THE ORGANIZATIONAL CORRELATES AND CONSEQUENCES OF SUBCONTRACTING: EVIDENCE FROM A SURVEY OF SOUTH WALES BUSINESSES

Recent interest in the growth of subcontracting, as part of a broader trend towards greater ‘flexibility’in forms of employment relationship, has not as yet been matched by a full consideration of its organizational and managerial implications. In particular, the question of whether or not subcontracting has an impact upon, or is affected by, the organization's structural characteristics remains largely unexplored. the aim of this article is to report findings from a detailed study of subcontracting practices across a sample of British industry, which focuses upon the relationship between subcontracting and organizational characteristics. the results indicate several important points about the practice. Firstly, that there is wide variation in the use of subcontracting across industry, although the overall extent is limited. Secondly, that variation in the practice is significantly related to basic firm characteristics - namely, industrial sector, type of production system and pattern of ownership and control. Thirdly, that, on balance, subcontracting is associated with more, not less, structural complexity. Finally, that this greater complexity is found in particular types of firms - notably, outside the manufacturing sector, in mass and process production systems and amongst British independents and subsidiaries, rather than in their foreign competitors.     

External spillovers, internal spillovers and the geography of production and innovation

We consider a three-location duopoly model such that (i) firms choose production and innovation locations before (Bertrand) competition takes place and (ii) there are internal and external knowledge spillovers. We show: (1) agglomerations where firms earn negative profits may exist when there are both external and internal knowledge spillovers; (2) greater external spillovers do not necessarily favor agglomeration; (3) decreasing communication costs tend to favor agglomeration; (4) there are exactly two types of agglomeration equilibria: either both firms innovate in the agglomeration, or there is an innovator and an imitator; and (5) if there is a location where both firms produce, then innovation must take place in this location.     

Mixed Duopoly with Subcontracting

Existing literature on mixed oligopoly focuses on competition among different types of firms but ignores their possible cooperation. We allow cooperation between a public firm and a private firm through subcontracting in a Hotelling mixed‐duopoly model. We find that when subcontracting is possible, the equilibrium without subcontracting is not socially optimal because subcontracting can lower total production costs. And if both firms engage in subcontracting, the existence of a public firm can guarantee the first best equilibrium, whether it is the low‐cost firm or not. But when a private firm is the low‐cost firm, it is more profitable for it to choose vertical foreclosure. And the consequent equilibrium is not socially desirable anymore. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Firm heterogeneity and wages in unionised labour markets: Theory and evidence

In many countries wages are set in two stages, where industry-level collective bargaining is followed by firm-specific arrangements determining actual paid wages as a mark-up on the industry wage floor. What explains the wage set in each of these stages? In this paper we show that both the industry wage floor and the average wage cushion are systematically associated with the degree of firm heterogeneity in the industry: The former (latter) is negatively (positively) associated with the productivity spread. Furthermore, since the response of the wage floor dominates that of the wage cushion, workers in more heterogeneous industries tend to get lower actual paid wages. These conclusions are reached in a model of Cournot oligopoly with firm productivity heterogeneity and a two-tiered wage setting system. They are then confirmed by administrative data covering virtually all workers, firms and collective bargaining agreements of the Portuguese private sector for the period 1991–2000.     

Agglomeration, Dispersion, and the Pioneer Firm

This paper models industry location as a process of successive stages of agglomeration, dispersion, and reagglomeration. External economies lead firms to agglomerate in an industry center. Agglomeration drives up wages in the center, compelling firms to move low-skill activities to low-wage regions. A pioneer firm provides intermediation services between outlying regions and the center. The result is a regional production network: an industry center served by high-volume production sites, where pioneers are active, and low-volume production sites, where they are not. Evidence from the Mexican garment industry supports the theory.     

At the bottom of a global commodity chain––how different really are hourly wage rates and piece rates?

