Buying decision making is a complicated process, in which a consumer's decision is under the influence of others. The buyer's decision making is directed in such a way that they must act as a consumer in society. Media and family are key socializing agents for adolescents. Moreover, changes in the socio-cultural environment in India necessitate that adolescents' influence in family's buying decision making should be investigated. In comparison to Western society, Indian society is quite different when compared in terms of family composition and structure, behavior, values and norms which impact adolescents' buying decision making. Adolescents, Family and Consumer Behaviour studies the role of consumer socialization agents for adolescents, examining socio-economic factors that influence adolescents' buying decision making in Indian urban families. It aims to discover the influence tactics that adolescents employ and to qualitatively analyse how marketers in turn influence adolescents. It addresses the topics with regard to strategic management and marketing and will be of interest to researchers, academics, practitioners, and students in the fields of management, entrepreneurship, small business management, and human resource management.

This third volume in the Routledge Focus on Women Writers in Organization Studies series challenges us to think again about the implications of gender, embodiment and fluidity for organizing and managing. The themes of this book disrupt our understanding of dualisms between sex (men and women), gender (masculinity and femininity) and mind / body, and in so doing analyze the ways in which dominant power relations constitute heteronormativity throughout organizational history, thereby reinforcing mainstream management research and teaching. By centring the work of women writers, this book gives recognition to their thinking and praxis; each writer making political inroads into changing the lived experiences of those who have suffered discrimination, exclusion and marginalization as they consider the ways in which organizational knowledge has tended to privilege rather than problematize masculinity, fixity, control, normativity, violence and discrimination. The themes and authors (Acker, de Beauvoir, Halberstam, Kosofsky Sedgwick, Kristeva, Yourcenar) covered in this book are important precisely because they are not generally encountered in mainstream writing on management and organization studies. They are significant to the study and analysis of organizations because they demonstrate how our understanding of managing and organizing can be transformed when other voices/bodies/genders write on what it is work, live, lead and relate to self and others. All the writers turn to the ways in which individuals matter organizationally, acknowledging that lived experiences are a source of political and ethical practice. Each Woman Writer is introduced and analyzed by experts in organization studies. Further reading and accessible resources are also identified for those interested in knowing more. This book will be relevant to students, researchers and practitioners with an interest in business and management, organizational studies, critical management studies, gender studies and sociology. Like all the books in this series, it will also be of interest to anyone who wants to see, think and act differently.

Spanning the 20th and 21st centuries, the writers considered in this first book of the Routledge Focus on Women Writers in Organization Studies series make an important contribution to how we think about rationality in managing, leading and working. It provides a space in which to think differently about rationality, challenging dominant masculine logics while positioning relations between people centre stage. A critical and intellectually provocative text, the book provides a nuanced and practical account of rationality in organizational contexts, making it clear that women have and continue to write groundbreaking work on the subject: women like Lillian Moller Gilbreth, who was at the forefront of developments in scientific management, and Frances Perkins, who was the first female US cabinet secretary. Both are important not only for what they achieved but also as illustrations of the ways in which women have been written out of the accounts of managing and management thought. This matters not only because credit is denied to those who deserve it, but also because it impoverishes our understanding of complex organisational phenomenon. Where so much extant writing on managing and organizing is preoccupied with abstract notions of structure, strategy, metaphor and machines, the writers considered here explain why effective working and managing is primarily about seeing and working with people. Writers such as Arlie Hochschild, Mary Parker Follett and Heather Hoepfl remind us that rationality cannot be decoupled from emotion or, where a system is to be rationalised, then it should start with and enhance the lives of people - be designed with people at the centre. In this sense, the book is not arguing for a wholesale rejection of rationality. Rather, authors call on readers to move beyond a preoccupation with rationality for its own sake, seeing it instead as a useful and highly contestable aspect of organizational life. Each woman writer is introduced and analysed by an expert in their field. Further reading and accessible resources are also identified for those interested in knowing more. This book will be relevant to students, researchers and practitioners with an interest in business and management, organizational studies, critical management studies, gender studies and sociology. Like all the books in this series, it will also be of interest to anyone who wants to see, think and act differently.

