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Project ending phase is strategically important for organizations, but it has been largely neglected in previous research and practice. In this phase, the project manager is the executor of strategic moves and plays a paramount role in completing projects efficiently and other summarizing work, but the issues related to complicated work content, future career path, and work-family conflicts may rapidly increase the pressure on project managers at the same time. These stressors affect project managers psychologically, physiologically, and behaviorally and inhibit project managers' capability from functioning well. Under this scenario, the purpose of the study is to empirically figure out the impact of project managers' participation in project ending, and their capability's contribution to project ending performance under pressure. This research identified six factors of project ending stressor, namely skill discretion, decision authority, job demands, job insecurity, job readjustment, and family support. A sample of 214 experienced project managers from different industries was collected, and structural equation modeling (SEM) was used. The results show that project managers play as coordinators among stakeholders in completing product handover and accumulating knowledge asset, thus indirectly enhancing organizational strategic value integration in project ending. Completing product handover is more efficient in terms of strategic integration than accumulating knowledge assets. When the stressors begin to pile up, the contribution of project managers' capability will be hindered, but only the process of accumulating knowledge assets is affected. Thereby, project managers under pressure tend to first lose control of the task with less strategic importance. This study supplements insights to related theory in project management and human resource management fields and also provides practical suggestions for project management and personnel management in project-based organizations.

The aerospace industry ranks among the largest manufacturing industries in the world facing a significant growing phase as well as an increased competition. This paper addresses the scheduling of a set of jobs in a paced assembly line in presence of uncertainty affecting the availability of production resources, stemming from the assembly process in the aircraft manufacturing industry. The production problem is modeled as a no-wait paced permutation flow shop and solved providing a robust scheduling solution minimizing the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) of the residual work content, i.e., the amount of workload that cannot be completed during the cycle time in the stations, due to a lack of available resources. A branch-and-bound approach is developed and applied to randomly generated instances as well as to an industrial problem related to the production of aircrafts.

Shipbuilding projects are gaining in complexity and volume. To face this demand shipyards tend to share work content and constitute shipbuilding networks. The paper describes an approach to design these project specific shipbuilding networks. The approach focusses on the idea of evolving core competences for each shipyard in the network. Implementation of competence profiles for shipyards combined with profiles of capacity demand for shipbuilding projects enable to reveal deficits in a shipbuilding network and deduce possible adjustments. To evaluate network configurations and possible adjustments considering the dynamic production sequence in shipbuilding, a simulation model for shipbuilding networks is introduced.

Aircraft manufacturers are challenged with increasing demand requiring customers to place orders months in advance respect to the time aircrafts will be operative. Consequently, customers decide aircraft’s size but have additional time to select cabin fittings. Nevertheless, manufacturers must promise a delivery time, regardless real aircraft configuration and resource availability at the production sites. We propose a novel framework for order allocation and sequencing in aircraft manufacturing minimizing the risk for manufacturing costs. Different degrees of uncertainty affecting products, work content and resources are considered as time advances and decisions to be taken change. An industrial application is also presented.

As the most serious phase of construction pollution, the earthwork construction phase emits a large amount of dust into the environment and causes serious health hazards to construction workers. To reveal the characteristics of the health risks to workers caused by the dust generated during the earthwork construction phase, to polish the evaluation system of health damage in construction projects, and to improve the occupational health of workers, in this study, a health risk evaluation system was established based on the measured data and difference in the working contents of the works in the earthwork construction phase. Such an evaluation system consists of both measurements of dust exposure and the quantification of health risks. In this paper, the actual dust exposure of different workers was firstly monitored based on the differential characteristics of the work content of practitioners in the earthwork construction phase. The disability-adjusted life year (DALY) was then adopted to quantify health risks and brought them economic significance through the willingness to pay (WTP). The said evaluation system was applied to the earthwork construction phase of certain house construction to obtain dust health damage values for different work types and to conduct comparative analysis. The dust suppression effect of the spray system and application of protective masks in construction work were considered for the first time. During the construction phase of earthwork, the health risks of workers caused by dust pollution were increased. Moreover, there were obvious differences between the various types of work. Wearing protective masks and spraying systems could effectively reduce health risks. Overall, the protective mask and spray dust control system reduced the health risk by 67.54% and 38.56%, respectively, while the health risks for the use of both measures could be reduced by 76.89%. In addition, effective dust control measures were proposed according to the results of this study, which provide references for workers to strengthen dust-proof works. Using the methodology and results of this study, construction companies can systematically manage construction operations, consider the critical equipment to be used, and effectively manage dust generated from the construction site.

