Whys and hows of in-house writing

The combining of requisite technical knowledge with requisite writing ability is addressed. Considerations in the development of in-house writing courses, in-plant training, are presented and evaluated. Specific problems in past methodology are also detailed. It is suggested that teachers of technical writing should be technical people themselves, preferably with working experience in industry or business; the training provided should be user-oriented, not theory oriented

How Banks Construct and Manage Risk: A Sociological Study of Small Firm Lending in Britain and Germany

This paper analyses the role of banks in financing SMEs in Britain and Germany. It applies a sociological institutionalist approach to understand how banks construct and manage risk, relating to SME business. The empirical analysis is based on the results of a comparative survey of a sample of British and German banks and also refers to statistical material produced by the banks themselves. The paper concludes that, even though bank- firm relations are still deeply embedded in national institutional frameworks, some tendencies towards convergence can also be observed, particularly among commercial banks from the two countries. These flow from both internationalisation and from the political influence of the EU.Bank Lending; SMEs; Britain; Germany

Geometry of Thermodynamic States

A novel geometric formalism for statistical estimation is applied here to the canonical distribution of classical statistical mechanics. In this scheme thermodynamic states, or equivalently, statistical mechanical states, can be characterised concisely in terms of the geometry of a submanifold ${\cal M}$ of the unit sphere ${\cal S}$ in a real Hilbert space ${\cal H}$. The measurement of a thermodynamic variable then corresponds to the reduction of a state vector in ${\cal H}$ to an eigenstate, where the transition probability is the Boltzmann weight. We derive a set of uncertainty relations for conjugate thermodynamic variables in the equilibrium thermodynamic states. These follow as a consequence of a striking thermodynamic analogue of the Anandan-Aharonov relations in quantum mechanics. As a result we are able to provide a resolution to the controversy surrounding the status of `temperature fluctuations' in the canonical ensemble. By consideration of the curvature of the thermodynamic trajectory in its state space we are then able to derive a series of higher order variance bounds, which we calculate explicitly to second order.Comment: 7 pages, RevTe

Financial Exchange Rates and International Currency Exposures

Our goal in this project is to gain a better empirical understanding of the international financial implications of currency movements. To this end, we construct a database of international currency exposures for a large panel of countries over 1990-2004. We show that trade-weighted exchange rate indices are insufficient to understand the financial impact of currency movements. Further, we demonstrate that many developing countries hold short foreign-currency positions, leaving them open to negative valuation effects when the domestic currency depreciates. However, we also show that many of these countries have substantially reduced their foreign currency exposure over the last decade. Last, we show that our currency measure has high explanatory power for the valuation term in net foreign asset dynamics: exchange rate valuation shocks are sizable, not quickly reversed and may entail substantial wealth shocks.Financial integration, capital flows, external assets and liabilities

Multinationals, Social Agency and Institutional Change; Variation by Sector

This is the accepted manuscript version of the following article: Mike Geppert and Graham Hollinshead, ‘Editorial: Multinationals, Social Agency and Institutional Change; Variation by Sector’, Competition and Change, Vol 18(3): 195-199, June 2014. The final, definitive version of this paper has been published is available online via doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/1024529414Z.00000000056 Published by SAGE Publishing. All rights reserved. © W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2014Multinational corporations (MNCs) operate at a crossroads of countervailing influences, While headquarters are typically embedded in the institutional settings of their home country, subsidiaries tend to internalize regulative and cognitive frames in their own national and regional contexts. MNCs now frequently assume highly diffuse global structures, operating across regionally dispersed horizontal and vertical networks, thereby exposing them to a global mosaic of societal, institutional and socio- economic influences. Moreover, MNCs are subjected to regulative effects emanating from transnational regulationPeer reviewe

Financial exchange rates and international currency exposures

Our goal in this project is to gain a better empirical understanding of the international financial implications of currency movements. To this end, we construct a database of international currency exposures for a large panel of countries over 1990-2004. We show that trade-weighted exchange rate indices are insufficient to understand the financial impact of currency movements. We show that our currency measure has high explanatory power for the valuation term in net foreign asset dynamics: exchange rate valuation shocks are sizable, not quickly reversed and may entail substantial wealth redistributions. Further, we demonstrate that many developing countries hold short foreign-currency positions, leaving them open to negative valuation effects when the domestic currency depreciates. However, we also show that many of these countries have substantially reduced their foreign currency exposure over the last decade. --Financial integration,capital flows,external assets and liabilities