Gendered Meanings of Commitment from High Technology Engineering Managers in the United Kingdom and Sweden

This article considers why women managers are often perceived to be ‘less committed’ at work than men, through an exploration of male and female managers' meanings of ‘commitment’, to see whether their meanings are shared. Despite a large body of literature on the concept of commitment, managers' own meanings of commitment have not been reported. In general, engineers reported that they used the term ‘committed’ without defining what it meant. Their meanings were a broad composite of organizational and career commitment, focused on very strong affective commitment with almost no emphasis on continuance commitment, in contrast to the traditional (1979) definitions of commitment (Mowday et al. 1979). Results from this interview study of engineering managers and senior technologists (20 males, 17 females, 17 British, and 20 Swedish graduate engineers, from vice‐president to senior technologist) show that there are differences in male and female engineers' unprompted meanings of commitment at work, as well as differences in meaning between the three levels of management sampled. Females responded more often with less visible ‘commitment’ meanings such as involvement, being people‐concerned, and availability. More males (and top managers) used the term commitment to mean task delivery, being proactive, being innovative, adding value, and being ready for challenge. The gender differences identified in reported meanings could impact on the assessment of women's commitment, when evaluated for promotion, career development and professional chartered status by the mostly male engineering managers.     

Ergonomic analysis of the work conditions of porters and owners of the Supply Center of Campinas, SP

Transforming work conditions is part of the ergonomic action that should help to improve work situations that brings risks to the workers health. six workers were observed in different locations of the supply center (Central Free Market, Free Market 2, Flowers Market and Permanent Shed 4). During the observation of workers to the Ergonomic Analysis of Work - AET (Rohmert and Landau) was performed. The workers were divided into two groups: porters and owners. The porters were the most susceptible to the risks of work and minor accidents with sharp wood from boxes or even risk of traffic accidents as pedestrians. However, regarding the use of mental ability for negotiations, use of computers and organizing and planning the establishment of work, the owners were the ones that most time played these activities. The ergonomics advocates work that can be transformed and that favors employee and employer. It is, therefore, intended to redefine the strategies that are embedded into the organizational structure of work.     

Brave new brains: sociology,family and the politics of knowledge

This article critically explores sociological arguments for greater biosocial synthesis, centring contemporary developments in public policy to demonstrate how such a reframing of humanity tends to reinforce existing political orders and socially patterned normativities. The case for further amalgamation of the social and life sciences is examined to suggest that production of somatic markers of truth from relational encounters largely relies upon an anaemic and politically contained version of the social as acquired in early childhood. More specifically, the gendered, classed and culturally specific practice of parenting children has come to occupy a new significance in accounts of social brains and environmentally reactive genomes. This is highlighted through a discussion of ‘early intervention’ as a heavily biologized policy rationale framing opportunities for biosocial collaboration. It is argued that late capitalist objectives of personal investment and optimization are driving this assimilation of the social and life sciences, pursuing an agenda that traces and re‐scores long‐standing social divisions in the name of progress.     

Collaborative practices in new product development projects involving suppliers

Abstract

Collaboration with suppliers in New Product Development (NPD) is essential for business competitiveness. However, the management of such collaborative project needs to focus on interactions between team members from different companies since they performed inter-organizational activities. While the impact of collaboration with suppliers on NPD project performance has been widely studied, the investigation of practices to support daily collaborative activities between both teams has received limited attention. This paper aims at developing a framework of operational practices for successful inter-organizational collaboration in NPD. The practices enacted by both project teams in six case studies were examined according to the stages of the collaboration and a knowing perspective. The results revealed some peculiarities linked to the inter-organizational context. Practices interact with each other across stages with a specific dynamic. More particularly, early in the project, practices to justify the collaboration with the suppliers are determinant for practices related to the creation of social interactions between project members and project commitment. The results also show that boundary objects are useful formal socialization mechanisms for supporting the undertaking of collaborative work.     

