The fragility of functional work systems in steel

The I/N case offers insight into the interrelationship between work systems, living standards and performance. It demonstrates that a high road approach and functional work systems positively impact stakeholders’ lives, improve production efficiency and benefit the local and macro-level economies and societies in which they are embedded. It also shows that such work systems can be implemented in contexts with a history of adversarial labor-management relations. However, broader external forces can conspire to make it very difficult for firms to sustain functional work systems despite initial successes in specific contexts. Financial markets in particular make long term commitment to stakeholder groups other than shareholders (i.e. employees, suppliers and communities) conditional on profit maximization and share price appreciation. Yet the logic of profit maximization for the benefit of shareholders leads to short termist decisions that undermine the very commitments that were so necessary for creating a new work system: security is threatened, training is put on the back burner; trust is irreparably undermined. Indeed, because of the inherent contradiction between strategic approaches to maximizing stock market and long term product market success, these high road systems are fragile in national frameworks that subject them to low road pressures without a forum for resolving the difficulties that arise from opposing market pressures and responses

POLITIK HUKUM PENGELOLAAN LINGKUNGAN HIDUP DALAM PERSPEKTIF OTONOMI DAERAH MENUJU PENGATURAN HUKUM YANG BERORIENTASI KEBERLANJUTAN EKOLOGI

Desentralisasi dan otonomi daerah yang dimulai sejak tahun 1999 ternyata belum memberikan dampak positif bagi lingkungan hidup. Berbagai produk hukum otonomi daerah selain disharmonis dengan politik hukum lingkungan, juga terdapat inkonsistensi ketentuan satu dengan yang lain. Sebagai akibatnya, pengaturan wewenang dan kelembagaan lingkungan daerah lemah dan kerjasama antardaerah dalam bidang lingkungan belum berkembang dengan baik. Pada akhirnya, kondisi lingkungan di era otonomi daerah tidak menjadi lebih baik dari sebelumnya. Berdasarkan permasalahan di atas, maka pertanyaan penelitian disertasi ini dirumuskan sebagai berikut: (1) bagaimanakah dinamika perkembangan politik hukum pengelolaan lingkungan hidup di Indonesia dan refleksinya dalam produk hukum otonomi daerah?; (2) mengapa pengaturan hukum wewenang dan kelembagaan serta kerjasama antardaerah dalam pengelolaan lingkungan hidup lemah dan belum mencerminkan politik hukum yang berorientasi keberlanjutan ekologi?; dan (3) bagaimanakah konsep pengaturan hukum yang ideal tentang wewenang dan kelembagaan serta kerjasama antardaerah dalam pengelolaan lingkungan hidup yang kuat dan mencerminkan politik hukum yang berorientasi keberlanjutan ekologi? Penelitian ini merupakan penelitian hukum doktrinal, yaitu mengkaji doktrin-doktrin hukum, aturan hukum positif, dan prinsip-prinsip hukum lingkungan dan otonomi daerah guna menjawab permasalahan. Pendekatan yang digunakan adalah pendekatan perundang-undangan, konseptual, sejarah hukum, filosofis, dan perban-dingan hukum, kemudian dianalisis dengan metode preskriptif-analitis. Temuan penelitian menunjukkan bahwa politik hukum pengelolaan lingkungan hidup yang sebelum UULH-1982 bernuansa sektoral dan berorientasi ekonomi, secara bertahap telah bergeser ke arah pengaturan terpadu dengan orientasi perlindungan dan keberlanjutan ekologi. Pergeseran tersebut tidak terefleksi dengan baik dalam produk hukum otonomi daerah, karena substansinya hanya terfokus pada “pengendalian lingkungan” dan dalam implementasinya di daerah cenderung berorientasi ekonomi. Lemahnya pengaturan wewenang dan kelembagaan serta kerjasama antardaerah disebabkan oleh lemahnya dasar hukum dan sempitnya lingkup wewenang kelem-bagaan yang diberikan, serta belum diintegrasikannya prinsip perlindungan dan keberlanjutan ekologi. Kerjasama antardaerah juga belum diatur secara spesifik, sehingga yang berkembang lebih mengedepankan keuntungan dari sisi ekonomi. Konsep pengaturan hukum yang ideal tentang wewenang daerah adalah landasan hukum yang kuat, wewenang yang luas, dan terintegrasinya prinsip perlindungan dan keberlanjutan ekologi dalam kebijakan otonomi daerah mulai dari tataran konstitusi sampai pada undang-undang dan peraturan pelaksanaannya. Wewenang daerah tidak hanya terbatas “pengendalian lingkungan”, tetapi mulai dari perencanaan sampai penegakan hukum. Kelembagaan lingkungan ideal adalah yang memiliki wewenang koordinasi dan operasional, serta ada tata hubungan yang jelas baik antara pusat dan daerah maupun antardaerah. Kerjasama antardaerah diatur secara spesifik yang memadukan prinsip kerjasama pada umumnya dengan prinsip-prinsip pengelolaan lingkungan, diaturnya model-model kerjasama dan format kelembagaan yang dapat diterapkan dalam bidang lingkungan. Kata kunci: politik hukum, pengelolaan lingkungan, otonomi daerah. Decentralization and local autonomy which began in 1999 has not been having positive impact on environment. Various legal products of local autonomy have caused in addition to the existence of a disharmony with environmental legal politics, as well an inconsistency between one regulation formulations to another. As a consequence, the authority and institutional arrangement of local environment weakens and the inter-regional cooperation has not been well developing. At the end, the environment sphere in the era of local autonomy has not been becoming better than it was before. Based on above problems, research questions in this dissertation can be formulated as follows: (1) How is the dynamics of legal politics development on environmental management in Indonesia and its reflection within local autonomy legal product? (2) Why does the regulation on authority, institution, and inter-regional cooperation weaken and have not been reflecting a legal politics which is ecological sustainability oriented? (3) How the ideal regulation concept on authority, institution, and inter-regional cooperation on environmental management, which is strong and reflects the ecological sustainability principle? This research is a doctrinal legal research which examines legal doctrines, positive legal regulations, and legal principles of environment and local autonomy in order to answer the problem’s statements. It uses statute, conceptual, historical, philosophical, and comparative approaches, and then the analyzed with a prescriptive-analytical method. Research finding shows that legal politics of environmental management in Indonesia has a dynamic shifting from economic and sector oriented nuance, occurred before Act No. 4 of 1982 (UULH-1982), toward an integrated arrangement with protection and ecological sustainability orientation. However, this shifting is not well reflected in legal products of local autonomy since their substances focus only on “environment control” and tend to be economic oriented in its implementation. This weakness of authority, institution, and inter-regional cooperation arrangement is caused by the weakness of given legal basis and limited institutional authority scope, and the disintegrated ecological sustainability and protection principles. The inter-regional cooperation has not been specifically regulated as well, so that its development proposes more economic advantage rather than it should be. The ideal regulation concept on local authority in the future are the existence of strong legal basis, and integration of ecological sustainability and protection principles in local autonomy policy starting from constitution level down to legislation and its implementing rules. The local authority is not restricted to “environment control”, but it starts from planning up to law enforcement. The ideal form of environment institution is one which has coordinative and operational authority, and clear intra-governmental relation both between central and local and inter-region. The inter-regional cooperation is specifically regulated by rules which integrate the general cooperation principle and the principles of environmental management, including cooperation models, and institutional form suitable for environmental field. Keyword: legal politics, environmental management, local autonomy

