Essay about Cultural Anthropology Book Report - 1815 Words

Classical Readings on Cultural Anthropology What do we have to learn through the study of different cultures? I was hoping for some wonderful revelation in the collection of writings. I may have found one. This book was a difficult read for me. I am not sure whether it’s my age or my inexperience with classical readings. I also found it difficult to formulate a report on a collection of readings, the last report I did was on Laura Ingall’s Little House on the Prairie. This reading was a little more challenging. The main point that seemed to jump out at me is that perceptions change, our theory of reality changes with every viewpoint. Every culture can seem primitive, self destructive, nonsensical, immoral or just wrong, depending on†¦show more content†¦He had spent a year with these people and they humiliated him and hurt him and he needed to find out why. Then along comes someone else, Marvin Harris, and he uses the exact same incident as an â€Å"amusing story† to point out the need of the peop les to curb the ego. I don’t think Mr. Lee thought is was amusing at the time, however that is how Mr. Harris perceived it. I don’t think that either of these stories belonged in the Economics and Ecology section. It appears to me that Mr. Harris has taken his theory way beyond the economical points of world cultures. He seems much more interested in exploring the theory of why we work at jobs and are not just self-sustaining. He gives much credence to the fact that if we would return to the hunter-gatherer state that we could work less and be better off. Next we move into the Marriage and Family Section, with a writing from Melvyn C. Goldstein. This was a much easier read for me – less technical or scientific terms that I am as yet unfamiliar with. This was an interesting story of why one woman would take on many husbands in the Tibetan culture. I thoroughly understood this passage and appreciated the insight given by the author. It appeared non-judgmental and non-condescending like some of the other passages I had read to this point. Death without Weeping by Nancy Scheper-Hughes takes you on a journey through theShow MoreRelatedAnalysis Of The Book Savage Minds By Adam Fish And Nick Seaver855 Words   |  4 Pages I have chosen blog posts by Adam Fish and Nick Seaver. Adam Fish is a cultural anthropologist, a teacher and researcher at the Sociology Department of Lancaster University, UK. The blog posts I have chosen written by him are: â€Å"The genie is out of the bottle – it’s foolish to think encryption can now be banned† and â€Å"Interview: An anthropologist on Tiger Woods†. On the other hand, Nick Seaver is a PhD candidate in anthropology at UC Irvine. 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Women in the 20th Century - 1684 Words

The 1960’s was a time period in the United States history that saw an abundance of change for the American people. One of the many changes was the â€Å"sexual revolution†, which mainly focused on women. Not only did it focus on the sexual liberation of women, but also the attitude towards women in corporate America. The sexual revolution was a major turning point on how women were perceived in public, media, and politics. Throughout the 20th century women had become a political presence. They fought for the civil right of African Americans and were finally being heard as an organized group. Then women finally started to fight for their own right to vote, and in 1920 it was granted with the 19th amendment. After women were allowed to vote, and finally got to in the election of 1922, an abundance of women saw themselves as political equals to men. As a result of this many women started to pursue more professional freedoms, and started to engage in more masculine activities in view of the public eye. Women started to drink in public, which at the time was illegal due to prohibition. Fashion became more proactive for that time, skirts became higher, and hair was cut shorter as to blend in with their male counterparts. Women started to smoke as well, and wanted to obtain more sexual freedom, and to destroy the double standard of men being able to take multiple lovers, which was seen as healthy, but when a woman engaged in this activity was immoral and evil. With this fight forShow MoreRelatedWomen During The 20th Century1548 Words   |  7 PagesWomen are a large part of our society. They always have been. Without women none of us would be here right now. In the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries women did not really get to work much. A woman s job was typically to have and take care of the children. 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Roland Barthes the Death of the Author Free Essays