Differences in cycle-to-cycle work content in mixed-model assembly lines (MMAL) may increase exposure to risk factors of work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSD). This study investigated the effect of conveyor type and product mix/sequence in MMALs on joint loads and recovery time. An assembly task was simulated using 9 conveyor (continuous moving, synchronous indexing, and asynchronous indexing) and product mix/sequence (single product, 3 products with fixed sequence, and 3 products with random sequence) configurations. Results show the self-paced conveyor resulted in the least frequency of reaching. However, subjects did not use the available time for recovery and worked at a faster pace than in the continuous and synchronous indexing conveyors. In conclusion, an asynchronous indexing conveyor provided workers the flexibility they needed to complete their job correctly without reaching but recovery time was not sufficient. Practitioner summary Cycle-to-cycle task variations in MMAL may increase workers’ risk of developing WMSDs. An asynchronous indexing conveyor, with a minimum work time built in, may allow workers to complete their job with less reaching outside the reach envelope while providing sufficient recovery time.

Background To improve working conditions and counteract nursing shortages, more knowledge is needed about the opportunities nurses have to carry out their work and what guide nurses’ work. The aim of this study was to use the ARIA guide to identify the opportunities and obstacles in nurse managers, registered specialist nurses and non-registered assistant nurses work in an operating department. Methods A descriptive case study design was performed in an operating department, comprising structured individual and group interviews according to work content analyses with nurse managers, registered specialist nurses and assistant nurses. Interviews were analysed in terms of predetermined aspects regarding working conditions and criteria for performance obstacles. Extracts from documents stating goals and registered data supplemented the interviews. Results The findings show that the daily surgery schedule, not the goal documents, guided daily work. An over-optimistic surgery schedule with unplanned changes and cancellations, over which the nurses had very little influence, as well as the time required to locate necessary equipment that was spread throughout the ward, resulted in nurses rushing through medical records and other preparations rather than preparing calmly for surgery. Although the registered specialist nurses and assistant nurses considered quality of care to be highly important, no standardised evaluations on quality of care were performed. Conclusion The study reveals the importance of a functioning physical work environment including storage, technical equipment supplies, and the positioning of technical equipment in operating rooms, in order for registered specialist and assistant nurses to perform their tasks well. Due to goal incongruence and performance obstacles, the nurses were often unable to reach their daily goals. Involving registered specialist nurses in the process of planning of the surgery schedule could facilitate their work to better match the prerequisites in the physical work environment and among available staff. In order for the Operating Department Goal Document to guide work, goals must be transformed into understandable, realistic, applicable and evaluable aims, and incorporated into daily work.

This article discusses the development of Taylorism from classical Taylorism to New Taylorism (Digital Taylorism) and leads to rethinking the development of Taylorism. The increasing individualization of products and shorter product life cycles lead to an increasing demand on the qualification of the workforce in production. With an increasing individualization, conventional methods of capacity-building, especially those based on the principles of division of labor and standardization of work content in production, are becoming impractical and inefficient. New areas of competence must be created in which employees will be able to plan and produce products in co-operation with the customer and handle the sales orders. This inevitably leads to a reversal of Taylorism.

