Forward to the Past? The Case of 'New Production Concepts'

1991 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Gahan
Keyword(s):  
New Production ◽  
The Past ◽  
Flexible Specialization

In the 1980s a growing number of books and articles utilized the terms 'post-Fordism; 'post-Taylorism ; 'flexible specialization' and 'new production concepts: This paper explores a number of common themes which have been developed under these separate titles. It is argued that many of these concepts do not represent a clear break from past theoretical traditions. Rather, they offer a restatement of many of the ideas found in Industrialism and Industrial Man (Kerr et al. 1960a). Moreover, it is argued that a number of conceptual and empirical problems exist that invalidate many of the claims made by adherents to these various labels. Particular attention is paid to Australian contributors to the debate, most notably, to the work of John Mathews.

Technological Change and Financial Innovation in Banking

2019 ◽  
pp. 261-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Scott Frame ◽  
Larry Wall ◽  
Lawrence J. White
Keyword(s):  
Technological Change ◽  
Financial Innovation ◽  
Empirical Literature ◽  
New Production ◽  
Financial Innovations ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Economy ◽  
New Organizational Forms ◽  
Recent Developments

Financial intermediation has changed dramatically over the past thirty years, due in large part to technological change. The chapter first describes the role of the financial system in a modern economy and how technological change and financial innovation can affect social welfare. We then survey the empirical literature relating to several specific financial innovations, broadly categorized as new production processes, new products or services, or new organizational forms. In each case, we also include examples of significant FinTech innovations that are transforming various aspects of banking. Drawing on the literature on innovations from the 1990s and 2000s informs what we might expect from recent developments.

A Brief Analysis of Global Rare Earth Trade Structure

2013 ◽  
Vol 734-737 ◽  
pp. 3324-3331 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ying Li ◽  
An Jian Wang ◽  
Jiang Wu Li ◽  
Qi Shen Chen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Rare Earth ◽  
Production Capacity ◽  
International Market ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global Market ◽  
Earth Structure ◽  
New Production ◽  
The Past ◽  
Import And Export

Since a large number of cheap rare earth from China entered the international market in the late 1980s, the rare earth structure in world started to change, and China replaced the United States as the largest rare earth producer and exporter. However, due to Chinas rare earth management and other factors, rare earth prices have rebounded. The foreign rare earth new production capacity is about to increase production in recent years, and the global rare earth structure will change in the future. Through analysis of rare earth import and export, as well as rare earth prices over the past decades in three major trading countries, China, Japan and the United States, this article points out that the diversified pattern of global rare earth supply will be formed, and China will continue to be the main supplier of the worlds rare earth. China should abandon the practice of one to support the global market in the past, and create a harmonious international trade environment.

Gender, Work and Organization in the Time/Space Economy of ‘Just-in-Time’ Labour

2003 ◽  
Vol 12 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 293-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela Odih
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Just In Time ◽  
Gender And Work ◽  
The Past ◽  
Flexible Specialization ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Part Time ◽  
Work Production ◽  
Space Economy ◽  
Spatial Flows

Formidable changes are occurring in the organization of work, production and the labour process. The emerging world of flexibility, part-time contracts and ‘just-in-time labour’ has invoked systemic disruptions in the sequential ordering of time/space. Feminists have been less than sanguine in their resistance to the placeless, timeless logic of ‘just-in-time labour’. The flexible fragmented present of post-fordist production is variously argued to be in contradiction to the embodied social relations through which women ‘weave’ their own autobiographies. While sympathetic to the concept of ‘feminine time’, its application to the present labour market context requires intense inquisition and critical reflection. The modern episteme consisted of a constellation of discourses linked to narrative realism. This is to appreciate that basic to all forms of gendered subjectivity is a conscious subject living in time and capable of uniting the literal with the virtual, or linking one temporal order (the present) with others (the past and future). The ‘timeless times’ and dislocated ‘spatial flows’ of our current era threaten the ability of gendered subjects to form their identities into sustained narratives. Focusing on post-fordist flexible specialization, this article challenges the fixed, unitary, relational subject of feminist critique and begins to deconstruct the problematics of gender and work in the time/space economy of ‘just-in-time’ labour.