Recurrent time-to-event models with ordinal outcomes

A model to accommodate time-to-event ordinal outcomes was proposed by Berridge and Whitehead. Very few studies have adopted this approach, despite its appeal in incorporating several ordered categories of event outcome. More recently, there has been increased interest in utilizing recurrent events to analyze practical endpoints in the study of disease history and to help quantify the changing pattern of disease over time. For example, in studies of heart failure, the analysis of a single fatal event no longer provides sufficient clinical information to manage the disease. Similarly, the grade/frequency/severity of adverse events may be more important than simply prolonged survival in studies of toxic therapies in oncology. We propose an extension of the ordinal time-to-event model to allow for multiple/recurrent events in the case of marginal models (where all subjects are at risk for each recurrence, irrespective of whether they have experienced previous recurrences) and conditional models (subjects are at risk of a recurrence only if they have experienced a previous recurrence). These models rely on marginal and conditional estimates of the instantaneous baseline hazard and provide estimates of the probabilities of an event of each severity for each recurrence over time. We outline how confidence intervals for these probabilities can be constructed and illustrate how to fit these models and provide examples of the methods, together with an interpretation of the results.     

A standard-based business repository for on-demand manufacturing execution systems

In manufacturing execution system (MES) projects, knowledge is heterogeneous and is applied partially in each software package. Consistency is therefore critical. Some standard business reference models exist, such as the IEC/ISO 62264 standard for MESs (also known as ISA S95), or the Supply Chain Operations Reference model for supply chain planning (SCP) and execution (SCE). These reference models have some overlaps. For example, traceability is part of both MES and SCE packages. A consortium of manufacturing software editors for industry has launched an ‘MES on demand’ platform using services from different packages. This paper presents the enriched business repository model built to facilitate business heterogeneity. It is used to align different business repositories (B–B alignment) and different business and software packages (B–S alignment). It likewise serves to align customer requirements with the repository (B–C alignment). The consortium platform is then ‘S95 compliant’ when knowledge supported by the different actors is included.     

Targeting the worst-off for free health care: a process evaluation in Burkina Faso

Effective mechanisms to exempt the indigent from user fees at health care facilities are rare in Africa. A State-led intervention (2004-2005) and two action research projects (2007-2010) were implemented in a health district in Burkina Faso to exempt the indigent from user fees. This article presents the results of the process evaluation of these three interventions. Individual and group interviews were organized with the key stakeholders (health staff, community members) to document the strengths and weaknesses of key components of the interventions (relevance and uptake of the intervention, worst-off selection and information, financial arrangements). Data was subjected to content analysis and thematic analysis. The results show that all three intervention processes can be improved. Community-based targeting was better accepted by the stakeholders than was the State-led intervention. The strengths of the community-based approach were in clearly defining the selection criteria, informing the waiver beneficiaries, using a participative process and using endogenous funding. A weakness was that using endogenous funding led to restrictive selection by the community. The community-based approach appears to be the most effective, but it needs to be improved and retested to generate more knowledge before scaling up.     

A New Era in Australian Multiculturalism? From Working‐Class “Ethnics” To a “Multicultural Middle‐Class”

This article analyses the changing socio‐economic profile of the “multicultural” section of the Australian population, in the past officially referred to as people of “non‐English‐speaking background” (NESB). After importing low‐skilled NESB labor to service the manufacturing boom of the post‐war decades, at the end of the 1970s, following economic restructuring, the Australian immigration program was refocused on skilled intake which resulted in immigrants increasingly becoming a middle‐class demographic. Over the past three decades, a “multicultural middle class” (MMC) has been created from two sources: the intake of highly skilled NESB immigrants and upwardly mobile second and third migrant generations. The article documents this demographic change using census and immigration data, and discusses what it may mean for the future of Australian multiculturalism, which, according to many analysts, is in crisis and requires re‐articulation.