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Laser materials processing system technology has become indispensible to the tool and die manufacturing industries and for repairing engines and turbines. The laser build‐up welding process especially is now a standard technology where cost efficient, precisely localized and near net shape repair welds are required. The concept of integrating the modular laser components into standard machine tools makes the technology easily accessible to the user and very efficiently combines build‐up welding and metal‐cutting processes.

Specially designed laser system technology is available as add‐on kits for different machine tools of the end‐users. They can choose from a large variety of laser sources, manufacturing heads, welding material supply as well as process control devices. User‐friendly software guides through the entire process chain. So, optimized laser systems for different cladding and build‐up applications can be installed easily and inexpensively in common turning and milling machines.

The laser integration into machine tools connects efficiently laser and mechanical finish operations. This way, repairs, rapid design changes, and direct manufacturing of parts are available with a high level of accuracy and in very short times. Additionally, exactly specified property profiles can be realized.

The laser application shown here represents a new technical solution of laser integration into machine tools, which offers an efficient complete machining. It allows to quickly switch between milling and laser processing, which simplifies the combination of both processes. The computer numerical controlled process control treats the laser head just like a milling tool. This shortens the machining time and expands the capability of the machine with respect to generating multiple shapes.

In this chapter, the authors situate metal medievalism in the discourse on medievalism and neomedievalism. Detangling the ways in which historicity and authenticity are perceived and negotiated in metal cultures reveals how metal medievalism’s relationship to the past illuminates perceptions of post-modernity. The disparate pieces of the Middle Ages (both ‘real’ and ‘imagined’) form a bricolage through which post-modern meanings are expressed. Metal musicians and consumers use these fragments of the past as a means of collective resistance against the post-enlightenment, capitalist and machine-mediated present. The Middle Ages represent attempts at the re-enchantment of the present with a transcendent, organic, and carnal past. The meanings which are created this way are far from uniform or absolute however, but spiral between historical and imaginary, collective and individual, and continue to spin on in ever more complex permutations with no sign of abating.

Industrial marketing covers a broad range of heterogeneous products and services. In response to this heterogeneity, researchers have developed a variety of systematisations of transactions on industrial markets. These systematisations have provided insights for the identification of different types of transaction processes (business types), and for deriving type‐specific marketing recommendations. Based on this literature, the paper considers the consequences of interpreting the typological criteria as variables that can be influenced by the transaction parties, instead of treating them as data.

Transaction cost economics provides the main theoretical foundations. Focusing on seller‐initiated strategy, the paper develops a conceptual framework for shifts between business types that are derived based on differing degrees and horizons of asset specificity.

The paper proposes a conceptual framework and discusses technological and contractual ways of implementing shifts between business types. A central implication of the dynamic perspective is the idea of asset specificity as a choice variable.

First, this research is conceptual. Future empirical research is needed regarding the proposed framework as a whole as well as individual hypotheses. Second, based on our qualitative considerations, more formal models could possibly be applied as useful complements in further analysis of some of the raised issues.

Fundamental changes in market offerings in the form of shifts between business types are common elements of marketing practice, with recent examples in the automotive industry and the IT sector. The paper offers a framework for systematically considering such shifts.

The paper extends existing (static) business types frameworks by incorporating a dynamic perspective.

This paper explores the comprehensiveness of management accountants’ planning and the resource consumption associated with it in Chinese small enterprises (SEs).

The methodology involves correlation and regression analyses of online survey responses.

The study findings are as follows: planning comprehensiveness and the resource consumption associated with it vary greatly across Chinese SEs; there is a trade-off between these two aspects of planning; and provision of linkages within and across plan types, employment of valuation analytics and the use of future-oriented techniques and tools, as well as joint venturing with a foreign partner explain roughly three-quarters of the observed differences in planning behavior.

With no readily accessible source to ensure random selection of the units of analysis, this study relies on a convenience sample. Participants’ survey responses may contain a residual element of key informant bias.

This study uses primary data exclusively. It demonstrates a general trade-off between the comprehensiveness of management accountants’ planning and the associated resource consumption in Chinese SEs. Its novelty also derives from an approach that explains intercompany differences in the observed behavior via variables heretofore seldom used in empirical research.

Many jurisdictions fine illegal cartels using penalty guidelines that presume an arbitrary 10% overcharge. This article surveys more than 700 published economic studies and judicial decisions that contain 2,041 quantitative estimates of overcharges of hard-core cartels. The primary findings are: (1) the median average long-run overcharge for all types of cartels over all time periods is 23.0%; (2) the mean average is at least 49%; (3) overcharges reached their zenith in 1891–1945 and have trended downward ever since; (4) 6% of the cartel episodes are zero; (5) median overcharges of international-membership cartels are 38% higher than those of domestic cartels; (6) convicted cartels are on average 19% more effective at raising prices as unpunished cartels; (7) bid-rigging conduct displays 25% lower markups than price-fixing cartels; (8) contemporary cartels targeted by class actions have higher overcharges; and (9) when cartels operate at peak effectiveness, price changes are 60–80% higher than the whole episode. Historical penalty guidelines aimed at optimally deterring cartels are likely to be too low.

The article discusses findings from a research project on the communication history of the League of Nations. It departs from the League's normative goal of “open diplomacy”, which, from an analytical standpoint, can be framed as an “epistemic project” in the sense of a non-linear and ambivalent negotiation by communication of what “open diplomacy” should and could be. The notion of the “epistemic project” serves as an analytical concept to understand this negotiation of open diplomacy across co-evolving actors' constellations from journalism, PR and diplomacy.

The study employs a mixed-method approach, including hermeneutic document analysis of UN archival sources and collective biography/prosopography of 799 individual journalists and information officers.

It finds that the League's conceptualisations of the public sphere and open diplomacy were fluent and ambivalent. They developed in the interplay of diverse actors' collectives in Geneva. The involved roles of information officers, journalists and diplomats were permeable, heterogenous and – not least from a normative perspective – conflictive.

The subject remains under-researched, especially from the perspective of communication studies. The study is the first to approach it with the described research framework.

Requirements for business improvement professionals depend on different job characteristics. By focussing on lean management, the purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to provide a comprehensive conceptualisation of competencies relevant for lean professionals by comparing them to an existing project management competency framework; and second, to identify their similarities and differences in three different analysed countries.

This paper investigates 2,701 online published job advertisements in the USA, UK and Germany by means of a content analysis to compare and contrast the respective job profiles.

Main findings are similarities and differences in the specification and perception of lean professional’s roles among the three countries. Strikingly, four out of eight considered competency categories comprise 74 per cent of the profiles’ most relevant keywords. Additionally, with the help of a latent semantic analysis, 16 specific competencies can be summarised in a lean professional’s competency taxonomy.

The collected data only represent a snapshot of lean professionals’ advertisements. Also, text mining results from job profiles could largely differ from other techniques like recruiter interviews or company surveys. Further research could use different methods or combine them to construct a more complete model.

Lean education and training as well as the respective candidate selection processes can benefit from these studies’ results.

Requirements and job contents for lean professionals have not been empirically researched on a comparable in-depth level before, even though their expertise is in high demand in any kind of business sector.