物流管理本科专业教学改革方案

本文提出了物流管理本科专业教学改革的总体方案,分别从培养目标、课程体系建设、实践性教学建设、教学方法和考核方法的改革及专业教师的培养等五个方面提出了物流管理本科专业的改革构想,并针对物流管理人才应具备的基本技能,提出师资、教材、实训三要素的重要性。     

Small firms and the failure of national skills policies: adopting an institutional perspective

Both skills and small firms have been increasingly prominent in policy agendas across the world in recent years. Skills are now seen as being crucial to economic prosperity, yet evidence consistently shows much lower levels of training, on average, in small firms than in larger businesses. Policy makers in various countries have sought to address this perceived problem and to stimulate skills development in small firms, but have attempted to do so in different ways and with varying degrees of success. It is this divergence in national skills policies, as well as its causes and implications for skill formation in small firms, that this paper seeks to illuminate. In doing so, it adopts an ‘institutional’ perspective that advances current understanding of how and why skills policies adopted in different countries appear to have varying effects on small firms. Through employing this institutional analysis, the paper promotes an awareness of how historical, social and economic forces in the ‘corporatist’ systems, found for example in Germany and Scandinavia, tend to provide a more supportive context for skills development in small firms than the liberal free market systems found elsewhere in the world, such as in the USA, Canada and the UK – which is highlighted as an illustrative case in this paper.     

Defining a Post-Conventional Corporate Moral Responsibility

The stakeholder approach offers the opportunity to consider corporate responsibility in a wider sense than that afforded by the stockholder or shareholder approaches. Having said that, this article aims to show that this theory does not offer a normative corporate responsibility concept that can be our response to two basic questions. On the one hand, for what is the company morally responsible and, on the other hand, why is the corporation morally responsible in terms of conventional and post-conventional perspectives? The reason why the stakeholder approach does not offer such a definition, as we shall see, is because the normative stakeholder approaches tend to confuse the social validity with the moral validity or legitimacy. It leads us to a conventional definition of corporate moral responsibility (CMR) that is not relevant to the pluralistic and global framework of our societies and economies. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate this intuition.     

Skill Formation Of Engineers In Large Korean Firms: An Analysis From A Comparative Perspective

On the basis of firm‐level case studies, this paper examines the actual performance of university education and in‐firm training for engineers in large Korean manufacturing firms. University education fails to meet the actual demands for skills at the firm level, while in‐firm training fails to devote sufficient resources to the continuous, lifetime skill formation of engineers. The poor performance of this education is explained by the rigid university administration system in Korea, and worsened by exclusive government intervention. The limitations of in‐firm training are accounted for by several features of corporate management, including the prevail‐ing production strategies and top‐down governance structures inside firms as well as the distinct occupational culture popular among young engineers.     

International briefing 13: Training and development in Spain—the politics of modernisation

The article will address the issue of training and development in Spain. First, the general economic and labour market context will be outlined. Second, the public policy context of training and development and the institutions of regulation will be considered in terms of the way challenges have been responded to by the state and social actors, with an emphasis on developments in lifelong learning and the reality of corporate strategy and practice. Finally, the article will provide an outline of the relevant institutions, networks and sources with regard to the issue of training and development, showing how a new constituency of interests have emerged and coalesced. There is a tendency in the literature and debates related to training and development to speak in terms of binarisms. On the one hand, there are social systems that are deemed to exalt the virtues of training and create high levels of economic investment and political involvement in this area, whilst there are others who fail both to prioritise it and develop extensive systems of social engagement. These types of approaches tend to have difficulty dealing with some of the more complex realities of training, and the myriad of typologies and hybrids, that constitute national training systems such as Spain's.     

What predicts skill transfer? An exploratory study of goal orientation,training self‐efficacy and organizational supports

Results from a study examining the predictors of skill transfer from an instructional to a work environment are presented. Prior research indicates that skill transfer is a function of both individual and contextual factors. A total of 186 employees from a work organization were surveyed on individual dimensions (goal orientation, training self‐efficacy) and contextual factors (supervisor and peer support). Pre‐training motivation was proposed as proximal training outcome and further connected to the distal outcome, skill transfer. Analyses with structural equation modeling using EQS indicate that individual dimensions, such as mastery‐approach goal orientation and training self‐efficacy, are related to pre‐training motivation. Also, contextual factors, such as peer support, predicted both pre‐training motivation and skill transfer, while supervisor support was unrelated to either pre‐training motivation or skill transfer. Pre‐training motivation, in turn, was related to skill transfer. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

Global production sharing and trade in the services of factors

This article develops an approach to measuring the factor content of trade when intermediate inputs are traded, and techniques differ for reasons such as factor price differences. An empirical section documents the importance of intermediates and shows that they mitigate cross-country differences in the factor content of finished goods. The performance of recent models of factor service trade is also evaluated. Existing approaches impute the factor content of imported intermediates with domestic techniques and tend to overstate how well those models perform. The framework developed here can help reconcile general-equilibrium trade models with actual patterns of trade.     

