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The purpose of this paper is to explore the most common themes within Lean Six Sigma (LSS) relating to small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) within manufacturing organisations and to identify the research gaps in the existing literature.

Tranfield et al.’s (2003) systematic review methodology was utilised encompassing three stages: planning, conducting and reporting/dissemination.

The literature revealed that there are many areas in which LSS has been utilised with varying successes. In total, 52 journals have been reviewed and it has been concluded that although LSS is a powerful methodology, there are many gaps that exist in the literature and further research is needed to address these in the field of LSS.

The papers included in the systematic review were peer-reviewed papers available in English. Due to these limitations, relevant papers may have been excluded. Moreover, the authors have excluded all conference and white papers for their inclusion in this study.

It is vital that LSS practitioners are fully aware of the benefits, limitations and impeding factors when implementing a LSS initiative. Therefore, this paper could provide valuable insights to ensuring maximum value, is obtained from LSS implementation in SMEs.

This systematic review identifies research gaps in the current literature and highlighting areas of future research which will be beneficial to many SMEs in their pursuit of value optimisation.

Lean Six Sigma (LSS) is a continuous improvement methodology that has been adopted by several companies as a strategy to increase their competitive advantage. However, due to the misuse of LSS theory in practice, a high rate of implementation failure results. There is a need for a structured and standardised framework to describe how the LSS initiative should be implemented and sustained over time. As a result, this study aims to develop a practical, user-friendly and accurate LSS road map for a Scottish manufacturing small and medium enterprise.

The approach was to analyse existing literature on lean and Six Sigma that included road maps and critical success factors (CSFs) in order to design an in-company, quantitative survey instrument. The aim of the survey was to evaluate employees' perceptions on the importance of LSS CSFs for the successful implementation and sustainability of a continuous improvement initiative. Based on the literature and results from the data collected, an LSS reference guide - in the form of a road map - was designed to support LSS implementation and sustainability.

A customised LSS reference guide in a road map format for the Scottish SME was proposed. This road map was developed by adopting existing successful road maps from the literature into consideration and then adapting them to fulfil the company's particular perspective on CI. This study complements current literature on LSS road maps and corroborates LSS CSFs as crucial for successful LSS implementation and sustainability, regardless of the type of company and/or culture. However, a degree of importance is ascribed to the organisation's culture.

Whilst a survey was used as the data collection instrument future interviews with employees would enhance the understanding of the organisational culture and hence further improve the road map.

The authors developed a practical and strategic roadmap for a Scottish packaging small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) which can be used by other similar SMEs. The proposed LSS road map can be replicated and/or adapted for companies in their application of LSS. The methodology by which this study's road map was designed can be used as a guide in the development of further CI road maps.

This study aims to provide insights into the conceptualization of social entrepreneurship and the extent to which culture affects it.

First, social entrepreneurship is conceptualized and then the research integrates Hofstede’s framework, with some consideration for Inglehart’s and Schwartz’s framework in exploring the effects of cultural values.

Seminal studies on social entrepreneurship delineated acting entrepreneurially and having a social mission but failed to consider cultural contextualization. After illustrating Hofstede’s, Inglehart’s and Schwartz’s frameworks for cultural dimensions, the research shows that different cultural dimensions can provide a better understanding of social entrepreneurship.

This study has a limited scope as it relies on narrow conceptualizations of social entrepreneurship and culture.

Future national agendas should embrace varying notions of shared obligation across support institutions and enterprises as they attempt to address social problems across differing cultures.

This research contributes to the literature by providing an insightful understanding of the influence of culture on social entrepreneurship through integrating widely used cultural dimensions.

Viewing consumer confidence as a set of static factors has informed previous research and underpinned strategies used in recovering from food safety quality failures, but this approach has not delivered reliable and quick recovery from large-scale food safety scandals. The purpose of this paper is to examine extant models and the factors they are composed of, and suggest an extended model that has a better potential for consumer confidence. The paper focuses on food products where supply chains are visible, and use these features to group the findings.

In this study principal components and logit analyses are used to assess the role of 30 variables operating in a consumer confidence model constructed from several existing in the literature. This combined model considers emotional, cognitive, trust and sociodemographic factors. In total, 14 independent factors are identified. The authors examine the factors, and from these, the decision-making mechanisms before and after the Sanlu Infant Milk Formula (IMF) scandal of 2008.

The authors find that the factors considered by consumers are different for different IMF supply chains, and different again before and after the scandal. The authors develop the argument for an extension to the existing models, incorporating a dynamic consumer confidence system.

