Download or read book The Rise and Fall of Mass Production written by Steven Tolliday and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 1998 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of 32 articles written between the 1910s and the 1990s. They focus on the questions of where mass production came from, the fundamental elements of Fordism and why it emerged when and where it did, why and how far mass production spread into the wider economy and how it changed in the process, its impact on work and workers, whether the 20th-century success of Japan is due to a more ruthless exploitation of the principles of mass production or to a new form of productive organization, and whether the late 20th century is witnessing the end of mass production as a dominant or viable paradigm. They are reproduced from the original publications, so the type is variable and the illustrations generally of a poor quality. No subject index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Changing by Design written by Deone Zell and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do corporations achieve change? In the first analytic book about Hewlett-Packard, Deone Zell also offers an ethnography of corporate redesign, documenting Hewlett-Packard's radical reorganization of both a manufacturing and a research division. Because she writes from within the process as it unfolds, Zell is able to demonstrate how the inclusion of employees in every step of redesign can inspire the knowledge and commitment to transform an organization. Hewlett-Packard is among a growing number of companies in the United States exploring what is called sociotechnical systems (STS) redesign. As competitive pressures have grown, interest in STS has increased because it has the potential to catalyze comprehensive organizational change and avoid the pitfalls of a piecemeal or small-scale approach. STS works from the ground up, involving front-line employees in analysis and redesign of the entire organization and in explicit examination of an organization's culture. In Hewlett-Packard's California Personal Computer Division, production operators worked alongside managers to redesign their printed circuit assembly line into self-managing teams of employees. In the Santa Clara Division, a very different workforce of engineers, initially unwilling to standardize their creativity, had to develop commercial applications and become more responsive to customers in order to survive. On the basis of Hewlett-Packard's success, Zell concludes that, with top-level support and a high investment of resources at the outset, redesign can inspire relatively rapid change, especially suitable for organizations in fast-paced environments. As one H-P manager commented, "Empowerment is no longer a nice thing to do. It is now a business imperative."
Download or read book The Rise and Fall of American Growth written by Robert J. Gordon and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-29 with total page 785 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How America's high standard of living came to be and why future growth is under threat In the century after the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, motor vehicles, air travel, and television transformed households and workplaces. But has that era of unprecedented growth come to an end? Weaving together a vivid narrative, historical anecdotes, and economic analysis, The Rise and Fall of American Growth challenges the view that economic growth will continue unabated, and demonstrates that the life-altering scale of innovations between 1870 and 1970 cannot be repeated. Gordon contends that the nation's productivity growth will be further held back by the headwinds of rising inequality, stagnating education, an aging population, and the rising debt of college students and the federal government, and that we must find new solutions. A critical voice in the most pressing debates of our time, The Rise and Fall of American Growth is at once a tribute to a century of radical change and a harbinger of tougher times to come.
Download or read book Direct and Database Marketing written by Graeme McCorkell and published by Kogan Page Publishers. This book was released on 1997 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through examples and case studies, this book demonstrates how to adopt the methods, technology and techniques pioneered in direct marketing and apply them in the broader context of integrated marketing.
Download or read book Made in the USA written by Vaclav Smil and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2013-08-23 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An argument that America's economy needs a strong and innovative manufacturing sector and the jobs it creates.
Download or read book Shredding Paper written by Michael G. Hillard and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-15 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the early twentieth century until the 1960s, Maine led the nation in paper production. The state could have earned a reputation as the Detroit of paper production, however, the industry eventually slid toward failure. What happened? Shredding Paper unwraps the changing US political economy since 1960, uncovers how the paper industry defined and interacted with labor relations, and peels away the layers of history that encompassed the rise and fall of Maine's mighty paper industry. Michael G. Hillard deconstructs the paper industry's unusual technological and economic histories. For a century, the story of the nation's most widely read glossy magazines and card stock was one of capitalism, work, accommodation, and struggle. Local paper companies in Maine dominated the political landscape, controlling economic, workplace, land use, and water use policies. Hillard examines the many contributing factors surrounding how Maine became a paper powerhouse and then shows how it lost that position to changing times and foreign interests. Through a retelling of labor relations and worker experiences from the late nineteenth century up until the late 1990s, Hillard highlights how national conglomerates began absorbing family-owned companies over time, which were subject to Wall Street demands for greater short-term profits after 1980. This new political economy impacted the economy of the entire state and destroyed Maine's once-vaunted paper industry. Shredding Paper truthfully and transparently tells the great and grim story of blue-collar workers and their families and analyzes how paper workers formulated a "folk" version of capitalism's history in their industry. Ultimately, Hillard offers a telling example of the demise of big industry in the United States.