Traditional approaches in construction project management assign each process to a trade contractor with an individual specialisation, and trades with the greatest work content (bottlenecks) have a significant influence on the progress rate of projects. A system with integrated processes, however, is able to function dynamically in response to variability in product demand and labour resources. This investigation aims to compare and contrast cross-training strategies that are applicable to off-site construction in order to create multi-skilled resources. To this end, the optimal number of additional skills was formulated as a constrained optimization problem. Then, production data from two prefabricated production facilities in Melbourne and Brisbane, Australia were used to construct a total of 1080 simulation experiments. Tangible performance metrics of systems were used to compare process integration strategies and use of multi-skilled resources. Findings show that choosing optimal process integration architecture depends on the level of capacity imbalance and processing time variability. This investigation optimises the decision making on process integration in off-site construction networks.

The predominant approach on machining is to manufacture a workpiece on a complex done-in-one machine tool. In contrast, the Cellular Manufacturing concept splits up the machining steps and distributes them sequentially to several simpler and cost-efficient machine tools with a higher manual workload. Both concepts are technically feasible, but the question which approach is favorable from an economic perspective is still open. This article first identifies relevant input factors like machining tasks, operator work content, labor and capital costs, etc. Available machine tools are grouped by a k-means cluster analysis, human tasks of operation are identified by an MTM-UAS analysis. Together with key performance indicators like ‘cell balancing efficiency’, all data are transferred into monetary values and combined to a static total cost comparison model. The paper closes with a validation on industrial parts and a sensitivity analysis of the results achieved.

Background The workforce is a key component of the nation's public health (PH) infrastructure, but little is known about the skills of local health department (LHD) workers to guide policy and planning. Purpose To profile a sample of LHD workers using classification schemes for PH work (the substance of what is done) and PH job titles (the labeling of what is done) to determine if work content is consistent with job classifications. Methods A secondary analysis was conducted on data collected from 2,734 employees from 19 LHDs using a taxonomy of 151 essential tasks performed, knowledge possessed, and resources available. Each employee was classified by job title using a schema developed by PH experts. The inter-rater agreement was calculated within job classes and congruence on tasks, knowledge, and resources for five exemplar classes was examined. Results The average response rate was 89%. Overall, workers exhibited moderate agreement on tasks and poor agreement on knowledge and resources. Job classes with higher agreement included agency directors and community workers; those with lower agreement were mid-level managers such as program directors. Conclusions Findings suggest that local PH workers within a job class perform similar tasks but vary in training and access to resources. Job classes that are specific and focused have higher agreement whereas job classes that perform in many roles show less agreement. The PH worker classification may not match employees' skill sets or how LHDs allocate resources, which may be a contributor to unexplained fluctuation in public health system performance.

We address the stochastic multi-mode resource-constrained project scheduling problem in the case where the project activities require multiple renewable resources, constrained by total availability. In our study, we introduce uncertainty by characterizing, in each activity, each required resource with a work content following some known distribution. Furthermore, the set of feasible resource allocations is a continuous and well defined interval of real values. In turn, any allocation must also comply with the resource maximum total availability at any point during the project execution. We propose a mathematical model that relies on a discrete and finite partition of the timespan when evaluating activity schedules and enforces equal durations yielded by each required resource, within each activity, in expectation. The objective is to determine the start times and the mode (defined by the resource allocations) which minimize the expected total project cost. We implemented a method relying upon two global optimization metaheuristics - the electromagnetic-like mechanism and the evolutionary algorithm to solve the problem.

The implications of thermodynamics for economic theory have been a source of debate for 40 years. Adopting the framing used in modern engineering rather than physics suggests that the market place has already recognised most of these thermodynamic truths as self-evident rather than challenging basic concepts. The exception is the relatively small market for heat where the idea of thermodynamic grade, conveniently represented by the exergy or available work content of a heat source, exposes inconsistencies especially in monopoly supply and economic instruments. Earlier commentators were not wrong in the thrust of their criticisms of economic theory but may have been overly elaborate in their attack.