Creating a high‐skills society during recession: issues for policy makers

The present study looks at the skill formation policies adopted by policy makers in Greece in order to create a high‐skills society. It examines empirically the demand side of the skill creation process within 300 small enterprises in order to understand how far supply‐side measures have influenced the demand for well‐trained staff within small businesses. The article draws on empirical data from 650 interviews with workers and small firm owners that explored owner demand for higher level skills and training. The study questions the effectiveness of the measures put forward by policy makers in order to encourage an up‐skilling strategy in the country. The analysis reveals that this policy agenda has been supported predominantly by various skills supply‐side initiatives including investments in higher education and subsidized accredited company training. Yet the empirical evidence indicates that such initiatives have not so far influenced owner demand for higher level skills and training, suggesting a new agenda for policy intervention may be necessary. The study provides valuable lessons for policy makers across the advanced capitalist world on the development of a high‐skills society.     

What Skills Are Needed to be a Humanitarian Logistician?

Logistic skills are of importance for employment and career development, and prior research has highlighted differences in skill requirements for different logistics functions as well as for different groups of logisticians. However, the continuing incidence of natural disasters and complex emergencies and their associated challenges including the requirement to build relationships with diverse stakeholders, has increased the demand for humanitarian logisticians—but there is, as yet, little understanding of which skills are important in this context. This article develops a conceptual framework for skills in the field of humanitarian logistics, and evaluates the framework through a content analysis of job advertisements with a special focus on the 2010 Haiti earthquake. This analysis concludes that humanitarian logisticians need a broad spectrum of functional skills (such as procurement, and warehouse and transport management) that must often be held in some depth. In addition, however, humanitarian logisticians need “contextual” skills that reflect their particular field of employment (such as security management and a comprehensive knowledge of donor regulations). It is suggested that such contextual skills are likely to feature in other areas of logistic employment, and that further research to identify these would lead to improvements in training and education programs.     

Rethinking UK small employers' skills policies and the role of workplace learning

Small business employers in the UK are widely perceived as adopting a reactive, ad hoc approach to employee skill formation. Employer reliance on workplace learning is often treated, explicitly or implicitly, as evidence of such an approach. Small employers' approaches to skill creation are investigated using data from two employer samples. Three main conclusions challenging these arguments are presented. First, small employers' skills policies are highly diverse: strategic, tactical and restrictive policies are distinguished. Second, employers perceive particular benefits in enabling workplace learning; simplistic views that a reliance on workplace learning necessarily constitutes an inferior last resort for those employers unable to provide access to external training are rejected. Third, enabling workplace learning is important to strategic employers, as well as to those attaching a lower value to skills. For some employers, the workplace is the primary source of new knowledge and skills because they are unavailable elsewhere. The prevalence, diversity and significance of workplace learning in small businesses require a reappraisal of UK small employers' skills policies. The implications for research, practice and policy are discussed.     

Real and financial crises in the Keynes–Kalecki structuralist model: An agent‐based approach

Agent‐based models are inherently microstructures—with their attention to agent behavior in a field context—and only aggregate up to systems with recognizable macroeconomic characteristics. One might ask why the traditional Keynes–Kalecki or structuralist (KKS) model would bear any relationship to the multi‐agent modeling approach. This paper shows how KKS models might benefit from agent‐based microfoundations, without sacrificing traditional macroeconomic themes, such as aggregate demand, animal spirits and endogenous money. Above all, the integration of the two approaches gives rise to the possibility that a KKS system—stable over many consecutive time periods—might lurch into an uncontrollable downturn, from which a recovery would require outside intervention. As a by‐product of the integration of these two popular approaches, there emerges a cogent analysis of the network structure necessary to bind real and financial agents into an integrated whole. It is seen, contrary to much of the existing literature, that a highly connected financial system does not necessarily lead to more crashes of the integrated system.     

基于SDN特征理念的企业员工培训体系设计研究初探

本文针对现阶段企业培训体系存在的问题，结合SDN“充分合作与共赢”等特征理念。对企业员工培训体系进行再设计初探。目的在于转换企业封闭僵化的培训观念，使企业能够运用更加开阔的视野重新审视培训，并且提出基于SDN特征理念的企业员工培训体系的基本架构及流程。     

Kathleen Thelen. How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xv + 333 pp. ISBN 0-521-83768-5, $75.00 (cloth); ISBN 0-521-54674-5, $29.99 (paper).