Employers have a number of different ways in which they can pay their employees. Discussions of the forms of wage payment were once very fashionable and they still remain important in terms of practice, but in theoretical terms, they have disappeared from the radar and been less central to recent analysis of work. On the surface, without any theoretical analysis and primarily empirical evidence, it appears that there is a major difference between ‘time wage’ rate and ‘piece wage’ rate. This article via Marxist theoretical analysis and primarily empirical evidence from Australian, New Zealand, Chinese and Fiji garment firms argued that there is a high level of similarity between time rate and piece rate. The empirical research findings of the Fiji garment industry shows that a time rate is not really much different from a piece rate, and in fact, a time rate is a disguised form of piece rate because workers are required to meet their targets per hour via very close monitoring of output and performance. The article further argued that there exist greater work intensification and exploitation via strict management control systems such as close supervision and punitive factory rules. The article also highlighted some of the limitations of existing social science theories because they can not account for what is going on garment firms in Fiji (especially Chinese firms). The article argues that we must either expand the earlier social science theories or move beyond and developed new theories to fully capture the new emerging trends of contemporary capitalist global production system.     

Understanding Labour Turnover in a Labour Intensive Industry: Evidence from the British Clothing Industry*

ABSTRACT The clothing industry is both a quintessential global industry and one that is inescapably labour intensive. Despite more and more production shifting to low wage economies in the past decades, there remains a significant amount of clothing manufacturing in high wage economies. This study examines the drivers of change that are forcing restructuring in one such country and the outcomes of such changes for the organization of production. Because the changes have involved treating workers as a resource to be developed rather than a cost, preventing labour turnover has become a crucial component of this strategic repositioning. In presenting the results of a national survey of UK clothing manufacturers we find that high labour turnover rates persist. We discuss the historical background to this phenomenon and current trends, and then explore the principal variables that might explain these trends. We conclude with a discussion of the outcomes facing firms in this industry and comment on why managers resist comprehensive changes in organizational routines and the effort bargain.     

Performance Pay,Union Bargaining and Within‐Firm Wage Inequality*

Theory predicts that performance pay boosts wage dispersion. Workers retain a share of individual productivity shocks and high‐efficiency workers receive compensation for greater effort. Collective bargaining can mitigate the effect of performance pay on wage inequality by easing monitoring of common effort standards and group‐based pay schemes. Analyses of longitudinal employer–employee data show that the introduction of performance‐related pay raises wage inequality in non‐union firms, but not in firms with high union density. Although performance‐related pay appears to be on the rise, the overall impact on wage dispersion is likely to be small, particularly in European countries with influential unions.     

The Governance of Networks and Economic Power: The Nature and Impact of Subcontracting Relationships

Abstract.  Current debate on networking focuses on network structures and firm strategies. In this perspective, theoretical analysis has been concerned with allocative issues. This essay proposes a different interpretation. Starting from the existing theoretical framework, we emphasise the nature and the implications of different types of networks with respect to socio‐economic development from a distributional point of view. Within this context, we develop the analysis of subcontracting starting from the concept of economic power. We then provide an analysis of governance in production by considering the attitudes and the nature of the actors involved. The externalisation of activities by large transnationals, which characterises current corporate restructuring, is often related to the search for greater flexibility, but also for greater power over governments, labour, and subcontractors. Differently, networks based on the mutual dependence of actors, which are not necessarily built around a large firm, could – under particular conditions – reach large production scales or more complex scopes without breaking the links with territorial systems, thus including local objectives in the strategic decision‐making process. Our conclusion is that the impact of subcontracting networks varies enormously. This is crucial to an understanding of future trends and possibilities. Not least, firms and public policy agencies need to understand the implications of different forms of subcontracting network and how those forms actually differ in practice.     