Work content, working tools and spatial arrangements of the equipment as well as musculoskeletal complaints were studied for 69 employees of a fiscal office using questionnaires. In addition, a work-physiological field investigation regarding muscular strain and fatigue was performed during total working days under normal working conditions in the office for a subgroup of 13 subjects. Surface electromyograms (EMG) of 4 shoulder and arm muscles were recorded during the total working shift; simultaneously the workflow was documented applying an encoding procedure. At four points in time, acute musculoskeletal complaints were documented using a specific questionnaire. The work under study is characterised by a fast changing between the use of documents in paper form and the use of a computerised data processing system. Accordingly, spatial problems result for the concurrent arranging of the documents and the keyboard and mouse on the table within the eye focus and the reach. About 50% of the 69 persons indicated complaints for at least 8 days during the last year for the neck and the lower back and 30% for the thoracic region; 40% and 30% of the persons stated complaints for the right and left shoulder region, respectively. EMG analyses were performed for 11 of the 13 participants of the work-physiological part of the study. For the shoulder region, the highest myoelectrical activity was observed during paper work and for the forearm during mouse application. Time-related changes in the EMG amplitude and frequency spectrum were analysed in order to determine potential changes in the fatigue and force-production status. For several persons muscular fatigue was observed, in particular, for the hand extensor during keyboard operations and for the trapezius during paper work. For the major part of the persons, however, force decrease was found for all muscles under test. Persons with a decrease in myoelectrical activity in the shoulder region reported shoulder complaints less frequently than persons with constant or increasing activity. This finding suggests that persons with less number of complaints perform a self-adjustment of physical activity aiming for the avoidance of pain. It is therefore concluded that self-organisation of the work by the subjects, e.g. by changing the working posture or the work sequence and pace resulting in a decrease in muscular activation in the course of the working day is helpful to prevent muscular complaints. For about half of the persons a decrease in the rest time, i.e. periods with very low muscular activity, in the course of the day was found. Considering the “gap hypothesis” stated in the literature, an increase in the risk for the development of muscular complaints with increasing working time may be inferred. Relevance to industry Results of electromyographical field investigations on office workers suggest that self-organisation of the work on the employee’s own responsibility comprising a reduction of the actual muscular activation in the course of a working day may be an effective mean for preventing musculoskeletal complaints.

In many practical applications of resource-constrained project scheduling a work content (e.g., in man months) is specified for each activity instead of a fixed duration and fixed resource requirements. In this case, the resource usages of the activities may vary over time. The problem then consists in determining the resource usage of each activity at each point in time such that precedence constraints, resource scarcity, and specific constraints on the evolution over time of resource usages are respected and the project duration is minimized. We present two priority-rule methods for this problem and report on results of an experimental performance analysis for instances with up to 200 activities.

Although the ambiguity of the impacts of lean production (LP) on working conditions is well-known, few in-depth empirical data are available concerning LP applications in contexts other than automobile plants located in developed countries. This study presents an assessment of the impacts of LP on working conditions in a harvester assembly line of an American-owned plant in Brazil. Data collection involved four main stages: (a) a qualitative assessment of the extent to which 11 LP enablers were adopted in the assembly line, based on 15 interviews with managers and supervisors; (b) interviews with six safety specialists, one safety engineer and three groups of 10 workers, in order to detect their views on both the negative and positive impacts of LP; (c) the application of two types of questionnaire to be answered by all assembly line workers – one of them aimed at assessing their views on the current working conditions and the other aimed at assessing their views on the differences between the old Taylorist–Fordist system and the new lean system; (d) a feedback meeting to discuss the results of the questionnaires with the workers. As a framework for analysis, the data collected were grouped into four constructs: work content; work organization; continuous improvement; and, health and safety. The results indicated that workers considered their working conditions were fairly good and had improved after the introduction of LP. To some extent, this positive view was due to the fact that there were many gaps between standardized work and real work. This meant that workers did not follow the assembly standards strictly and had substantial degrees of freedom. Relevance to industry This paper presents guidelines for assessing lean production (LP) impacts on working conditions either at a plant or departmental level, which were tested on a harvester assembly line in Brazil. The impacts detected in that line may provide insights for other companies concerned with balancing lean and good working conditions. Since the method adopted for assessing the impacts is fairly simple, it is a workable alternative for companies interested in surveying how LP is affecting their workforce.