string(360) " person of the interlocutors: linguistically, the author is never anything more than the man who writes, just as I is no more than the man who says I: language knows a â€Å"subject,† not a â€Å"person,† end this subject, void outside of the very utterance which defines it, suffices to make language â€Å"work,† that is, to exhaust it\." The Death of the Author In his story Sarrasine, Balzac, speaking of a castrato disguised as a woman, writes this sentence: â€Å"It was Woman, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive fears, her unprovoked bravado, her daring and her delicious delicacy of feeling† Who is speaking in this way? Is it the story’s hero, concerned to ignore the castrato concealed beneath the woman? Is it the man Balzac, endowed by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman?Is it the author Balzac, professing certain â€Å"literary† ideas of femininity? Is it universal wisdom? or romantic psychology? It will always be impossible to know, for the good reason that all writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin: literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.Probably this has always been the case: once an action is recounted, for intransitive ends, and no longer in order to act directly upon reality – that is, finally external to any function but the very exercise of the symbol – this disjunction occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins.Nevertheless, the feeling about this phenomenon has been variable; in primitive societies, narrative is never undertaken by a person, but by a mediator, shaman or speaker, whose â€Å"performance† may be admired (that is, his mastery of the narrative code), but not his â€Å"genius† The author is a modern figure, produced no doubt by our society insofar as, at the end of the middle ages, with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, or, to put it more nobly, of the â€Å"hu man person† Hence it is logical that with regard to literature it should be positivism, resume and the result of capitalist ideology, which has accorded the greatest importance to the author’s â€Å"person†The author still rules in manuals of literary history, in biographies of writers, in magazine interviews, and even in the awareness of literary men, anxious to unite, by their private journals, their person and their work; the image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions; criticism still consists, ost of the time, in saying that Baudelaire’s work is the failure of the man Baudelaire, Van Gogh’s work his madness, Tchaikovsky’s his vice: the explanation of the work is always sought in the man who has produced it, as if, through the more or less transparent allegory of fiction, it was always finally the voice of one and the same person, the aut hor, which delivered his â€Å"confidence. We will write a custom essay sample on Roland Barthes the Death of the Author or any similar topic only for you Order Now â€Å"Though the Author’s empire is still very powerful (recent criticism has often merely consolidated it), it is evident that for a long time now certain writers have attempted to topple it. In France, Mallarme was doubtless the first to see and foresee in its full extent the necessity of substituting language itself for the man who hitherto was supposed to own it; for Mallarme, as for us, it is language which speaks, not the author: to write is to reach, through a preexisting impersonality never to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realistic ovelist – that point where language alone acts, â€Å"performs,† and not â€Å"oneself†: Mallarme’s entire poetics consists in suppressing the author for the sake of the writing (which is, as we shall see, to restore the status of the reader. ) Valery, encumbered with a psychology of the Self, greatly edulcorated Mallarme’s theory, but, turning in a preference for classicism to the lessons of rhetoric, he unceasingly questioned and mocked the Author, emphasized the linguistic and almost â€Å"chance† nature of his activity, and throughout his prose works championed the essentially verbal condition of literature, in the face of which any recourse to the writer’s inferiority seemed to him pure superstition.It is clear that Proust himself, despite the apparent psychological character of what is called his analyses, undertook the responsibility of inexorably blurring, by an extreme subtilization, the relation of the writer and his characters: by making the narrator not the person who has seen or felt, nor even the person who writes, but the person who will write (the young man of the novel – but, in fact, how old is he, and who is he? – wants to write but cannot, and the novel ends when at last the writing becomes possible), Proust has given modern writing its epic: by a radical reversal, instead of putting his life into his novel, as we say so often, he makes his very life into a work for which his own book was in a sense the model, so that it is quite obvious to us that it is not Charlus who imitates Montesquiou, but that Montesquiou in his anecdotal, historical reality is merely a secondary fragment, derived from Charlus.Surrealism lastly – to remain on the level of this prehistory of modernity – surrealism doubtless could not accord language a sovereign place, since language is a system and since what the movement sought was, romantically, a direct subversion of all codes – an illusory subversion, moreover, for a code cannot be destroyed, it can only be â€Å"played with†; but by abruptly violating expected meanings (this was the famous surrealist â€Å"jolt†), by entrusting to the hand the responsibility of writing as fast as po ssible what the head itself ignores (this was automatic writing), by accepting the principle and the experience of a collective writing, surrealism helped secularize the image of the Author.Finally, outside of literature itself (actually, these distinctions are being superseded), linguistics has just furnished the destruction of the Author with a precious analytic instrument by showing that utterance in its entirety is a void process, which functions perfectly without requiring to be filled by the person of the interlocutors: linguistically, the author is never anything more than the man who writes, just as I is no more than the man who says I: language knows a â€Å"subject,† not a â€Å"person,† end this subject, void outside of the very utterance which defines it, suffices to make language â€Å"work,† that is, to exhaust it. You read "Roland Barthes the Death of the Author" in category "Papers" The absence of the Author (with Brecht, we might speak here of a real â€Å"alienation:’ the Author diminishing like a tiny figure at the far end of the literary stage) is not only a historical fact or an act of writing: it utterly transforms the modern text (or – what is the same thing – the text is henceforth written and read so that in it, on every level, the Author absents himself). Time, first of all, is no longer the same.The Author, when we believe in him, is always conceived as the past of his own book: the book and the author take their places of their own accord on the same line, cast as a before and an after: the Author is supposed to feed the book – that is, he pre-exists it, thinks, suffers, lives for it; he maintains with his work the same relation of antecedence a father maintains with his child. Quite the contrary, the modern writer (scriptor) is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate; there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now.This is because (or: it follows that) to write can no longer designate an operation of recording, of observing, of representing, of â€Å"painting† (as the Classic writers put it), but rather what the linguisticians, following the vocabulary of the Oxford school, call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given to the first person and to the present), in which utterance has no other content than the act by which it is uttered: something like the / Command of kings or the I Sing of the early bards; the modern writer, having buried the Author, can therefore no longer believe, according to the â€Å"pathos† of his predecessors, that his hand is too slow for his thought or his passion, and that in consequence, making a law out of necessity, he must accentuate this gap and endlessly â€Å"elaborate† his form; for him, on the contrary, his hand, detached from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin – or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, that is, the very thing which ceaselessly questions any origin. We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single â€Å"theological† meaning (the â€Å"message† of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.Like Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, both sublime and comical and whose profound absurdity precisely designates the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture forever anterior, never original; his only power is to combine the different kinds of writing, to oppose some by others, so as never to sustain himself by just one of them; if he wants to express himself, at least he should know that the internal â€Å"thing† he claims to â€Å"translate† is itself only a readymade dictionary whose words can be explained (defined) only by other words, and so on ad infinitum: an experience which occurred in an exemplary fashion to the young De Quincey, so gifted in Greek that in order to translate into that dead language certain absolutely modern ideas and images, Baudelaire tells us, â€Å"he created for it a standing dictionary much more complex and extensive than the one which results from the vulgar patience of purely literary themes† (Paradis Artificiels). succeeding the Author, the writer no longer contains within himself passions, humors, sentiments, impressions, but that enormous dictionary, from wh ich he derives a writing which can know no end or halt: life can only imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, a lost, infinitely remote imitation.Once the Author is gone, the claim to â€Å"decipher† a text becomes quite useless. To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing. This conception perfectly suits criticism, which can then take as its major task the discovery of the Author (or his hypostases: society, history, the psyche, freedom) beneath the work: once the Author is discovered, the text is â€Å"explained:’ the critic has conquered; hence it is scarcely surprising not only that, historically, the reign of the Author should also have been that of the Critic, but that criticism (even â€Å"new criticism†) should be overthrown along with the Author. In a ultiple writing, indeed, everything is to be distinguished, but nothing deciphered; structure can be followed, â€Å"threaded† (like a stocking that has run) in all its recurrences and all its stages, but there is no underlying ground; the space of the writing is to be traversed, not penetrated: writing ceaselessly posits meaning but always in order to evaporate it: it proceeds to a systematic exemption of meaning. Thus literature (it would be better, henceforth, to say writ ing), by refusing to assign to the text (and to the world as text) a â€Å"secret:’ that is, an ultimate meaning, liberates an activity which we might call counter-theological, properly revolutionary, for to refuse to arrest meaning is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law.Let us return to Balzac’s sentence: no one (that is, no â€Å"person†) utters it: its source, its voice is not to be located; and yet it is perfectly read; this is because the true locus of writing is reading. Another very specific example can make this understood: recent investigations (J. P. Vernant) have shed light upon the constitutively ambiguous nature of Greek tragedy, the text of which is woven with words that have double meanings, each character understanding them unilaterally (this perpetual misunderstanding is precisely what is meant by â€Å"the tragic†); yet there is someone who understands each word in its duplicity, and understands further, o ne might say, the very deafness of the characters speaking in front of him: this someone is precisely the reader (or here the spectator). In this way is revealed the whole being of writing: a text consists of multiple writings, issuing from several cultures and entering into dialogue with each other, into parody, into contestation; but there is one place where this multiplicity is collected, united, and this place is not the author, as we have hitherto said it was, but the reader: the reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations a writing consists of; the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination; but this destination can no longer be personal: the reader is a man without history, without biography, without psychology; he is only that someone who holds gathered into a single field all the paths of which the text is constituted.This is why it is absurd to hear the new writing condemned in the name of a humanism which hypocritically appoints itself the champion of the reader’s rights. The reader has never been the concern of classical criticism; fo r it, there is no other man in literature but the one who writes. We are now beginning to be the dupes no longer of such antiphrases, by which our society proudly champions precisely what it dismisses, ignores, smothers or destroys; we know that to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author. How to cite Roland Barthes the Death of the Author, Papers

