Production & Quality Control Management books

This volume is intended to foster new ways of thinking about quality in terms of how it is researched and practiced. With the high demands placed on organizations to provide high quality products and services to their customers, it is appropriate that research begins to address many of the questions that have arisen concerning quality in organizations. The chapters in this volume focus on two major themes: the role of suppliers in improving quality (supplier quality awards, integrating suppliers in new product development, and supplier management), and organizational aspects and how they relate to quality (culture, organizational citizenship, and agency theory).

The series "Advances in the Management of Organizational Quality" is designed to stimulate thinking on quality-related issues and to facilitate bringing quality into the mainstream of organizational effectiveness. This volume spans a broad range of topics from the transference of quality practices across multinational boundaries to the role of performance feedback systems in achieving quality-based objectives. The papers push the boundaries of traditional conceptualizations of quality and shed new light on important topics.

The competence-based perspective on strategy and management emerged in the 1990s as a new approach to developing strategy and management theory and practice. In the past decade, the focus on organizational competences - and the resources, capabilities, and processes that create competences - has provided a highly productive "broad church" for theory development, research, and practice in both strategic and general management. Authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners working within the competence perspective, the papers in this volume contribute to developing a better theoretical and practical understanding of interfirm interactions that significantly affect an organization's competences.The papers present both theoretical developments and empirical research based on a variety of case studies and other research in diverse industrial and geographical contexts. The papers in this volume develop three themes. Part I includes papers that address the key issues of managing activities in an organization's competence building and leveraging processes that span the boundaries of two organizations. The papers in Part II investigate the role of networks and strategic alliances in competence building and leveraging processes. Part III presents papers that investigate competitive interactions between firms in their competence leveraging activities.

This book contains selected papers first presented at the "Canada-United States Business Conference" held at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, on April 11-12, 2003. The set of 18 chapters in this book are grouped into three major sections. Part I deals with regional economic integration in North America, including papers on the strategies of multinational enterprises and exporting firms. In Part II, five chapters deal with financial integration in North America and the issues of a common currency.Finally, specific industry sectors and issues of public policy across the Canada-U.S. border are examined in Part III. They include: agriculture; softwood lumber; transportation; and electricity. The key issues of current interest and concern examined include: cross border trade and security - of particular importance in the post-9/11 environment; NAFTA at age ten; and the impact of the Free Trade of the Americas (FTAA) on NAFTA; and, the FTAA and civil society. The key policy areas discussed included regulation, labor mobility, productivity, and specific sectoral issues (energy, transportation, etc.). In addition to this examination of key research issues, authors also explore managerial and public policy implications of their findings.