The Experts below are selected from a list of 327 Experts worldwide ranked by ideXlab platform

Laurence J.n. Cooper - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

James Carrier - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • Reconciling commodities and personal relations in industrial society
    Theory and Society, 1990
    Co-Authors: James Carrier
    Abstract:

    I began this article with Colin Campbell's lament about the Productionist bias in sociology and the related point that most sociologists concerned with consumption have ignored private meanings and small-scale structures in favor of public meanings and large-scale structures. This article calls attention to and builds on an emerging alternative approach to what happens after Production, using an understanding of the social nature of objects that springs from Marcel Mauss's distinction between gifts and commodities. Mauss's model directs attention to the conflict in industrial societies between the two realms of commodity exchange and gift exchange, which I have cast as the conflict between the world of work and the world of family, and as the contrast between commodities and possessions. Thus, the model directs attention to the fact that objects are not simply transformed in Production and displayed in consumption. However important these facts may be for understanding objects and society, they do not exhaust the important ways that people experience, use, and think about the objects that surround them. In particular, Mauss's model throws into relief the problematic nature of the objects that surround us and that we use in our social relations. And in doing so it directs attention to the ways that people try to reconstruct and redefine those objects by transforming them into personal possessions. This transformation makes objects acquired as commodities suitable for gift transactions, and hence suitable for the key task of recreating social relationships and social identities, the task of creating, not merely defining, who we are and how we are related to each other. Although the Maussian model addresses many of the links between people in the worlds of work and the home, and many of the ways that objects are part of these links, I am concerned here primarily with the ways that people can appropriate commodities in the process of purchase: shopping. This concern with shopping points out the social significance of retail trade, which I take to include advertising and shopping. This is not simply a passive conduit between Production and consumption. Instead, it is an important point at which objects begin to leave the realm of work, commodities, and commodity relations and enter the realm of home, possessions, and gift relations. Shopping is an ubiquitous activity in industrial society and one that is highly significant culturally: we spend vast amounts of time, energy, money, and attention on it. Doubtless part of the reason for this is utilitarian, for we need to buy to live, but it would be foolish to reduce the significance of shopping to some combination of the need of individuals to acquire in order to survive and the need of companies to generate demand in order to profit. Thus, retail trade needs to be seen as well as a set of relations and transactions between seller and buyer that define and are defined by the objects and services involved, their history, and their future. My focus on purchasing food in supermarkets has the advantage of throwing into relief the problem of appropriation, because of the impersonality of object and social relations in large, self-service supermarkets. However, the very extremity of this example can create a false impression. As I noted, in other forms of shopping the social relations between buyer and seller, like the social identity of objects, can be more personal. This personality can be real, as when buyer and seller know each other or where the object is hand-made or even unique. Alternatively, it can be more purely symbolic, as when the selling company touts itself or its employees as friendly and caring or where the manufacturer advertises the personal nature of its commodities. In some cases, indeed, the manufacturing or trading company can present itself in such a way that the company itself becomes the “person” with whom the purchaser transacts. Some of the complexities of this personification are described in Wally Olins, The Corporate Personality (London: Design Council, 1978). In addition, because of the focus on the appropriation of commodities in purchasing, I have touched only briefly on Production and the world of work more generally. As does life at home, so life at work involves the transaction of objects and labor. Relations at work, then, will shape and be shaped by the nature of what is transacted. Co-workers who transact things that are more clearly stamped with their own identity, as among service workers and craft producers, will likely have more personal relations with fellow workers than will those who transact things that are themselves relatively impersonal, as in Assembly-Line Production. This variability in the objects and relations at work suggests that people will have diverse understandings of work, and hence of manufactured objects more generally, which will affect the need they feel to appropriate commodities. It is also likely that those involved in more craft-like Production will face a problem that is the inverse of those faced by shoppers: the need to make impersonal the things that they have produced and infused with their identities. One would expect that such workers have rituals and activities of alienation, the inversion of the rituals and activities of appropriation that have been described in this article. In all, though, the point of this article is simple. People use objects to create and recreate personal social identities and relationships, and in industrial capitalist societies these objects are likely to be produced and purchased as commodities and understood as “manufactures” in Miller's sense. Our experience with and understanding of the Production and sale of objects will affect the way we use them in transactions that create and recreate social identity and relationship, and will affect our understanding of the social identities and relationships that are created and recreated. Thus, the objects that people use in social relationships mediate between realms of economy and society, between the public realms where those objects are produced and distributed, and the private realms where those objects are transacted as part of social reProduction. The fact of this mediation and its effects on people's understanding of objects and social relations deserve careful attention.

