Retail is now a significant part of the UK economy, accounting for £256 billion in sales and one-third of all consumer spending (Skillsmart, 2007). Indeed, it is the largest private sector employer in the UK, employing three million workers, or 1 in 10 of the working population. Retail though...

Companies increasingly seek solutions to the corporate/local dichotomies perceived to be a feature of more traditional approaches to managing across national boundaries. At the human resource level, the rhetoric of transnationalism emphasizes integration being achieved through 'soft' mechanisms,...

Purpose:- This paper aims to demonstrate the performance benefits of adopting a business process perspective to managing a business and, through grounded research, propose a revised business process architecture which builds upon recent advances in business process thinking....

Empirical studies of strategizing face contradictory pressures. Ethnographic approaches are attractive, and typically expected since we need to collect data on strategists and their practices within context. We argue, however, that today's large, multinational, and highly diversified...

It is well known that, given observable data for a competing risk problem, there is always an independent model consistent with the data. It has been pointed out, however, that this independent model does not necessarily have to be one with proper marginals. One purpose of this paper is to...

Within reliability theory, identifiability problems arise through competing risks. If we have a series system of several components, and if that system is replaced or repaired to as good as new on failure, then the different component failures represent competing risks for the system. It is well...

Much operational reliability data available, e.g., in the nuclear industry, is heavily right-censored by preventive maintenance. The common methods for dealing with right-censored data (total time on test statistic, Kaplan-Meier estimator, adjusted rank methods) assume the s-independent...

This paper combines the use of (binary) logistic regression and stochastic frontier analysis to assess the operational effectiveness of the UK Coastguard (Maritime Rescue) coordination centres over the period 1995-1998. In particular, the rationale for the Government's decision - confirmed in...

Using a survey, this paper provides information about the current state of performance management (appraisal) from a sample of UK-based EFQM-affiliated organizations. It particularly focuses on several critical issues of performance management in the context of TQM including: the effectiveness...

There is a plethora of literature to suggest that even in quality-oriented organizational contexts, the approach driving performance appraisal is fundamentally in conflict with Total Quality Management (TQM) precepts, which put heavy emphasis on systems-level features of performance management....