Women, Work, and Family Foundation Essay -- Government Rights Feminism

Women, Work, and Family Foundation With the war in Iraq nearly two years old, I hoped that new leadership in the executive branch would put an end to the destruction overseas and funds would be redirected to rescue our receding economy, unemployment rate, healthcare services, and living conditions for the struggling American majority. November 2nd came and went, and those of us who shared my views found ourselves the minority. We shed a few tears and yelled at the unresponsive television screen, and surprisingly enough, the sun rose the next morning. No apocalyptic horses or trumpets, just a few chosen liberals feeling suddenly beckoned toward the promised land of Canada where certain rights are more a thing of the present rather than a dream of years to come. It is important to remember that while we do not make the decisions concerning the deployment of troops or the dropping of bombs, we do decide what condition we would like our country to be in when those serving the military are lucky enough to return home. In o ur current situation, I feel compelled to turn away from protesting the war and refocus on the home front. Many grassroots organizations have been inclined to take initiative in improving domestic policy while the president is not looking. For this reason, I have received another invitation to make a tax deductible donation to a non-profit organization: The Women, Work, and Family Foundation. I now have the personal opportunity to improve gender equality in the American workforce and receive a mug and free subscription to Newsweek in the process. "The first question is, obviously, Why [are they] asking for money?" (Woolf, p. 41) I must paint the landscape of gender equality in the workforce and determine if f... ... Works Cited: 1. Bernard, Jessie, "The Good-Provider Role: Its Rise and Fall." from American Psychologist, 36, 1981. 2. Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001) 3. Gornick, Janet and Meyers, Marcia, Families That Work: Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment. (New York: The Russell Sage Foundation, 2003) 4. Pateman, Carole, "Three Questions about Womanhood Suffrage" in Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives" ed. Caroline Daley and Melanie Nolan. (Auckland, New Zealand: Auckland University Press, 1994) 5. Saxonhouse, Arlene, Women in the History of Political Thought. (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1985) 6. Seager, Joni, The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World. (New York: Penguin Books, 2003) 7. Woolf, Virginia, Three Guineas. (London: Harcourt & Brace Company, 1938)

BMW Operations Management Essay

1. Executive Summary This report will describe a named organisation in terms of a general introduction and background of that organisation. For the organisation described, there will be a detailed account and critique of quality management and capacity management issues within the business. This will then be backed up with relevant academic theory and models; in addition to this there will be a description of their relevance in the business environment, citing examples of their use. The report will then finish with a conclusion and possible recommendations for the chosen organisation in regards to their operational management style and how it could be improved. 2. Introduction 2.1 Background BMW is primarily a German automobile company. It also has operations in aircraft engine production; electronic systems and hardware production; finance; and service. It had revenues of more than $27 billion and net profits of nearly $700 million in 1990, with about 65,000 employees. Bayerische Maschinen Werke GmbH as it is otherwise known was the surviving entity of a merger in 1955 between BMW and Allegemeina Flugzeug Werke (AFW). BMW has a history dating all the way back to the early 1920s when it was founded as a machine shop on the outskirts of Nuremberg. The AFW part of the company was founded in 1910 and was one of the major contributors of military aircraft during the First World War. The automobile industry can be very volatile and mistakes in decision making can prove to e extremely costly. BMW has proved over time that through careful management the number of errors a firm makes can be greatly reduced. BMW’s operations management is also of a high standard; it designed a production system where new parts can be produced in small amounts and only result in a moderate cost. 2.2 Methodology Research will have to be done in developing the report before any reflection can be made on its contents. There are a number of sources available to get the relevant information from; a many number of books are accessible that go into great detail on each subject within operations management. These will provide a range of academic theory and models which can then be applied into business terms. The internet also provides a vast amount of information that can be used as a reference in the writing of the report, it not only refers to academic theory but also other authors reflections on certain topics which can then be used to draw ideas and apply them to the report. 2.3 Structure of the Report This report will describe a named organisation in terms of a general introduction and background of that organisation. For the organisation described, there will be a detailed account and critique of quality management and capacity management issues within the business. This will then be backed up with relevant academic theory and models; in addition to this there will be a description of their relevance in the business environment, citing examples of their use. The report will then finish with a conclusion and possible recommendations for the chosen organisation in regards to their operational management style and how it could be improved. 