Pressure From The Women Essay Example For Students

Pressure From The Women Essay March 10, 1999English 102Pressure from the WomenIn Like a Winding Sheet Anne Petry chooses not to fully develop the femalecharacters of the story but still used them as a major part of the story to bring on theclimax. Petry chose to do this by using each womans appearance and in some cases theirrank in society to bring out the violent doings of Johnson. Petry first used Johnsons boss as a crisis in the plot. Johnson was described as aman in pain and being tired which is assumed by the reader was from working the longhours at work. After repeatedly being late to work his boss finally scolds him for arrivingso late, making her the first lady to start the conflict in the story. By Johnsons bossyelling at him he becomes angered as thoughts of striking his white, female boss enter hismind. The only things that keeps Johnson from hitting the boss was that it was extremelyimmoral to hit a woman, and the fact that she is a superior to him as his boss. The second woman in the story to create a complication in the story was the nextyoung white girl who is working at the coffee shop. On his way home from work Johnsonstopped at the coffee shop for the obvious cup of coffee. Johnson had waited in line forquite a while for the cup of coffee but when he finally got to the front for his coffee, theyoung white girl said that they were out of coffee. When she told Johnson this he didntthink that she did it in a polite manner at all. Johnson thought that he deserved morerespect due to him being an elder to the girl, he felt that the girl didnt show this respect. Once again Johnson had thoughts of striking the young girl but for morality reasons, herefrained. The final woman was the one that pushed the story to its climax. Johnsonreturned home a very tired and aggravated man from working and the disrespectfulwomen through out the day. This woman happened to be his wife Mae, waiting forJohnson at home. Mae verbally abused him similarly to what his boss had done. His wifetold him that he was being a tough old nigger, and continued with similar statements. Although her meaning of the term wasnt as serious as the bosses was, it still added toJohnsons pressure. Once again the thoughts of raising a hand and striking the woman passed throughhis mind. This time Johnson couldnt refrain from striking his abuser. Although theperson was again a woman, the pressure on the man had been too much, and he releasedall of his pressure. All the women throughout the day contributed to the pressure that theman had building inside which finally became too much for Johnson to contain.

