Improvement in the Finishing Shop

Abstract

We have been discussing some theoretical ideas about how patterns of events in industrial organisations are determined, what is the nature of organisational performance and how it can be defined, how it is possible to devise new means of improving performance and monitoring and evaluating the improvement. Theoretical discussions can add to academic understanding of organisational behaviour, and they can perhaps show more clearly the limitations of various approaches to explanation and to improvement, some of which we have criticised in chapters 9 and 10. However, general models and developments in theory are only of real practical value when the usefulness of the ideas can be demonstrated in application to specific industrial situations in all the complexity of the real world.