Control your inventory in a world of lean retailing

As retailers adopt lean retailing practices, manufacturers are feeling the pinch. Retailers no longer place large seasonal orders for goods in advance-instead, they require ongoing replenishment of stock, forcing manufacturers to predict demand and then hold substantial inventories indefinitely. Manufacturers now carry the cost of inventory risk--the possibility that demand will dry up and goods will have to be sold below cost. And as product proliferation increases, customer demand becomes harder to predict. Most manufacturers apply one inventory policy for all stock-keeping units in a product line. But the inventory demand for SKUs within the same product line can vary significantly. SKUs with high volume typically have little variation in weekly sales, while slow-selling SKUs can vary enormously in weekly sales. The greater the variation, the larger the inventory the manufacturer must hold relative to an SKU's expected weekly sales. By differentiating inventory policies at the SKU level, manufacturers can reduce inventories for the high-volume SKUs and increase them for the low-volume ones--and thereby improve the profit-ability of the entire line. SKU-level differentiation can also be applied to sourcing strategies. Instead of producing all the SKUs for a product line at a single location, either offshore at low cost or close to market at higher cost, manufacturers can typically do better by going for a mixed allocation. Low-variation goods should be produced mainly offshore, while high-variation goods are best made close to markets.     

Analysing change in an Accident and Emergency Department: organisational routines as ongoing and emergent sociomaterial accomplishments

Bringing together insights from Organisation Studies and Science and Technology Studies this paper provides a multilevel analysis of a planned change initiative. Focusing on different layers of this change the emergent ambiguities, multiplicities and tensions are explored serving to highlight the ‘back stage complexities’ often hidden by the ‘front stage slickness’ (Moser and Law) of organisational routines.     

Boards of Directors and the Adoption of a CEO Performance Evaluation Process: Agency — and Institutional — Theory Perspectives

Using both agency and institutional theories, we examined factors associated with the board's adoption of a formal process for evaluating the performance of the corporation's chief executive officer (CEO). Our sample was drawn from the hospital industry. Results show that an independent board chairperson, the level of market competition and the degree of managed care penetration were significant predictors of whether or not the board had adopted a formal CEO evaluation process. These findings imply that initiatives to improve governance effectiveness based on agency theory should take into account the institutional environment of corporate boards.     

Comparing Malta and USA police officers’ individual and organizational support on outcomes

This paper investigates the quality of support for police officers in the USA and Malta to use as protection against stress. The authors found a significantly different organizational work context for police officers doing the same tasks. Police officers in both countries would benefit from upskilling in psychological capital and police managers require upskilling in management training as a means of increasing support for police to reduce the impact of stress.     

Flexible pension take-up in social security

This paper studies the redistribution and welfare effects of increasing the flexibility of individual pension take-up. We use an overlapping-generations model with Beveridgean pay-as-you-go pensions and heterogeneous individuals who differ in ability and lifespan. We find that introducing flexible pension take-up can induce a Pareto improvement when the initial pension scheme contains within-cohort redistribution and induces early retirement. Such a Pareto improving reform entails the application of uniform actuarial adjustment of pension entitlements based on average lifespan. Introducing actuarial non-neutrality that stimulates later retirement further improves such a flexibility reform.     

Insolvency practice in the field of football

This paper is concerned with UK insolvency practice. It considers how the field of insolvency has developed since the passing of the Insolvency Act 1986 through a Bourdieusian theoretical lens. The case of the administration of Gretna football club is presented as a “special case of what is possible” to enable one to consider “the deepest logic of the social world” (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 4). Football is a field with its own complex insolvency rules which are incommensurable with the Insolvency Act. The case therefore presents an opportunity to reveal that whether insolvency laws are applied or not is determined by a complex socio-political process. Through revealing the socio-political process the paper problematises the notion that insolvency practice is neutral.     

Why should I share my knowledge? A multiple foci of commitment perspective

Knowledge‐intensive firms need to leverage their individual knowledge assets via knowledge sharing to create collective knowledge resources. This process is, however, in the control of the knowledge worker. We explore this personal and emotive quality of knowledge sharing by asking: ‘How does employee commitment impact on knowledge sharing?’ We study professional service firms operating in cross‐boundary environments and examine the impact of commitment to the organisation, profession, team and client on knowledge sharing. The article contributes directly to our understanding of the interrelationship between (a) the types and foci of commitment and (b) bidirectional knowledge sharing.