Eleonora Masini on the empowerment of women

Eleonora Barbieri Masini's lifetime contributions as visionary sociologist and pioneering futurist are well known. Less well known, perhaps, are her roles as vital catalyst in organizing comparative research on the role and status of women and as activist leader in efforts to end the exploitation and subordination of women and to create a future world of equality, freedom, and social justice. In this article, examples of Masini's work on—and for—the empowerment of women are given.     

Achieving competitive capabilities in e-services

What implications does the Internet have for service operations strategy? How can business performance of e-service companies be improved in today's knowledge-based economy? These research questions are the subject of this paper. We propose a model that links the e-service company's knowledge-based competencies with their competitive capabilities. Drawing from the current literature, our analysis suggests that services that strategically build a portfolio of knowledge-based competencies, namely human capital, structural capital, and absorptive capacity have more operations-based options, than their counterparts who are less apt to invest. We assume that the combinative capabilities of service quality, delivery, flexibility, and cost are determined by the investment in intellectual capital. Arguably, with the advent of the Internet, different operating models (e.g., bricks-and-mortar, clicks-and-mortar, or pure dot-com) have different strategic imperatives in terms of knowledge-based competencies. Thus, the new e-operations paradigm can be viewed as a configuration of knowledge-based competencies and capabilities.     

The deployment of temporary production workers in assembly operations: a case study of the hidden costs of learning and forgetting

The dynamics of workforce skill levels has a considerable impact on plant-level performance that is commonly overlooked by managers of manufacturing operations. In this study, we present a discrete event simulation model inspired by and validated in an actual manufacturing setting that includes short product life cycles, mid-volume production quantities, and a production environment consisting of assembly, inspection and testing.The effect of worker skill dynamics is analyzed using a factorial experimental design that contrasts the use of temporary versus permanent workers on manufacturing cost performance. The manufacturing costs assessed include labor, inspection and testing. The cost of reworking a defect is captured as an increase in the labor consumption. Materials costs are not assessed. At the core of the analysis, it is assumed that temporary workers have relatively less skill and therefore have higher average production times, higher average defect rates associated with their assembly activity, and lower rates of learning. In addition, the variance of the production time is higher for the temporary workers. Despite these indicators of performance problems, temporary workers may be used because of the considerably lower wage rate compared to permanent employees.Our in-depth case analyses shows that assigning skilled permanent workers to upstream build operations was superior to other policies deploying temporary workers, regardless of lot size or product complexity. Attesting to the importance of the labor mix component of manufacturing strategy, workforce deployment policies tended to dominate product switching frequency (a proxy variable for lot size and product mix) in impacting costs.