Combining empirical and theoretical perspectives, David KnightsandHugh Willmott show how both term and practice shaped the recent widely adopted policies of `downsizing′, restructuring and emphasis on `process′ rather than task.

Well-known contributors analyze the impact of Business Process Reengineering in a number of settings: supermarkets and the food chain; the public sector; banks.

The theoretical history of Business Process Reengineering is also detailed in relation to ideas about bureaucracy, hierarchy, transformation and design.

Thomas Brown (1778–1820), Professor of Moral Philosophy in Edinburgh, was among the most prominent and widely read British philosophers of the first half of the nineteenth century. An influential interpreter of both Hume and Reid, Brown provided a bridge between the Scottish school of ‘Common Sense’ and the later positivism of John Stuart Mill and others. The selections in this volume illustrate Brown’s original ideas about mental science, cause and effect, emotions and ethics. They are preceded by an introduction situating Brown’s career and writings in their intellectual and historical context.