The well-known resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) schedules project activities within the precedence and renewable resource constraints while minimizing the total lead time of the project. The basic problem description assumes non-pre-emptive activities with fixed durations, and has been extended to various other assumptions in the literature. In this paper, we investigate the effect of three activity assumptions on the total lead time and the total resource utilization of a project. More precisely, we investigate the influence of variable activity durations under a fixed work content, the possibility of allowing activity pre-emption and the use of fast tracking to decrease a project's duration. We give an overview of the procedures developed in the literature and present some modifications to an existing solution approach to cope with our activity assumptions under study. We present computational results on a generated dataset and evaluate the impact of all assumptions on the quality of the schedule.

In this paper, we develop a metaheuristic procedure for solving the discrete time/resource trade-off problem in the field of project scheduling. In this problem, a project contains activities interrelated by finish-start-type precedence constraints with a time lag of zero, which require a single constrained renewable resource. Each activity has a specified work content and can be performed in different modes, i.e. with different durations and resource requirements; as long as the required work content is met. The objective is to schedule each activity in one of its modes in order to minimize the project makespan. To tackle this problem, we use a genetic algorithm in which a new method based on the resource utilization ratio is developed for generation of crossover points and also a local search method is incorporated with the algorithm. Comparative computational results reveal that this procedure outperforms the best available results in the literature.

In this paper, we develop a general framework to analyze the influence of system load on service times in queueing systems. Our framework unifies previous results and ties them to possible future studies to help empirical and analytical researchers to investigate and model the ways in which load impacts service times. We identify three load characteristics: changeover, instantaneous load, and extended load. The load characteristics induce behaviors, or mechanisms, in at least one of the system components: the server, the network, and the customer. A mechanism influences the service-time determinants: the work content, service speed, or in-process delay. We identify and define mechanisms that cause service times to change with load and use the framework to categorize them. We argue that an understanding of the relationship between load and service times can come about only by understanding the underlying mechanisms.

A comparison of the careers of two pioneering public relations professionals suggests that their work content in the first quarter of the last century and that of modern professionals is much the same. John Elliot was the first Briton to carry the title ‘public relations officer’ and he knew of Ivy Lee when working in New York as a reporter. Research shows that they faced operational problems and responded with techniques recognisable to today’s public relations industry, although their professional vocabulary was different. This timeline of common experience over almost a century allows us to see public relations people as a community of professionals, and thus to explore how knowledge of the past can inform the present.

The aim of this study was to examine the effects and feasibility of an ergonomic intervention on the work content and load of home care workers. The subjects were female home care workers aged 42±5 yr. They were divided into the intervention group ( n =34) and control group ( n =36). The 1 yr work-site intervention included various ergonomic measures utilizing the developmental participatory approach based on teamwork and training within the work units. According to the OWAS method the proportion of straight back postures and normal or acceptable work posture combinations increased significantly ( p p Relevance to industry In the near future, the number of elderly clients within the realm of home care services will increase sharply due to the rapid ageing of the population in industrialised countries. The numbers of difficult and multi-disabled clients needing more intensive and diversified care will also grow. The good work ability and health of home care workers is a basic prerequisite for high productivity and quality in their work. This study focuses on the participatory ergonomic intervention with various work-site measures which were found to be effective and feasible for preventing disability among ageing female home care workers performing physically demanding tasks.

In this paper an n-job one-machine scheduling problem is considered, in which the machine capacity is time-dependent and jobs are characterized by their work content. The objective is to minimize the sum of weighted completion times. A necessary optimality condition is presented and we discuss some special cases where this condition is also sufficient. We prove that the problem is NP-complete. A branch-and-bound algorithm is developed for the case when the capacity function is a step function. Computational results for 1000 test problems are presented.

Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) have the flexibility to meet the material handling requirements of asynchronous assembly lines. Furthermore, AGVs can select from among alternative paths in accordance with a prescribed lane selection rule, thereby facilitating the use of parallel server workstations. In this paper, motivated by our work in the automotive industry, several new lane selection rules are proposed. One of these, First Available Server/First Available Buffer/Balanced Work Content (FAS/FAB/BWC), is compared to two existing rules: Alternating Server, and First Available Server/First Available Buffer/Expected Completion Time (FAS/FAB/EC). Three performance measures — job throughput, workload balance among servers, and alteration of input job sequence — are employed. A SIMAN simulation model of a small, asynchronous parallel assembly line is used to study the impact on system performance of both the lane selection rule and the number of parallel servers. Interaction between these two factors is studied through ANOVA. A number of interesting findings are reported for results of the lane selection rules with respect to the three performance measures. Their interpretation is used to motivate further research.

We examined relations between the environmental dimensions underlying Holland's theory of vocational choice and skill requirements, context characteristics, and task frequency ratings for managerial jobs. The Holland environmental constructs were measured by the recently developed Position Classification Inventory (PCI). The task, skill requirement, and context variables were measured using traditional job analysis surveys. Ten judges provided estimates of the expected correlations between the job analysis variables and the Holland constructs. The profile of observed correlations was generally consistent with the judges’ expectations based on Holland's theory, providing support for both that framework and the construct validity of the PCI. The one Holland dimension for which the data were least consistent with predictions was “Realistic.” Results provide a detailed picture of the work content, skills, and context variables within managerial work that are likely to be associated with the RIASEC dimensions. Implications for management development are discussed.

The goal of new organizational forms is to give the worker more work content, various cognitive demands and complete activities. In highly automated systems the realisation of these prententious demands is a problem. Especially in the steel processing industry a lot of such projects have been done. However, an analyse of these workplaces shows that there is a lack of work content. The paper shows the main facts of an existing form of group work in a train of rolling mills and participative models for its realization.

Self organization in ecosystems has been postulated to be directed by a number of seemingly unrelated goal functions or extremal principles. These include exergy , the useful work content of energy, which measures distance from thermodynamic ground; emergy , which increases in proportion to the number of steps energy has taken away from its point of input to a system; power , which is work per unit time, and can be measured as the total energy flow in an ecosystem; ascendency , which combines a mutual information measure of the distribution of flows in a system network with the total flow; and indirect effects , which concern relationships at a distance in energy networks. S.E. Jorgensen recently obtained high correlations between exergy, emergy, ascendency, and the ratio of indirect to direct effects, in a set of ecosystem models. These results suggest that these optimality criteria may be formally related. This paper shows, for systems at macroscopic steady states, that they are. Exergy, emergy, power, ascendency, and indirect effects all have common origins in the path structure and associated microscopic dynamics of energy and matter flows and storages in ecosystem networks. Thus, these organizational measures, originally derived from different perspectives on ecosystems, are in fact related through a common basis.

Experts estimate that 65% of all manufacturing firms employ fifty or less employees, and many of these small manufacturing firms operate as job shop environments. This paper will focus on a methodology for the development of an expert systems approach to job shop scheduling. Specifically, the concept of prototyping and life cycle development will be discussed. Prototyping combines the steps of knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation, knowledge implementation, and verification and validation into a repetitive cycle, rather than having the steps in a sequential fashion. By using a prototyping cycle, a small expert system is developed first and then gradually enlarged as exception cases are identified, instead of attempting to complete each step entirely before continuing with the next.

