The jury and abjury of my peers: The self in face and dignity cultures.

The self is defined and judged differently by people from face and dignity cultures (in this case, Hong Kong and the United States, respectively). Across 3 experiments, people from a face culture absorbed the judgments of other people into their private self-definitions. Particularly important for people from a face culture are public representations—knowledge that is shared and known to be shared about someone. In contrast, people from a dignity culture try to preserve the sovereign self by not letting others define them. In the 3 experiments, dignity culture participants showed a studied indifference to the judgments of their peers, ignoring peers' assessments—whether those assessments were public or private, were positive or negative, or were made by qualified peers or unqualified peers. Ways that the self is “knotted” up with social judgments and cultural imperatives are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Total quality control for a surface mount technology process for the manufacture of printed circuit board assemblies

Surface mount technology is used widely nowadays in the manufacture of printed circuit board assemblies in the electronics industry. The occurrence of defective products when this technology is used is mostly caused by technological problems, but sometimes it is also caused by management problems or human errors. When technological problems are being tackled, human interactions will always be involved. This is because the quality of a product is related to the quality of the material, the design of the product and the manufacturing process, and as tasks are subdivided, problems occurring in production cannot be solved completely by the sole effort of a single individual. Hence improvement of product quality involes man, machine, and material. This article explains how quality problems arising from surface mount technology are tackled by team effort in an organization via the implementation of a process-oriented total quality control system.