A follow-up study of the 1940-1955 business department graduates of Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York.

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

The Policy Trajectories of Autonomous Vehicles

Autonomous Vehicle (AV) technology promises to dramatically reduce deaths and economic losses from crashes caused by human error, increase mobility for those with disabilities, and revolutionize the auto industry. Yet legislation to facilitate oversight of the development and deployment of AVs is stalling in Congress. Professor John Paul MacDuffie offers a primer on AV technology policy, and discusses strategies for addressing safety and other public concerns while still facilitating AV innovation in the private sector.https://repository.upenn.edu/pennwhartonppi/1056/thumbnail.jp

Creating Lean Suppliers: Diffusing Lean Production Through the Supply Chain

Hon& of America has developed a comprehensive approach to teaching the principles of lean production to its suppliers. The centerpiece of these efforts is a program called BP (for ?Best process?, ?Best Performance ?, ?Bs Practice?), in which a crossfunctional team of persomel born Honda and the supplier work intensively for week or even months on narrowly-targeted improvement projects in the supplier?s plant. BP has been quite successfid in enhancing supplier performance; suppliers participating in the program in 1994 avmge~ productiviw gains of 50?/0 on lines reengineered by BP. However, Honda found there was high variation in the extent to which suppliers were able to transfer the lessons taught beyond the line or plant where the BP intervention occurred. We explore the reasons for this variatio~ touching on how the BP process interacts with the broader relationship between customer and supplier, organizational learning, technology transfer, and the transplantation of Japanese management practices to the U.S. The case studies we present of three of Honda?s U.S. suppliers illustrate the dynamics of the learning process and the complex relationship that emerged between ?teacher? and ?student?. We found that achieving self sufficiency with the lean production techniques taught by BP is more likely when the supplier has a moderate degree of identification with and dependency on the customer. If these are too hi~ the supplier will be tempted to continue to rely on the customer for assistance; if they are too low, the learning relationship may break down. It appears that Honda has achieved the most supplier self reliance with larger U.S.-owned companies, who have an identity as strong, competent actors, and thus try to reduce dependence on Honda by mastering the new knowledge quickly. Yet these larger suppliers may be less responsive to Honda?s needs that small-to-medium suppliers whose capabilities can be boosted through Honda?s supplier development activities.Funding for this research was provided by the International Motor Vehicle Progam at M.I.T., the Jones Center for Management Policy, Strategy, and Organization at Whartou and the Center for Regional Economic Issues at Case Western Reserve University

From Fixed to Flexible: Automation and Work Organization Trends from the International Assembly Plant Survey

The paper is organized into seven sections. First, we define how we measure automation in the assembly plant study. Second, we describe the overall regional trends in the use of automation from 1989 to 1993/94. Third, we explore the patterns of usage for robotic equipment across regions, emphasizing in particular the significant move by many companies towards the replacement of fixed or "hard" automation with flexible, programmable automation. Fourth, we explore departmental differences in the use of automation, emphasizing the evolution in thinking about the most effective way to automate various tasks in the body, paint, and assembly shops. While automation levels continue to rise in the body and paint shops, a different approach is being taken in the assembly department, the most labor-intensive area of the plant and yet the place where total automation solutions have been most elusive. Fifth, we describe how trends in the adoption of flexible automation are linked to the adoption of flexible work practices that seek to boost worker involvement in production-related problem-solving. Sixth, we summarize what we have learned about the performance implications (in terms of productivity and quality) of the automation trends described here. The seventh section presents our conclusions from these analyses and our speculation about future trends in automotive manufacturing automation.The International Motor Vehicle Program and the Sloan Foundation