Developing advanced manufacturing systems involves a number of specialists. Due to the numerous parts of the system, both software and hardware, the system is, however, likely to deviate considerably from ideal behaviour with frequent stops. Handling unexpected events is the key function in machine tool operation. Due to the complexity of the task, it is a job for the human operator given proper training. The theory of Maslow's human needs formed the basis for a Swedish study on the job content of flexible manufacturing systems, FMS. The supervisory control model, designed by Sheridan of MIT, used for automated production with the five operator roles planning, programming, monitoring, intervening and learning will be dealt with in the paper. The paper concludes thai it is essential for the operator to be able to use his creativity, which he can do in tasks like planning, programming and disturbance handling

This chapter presents several guidelines for job design for the aged. The understanding of the aging process should be combined with knowledge of work systems, work content, and work demands. These guidelines help in (1) preventing premature aging, (2) improving work satisfaction, (3) improving productivity, and (4) reducing early retirement of the aging work population. These guidelines for the aged workforce should be used as a part of occupational health and safety strategy of the company. The identification of the problem with the aged is based on data collection and analysis. Data is needed from the following sources—(1) age structure, (2) health risks of the work, (3) assessment of work ability and functional capacity, (4) assessment of job demands, and (5) identification of the imbalance between work demands and functional capabilities. The health of the aging worker plays an important role when the acceptability of a certain work load is considered. These guidelines presume that the functional capacity is an indirect indicator of both the health status and the work ability with advanced age.

This paper documents the conflict between information systems (IS) and business management concerning computerization and managerial decision-making, based on in-depth interviews with 150 IS and business managers from ten large corporations. Relations between IS and user departments in these firms were generally characterized by mutual lack of trust. Four underlying sources of conflict were identified: disagreement about control of computerization; differences in goals and time-frames of managers; lack of measurable benefit; and disagreement over the roles and responsibilities during systems development. In addition, the paper discusses those emerging trends that influence the IS-business relationship; the routinization and standardization of managerial work; changes to work content and skill requirements; and the erosion of managerial control and decision-making. Finally, the paper presents some prescriptions to derive maximum advantage from IS.

To find out the roles of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in firm performance, two dimensions of impacts of ICT on firm activities are identified. Except for lowering the cost of information processing, storage, and communication, ICT significantly changes the way that people and organizations are connected and organized; it also reshapes work content, workflow, the accumulation and distribution of organizational knowledge, and the business processes. With these impacts, information processing, decision making, resource allocation, and innovation process become more efficient, which eventually lead to higher value added of products and services. These are the major sources of productivity improvement documented in empirical studies. The survey indicates the theoretical gaps in the above vision for future researches.

The paper describes text processing mechanisms as adequately as possible in an attempt to simulate those processes relevant to constructing the meaning of a literary narrative text. The theoretical constructs FRAME and SUPERSTRUCTURE are adapted to this end in order to express the specific features of LITERARY DISCOURSE, and applied in combination. The author suggests extending the concept TEXT SEMANTICS to include a component FRAME, with the aim of objectifying analysis of the work content (meaning, WORK R ) of literary narratives.

This paper describes a method for generating assembly line balancing problems randomly and measuring their complexities. In this present study, a measure for complexity of assembly line balancing problem, TF-ratio (ratio of the sum of total number of followers of each element and maximum possible number of ordering relations among them) is used. A complex problem will need more CPU time for its solution. Some of the factors, such as, work content (W), cycle time (C), standard deviation (SD) of elemental times, TF-ratio, etc., which are responsible for the complexity of the line balancing problem, are identified and their effect on the complexity of the problem is discussed.

The case analysis presented in this paper is part of a larger project entitled “Information technology and the working environment”. In one of the sub-projects flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) implemented so far in Finland and those to be implemented in the near future will be studied. The system studied was installed in 1982, and it is used for machining the transmission housings and oil sumps for tractors. The process of implementation, participation and training of personnel, job structure and division of labor, as well as tasks of the FMS crew are described. The analysis revealed that the training of the operators had mainly been on-the-job training provided by the machine vendors, foremen and fellow workers. Especially the operators who joined the system later had not acquired the skills needed to deal with tasks resulting from machine disturbances and breakdown of tools. Consequently, the task structure in FMS was polarized. This may be one reason for the relatively low total running time of the system. The opinions of the management and employees concerning the implementation process, work organization and development needs are also discussed.