Why Teachers Should Have Guns free essay sample

Of all the places in the world, you would think that a school is the safest place for a child to be. Sometimes this isn’t the case. In this speech, I will talk to you about how allowing teachers to carry concealed weapons will be a good idea. I will talk about the advantages of allowing teachers to carry a concealed weapon, how allowing teachers to carry concealed weapons is helping other countries, and why Gun-Free zones aren’t working. Let’s start with the advantages of allowing teachers to carry a concealed weapon. There are three main advantages for allowing teachers to carry a concealed weapon. The three advantages are casualties will be reduced if you could take down the shooter quickly before the shooter kills any more people, teachers can be a tremendous deterrent to crime, and teachers can help stop another school shooting for example, Columbine or Virginia Tech. We will write a custom essay sample on Why Teachers Should Have Guns or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Let’s start with the first advantage. Casualties will be reduced if you could take down the shooter quickly before the shooter kills any more people. An armed teacher provides more immediate protection for the students than a police officer on the phone. It will take probably 5-10 minutes before the police will even get there. That is too much time for the shooter to do whatever he wants. So, if some teachers were carrying a gun, they could take down the shooter quickly before more damage is done. The second advantage is if teachers have guns and the public knows about it. Its a good thing because that would alert anyone coming into our schools armed with a gun. The last advantages is for protection and it would make the students and parents feel a lot more safe! Those are the three advantages I think why teachers should have concealed weapons

War Without Mercy essays

War Without Mercy essays Race played a dominant role in World War II for a variety of reasons. Historically, power relationships emerge between the dominant and the domineered. This has occurred throughout history, from slavery in Roman times to slavery in our own South. It seems there is always a victor and a vanquished, and those weaker must bow to those stronger who dominate them. In World War II, and added tension was added, and author Dower calls this "race hate." We were not just fighting the Japanese, we were fighting the "Japs," the "Yellow Bastards" who attacked Pearl Harbor and killed so many of our fighting men in a single morning. They were not only the enemy, they were despicable because of their color and their race, and we hated In Europe, we were fighting the Nazis, the "Krauts," who murdered millions of Jews and sought to take over all of Europe. In both cases, the threats were quite real, and it is understood why we were fighting a war, but it became more than a war, and turned into a racial war because we hated and feared the things these foreigners had done, and this is common when we fear the vanquisher, and hope not to become the vanquished. On the home front, race hate reared its own ugly head in the way we treated our own black soldiers, who were not allowed to do many of the jobs that whites were allowed to do. We formed all black regiments, and all black fighter squadrons, but never mingled the two, thus underlining it was not just the enemy we were afraid of, it was anyone with a different color skin. Race played a dominant role in World War II because of fear, and because of ignorance, but that is not to say it could not happen again. Race hate will always be an issue when two dominant nations face off against each other; it seems to be human nature. ...

'Memory is simply biased, inaccurate history.' Discuss Essay

'Memory is simply biased, inaccurate history.' Discuss - Essay Example Memory denotes a distinctive and new field of study and a new method of conceptualization of the history as a generic field of inquiry (Cubitt, 2007). History is fundamentally remembered by the new generation by reading the accounts of the historians. It is not uncommon to find the pieces of literature giving completely different information from each other though they are all related to the same event. The main reason why there is so much difference between the historic accounts related to the same events is that different historians have made their accounts solely depending on their own memories. This paper discusses the statement â€Å"memory is simply biased, inaccurate history† drawing upon the elements that incorporate biasness in the memory and make its status as history inaccurate. In the recent years, the notion of memory has attained the status of a leading term in the cultural history. The notion of memory is used with varying levels of sophistication and is practic ed more than theorized. It has been used to study the memory of people that experienced such great and memorable events as the Holocaust survivors (Confino, 1997, p. 1386). In addition to that, memory has denoted past’s representation and its making into a knowledge of shared culture by the successive generations in such vehicles of memory as films, books, commemorations, and different forms and mediums of literature. The pageantry surrounding the British monarchy in the manifestations of its public ceremonies are seemingly the most ancient and related to an immemorial past. It is a product of the last two centuries in its modern form. Traditions that claim to be ancient are sometimes invented or are recently made. People who know about the colleges of the ancient British universities can visualize these traditions on a local scale (Hobsbawm, 1983, p. 1). Along with the rapid advancement of the world, the study of nationalism has also undergone a massive transformation in ter ms of scale, quantity, method, and level of sophistication (Anderson, 1983, p. xii). There is a tendency in human beings known as confirmation bias that causes them to favor the information by which their beliefs are confirmed. People make use of the confirmation bias upon collecting or remembering the information in a selective manner or while interpreting the information in a biased manner. Issues that are emotionally charged have a stronger effect as well as for the beliefs that are deeply entrenched. For instance, people generally use the sources that are in favor of their existing attitudes towards and perceptions of politics. Ambiguous evidence is also interpreted as supportive of people’s existing position. Memory, biased research, and interpretation have all been summoned to explain the polarization of behavior when different parties have the same evidence and yet they disagree with one another, perseverance of belief when it persists after the evidence has turned out to be false, illusionary correlation 0when people misunderstand the link between different events and situations, and the irrational primacy effect that refers to a greater reliance on the earlier encountered information in a series. During the 1960s, a series of experiments showed how biased people are toward supporting their current beliefs. Results of these researches were re-interpreted later as a tendency to evaluate the concepts in a one-sided

