QUALITY MANAGEMENT: UNIVERSAL OR CONTEXT DEPENDENT?

Quality management has often been advocated as being universally applicable to organizations. This is in contrast with the manufacturing strategy contingency approach of Operations Management that advocates internal and external consistency between manufacturing strategy choices. This article empirically investigates whether quality management practices are contingent on a plant's manufacturing strategy context, by examining the use of process quality management practices—a critical and distinctive subset of the whole set of quality management practices—across plants representative of different manufacturing strategy contexts. The study strongly suggests that process quality management practices are contingent on a plant's manufacturing strategy, and identifies mechanisms by which this takes place.     

Sport in Modern European History: Trajectories,Constellations, Conjunctures1

This essay reviews sport-related articles that have previously appeared in the JHS, alongside a range of other historical works, and in so doing recognizes the importance of persisting themes in the socio-cultural, historical analysis of sport. Such themes have appeared in wide-ranging socio-historical and figurational work, and also underpin the contributions to this special issue: they include the dynamics of cultural importation, diffusion and appropriation; and the cultural significance of sport in wider status and power relations. Emphasizing the compatibility of the historical and the sociological imaginations, and confirming recent positions on the integration of the cultural and the social in historical work, the article goes on to contextualize the place of sport in Europe in the period from the later decades of the nineteenth century into the fourth decade of the twentieth century. Referencing classic debates on historical method and periodization – particularly Braudel's discussions of event, conjuncture, and longue durée– the article identifies core conjunctural features of European sport in the period: internationalism/early globalization; increasing forms of mediatization; emergent individualism; and commercialized consumption and celebrity.     

The Culture of Sports

In conversation with Orlando Patterson, the editors of this special issue reflected and speculated on the nature of the historical sociologist's task and challenge. We agreed that any historical sociology concentrated upon particular events or single sports, but overlooking comparative cultural and social contexts, was narrow and over-focused. Recalling early contributions, Patterson notes how in cricket in the Caribbean there could be found an “intense distillation of every kind of problem and emotional baggage” carried by a society at a particular socio-historical moment. Patterson advocates the dual focus upon time/place and socio-cultural historical influence that is at the heart of the historical sociologist's enterprise; and that shows how cricket, for instance, is both constituted by the legacies of a specific historical past, and constituting of a potentially different future.     

Comparison of a genetic algorithm and simulated annealing in an application to statistical image reconstruction

Genetic algorithms (GAs) are adaptive search techniques designed to find near-optimal solutions of large scale optimization problems with multiple local maxima. Standard versions of the GA are defined for objective functions which depend on a vector of binary variables. The problem of finding the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimate of a binary image in Bayesian image analysis appears to be well suited to a GA as images have a natural binary representation and the posterior image probability is a multi-modal objective function. We use the numerical optimization problem posed in MAP image estimation as a test-bed on which to compare GAs with simulated annealing (SA), another all-purpose global optimization method. Our conclusions are that the GAs we have applied perform poorly, even after adaptation to this problem. This is somewhat unexpected, given the widespread claims of GAs' effectiveness, but it is in keeping with work by Jennison and Sheehan (1995) which suggests that GAs are not adept at handling problems involving a great many variables of roughly equal influence.We reach more positive conclusions concerning the use of the GA's crossover operation in recombining near-optimal solutions obtained by other methods. We propose a hybrid algorithm in which crossover is used to combine subsections of image reconstructions obtained using SA and we show that this algorithm is more effective and efficient than SA or a GA individually.     

CENTRAL BANKING AS A POLITICAL PRINCIPAL-AGENT PROBLEM

Due to their ties with elected leaders, central bankers may pursue policies that are not in society's best interests. Consequently, the relationship between the public and the central bank can be characterized as a principal-agent problem. An inflation and stabilization bias arise as a result of this agency problem and the magnitudes of these biases depend on the political environment. Various institutional proposals for eliminating these biases are examined, and we find that central bank independence and performance contracts work best. However, we argue that central bank independence is preferable for resolving the agency problem.     

HETEROGENEOUS FIRMS: A CONSUMER'S REPORT

The august title 'the theory of the firm' is well known to every student of economics. Less well known is what a firm is exactly, what it may do, or of what use this 'theory' may be in understanding the world. W.Y. Oi adds substance to our vague outline of a 'theory' in his analysis of heterogeneous firms, while posing a definite challenge of explanation for it. If the result falls short of the mark, it is an interesting attempt, nevertheless.