Kathleen Thelen has written an incredibly fascinating book thatshould be obligatory reading for anyone interested in the historyof skill formation or the evolution of institutions in general.For those working on the "varieties of capitalism," path-dependency,punctured equilibrium, or historical institutionalism, thistext should feature prominently in their work. Thelen’sgoal in this book is to discover why Germany, Britain, the UnitedStates, and Japan pursued different "paths" of skill formation.She traces the origin of each path     

Trade Unions as Agents for Skill Formation: The Case of Singapore

Trade unions can influence the quality and quantity of training provided to workers. This article delineates the role played by unions in Singapore’s skill formation system, during the 1980s and 1990s. This role is framed by the context of the developmental state and of a collaborationist union movement. Singapore unions act to support the state’s drive to upgrade the skills of the workforce. They put pressure on employers to sign up to collective agreements including statements about training, and they act as both agents and providers of training and education for basic and core skills. They also devote considerable resources to persuading their members to take up training opportunities. What evidence there is suggests that these various strategies have had some success. The unions’ role in Singapore is contrasted with their role in some other countries.     

Personalization without Interrogation: Towards more Effective Interactions between Consumers and Feature-Based Recommendation Agents

Software agents that provide consumers with personalized product recommendations based on individual-level feature-based preference models have been shown to facilitate better consumption choices while dramatically reducing the effort required to make these choices. This article examines why, despite their usefulness, such tools have not yet been widely adopted in the marketplace. We argue that the primary reason for this is that the usability of recommendation systems has been largely neglected – both in academic research and in practice – and we outline a roadmap for future research that might lead to recommendation agents that are more readily adopted by consumers.     

Measuring the learning of university teachers following online staff development courses: a Spanish case study

Online education is used for a variety of purposes in higher education. Two such purposes are improving staff performance over time and allowing staff to obtain feedback about their professional skill development. Relying on data from online staff skill development courses delivered in five universities, this article explores online faculty learning through the lens of a model of professional development. This theoretical perspective offers an examination of how professional skills are understood and practiced in online staff development courses. At the core of this analysis is the contention that faculty participants understand and respond to the need for high‐quality teaching. Finally, this study highlights the points deemed important when designing, implementing and evaluating Internet training courses.     

The development of British accountancy in the nineteenth century: A technological determinist approach

This article argues that some of the most popular treatments of the development of accountancy in Britain do not accord with the historical evidence. This is true of the functionalist's altruistic view of the profession and of the predominant paradigm – the Weberian ‘professional project’. There is no evidence in the early history of British accountancy to support the concepts of, for example: monopolistic closure, credentialism, or the social construction of skill. Instead, using a model based on technological determinism, the article reasserts the importance of the industrialisation process in forming the accountancy profession, and sees the formation of the chartered societies as largely set up to brand the accountants' training and thereby preserve the value of their human capital.     

A research framework for group support systems

Over the last decade, many methodologies and techniques have been devised to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of cooperative working. The efficacy of many of these approaches has not been rigorously assessed, causing doubt about their applicability and helping restrict their use. Additionally, research effort has been dissipated. The need is for a generally agreed framework within which research can be conducted and results determined. This article proposes such a framework, involving the identification of the context, process, and outcome variables which, a priori, are deemed important to understanding, and subsequently predicting, the appropriate forms of intervention in the workings of groups. Six major components have been identified: the organizational environment, the group context, the process context, the group process, the substantive outcomes, and process performance indicators. Within these six components, 16 macrovariables have been identified. Within these macrovariables, 90 variables have been selected that characterize an issue-handling situation and its outcomes. The framework is applicable to a very wide range of group support systems used in many contexts.     

When absorptive capacity meets institutions and (e)learners: adopting,diffusing and exploiting e‐learning in organizations

E‐learning was thought to be one of the fastest growing industries on both sides of the Atlantic and has been frequently heralded as a transforming influence on global corporate training and higher education. Despite such rhetoric, the adoption, diffusion and exploitation have been slower than anticipated. In this paper we attempt to explain why this might have been the case in Europe by drawing on an increasingly influential body of management literature on the absorptive capacity (ACAP) of organizations to acquire, assimilate and use new technologies and ideas. We supplement this work on absorptive capacity with two other streams of literature on learners and on the business systems or institutionalist perspective, which focuses on the embeddedness of unique organizational forms, ideas and human resource development approaches in particular national business systems. We develop a model of absorptive capacity for e‐learning in organizations (ACAP for eL), which we argue has important theoretical implications for business and management academics in developing a model of technology transfer and diffusion, key lessons for HRD practitioners and politicians associated with furthering e‐learning developments in their organizations, and also for policy makers at government level wishing to spread the e‐learning message.     

A response to Richard Evans

The article argues for the need for business to give a positive lead in society. There are three reasons for this. First, a large multinational can have enormous influence in a local economy, especially in the Third World. Secondly, but much more unusually, business can demonstrate how cooperative endeavour can make profits. Thirdly, business can cooperate with local or central government in education, and training. But such reasons themselves raise questions about accountability and values. The article also discusses why such leadership does not happen more often, looking to the short-term practices of business as the main culprit.