Diversity, legal rights of students Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Diversity, legal rights of students - Essay Example The IEP channels the delivery of special education services and supports for the student with a disability (La Venture, 2003). 3) Evaluations for special education. It should involve more than a single process, be nondiscriminatory, be done in a child's primary language, arranged by qualified multidisciplinary team, and tailored to gauge particular areas of need (La Venture, 2003). 4) Federal financial assistance. It will be given to local and state governments that provide full educational opportunities to students with disabilities. Since federal law regulates the rights of education for students with special needs, and due to the additional costs associated with educating these students, federal money is made available to schools based upon the number of students in the special education program. Every student, regardless of cost or disability, should be given by public school districts the right to an education within their schools (La Venture, 2003). 5) Due process procedures. Occasionally school districts and parents argue on how a child with disabilities must be educated. When this occurs, there are measures in place to deal with these conflicts. Parent involvement consists of a) the right to receive notice, b) equal partnership in the decision-making pr... ght to give approval for particular activities such as changes in placement, assessments, and release of information to others, d) and the right to join in all meetings regarding their child's special education (La Venture, 2003). 6) Least Restrictive Environment (LRE) in which to learn. This concept reveals the act's solid inclination for educating students with disabilities in general education classes with the access to general education curriculum. Education in the general education classroom is the first placement preference the IEP team should consider. If the IEP team concludes that the student can be properly educated in the general education classroom via adjustments/additional services and aids, this is the LRE for that student (La Venture, 2003). The Four IDEA Re-authorizations 1) PL 99-457 (1986). PL 99-457 or "The Preschool Law" expanded services for young children or infants who are at risk or have disabilities. Two parts of the law, Part B and H, summarize services for children from 0 to 5 years old. Part B states that each state shall extend all the provisions of the law to young children with disabilities. Young children are now entitled to the six chief mandates that used to just cover older students. All states that will not conform will lose the federal funds they had been getting for other pre-school services. Part H encourages states to devise and execute a broad method of intervention for toddlers or even infants with disabilities or developmental delay (Apling & Jones, 2002). 2) PL 101-476 (1990). PL 101-476 amended the title of the special education act to Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), also known as the "Person First" act. The aim of the law is to understand children first and the disability second. All terms having the

No tpoic Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

No tpoic - Essay Example There are chances of redundancy when using cellular phones especially for low volume or emergency calls. Mobile satellite transmission can serve as a backup or diverse routing while microwave transmission is a way of promoting redundancy-building connections in either town or colleges. Lower-frequency radio and infrared transmitters connect desktop and server networks. In deed, time and cost of reconnecting networks after a crisis occurs is saved. For communication to continue, transfer of calls to another company location is the solution. However, this is possible if the equipment has the capability of accommodating the extra volume and the existence of enough operators. Commercial call centers help in preventing overflow traffic and most of them operate like data center hot locations whose fee structure resemble each other. This helps in the possibility of receiving messages, forwarding calls, explaining situations, and if with the qualification, taking orders and answering technical questions. Kobe earthquake affects majority of United States and Japan firms directly in reference to raw materials thus reducing production in a notable rate. Further, there is reduced suppliers, inflation, and mismanaged delivery schedule. To solve this problem, a sole supplier must be identified and equip warehouse to handle any delays in supply resulting from any crisis. Another problem is limited manufacturing machinery and knowledgeable personnel majorly because of unpredictable weather and natural calamities. If the possibility of transferring operation to another site within the company is inhibited, it is advisable to arrange with contract manufacturing company to produce and resemble the product. These arrangements should be made early enough and the vendor informed in time. Vendors should be used to supply small quantities for quality checking, minimize ramp-up time, and make the vendor informed

How would Contemporary Leaders Maintain Quality Standards of Their Organizations?

