Joint Venture Manufacturing in China : an Exploratory Investigation

International joint venture (IJV) manufacturing is important for both the Chinese economy and a large number of foreign investors. A review of the literature from both Western and Chinese researchers showed that although the purpose and advantages of IJV manufacturing in China are known, a vital aspect – operations management – has largely been ignored. Therefore, exploratory interviews with managers at six companies were conducted to investigate the operations management issues faced by IJV manufacturers in China. Four main problems were identified: the difficulty with recruiting and training suitable employees; all aspects of supplier management; problems with achieving high- quality output; and achieving an effective IJV business culture. The results have implications not only for researchers, in that they indicate where more research is necessary, but also for practitioners, since they identify the areas where IJV manufacturers are most likely to encounter problems in C

Italian and UK Manufacturing compared

Although the Italian economy has seen a steady growth in the importance of the service sector, manufacturing still plays a key role in the economy. It employs 32 per cent of the active population and accounts for about 33 per cent of the country’s gross national product. For this reason, the performance of Italian manufacturing plants relative to their international counterparts is of considerable domestic importance, as well as highly relevant for those interested in wider European comparisons and benchmarks. This article reports on a research project that looked at the performance of manufacturing plants in Italy, and in the

Collaborate to innovate

Innovation is something that many governments strive to support, in both the private and public sectors. By bridging the two sectors and creating novel partnerships, public sector expenditure can be reduced

Nord, B. und P. Schmitt (eds) (2003) : Traducta Navis, Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Christiane Nord, Stauffenerg, Tübingen, 297 p.

SCOPUS: no.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Music feels like moods feel

While it is widely accepted that music evokes moods, there is disagreement over whether music-induced moods are relevant to the aesthetic appreciation of music as such. The arguments against the aesthetic relevance of music-induced moods are: (1) moods cannot be intentionally directed at the music and (2) music-induced moods are highly subjective experiences and are therefore a kind of mind-wandering. This paper presents a novel account of musical moods that avoids these objections. It is correct to say that a listener’s entire mood is not relevant to the aesthetic appreciation of music. However, the experience of mood consists of having different feelings. Music induces feelings that are intentionally directed at the music and clusters of these feelings can be recognized as typical of a specific mood. Therefore, mood-feelings are relevant to the aesthetic appreciation of music

Interlinguistique et Terminologie : un bref regard en arrière

Discipline frontière en quête d’un statut autonome au sein des sciences du langage, la Terminologie reste aujourd’hui orpheline d’un appareil conceptuel suffisant et d’un discours s’appuyant sur des modes de description objectifs. En réalité, à en juger par l’abondance des publications récentes, les théories de la Terminologie sont disparates, éclectiques et les pessimistes sont même tentés de parler d’enlisement, voire de crise(s) d’identité. Ils n’ont pas tout à fait tort. Un état des lieux s’impose. Qui veut bien suivre le parcours de la pensée terminologique aura tôt fait d’en constater les discordances et les blocages, les lacunes, en dépit des avancées réelles comme la prise en compte de la phraséologie et du texte complet, et la mise en perspective des aspects sociolinguistiques et cognitifs. Un bref coup d’oeil rétrospectif s’impose pour rappeler comment, dès le début des années 1970, les chercheurs ont fait leur profit de l’approche interlinguistique (au sens de linguistique différentielle) pour se déprendre des axiomes de la Terminologie d’obédience wüsterienne et pour montrer que les terminologies ne se démarquaient pas aussi radicalement de la langue générale que d’aucuns l’avaient supposé, qu’elles constituaient des polysystèmes complexes qui présentent en un rapport dialectique à la fois motivation et convention, monosémie et polysémie, analogies et anomalies, et concurrences synonymiques. L’heure étant aux bilans et aux prospectives, nous nous risquerons à faire quelques projections au triple plan des pratiques, des praxéologies (science des praxis) et de la recherche fondamentale.A border discipline in search of an autonomous status within language sciences, Terminology today remains deprived of a conceptual tool and a discourse based on objective methods of description. In reality, judging from the abundance of recent publications, Terminology theories are disparate and eclectic. Pessimists refer to a decline if not an outright identity crisis. They are not entirely wrong. What is needed is a state of the art. Those willing to pursue the course of the terminological thought soon notice the conflicts, the barriers, and the gaps. Nonetheless, real progress has been made, such as taking phraseology and the complete text into consideration, and putting into perspective sociolinguistic and cognitive aspects. A quick retrospective glance reminds us how researchers, even from early 1970, began benefitting from the interlinguistic approach (in the sense of differential linguistics) to detach themselves from axioms of the Terminology of Wusterian obedience and to demonstrate that terminologies were not as radically distant from the general language as some presumed, that they constituted complex polysystems that present, in a dialectical relation, both motivation and convention, monosemy and polysemy, analogies and anomalies, and synonymical concurrences. Since this is the time for assessments and perspectives, we will venture to reflect on the three levels of practice, praxeology and fundamental research

