Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of Fayol's ideas on both British management thought and practice. Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents a schematic which seeks to illustrate the links between the various strands of scientific management theory,...

Purpose – Motivated by the call of the Congress for Industrial Organizations (CIO) for greater labour involvement in management (a call informed by the principles of the Taylor Society), US business launched a crusade in 1944 under the banner, “The Right to Manage”. The purpose of this...

Classical (rationalistic) management science is based on an image of what constitutes scientific practice. However, the arena from which this image emanates has moved on quite considerably. As to what now constitutes science, we are drawn to the fact that the idea of an autarkic subject...

Centers on motivation in work organizations, yesterday, today and tomorrow. To retain qualified employees in an organization and to maintain a satisfactory type of role performance, people’s experiences in the system must be rewarding, particularly if they have freedom to move in and out of...

Reflects on the classical administrative approach to strategic management. Discusses how theoretically prescribed steps for improving the organization’s functions of supplies management, sales management, supply chain management and total quality management are rooted in the scientific...

In this paper we study a challenging call center operation problem. The goal of our analysis is to identify an optimal policy for allocating tasks to agents. As a first step, we discuss promising randomized policies and use stochastic approximation for finding the optimal randomized policy when...

Over the past ten years there has been a massive growth in call centres worldwide. These centres are said to represent the most dynamic growth area in white-collar employment internationally since the mid 1990s. Yet the footloose and global nature of the industry means that jobs will always be...

The issue of precarious employment has gained increasing currency over recent years, as OECD countries have shifted away from traditional standard employment models. Nevertheless, there has been little empirical research on the experiences of nonstandard workers and the links that can be...