  • Reconciling commodities and personal relations in industrial society
    Theory and Society, 1990
    Co-Authors: James Carrier
    Abstract:

    I began this article with Colin Campbell's lament about the Productionist bias in sociology and the related point that most sociologists concerned with consumption have ignored private meanings and small-scale structures in favor of public meanings and large-scale structures. This article calls attention to and builds on an emerging alternative approach to what happens after Production, using an understanding of the social nature of objects that springs from Marcel Mauss's distinction between gifts and commodities. Mauss's model directs attention to the conflict in industrial societies between the two realms of commodity exchange and gift exchange, which I have cast as the conflict between the world of work and the world of family, and as the contrast between commodities and possessions. Thus, the model directs attention to the fact that objects are not simply transformed in Production and displayed in consumption. However important these facts may be for understanding objects and society, they do not exhaust the important ways that people experience, use, and think about the objects that surround them. In particular, Mauss's model throws into relief the problematic nature of the objects that surround us and that we use in our social relations. And in doing so it directs attention to the ways that people try to reconstruct and redefine those objects by transforming them into personal possessions. This transformation makes objects acquired as commodities suitable for gift transactions, and hence suitable for the key task of recreating social relationships and social identities, the task of creating, not merely defining, who we are and how we are related to each other. Although the Maussian model addresses many of the links between people in the worlds of work and the home, and many of the ways that objects are part of these links, I am concerned here primarily with the ways that people can appropriate commodities in the process of purchase: shopping. This concern with shopping points out the social significance of retail trade, which I take to include advertising and shopping. This is not simply a passive conduit between Production and consumption. Instead, it is an important point at which objects begin to leave the realm of work, commodities, and commodity relations and enter the realm of home, possessions, and gift relations. Shopping is an ubiquitous activity in industrial society and one that is highly significant culturally: we spend vast amounts of time, energy, money, and attention on it. Doubtless part of the reason for this is utilitarian, for we need to buy to live, but it would be foolish to reduce the significance of shopping to some combination of the need of individuals to acquire in order to survive and the need of companies to generate demand in order to profit. Thus, retail trade needs to be seen as well as a set of relations and transactions between seller and buyer that define and are defined by the objects and services involved, their history, and their future. My focus on purchasing food in supermarkets has the advantage of throwing into relief the problem of appropriation, because of the impersonality of object and social relations in large, self-service supermarkets. However, the very extremity of this example can create a false impression. As I noted, in other forms of shopping the social relations between buyer and seller, like the social identity of objects, can be more personal. This personality can be real, as when buyer and seller know each other or where the object is hand-made or even unique. Alternatively, it can be more purely symbolic, as when the selling company touts itself or its employees as friendly and caring or where the manufacturer advertises the personal nature of its commodities. In some cases, indeed, the manufacturing or trading company can present itself in such a way that the company itself becomes the "person" with whom the purchaser transacts.Some of the complexities of this personification are described in Wally Olins, The Corporate Personality (London: Design Council, 1978). In addition, because of the focus on the appropriation of commodities in purchasing, I have touched only briefly on Production and the world of work more generally. As does life at home, so life at work involves the transaction of objects and labor. Relations at work, then, will shape and be shaped by the nature of what is transacted. Co-workers who transact things that are more clearly stamped with their own identity, as among service workers and craft producers, will likely have more personal relations with fellow workers than will those who transact things that are themselves relatively impersonal, as in Assembly-Line Production. This variability in the objects and relations at work suggests that people will have diverse understandings of work, and hence of manufactured objects more generally, which will affect the need they feel to appropriate commodities.It is also likely that those involved in more craft-like Production will face a problem that is the inverse of those faced by shoppers: the need to make impersonal the things that they have produced and infused with their identities. One would expect that such workers have rituals and activities of alienation, the inversion of the rituals and activities of appropriation that have been described in this article. In all, though, the point of this article is simple. People use objects to create and recreate personal social identities and relationships, and in industrial capitalist societies these objects are likely to be produced and purchased as commodities and understood as "manufactures" in Miller's sense. Our experience with and understanding of the Production and sale of objects will affect the way we use them in transactions that create and recreate social identity and relationship, and will affect our understanding of the social identities and relationships that are created and recreated. Thus, the objects that people use in social relationships mediate between realms of economy and society, between the public realms where those objects are produced and distributed, and the private realms where those objects are transacted as part of social reProduction. The fact of this mediation and its effects on people's understanding of objects and social relations deserve careful attention. © 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

