otal Quality Management (TQM) has become a frequently used term in discussions concerning quality. The international and national competitive environment is in a process of constant change by the globalization of markets and the increase interdependence of economic agents. This process of change has brought increase demands on the organizations’ competitiveness and the customers have gained …
At a time when the United States faces tremendous pressure from global competition, and the voices of external customers are growing louder and stronger, the quest for quality has never been more urgent. The very survival of organizations is acutely in jeopardy. The notion of quality has gone from being a socially provocative one to being a deliberate strategy for long-term viability. In t…
The rise of the quality profession as a specialty within business coincided with the increased complexity of business enterprises. In simpler times, when goods and services were provided by individual artisans, elaborate quality systems were unnecessary. An individual producer could simply compare customer requirements to his or her work and estimate its value. The rise of complex and larg…
When I wrote the first edition of Total Quality Management in 1988, there were very few books on the subject. Since its publication the interest in TQM and business performance improvement has exploded. There are now many texts on TQM and its various aspects, including business/operational excellence, business process management, Six Sigma and Lean manufacturing based approaches
Econometric modelling has long been an integral part of the academic and policy- making scene in Singapore and has contributed in important ways to enhancing our understanding of key relationships and interlinkages in the economy. This in turn has formed the basis for deeper and more valuable discussions of macroeconomic policy issues. Indeed, the practice of econometric modelling has evolved …
where f is the objective function, x represents the decision variables, and Θ is the feasible region or constraint set. All of the chapters with the exception of the final one basically address this problem in some form. As in the deterministic optimization domain, one dichotomy is whether the decision variables are discrete (ordered or unordered, finite or infinite) or continuous, or a mixt…
This book presents the main macroeconomic models used in the central banks of the euro area. These include models of individual countries, multi-country models and aggregate euro-area models. In my view the important contribution of this volume is that it is the first attempt to provide a systematic comparison of these models in terms of their structures, main features and properties. In line w…
In recent years economists have come to realise that social norms and norm-driven behaviour – such as notions of fairness, willingness to be generous towards strangers or cooperate with them, willingness to trust strangers and reciprocate others’ trust – play a crucial role in a variety of economic transactions and have implications for economic theories. There have been a lot of innovati…
The present book is the outcome from the third European Meeting of Applied Evolutionary Economics (EMAEE) which took place in April 2003 at the University of Augsburg. The conference was entitled as this volume ‘Applied Evolutionary Economics and the Knowledge-based Economies’. The different contributions of this book are a selection of conference papers and deal with various aspects of kno…
The question of intangibles is very current. The rapid growth of service activities over the last twenty years testifies to the fact that intangibles are a critical issue for corporate management. In addition, the industrial activities themselves are dematerialised: companies allocate as many resources to pre- and post productive tasks as they do to production activities strictly speaking.…
We have entered a new era in the evolution of organizational life in which all of us can be agents capable of transforming the direction and flow of events. The immense forces of the technological, societal, and global changes resulted in a variety of new terms and labels that attempted to capture the changing work-life reality: post-industrial society, the information revolution, the postc…
Accordingly, my strong hypothesis going into this research project was that the emphasis on short-term budgetary targets – a pivotal aspect of the slightly clumsy term Reliance on Accounting Performance Measures (RAPM) – is one key barrier to a strong long-term growth orientation of the management at the researched company.
Modeling Count Data is written for the practicing researcher who has a reason to analyze and draw sound conclusions from modeling count data. More specifically, it is written for an analyst who needs to construct a count response model but is not sure how to proceed.