3. Findings The operations management task is defined as the day-to-day production of goods that continually requires decisions to be made and the implementation of changes. Operations Management is different to that of other management topics such as strategy, marketing or finance. Whereas these fields are based on theory such as economic, social, and mathematical factors; Operations Management is much more difficult to pin down to a specific aspect. It takes into account a vast array of academic and practical applications that when communally put together produce a basis from which decisions can be made. Operation managers that work inside an organisation work on the foundation of balancing the quality of the service that they provide against the resources they currently have available to them. They are required to be highly skilled in managing their current capacity output so that it can cope with the ever changing levels of demand placed upon their organisation. There are many ways that managers cope with the levels of demand; a manufacturing manager such as BMW would attempt to influence the demand through an assortment of different marketing techniques. In any organisation there will be a relationship between their capacity management, quality management, and their resource productivity. There are a number of issues that arise when trying to manage the organisations supply and demand. Managers must keep to their productivity targets without adversely affecting the quality of the product that they produce; striking a balance can prove difficult especially in the automobile industry where mistakes can prove to be very costly. 3.1 Capacity Management Capacity management is finding the balance between the demand from customers and the capability of the organisation in satisfying that demand. There is a great need for managers to forecast what they think the demand might be in the future so they can sufficiently change their capacity to cope with the change. Where the capacity of the organisation is limited the focus will be on influencing the demand to be in line with the available capacity, this is referred to as level strategy. The opposite of this is chase strategy; this is where the supply can be changed to meet the fluctuating level of demand. Managers can direct their operational control by altering the capacity of the organisation, hold items in inventory in case of a sudden increase in demand, oblige customers to wait for their product, or attempt to influence the demand themselves. In the automobile industry it is possible for an organisation to produce cars in advance of demand and hold it in inventory. Operations managers must at all times be wary of their current capacity, to what degree it can be changed, the costs involved in changing that capacity, and the speed in which the change can happen. This is most important in organisations where profitability is linked to that of capacity and the prices charged for their product or service. BMW is already a leader in the niche car segment of the automobile industry. To retain that status BMW built a $660 million Research & development centre and plans to invest more than $1 billion each year in finding new ways to exploit their position as a market leader. BMW are aware of the fact that they are not one of the biggest companies in the industry and can’t mimic the bigger companies who have far greater capacity and financial power. BMW try to innovate new ways to stay ahead of their competitors. They designed a new manufacturing plant where the cars would move down the assembly line on an independently powered gantry. The new technology would produce sound waves so that collisions can be avoided, thus reducing the need for more workers and also reducing the risk of unwanted accidents in the plant. The output achieved by any capacity management system depends on a number of factors that relate the resources currently available to the actual output of the organisation. It is sometimes inevitable in the niche car segment that an organisation will run out of capacity to cope with the ever changing levels of demand. If this problem occurs then the management can carry out two possible courses of action: o Allow the quality of the product to decline o Attempt to influence the demand so it doesn’t affect the organisation in the long term. In the scenario where the capacity of the organisation is in excess of the demand, this can lead to lower efficiency and a lower quality service to the customer. 3.2 Quality Management BMW believe that quality is of key importance in every stage of the manufacturing process, from product conception to customer feedback. They base their working principles around consistency and complete coverage of all requirements throughout the development and production process. Quality control within BMW is achieved through a system of quality audits at every stage of the manufacturing process; the productions of parts, components and in the assembly plant are all thoroughly maintained. These same quality control principles also apply to their suppliers of materials and components, with all of BMW suppliers agreeing to work to specific specifications of quality. Once cars arrive in the distribution centre, they take on a quality check and have a full pre-delivery inspection before being delivered to the customer. Quality driven organisations are more likely to integrate human resource management into their