M. Nor Akramin - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • Optimizing Assembly Line Production through Line Balancing: A Case Study
    Applied Mechanics and Materials, 2015
    Co-Authors: Adi Saptari, Jia Xin Leau, M. Nor Akramin
    Abstract:

    In Line Balancing principles, the total workload in the assembly process is divided as evenly as possible among the workstations, without violating the sequences and relations in the assembly operations. Line balancing is important in an assembly system as it balances the line and increases the efficiency, as well as the productivity of a system. A case study was conducted in the assembly line of an electrical accessories manufacturer in Malaysia. The cycle time for each station was recorded, and the standard cycle time was estimated. The productivity, as well as the efficiency of the current assembly line, were studied. In terms of the productivity, the performance of the current systems was 500 units/worker/day, while the expected productivity was 600 units/worker/day. An assembly line setting was proposed based on the Line Balancing Method; the productivity for the proposed line increased to 671 units/worker/day, or in rough additional increase around 34%.

Wenming Cheng - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • Teaching Assembly Line Balancing Problem by Using Lingo Software
    2010 Second International Workshop on Education Technology and Computer Science, 2010
    Co-Authors: Zeqiang Zhang, Wenming Cheng
    Abstract:

    Assembly-Line Production systems are most commonly used for large quantity Production. Assembly line balancing problem is one of the most important problems of preliminary design stage for flow-line Production systems and is the important content of the course of operation management. improve the teaching effect of the content, according to the model of the simple assembly line balancing problem of type 1, the solving procedure is constructed by the syntax of Lingo extended version. An illustrative example is followed to describe the detailed solving procedure. The results show that the procedure is effective.

  • An Ant-Based Algorithm for Balancing Assembly Lines in a Mass Customization Environment
    2009 International Workshop on Intelligent Systems and Applications, 2009
    Co-Authors: Zeqiang Zhang, Wenming Cheng, Lin Song, Qingliang Yu
    Abstract:

    Facing the intense competition, rising costs and ever changing consumer demands, many manufacturers switch to mass customization from mass manufacturing. The mass customization assembly line balancing problem arises to smooth the Production and decrease the cost. However, the development towards mass customization has caused considerable increases in complexity within assembly line Production processes. This paper presents a novel ant algorithm for the Type I mass customization assembly line balancing. The proposed algorithm made use of the trail information which is deposited between the task and the task selected position, and pheromone summation rules was adopted. According to the characteristics of the problem, a new nonlinear objective function is used to instead of the function of number of workstations. The results of the computational study show that the proposed approach performs quite effectively.

Xiang-bo Li - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.

  • Studies of Balance and Simulation of Gearbox Assembly Line Based on Flexsim Software
    Proceedings of 20th International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management, 2013
    Co-Authors: Hong-ying Shan, Li-bin Zhang, Xiang-bo Li
    Abstract:

    The balance of Production line would definitely help the workers and facilities increase the operational efficiency. Computer modeling and simulation can shorten the R&D cycle, predict and optimize the layout of Production line. After analyzing the gearbox assembly line and drawing flow charts, we can work out a simulation model and then use Flexsim software and heuristic balancing algorithm to make gearbox assembly line more reasonable. By comparing the balance of gearbox assembly line. From the comparison of the indicators before and after simulation and the utilization of the station, we can firmly draw the conclusion that the transmission efficiency of assembly line Production is significantly improved.