Quality and Process Improvement
Author: Mark Fryman
This book offers readers step-by-step approaches for achieving quality and process improvement through the use of many techniques. These methods include statistical process control, flowcharting, Pareto analysis and fishbone diagramming, process capability and process capability indices, design of experiments (DOE), and more! The first part of the book establishes the building blocks upon which quality is based, discussing each in great detail while using everyday examples to link individual concepts to the world of quality and illustrate how they interface with one another. Once this foundation has been established, the second part of the book encourages readers to apply the techniques of quality systematically to achieve documented process improvement. Complex mathematical concepts are presented and explained at a level that is easy to understand, to help readers to gain a sound understanding of DOE, enabling them to determine the level settings for different factors and predict optimum level settings and expected outcome.
Rhetorical and Critical Approaches to Public Relations
Author: Elizabeth L Toth
This volume is the first to illustrate the application of rhetorical theory and critical perspectives to explain public relations practices. It provides a systematic and coherent statement of the critical guidelines and philosophical underpinnings of public relations and as such should guide pedagogy and practice. It also supplies pedagogic and critical standards with which to meet the needs of an increasingly sophisticated society that tends to reject all of public relations as propaganda. With the enormous amount of money spent on product publicity and public policy debates, this book gives practitioners a sense of whether their public relations campaigns make a contribution to the organizational bottom line by means of achieving the timeless standards of the art of rhetoric.
Table of Contents:
| Preface | ||
| I | An Overview | |
| Ch. 1 | The Case for Pluralistic Studies of Public Relations: Rhetorical, Critical, and Systems Perspectives | 3 |
| Ch. 2 | The Wrangle in the Marketplace: A Rhetorical Perspective of Public Relations | 17 |
| Ch. 3 | Critical Perspectives on Public Relations | 37 |
| II | Toward a Critical Method for Assessing Public Relations | |
| Ch. 4 | Toward the Philosophy of Public Relations | 65 |
| Ch. 5 | Crisis Management and the "Paradigm Case" | 93 |
| Ch. 6 | Perspectives on Public Relations History | 111 |
| Ch. 7 | Public Relations and Public Policy: The Structuration of Dominance in the Information Age | 131 |
| Ch. 8 | The Corporate Person (Re)Presents Itself | 165 |
| III | An Examination of the Practice of Public Relations | |
| Ch. 9 | Corporate Communication and Control | 187 |
| Ch. 10 | The Automic Power Industry and the NEW Woman | 205 |
| Ch. 11 | Trade Associations: Whose Voice? Whose Vice? | 225 |
| Ch. 12 | Smoking OR Health: Incremental Erosion as a Public Interest Group Strategy | 241 |
| Ch. 13 | White Knights, Poker Games, and the Invasion of the Carpetbaggers: Interpreting the Sale of a Professional Sports Franchise | 257 |
| Ch. 14 | The Environment and the Oil Company: A Semiotic Analysis of Chevron's "People Do" Commercials | 279 |
| Ch. 15 | "The Decision Is Yours" Campaign: Planned Parenthood's Character-Istic Argument of Moral Virtue | 301 |
| Epilogue: Visions of Critical Studies of Public Relations | 315 | |
| Author Index | 321 | |
| Subject Index | 327 |