Download or read book Beyond Mass Production written by Martin Kenney and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on five years of research that included field studies of dozens of factories, hundreds of personal interviews, and comprehensive surveys of industrial sectors, the authors show how a new face of capitalism is emerging in the US as a result of the infusion of Japanese methods. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book The Machine That Changed the World written by James P. Womack and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-12-09 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When James Womack, Daniel Jones, and Daniel Roos wrote THE MACHINE THAT CHANGED THE WORLD in 1990, Japanese automakers, and Toyota in particular, were making a strong showing by applying the principles of lean production. However, the full power of lean principles was unproven, and they had not been applied outside of the auto industry. Today, the power of lean production has been conclusively proved by Toyota's unparalleled success, and the concepts have been widely applied in many industries. Based on MIT's pioneering global study of industrial competition, THE MACHINE THAT CHANGED THE WORLD offers a groundbreaking analysis of the entire lean business system, including product development, supplier management, sales, service, and production - an analysis even more relevant today as GM and Ford struggle to survive and a wide range of British abd American companies embrace lean production. A new Foreword by the authors brings the story up to date and details how their predictions were right. As a result, this reissue of a classic is as insightful and instructive today as when it was first published.
Download or read book The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order 1930 1980 written by Steve Fraser and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The description for this book, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980, will be forthcoming.
Download or read book Sustainable Futures written by Raphael Kaplinsky and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long before the pandemic, economies across the world were in trouble, with growth slowing across the board. This downturn coincided with growing inequality and social exclusion. Rising political dissatisfaction with ruling elites fuelled the rise of populism. Add to this the alarming environmental emergency and few can deny we live in a time of multiple sustainability crises. While this conclusion can lead to despair, in this broad-ranging book Raphael Kaplinsky, a leading development policy analyst, argues that the future is not necessarily bleak. Interrogating the causes and nature of the systemic crises we are living through, he shows how the challenges which we now face mirror previous historical epochs, in which dominant ‘techno-economic’ paradigms flourish, mature and run into crisis. In each case, decisive action is required to move to a more economically and socially sustainable world. In our time, we are witnessing the exhaustion of the Mass Production paradigm. How we herald and manage the transition to the next paradigm – that of Information and Communications Technologies – will determine our capacity to build a more prosperous, equitable and environmentally sustainable world. This book sets out an integrated agenda for action by multiple stakeholders to achieve this end.
Download or read book Democracy and Prosperity written by Torben Iversen and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-03 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a widespread view that democracy and the advanced nation-state are in crisis, weakened by globalization and undermined by global capitalism, in turn explaining rising inequality and mounting populism. This book, written by two of the world's leading political economists, argues this view is wrong: advanced democracies are resilient, and their enduring historical relationship with capitalism has been mutually beneficial. For all the chaos and upheaval over the past century--major wars, economic crises, massive social change, and technological revolutions--Torben Iversen and David Soskice show how democratic states continuously reinvent their economies through massive public investment in research and education, by imposing competitive product markets and cooperation in the workplace, and by securing macroeconomic discipline as the preconditions for innovation and the promotion of the advanced sectors of the economy. Critically, this investment has generated vast numbers of well-paying jobs for the middle classes and their children, focusing the aims of aspirational families, and in turn providing electoral support for parties. Gains at the top have also been shared with the middle (though not the bottom) through a large welfare state. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom on globalization, advanced capitalism is neither footloose nor unconstrained: it thrives under democracy precisely because it cannot subvert it. Populism, inequality, and poverty are indeed great scourges of our time, but these are failures of democracy and must be solved by democracy.
Download or read book The Rise Fall and Replacement of Industrywide Bargaining in the Basic Steel Industry written by and published by M.E. Sharpe. This book was released on with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Fordlandia written by Greg Grandin and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2010-04-27 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Greg Grandin comes the stunning, never before told story of the quixotic attempt to recreate small-town America in the heart of the Amazon In 1927, Henry Ford, the richest man in the world, bought a tract of land twice the size of Delaware in the Brazilian Amazon. His intention was to grow rubber, but the project rapidly evolved into a more ambitious bid to export America itself, along with its golf courses, ice-cream shops, bandstands, indoor plumbing, and Model Ts rolling down broad streets. Fordlandia, as the settlement was called, quickly became the site of an epic clash. On one side was the car magnate, lean, austere, the man who reduced industrial production to its simplest motions; on the other, the Amazon, lush, extravagant, the most complex ecological system on the planet. Ford's early success in imposing time clocks and square dances on the jungle soon collapsed, as indigenous workers, rejecting his midwestern Puritanism, turned the place into a ribald tropical boomtown. Fordlandia's eventual demise as a rubber plantation foreshadowed the practices that today are laying waste to the rain forest. More than a parable of one man's arrogant attempt to force his will on the natural world, Fordlandia depicts a desperate quest to salvage the bygone America that the Ford factory system did much to dispatch. As Greg Grandin shows in this gripping and mordantly observed history, Ford's great delusion was not that the Amazon could be tamed but that the forces of capitalism, once released, might yet be contained. Fordlandia is a 2009 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.