Agglomeration elasticities and firm heterogeneity

This paper examines three key issues encountered when estimating the relationship between agglomeration and multi factor productivity (‘agglomeration elasticities’): the sorting of heterogeneous firms, the convexity of agglomeration effects, and the challenges of identifying the impact of persistent spatial differences in effective density. We use a firm-level panel containing production data together with detailed information on the geographic location of employment, covering a high proportion of the New Zealand economy. We are able to control for heterogeneity along firm, region, and industry dimensions, and to estimate separate agglomeration elasticities across industries and regions. Sorting leads to upward biased elasticity estimates but using firm fixed effects can lead to downward bias due to the highly persistent nature of agglomeration variables. Our preferred estimates control for sorting across regions and industries. Overall, we find a positive agglomeration elasticity of 0.066. Within industries and, to a lesser extent within regions, there is pronounced variation in the strength of agglomeration effects, and evidence of decreasing returns to agglomeration. High density areas attract firms that benefit most from agglomeration.     

A firm level perspective on migration: the role of extra-EU workers in Italian manufacturing

A production-theory approach to migration is adopted in this paper to address the role of migrant workers from extra-EU countries in Italian manufacturing firms. The adoption of flexible functional forms to model firm-level technology lets us directly derive different measures of elasticity from the coefficients of the estimated production and cost functions. The use of foreign labour is shown to affect the industry composition in favour of low skill intensive sectors and the estimated cross demand elasticities confirm the complementarity between migrant and native workers found in previous studies. However, the two labour inputs prove to be substitutes in terms of the Morishima elasticity of substitution: in general, firms tend to increase the foreign labour intensity of production in response to a decline in migrants’ wage, while the migrant to domestic labour ratio responds to changes in the domestic workers’ wage only for firms in low skill intensive sectors.     

论国际垂直专业化分工的工资效应——基于浙江制造业数据的实证分析

在全球生产网络化的背景下,中国制造业广泛参与国际垂直专业化分工,对劳动收入分配产生了重要影响。本文以外向经济较为发达的浙江省为例,测算了浙江26个制造业部门参与垂直专业化分工的程度,并就垂直化专业分工对浙江制造业工资收入的影响进行了实证分析。研究结果显示:浙江制造业部门参与国际垂直专业化分工总体上提升了行业工资收入水平;垂直专业化分工对制造业工资收入的促进作用在资本密集型行业中比在劳动密集型行业中更大。本文最后就如何提升浙江制造业工资水平、缩小行业工资差距提出了相应对策建议。     

Urban agglomeration effects and employment and wage gradients

When employment occurs at both central and non-central points, but firms have a preference to be near the center, the rent gradient will decline, and a wage gradient is necessary to compensate workers for more centrally located employment. Wage gradients and rent gradients are jointly determined. The relationship between wage offer functions and the equilibrium wage gradient is derived, the latter dependent on utility functions and commuting costs. This is illustrated with a two sector model incorporating agglomeration economies in the export sector. Numerical solution reveals how agglomeration economies affect wages, employment, and city size.     

LOCATION OF HIGH TECHNOLOGY INDUSTRIES AND REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT – THE ISRAELI CASE

This paper reviews and empirically examines the effectiveness of the Israeli government's declared policy to induce the location of high technology industries in developing regions. The first section of the paper reviews the literature on high technology industry location. The second section presents the findings from the analyses of a sample of 53 high technology Israeli firms in regard to their critical locational determinants. The findings corroborate the results reported in other similar studies. High technology industries, primarily those engaged in research and development, appear to favor the large urban concentrations, where agglomeration economies, large pools of skilled workers and high quality educational and cultural facilities exist. High technology firms which choose to locate in peripheral regions engage primarily in production activities and employ larger proportions of unskilled and semi-skilled labor. The average size of these firms is greater than their counterparts, firms located in and around urban concentrations.     

Japanese Interfirm Networks: Exploring the Seminal Sources of their Success

An extensive body of literature explains features of the highly co-operative relationship between Japanese firms, particularly Toyota, and their supplier-firm network. The literature does not explore when these networks emerged or the factors conducive to their emergence. This paper uses transaction cost analysis and game theory to address these issues. It indicates that the networks emerged in the 1950s, and that the initiating factors were exogenous to the networks, centring on the unusual business environment that then prevailed in Japan. The analysis indicates why firms like Toyota gained an advantage over competitors in America. They were relieved of two major transaction costs: those linked to internalization and decomposed subcontracting. In addition, successful networks developed intragroup understandings that led to significant reductions in both interfirm co-ordination costs and direct production costs per unit of output. The paper questions the extent to which Toyota-type networks are prevalent in Japan. It questions the advantage that firms in America or elsewhere (even Japan) can gain from emulating Toyota practices such as unguarded subcontracting. It offers a different interpretation to standard business practices in firms like Toyota, such as relational contracting. It provides a basis for a reinterpretation of Japanese business history and the role of ‘Japan Inc.’.     