Images of coordination : how implementing organizations perceive coordination arrangements

A crucial challenge for the coordination of horizontal policy programs those designed to tackle crosscutting issues is how to motivate government organizations to contribute to such programs. Hence, it is crucial to study how practitioners in implementing organizations view and appreciate the coordination of such programs. Assisted by Q-methodology, this inductive study reveals three significantly different "images" centralframe setting, networking via boundary spanners, and coordination beyond window dressing Most surprisingly, different images show up among respondents within the same organizations and horizontal programs. The authors find that the images reflect elements of the literature: the resistance to hierarchical central control, the need for local differentiation and increased incentives, and a collaboration-oriented culture. Most importantly, practitioners of implementing organizations perceive top-dawn mechanisms as ineffective to achieve coordination and ask for adaptive arrangements, involvement, and deliberative processes when designing coordination arrangements and during the collaboration

CrossFlow: Cross-Organizational Workflow Management for Service Outsourcing in Dynamic Virtual Enterprises

In this report, we present the approach to cross-organizational workflow management of the CrossFlow project. CrossFlow is a European research project aiming at the support of cross-organizational workflows in dynamic virtual enterprises. The cooperation in these virtual enterprises is based on dynamic service outsourcing specified in electronic contracts. Service enactment is performed by dynamically linking the workflow management infrastructures of the involved organizations. Extended service enactment support is provided in the form of cross-organizational transaction management and process control, advanced quality of service monitoring, and support for high-level flexibility in service enactment. CrossFlow technology is realized on top of a commercial workflow management platform and applied in two real-world scenarios in the contexts of a logistics and an insurance company

Organization of Multi-Agent Systems: An Overview

In complex, open, and heterogeneous environments, agents must be able to reorganize towards the most appropriate organizations to adapt unpredictable environment changes within Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). Types of reorganization can be seen from two different levels. The individual agents level (micro-level) in which an agent changes its behaviors and interactions with other agents to adapt its local environment. And the organizational level (macro-level) in which the whole system changes it structure by adding or removing agents. This chapter is dedicated to overview different aspects of what is called MAS Organization including its motivations, paradigms, models, and techniques adopted for statically or dynamically organizing agents in MAS.Comment: 12 page