Product Development Strategy and Organizational Learning: A Tale of Two PC Makers

The personal computer (PC) marketplace in the US presents a dizzying array of component suppliers and products. No single firm dominates the industry with a complete package of hardware and software components. Although one company's operating systems and general-purpose applications are installed on most PCs in the US, the other system components—processors, memory, storage devices, display adapters, monitors, specialized applications, and so on—come from any number of sources. David T. Methe, Ryoko Toyama, and Junichiro Miyabe point out that the PC industry in Japan also exhibits this decentralized nature. However, they also note that despite the decentralized network structure of the Japanese PC industry, one company—NEC—was able to achieve a dominant market share. To provide insight into the key issues involved in the management of complex technology, they contrast NEC's strategic approach to product development and organizational learning with the approaches taken by Fujitsu—the firm that placed a distant second in this market. Despite matching NEC in terms of technological capabilities, financial resources, and managerial talent, Fujitsu never managed to threaten NEC's dominance of the PC market in Japan. Fujitsu continually emphasized technological leadership, even at the expense of protecting its installed base. Poor coordination of resources and product development efforts resulted in incompatibilities among Fujitsu's various products, and the company failed to foster close relationships with suppliers of such key technologies as software and peripherals. NEC's PCs did not enjoy the advantages of first-to-market status or technological leadership. Instead, NEC achieved market dominance by finding the combination of product technologies that met the needs of the greatest number of consumers. Throughout almost 20 years of competition in the PC industry, NEC successfully maintained consistency and backward compatibility across its product lines. NEC also recognized the importance of third-party software developers, and carefully cultivated relations with these firms as a source of competitive advantage. In other words, NEC struck the right balance between three key factors: technological innovation, motivation of third-party developers of software and peripherals, and service to its installed base of customers.     

粤苏玩具交流 共商合作发展——江苏玩具商会赴广东澄海学习考察记

【本刊报道】为应对世界金融危机,及时适应国际玩具业的变化,加强粤、苏区域性的交流合作,探讨、总结两省玩具业创新发展和抵御风险的经验及教训,实现双方玩具业优势互补,共同发展。江苏省工商联合会玩具业商会在一行15人在会长、本次考察团团长林若庸的带领下,不远千里,于2008年12月7日-11日专程赴广东省的广州、深圳、澄海学习考察和交流。     

粤苏浙产业集群竞争力的比较研究--基于10大代表性行业的统计分析

本文基于10个行业的统计分析显示,浙江产业集群的整体竞争力在三省中最强,广东产业集群竞争力处于中间水平,而江苏产业集群的整体竞争力垫底。浙江产业集群竞争力优势主要集中体现在劳动密集型的传统制造业上,而在资本和技术密集型装配制造业上的集群竞争力较弱。相反,广东和江苏虽然劳动密集型传统制造业集群竞争力不如浙江,但其资本和技术密集型装配制造业集群则具有较高的竞争力。同时,网络系统的结构差异是导致粤苏浙三省产业集群竞争力差异的决定性因素,因此,各地应将改善集群网络系统的构成和运行质量作为未来产业政策的重点。     

Finance, Corporate Governance and the Management of Labour: A Conceptual and Comparative Analysis

This article explores links between the firm's financial structure, corporate governance, and the management of labour. It reviews various literatures, in particular drawing from financial economics and political economy, and combines these with industrial relations, and human resource management. We develop a model that identifies how financial institutions and pressures impact upon labour management. Managerial discretion is at the centre of the model, and six key influences and constraints upon management are identified. We present evidence from comparative analysis of labour management which illustrates how management decisions and practices are affected. A benefit of this approach is that it can take account of within‐country variations.     

Taiwan: An Exploration of Labour Relations in Transition

This paper explores the emerging relations between workers and employers in Taiwan. The lifting of martial law in 1987 and other reforms have set in motion a basic restructuring of the industrial relations system. A union movement dominated by the interests of employers and the ruling political party has given workers little leverage in the employment relationship. Constrained collective bargaining plus consultation with employers offers the best long-term prospect of providing a systematic basis for worker participation in the workplace and broader business and economic decision-making.     

Promoting Labour Market Efficiency and Fairness through a Legal Minimum Wage: The Webbs and the Social Cost of Labour

Neoclassical economists, using a competitive demand/supply model of labour markets, typically conclude a legislated minimum wage is harmful to economic efficiency and social welfare. The major theoretical counter-attack by proponents of a minimum wage is to argue that low-wage labour markets are better modelled as monopsonistic. This article develops and formalizes a second theoretical defence for a legal minimum wage law. This defence rests on the concept of the social cost of labour , as originally popularized by Sidney and Beatrice Webb and then further developed by American institutional economists. This analysis is unique in that it continues to use the competitive demand/supply model but nonetheless demonstrates that a legislated minimum wage often simultaneously increases both economic efficiency and fairness, unlike the neoclassical prediction.     

Unequal Japan: Conservative Corporatism and Labour Market Disparities

The majority of the literature on the increasing labour market disparities in Japan has attributed the trend to changing market circumstances or new government policies. However, this article claims that widening income disparities, especially between regular and non-regular workers, are more deeply rooted in the nature of Japan's policy-making mechanism. Combining industrial actors' conservative orientation towards dual labour markets and their corporatist interactions for policy making, this article argues that Japan's disparity problem has originated from its ' conservative corporatism '. The article presents the manner in which conservative corporatism has widened the disparities in employment security and welfare benefits.     