Do governments tax agglomeration rents?

Empirical evidence suggests that firms receive rents from locating in economic agglomerations and industry clusters. Using the German local business tax as a testing ground, we empirically investigate whether these agglomeration rents are taxable for local governments. The analysis exploits a rich data source on the population of German plants to construct measures for the communities’ agglomeration characteristics. The findings indicate that economic agglomerations and industry clusters exert a positive impact on the jurisdictional tax rate choice. Further analysis moreover suggests that a municipality’s potential to tax agglomeration rents depends on its firm and industry agglomeration relative to neighboring communities. To account for potential endogeneity problems, our analysis exploits long-lagged population and infrastructure variables as instruments for the agglomeration measures.     

Monopsonistic competition for the “best” workers

In this paper we analyse an economy where firms use labour as the only production factor, with constant return to scale. We suppose that jobs differ in their non-wage characteristics so each firm has monopsonistic power. In particular, we suppose that workers are heterogeneous with respect to their productivity. Then, each firm has incentives to offer higher wages in order to recruit the most productive workers. Competition among firms leads to a symmetric equilibrium wage, which is higher than the reservation wage, and to involuntary unemployment for the less productive workers, who are willing to work at the current wage but are not hired because their productivity is lower than the wage level. If firms have no institutional constraint on paying lower wages for the same job, an endogenous labour market segmentation emerges.     

Cities as the Industrial Districts of Housebuilding

In North America the housebuilding industry is ubiquitous and locally autonomous. In Ontario during the 1990s, 81% of urban single‐family homes were erected by locally based builders, a proportion that varied with urban isolation. Urban areas may be regarded as the industrial districts of home builders: numerous small, specialized firms interact frequently within a rich, embedded market network; subcontracting is the norm; networks and firm boundaries are fluid. The theory of industrial districts offers a useful vocabulary for analysing the neglected building industry. Analytically, the building industry offers unequalled opportunities to explore the dynamics of industrial districts, and how economic globalization meets local limits.     

Influence of subcontracting on innovation and economic performance of SMEs in Indian automobile industry

Trans-national corporations (TNCs) expanding their production bases to developing countries having better conditions of manufacturing and domestic markets provide increasing opportunities for local small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to have subcontracting relationships with these TNCs. Even though some theoretical and a few empirical studies throw light on the nature of assistance provided by TNCs to local SMEs through subcontracting relationships, none of the studies so far quantitatively analysed the role of this assistance on the innovative performance of SMEs leading to better economic performance. This paper probes the extent and diversity of assistance received by SMEs from a TNC through subcontracting and its influence on technological innovations and economic performance of SMEs, in the Indian automobile industry. Indian SMEs were able to receive mainly product related and purchase process assistance, thereby implying that subcontracting is largely confined to purchase–supply relationships. However, assistance received through subcontracting is beneficial as it promoted technological innovations of SMEs: the higher the degree of assistance, the higher the level of innovations carried out by these SMEs, which, in turn facilitated their economic performance. Thus, this paper substantiates in the Indian context that subcontracting relationship with a TNC can be an important source of technological innovations and enhanced economic performance for SMEs.     

Near‐sourcing UK apparel: value chain restructuring,productivity and the informal economy

Fast fashion's emphasis on quick response production and supply chain management is at the basis of renewed growth in UK apparel manufacturing. This article shows how increasing pressure from lead firms has resulted in manufacturers maintaining profit levels, mainly, through informal subcontracting and informal employment, as opposed to increasing productivity.