There is a long tradition of research on politics, power and exclusion in areas such as sociology, social policy, politics, women's studies and philosophy. While power has received considerable attention in mainstream management research and teaching, it is rarely considered in terms of politics and exclusion, particularly where the work of women writers is concerned. This second book in the Routledge Series on Women Writers in Organization Studies analyses the ways in which women have theorised and embodied relations of power. Women like Edith Garrud who, trained in the Japanese art of jujutsu, confronted the power of the state to champion feminist politics. Others, such as Beatrice Webb and Alva Myrdal, are shown to have been at the heart of welfare reforms and social justice movements that responded to the worst excesses of industrialisation based on considerations of class and gender. The writing of bell hooks provides a necessarily uncomfortable account of the ways in which imperialism, white supremacy and patriarchy inflict unspoken harm, while Hannah Arendt's work considers the ways in which different modes of organizing restrict the ability of people to live freely. Taken together, such writings dispel the myth that work or business can be separated from the rest of life, a point driven home by Rosabeth Moss Kanter's observations on the ways in which power and inequality differentially structure life chances. These writers challenge us to think again about power, politics and exclusion in organizational contexts. They provide provocative thinking, which opens up new avenues for organization theory, practice and social activism. Each woman writer is introduced and analysed by experts in organization studies. Further reading and accessible resources are also identified for those interested in knowing (thinking!) more. This book will be relevant to students, researchers and practitioners with an interest in business and management, organizational studies, critical management studies, gender studies and sociology. Like all the books in this series, it will also be interest to anyone who wants to see, think and act differently.

This book explores the underlying causes of the pervasive dominance of 'unethics' in contemporary affairs in economics, business, and society. It is argued that the state of unethics is related to the overexpansion of market and market values in all spheres of social life and human activities. A correlate of this development is the emergence of an extremely individualistic, materialistic and narcissistic mind-set that dictates the decisions and behavior of people and organizations. The author argues that art can help to overcome the dominant market metaphysics of our age, as genuine art creates models of 'poetic dwelling,' which can generate non-linear, progressive change that opens up a larger playing field for ethics. Aesthetics and ethics go hand in hand. Ethical action is not just right for its own sake, but makes the world a richer, livable and more beautiful place. Ethics, Meaning, and Market Society will be of interest to students at an advanced level, academics, researchers and professionals. It addresses the topics with regard to ethics in economics, business, and society in a contemporary context.

Although studies on multiobjective mathematical programming under uncertainty have been accumulated and several books on multiobjective mathematical programming under uncertainty have been published (e.g., Stancu-Minasian (1984); Slowinski and Teghem (1990); Sakawa (1993); Lai and Hwang (1994); Sakawa (2000)), there seems to be no book which concerns both randomness of events related to environments and fuzziness of human judgments simultaneously in multiobjective decision making problems. In this book, the authors are concerned with introducing the latest advances in the field of multiobjective optimization under both fuzziness and randomness on the basis of the authors' continuing research works. Special stress is placed on interactive decision making aspects of fuzzy stochastic multiobjective programming for human-centered systems under uncertainty in most realistic situations when dealing with both fuzziness and randomness. Organization of each chapter is briefly summarized as follows:

Chapter 2 is devoted to mathematical preliminaries, which will be used throughout the remainder

of the book. Starting with basic notions and methods of multiobjective programming, interactive

fuzzy multiobjective programming as well as fuzzy multiobjective programming is outlined.

In Chapter 3, by considering the imprecision of decision maker's (DM's) judgment for stochastic

objective functions and/or constraints in multiobjective problems, fuzzy multiobjective stochastic

programming is developed.

In Chapter 4, through the consideration of not only the randomness of parameters involved in

objective functions and/or constraints but also the experts' ambiguous understanding of the realized values of the random parameters, multiobjective programming problems with fuzzy random variables are formulated.

In Chapter 5, for resolving conflict of decision making problems in hierarchical managerial or

public organizations where there exist two DMs who have different priorities in making decisions, two-level programming problems are discussed.

Finally, Chapter 6 outlines some future research directions.

Nowadays, decision problems are pervaded with incomplete knowledge, i.e., imprecision and/or uncertain information, both in the problem description and in the preferential information. In this volume leading scientists in the field address various theoretical and practical aspects related to the handling of this incompleteness. The problems discussed are taken from multi-objective linear programming, rationality considerations in preference modelling, non-probabilistic utility theory, data fusion, group decision making and multicriteria decision aid. The book is oriented towards researchers, graduate and postgraduate students in decision analysis, fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic, and operations research/management science.