Remaking the World of Chinese Labour: A 30‐Year Retrospective

Over the past 30 years, labour relations, and, indeed, the entirety of working‐class politics in China, have been dramatically altered by economic reforms. In this review, we focus on the two key processes of commodification and casualization and their implications for workers. On the one hand, these processes have resulted in the destruction of the old social contract and the emergence of marketized employment relations. This has implied a loss of the job security and generous benefits enjoyed by workers in the planned economy. On the other hand, commodification and casualization have produced significant but localized resistance from the Chinese working class. Up until now, the activities of labour non‐governmental organizations and of the official trade unions have contributed to the state's effort of individualizing and institutionalizing labour conflict resolution through labour law and arbitration mechanisms. Finally, we provide a brief discussion of the impact of 2008's Labour Contract Law and the outbreak of the economic crisis on labour relations. We conclude that the continual imbalance of power at the point of production presents a real dilemma for the Chinese state as it attempts to shift away from a model of development dependent on exports.     

Labour Market Dualism and Diversification in Japan

The Japanese labour market has been regarded as ‘dualistic’ in terms of employment status (regular vs non‐regular). While it is true, this perspective misses recent changes in regular employment in terms of labour flexibility. The government has attempted labour market deregulation since the 1990s to increase the flexibility of not only non‐regular but also regular employment, and the labour market has become more diversified. Labour unions lack power resources to resist these neoliberal changes, however, because of their insufficient access to policy‐making, low union density and a lack of solidarity against the background of economic stagnation and competition under globalization.     

Industrial Districts and Migrant Labour in Italy

Both the flexibility of labour and wider sociocultural issues have historically been identified as important dimensions of the economic success of Italy's industrial districts. Increasing numbers of labour migrants from Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe are now working in industrial districts and living in local communities previously characterized as socially cohesive. Immigration status, Italian employment legislation and the micro‐level conditions prevailing in districts appear as key issues affecting employment relationships for labour migrants, and the social cohesiveness seen to contribute to the success of industrial districts is being undermined through the treatment of labour migrants as people outside the national Italian community in terms of rights and other markers of citizenship.     

Immigration,Labour Markets and Employment Relations: Problems and Prospects

In this review essay, I argue that immigration presents employment researchers with a promising strategic research site because it raises a number of theoretically significant problems with mainstream economic approaches to labour and labour markets. Despite the tendency to view economic migrants as homo economicus personified, I argue that immigration brings the institutional nature of labour markets into sharp relief as it exposes, among other things, the influence of the state, processes of labour market segmentation, and the role of trade union policy and practice. Having identified a number of empirical anomalies that contradict neoclassical economic theory, I proceed to sketch out three areas where a more institutionally oriented approach should prove more fruitful.     

Labour Intensification, Work Injuries and the Measurement of Percentage Utilization of Labour (PUL)

Labour intensification has often been assumed to be related to industrial safety, but surprisingly different views of this relationship have been held and systematic enquiry is lacking. A measure called the percentage utilization of labour (PUL) claims to monitor the intensity of labour in British manufacturing and therefore potentially affords the opportunity for a much more systematic investigation into the effects of labour intensity on industrial safety than has ever been possible before. This paper introduces the PUL measure and indicates why it might be thought particularly likely to register an increase in the 1980s. It then examines variation in PUL and in industrial injury rates in British manufacturing, both in the early part of the 1980s and over a longer period, in order to assess whether changes in PUL have tended to be associated with changes in safety. No consistent relationship is found. The evidence presented is reviewed, and the relationship between industrial injury rates, intensification of labour and the adequacy of the PUL measure for safety research is reconsidered.     

Living at Work: Management Control and the Dormitory Labour System in China

The paper is based on a review of the literature on the use of dormitory labour, in the past and currently within parts of China, especially the Southern Pearl River Delta. It compares the provision of dormitories by firms with provision of housing under paternalist management practices. It explores the benefits that flow from having labour available on tap, as against the potential disadvantages of having short tenure circulating labour as firms aim to move up the value chain which may require the retention of skilled labour with the firm for longer periods.     

Subcontracting and Labour Standards: Reassessing the Potential of International Framework Agreements

Attempts to regulate labour standards in multinational companies face clear difficulties, not least because companies themselves may not have the executive power to enforce terms throughout complex and fragmented subcontracting structures. In the case of international framework agreements (IFAs), this might suggest a fundamental weakness. Taking our example from the South African construction industry, this article presents an IFA in the context of both employer and union strategy. We demonstrate that a two‐track approach exists: highly interventionist approach to quality‐critical issues compared with labour‐related issues. On this basis, we suggest that, far from being over‐hyped, IFAs have yet to be taken seriously enough.     

Labour productivity change: Drivers, business impact and macroeconomic moderators

This paper focuses on the operational drivers of labour productivity changes. We consider two sets of drivers: (a) current working practices and (b) changes in working practices through management programs. The relationship between these two sets of drivers and productivity changes are analysed. We also investigate the importance of productivity growth by looking at the impact of labour productivity changes on business performance changes. Finally, the moderating effects of industry and country on the use of drivers of productivity changes are examined. Data from an international survey, IMSS-IV, are used for the analysis.     

Labour process analysis and socio-technical design: living apart together?

Here the authors explore how the labour process approach and the socio-technical approach can be used in the process of design and redesign of production organizations. The implications of both approaches are looked at in several cases of work reorganization in Rotterdam harbour.