The emergence of the 'coastal steelworks' in the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), 1952-1967.

The coal and steel production was key in the post-war rebuilding of the European economy. However, after WWII, Germany still had the technological knowledge and experience to quickly regain its pre-war position as the dominant economic force in Europe. In response to this ‘problem’, the political leaders of six Western European countries founded the European Coal and Steel Community or ECSC, which they hoped would provide a common legal framework for the coal and steel industry. When the ECSC was founded, all six founding countries of the ECSC produced steel and all but two also produced substantial quantities of coal. However, there were considerable differences in the ‘regional concentration’ of the coal and steel companies and before 1952 (the first year of the ECSC), a (relatively) small geographical area was responsible for more than 90 % of both the European coal and steel production. We have then looked at how the relative importance of this ‘industrial triangle’ in the total coal and steel production of the ECSC has decreased between 1952 and 1967 and we discuss the different causes of this decrease. More specifically, we show how the importance of the so-called ‘coastal steelworks’ has increased between 1952 and 1967.ECSC; Regional concentration; coastal steelworks; Industrial triangle;

Qualitative study of work-family conflict in managerial couples, A. Are we overlooking some fundamental questions?

In this study I explore the phenomenon of work-family conflict in an "unconventional" way. Most studies on work-family conflict are quantitative studies of individuals, based on Anglo-Saxon samples. The contribution of this study is to use a different method (i.e. in-depth interviews) to focus on a different unit of analysis (i.e. managerial couples) in a different context (i.e. Spain). The study suggests that the field may be overlooking some fundamental variables. Content analysis of the interview transcripts reveals the crucial importance of implicit values and beliefs, immanent or tacit actions such as decision-making and learning, and communication and mutual understanding within the couple. The study contributes to the field by suggesting a different theoretical approach to work-family conflict as a decision-making problem. I suggest using social exchange theory to explain work-family conflict as a complex evaluation of costs and benefits of exchanges between multiple actors on the basis of personal values and beliefs. I invite scholars to develop theory along these lines or suggest alternative theory that incorporates these neglected variables, and call for more qualitative and comparative studies to understand the experience of work-family conflict in different collectives. Future research should test whether decision making is central for the understanding of work-family conflict only in managers or in other collectives as well. I recommend the couple as a unit of analysis to address issues such as accommodation within couples and complex decision making in both individuals and couples.Organizational behavior; Family and work

A general framework for positioning, evaluating and selecting the new generation of development tools.

This paper focuses on the evaluation and positioning of a new generation of development tools containing subtools (report generators, browsers, debuggers, GUI-builders, ...) and programming languages that are designed to work together and have a common graphical user interface and are therefore called environments. Several trends in IT have led to a pluriform range of developments tools that can be classified in numerous categories. Examples are: object-oriented tools, GUI-tools, upper- and lower CASE-tools, client/server tools and 4GL environments. This classification does not sufficiently cover the tools subject in this paper for the simple reason that only one criterion is used to distinguish them. Modern visual development environments often fit in several categories because to a certain extent, several criteria can be applied to evaluate them. In this study, we will offer a broad classification scheme with which tools can be positioned and which can be refined through further research.

Work-family conflict as a mediator of the work stress - mental health relationship

The relationship between work stressors and mental health outcomes has been demonstrated in a whole range of work stress models and studies. But less has been written about factors outside the work setting that might predict or moderate the relationship between work stressors and strain. In this exploratory study, we suggest a model linking work stressors and "time-based" work-family conflict (TWFC) with mental health, with the intention to contribute to the refinement of the traditional work stress-model. In a quantitative study of 115 Spanish managers, we found that TWFC mediates the relationship between some work stressors and mental health. This implies that mental health problems will increase if work stress spills over to the family and consequently causes work-family conflict. Future managerial stress research should further test TWFC as an intervening variable linking work stressors and mental health.Work-family conflict; stress; mental health;

An architecture for bridging OO and business process modeling.

Workflow systems and object-oriented (OO) technology have undoubtedly been some of the most important domains of interest of information technology over the past decade. Both domains however, have largely evolved independently, and not much research can be found in which OO principles and concepts have been applied to workflow systems or vice versa. In this paper we show how the two domains can be integrated. By integrating both domains, business process modelling can benefit from the advantages of the object-oriented approach. On the other hand, a more process oriented approach to object-oriented development would enhance the organisational fit in of object-oriented information systems development. The architecture that results from this integration is a tier-based one with a separate tier for workflow aspects.Architecture; Processes; Systems; Information technology; Systems development; Integration;

Exploratory study of managerial stress in Spain, An

The purpose of this exploratory study is to chart the existing Spanish literature, and to report some first tentative results on managerial stress in Spain. The study is based on a literature study and a quantitative study using a sample of 115 Spanish managers. The results are based on data collected for the Collaborative International Study on Managerial Stress (CISMS). The literature review of work stress in Spain revealed that most studies on work stress use health professionals as respondents, and that research on managerial stress is generally lacking in Spain. Cross-cultural studies on work stress show that there is a clear need for nation-specific research. We compare the results of our Spanish sample with other countries that participated in the CISMS-study. We found that Spanish managers report relatively higher levels of mental strain than their colleagues worldwide. An explanation can be found in long working hours and relatively high work stress, which in turn causes work-family conflict. An important implication is that mental strain has an important influence on the performance of managers. Cluster analysis seems to suggest that coping and health habits can make a difference, although personality and work environment are also important in differentiating healthy from unhealthy managers.managerial stress;

Existence dependency-based domain modeling for improving stateless process enactment.

In a process-enabled service oriented architecture, a process engine typically stores the state of the process instances during enactment. As an alternative, stateless process enactment entails that process state is derived from the state of business objects, which are organized in a domain model. The business objects are referred to in pre- and post-conditions of activities, which determine when the activity is enabled and completed, respectively. Despite the fact that the latter approach has multiple benefits compared with the former, the repeated state (re)calculations deteriorate performance and the formulation of clear conditions is not self-evident if typical domain modeling techniques (e.g. UML or ER) are adopted. In this paper we show that by adopting a specific domain modeling technique, which is based on the notion of existence dependency between the business objects, the performance and comprehensibility issues can proficiently be dealt with. We illustrate the technique using a real-world case from the insurance domain and analyze the emerging duality between process modeling and domain modeling.

Concept discovery innovations in law enforcement: a perspective.

In the past decades, the amount of information available to law enforcement agencies has increased significantly. Most of this information is in textual form, however analyses have mainly focused on the structured data. In this paper, we give an overview of the concept discovery projects at the Amsterdam-Amstelland police where Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is being used as text mining instrument. FCA is combined with statistical techniques such as Hidden Markov Models (HMM) and Emergent Self Organizing Maps (ESOM). The combination of this concept discovery and refinement technique with statistical techniques for analyzing high-dimensional data not only resulted in new insights but often in actual improvements of the investigation procedures.Formal concept analysis; Intelligence led policing; Knowledge discovery;

Using formal concept analysis for the verification of process-data matrices in conceptual domain models.

One of the first steps in a software engineering process is the elaboration of the conceptual domain model. In this paper, we investigate how Formal Concept Analysis can be used to formally underpin the construction of a conceptual domain model. In particular, we demonstrate that intuitive verification rules for process-data matrices can be formally grounded in FCA theory. As a case study, we show that the well-formedness rules from MERODE are isomorphic to the clustering rules in Formal Concept Analysis, and that the relationships in the class diagram are isomorphic to the subconcept-superconcept relationship in FCA.Formal concept analysis; MERODE; Conceptual domain modeling; OOSSADM; CRUD;