How to assess historic iron and steel bridges

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemarie Helmerich
Keyword(s):  
Mechanical Engineering ◽  
Steel Structures ◽  
New Production ◽  
Iron And Steel ◽  
Wrought Iron ◽  
The Past ◽  
Special Knowledge ◽  
Industrialization Process ◽  
Specific Material ◽  
Assessment Procedures

The early industrialization process required a higher and higher developed infrastructure to transfer more and more people and goods. These requirements lead to the development of new materials that can resist the higher loading, to advances in mechanical engineering, more sophisticated calculation methods and transfer of all these advances to infrastructure to build longer spanning or higher rising structures. During the 18th and 19th century, the advances in industrialization resulted in new production processes, for iron, too. After using iron in mechanical engineering, it was applied to infrastructure as well [1]. Today, these first old iron and early mild steel structures belong to the cultural and technical heritage of the world. When looking at them as an assessing engineer, it is in favour understanding the production process, the resulting microstructure and the mechanical properties of the specific material. Any historic iron structure requires special knowledge about connections, structural design and of course, the material behaviour [2]. The paper presents these basics and some guiding documents on how to “engineer the past”. Selected representative heritage structures made of cast iron, wrought iron and early mild iron as well their material- and structurespecific requirements on rehabilitation are presented. Appropriate assessment procedures, developed e.g. in technical committees and European projects, allow us keeping the witnesses of the early industrialisation in service and the surviving structures being still in use. Finally, the background documents prepared in Europe will be shortly presented to guide the assessment of old iron bridges considering the past but in line with modern methodology. The background documents support the implementation, harmonization and further development of the Eurocodes for assessment, not only for design.

Farming Out Factories: Japan's Law to Promote the Introduction of Industry into Agricultural Village Areas

1996 ◽  
Vol 28 (11) ◽  
pp. 2041-2061 ◽  
Author(s):  
M G McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Growth Period ◽  
Social Regulation ◽  
New Production ◽  
Industrial Firms ◽  
The Past ◽  
Industrial Parks ◽  
External Conditions ◽  
Japanese Industry ◽  
Rural Sites

Questions as to how social regulation serves renewed accumulation may be answered by mesoscale studies of the ways states make sites and localities available to new forms of production. In this study I examine the important social-regulatory role of the Japanese state in the rapid creation of new factory sites for flexible producers after 1970, particularly through negotiation with rural constituencies. Firms in leading sectors of Japanese industry have spun-off thousands of new production units over the past twenty years, not only as a result of growth but as a continuous strategy to achieve that growth. One way new factories obtained land and labor was through Japan's 1971 Law to Promote the Introduction of Industry into Agricultural Village Areas, Nōson Chiiki Kōgyō Dōnyū Sokushin Hō. This policy coaxed farmtown governments to carve new industrial parks out of farmland and to sell improved factory sites to manufacturing firms. By subscribing hundreds of farmtowns into this national program annually in the 1970s, the policy helped to structure the external conditions of industrial firms' flexibility, granting full rein to the internal logics allowing their greater spatial reach. By early 1992, over 6800 factories had acquired rural sites under this program and 444000 workers had been hired, many from farm households. The state has by no means abandoned interventionism in this growth period, but has actively reregulated the countryside away from its former engagements in agriculture and into the service of flexible industrial production.

The decline of managerial capitalism and visionary leadership literature

2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-245
Author(s):  
Alexander Styhre
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Manufacturing Industry ◽  
Visionary Leadership ◽  
Social Needs ◽  
Past Century ◽  
New Production ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Managerial Capitalism ◽  
The Past

