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Motivations for sustainable design
Published in Rob Fleming, Saglinda H Roberts, Sustainable Design for the Built Environment, 2019
Rob Fleming, Saglinda H Roberts
His view was that by allowing people to freely pursue their own economic interests, society as a whole would benefit. The merchant would want to produce the best possible product to inspire the consumer to choose their product. The consumer would have a better quality and larger selection. Supply and demand addresses the theory that the amount of available products will increase if there is a demand for them, and decrease if not. This also addressed the dependency of pricing on the demand relative to the supply. Division of Labor addressed breaking each task within production and increasing efficiency. This is the basis of assembly lines and industrial factories during the industrial age. Inherent in Smith’s argument was the presence of the rule of law, moral codes, and holistic benefit to society. The principles outlined in The Wealth of Nations are still used today.
Basic Concepts for Improving Production Systems
Published in Shigeo Shingo, Alan Robinson, Modern Approaches to Manufacturing Improvement: The Shingo System, 2017
For the producer, mass production has several consequences: Depreciation of machinery, dies, and so on, is more profitable.The use of dedicated machines improves productivity.Division of labor simplifies operations and raises productivity. Labor costs can be cut by employing low-wage, unskilled workers for production.Workers increase in number and, in turn, become consumers. The resulting expanded demand opens up further opportunities for mass production.Mass production of this sort that results from producers creating more demand leads to the adoption of large-lot production methods. Such methods make setup time reductions unnecessary or minimize apparent labor costs. Long production cycles are not much of a problem either, and speculative production systems are used as a matter of course.
Introduction
Published in Darina Lepadatu, Thomas Janoski, Framing and Managing Lean Organizations in the New Economy, 2020
Darina Lepadatu, Thomas Janoski
Are James Womack, Daniel Jones, and Daniel Roos correct in The Machine that Changed the World (1990) that lean production is the new model of the division of labor in the world? The division of labor is about how work is divided among workers, organizations, and industries. It has been observed since the time of Adam Smith (1776) and Emilé Durkheim (1997/1893)—farmers begetting bakers of bread and millers of wheat—about the actual procedures by which jobs are divided and organized so that they fit together in larger scale organizations. Adam Smith described the division of tasks involved in making a straight pin (obtaining wire, straightening it, cutting it, drawing it out, making a point, and putting a head on it). It inherently involves the division of work within a firm with greater specialization and repetition of tasks (1976/1776:8–9).1 In fact, the Germans and many industrial engineers use “takt time” to describe the amount of time that it takes to do a repetitive task (for instance, 90 to 120 seconds on an assembly line). But the division of labor also consolidates some tasks through teamwork and job rotation, so it need not always be perceived negatively. In a sense, the division of labor refers to how people organize others to make things and deliver services. In most cases, it simply refers to dividing a project into smaller tasks, but it can also refer to the division of products between organizations (one firm makes pistons, another tie-rods, and an assembler puts them together as a car). Finally, it refers to country-level divisions of labor where one country produces one product, and another country produces a different product.2 In this book, we focus on how this new division of labor is modeled by academics and organized by major corporations.
Creating Interdependencies: Managing Incidents in Large Organizational Environments
Published in Human–Computer Interaction, 2018
Paul Luff, Christian Heath, Menisha Patel, Dirk Vom Lehn, Andrew Highfield
In this paper, we will consider one such center: a substantial multifunction, transport operations center in Central London. Responsible for traffic management and dealing with major incidents, this center of operations brings together three separate organizations and their respective operation centers – transport control, traffic management, and the police, within one control room. It houses more than a hundred personnel, located within various regions of the room, personnel with different responsibilities, reporting to different organizations, with common access to a complex range of information and communication resources. These personnel have to manage the problems and emergencies that inevitably arise in the day-to-day flow of traffic in a major urban environment. The coordination of problems and emergencies through a highly complex division of labor is a major practical challenge for staff and management. It also raises important questions for our understanding human–computer interaction and the concepts, methods, and ideas that informed more traditional studies of work and collaboration within control rooms.