Teamwork in the Automobile Industry - an Anglo-German Comparison

Teamwork in the automotive industry varies significantly from plant to plant. This article compares teamwork in four automobile plants in Germany and Britain, and addresses two questions: (1) Do different models of teamwork fit into a bi-polar model of teamwork, being either innovative or structural conservative? (2) Do current models of teamwork signify a development towards post-fordism, or are they merely part of a neo-fordist rationalisation of production? The following answers are suggested: (1) Teamwork in different motor-car plants cannot be categorised in a bi-polar model; rather do they represent a continuum. (2) Teamwork moves manufacturing away from traditional taylorist models of production, but does not overcome Taylorism altogether.Teamwork, Automobile Industry, Industrial Relations, Lean Production, Post-fordism

Consulting in Higher Education: Principles for Institutions and Consultants

American higher education is characterized by keen competition but also by a high degree of cooperativeness. This apparent paradox is illustrated by the extensive use of consultants. The typical higher education consultant is based on one campus and helps a competing institution become more effective. The net result is the reverse of Gresham\u27s Law: good practice drives out bad, and the total enterprise of higher education benefits. This handbook is intended to help colleges and universities make wise choices about consultants and derive the maximum benefit from them. It draws extensively from experiences of the Consultation and Advisory Service that the Association of American Colleges established in 1980 with generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Administrative Leadership

This paper reviews current thinking on organizational leadership generally and academic leadership in particular. In the past quarter-century, views about the essence of leadership have shifted from a hierarchical view that leadership flows from a leadership position to a much more lateral view that leadership roles are available to everyone. Recent research on leadership in higher education largely mirrors the more general leadership literature: significantly more attention is now being paid to collective, context-dependent, and relational approaches. The higher education leader drawn to these new models is, however, also pulled in the opposite direction, toward an increasingly managerial culture requiring greater managerial expertise. Academic leaders are thus faced with unique challenges. Resolving them will require the academic leader to: balance lateral with administrative leadership, encourage cultures of reflection in their academic units, and recognize and take advantage of the power of networks

A Survey of Retail Trade Patterns in South Dakota: 2012-2021

This paper provides an analysis of retail sales and retail trade in the state of South Dakota for the years 2012 to 2021. This analysis will provide valuable information to community leaders in the cities and towns of South Dakota. Along with measures such as unemployment and inflation, Retail Pull (RP) provides a measure of community’s economic health. For example, retail is often the largest employer in a city, particularly the smaller communities of South Dakota, and a robust retail sector provides a tax base to support community services. Thus, the economic health of the community depends on the viability of its retail sector

Trumping the Ethnic Card: How Tourism Entrepreneurs on Rodrigues tackled the 2008 Financial Crisis

The 2008 global financial crisis had significant repercussions on small island states and territories. This article discusses the efforts of tourism entrepreneurs from Rodrigues, a subnational island jurisdiction and a de¬pendency of the Republic of Mauritius, to combat those effects by organizing themselves as the group Associations du Tourisme Réunies (ATR). Their aim was to secure subsidies from the Mauritian government to reduce the price of airfares to Rodrigues so as to at¬tract more tourists to the island. The article offers an ethnographic account of how the economic crisis was tackled in a creative way by ATR and how its members put the negative image of a Creole minority suppressed by a Hindu majority to strategic use to achieve a stronger recognition of Rodriguan interests within the Republic of Mauritius

Interactions Between Spermatozoa and the Crypts, Cilia, and Mucus of the Cervix in the Ewe

In ruminants, minor cervical folds, commonly called crypts, temporarily store spermatozoa for a short interval of time between insemination and fertilization. However, the mechanism by which spermatozoa are transported to these crypts and subsequently to the uterus is not known. To study this problem, cervical tissue, which was removed from ewes that were naturally inseminated by rams at estrus, was examined with the scanning electron microscope to determine the physical associations that occur between the spermatozoa and the structural features of the cervix. The study indicates that the spermatozoa generally are not oriented parallel to the longitudinal axis of the cervix, exhibit no consistent association with the cervical cilia, and do not lie in any well defined channels formed by the cervical secretions. Alternatively, the majority of spermatozoa occur as isolated aggregations that lie in or near the shallow folds or crypts of the cervix. The vast numbers of spermatozoa in these aggregations and the lack of any common orientation suggest that some form of external stimulus, such as cervical contractions, might be responsible for the initial mass movement and distribution of spermatozoa in the cervix of the ewe

