This paper presents a review on design and control of automated guided vehicle systems. We address most key related issues including guide-path design, estimating the number of vehicles, vehicle scheduling, idle-vehicle positioning, battery management, vehicle routing, and conflict resolution....

Account managers invest in two distinct, compensatory social ties to achieve social capital, namely peripheral knowledge ties and implementation support ties. The first ties require communal investments, which consist of organizational citizenship behaviors and peripheral information sharing....

Control in interfirm transactional relationships has, inter alia, the purpose of mitigating potential opportunistic behaviour. For an individual actor the power-base to exercise control over the (output of) the behaviour of another actor in the relationship is a contractual arrangement. From a...

Cultural background of identities calls for upholding of values, but realities of multicultural interactions require cross-cultural compromises. Compromises begin already with the introduction of the term multiculturalism, which served both as a platform for cross-cultural urban policies in...

In this paper we provide an alternative explanation for the rise of modern management schools at the turn of the 20th century. We argue that these schools were not just responses of the higher education system to the demand of industrializing companies for a new class of professional managers,...

The present backlash of neo-neopositivism has been academically justified either with a biological or evolutionary ideologies. How did academic intellectuals respond? First, by developing a concept of professional self-identity and institutional peer-control and making it independent of...

Increasingly, firms adopt mass customization, which allows consumers to customize products by self-selecting their most preferred composition of the product for a predefined set of modules. For example, PC vendors such as Dell allow customers to customize their PC by choosing the type of...

The interrelationships among technology, organization, and territory in an economic system have been considered as a 'holy trinity' from the perspective of regional development studies. The mutual information in three dimensions was proposed as an indicator of the surplus value (entropy) in...

As multi-national firms and major offshore outsourcing companies develop experience with global work, their globally distributed teams face the challenge of collaborating intensely without the common interaction advantages associated with collocated work. This chapter analyzes the sources of...

During the 1990s Baan Company became a market leader in the enterprise applications industry. Its mission was to become an independent software manufacturer, serving a global market. To speed up growth, Baan developed its Baan Web strategy which implied a far-reaching renewal of its corporate...