The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

THE NEED FOR QUALITY The first thing that we need to consider, in any organization, is that quality is the most important thing. The quality of your work defines you.  Whoever you are,  Whatever you do,  I can find the same products and services cheaper somewhere else. But your quality is your signature. Developing and delivering high quality products and services means that you are doing things correctly from the beginning. As a consequence, you are reducing the need for additional services, from verification to warranty.

Total quality management.

https://ir.nctu.edu.tw:443/bitstream/11536/100881/1/982410H009004.PDF

國際期刊 Transportation Research-Part E---Logistics and Transportation Review 特刊編輯補助

Purpose – Global sourcing can bring many benefits to organisations, but it can also expose them to a number of risks. The purpose of this study is to understand how managers assess global sourcing risks across the entire supply chain and what actions they take to mitigate those risks.Design/methodology/approach – A multiple case study approach was used, involving 15 cases in seven different industries. Each case consisted of interviews with managers directly involved in the global sourcing decision, supported by documentary evidence. A cross‐case analysis was conducted to analyse patterns across different industries.Findings – The study revealed that most companies do not have a structured supply chain risk management and mitigation system. Nevertheless they do use a number of informal approaches to cope with risk. The paper proposes that a multidisciplinary approach is required when dealing with global sourcing risks. It presents a classification of risks covering four categories: supply risk, process an...

Approaches to managing global sourcing risk

This book is a strategic look at consumer behavior in order to guide successful marketing activities. The Wheel of Consumer Analysis is the organizing factor in the book. The four major parts of the wheel are consumer affect and cognition, consumer behavior, consumer environment, and marketing strategy. URI http://dspace.fue.edu.eg/xmlui/handle/123456789/4317 Description Includes bibliographical references and index. xxii, 778 p. : Collections Books Summaries [1560] DSpace software copyright © 2002-2016 DuraSpace Contact Us | Send Feedback All rights reserved to Consumer behavior: Building marketing strategy  

Consumer Behavior: Building Marketing Strategy

Today, customer satisfaction is an important issue for organizations. Being a winner or loser is based on the percentage of customers that they have retained. This is why many scholars and researchers have continually stressed the importance of customer satisfaction. On the other hand, customer is one of the most important stakeholders in any organization because, without the customer, the organization probably will not succeed. So a customer behavioral intentions and responses, is one of the main concepts in the marketing literature has been studied. The objective of the study was to investigate the effect of customer satisfaction on word of mouth communication. Data were collected with questionnaire instruments. Model was developed and tested with structural equation model using data collected from the 412 Iranian bank customers. The results show that employee competence has a negative effect on word of mouth communication. Reliability has a positive effect on word of mouth communication and physical evidence has positive effect on word of mouth communication.

The Effect of Customer Satisfaction on Word of Mouth Communication

In this paper, using supply chain operational reference, the reliability evaluation of available relationships in supply chain is investigated. For this purpose, in the first step, the chain under investigation is divided into several stages including first and second suppliers, initial and final customers, and the producing company. Based on the formed relationships between these stages, the supply chain system is then broken down into different subsystem parts. The formed relationships between the stages are based on the transportation of the orders between stages. Paying attention to the system elements' location, which can be in one of the five forms of series namely parallel, series/parallel, parallel/series, or their combinations, we determine the structure of relationships in the divided subsystems. According to reliability evaluation scales on the three levels of supply chain, the reliability of each chain is then calculated. Finally, using the formulas of calculating the reliability in combined systems, the reliability of each system and ultimately the whole system is investigated.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/2251-712X-8-22.pdf

The investigation of supply chain's reliability measure: a case study

Article history: Received January 22 2014 Received in Revised Format June 6 2014 Accepted June 12 2014 Available online June 17 2014 Selection of robots from the several proposed alternatives is a very important and tedious task. Decision makers are not limited to one method and several methods have been proposed for solving this problem. This study presents Polygons Area Method (PAM) as a multi attribute decision making method for robot selection problem. In this method, the maximum polygons area obtained from the attributes of an alternative robot on the radar chart is introduced as a decisionmaking criterion. The results of this method are compared with other typical multiple attribute decision-making methods (SAW, WPM, TOPSIS, and VIKOR) by giving two examples. To find similarity in ranking given by different methods, Spearman’s rank correlation coefficients are obtained for different pairs of MADM methods. It was observed that the introduced method is in good agreement with other well-known MADM methods in the robot selection problem. © 2014 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved

/pdf/selection-of-industrial-robots-using-the-polygons-area-2mndphs1vv.pdf

Selection of industrial robots using the Polygons area method

In recent years, a various of novel techniques for measuring project performance have been proposed. The Earned Duration Management (EDM) is the most recent technique which uses time-based data exclusively. In this paper, as the uncertainty is inherent in real-life activities, linguistic terms are used to describe progress of activities rather to evaluate it deterministically and a fuzzy approach is applied on EDM methodology. The proposed approach derived development of new fuzzy indices which are capable of measuring project duration performance under uncertainty. A small example illustrates how the proposed model can be employed in reality.

Project Duration Performance Measurement By Fuzzy Approach under Uncertainty

Air traffic management is an important job and often faces various problems. One of the most common problems in this area is the issue of aircraft sequencing, which is a multi-dimensional problem due to the large number of flights and their different locational conditions. Previously proposed models Based on First Come, First Service(FCFS) do not takes time factors into account and result on increasing of the delay penalties. In this regard, this article proposes a model in which time is one the managing factors and additional cost due to delay is removed. The proposed model improves the efficiency of flight scheduling, reduces time costs, minimizes delays and reduces fuel consumption. In this model a multi-objective optimization function is used and some expenses such as the cost of apron and parking are reduced. In this study, using the proposed model data set of Shahid Hasheminejad International Airport in Mashhad was analyzed; also they were analyzed using a published model. The results show 5% improvement in the accuracy when the data set were analyzed by proposed model

http://www.journal-aprie.com/article_130160_17a1f771557276fcb981a3187a50fc17.pdf

Houshang Taghizadeh

Papers

The Effect of Customer Satisfaction on Word of Mouth Communication

The investigation of supply chain's reliability measure: a case study

Selection of industrial robots using the Polygons area method

Project Duration Performance Measurement By Fuzzy Approach under Uncertainty

A multi-objective grey wolf optimization algorithm for aircraft landing problem