Download or read book Making Steel written by Mark Reutter and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making Steel chronicles the rise and fall of American steel by focusing on the fateful decisions made at the world's once largest steel mill at Sparrows Point, Maryland. Mark Reutter examines the business, production, and daily lives of workers as corporate leaders became more interested in their own security and enrichment than in employees, community, or innovative technology. This edition features 26 pages of photos, an author's preface, and a new chapter on the devastating effects of Bethlehem Steel's bankruptcy titled "The Discarded American Worker."
Download or read book The Fourth Industrial Revolution written by Klaus Schwab and published by Crown Currency. This book was released on 2017-01-03 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: World-renowned economist Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, explains that we have an opportunity to shape the fourth industrial revolution, which will fundamentally alter how we live and work. Schwab argues that this revolution is different in scale, scope and complexity from any that have come before. Characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, the developments are affecting all disciplines, economies, industries and governments, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human. Artificial intelligence is already all around us, from supercomputers, drones and virtual assistants to 3D printing, DNA sequencing, smart thermostats, wearable sensors and microchips smaller than a grain of sand. But this is just the beginning: nanomaterials 200 times stronger than steel and a million times thinner than a strand of hair and the first transplant of a 3D printed liver are already in development. Imagine “smart factories” in which global systems of manufacturing are coordinated virtually, or implantable mobile phones made of biosynthetic materials. The fourth industrial revolution, says Schwab, is more significant, and its ramifications more profound, than in any prior period of human history. He outlines the key technologies driving this revolution and discusses the major impacts expected on government, business, civil society and individuals. Schwab also offers bold ideas on how to harness these changes and shape a better future—one in which technology empowers people rather than replaces them; progress serves society rather than disrupts it; and in which innovators respect moral and ethical boundaries rather than cross them. We all have the opportunity to contribute to developing new frameworks that advance progress.
Download or read book Makers and Takers written by Rana Foroohar and published by Currency. This book was released on 2017-09-12 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is Wall Street bad for Main Street America? "A well-told exploration of why our current economy is leaving too many behind." —The New York Times In looking at the forces that shaped the 2016 presidential election, one thing is clear: much of the population believes that our economic system is rigged to enrich the privileged elites at the expense of hard-working Americans. This is a belief held equally on both sides of political spectrum, and it seems only to be gaining momentum. A key reason, says Financial Times columnist Rana Foroohar, is the fact that Wall Street is no longer supporting Main Street businesses that create the jobs for the middle and working class. She draws on in-depth reporting and interviews at the highest rungs of business and government to show how the “financialization of America”—the phenomenon by which finance and its way of thinking have come to dominate every corner of business—is threatening the American Dream. Now updated with new material explaining how our corrupted financial system propelled Donald Trump to power, Makers and Takers explores the confluence of forces that has led American businesses to favor balance-sheet engineering over the actual kind, greed over growth, and short-term profits over putting people to work. From the cozy relationship between Wall Street and Washington, to a tax code designed to benefit wealthy individuals and corporations, to forty years of bad policy decisions, she shows why so many Americans have lost trust in the system, and why it matters urgently to us all. Through colorful stories of both “Takers,” those stifling job creation while lining their own pockets, and “Makers,” businesses serving the real economy, Foroohar shows how we can reverse these trends for a better path forward.
Download or read book Between Imitation and Innovation written by Robert Boyer and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 1998-11-19 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent years have seen intense debates among management and academics on the rise of `lean production' and `Japanization'. Some authors have stressed the `universal' impact of new forms of work organization and `best practice' while others have questioned the limits of convergence, stressed the weight of national contexts or `societal effects', or highlighted the evolutionary effects of unpredictability in the external environment. The international automobile industry has been a focus for much of this debate and this book, written by a team of leading international researchers in the field, uses this industry to examine in detail the actual practice of the transfer and adaptation of productive models and the trajectories of innovation, compromise, and failure that can result. Case studies cover in detail the Japanese transplant experience in North America, and the global experience of hybrid production systems in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. The book contributes to theoretical discussions about the transfer, adaptation, or convergence of productive models. In particular, the authors argue that direct transplantation or imitation of these models is rarely feasible or even desirable. Systems cannot be transferred without being significantly reshaped. Instead, the book focuses on the process of `hybridization', the complex interaction of productive models with national and societal effects. Hybridization, it is argued, is inevitable. But this should be seen not simply as a process of compromise and retreat but also as an important dynamic of innovation and learning. This book is from the French-based international research network GERPISA (Groupe d'étude de récherche permanent sur l'industrie et les salaries de l'automobile). See related titles below.