strategy as employee participation can be seen as key to bolster quality. The BMW management structure allows for teams, comprising of employees from all levels, to react quickly if a fault is found and work together immediately on a problem if one should occur. BMW also benefits from excellent personnel management that allows them to motivate their employees and create a friendly working environment. It provides its workers with a highly competitive pay package and supplies special contracts that allow certain workers to work four-day weeks. Every member of staff is fully responsible for the quality of their work and this well help lead to job enrichment for every member of the workforce. The company has never lost its focus or attempted to spread itself across the entire automobile industry. This is an example of quality management because if the management had been slack, BMW would have lost its focus and attempted to make products for everything and everyone. Manufacturing firms, such as BMW, are always searching for new and innovative ways to cope with global competition in the ever changing business environment. One such process that has been implemented at BMW is that of a focused factory. The complexity that comes with an automobile manufacturer can provide a barrier to managing these facilities, thus the creation of a focused factory solves this problem. The focused factory is a â€Å"plant established to focus the entire manufacturing system on a limited, concise, manageable set of products, technologies, volumes, and markets precisely defined by the company’s strategy, its technology, and its economics.†( APICS Dictionary 1992). Manufacturing companies implement this technique to improve the organisations productivity, quality, and responsiveness. BMW can focus their equipment, employees, and technology one specific tasks rather than using the same technique for all of their different projects. Implementing focused factories make it easier to manage production systems, reduce inventories, and reduce manufacturing space and investment requirements. As BMW have a strong quality emphasis with more attention being given to the performance of the organisation, the use of appraisals is crucial to the requirements that lead to producing a quality product. They place customers at the centre of attention as it is in any organisation that takes quality so seriously. The appraisal process necessitates the employees to evaluate each of their peers so that it encourages them to produce quality work and so to satisfy their customer-supplier relationship. 4. Conclusion Successful automobile manufacturers in the future will need to maximise efficiency, eliminate waste, adapt to change and implement strategies that stay in line with their customer requirements. BMW will need to keep modernising their internal operations to keep up with the constant changing in the automobile industry. Streamlining their plants will facilitate the balance between supply and demand while keeping the quality of their product high. Decisions within BMW are now made throughout the organisation, from the factory floor up to the chief executives. This has increased the communication between all levels of the organisation making it more flat and thus increasing the quality of the automobiles. Jobs have become more diversified with the need for new knowledge and skills becoming more crucial, as the global competition increases, more needs are placed on the company to provide products that meet consumer desires. The main link between the customer and organisation has always been the shop floor assistant. Performance feedback, audit results, and customer opinion surveys are the ways in which organisations know if they are doing there job to satisfactory standard. BMW make sure that the assembly workers are aware of the consumers’ requirements by providing suitable training and sound environment so that those requirements can be met. Organisations that cut down on investment in employee development will suffer a decrease in employee performance due to the close relationship between the two, and this will ultimately filter down to the consumers. Operations management in relation to automobile manufacture is crucial in defining priorities and identifying possible problems. One possible problem that might be confronted in the near future is that of overcapacity in terms of passenger cars. It is seen that other cars such as sport-utility vehicles don’t suffer from overcapacity as they are usually custom made to the consumers’ preferences. Passenger cars are normally batch produced on a production line in their thousands and organisations have a wealth of stock kept in their inventory. Automakers usually add capacity in the 100,000s so the market is never satisfied precisely; there is either a demand lag or a saturation of the market. Costs remain vitally important in making strategic product-line decisions. Regardless of the preferred quality or productivity quota, BMW must stay concerned with the continuous improvement of the business by improving quality, productivity, customer service, and delivery. 5. References Quality management: How four European companies succeeded? Nguyen, Andrea, Kleiner, Brian H. Business Credit. New York: Nov/Dec 1994.Vol.96, Iss. 10; pg. 32, 3 pgs Chrysler and minivans: Are we there yet? Vido, Adrian. CMA. Hamilton: Nov 1993.Vol.67, Iss. 9; pg. 11, 6 pgs The ‘coping’ capacity management strategy in services industry Armistead, Colin G, Clark, Graham. International Journal of Service Industry Management. Bradford: 1994.Vol.5, Iss. 2; pg. 5, 18 pgs Continuous improvement through the focused factory Elmore, Robert C, Natarajan, R, Rezaee, Zahihollah. CMA. Hamilton: Feb 1995.Vol.69, Iss. 1; pg. 21, 4 pgs The two worlds of operations management research and practice: Can they meet, should they meet? Nigel Slack, Michael Lewis, Hilary Bates. International Journal of Operations & Production Management. Bradford: 2004.Vol.24, Iss. 3/4; pg. 372 Tools and Techniques – A Current Responsibility Miller, John A.. CMA. Hamilton: Feb 1992.Vol.66, Iss. 1; pg. 34, 1 pgs http://www.bmweducation.co.uk (Accessed 16th March 2005) http://www.bmw.co.uk (Accessed 16th March 2005) APICS Dictionary, 7th Edition, APICS, Falls Church, Virginia, 1992. Sam Bench 03169230

