JAPANESE MANAGERIAL PRACTICES IN THE MALAYSIAN ELECTRONICS INDUSTRY: TWO CASE STUDIES

The transferability of the Japanese management syndrome is examined through an analysis of the employment policies and practices of two major Japanese multinational electronics companies operating in Malaysia. the evidence suggests that the question of transferability must be considered in the specific historical context. While such companies operate from within a preferred managerial style, the case study evidence suggests that employment policy and practice is likely to be significantly constrained by business objectives and heavily conditioned by the local economic, political and legal conditions and socio-cultural values.     

MANAGERIAL AND OWNERSHIP SUCCESSION AND CORPORATE RESTRUCTURING: THE CASE OF MANAGEMENT BUY-INS*

This paper addresses the effects on corporate restructuring of changing management and ownership. First, it synthesises a number of perspectives on corporate restructuring which involve managerial succession, voluntary restructuring, agency theory, incentives and entrepreneurship, to obtain insights into the relative impact of simultaneously changing either, neither or both management and ownership. Second, it uses case study evidence from management buy-ins to examine the effects of changing both management and ownership. the evidence suggests that whilst management may be adequately incentivized, problems may arise in respect of information asymmetries, difficulties in matching entrepreneurs to the context and monitoring by venture capitalists, and implementation of strategies.     

LIFE-CYCLE ANALYSIS AND POLICY OPTIONS: THE CASE OF THE EUROPEAN PULP AND PAPER INDUSTRY

As part of the shift in emphasis in environmental policy from clean-up to avoidance, environmental policy instruments that specify preferred technological directions for an industry are increasingly being used. Take-back requirements and mandatory recycling are cases in point. These directly affect the mix of materials and the technologies used by an industry. These effects reverberate throughout the industry and influence market conditions for everyone both up- and downstream in the supplier/client chains. As these chains frequently cross international frontiers, environmental policy-making is becoming increasingly significant in influencing competitive structures and international trade patterns. Concerns are that policy-making may lock in inappropriate technologies and that the policy process may be manipulated for industrial or trading advantage. Using fibre recycling in the European pulp and paper sector as a case study, it is shown how these concerns are manifest and also that materials accounting and operational research techniques exist to mitigate them. It is concluded that there is a need to establish agreed environmental impact evaluation methodologies to provide guidance on the robustness of policy-making and a basis for consistent, predictable and defensible policy-making.     

AN INVESTIGATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE, MANAGERIAL ROLE EXPECTATIONS AND MANAGERS' WORK ACTIVITIES

Having demonstrated the absence in the literature of an adequate conceptual treatment or empirical examination of the substantive relationship between managerial work, managers' role expectations and forms of organizational structure, the paper reports the findings of a multimethod comparative case study of this relationship in four organizations from the hotel and retail sectors in Zimbabwe. Focusing on the differences between centralized organizations where unit operations are tightly regulated and decentralized organizations where unit operating autonomy is coupled with performance controls, the findings indicate that organizational structure impinges primarily upon the formal management division of labour, more weakly upon the role expectations surrounding unit managers and in only limited ways upon their work activities, with the effect of organizational differences co-existing with and refracted by common work characteristics and inter-industry differences. Although decentralization gave rise to unit manager jobs with more formal autonomy, broader responsibilities, greater pressure to attend to unit performance rather than monitoring work processes, and an obligation to operate in more complex networks, managers were no more free of constraints than were those in more centralized organizations and operated in similar ways, with an emphasis on day-to-day administration and routine staffing matters.     

THE DETERMINANTS OF RURAL INDUSTRIAL ESTATE PERFORMANCE IN KOREA

Since the 1980s, a total of 221 small- and medium-sized rural industrial estates have been established primarily to induce economic growth into the rural areas in Korea. Despite a growing interest in the performance of the rural industrial estates, it has not been closely examined. The purpose of this paper is to find the plausible factors that have a significant influence on the performance of the rural industrial estates, thereby providing a general understanding of the structural relationship between the estate performance and its determinants. An econometric modeling approach, called LISREL, is used to carry out this evaluation. Of several influential determinants distinguished, seven variables appear to be of substantial significance. They include the urbanization and industrialization of the estate host community, the accessibility of the individual estates to the major cities, the distances from the estates to the large industrial complexes, the local tax rates, and the government loans and incentives. The findings imply that more favorable are the estates constructed within the labor market boundaries of the major cities and adjacent to large industrial complexes. In addition to the location and environmental factors, financial funds and incentives will continue to remain as an influential factor for the success or failure of the estates.     

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.     

MANAGERIAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL FACTORS ASSOCIATED WITH COMPANY PERFORMANCE PART I

T his paper utilizes information collected on more than eighty British companies and on about 800 senior managers working in them. It is in two parts. Part I starts by outlining problems involved in identifying influences on company performance. It then describes the sources of data analysed in the paper. The remainder of Part I examines the view that certain managerial and organizational attributes will tend to raise levels of performance whatever the type of company and its operating circumstances. Another approach takes the view that what makes for good performance is contingent upon the type of company and the prevailing situation. This is examined against our data in Part II of the paper. Part II concludes with an assessment of present knowledge on the managerial and organizational concomitants of company performance and the practical implicatons to be drawn from it.     

ORGANIZATIONAL OPTIONS FOR PROVIDING URBAN WASTE MANAGEMENT SERVICES: THE CASE OF INDONESIA

Rising incomes and rapid growth require better approaches to organizing and delivering solid waste management services in developing countries. This paper uses Indonesia as a case context for exploring organizational options to urban waste management, including provision by municipal agencies, semi-commercial enterprises, private firms, and neighborhood organizations. Semi-commercial enterprises were found to cover significantly higher shares of routine expenditures than municipal agencies. Few differences were found among different indicators of labor and equipment productivity among organizational types, however. The major difference is that non-public organizations more vigorously seek out revenues. Promising ways to increase revenues and stop leakages are to link solid waste payment with payment of electricity bills and to negotiate revenue-sharing schemes with neighborhood leaders.     

MARKET SHARE ANALYSIS: THE CASE OF THE BRITISH BREAKFAST CEREALS INDUSTRY

In this paper the authors apply simple econometric techniques to market share models for brand products in the British breakfast cereals market. Brand product price and advertising coefficients, as estimated by regression equations, are explored in the context of assumed profit and market share maximization, and an attempt is made to evaluate empirically firms' actual marketing strategies.