117 research outputs found
Structures of control : the changing role of shop floor supervision in the U.S. automobile industry, 1900-1950
The thesis is based on a longitudinal study of the automobile industry
in the U.S.A. from its inception around the turn of the century, to the
1950s. Charting the changes in methods of production, organisational
structure, demography and skill configurations among the workforce, and
institutional and political formations at the workplace, the study focuses
upon the meaning of these developments in terms of the control of work and
the personnel directly involved in that control - the changing role of
foremen in 20th century industry.
Using a range of sources including contemporary governmental and
industrial surveys, company and trade union records and oral histories, a
picture is built up of the way in which methods of production, and the
control of that production, are mediated through a series of social,
demographic, spatial and ideological factors, in all of which the foreman
is a central character.
In examining the role of shop floor supervision in shaping workers
experience and actual structures of control at the workplace, and showing
how the experience of foremen, individually and as a group, in turn are
affected by changing patterns of work, the thesis constructs a historical
modification to accounts of the labour process which stress a progressive,
teleological exodus of control from the shop floor. The study points out
for example, that the role of shop-floor supervisor during the inter-war
period, largely supposed to have been proscribed and marginalised by
technological and bureaucratic developments, remained in fact the focal
point of control over hiring, firing, wage levels, production levels and
methods of work, in short almost all aspects of the industrial workers'
experience of factory life.
Having established the boundaries of power and control surrounding the
foreman in pre-war mass production, and discussed the meaning of these
boundaries in terms of class, ideology and divisions among the workforce,
the thesis then examines the origins and effects of unionisation on the
role of supervision. Following an account of the restructuring of power and
control which comes with the establishment of production workers unions in
the industry, the advent of the unionisation of foremen themselves is
examined. The Foremen's Association of America (FAA), which saw its genesis
and principal area of recruitment in the automobile industry, represented
the most serious attempt to organise supervisory workers in the USA this
century, and marks a pivotal point in the spread of unionisation,
managerial response and state intervention in industrial relations.
Building on earlier sections outlining the position of foremen in terms of
power and ideology, the thesis proposes a complex, multi-level dynamic
behind the formation, growth and decline of the FAA as a corrective to
previous accounts which stress the primacy of legislative and institutional
explanatory frameworks.
Finally the thesis charts the post-war response of management in the
industry to the threat of foremen's unionisation, locating ensuing attempts
to restructure the role, status and prestige of foremen in terms of the
historical impact and progress of competing managerial theory, in
particular that of the human relations school
The Evolution of Private Equity: Corporate Restructuring in the UK, c.1945-2010
The paper analyses the role of private equity in restructuring the UK corporate economy. It develops a theoretical synthesis to show that the evolution of the PE industry and firms in which it invested were governed by the relations of corporate governance between investor and investee companies. Effective governance relations were a necessary condition for success and complement firm specific resources to create competitive advantage. Four case studies are used to show the contrasting effects of these determining factors, ICFC and Slater Walker, and the two waves of buy-out centred restructuring that developed with the maturity of the PE industry after 1980. In contrast to the evolutionary approach, the periodisations utilised in this study show that structural breaks associated with points of institutional reform are also necessary to make firm specific resource and governance determinants of competitive advantage operable
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Where constructionism and critical realism converge: interrogating the domain of epistemological relativism
The paper interrogates the status, nature and significance of epistemological relativism as a key element of constructionism and critical realism. It finds that epistemological relativism is espoused by authorities in critical realism and marginalized or displaced in the field of management and organization studies, resulting in forms of analysis that are empirically, but not fully critically, realist. This evaluation prompts reflection on the question of whether, how and with what implications epistemological relativism might be recast at the heart of critical realist studies of management and organization
A Software Tool to Model Genetic Regulatory Networks. Applications to the Modeling of Threshold Phenomena and of Spatial Patterning in Drosophila
We present a general methodology in order to build mathematical models of genetic regulatory networks. This approach is based on the mass action law and on the Jacob and Monod operon model. The mathematical models are built symbolically by the Mathematica software package GeneticNetworks. This package accepts as input the interaction graphs of the transcriptional activators and repressors of a biological process and, as output, gives the mathematical model in the form of a system of ordinary differential equations. All the relevant biological parameters are chosen automatically by the software. Within this framework, we show that concentration dependent threshold effects in biology emerge from the catalytic properties of genes and its associated conservation laws. We apply this methodology to the segment patterning in Drosophila early development and we calibrate the genetic transcriptional network responsible for the patterning of the gap gene proteins Hunchback and Knirps, along the antero-posterior axis of the Drosophila embryo. In this approach, the zygotically produced proteins Hunchback and Knirps do not diffuse along the antero-posterior axis of the embryo of Drosophila, developing a spatial pattern due to concentration dependent thresholds. This shows that patterning at the gap genes stage can be explained by the concentration gradients along the embryo of the transcriptional regulators
