Article history: Received 17 September 2009 Received in revised form 22 April 2010 Accepted 8 June 2010

Quality in its contemporary incarnation is commonly referred to as organizational excellence, enterprise excellence, business excellence, or performance excellence. While technology may serve as a key enabler of enterprise excellence, enterprise excellence itself is in large enabled by the human dimension both in terms of ideation and effort. The human dimension manifests in many ways, with peo...

The target article argues that whole groups can act as interactors in an evolutionary process. We believe that Smaldino's discussion would be advanced by a more thorough analysis of the appropriate replicators and lineages for this model. We show that cultural evolution is necessarily a separate process from cultural group selection, and we also illustrate that the two processes may influence e...

If marketing is truly the “ultimate social practice of postmodern consumer culture” (Firat, 1993) then it carries the heavy burden of “determining the conditions and meanings of life for the future” (Firat and Venkatesh, 1993). Certainly, social theory is now focusing on consumption as playing a central role in the way the social world is constructed, and it can be argued that marketing is too ...

Stable isotope composition of human tissue reflects that of foods consumed, and can provide information about diet independent of artifactual remains. Here we refine and test this method by analyzing nitrogen (delta(15)N) and carbon (delta(13)C) isotope ratios in historic North American Plains Indians hair. Gas-source isotope-ratio mass spectrometry provides high-precision data for both delta(1...

The fact that women are more likely than men to participate in traditional high status leisure activities constitutes one of the most consistent findings in the empirical study of cultural choice. Most explanations of this phenomenon point to the role of early socialization and society-wide cultural norms, but surprisingly, the more proximate influence of labor force participation and embeddedn...