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Suggests that successful TQM initiatives are frequently spurred by “stretch” goals created by benchmarking an organization’s performance and practices with others. Differentiates results and process‐driven benchmarking. Explains how TQM and benchmarking link with the philosophy of continuous improvement

Design to Distribution Ltd (D2D) is a wholly owned subsidiary of the ICL group. It gained this status in 1993, having previously been ICL Manufacturing Division. Since 1991 it has strategically penetrated the contract manufacturing market and now aims to provide a total electronics manufacturing service to external customers. It has developed a total solution capacity whereby it is able to offer its customers expertise, advanced manufacturing technology, and purchasing power to enable them to release their capital and resources to concentrate on their core competences. D2D have an established total quality culture and have benefited significantly from the resultant enhanced customer satisfaction and reduced cost of non‐conformance. It constantly searches for process improvement tools and benchmarking is one tool D2D employs. However, D2D has concentrated benchmarking efforts on results‐driven studies carried out by consultants. Although this provides a useful introduction to benchmarking, the next step for D2D to achieve its goal of worldwide competitiveness is a more process‐driven approach. Reviews the construction of benchmarking projects previously carried out by D2D and suggests a tool to help overcome one of the main pitfalls of process‐driven benchmarking, that of appropriate process selection.

The purpose of this paper is to consider a psychoanalytic explanation for the challenges facing social entrepreneurs in Scotland.

A qualitative approach was used, in an exploratory study involving semi‐structured interviews with, and observation of, a purposive sample of social entrepreneurs.

Respondents exhibited a sense of splitting between the archetype of hard driving business leader and that of social reformer. One respondent was able successfully to integrate the two roles through an intuitive understanding of psychodynamic processes.

This was an exploratory study with a small sample.

In a period of financial challenge for the UK economy, presenting new challenges for social enterprises, the findings add to researchers' understanding of apparently irrational responses to change.

There is limited research into the impact of archetypes on business behaviours and the paper aims to extend the literature.

The spouses or partners of serving members of the UK Armed Forces are often subject to similar constraints to those of enlisted personnel. This paper aims to examine the experiences and wellbeing of a group of army wives. In particular, it focuses on their shared experiences of consumer vulnerability and related challenges, exploring the extent to which membership of military wives’ communities can help them to cope.

Using an interpretivist approach, data were collected through four focus group discussions involving 30 army wives, and seven individual in-depth interviews.

The paper highlights shared experiences of consumer vulnerability and demonstrates how army wives’ approaches to coping incorporate both individual and community-based approaches. It proposes that communities of coping develop within the army wives community, providing women with both practical and emotional support.

The paper acknowledges that there is a range of factors that will impact military spouses’ experiences of consumer vulnerability and strategies for coping. This heterogeneity was difficult to capture within a small exploratory study.

The UK Government should consider their duties towards military spouses and children. This would entail a significant cultural shift and recognition of military personnel’s caring responsibilities.

This research contributes to understandings regarding the potentially shared nature of both consumer vulnerability and coping strategies. The study introduces the relevance of communities of coping to consumer contexts, highlighting how members can benefit from both practical and emotional support.

In this chapter, we first argue for a green criminological perspective on culture as well as nature, as those concepts are framed in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Second, from within this green criminological perspective we discern a neocolonial hegemony in the resource extraction from developing countries that is represented by international trafficking markets in looted cultural heritage and poached wildlife. In other words, developed nations benefit from these trades while developing nations suffer, and governance regimes attempting to control these global criminal trades prioritise the rational interests and cultural norms of the more powerful market nations over the local interests and cultural histories of communities at the source of the chain of supply. Finally, our third argument is that the emerging intellectual framework of sustainable development, as represented in the UN's goals, may provide a perspective on the issue of trafficking culture and nature that can push back against the neocolonial hegemony of international criminal markets such as these.

Eric Emerson's recently published research on the costs and quality of village, residential communities and supported housing should bring to an end an argument that has bedevilled learning disability services for a number of years. The most important questions raised by the research are arguably those that lie beneath the surface of the village community vs. ordinary life debate ‐ and also have an importance well beyond the learning disability field.

