Societal Effects and the Transfer of Business Practices to Britain and France

This paper seeks to reconcile the notion of a 'societal effect' in business organisation with the considerable evidence that competitive pressures continuously lead national producers to emulate the business practices of other nations, which are perceived as providing a basis for superior economic performance. The paper identifies three sources of national specificity in the process of emulation giving rise to 'hybrid' models. First, the fact that a nation's manufacturers have a distinctive knowledge base means that adopting another nation's methods will depend on local learning involving trial and error. The more 'distant' the emulated technology is from the local one, the less likely it is that this learning process will result in an exact replica of the parent model. Second, when there are strong interdependencies between a nation's production methods and its systems of vocational training, there will be strong pressure to adopt new methods in ways that are compatible with existing career structures. Third, the fact each nation has a particular industrial relations legacy involving varying levels of trust between labour and management, means that new practices will be introduced through a distinctive process of negotiation and compromise giving rise to national specific effects.knowledge, learning processes, national specificity

Organisational Change in Europe: National Models or the Diffusion of a New "One Best Way"?

Drawing on the results of the third European Survey on Working Conditions undertaken in the 15 member nations of the European Union in 2000, this paper offers one of the first systematic comparisons of the adoption of new organisation forms across Europe. The paper is divided into five sections. The first describe the variables used to characterise work organisation in the 15 countries of the European Union and presents the results of the factor analysis and hierarchical clustering used to construct a 4-way typology of organisational forms, labelled the 'learning , 'lean , 'taylorist and 'traditional forms. The second section examines how the relative importance of the different organisational forms varies according to sector, firm size, occupational category, and certain demographic characteristics of the survey population. The third section makes use of multinomial logit analysis to assess the importance of national effects in the adoption of the different organisational forms. The results demonstrate significant international differences in the adoption of organisational forms characterised by strong learning dynamics and high problem-solving activity. The fourth section takes up the issue of HRM complementarities by examining the relation between organisation forms and the use of particular pay and training policies. The concluding section explores the relation between national differences in the use of the four organisational forms and differences in the way labour markets are regulated and in such research and technology measures as patenting and R&D expenditures. The results show that the relative importance of the learning form of organisation is both positively correlated with the extent of labour market regulation, as measured by the OECD's overall employment protection legislation index, and with innovative performance, as measured by the number of EPO patent application per million inhabitants.Firm organisation; learning; Europe

Promoting workplace participation: lessons from Germany and France

"Recent surveys of workplace participation in the United States point to an ostensible paradox. Despite evidence that actively involving workers in shop-level decision-making can lead to significant and long-lasting improvements in productivity, only a small fraction of US companies have seen fit to confer meaningful participatory rights on their workers. This outcome may expose a systematic bias of the market against firms adopting participatory work organization, and a number of observers have argued in favor of external mandating of workplace participation on the grounds of market failure. Based on the comparative experience of Germany and France with mandated participation, I argue an equally important matter is how the wider industrial relations environment and the strategic choices of unions and employers impact on the effectiveness of legislation." (author's abstract)"Aktuelle Untersuchungen zur Partizipation am Arbeitsplatz in the Vereinigten Staaten weisen auf eine scheinbare Paradoxie hin. Obwohl es offensichtlich ist, daß die aktive Beteiligung von Arbeitern an unternehmerischen Entscheidungsprozessen zu bedeutenden und langanhaltenden Verbesserungen in der Produktivität führen kann, hat sich nur eine geringe Anzahl von US Firmen als fähig erwiesen, bedeutungsvolle Beteiligungsrechte auf ihre Arbeiter zu übertragen. Dieses Ergebnis mag ein systematisches Vorurteil des Marktes gegen Firmen darstellen, die eine partizipatorische Arbeitsorganisation annehmen, und eine Reihe von Beobachtern hat sich zugunsten einer externen Verwaltung von Partizipation am Arbeitsplatz aufgrund eines Marktversagens ausgesprochen. Basierend auf der komparativen Erfahrung von Deutschland und Frankreich mit Mandatspartizipation, argumentiere ich, daß es gleichermaßen wichtige Frage ist, welche Auswirkung die weitere Umgebung der industriellen Beziehungen und die strategischen Wahlmöglichkeiten der Gewerkschaften und Arbeitgeber auf die Effektivität der Gesetzgebung haben." (Autorenreferat