How would Contemporary Leaders Maintain Quality Standards of Their Organizations? How would contemporary leaders maintain quality standards of their organizations? Qualitative methods play an important part in developing, maintaining and improving survey quality by assessing vital issues that field pre-tests and pilot surveys alone cannot address. They are better able to identify the problems experienced by respondents in answering questions because they place a more systematic and in-depth spotlight on each question and its administration, as well as routing and instructions. Quality is built into every process in the company. It applies on proactive requirements and resource management, feature a complete testing process life cycle, and provide thorough and detailed documentation. Quality Improvement is basically, the actions taken throughout the organization to increase the effectiveness of activities and processes to provide added benefits to both the organization and its customers. There is a significant relationship between productivity and quality. As a result, they expect for business as a profession, as well as about the substance of ethical dilemmas they confront in running their organization properly and ethically. To maintain quality standards of the organizations there are several keys that needs to have: (1) Benchmarking is the use of standard measurements in a service or industry for comparison to other organizations in order to gain perspective on organizational performance. (2) Continuous Improvement, in regard to organizational quality and performance, focuses on improving customer satisfaction through continuous and incremental improvements to processes, including by removing unnecessary activities and variations. (3) Failure Mode and Effects Analysis is an approach that helps identify and prioritize potential equipment and process failures. (4) ISO9000 is an internationally recognized standard of quality, and includes guidelines to accomplish the ISO9000 quality standard. Organizations can be optionally audited to earn ISO9000 certification. (5) Total Quality Improvement (TQM) is a set of management practices throughout the organization, geared to ensure the organization consistently m eets or exceeds customer requirements. TQM places strong focus on process measurement and controls as means of continuous improvement. Finally, (6) Six sigma is a quality management initiative that takes a very data-driven, methodological approach to eliminating defects with the aim to reach six standard deviations from the desired target of quality. While this is a necessary reaction in such challenging times, maintaining quality standards are essential in ensuring sustainability and future growth. Adopting internal quality is an important means to achieving competitive advantage and cost efficiencies as the entire company structure reflects commitment and value for the customers. Every single person in the organization takes part in maintaining quality standards. This allows for continuous improvement as a fundamental practice in what is rapidly becoming a stricter market in every sense of the word. Customer satisfaction is essential for any business. Working to recognised quality management standards can help you to meet customer expectations. Quality management standards provide a framework for a business to manage its processes and activities. They can help a business improve its efficiency by providing a best practice model for it to follow. To meet a quality management system standard you need to set up a system to improve the key processes you use to provide your products and services allowing you to deliver consistently on your promises. Most of the contemporary leaders understand that three factors ensure the global market competitiveness of an organization, for example: a quality product, quality customer service, and quality delivery. Leaders must champion the processes of quality throughout the organization, benchmarking successful organizations, incorporating innovations in quality, and setting standards and measurements in every department. Leaders have several tools to ensure quality. They dont have to be Master Black Belts in Six Sigma or understand all the intricacies of lean manufacturing or supply chain management to see how each improves quality. They are sold on the merits of having a quality. They know that cutting waste translates to saving time and money for the organization. It is the leaders responsibility to drive, steer, and fund the quality initiative throughout the organization. For only when top leaders fully endorse a quality initiative does it have a chance of becoming fully implemented and t he harvest days of savings can occur. Contemporary leaders collaborate and provide their organizations succession plans that ensure the growth of the organization over time. They feel that they lead at the request of the company, customers, board of directors, and stockholders. If each of these entities trust in the leader remains unchallenged, the leader should lead until he or she chooses to step down. However, whereas even the best of leaders turn the company over to a new set of watchful eyes eventually, the leader who is irreparably jeopardizing the sacred trust of employees, customers, and the public at large should step aside and let a better leader take the helm. The history of quality management, from mere inspection to Total Quality Management, and its modern branded interpretations such as Six Sigma, has led to the development of essential processes, ideas, theories and tools that are central to organisational development, change management, and the performance improvements that are generally desired for individuals, teams and organisations. The roots of Total Quality Management can be traced to early 1920s production quality control ideas, and notably the concepts developed in Japan beginning in the late 1940s and 1950s, pioneered there by Americans Feigenbum, Juran and Deming More about Quality Management and TQM history. Quality Management resulted mainly from the work of the quality gurus and their theories: the American gurus featured in the 1950s Japan: Joseph Juran, W Edwards Deming, and Armand Feigenbum; the Japanese quality gurus who developed and extended the early American quality ideas and models: Kaoru Ishikawa, Genichi Taguchi, and Shigeo Shingo; and the 1970-80s American Western gurus, notably Philip Crosby and Tom Peters, who further extended the Quality Management concepts after the Japanese successes More about the Quality Management gurus and their theories, including the development and/or use of the Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA) cycle, Pareto analysis, cause and effect diagrams, stratification, check-sheets, histograms, scatter-charts, process control charts, system design, parameter design, tolerance design (Taguchi methodology), Quality Improvement Teams (QIT), Just In Time (JIT), Management By Walking About (MBWA), McKinsey 7-S Framework, etc. Quality improvement is basically, the actions taken throughout the organization to increase the effectiveness of activities and processes to provide added benefits to both the organization and its customers. In simple terms, quality improvement is anything which causes a beneficial change in quality performance. All beneficial change results in improvement whether gradual or radical so we really need a word which means gradual change or incremental change. The transition between where quality improvement stops and quality control begins is where the level has been set and the mechanisms are in place to keep quality on or above the set level. Thus it is very essential to raise the standard of quality. Improving quality by raising standards can be accomplished by various steps which includes organize the resources to implement the plan, carry out research, analysis and design to define a possible solution. Hence this improvement process will require controls to keep improvement project s on course towards their objectives. The controls applied should be designed in the manner described previously. There is a significant relationship between productivity and quality. The former is a measure of the firm output as compared to the input while the latter spells out the compatibility of the firm product with the consumer demands. Total Quality Management (TQM) is a zero-error approach towards improving the quality of processes and systems in an organization. TQM calls for the principle of continuous improvement with regard to all the areas of the organization. This approach calls for continuously examining quality of organizational systems rather than making it a one-time activity. TQM is an approach towards managing the productivity-quality equation in an efficient manner. In a dynamically changing business environment, organizations need to re-structure and align itself to the change. This adaptation to the change is imperative for the organization to sustain itself in the ever-changing market. Reengineering is an approach, which involves radical re-structuring in the systems, processes or philosophy of the organization in the face of an environmental change. This approach calls for continuously examining quality of organizational systems rather than making it a one-time activity. The paper touches upon the basic principles of reengineering and TQM. The quality aspect encompasses every area of a business organization. Institutionalization of best practices and a commitment to continuous improvement with regard to all areas of the organization is pre-requisite for enhancing organizational quality. Total Quality Management is an approach towards maintaining quality of processes and systems in the organization. The paper examines the quality scenario in organizations and explores the role of IT in the same. Many of the companys employees have considerable experience in their own specialist fields and, because of this, Keighley Laboratories is sometimes required to carry out failure investigations and possibly act as a expert witness if a court case results. For quite some time, picking up The Wall Street Journal meant reading stories rife with indictments of CFOs, CEOs, and accountants. Though many leaders practice good principles, clearly it is time to inspect closely what it means to lead with ethics. The world is full of strong leaders; however, leadership is a neutral term. It can be good or bad. Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao Tse Tung were regarded as good political leaders at some point in time by a certain element of the population. History has proven, however, that each was guilty of an immoral use of the tremendous power his leadership afforded him. What will history tell us about our current leaders of industry? Are they leading their companies in an ethical way? Perhaps the best barometer of achievement in this regard is the sustainable success of an organization over the long haul. For when you whittle commerce down to the point of its raison dà ªtre, you find its ethical basis. Is it not the mission and ethical imperative of every publicly held establishment to absorb the cost of doing business, produce a quality product for its customers, provide sustenance for its members, and turn a profit that can be reinvested to make the company stronger for lean times? One company has been doing this well for more than 120 years. General Electrics recent declining stock values may trouble investors, but it still was recognized as one of Fortunes 2002 Global Most Admired Companies and received the highest marks for its quality of management. Compare it to the relatively young MCI WorldCom, a company struggling in a quagmire of ethical issues, and the sustaining success of GE is clearly manifested. To get started, we will discuss the following five components of ethical leadership: communication, quality, collaboration, succession planning, and tenure. Ethical leaders set the standard of truth for every employee they lead. The moment people take leadership positions, they have an opportunity to place the highest premium on truthfulness. Recent cases of fiscal malfeasance at Enron, WorldCom, and Arthur Andersen illustrate the need for every form of communication leaders put forth to be an accurate representation. Yet, leading by example cannot be the only process by which this standard is relayed. It must become a company slogan, from the accounting office to the shop floor, that Truth is Job 1. Truthful information is quality information to the CEO, board of directors, and investors. Jim Collins, a noted researcher on leadership, advises leaders to conduct autopsies, without blame, and cites companies such as Philip Morris whose executives talked openly about the 7-UP disaster. Even when statistical evidence does not reflect well on a division or the financial status of the entire company, a plan of action to thwart disaster may be implemented and several lessons learned through open communication to ensure the sustainability of the organization. Ethical Quality An ethical leader understands that three factors ensure the global market competitiveness of an organization: a quality product, quality customer service, and quality delivery. Leaders must champion the processes of quality throughout the organization, benchmarking successful organizations, incorporating innovations in quality, and setting standards and measurements in every department. Leaders have several tools to ensure quality. They dont have to be Master Black Belts in Six Sigma or understand all the intricacies of lean manufacturing or supply chain management to see how each improves quality. They are sold on the merits of having a quality. They know that cutting waste translates to saving time and money for the organization. It is the leaders responsibility to drive, steer, and fund the quality initiative throughout the organization. For only when top leaders fully endorse a quality initiative does it have a chance of becoming fully implemented and the harvest days of savings can occur. Bob Galvin, Chairman of Motorola, implemented Six Sigma throughout the company in the early 1980s. Just two years after launching Six Sigma, Motorola was honored with the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. Even the federal government is investigating the merits of this management tool. Several local government agencies are already using Six Sigma, and the federal government may employ Six Sigma in its war on terrorism. With a failure rate of 3.4 per million products/actions or 99.99966% accuracy, agencies would be better informed and lives could be saved if only one of every 294,000 vital pieces of information †¦ [was] †¦ erroneously discarded. Ethical Collaboration Ethical leaders need many advisors. They pick the most astute within their organizations and hire some from other companies, but they surround themselves with answers. Wise leaders collaborate to incorporate best practices, solve problems, and address the issues facing their organizations. Regrettably, the natural tendency of leaders is to draw in a close, and more often than not, closed circle of advisors. Unfortunately, the smaller the group, the less the prospect of collectively providing the leader advice on the full range of issues facing the organization. But the leader who collaborates ethically makes better decisions for the organization. How is that possible? Leaders who use ethical collaboration keep their circle of advisors more open and fluid. The objective of the ethical leader is to reduce the risks taken by the organization by assigning trustworthy experts/advisors to every situation-from RD decisions to customer-driven needs. Advisors findings determine decisions of t he leader who becomes better equipped to make judgments based on two critical elements: more feasible solutions and viable processes needed to exact the solutions. Many states suffer the woes of underfunded education. Recently, South Carolina imposed a 15% budget cut, with more cuts promised in the future. The President of Clemson University, Jim Barker, pulled in campus-wide experts in their fields to provide solutions. Robert McCormick, an internationally known economist, among others, was assigned the task of creating a fiscal roadmap to ensure Clemson would sustain itself through time. While his advisors provided him with sound solutions, Barker remained focused on the overall mission of the university and its drive to become a top-20 public university. Ethical collaboration serves another important role, however. As Barker maintains an open and fluid circle of advisors while assigning the right people to the variety of issues facing the institution, he serves to broaden his and others awareness of promising internal successors. Ethical Succession Planning If principled leaders possess a need for control, they satisfy that need by establishing strong organizational standards and operational procedures for quality and communication. Yet for the long-term success of the organization, ethical leaders must set aside issues of turf and let other leaders surface within the company, giving potential successors opportunities to exercise and build their leadership skills. Once identified, these few should be personally mentored by the leader, given opportunities for 360 ° communications, and trained for the roles they may one day assume. In his book, Good to Great:Why Some Companies Make the Leap †¦ and Others Dont, Jim Collins identifies Chrysler with many organizations that achieve greatness only to have it slip away through time. While examining the long list of organizations in his study, Collins notes that under Lee Iacocca Chrysler followed a pattern †¦ found in every unsustained comparison: a spectacular rise under a tyrannical disciplinarian, followed by an equally spectacular decline when the disciplinarian stepped away, leaving behind no enduring culture of discipline †¦ Arguably Chrysler faltered without Iacocca at the helm because he had failed to practice ethical collaboration to the point that a succession plan was devised. Ethical Tenure How long should a leader lead? Whereas the most important leader in the American government leads for 4 to 8 years, industry has no governing standard to length of tenure. Should leadership in industry, like its counterpart in government, have a shelf life? The answer lies on the conduct of the leader. Leadership expert Peter Block contends that We search, so often in vain, to find leaders we can have faith in. Further, he notes that leadership is more often rated on the trustworthiness of the individual than on his or her particular talents, and that the mission of the ethical leader is to serve the institution and not themselves. Jim Collins identifies this category of executives as Level 5 Leaders: leaders who are able to channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company. Ethical leaders collaborate and provide their organizations succession plans that ensure the growth of the organization over time. They feel that they lead at the request of the company, customers, board of directors, and stockholders. If each of these entities trust in the leader remains unchallenged, the leader should lead until he or she chooses to step down. However, whereas even the best of leaders turn the company over to a new set of watchful eyes eventually, the leader who is irreparably jeopardizing the sacred trust of employees, customers, and the public at large should step aside and let a better leader take the helm. People are a fundamental component within any successfully developing organisation. Take away the people and the organisation is nothing. Take away the peoples motivation, commitment and ability to work together in well-organised teams, and again, the organisation is nothing. Conclusion Managing the ethical climate of an organization is not easy given the myriad influences, both internal and external, on the firm. Corporate ethics programs will not completely eliminate unethical conduct, nor will they resolve all of the perplexing conflicts of ethical values that arise in various social and economic arenas today. Nevertheless a Managers efforts to strengthen the ethical climate in their organizations will have real benefits for employees, for the performance of the firms, and for society at large. By legitimizing the discussion of ethical considerations in business, by standing up for ethical values despite short-term costs, by giving serious consideration to problems of conflicting values, managers and executives can contribute to strengthening their organizations and to building public trust in business. Much has been written about leadership. Regrettably, less time and thought has been afforded the concept of ethical leadership. Perhaps it is the very lack of discussion about what it means to lead with ethics that has created the current business environment of SEC investigations into improprieties, dot-com greed, and the general publics lack of faith in the stock market. Though we would have preferred that the government did not have to force the issue of business propriety through threats and legislation, apparently for some leaders fear and not moral certitude is their personal motivator. As a result, they expect for business as a profession, as well as about the substance of ethical dilemmas they confront in running their organization properly and ethically. Leaders establish unity of purpose and direction of the organization. They should create and maintain the internal environment in which people can become fully involved in achieving the organizations objectives. Considering the needs of all interested parties including customers, owners, employees, suppliers, financiers, local communities and society as a whole. Establishing a clear vision of the organizations future. Setting challenging goals and targets. Creating and sustaining shared values, fairness and ethical role models at all levels of the organization. Establishing trust and eliminating fear. Providing people with the required resources, training and freedom to act with responsibility and accountability. Inspiring, encouraging and recognizing peoples contributions. Identifying, understanding and managing interrelated processes as a system contributes to the organizations effectiveness and efficiency in achieving its objectives. Structuring a system to achieve the organizations objectives in the most effective and efficient way. Understanding the interdependencies between the processes of the system. Structured approaches that harmonize and integrate processes. Providing a better understanding of the roles and responsibilities necessary for achieving common objectives and thereby reducing cross-functional barriers. Understanding organizational capabilities and establishing resource constraints prior to action. Targeting and defining how specific activities within a system should operate. Continually improving the system through measurement and evaluation.