Referring to the importance of the public health services in this country, Sir Kingsley Wood, M.P., in a recent speech observed that the result of the recent General Election afforded an unprecedented opportunity for the steady development during the next five years, and possibly ten, of the public health services of the country, not by means of stunts, but by science and statecraft. Prevention must be their great watchword. The great triumphs of public health were due in no small degree to the work of the general practitioner. To him came the great host of patients with what were called “trivial ailments,” which, in fact, did so much to incapacitate us as a nation. People little realised, for instance, what the “common cold” cost the State. One of the greatest needs in health matters of the immediate future was research. We were still in the dark as to the causes of measles, of influenza, of rheumatism, and of cancer. We had yet to learn the relationship of certain foods and particular diseases. The Health Ministry was concerned with the important question of pure food. We needed not only cheap food but clean food, which was vital to a healthy and vigorous race. There were two great objects to be achieved. We must continue to improve our food values. It was true that in 1920 out of nearly half a million deaths those of fourteen men and two women were directly attributed to “starvation.” but the evils of malnutrition could not be so narrowly limited. Clean and wholesome food was an effective weapon against disease and premature death. There was, it was gratifying to note, a considerable rise in the standard of national nutrition, and this had been an important and favourable factor in the decline of mortality from tuberculosis. But the consumer must more and more be safeguarded against contaminated, adulterated, and disease‐producing food. Civilisation had urbanised man, it had taken him away from his natural base—the soil—and thus from the prime source of his food supply. It brought him from lone distances, and while giving him a greater abundance it had robbed his food of much of its freshness and vitality. To‐day we often chose our food more by reading advertisements than in trusting to our natural tastes. We loved to see some of our vegetables very green, and accordingly they were canned and coloured for us. Dirty and dusty milk, and careless handling of meat and bread, “doctored” butter, and the boron preserved sausage, the boracised egg, the mixture of sugar, artificial flavouring, and benzoic acid, sometimes called ginger beer, were not the best illustrations of our advance in national health conditions. It was quite possible to imagine a reasonable meal which might contain 20 or even more grains of boric acid besides other preservatives. In these respects Great Britain was behind the standard of many other countries. There was a general movement in various parts of the civilised world in the direction of limiting and controlling the admixture of chemical preservatives and colouring matter with foodstuffs. He was glad to say that it had the support in this country of the great majority of the traders, who were equally anxious to see a pure food supply. The best firms and the shopkeepers of the country strongly desired it. Mr. Neville Chamberlain had the matter well in hand, and already certain regulations were being framed on the basis of the recommendation of an Expert Committee which had recently enquired into the whole subject. These regulations would first be published, in order that persons interested might, if they desired, submit recommendations to the Ministry. Certain of the recommendations of the Committee could not be effected without legislation, but it was proposed to undertake this as soon as pressure on Parliamentary time permitted. The Ministry hoped also to promote a measure consolidating the whole of the law relating to food. He desired to say, in conclusion, that while laws were necessary and regulations were desirable to a large extent, the vital matter of clean food rested with the nation itself. The public had recently been asked by the Ministry to refrain from the common practice of handling meat before purchasing. Fingering meat was, of course, a definitely unhealthy habit. Nobody desired unnecessary regulations, especially Britishers, and they did not want grandmotherly legislation: but in certain elementary matters in connection with our food we must break many old bad habits. Education had done much for improved health and temperance, and he did not doubt it would largely help to achieve the advanre which was so necessary and urgent in connection with attainment of a purer and cleaner food supply.

Across the UK organisations are experiencing high‐velocity, discontinuous, radical change scenarios. As part of their strategic response, many are introducing more flexible and empowering structures and cultures. One outcome of this strategy has been the dispersal of change agency to a more diverse “cast of characters”. Traditional models of the singular, mandated change agent are now juxtaposed with the notion that “everybody is/can be a change agent”. Reveals some of the wider issues associated with change agency dispersal. Argues that the dispersal of change agency to a wider “cast of characters” creates strategic risk for organisations and has implications for strategic leadership and the way change agents are managed in the future. Discusses some of the dilemmas facing those seeking to control and manage change agents. Concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications facing those who have responsibility for managing those who find themselves cast in the role of “change agent”.

A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.

“Communism has never concealed the fact that it rejects all absolute concepts of morality. It scoffs at any consideration of “good” and “evil” as indisputable categories. Communism considers morality to be relative, to be a class matter… It has infected the whole world with the belief in the relativity of good and evil.” Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West, 1975.