Manufacturing Rationality

Management is a powerful mode of thought and code of conduct in the modern world, closely associated with the American way and a natural extension of economic progress. This is a book about the history of management and the origin of managerial rationality in the United States.

Through careful analysis of contemporary records in the engineering profession, the author shows how management invented itself and carved its own domain in the face of hostility and resistance from both manufacturers and workers. The book demonstrates how the new language and rhetoric of management emerged, and how it confronted and replaced the language of traditional capitalism: "system" instead of "individuals"; "jobs" instead of "natural rights"; "planning" instead of "free initiatives".

A collection of outstanding scholarship applying rational choice theory to three principal fields of political inquiry: comparative politics, international relations and political philosophy.

This is the first book to examine the growth and phenomenon of a securitized and criminalized compliance society which relies increasingly on intelligence-led and predictive technologies to control future risks, crimes, and security threats. It articulates the emergence of a ‘compliance-industrial complex’ that synthesizes regulatory capitalism and surveillance capitalism to impose new regimes of power and control, as well as new forms of subjectivity subservient to the ‘operating system’ of a pre-crime society. Looking at compliance beyond frameworks of business management, corporate governance, law, and accounting, it looks as it as a social phenomenon, instrumental in the pluralization and privatization of policing, where the private intelligence, private security, and big tech companies are being concentrated at the very core of compliance, and hence, governance of the social. The critical book draws on transversal, rather than interdisciplinary, approaches and integrates disparate perspectives, inspired by works in critical criminology, critical algorithm studies, critical management studies, as well as social anthropology and philosophy.

Providing a reasonable level of profitability through productivity is - and will remain - one of the fundamental tasks of the management teams of any production company. Manufacturing Cost Policy Deployment (MCPD) and Methods Design Concept (MDC): The Path to Competitiveness contains two new methodologies to improving the productivity and profitability of production systems that continuously increase competitiveness: Manufacturing Cost Policy Deployment (MCPD) and Methods Design Concept (MDC). Both MCPD and MDC are the result of long-time synthesis and distillation, being implemented successfully, totally or partially, in many companies. The MCPD system, developed by Alin Posteucă, is a manufacturing cost policy aimed at continuous cost improvement through a systemic and systematic approach. The MCPD is a methodology that improves the production flow driven by the need for Manufacturing Cost Improvement (MCI) for both existing and future products through setting targets and means to continuously improve production process productivity for each product family cost. The MDC, developed by Shigeyasu Sakamoto, design the effective manufacturing methods using a tool of engineering steps identifying ideas for increasing productivity called KAIZENSHIRO (improvable value as a target). The MDC results on production methods lead to effectiveness of work measurement for performance (P) and to knowledge and improvement of production control and planning as utilization (U), in order to achieve labor target costs. The combination of MCPD and MDC methodologies can provide a unique approach for the managers who are seeking new ways for increasing productivity and profitability to increase the competitive level of their manufacturing company.

Decision and Decision-maker in an Industrial Environment developed around the observation that two different decision-makers, faced with the same problem, may not make the same decision. The book proposes explanations for this, ranging from the wholly rational to the irrational, and analyzes different factors in decision-making, such as the intention of the decision-maker, the environment in which their decision is made or the process leading to decision-making. While the common belief is that everything in an industrial environment stems from reasoned decisions, analysis of common practice shows that this is not always the case. This book offers an original perspective by presenting the decision making mechanism from the point of view of the decision maker and their handling of a specific decision-making problem. To learn more about the decision-maker’s motivations when faced with these situations, the authors provide a review of the history of decisionmaking and the major trends in decision-making theory. The concepts and methods are presented with illustrations based on the use of an MES, an industrial management software package.

Ideas linked to rational choice theory started to appear frequently in the economics literature in the 1960s and 1970s, but the attention given to rationality widened to include commentators presenting far-reaching appraisals and critiques. The literature grew to a steady flow and spanned diverse areas of thought including socialist and `rational-choice Marxist' assessments, and other approaches including institutional, sociological, psychological, ethical, choice-theoretical, strategic, and game-theoretical treatments of rationality. This diversity of literature led to the creation of this volume. What does rationality mean? Was there some common core of meaning that held all of these seemingly disparate developments together, or were there discernable schools of thought with peculiarities that set them clearly apart from one another? The essays in this volume illustrate that diversity, and despite the variety of approaches there remains a common core of meaning that accommodates not so much a radically different set of concepts of rationality as a highly variegated array of methods and approaches to this subject. Contributors address topics of their choice on the concept of rationality in economics, and the selection of these contributors is meant to represent a variety of backgrounds and approaches.

Describing the field, spanning individual, organisation societal and cultural perspectives in a cross-disciplinary manner, this is the premier reference tool for students lecturers, academics and practitioners to gather knowledge about a range of important topics from the perspective of organisation studies.

An alternative framework for examining and explaining the widening economic and social stratification within United States society is provided in this book. Until now, two points of view - Marxist and industrialist - have dominated the discourse. Joel I Nelson offers a comprehensive explanation of inequality and locates its source in the transformation of capitalism, free market ideology and the evolution of US business.