Example Psychology Essay - Free Essay Example

Sample details Pages: 6 Words: 1679 Downloads: 3 Date added: 2017/06/26 Category Psychology Essay Type Essay any type Did you like this example? What Is a Polygraph Test A polygraph machine is used to attempt to detect physiological changes that are thought to occur when a person tells a lie. These measures include the blood pressure, the amount of sweating on the palms and the heart rate. Polygraph testing is currently being used to investigate crime in a number of countries around the world,including the USA, Japan, South Korea and Israel (Raskin, 1990). Don’t waste time! Our writers will create an original "Example Psychology Essay" essay for you Create order At present there is a wide-ranging literature evaluating the use of the polygraph machine and associated techniques, largely based on laboratory experimentation.Like any psychometric test, the use of a polygraph machine in the detection of deception has been questioned on the basis of its reliability and its validity. Reliability refers to the ability of a test to be consistent, no matter who is carrying it out. The question of validity asks whether the test is actually measuring what it claims to measure. The answer to both of these questions is vital in answering whether the polygraph should be introduced into British policing. The polygraph machine has been used in a number of different ways to elicit useful information from suspects. Bull, Gudjonsson, Hampson, Baron, Rippon, Vrij (2004) identify four main techniques: the Relevant/Irrelevant Technique, the Directed Lie Test, the Control Question Test, and the Guilty Knowledge Test. Of these, the majority of research has addresse d the last two and so the discussion will concentrate on these. The Control Question Test The theory behind the Control Question Test (CQT) is that the physiological responses of a suspect to control questions are compared with those which are directly relevant to the crime. Control questions are specifically chosen to be vague in nature and to relate only indirectly to the crime under investigation (Iacono Patrick, 1997). This means that they should provoke high levels of physiological arousal in innocent suspects as they are designed to elicit guilty memories but those that are not under investigation. By contrast, to an innocent interviewee, the specific questions about the crime should evoke lower physiological arousal as they can be categorically denied. To the guilty interviewee, however, the reverse pattern should be seen with higher physiological response seen to the more specific questions. The basic paradigm for assessing the polygraph test used in laboratory investigations involves a mock crime with participants randomly told to act either innoce nt or guilty. Raskin (1982), for example, explains that the guilty participants enact the mock crime, while the innocent participants simply have the facts relayed to them. Both groups are given a cash incentive to pass the test, and this goes some way towards giving them the required motivation to pass the test. Many of the earlier studies used the CQT test and found some encouraging results. Carroll (1988) summarises some of these studies, referring first to the Office of Technology Assessment of the United States Congress (1983) which rounded up 14 studies which found an overall accuracy level of 88.6% in the guilty participants, and 82.6 in the innocent participants. However, Carroll (1988) criticises this assessment as some of these studies had flawed methodologies. Instead, using stricter criteria, the figures of 85.4% for guilty and 76.9% for the innocent were found. Carroll (1988) makes two important points about most of these studies. Firstly, there was a fairly high rate of false positives of around 20-25% instances where the participant was innocent but pronounced guilty. Secondly, the polygraph operators also have their own visual information to go on when carrying out the test, they are not simply relying on the physiological data. This means that the results cannot be fully attributable to the polygraph as the human operator could be partly acting as a lie detector. The most obvious criticism of these kind of studies is that of ecological validity. The test itself relies on the emotional reactions of the participants how likely is it that monetary inducements are equivalent in motivational terms to the chance of being convicted of a crime? For this reason, MacLaren (2001) points out that the participants have little reason to be worried about the important questions and are unmotivated to try and beat the test unlike a real guilty suspect. Field studies, then, have attempted to fill this gap, but immediately the problem aris es of how it is possible to measure whether a person is really guilty or innocent. In reviewing the data on field studies, Carroll (1988) found that generally the accuracy rates were low at 69.6% comparing to the 50% obtainable by chance this does not seem high. In