The book develops manufacturing concepts and applications beyond physical production and towards a wider manufacturing value chain incorporating external stakeholders that include suppliers of raw materials and parts, customers, collaborating manufacturing companies, manufacturing service providers, and environmental organisations. The focal point of the value chain remains as a manufacturing system and its operations whiles flows of parts/materials and information and services across the supply/value chain tiers are taken into account. The book emphasises on the two innovative paradigms of Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMS) and the 4th industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) along with their incorporated development. RMS, as a relatively new paradigm, has been introduced to meet the requirements of 'the factories of the future', which is aimed by Industry 4.0, though introducing greater responsiveness and customised flexibility into production systems, in which changes in product volumes and types occur regularly. Manufacturing responsiveness can be achieved by RMS through reconfiguring the production facilities according to changing demands of products and new market conditions. The book addresses challenges of mass-customisation and dynamic changes in the supply-chain environment by focusing on developing new techniques related to integrability, scalability and re-configurability at a system level and manufacturing readiness in terms of financial and technical feasibility of RMS. It demonstrate the expected impacts of an RMS design on operational performance and its supply/value chain in the current/future manufacturing environment facing dynamic changes in the internal/external circumstances. In order to establish a circular economy through the RMS value chain, an integrated data-based reconfiguration link is introduced to incorporate information sharing amongst the value chain stakeholders and facilitate grouping products into families with allocation of the product families to the corresponding system configurations with optimal product-process allocation. Decision support systems such as multi criteria decision making tools are developed and applied for the selection of product families and optimising product-process configuration. The proposed models are illustrated through real case studies in applicable manufacturing firms.

The issue of sustainability has become a vital discussion in many industries within the public and private sectors. In the business realm, incorporating such practices allows organizations to re-design their operations more effectively. Green Supply Chain Management for Sustainable Business Practice examines the challenges and benefits of implementing sustainability into the core functions of contemporary enterprises, focusing on how green approaches improve operations in an ecological way. Highlighting key concepts, emerging innovations, and future directions, this book is a pivotal reference source for professionals, managers, educators, and upper-level students.

This attractive textbook with its easy-to-follow presentation provides a down-to-earth introduction to operations research for students in a wide range of fields such as engineering, business analytics, mathematics and statistics, computer science, and econometrics. It is the result of many years of teaching and collective feedback from students.The book covers the basic models in both deterministic and stochastic operations research and is a springboard to more specialized texts, either practical or theoretical. The emphasis is on useful models and interpreting the solutions in the context of concrete applications.The text is divided into several parts. The first three chapters deal exclusively with deterministic models, including linear programming with sensitivity analysis, integer programming and heuristics, and network analysis. The next three chapters primarily cover basic stochastic models and techniques, including decision trees, dynamic programming, optimal stopping, production planning, and inventory control. The final five chapters contain more advanced material, such as discrete-time and continuous-time Markov chains, Markov decision processes, queueing models, and discrete-event simulation.Each chapter contains numerous exercises, and a large selection of exercises includes solutions.

This attractive textbook with its easy-to-follow presentation provides a down-to-earth introduction to operations research for students in a wide range of fields such as engineering, business analytics, mathematics and statistics, computer science, and econometrics. It is the result of many years of teaching and collective feedback from students.The book covers the basic models in both deterministic and stochastic operations research and is a springboard to more specialized texts, either practical or theoretical. The emphasis is on useful models and interpreting the solutions in the context of concrete applications.The text is divided into several parts. The first three chapters deal exclusively with deterministic models, including linear programming with sensitivity analysis, integer programming and heuristics, and network analysis. The next three chapters primarily cover basic stochastic models and techniques, including decision trees, dynamic programming, optimal stopping, production planning, and inventory control. The final five chapters contain more advanced material, such as discrete-time and continuous-time Markov chains, Markov decision processes, queueing models, and discrete-event simulation.Each chapter contains numerous exercises, and a large selection of exercises includes solutions.

National oil companies are big business with about 80 percent of the world's proven oil reserves, and they are crucial to the world's energy supplies. They are giants, some of the world's largest companies, measured by market capitalisation, cash flow and investment. Little is known about their modus operandi, how they make decisions about investment and production or about relations with their government-owners. However, it is known that they conduct business with a political mandate, often with multiple long-term objectives, broadly defined and hard to quantify. Unclear mandates give national oil companies leeway to pursue their own distinctive interests, apart from those of the government-owner. As investors, governments are less zealous than private investors. They generally observe multiple objectives, not only return on capital. Therefore, the senior management of national oil companies enjoy more discretionary power and consider longer time horizons than their counterparts in the private sector. The Oil Business and the State explains the practice of state ownership in a capital-intensive industry with high risks and high return, and how these companies act in a market with imperfect competition. This book looks to give readers more insight into the oil industry, into the background of oil exporting countries as well as the economic and political challenges confronting them, including problems of state ownership. The book discusses wider consequences of China replacing the United States as the world's leading oil importer. It will be of interest to researchers, academics and students in the fields of international business, management history, corporate governance, political economy and economic development of oil-rich countries.

