Measuring management quality in the factory

The last decade has seen a growing consensus that manufacturing matters. The factory as the producing unit is the core of the firm's manufacturing activities. However, even now, it is not agreed on or even fully understood what constitutes a well-managed factory. This article attempts to create a causal model of management quality in the plant, identifying key managerial levers for improving plant performance. The model is based on an integrated view of three core processes: supply chain, product and process development, and strategy deployment. We postulate that the joint performance of the three processes is determined by the quality with which they are managed. Management quality is operationalized as consisting of six types of action: delegation (or decentralization), integration (or coordination), measurement, employee participation, communication, and employee development.This management quality model has been applied to the design of the Top Usine 1995 Best Factory Award administered in cooperation with the French weekly L'Usine Nouvelle. Data collected from participating plants do substantiate our view that plant performance is substantially driven by management quality: the six management quality dimensions are shown to be statistically linked to performance improvement rates in the plant, and we provide further evidence of this link by detailing the case example of the award winner. Our survey also shows that supply management appears to be a common problem area for the factories participating in the Top Usine award, including the best ones.     

Situated Knowledge and Learning in Dispersed Teams

This qualitative field study explores how geographically dispersed teams learn and accomplish challenging work by drawing on knowledge situated in the multiple physical locales they span. We propose the construct of situated knowledge as important for understanding the learning process in dispersed teams. Data collected on seven development projects, each spanning multiple sites, reveal that situated knowledge is at the same time a valuable resource and a source of communication difficulty for dispersed teams. We find that, because their members understand and participate in locale–specific practices, dispersed teams can easily access and use unique locale–specific knowledge resources to resolve problems that arise in those same locales. However, when dispersed teams need knowledge situated at a site other than where the problem occurred, they must first recognize and adjust for locale–specific practices within which that knowledge is embedded before they can use it. The paper reports on analyses of 44 learning episodes that involved identifying and engaging situated knowledge, and draws from these data to identify implications for research and practice.     

Marital and fertility careers of Russian women born between 1910 and 1934

Women born in Russia in the early decades of this century grew up in a period characterized by profound societal changes. Their lives were affected by often devastating events, in particular World War II, that ravaged society when they were entering their childbearing years. This note presents a detailed demographic analysis of the marital and fertility careers of women born between 1910 and 1934 based on individual retrospective life histories, collected in the most recent (5 percent) 1994 microcensus of the Russian Federation. It assesses the influence of external events on age at first marriage, widowhood, divorce, childlessness, parity, and age at birth. A comparison with younger cohorts shows that the societal disturbances had strong temporary effects. However, the final outcomes were not influenced very much: completed fertility continued its slow, secular decline.     

Helping a Victim or Helping the Victim: Altruism and Identifiability

Although it has been claimed that people care more about identifiable than statistical victims, demonstrating this identifiable victim effect has proven difficult because identification usually provides information about a victim, and people may respond to the information rather than to identification per se. We show that a very weak form of identifiability—determining the victim without providing any personalizing information—increases caring. In the first, laboratory study, subjects were more willing to compensate others who lost money when the losers had already been determined than when they were about to be. In the second, field study, people contributed more to a charity when their contributions would benefit a family that had already been selected from a list than when told that the family would be selected from the same list.     

Prenatal child abuse risk assessment: a preliminary validation study

Workers need an efficient prenatal screener that can identify mothers at greatest risk of child abuse. Existing risk assessment methods are often invasive and difficult to administer. This study assessed child abuse risk in a sample of 49 expectant mothers using the Brigid Collins Risk Screener (BCRS). At three months postpartum, high-risk mothers scored significantly lower on the quality of infants' physical, social, and emotional environments than moderate or low-risk mothers. BCRS appears to offer a noninvasive, efficient approach to assessing risk of child abuse.     

Approximating the Independence Number and the Chromatic Number in Expected Polynomial Time

The independence number of a graph and its chromatic number are known to be hard to approximate. Due to recent complexity results, unless coRP = NP, there is no polynomial time algorithm which approximates any of these quantities within a factor of n ^1– for graphs on n vertices.We show that the situation is significantly better for the average case. For every edge probability p = p(n) in the range n ^–1/2+ p 3/4, we present an approximation algorithm for the independence number of graphs on n vertices, whose approximation ratio is O((np)^1/2/log n) and whose expected running time over the probability space G(n, p) is polynomial. An algorithm with similar features is described also for the chromatic number.A key ingredient in the analysis of both algorithms is a new large deviation inequality for eigenvalues of random matrices, obtained through an application of Talagrand's inequality.