Purpose In the recent literature on financialization and the rise of investor capitalism, the successor of managerial capitalism, which dominated until the 1970s, suggests that the firm is today enacted as a bundle of financial assets managed to create value for the shareholders. This paper aims to demonstrate how such views are established relatively recently by examining leadership literature published in the 1970s, representing an entirely different view of leadership work, the role of the firm and capital–labour relations. Design/methodology/approach Two books and one Harvard Business Review article published by the Volvo CEO Pehr G. Gyllenhammar, one of the most prominent Swedish industry leaders of the past century and one of the architects behind Volvo’s internationally renowned Kalmar and Uddevalla plants in Sweden, are examined. Based on a critical discourse analysis framework, these two volumes are treated as representatives of what Alfred Chandler speaks of as the regime managerial capitalism, today largely displaced by the regime of investor capitalism. Findings Gyllenhammar’s discourses stresses the role of the corporations as serving a wider social community than merely the shareholders, and regard the manufacturing industry as the legitimate site for the development of new production systems better suited to a more educated workforce demanding more qualified work assignments and greater autonomy. This argument, in favour of a view of the corporation as being socially embedded and responsive to wider social needs, can be contrasted against the contemporary view of leadership and corporate governance practice. Originality/value The paper addresses the shift from managerial capitalist regime of the post-Second World War period to the investor capitalism of the financialized economy and the financialized firm by contrasting leadership writing of the 1970s against today’s strong focus on shareholder enrichment and the enactment of CEOs and directors as the servants of the capital owners. A long-term perspective on the changes occurring over the past four decades may enable a better understanding how leadership, governance and industry are subject to ongoing re-interpretations and understanding in the face of novel economic, social and political conditions.

scholarly journals Structural Modelling, Construction and Test of The First 3D-printed Gridshell in Ice Composite

2020 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 177-186
Author(s):  
Arno Pronk ◽  
Qingpeng Li ◽  
Elke Mergny
Keyword(s):  
Iterative Process ◽  
Shell Structures ◽  
Water Mixture ◽  
Cold Environment ◽  
Production Technique ◽  
Dead Load ◽  
New Production ◽  
The Past ◽  
Large Shell ◽  
3D Printed

In the past, record breaking large shell structures with ice composites were successfully realized by spraying cellulose-water mixture on an inflatable mould. This paper presents the application of a new, production technique for ice composites by extrusion instead of spraying. With this additive manufacturing technique, the world's first gridshell in fibre-reinforced ice was designed, constructed, and tested. To increase the stiffness of the gridshell the floorplan of the inflatable mould was designed with an anti-clastic curvature at the supports of the structure. Concerning the pattern of the grid different options were developed and compared and verified in ABAQUS®. The size of the struts were determined by an iterative process. The gridshell was realized in a cold environment by printing multiple layers of cellulose-water mixture on the inflatable mould using piping bags. After the substance has been extruded, the mixture froze at temperatures of minus eight degrees Celsius or lower. The realized structure was tested on-site with a dead load to prove its strength.

A tale of two bogs - new 10Be production rates from UK and NZ calibrated by basal 14C ages 

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Fink ◽  
Philip Hughes ◽  
Reka Fulop ◽  
Klaus Wilcken ◽  
Patrick Adams ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Radiocarbon Dating ◽  
Published Data ◽  
British Isles ◽  
Production Rates ◽  
New Production ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
Global Average ◽  
The Past ◽  
Minimum Age ◽  
Exposure Ages

