Is Germany a model for managers?

Most American managers have a hard time making sense of Germany. The country has a fraction of the resources and less than one-third the population of the United States. Labor costs are substantially higher, paid vacations are at least three times as long, and strong unions are deeply involved at all levels of business, from the local plant to the corporate boardroom. Yet German companies manage to produce internationally competitive products in key manufacturing sectors, making Germany the greatest competitive threat to the United States after Japan. The seemingly paradoxical nature of the German economy typically evokes one of two diametrically opposed responses. The first is to celebrate the German economy as a "model" worth emulating--indeed, as the answer to declining U.S. competitiveness. The alternative, more skeptical response is to question Germany's staying power in a new, more competitive global economy. According to Kirsten Wever and Christopher Allen, the problem with both points of view is that they miss the forest for the trees. Observers are so preoccupied with praising--or blaming--individual components of the German economy that they fail to see the dynamic logic that ties these components together into a coherent system. In their review of recent research on the German business system, Wever and Allen argue that managers can learn an important lesson from Germany. In the global economy, competition isn't just between companies but between entire socioeconomic systems. Germany's ability to design a cohesive economic and social system that adapts continuously to changing requirements goes a long way toward explaining that country's competitive success.     

The role and place of research and intellectual discourse in the reproduction of social relations of racial domination in South Africa

The South African research community which undertakes all research activity in the social and natural sciences, with and without state and corporate sponsorship, draws its membership mainly from the dominant social group. In this country, the dominant group is both economically and racially determined. Consequently, the white minority dominates the research community and intellectual discourse as it does other socio‐economic and political spheres of society. This situation guarantees the constant reproduction and perpetuation of the social relations of racial domination.

As an agent that generates knowledge and new ideas, research as an academic and intellectual tool of enquiry is an instrument of social control, producing new concepts, language and theoretical abstractions which are not accessible to those outside its multi‐farious disciplines. Insofar as the largest proportion of practitioners of these specialised disciplines is drawn from the dominant group, research has itself become a pivotal part of the dominant ideology. Its role is inevitably and inextricably bound up with the processes of systematic reproduction of the relations of domination.

The aim of this viewpoint is therefore to explore various ways in which research bodies and intellectual discourse in general in South Africa can be deracialised and be made more representative of the social make‐up of society.     

The relationship between wellness participation and health care benefit utilization

To examine the relationship between participation in a wellness program and the amount of absenteeism and medical claims, seven years of retrospective absenteeism and medical claims records were collected for 207 employees (pre- and postwellness intervention) and entered into a database. A proportional stratified random sample of workers by wellness participation was selected. While there was no significant change in the amount of sick leave taken over time, a log transformation revealed a significant increase in the dollar amount of medical claims over time, particularly for the middle-aged group of employees. This confirms that wellness intervention slowed the rate of increasing claims among middle-aged participants after just three years of wellness intervention.     

Struggling to save our kids

Many more than ever face the crises of childhood: violence, drugs, bad schools, poverty, divorce, or two parents at work. And no one seems to care.     

Country size and ‘insulation’ from external disturbances

Summary This paper considers the relationship between economic size and vulnerability to external disturbances. In order to analyze this issue effectively a model comprising three different-sized economies is constructed. The issue of economic size and insulation is approached from this alternative perspectives depending upon the relative size of (a) the `recipient' country and (b) the transmitting country. The results of the analysis indicate that, contrary to popular belief, a small country under floating exchange rates is less severely affected by external economic events than a large economy regardless of the type of external disturbance and the degree of domestic wage indexation.This paper has been improved by the helpful comments of a referee. We alone are solely responsible for all remaining errors.