Performance Findings of the International Assembly Plant Study

We recently undertook the largest in-depth evaluation ever of automobile assembly plants around the world. In the Second Round of the International Assembly Plant Study, we surveyed 88 automobile assembly plants representing 20 companies and as many nations (see figure 1 for a distribution of plants by region of the world). We collected data on a host of different issues ranging from production processes and design choices to labor relations and organization of work. Here we report on our performance findings. In addition to reporting on our most recent findings, reflecting performance in 1993/4, we will compare those with the performance findings of the First Round of the International Assembly Plant Study which took place in 19892. European plants have shown the greatest percentage improvement in productivity of any region, but Korean plants, and plants in North America have also shown considerable gain. Given the minimal improvement in the average performance of Japanese-owned assembly plants in Japan, the performance gap between US and Japanese plants has closed significantly, although a differential still remains. In the area of quality, the European and US producers have shown tremendous improvement, and are approaching Japanese quality levels. However, our quality data only reflects vehicles sold in the United States, and as such, may overstate the average quality level of the European producers. The quality level of new entrant plants (particularly Korea) has not followed the world-wide trend in improvement in quality. One of our most important observations from this round is that there are tremendous performance differentials within each region of the world. This reflects different capabilities of companies operating in those regions. We are currently undertaking extensive analyses to understand the drivers of these intra-regional performance differences.MIT's International Motor Vehicle Program and the Sloan Foundatio

Strategies for Product Variety: Lessons From the Auto Industry

Driven by the market\u27s pull fir increasingly differentiated products and by manufacturers\u27 push to seek finely targeted niche segments, the variety of products offered in most industries has increased steadily over the last several decades. The pull comes from customers who seem to reward companies that can offer high variety while matching the price and quality of competitors with narrower product lines. Modern marketing methods accelerate this trend by identifying once-obscure specifics of consumer preferences. As more companies compete internationally, product markets become more crowded and product differentiation more important, both to make a product stand out in a popular product category and to help tailor a product to niche markets. The push comes from new firm capabilities as the increased sophistication and declining price of flexible, programmable automation bring the opportunity for greater product variety within the grasp of many more companies

Prototypes and Strategy: Assigning Causal Credit Using Fuzzy Sets

Strategies often are stylized on the basis of particular prototypes (e.g. differentiate or low cost) whose efficacy is uncertain often due to uncertainty of complex interactions among its elements. Because of the difficulty in assigning causal credit to a given element for an outcome, the adoption of better practices that constitute strategies is frequently characterized as lacking in causal validity. We apply Ragin\u27s (2000) fuzzy logic methodology to identify high performance configurations in the 1989 data set of MacDuffie (1995). The results indicate that discrete prototypes of practices are associated with higher performance, but that the variety of outcomes points to experimentation and search. These results reflect the fundamental challenge of complex causality when there is limited diversity in observed experiments given the large number of choice variables. Fuzzy set methodology provides an approach to reduce this complexity by logical rules that permit an exploration of the simplifying assumptions. It is this interaction between prototypical understandings of strategy and exploration in the absence of data that is the most important contribution of this methodology

Reorienting and Recalibrating Inter-Organizational Relationships: Strategies for Achieving Optimal Trust

Drawing upon longitudinal, dyadic, comparative case-based research, we analyze the pursuit of optimal trust, i.e. trust that is neither excessive nor insufficient, by introducing the concepts of reorientation and recalibration. First, we show that large deviations from optimal trust are best addressed by reorientation which deals with both too much as well as too little trust. Reorientation processes include substantial efforts to change parties’ attributions of the intentions underlying past behavior, to reestablish social equilibrium among the parties, and to make structural changes via adjustments to goals and incentives. Reorientation is necessary when imbalance occurs in the powerful and opposed forces associated with excessive trust (faith, favoritism, contentment, loyalty) vs insufficient trust (skepticism, impartiality, exigency, opportunism). Second, we demonstrate that there is an effective path to maintaining optimal trust via practices we call recalibration, wherein small deviations are addressed before damage to trust occurs. Recalibration maintains inter-organizational trust near its optimum through processes that proactively balance the opposed forces. Large deviations from optimal trust in either direction can unleash destabilizing dynamics, requiring significant reorientation efforts to offset. Recalibration processes are then essential for preserving the effects of successful reorientation