<p>Cosmogenic production rates (PRs) are the essential conversion factor between AMS cosmogenic concentrations and absolute exposure ages. The accuracy of cosmogenic glacial chronologies and reliability in their comparison to other paleoclimate systems  is largely contingent on the precision and accuracy of the adopted production rate. This is particularly critical in determining past glacial geochronologies at the scale of millennial temporal resolution. Most PR calibrations are carried out at deglaciation sites where radiocarbon provides the independent chronometric control usually based on 14C ages in basal sediments or varves from lake or bog cores which is assumed to represent the minimum age for glacial retreat. Under these conditions and hence provide PRs as maximum values. Given that today most AMS facilities can deliver 10-Be, 26-Al and 36-Cl data with total analytical errors less than 2% ( for 10 ka exposure), the precision of a PR remains largely dependent  on the error in the independent chronology and accuracy of AMS standards. The history over the past 20 years of the ever-decreasing value of  SLHL 10-Be cosmogenic spallation PRs   from initial estimates of about 7 atoms/g/a to the current  ‘accepted‘ (global average) values of ~4 atoms/g/a,   is an interesting story in itself and demonstrates the complexity in such determinations.  </p><p>Over the past few years new web-based calculators are now available to calculate uniformly new production rates from either new data or combinations of any set of published data (CRONUS-Earth, CRONUS-UW, CosmoCalc, ICE-D, CREp). This delivers a means by which new production rates can be seamlessly integrated and compared using identical constants, methods and statistics that were used to generate (currently accepted) global average or regional production rates.</p><p> For the British Isles, there are a number of 10-Be reference sites that give PRs (Lm scheme) between 3.89±3%  atoms/g/a  (Putnam, QG, v50, 2019) to 4.20±1% atoms/g/a (Small, JQS, v30, 2015) which convert to 3.95 and 4.28, respectively, using datasets in the ICE-D calculator). This difference in 10-Be spallation PRs has recently raised some debate and challenges for the timing of the local-LGM and demise of the British Ice Sheet. This work provides a new  British Isles site specific 10Be PR from the  Arenig Mountains in North Wales where radiocarbon dating of basal sediments from a bog core associated with a series of nearby cirque moraines provides independent age control.  Similarly in the South Island of New Zealand, the current accepted 10Be PR is 3.76±2% (Putnam, QG 2009; converts to 3.94±1% using ICE-D) and is the only available PR that is used for these southern hemispheric glacial sites. This work provides a new Australasian site specific 10Be PR from Arthurs Pass retreat moraines where radiocarbon dating of basal sediments from three cores extracted from a bog impounded by the moraine provides independent age control. </p>

Retraining and Advanced Training of Employees and Specialists

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 53-57
Author(s):  
Р. Закиева ◽  
R. Zakieva
Keyword(s):  
Professional Development ◽  
Multinational Corporations ◽  
Vocational Training ◽  
Technological Progress ◽  
Vice President ◽  
Modern World ◽  
New Production ◽  
Noticeable Increase ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Cost

Personnel training is one of the key conditions for the successful functioning of any organization. This has become especially important in the modern world, when an increase in the pace of development of scientific and technological progress greatly accelerates the process of obsolescence of professional knowledge and skills. The contradiction of the qualifications of employees to the needs of the company is negatively manifested in the results of its activities. The growing sense of vocational training for the organization and a noticeable increase in the need for it over the past forty years have shown that the first companies in the market have taken up the improvement of the skills of their employees. Preparation of the implementation of vocational training has become the leading direction of personnel management, and the cost of it is the highest (after wages) in the list of expenses of many companies. Professional development is the process of equipping an employee with the knowledge to perform assigned tasks, new production functions, to obtain new positions, without the difficult solution of new tasks. In huge multinational corporations there are special professional development departments, managed by a manager with the rank of director or vice president, which emphasizes their great importance to the company. The need for professional development for current organizations is also described by the fact that the motives in this border are drawn up into personal plans (from the implementation of which the employee’s earnings are proportionally calculated) by the heads of most corporations: presidents, regional vicepresidents, directors of national companies

Unions, the Skills Agenda, and Workforce Development

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Stuart ◽  
Tony Huzzard
Keyword(s):  
Workforce Development ◽  
Mass Production ◽  
Contrasting Cases ◽  
New Production ◽  
Labour Process ◽  
Flexible Specialization ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter explores the relationship between unions and skills at the workplace. We argue that the significance of the skills agenda is broadly concomitant with a shift in the labour process beyond mass production into newer trajectories, variously described as post-Fordism, post-industrialism, flexible specialization and new production concepts. Unions are increasingly equating their members’ learning (and skills) as much as with enhancing their employability as with broader emancipation or entry into a trade. Through focusing on the contrasting cases of the UK and Sweden we show how the recent pursuit of the skills agenda has gone hand in hand with a strategic reorientation of unions, in response to more challenging bargaining environments and a declining membership base. We also argue that different approaches by unions to skills can be explained not only by national and sectoral factors but also by agency and voice mechanisms.

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