If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractEvaluates a short course entitled:``The implementation of managerial techniques in primary and secondary schools'', which was addressed to the headmasters of the primary and secondary schools in Patras, Greece. The course was designed utilizing the principles of total quality and the evaluation is focused on the degree of achievement of the objectives through the analysis of quality factors such as participation, methodology, content, subject knowledge and teaching ability of the course deliverers. The evaluation is based on questionnaires that were completed by the participants at different stages of the duration of the short course. Proposes a list of parameters that have to be considered in designing short courses for adults who already have a long professional experience. Electronic accessThe research register for this journal is available at

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Fuzziness is a key concern in modern industry and, thus, its implementation in manufacturing process modeling is of high practical importance for a wide industrial audience. The scientific contribution of the present attempt lies on the fact that the assembly line balancing problem of type 2 (SALBP-2) is approached for a real manufacturing process by introducing fuzzy processing times. The main scope of this work is the solution of the SALBP-2, which is an NP-hard problem, for a real manufacturing process considering fuzziness in the processing times. Since the data obtained from realistic situations are imprecise and uncertain, the consideration of fuzziness for the solution of SALBP-2 is of great interest. Thus, real data values for the processing times are gathered and estimated with uncertainty. Then, fuzzy processing times are used for finding the optimum cycle time. The optimization tool for the solution of the fuzzy SALBP-2 is a Genetic Algorithm (GA). The validity of the proposed approach is tested on the construction process of a metallic robotic arm. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed GA in determining the optimum sequence of the tasks assigned to workstations which provides the optimum fuzzy cycle time.