Construction and Deconstruction of Essence in Representating Social Groups: Identity Projects, Stereotyping, and Racism

Projecting essence onto a social category means to think, talk, and act as if the category were a discrete natural kind and as if its members were all endowed with the same immutable attributes determined by the category's essence. Essentializing may happen implicitly or on purpose in representing ingroups and outgroups. We argue that essentializing is a versatile representational tool (a) that is used to create identity in groups with chosen membership in order to make the group appear as a unitary entity, (b) that outsiders often draw on a group's essentialist self-construal in their judgements about the groups, (c) that judgements about members of forced social categories are often informed by essentialist thinking that easily switches to discrimination and racism, and (d) that under certain historical and political conditions members of social categories and groups may contest their essentialized identity, such as parts of the feminist movement, or that they may attempt to reconstruct an essentialized identity, such as parts of the homosexual movement or the largely defunct European nobility. Besides explicit political and power interests, we see communication processes and language use as a tacit force driving essentialization of social categories.     

Load-oriented manufacturing control just-in-time production for job shops

The paper describes the principles of load-oriented manufacturing control as a new solution for job shops and its successful implementation in a pump-manufacturing factory. The idea of load-oriented manufacturing control is to limit and balance work-in-process inventory on a level as low as possible in order to accomplish a high work-centre utilization as well as a rapid and in-time flow of orders. As the new system keeps actual lead times on a planned level in a self-regulating way, it allows reliable due-date scheduling. Furthermore it points out the bottlenecks and performs applicable mid-term and short-term capacity planning.     

Memory and (Dissemi) Nation: Völkerschlachtdenkmal and Deutsche Bücherei at Leipzig 1813/1913 Between Real Bones and Symbolic Letters1

Abstract At Leipzig, the monument to the victorious battle against Napoleon in 1813 was inaugurated one hundred years after the event. The article raises the questions: how far is the authority of the monument dependent on material relics (bones) and what correspondences are there between symbolic commemoration and the infrastructure of national memory as represented by the neighbouring German Library at Leipzig. The dimension of sacred space and time’ is set against the hardware of agencies of memory, while an archaeological perception serves methodologically as a challenge to historical discourse in processing the material or textual archives of the past.     

Models,methods and tools for interorganizational logistics operations

Enterprise modelling is today one of the key techniques to improve the performances of an enterprise. This paper first defines enterprise modelling techniques as compared to BPR techniques. Then the latest developments in GRAI methodology are presented. Finally, examples of industrial applications are presented for three methods: GIM (GRAI Integrated Method) for re-engineering, GIMSOFT for the choice of an ERP software package and ECOGRAI for the design and implementation of performance indicator system.