The paper uses a single survey after the focus event to establish “before” and “after” decision-making factors. Since the IMF scandal is recent and of very high profile, this is likely valid even if it carries memory bias effects. The study is directly applicable to food safety scandals in a Chinese context. Deductive reasoning extends our assertions to a wider context. They are logically validated but have not been formally tested.

Using this system as a framework a checklist for recovery from a similar food safety scandal is suggested. The authors also suggest more general use for use where supply chains features are visible to consumers.

Models for food safety consumer confidence recovery have previously focused on identifying models and the static factors they consist of. These do represent a reflection of how this phenomenon operates, but using the principals of this model nevertheless does not result in good recovery from extreme food safety failures. This paper contributes by extending these models to one that can be applied for better recovery.

Small traditional industry has been recognized as an important local economy that support cultural industry and is significant in many parts of the world, particularly in developing countries. The significance of this type industry as a poverty barrier, enables jobs for local rural villagers, and their role in continuing local community based cultural activities have become obvious. However, as the current modern days global pressures affecting many traditional people in developing countries, pathways of small traditional industry toward local sustainable development remain unclear. Further continuous investigations are still required on how this industry provide the platform for greater local, regional and global sustainability. Literatures and debates on the sustainability of the rural developing country concerning small traditional industries may even begin from the establishment of Brundtland sustainability commission in 1987. The conflict between brown and green agenda in Brundtland commission may also point to small-scale traditional industry growth in the developing world. Cultural traditional industries in developing countries could better lead to local sustainability pathway. On the other hand, conflict of the use of natural resources and competition may create different stories. How traditional industry in developing country survive and further innovate for development is a significant knowledge to understand. This chapter uses Jepara traditional furniture industry in Central Java – Indonesia which has been the subject of prolonged study on how small-scale industry implicated to global competition and pressures of raw material resources decline. This chapter further reviews previous research and recent study on Jepara industry upgrade and innovation, and how likely innovation may prosper for the future sustainability of this type of industry.

Approaches to the sociology of culture have largely been constituted around the long tradition of functionalism in sociology. This has hampered the field greatly. Among other shortcomings, this intellectual foundation has led to a limited understanding of ideology and civil society, a conservative political orientation and an overdeterministic view of social action and the actor. In this paper, I explore and then apply a new approach to the sociology of culture, one that attempts to conceptualize more robustly the dynamics of ideology, ideological conflict and civil society. As part of this project, I endeavor to map out a critical cultural perspective that establishes a multidimensional understanding of the contingency of social action.

This chapter is a contribution to the intellectual history of the anxiety that full employment in the modern United States depended somehow on military spending. This discourse (conveniently abbreviated as “military Keynesianism”) is vaguely familiar, but its contours and transit still await a full study. The chapter shows the origins of the idea in the left-Keynesian milieu centered around Harvard’s Alvin Hansen in the late 1930s, with a particular focus on the diverse group that cowrote the 1938 stagnationist manifesto An Economic Program for American Democracy. After a discussion of how these young economists participated in the World War II mobilization, the chapter considers how questions of stagnation and military stimulus were marginalized during the years of the high Cold War, only to be revived by younger radicals. At the same time, it demonstrates the existence of a community of discourse that directly links the Old Left of the 1930s and 1940s with the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s, and cuts across the division between left-wing social critique and liberal statecraft.

Comics and graphic novels can disrupt traditional texts by challenging the “worship of the written word” (Torres, 2019), a feature of white supremacy that perpetuates textual hierarchies within educational spaces. Giving all of our students access to contemporary literature that centers Black youth perspectives is not only important in decolonizing literature education but also in presenting a holistic view of Black childhood. They can be used in the classroom as subjects to challenge stereotypical depictions by centering experiences, ideas, and concepts that are often marginalized in traditional curriculum. Within this chapter, we focus on comics and graphic novels as tools to enact students’ multiliteracies and to analyze visual stories depicting BlackBoy adolescence, using the frameworks of BlackBoy Crit Pedagogy (Bryan, 2022), an equity framework that interrogates the interdisciplinary ways that Black boy students' literacy learning can be formed through the teaching and learning of Blackness, maleness, and the schooling experiences of Black boys. We utilize this framework to analyze the use of diverse comics and graphic novels to facilitate critical conversations of bringing inclusive visual texts into the classroom. We invite practitioners to reimagine curricular ideas and content centered on empowerment and Black boy adolescence and how those ideas are presented to youth through a variety of visual narratives.