Modular Production's Impact on Japan's Electronics Industry

This paper examines the notion that national industrial models evolve with time, and provides evidence of transformation when elements are transferred from one society to another. The Japanese Production System, itself an adaptation of American-style mass production to the constraints of the post World War Two Japanese economy, in turn had a profound impact on the organization of industrial production in the United States, especially during the 1990s. I characterize the new model that emerged in the United States as the “Modular Production System.” This paper examines the response of Japanese electronics firms to Modular Production in the period 2000-2004. It is based on forty-three interviews with top managers at Japan’s largest electronics firms, conducted during the calendar years 1999-2004, as well as insights gained from more than 600 field interviews conducted between 1999 and 2005 for the MIT Industrial Performance Center’s Globalization Study. I argue that Japanese electronics firms have been strongly influenced by Modular Production but that they have, unsurprisingly, adapted it to their current environment and in the process may have begun to transform both the Japanese and Modular Production Systems. While it is too early to determine if these changes amount to the emergence of a distinct industrial model, the chapter concludes by laying out the challenges and opportunities that now face Japanese electronics firms given their recent experiments with joint technology development, production alliances, and global outsourcing

The Next Wave of Globalization: Relocating Service Provision to India

The offshoring of services is rapidly growing in magnitude and scope. To understand this evolution, observation-based research is vital. In the last decade, services offshoring has rapidly expanded from software to any information technology-enabled business process. This paper draws upon two rounds of interviews with executives and managers in India and the case studies of Sloan Foundation-funded conference to explain the dynamics of offshoring to India, the largest recipient of offshored services, from the perspective of the firm, the industry, and the recipient nation. We show that the growth in offshoring was intimately linked to the prior development of India’s software sector and an enabling regulatory and other institutional environment. Multinationals played a key role, although domestic firms were early adopters. The role of multinationals has deepened substantially moving from the large firm to include smaller firms, outsourcing specialists, and startups offering innovative new services. As this has happened, the value-addition and sophistication of the work done has increased. The most sophisticated work being done in India increasingly resembles the most sophisticated work being done anywhere else. Services exports required well-educated labor from the beginning, which is fundamentally different from the origins of manufactured goods exports from developing nations. However, a value-chain exists and it is possible that some lower-end services will relocate from India as the country moves up the value-chain. Finally, the speed at which services exports can grow in scale and scope is noteworthy and is occurring more quickly than was the case with manufacturing exports. This raises important issues for structural adjustment in developed countries. The conclusion also considers the implications of the offshoring of services for developing nations and possible policy initiatives for developing nations interested in entering the ITES sector

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Optimizing company cash : a guide for financial professionals

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aicpa_guides/1486/thumbnail.jp

Digital government: ideology and new forms of power

Behind the façade of a “digital government” narrative of convenience and accessibility, bureaucrats and corporations are building a new mode of public governance that restructures and redistributes public sector work and institutions, furthering the growth of a corporate state with expanding powers of surveillance and social control

The politics of skill building in a global age

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2009.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 352-380).National skills systems have historically imposed significant constraints on production strategies. This dissertation investigates the impact of the home economy skill base on firms' off-shoring and out-sourcing decisions, asking: how are globalization pressures mediated and shaped by politically constructed institutions? Chapters One and Two review the literatures on 'varieties of capitalism' and national skill profiles, examining the relationship between skills and production strategies in the US (general skills and Fordism), Germany (industry-specific skills and diversified quality production) and Italy (tacit skills and industrial district production). Despite considerable differences, politicians and business leaders in all three countries have embraced remarkably similar skill-building rhetoric. The dissertation then examines globalization as a de-stabilizing agent for skill-building systems, focusing on the textiles and apparel industries. Chapter Three argues that domestic education and training institutions in the United States facilitated offshoring, and that upgrades in management skills were rarely accompanied by more robustly skilled workers on the production floor. Chapter Four argues that recent changes in Italian industry structure attempted to ensure a steady supply of a vital input -workers with lots of tacit skill - but an over-reliance on tacit knowledge could ultimately undermine competitiveness in the industry. Chapter Five finds that Germany's edge in production, rooted on strong, industry-based skills institutions , gave firms a clear advantage in the period of intense globalization. But given recent transfer of skills from German firms to Central European suppliers, how enduring Germany's skills advantage will be remains unclear. Chapter Six examines the impact of new, global technologies on national skill-building systems, looking at the advent of information technology skill certifications. Despite important national variations in adoption, IT skill certificates came to define skill sets at the international level, underscoring the importance of a new set of global, often for profit actors in previously domestic arena of training and education. Chapter Seven concludes with a discussion of the skills workers and employers need to be competitive in the global economy, arguing that reform of formal education institutions may be necessary but insufficient. Policy makers and employers would do well to focus more attention on fostering tacit skills.by Sara Jane McCaffrey.Ph.D

