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Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to take a critical, analytical approach to explore the growth and spread of Lean through the academic and practitioner community over the last 25 years to understand the impact of the bookThe Machine that Changed the Worldon management thinking.Design/methodology/approach– A comprehensive and systematic review of the extant literature of lean was undertaken and analysed critically to observe patterns and trends that could explain the acceptance of Lean as an operations management philosophy. The review spans from 1987 to 2013. To enable us to effectively manage and understand the diffusion of this literature a database, the Lean Publications Database, was constructed. The number of publications has been adjusted to compensate for growth in the total number of articles published in the same period.Findings– Lean has evolved to be one of the best-known, yet fiercely debated, process improvement methodologies. It emerged during a proliferation of such methodologies in the business and management literature. Lean has developed from a generic description of Toyota Production System (TPS) to a particular type of organisational and management intervention focused on best practice and process improvement methodologies.Research limitations/implications– This paper provides the first comprehensive review of the Lean literature, from the perspective of Lean as the unit of analysis. It covers both sides of the academic debate and categorises the progression of Lean from its origins as a generic description of TPS to a movement that has changed management systems in many and diverse sectors.Practical implications– This paper demonstrates how Lean research, application and thinking has evolved over 25 years from its origins in Japanese auto-manufacturing to a holistic value system that is applicable to all business sectors, both private and public.Originality/value– In most empirical studies on Lean, the unit of analysis is the organisation. In this study, the unit of analysis is the Lean phenomenon itself. This paper examines the impact ofThe Machine that Changed the Worldon management thinking. In addition, it presents a step to developing an underpinning theory by linking Lean to theTheory of Swift, Even Flow. As such it is of interest to academics in the field of operations management and offers a contribution to knowledge. It is also likely to be of interest to policy makers. Considerable amounts of public money have been spent, and continue to be spent, on promoting Lean. Taxpayers and policymakers are likely to be interested in whether that expenditure is justifiable. 25 years of publications have been analysed to provide clarity around this popular approach to organisational improvement.

This literature review looks at research conducted on the phenomenon of benchmarking e-government during the years 2003 to 2016 and entails 27 articles. The review shows how this field has changed over time, its main findings and what the potential benefits are for the public sector in using the results from benchmarks. The findings reveal how initial research created taxonomies of benchmarks and criticised them for being too focused on measuring online services. This research was followed by even more criticism on how benchmarks can have a negative impact on e-government policy and development. During the same time-period there is research giving methodological support on how to improve ways of benchmarking. Later research offer theoretically and conceptually informed critique of benchmark-studies. The review finds that there are mainly implicit assumptions about the potential benefits in using benchmarks for improving e-government. The article concludes by discussing the implications of the findings in terms of the lack of context and relevance in benchmarks for e-government in relationship to the nature of public administration and makes suggestions for ways forward.

Against a backdrop of acute global terrorist actions and international counter-terrorist initiatives, and newly marked involvement of UK universities in counter-terrorism with the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, this article reviews a wide multidisciplinary literature to provide a structural analysis of terrorism and counter-terrorism policy and research in UK universities over a 20-year timeframe (1997–2017), identifying three phases in terrorism and counter-terrorism legislative and related policy contexts: temporary; permanent and normative permanence. These three periods correlate with a vast expansion of academic terrorism research which is multidisciplinary, rapidly diversifying and expanding in direct correlation to the intensification of terroristic action. Mindful of a complex context of intensified global terrorism, the article identifies shifting patterns in the aims and manifest impacts of terrorism and counter-terrorism policy and research in UK universities. This article concludes by proposing a working analytic-structural framework for framing the disciplinary-epistemological, institutional and operational impacts on UK higher education of terrorism and counter-terrorism policy and research, including a critical and little explored relationship between universities and security and intelligence agencies.

In recent decades, there have been shifts in the conceptualization of intellectual disability and increased attention has been directed toward the importance of identifying and capitalizing on the strengths and capabilities of people with intellectual disabilities as a means to promote meaningful participation, community inclusion, and quality of life outcomes. However, there are little data on the extent to which research in the field of intellectual disability has been influenced by these new conceptualizations. This paper reports the results of a content analysis of 30 years of literature that examines the degree to which research in the field has emphasized the strengths and capabilities of people with intellectual disabilities, as well as the degree to which this literature base has included constructs associated with positive psychology and self-determination. Our review found that there has been a shift toward research focusing on the capacities of people with intellectual disabilities. Additionally, there is a growing body of literature that focuses on constructs within the parameters of positive psychology, including self-determination. However, such research still represents a minority of the scholarship in the field.