Conceptual and practical challenges for implementing the communities of practice model on a national scale - a Canadian cancer control initiative
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Cancer program delivery, like the rest of health care in Canada, faces two ongoing challenges: to coordinate a pan-Canadian approach across complex provincial jurisdictions, and to facilitate the rapid translation of knowledge into clinical practice. Communities of practice, or CoPs, which have been described by Etienne Wenger as a collaborative learning platform, represent a promising solution to these challenges because they rely on bottom-up rather than top-down social structures for integrating knowledge and practice across regions and agencies. The communities of practice model has been realized in the corporate (e.g., Royal Dutch Shell, Xerox, IBM, etc) and development (e.g., World Bank) sectors, but its application to health care is relatively new. The Canadian Partnership Against Cancer (CPAC) is exploring the potential of Wenger's concept in the Canadian health care context. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of Wenger's concept with a focus on its applicability to the health care sector.</p> <p>Discussion</p> <p>Empirical studies and social science theory are used to examine the utility of Wenger's concept. Its value lies in emphasizing learning from peers and through practice in settings where innovation is valued. Yet the communities of practice concept lacks conceptual clarity because Wenger defines it so broadly and sidelines issues of decision making within CoPs. We consider the implications of his broad definition to establishing an informed nomenclature around this specific type of collaborative group. The CoP Project under CPAC and communities of practice in Canadian health care are discussed.</p> <p>Summary</p> <p>The use of communities of practice in Canadian health care has been shown in some instances to facilitate quality improvements, encourage buy in among participants, and generate high levels of satisfaction with clinical leadership and knowledge translation among participating physicians. Despite these individual success stories, more information is required on how group decisions are made and applied to the practice world in order to leverage the potential of Wenger's concept more fully, and advance the science of knowledge translation within an accountability framework.</p
Catching and monitoring clinical innovation through performance indicators. The case of the breast-conserving surgery indicator
Stable, Precise, and Reproducible Patterning of Bicoid and Hunchback Molecules in the Early Drosophila Embryo
Precise patterning of morphogen molecules and their accurate reading out are of key importance in embryonic development. Recent experiments have visualized distributions of proteins in developing embryos and shown that the gradient of concentration of Bicoid morphogen in Drosophila embryos is established rapidly after fertilization and remains stable through syncytial mitoses. This stable Bicoid gradient is read out in a precise way to distribute Hunchback with small fluctuations in each embryo and in a reproducible way, with small embryo-to-embryo fluctuation. The mechanisms of such stable, precise, and reproducible patterning through noisy cellular processes, however, still remain mysterious. To address these issues, here we develop the one- and three-dimensional stochastic models of the early Drosophila embryo. The simulated results show that the fluctuation in expression of the hunchback gene is dominated by the random arrival of Bicoid at the hunchback enhancer. Slow diffusion of Hunchback protein, however, averages out this intense fluctuation, leading to the precise patterning of distribution of Hunchback without loss of sharpness of the boundary of its distribution. The coordinated rates of diffusion and transport of input Bicoid and output Hunchback play decisive roles in suppressing fluctuations arising from the dynamical structure change in embryos and those arising from the random diffusion of molecules, and give rise to the stable, precise, and reproducible patterning of Bicoid and Hunchback distributions
A tentative return to experience in researching learning at work
This paper explores possibilities for more democratic approaches to
researching learning in and through everyday workplace practices.
This links with a concern with who is able to speak in
representations of learning at work, what is able to be spoken
about and how knowing, learning and experience are inscribed in
theories of workplace learning. I propose that Rancière’s notion of
‘the distribution of the sensible’, which draws attention to an
aesthetic dimension of experience, knowledge and politics,
provides a useful way of exploring learning in and through
everyday workplace practices. The approach points to the
possibility of knowledge without hierarchies and a shift from a
knowledge – ignorance binary. An understanding of experience as
aesthetic enables accounts of learning which counter the story of
destiny in literature on learning in and through everyday practice.
It also points to a very different way of doing academic research.
The presupposition of equality is the point of departure in this
approach and the purpose of research is the verification of
equality (rather than the verification of oppression). The paper
makes a significant contribution to literature on learning in and
through everyday workplace practices by disrupting a prevailing
view that knowledge is necessarily tied to identity
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