of mean demand and demand smoothness when evaluating new heuristic methods.

This paper explores four works of contemporary fiction to illuminate formal and informal regulation of sex. The paper’s co-authors frame analysis with the story of their creation of a transdisciplinary course, entitled “Regulating Sex: Historical and Cultural Encounters,” in which students mined literature for social critique, became immersed in the study of law and its limits, and developed increased sensitivity to power, its uses, and abuses. The paper demonstrates the value theoretically and pedagogically of third-wave feminisms, wild zones, and contact zones as analytic constructs and contends that including sex and sexualities in conversations transforms personal experience, education, society, and culture, including law.

Presents a new approach to working set generation for personnel scheduling problems. In full‐time (FT) and mixed‐workforce (MW) experiments, generates the schedules in the working sets from the use of two‐phase heuristic labour scheduling solution procedures. The solution procedures were implemented on a 386 microcomputer and did not require the specification of the size of the working sets in advance. In the FT experiment, the general set‐covering formulations (GSCFs) associated with the produced working sets were solved with integer programming. The new working set procedure yielded optimal integer solutions for all 36 test problems in the FT experiment. Owing to the size and complexity of the problem data in the MW experiment, the GSCFs associated with the working sets were solved with linear programming, and heuristic rounding procedures were applied to obtain feasible integer solutions. The mean labour costs of these solutions averaged 0.69 per cent less than the mean cost of solutions obtained via the application of heuristic rounding procedures applied to the linear programme solutions for the GSCFs associated with the master sets. Compares solution costs for the new working set method with those associated with other working set generation/refinement procedures. Results indicate that the new method produces lower solution costs in less control processing unit time.

The CW’s long-running horror-drama series Supernatural (2005–) has been accused of undoing progressive advances for women made by Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1996–2003). While it’s hard to deny the truth in that claim, Supernatural also problematizes conventional gender roles from a very different approach, one that plays with perceptions of masculinity and social class.

Buffy Summers may initially seem to have more in common with Supernatural’s Sam Winchester, a chosen one with special powers who wants a normal life away from the supernatural. However, Buffy shares more in common with Dean Winchester. Embodying popular gendered stereotypes in their introductions, it’s gradually revealed that there is more complexity to each. Both form alliances with Others; both recognize elements of the Other in themselves. Both transgress conventional gender boundaries, complicating the notion of a binary gender system. Both series introduce the seemingly familiar only to alter it into the uncanny. See the little cute blonde virginal cheerleader? She can kick your ass. See the stupid cocky womanizing jock? All he wants is family and a home. This chapter explores the increasingly gender-blended, social-class-crossing behaviours of Supernatural’s Dean Winchester as an heir to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The study of accounts, corrective practices, or aligning actions has grown to constitute a significant sub-discipline within everyday life sociology. Most work in this field starts with an assumption of order and assumes that accounts reestablish broken sociality. However, much accounting activity resists against alignment efforts, and alignment efforts can be used as a means of conflict. The present chapter aims to survey situations in which actors resist and negotiate alignment and the power and status conflicts involved in these negotiations. With these conflicts, participants also negotiate responsibility, which is here seen not as an internal attribute of actors, but a socially negotiated meaning as well. On a larger level, the present chapter shows how levels of meaning are intertwined in alignment situations, making them much more than mere tools to produce and protect order.

The purpose of this study is to examine how a school leadership team in a rural, high-poverty elementary school learned to lead continuous school improvement in a research–practice partnership.

This case study draws on qualitative research methods, improvement science and Deming's notion of a system of profound knowledge to identify how members of the school leadership team understood and approached their school improvement work differently as a result of engaging in continuous improvement processes in a research–practice partnership.

The findings illustrate how engaging in continuous improvement processes in the research–practice partnership enhanced the leadership team members' capacities to prioritize and solve problems, incorporate multiple and diverse perspectives in problem-solving efforts and establish a culture of increased risk-taking and ownership of teaching and learning outcomes. In sum, the members of the leadership team became the drivers of their own change processes.

The findings provide insight into how leaders in rural, high-poverty schools can build capacity within their schools to meet the demand for increased student achievement by leading collaborative, continuous improvement processes grounded in improvement science in research–practice partnerships.

With respect to the guiding “ideas” of Humboldt and their consequences for the constitution of science, describes the transition to a modern research university with the emergence of theory‐based practice, science‐based technology and technology‐based industry. The pure research imperative is endangered or even substituted by a new technological imperative