This article describes a method to improve the process of creating standards for management systems. It is demonstrated that by using the method, the quality of these standards can be improved: standards for quality management, environmental management, and occupational health and safety...

In this paper, standardization education is studied by combining standardization practice and academic reflection on that with the area of (regular and continuing) education. The question, which people are to be educated in standardization, is answered by making use of a standardization model....

While the Digital Versatile Disc was becoming the consumer's technology of choice for playing video content at the end of the 1990s, several companies started developing the next generation of optical discs. This led to a format war between two similar but incompatible high definition optical...

Recent years have witnessed a continuous erosion of the Microsoft Internet Explorer share in the web browser market, mainly induced by the continuous gains of Mozilla Firefox, an open source software product. This tendency would seem to contradict the well-established belief that in a standards...

The discipline of ergonomics studies the interaction between man and the designed technical and organizational environment. In product ergonomics, this knowledge is used to develop user-friendly products and in production ergonomics to design human-friendly (production) processes. Beside social...

This paper explores whether the manager’s physical office work environment can stimulate the manager’s creativity. A total of 60 managers from a large manufacturing company participated in the study. They rated the creativity potential and physical elements of office environments shown in 25...

Purpose – To show that necessary condition hypotheses are important in operations management, and to present a consistent methodology for building and testing them. Necessary condition hypotheses (“X is necessary for Y”) express conditions that must be present in order to have a desired...

Theory-testing with cases is ascertaining whether the empirical evidence in a case or in a sample of cases either supports or does not support the theory. There are two methodologies for theory-testing with cases, (a) testing in a single case (‘theory-testing single case study’), and (b)...