Evaluating the Economy of Austria Essay -- Business Marketing Manageme

Evaluating the Economy of Austria   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  In 1995 Austria joined the European Union (EU), and in 1999 they joined the European Monetary Union. The use of a common currency the â€Å"Euro† has facilitated trade and promoted economic stability for U.S. companies to manage pricing, balance accounts, and move products into Austria and throughout the EU member nations (â€Å"globaledge†, 2003). An unfavorable exchange rate for U.S. exporters turned positive in 2003 making the U.S. able to compete on more favorable terms in the near future. Current economic reforms in Austria are increasing the attractiveness of foreign investment. There are several advantages to conducting business in Austria that will be particularly relevant in the year 2004. Austria is an international crossroads bordering on eight European countries which include Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Slovenia, Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic, and Liechtenstein. Austria’s eastern neighbors, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Hungary will join the EU in May of 2004. The impact of this is that Austria will become more centrally located.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Austria’s market is well diversified and resilient. Government is seeking to remain competitive by pursuing investment in high potential industries such as telecommunications and electronics (â€Å"globaledge†, 2003). United States companies that are in the telecommunications and electronics industries have a great opportunity for exporting, joint venturing, and investment in Austria.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The U.S. is Austria’s 3rd largest supplier of imports and largest trade partner outside of Europe (â€Å"CIA†, 2003). U.S. companies entering the market for the first time can benefit from the already established trade lines between the two countries. Austria’s market is highly competitive with high demands placed on quality, service, and price. This type of market is ideal for supporting the favorable reputation of high quality American made technological and electronic products. A US company would be able to compete with EU member nations products by exporting these products to Austria.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  US companies looking to export products to Austria are able to employ the services of the Commercial Services of the United States Embassy in Vienna (CS Vienna) acquire the information necessary to begin its operations (â€Å"globaledge†, 2003). The following services would be offered to such compa... ... Austria’s market are very favorable to a US company that is looking to export goods. It is important to remember that while tariffs and value added taxes exist, most many goods do not have tariffs and consumers are willing to pay more for products that they see as inferior to all others. CONCLUSION   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ultimately, Austria’s market is very appealing to US companies looking to export technology-based products. This is clear after examining several factors including: marketing and management forces, physical forces, economic and socioeconomic forces, and cultural forces. It is necessary that any company entering the Austrian market be familiar with the pros and cons of all of these forces. Additionally, there are a few key barriers which exist, including the potentially weak Austrian economy, the high tax burden, and new EU members. While these barriers may seem intimidating it is necessary that any US company seek out and employ all of the resources which are available, including the Commercial Services of the United States Embassy in Vienna. In conclusion, Austria appears to be an untapped gold mine for United States companies which are looking to export technological goods.