The increasing complexity of financial problems and the enormous volume of financial data often make it difficult to apply traditional modeling and algorithmic procedures. In this context, the field of computational intelligence provides an arsenal of particularly useful techniques. These techniques include new modeling tools for decision making under risk and uncertainty, data mining techniques for analyzing complex data bases, and powerful algorithms for complex optimization problems. Computational intelligence has also evolved rapidly over the past few years and it is now one of the most active fields in operations research and computer science. This volume presents the recent advances of the use of computation intelligence in financial decision making. The book covers all the major areas of computational intelligence and a wide range of problems in finance, such as portfolio optimization, credit risk analysis, asset valuation, financial forecasting, and trading.

This book focuses largely on constrained optimization. It begins with a substantial treatment of linear programming and proceeds to convex analysis, network flows, integer programming, quadratic programming, and convex optimization. Along the way, dynamic programming and the linear complementarity problem are touched on as well. This book aims to be the first introduction to the topic. Specific examples and concrete algorithms precede more abstract topics. Nevertheless, topics covered are developed in some depth, a large number of numerical examples worked out in detail, and many recent results are included, most notably interior-point methods. The exercises at the end of each chapter both illustrate the theory, and, in some cases, extend it. Optimization is not merely an intellectual exercise: its purpose is to solve practical problems on a computer. Accordingly, the book comes with software that implements the major algorithms studied. At this point, software for the following four algorithms is available: The two-phase simplex method The primal-dual simplex method The path-following interior-point method The homogeneous self-dual methods.GBP/LISTGBP.

Over the last fifty-plus years, the increased complexity and speed of integrated circuits have radically changed our world. Today, semiconductor manufacturing is perhaps the most important segment of the global manufacturing sector. As the semiconductor industry has become more competitive, improving planning and control has become a key factor for business success. This book is devoted to production planning and control problems in semiconductor wafer fabrication facilities. It is the first book that takes a comprehensive look at the role of modeling, analysis, and related information systems for such manufacturing systems. The book provides an operations research- and computer science-based introduction into this important field of semiconductor manufacturing-related research.

The quadratic binary optimization problem (QUBO) is a versatile combinatorial optimization model with a variety of applications and rich theoretical properties. Application areas of the model include finance, cluster analysis, traffic management, machine scheduling, VLSI physical design, physics, quantum computing, engineering, and medicine. In addition, various mathematical optimization models can be reformulated as a QUBO, including the resource constrained assignment problem, set partitioning problem, maximum cut problem, quadratic assignment problem, the bipartite unconstrained binary optimization problem, among others. This book presents a systematic development of theory, algorithms, and applications of QUBO. It offers a comprehensive treatment of QUBO from various viewpoints, including a historical introduction along with an in-depth discussion of applications modelling, complexity and polynomially solvable special cases, exact and heuristic algorithms, analysis of approximation algorithms, metaheuristics, polyhedral structure, probabilistic analysis, persistencies, and related topics. Available software for solving QUBO is also introduced, including public domain, commercial, as well as quantum computing based codes.

Presents an elucidative discussion about productivity and efficiency, illustrating its potentials of use and conceptual differencesCovers the concepts and techniques for analysis of productivity and efficiency, analyzing critical benefits and limitations Explains didactically and in detail how to use DEA for analysis of productivity and efficiency Provides an innovative method for using DEA Offers a free online computer tool to operationalize the concepts and method proposed in the book

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Includes practical organizational and economical methodologies Offers concepts of marketing and its role in business and public organization Presents marketing decisions and the need for scientific marketing analysis Provides mathematical models in marketing Illustrates sales response to advertising in presence of competition

This book will cover heuristic optimization techniques and applications in engineering problems. The book will be divided into three sections that will provide coverage of the techniques, which can be employed by engineers, researchers, and manufacturing industries, to improve their productivity with the sole motive of socio-economic development. This will be the first book in the category of heuristic techniques with relevance to engineering problems and achieving optimal solutions. Features Explains the concept of optimization and the relevance of using heuristic techniques for optimal solutions in engineering problems Illustrates the various heuristics techniques Describes evolutionary heuristic techniques like genetic algorithm and particle swarm optimization Contains natural based techniques like ant colony optimization, bee algorithm, firefly optimization, and cuckoo search Offers sample problems and their optimization, using various heuristic techniques

