MANUFACTURING REFORM AND THE CHANGING ROLE OF THE PRODUCTION SUPERVISOR: THE CASE OF THE AUTOMOBILE INDUSTRY*

This research assesses current changes in the nature of the supervisory role in the automobile industry. It locates these changes in the context of a transition from mass production to lean or just-in-time production. the emergence of a supervisory role, with supervisors performing critical functions as effective managers of integrated work areas is explored by focusing on two lean producers, Nissan UK and Mazda's Flat Rock plant in the US. Noting the increased responsibility of the supervisor under lean production, the extent of the supervisors’enhanced status and authority are considered. However, a case study of an established vehicle producer in the UK, involving interviews with a sample of forty supervisors draws out the structural and organizational difficulties faced by existing manufacturers in their attempts to reformulate the role of the supervisor.     

When Does University Research Get Commercialized? Creating Ambidexterity in Research Institutions

We examine the tensions that make it difficult for a research‐oriented university to achieve commercial outcomes. Building on the organizational ambidexterity literature, we specify the nature of the tensions (between academic and commercially‐oriented activities) at both organizational and individual levels of analysis, and how these can be resolved. We develop hypotheses linking specific aspects of the organization and the individual researcher to the likelihood of their research projects generating commercial outcomes, and we test them using a novel dataset of 207 Research Council‐funded projects, combining objective data on project outcomes with the perceptions of principal investigators. We show that the tension between academic and commercial demands is more salient at the level of the individual researcher than at the level of the organization. Universities show evidence that they are able to manage the tensions between academic and commercial demands, through for example their creation of ‘dual structures’. At the individual level, on the other hand, the tensions are more acute, so that the people who deliver commercial outcomes tend to be rather different to those who are accustomed to producing academic outcomes.     

Ownership and Control of German Corporations

In a study of the ownership of German corporations, we finda strong relation between board turnover and corporate performance,little association of concentrations of ownership with managerialdisciplining, and only limited evidence that pyramid structurescan be used for control purposes. The static relationship ofownership to control in Germany is therefore similar to theUnited Kingdom and the United States. However, there are markeddifferences in dynamic relations involving transfers of ownership.There is an active market in share blocks giving rise to changesin control, but the gains are limited and accrue solely to theholders of large blocks, not to minority investors. We provideevidence of low overall benefits to control changes and theexploitation of private benefits of control.