A Survey of Retail Trade Patterns in South Dakota: 2013-2022

This paper provides an analysis of retail sales and retail trade in the state of South Dakota for the ten years 2013 to 2022. This analysis will provide information to community leaders in the cities and towns of South Dakota. Retail pull is an economic indicator that provides a measure of community’s economic health and its ability to attract shoppers, both shoppers from its own community and from other communities. A community that has a healthy retail economy is generally able to attract shoppers from its own community as well as surrounding communities

The Milwaukee Idea: A study of transformative change

Through an initiative called the “Milwaukee Idea,” the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UW-Milwaukee) is striving to become a scholarly partner with its host city and to have that partnership energize the university’s teaching, research, and service activities. Chancellor Nancy L. Zimpher conceived the Milwaukee Idea in 1998 as a way to capture the spirit and potential of the university’s urban location and character. This study assesses the extent to which the university has transformed itself through this recommitment to community engagement and whether UW-Milwaukee’s new urban mission is likely to be institutionalized in the coming years. Zimpher knew from the start that, to be successful, the Milwaukee Idea would require strong commitments from advocates on campus and in the community. She also knew that these advocates would have to represent all disciplines and stakeholder groups. Creating this support for the Milwaukee Idea required months of discussion, planning, negotiation, and action. The process officially began in fall 1998 when 100 campus and community participants gathered in a daylong plenary session and identified seven focus areas that would form the core of the university’s new focus on community engagement. Over the next 2 years, many other interdisciplinary groups would meet to plan and implement community outreach initiatives in each focus area. Initiatives have included a new core curriculum that emphasizes multiculturalism and service learning, a community-based consortium that provides technical assistance and research for economic development, and a collaboration with health and social agencies that addresses urban health issues. This study suggests that the Milwaukee Idea possesses the ingredients needed to bring about transformative change at UWMilwaukee. These ingredients include a readiness for change at the university, a charismatic leader who has captured the university’s imagination, a capable and committed administrative team, an inclusive process, and new financial resources.This combination makes it likely, the authors suggest, that the Milwaukee Idea will become much more than simply the latest administrative initiative foisted on an unwilling or indifferent campus. How much transformation is likely to take place and whether that transformation will lead to institutionalization depends on the extent to which UW-Milwaukee can address the barriers to change identified by the authors.These barriers include a lack of shared definitions of partnership and engagement, traditional institutional behaviors and values, territoriality, conflicts over funding priorities, a fragile infrastructure, and a lack of widespread understanding about what true diversity means

Increasing Resolution and Versatility in Low Temperature Conventional and Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscopy

Studies were undertaken to expand the versatility and the resolution of low temperature conventional and field emission scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The results indicated that simple modified specimen holders, which could be used in conjunction with the commercial cryosystems, allowed one to store specimens for several weeks in liquid nitrogen, either before or after observation in a conventional SEM, without incurring degradation of the surface features. Other modified holders permitted one to move the specimen closer to the final lens or to use the upper secondary electron detector, which is available with some SEMs. Both of these procedures increased the resolution that was attainable with the standard holders. In conventional SEM (CSEM) and field emission SEM (FESEM), holders were also modified to allow one to obtain complementary images of fractured specimens. When a conventional vacuum evaporator equipped with a freeze-etch module was used in conjunction with these holders, specimens could be fractured, etched, shadowed with platinum and coated with carbon before the sample was transferred to the cryostage in the SEM. This procedure increased resolution beyond that obtained with the sputter units in two commercial cryosystems that were used on a CSEM and a FESEM, provided membrane particle resolution in the FESEM and produced a coating or replica that could be recovered and examined in a TEM. These results, which demonstrated how resolution of cryospecimens can be enhanced in CSEM and FESEM, indicated that coating specimens in a high vacuum evaporator provided an alternative procedure that could be used to obtain high resolution images in a FESEM