Work organization conventions and the declining competitiveness of the British shipbuilding industry, 1930-1970

"This article attributes the declining competitiveness of the British shipbuilding industry from the 1930s to employers' slow and imperfect substitution of bureaucratic for craft conventions of work organization. An explanation is developed for this excess inertia. First, the article maintains that the interdependent nature of British employers' decision-making on matters of training and work organization tended to "lock-in" individual firms to a particular configuration. Secondly, it is shown how the uncertainty over the need for reform perceived by the majority of builders prevented the more progressive minority from using the industry's collective employers' association to coordinate a timely switch to a more bureaucratic convention. Thirdly, it is argued that once these obstacles were overcome, the process of achieving organizational reform was slowed or even blocked by a lack of trust between labor and management." (author's abstract

An investigation of the value of symmetry in forecasting

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Meteorology, 1943.Includes bibliographical references (leaf 22).by Edward Norton Lorenz.M.S

The Search for Constitutional Protection of Labor Standards, 1924-1941: From Interstate Compacts to International Treaties

Part II of this article will begin by reviewing the growing awareness before 1925 of the crisis in the New England textile industry and the emergence of John Winant as a concerned leader. Part III examines the early effort to confront the decline with new corporate and public policies. Part IV chronicles the pursuit of labor standards through interstate compacts and alternatives. Part V focuses upon joining the ILO and the questions that arose regarding the relationship of conventions to domestic law. Part VI describes the post-World War II attacks on the ILO which undermined, until the 1990s, the United States\u27 willingness to protect global labor rights

The Search for Constitutional Protection of Labor Standards, 1924-1941: From Interstate Compacts to International Treaties

Part II of this article will begin by reviewing the growing awareness before 1925 of the crisis in the New England textile industry and the emergence of John Winant as a concerned leader. Part III examines the early effort to confront the decline with new corporate and public policies. Part IV chronicles the pursuit of labor standards through interstate compacts and alternatives. Part V focuses upon joining the ILO and the questions that arose regarding the relationship of conventions to domestic law. Part VI describes the post-World War II attacks on the ILO which undermined, until the 1990s, the United States\u27 willingness to protect global labor rights

Organisational Innovation, Governance Structure and Innovative Capacity In British and French Industry

This study makes use of the results of a postal questionnaire sent to a sample of large private sector companies in Britain and France to address two key issues in the new institutional analysis of the firm. The first is the way the institutional environment supports and constrains the design of firm-level organisational devices and governance mechanisms. The second concerns the relation between the introduction of new organisational methods and the firm’s innovative capacity. Multiple correspondence analysis is used to describe the relation between the use of innovative work methods and pay policies. The analysis shows that the policies of the British sample of firms display greater ‘coherence’ than those of the French sample, in the sense that a more intensive use of the new organisational methods is more consistently associated with a more intensive use of the new pay policies. Ordered logit regression analysis shows that UK firms with positive expenditures on R&D are more likely to introduce new organisational methods than those not making such expenditures. This relation between the use of new organisational methods and investments in innovative capacity are not confirmed for the French case.knowledge flow, innovation, organization.

The Organization of Work and Innovative Performance A comparison of the EU-15

It is widely recognised that while expenditures on research and development are important inputs to successful innovation, these are not the only inputs. Further, rather than viewing innovation as a linear process, recent work on innovation in business and economics literatures characterises it as a complex and interactive process involving multiple feedbacks. These considerations imply that relevant indicators for innovation need to do more than capture material inputs such as R&D expenditures and human capital inputs. The main contribution of this paper is to develop EU-wide aggregate measures that are used to explore at the level of national innovation systems the relation between innovation and the organisation of work. In order to construct these aggregate measures we make use of micro data from two European surveys: the third European survey of Working Conditions and the third Community Innovation Survey (CIS-3). Although our data can only show correlations rather than causality they support the view that how firms innovate is linked to the way work is organised to promote learning and problem-solving.National innovation systems, measuring, methodology