The Fundamentals of Developing Operational Solutions for the Government guides professionals on how to use operations research to solve problems and capture opportunities for government customers. The governments of modern democratic nations manage large complex societal operations to offer national defense, social services, infrastructure sustainment, law enforcement, monetary control, and other benefits for their citizens. The United States government alone spends over $1 trillion per year on these discretionary activities. Within all the spending, deliveries, and oversight, some operational needs require solutions to improve processes, architectures, technologies, and human factors. Without such effective and comprehensive solutions, the most eloquent proposal for government work could end in defeat and the most well-funded government programs could yield operational disruptions and performance failures. There are many books on how to write winning proposals to the government, but this book places winning in the context of deeply understanding government operations and innovatively solving government problems. There are also some books on convincing the government to adopt new transformational processes, but this book seeks to first try to fix current government processes before demanding risky transformation. Finally, there are massive tomes dedicated to the theories and mathematical models of operations research, but this book is devoted to making operations research simple enough for professionals to apply throughout the course of developing proposals and delivering products and services. Presenting the methods and techniques for quickly developing solutions is thus the central focus.

Software Engineering Techniques Applied to Agricultural Systems presents cutting-edge software engineering techniques for designing and implementing better agricultural software systems based on the object-oriented paradigm and the Unified Modeling Language (UML). The focus is on the presentation of rigorous step-by-step approaches for modeling flexible agricultural and environmental systems, starting with a conceptual diagram representing elements of the system and their relationships. Furthermore, diagrams such as sequential and collaboration diagrams are used to explain the dynamic and static aspects of the software system. This second edition includes: a new chapter on Object Constraint Language (OCL), a new section dedicated to the Model-VIEW-Controller (MVC) design pattern, new chapters presenting details of two MDA-based tools - the Virtual Enterprise and Olivia Nova and a new chapter with exercises on conceptual modeling. It may be highly useful to undergraduate and graduate students as the first edition has proven to be a useful supplementary textbook for courses in mathematical programming in agriculture, ecology, information technology, agricultural operations research methods, agronomy and soil science and applied mathematical modeling. The book has broad appeal for anyone involved in software development projects in agriculture and to researchers in general who are interested in modeling complex systems. From the reviews of the first edition: "The book will be useful for those interested in gaining a quick understanding of current software development techniques and how they are applied in practice... this is a good introductory text on the application of OOAD, UML and design patters to the creation of agricultural systems. It is technically sound and well written." -Computing Reviews, September 2006

In an era of systemic crisis and of global critiques of the unsustainable perpetuation of capitalism, Pervasive Powers: The Politics of Corporate Authority critically questions the conditions for the maintenance and expansion of corporate power. The book explores empirical case studies in the realms of finance, urban policies, automobile safety, environmental risk, agriculture, and food in western democracies. It renews understanding of the power of big business, focusing on how the study of temporalities, of multi-sited influence and of sociotechnical tools is crucial to an analysis of the evolution of corporate authority. Drawing on different literatures, ranging from research on business associations and global governance to that on the social production of ignorance or on corporate crime, this book aims at contributing to existing works on the capacity of corporations to rule the world. Unlike approaches focused on economic elites and on the political activities of firms, it goes beyond analysis of the power of corporations to influence policy-making to depict their unprecedented capacity to transform and shape the social world. Operating in numerous social spaces and mobilizing a wide range of strategies, corporate organizations have acquired the pervasive power to act far beyond mere spaces of regulation and government. Based on contributions from historians, science and technology studies scholars, sociologists and political scientists, this book will be of great interest to researchers, academics and students who wish to understand how corporations exert a pervasive influence on public policies, and to NGOs and regulatory agencies.

This book surveys new algorithmic approaches and applications to natural and man-made disasters such as oil spills, hurricanes, earthquakes and wildfires. Based on the "Third International Conference on Dynamics of Disasters" held in Kalamata, Greece, July 2017, this Work includes contributions in evacuation logistics, disaster communications between first responders, disaster relief, and a case study on humanitarian logistics. Multi-disciplinary theories, tools, techniques and methodologies are linked with disasters from mitigation and preparedness to response and recovery. The interdisciplinary approach to problems in economics, optimization, government, management, business, humanities, engineering, medicine, mathematics, computer science, behavioral studies, emergency services, and environmental studies will engage readers from a wide variety of fields and backgrounds.

Through an exclusive focus on public policy advocacy, Dalton and Butler offer practical guidance for determining the fundamental issues that make up a controversy and what expectations public audiences will have for advocacy based on the issues and the burdens of advocates challenging or defending the status quo. Through examples that span a wide range of advocacy situations and subjects of contemporary importance, the authors build a framework for public policy advocacy that is organic to the communication discipline, recover and refresh foundational lessons about the uses of evidence, and provide critical questions that can be used to develop and communicate policy proposals that are sensible and appealing. Written in an accessible, respectful, and motivational style, the book is suitable for students of debate, professionals who function as advocates, and people who wish to voice their opinion.