Ballard, M. (dir.) (2006) : Qu’est-ce que la traductologie ?, études réunies par Michel Ballard, Arras, Artois Presses Université, 302 p.

SCOPUS: no.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Giving the customer a voice: A study of market research methods and their perceived effectiveness in NPD

There is a widely held view that a lack of, “…customer understanding,” is one of the main reasons for product failure (Eliashberg et al., 1997, p. 219). This is despite the fact that new product development (NPD) is a crucial business process for many companies. The importance of integrating the voice of the customer (VoC) through market research is well documented (Davis, 1993; Mullins and Sutherland, 1998; Cooper et al., 2002; Flint, 2002; Davilla et al., 2006; Cooper and Edgett, 2008; Cooper and Dreher, 2010; Goffin and Mitchell, 2010). However, not all research methods are well received, for example there are studies that have strongly criticized focus groups, interviews and surveys (e.g. Ulwick, 2002; Goffin et al, 2010; Sandberg, 2002). In particular, a point is made that, “…traditional market research and development approaches proved to be particularly ill-suited to breakthrough products” (Deszca et al, 2010, p613). Therefore, in situations where traditional techniques—interviews and focus groups—are ineffective, the question is which market research techniques are appropriate, particularly for developing breakthrough products? To investigate this, an attempt was made to access the knowledge of market research practitioners from agencies with a reputation for their work on breakthrough NPD. We were surprised to find that this research had not been conducted previously. In order to make it possible for the sample of 24 market research experts identified for this study to share their knowledge, repertory grid technique was used. This psychology based method particularly seeks out tacit knowledge by using indepth interviews. In this case the interviews were conducted with professionals from leading market research agencies in two countries. The resulting data provided two unique insights: they highlighted the attributes of market research methods which made them effective at identifying customers’ needs and they showed how different methods were perceived against these attributes. This article starts with a review of the literature on different methods for conducting market research to identify customer needs. The conclusions from the literature are then used to define the research question. We explain our choice of methodology, including the data collection and analysis approach. Next the key results are presented. Finally, the discussion section identifies the key insights, clarifies the limitations of the research, suggests areas for future research, and draws implications for managers. We conclude that existing research is not aligned with regard to which methods (or combination of methods) are best suited to the various stages of the NPD process. We have set out the challenges and our own intended work in this regard in our section on ‘further research’. Also, the existing literature does not explicitly seek the perceptions of practitioner experts based in market research agencies. This we have started to address, and we acknowledge that further work is required. Although our research in ongoing, it has already yielded the first view of a model of the perceptions of 24 expert market researchers in the UK and Denmark. Based on the explanation of these experts, the model situates a derived set of categories in a manner that reflects the way in which they are inter-linked. We believe that our model begins to deal with the gaps and anomalies in the existing research into VoC methods