Exploring supply chain sustainability risk in the UK fashion industry : a multiple case-study

Much has been written about fashion supply chains in recent years pertaining to the offshoring of production and sourcing by the companies in the UK fashion industry to other countries including inter alia Asia, as well as the attendant risks to such activities. Evidence suggests that businesses can experience disruptions from sustainability issues in their supply chains. In addition, there is an increasing focus on sustainability issues in global businesses and the UK fashion industry is not immune to these issues. Nevertheless, consideration of sustainability and its impact on risk pertaining to the supply chains in the UK fashion industry has not been actively pursued. Moreover, little is known about how sustainability issues manifest themselves as risks. Finally, the lack of a sustainability risk conceptualisation hinders the development of a sustainability risk management framework, which is critical to enable global fashion supply chains to survive and compete in a volatile and demand-driven sector. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to explore the phenomenon of sustainability risk and supply chain sustainability risk management processes within the context of the UK fashion industry.For the purpose of exploration, an inductive qualitative research approach and a multiple case study research method were adopted. The UK fashion industry has exhibited interesting dynamics in the last few decades. For example, UK textile and garment manufacturing has massively declined in size, yet the UK fashion industry demonstrates fierce competition and retailer concentration. Therefore, five fashion companies were theoretically sampled from the UK fashion industry. The selected companies were a good mix of small and medium size. All carried out their major operations such as sourcing, manufacturing, distribution, warehousing and customer service in the UK. This enabled the researcher to deeply explore and gain insights into the phenomenon of sustainability risk and supply chain sustainability risk management processes in the contemporary context of the UK fashion industry. Data was collected by semi-structured interviews, supported by observations and secondary sources. Interview transcripts were subject to narrative analysis based upon a social constructionist approach.This research identified seven major factors as barriers and drivers for supply chain sustainability risk management: organisational culture, growth of fast fashion, organisational resources, management structure, safeguarding brand reputation, stimulator of innovation and co-opetition. These findings were further grouped into a supply chain sustainability risk management typology. The typology implies that the case companies need to understand and should have knowledge about their current and potential future key sustainability risk and then need to have a certain organisational design and innovative management processes to manage their supply chain sustainability risk

The work of financialisation: an ethnography of a global management consultancy in post-Mao China

This thesis examines and exposes the work of one of the most enigmatic of capitalist institutions – the management consultancy – as that of financialisation. In recent decades financial markets have played an increasingly important role in the operations of the global economy, which has led to fundamental changes to managerial practices of the modern corporation. In particular, many authors, from a variety of disciplines within social sciences, have discussed the ascendancy of shareholder value as the ideology of corporate governance. But what is rarely examined is how shareholder value has been disseminated and installed as a corporate good. At the same time, there continues to be widespread ignorance about one of the major proponents of shareholder value – management consultancies. In short, we still do not know what consultancies do. I attempt to address this lacuna by examining how management is practised within management consultancy. Through an ethnography based on 16 months of fieldwork inside one of the world’s largest management consultancies, I show that shareholder value is an ethic of production which has to be made through a set of sociotechnical practices which are deployed in the pursuit of an ontological transformation – the enactment of the corporation as a financial asset. I highlight the importance of information technology (IT) in this endeavour, specifically, how it is incorporated in managerial techniques of “corporate culture”, which attempt to not only orientate employees towards the “needs” of financial markets, but also constructs them as financial objects. The work of consultancies is to establish the practice of managing labour as financial capital. This thesis draws on analytical approaches from science and technology studies to examine complex managerial systems and how they operate to produce an ethics of capitalism; it contributes to existing anthropological scholarship on the “new economy”, financial markets, corporate subjectivities and theories of value, and provides a novel example of how “fast capitalism” can be captured, ethnographically, through a methodology of collaboration

Compilation of thesis abstracts, December 2006

NPS Class of December 2006This quarter’s Compilation of Abstracts summarizes cutting-edge, security-related research conducted by NPS students and presented as theses, dissertations, and capstone reports. Each expands knowledge in its field.http://archive.org/details/compilationofsis109452750