addition, there was a very high rate of false positives 43%. More recent field studies have been reviewed by Bull et al. (2004), who find better average figures for those guilty suspects at between 80% and 90% accuracy, but still poor results for innocent suspects, with false positives ranging from 12% to 47% accuracy. The theoretical problems with the CQT have been pointed out by Ben-Shakhar (2002), amongst others. The whole design of the test is such that the operator of the polygraph is trying to deceive the suspect something that may be perceived as unethical. It is still possible to imagine good reasons for why an innocent suspect would show arousal to the specific questions these are still anxiety pr ovoking questions. There is little evidence that this test is standardised, in that the control questions that are asked in each interview are different. This means that much variability in the accuracy of test is probably due to the operator this reduces the theoretical reliability of the test. The Guilty Knowledge Test False positives, then, are one of the major problems with the CQT. The Guilty Knowledge Test (GKT) has been shown to meet this challenge. The GKT is designed to try and uncover whether the interviewee is withholding information about a crime under investigation. This involves asking the suspect a number of specific questions about the crime, each question having a number of alternatives, only one of which is correct. The operator then looks for a pattern of physiological responses to the correct option across the whole test. This test is much more difficult to apply, mainly because it requires the test operator to know a number of facts about the crime that she must be reasonably sure that the guilty suspect would also know these would tend to be details, although does not exclude major facts. A range of reviews have been carried out on the GKT in laboratory conditions. Ben-Shakhar and Furedy (1990) found accuracy rates of 84% for guilty participants and 94% for innocen t participants. Elaad (1998) found rates of 81% for guilty and 96% for innocent. While these are encouraging, again it is the field studies that are more convincing because of ecological validity. Only two of these have been carried out. Elaad (1990) found rates of only 42% for guilty participants but 98% for the innocent. Similarly Elaad, Ginton Jungman (1992) found 76% for guilty and 94% for innocent. Ben-Shakhar, Bar-Hillel, Kremnitzer, (2002) defend the low results for guilty suspects, claiming that they were carried out under sub-optimal conditions, being just after a CQT had been carried out and only involving an average of 1.8 questions. Overall though, levels of false positives are much lower for the GKT than the CQT. Perhaps the biggest criticism of the GKT relates to how useful it is in a practical sense. The nature of the test requires that the interviewer has been able to amass half a dozen items of knowledge that the guilty person would be aware of that wou ld not be recognised by an innocent person. In addition, it is not always possible to be confident that the suspect will have remembered or even noticed the particular details which the operator refers to. Bull et al. (2004) makes the point that, in high profile cases, details are often released to the public to aid the solving of the crime, which will make the interviewing of the suspect even harder using a GKT, as innocent suspects will know many more details of the crime, making the choice of details for interview more obscure. The advantage of the GKT is that in evaluating its theoretical underpinnings, some researchers have made much stronger claims for it than the CQT (The Committee to Review the Scientific Evidence on the Polygraph, National Research Council, 2003). The reason for this is that the GKT relies on the response being greater to a particular subset of the questions relative to whatever the physiological response is to the other questions (Carmel, Dayan, N aveh, Raveh Ben-Shakhar, 2003). This is unlike the CQT where variations in the physiological response of the suspect will tend to disrupt the test. In addition, the GKT does not rely on duping the suspect. The GKT does also have practical advantages. Ben-Shakhar et al. (2002) point out that a problem for the admissibility of polygraph tests in court is that they can become contaminated. In practice, a polygraph operator has the evidence of his eyes as well as the polygraph machine to go on. This may mean that the operator does not entirely base his decision on the physiological data. The advantage of the GKT is that it is much more easy to carry out blind, or for another polygraph tester to simply look at the physiological evidence. Counter measures and Base Rates Two other criticisms that apply more generally to all the different types of polygraph tests, are the effects of countermeasures and of base rates. Countermeasures refers to attempts to beat the polygraph test, these Gudjonsson (1988) classifies in three ways: reducing reactivity, suppressing physiological reactions and augmenting physiological reactions. According to Ford (1995) a man named Floyd Fay was able to successfully train 23 of 27 fellow inmates to beat the polygraph test in 20 minutes despite their admission of guilt to crimes for which they had been incarcerated. On the problem of base rates, Bull et al. (2004) point out that the kinds of situations in which polygraph tests are used may mean that there are a large number of suspects to test. This will exacerbate the problems of false positives, although, perhaps, is not such a problem in forensic situations as numbers are more likely to be limited.