Synopsis Popular ideology indicates that technology has helped to liberate women from the household. But in practice, just as women's work load at home was declining, technology allowed the taking on of new burdens. We examine the specific impacts of various levels of technologies-industrialization, utilities, appliances, and convenience foods-on the division of household labor. Effects are measured in three ways: (1) potential reallocation of women's time; (2) redivision of household labor among its members, and (3) Labor market aids for housework including convenience foods or home services. We conclude that most past change in work content has occurred from non-technological sources, and that household division of labor seems to be increasing. Future ‘liberation≐ is most likely to come through the provision of labor market services for the household.

Basic trends of flexible manufacturing automation is evaluated. Design practice of systems is evaluated putting a special emphasize on work content design and training and their role in the all over cost model of system. Comment on economic impacts of flexible production automation are presented and their influence on enterprice size and diffusion of FMS are discussed

Using a sample of 566 nurses from four urban hospitals, this study focused on role stress,conceptualized in terms of role conflict, uncertainty about acceptance of one's behavior by supervisors and peers, and role ambiguity. Results indicated that individual attributes, including education, locus of control, and professional commitment, predicted role stress, as did work content variables and leadership sensitivity. Interaction effects on individual performance were discovered between role-stress variables and education, feedback from others, and leadership sensitivity. This study did not contribute to understanding nursing turnover.

A detailed design of the working places in a high-level automation of a train-to-train container transfer process has been performed. It will be shown that the original idea of a full-automatic system without any personnel could not be reached. Due to the variety of working conditions expected, the control system operates in several automation modes, which allow the choice between various levels of automation. Thus the work content can be changed according to the choice of the workers. - Because various companies and institutions developed the system in cooperation, the communication process between the designers turned out to be sometimes complicated and economic limitations influenced the design phases strongly. It will be shown, how - despite of these circumstances - aspects of man-machine-interface design and work content could be included into the design process.

The basic trends of process automation are evaluated and design problems, based on conducted interviews, are discussed. A special emphasis is put on project management, all over cost estimation; work content design and training need, and their evaluation as a part of cost model of the system. Finally future trends are evaluated.

A striking characteristic of Japanese factories is the extent of process control: from both the technical and the social viewpoint the labour and production system is controlled down to the very last detail. The characteristics of management and organization which underlie this are closely interwoven with Japanese culture. This explains why the work content, working conditions and working relationships in the factories look so different from those in western cultures. The paper shows why factories in the West cannot and should not copy Japanese factories.

Automation transforms skills and the content and organization of work. “Since the late seventies, new technology, and in particular numerical control (NC) have been used predominantly for small and medium production runs, which are the main area of activity of small and medium-sized firms. NC structures the organization of work within these firms in various manners. It introduces a great diversity of situations, whose root causes are to be found in the interaction of three main sets of variables : the size of the firm, the technological development of NC and the specific social labour relations in each firm. On the basis of a thorough on-the-spot survey concerning a dozen small or medium sized mechanical engineering sub-contracting firms, in the Grenoble and Paris regions, we have highlighted three types of situation which range from integration of programming at the industrial engineering or methods level to integration at the production level. The evolutive forms of NC have different and sometimes contradictory effects on the skills of the programmers, but also, on the way that skills are distributed between the workshop and the industrial engineering or methods department, and between the operator and the programmer. Similarly, NC and its development have contrasting effects on the skills of the operators themselves. However, on the whole, the introduction of NC into small and medium-sized firms induces a process of skilling. This enrichening of work content depends on where and to what extent the technology, language and codes have been mastered.

In this second of two papers on planning a hospital centralized tray assembly conveyor system, a model related to the fifth essential component—work station content—is presented. This provides a technique which can improve the balance of work distribution among the operations in tray assembly systems.

The study set out to establish the work content involved in handling cauliflowers from the field until they are in a form ready to be sent to market. Of the many methods encountered in practice, three common methods of handling the crop in the field and one packhouse system were examined. Time standards were obtained and an analysis of the system is given in nomograph form. Finally some comments are made on the future possibilities of handling cauliflowers.