CAD—The‘Taylorisation’of drawing office work?

CAD has been described as a'Trojan horse'through which drawing office work will be deskilled. This article rebuts the crude Tayloris-ation thesis which underlines such views and offers an alternative analysis of the effects of CAD .     

R&D Performance of UK Companies

This short article compares the R&D performance of the major British R&D spenders with that of other major R&D spenders world-wide. A performance index is constructed which adjusts actual R&D for firm size and the R&D intensity of the firm's main area of business. According to these performance measures, the R&D performance of these British firms is better than is suggested by the share of R&D in Britain's GDP. However, the article identifies a gap in British R&D performance - what may be called a third rank of R&D spenders - who are rare in Britain, but very common in Japan and the USA.     

Japanisation as mythology

Manufacturing management texts describe ‘just-in-time’ production as an innovative paradigm for manufacturing control, originally developed in Japan, which when implemented by Western companies will enable them to remain internationally competitive. This article describes how manufacturing techniques observed in Japan have been radically modified to suit Western organisations, and discusses the significance of continuing to describe them as ‘Japanese’.     

Services in the new industrial economy

‘Manufacturing matters’,¹ but ‘So do services’. The future of industrialization is the future of both these increasingly intertwined and interdependent activities. Rather than a post-industrial society, we are seeing a new mode of industrialization encompassing and integrating manufacturing and services. This article considers the prospects for services in the new industrial economy,² focusing on innovation in services. Services have frequently been considered to be relatively poor in economic performance. However, regarding services as laggards is decreasingly useful when considering contemporary services, many of which are the major users, carriers and promoters of many classes of innovative hardware. New services (such as software and telematics) are performing vital roles in the diffusion of new technologies, techniques and organizational styles. This article outlines some trends in the service economy, examines the special nature of services, considers how services are changing their products and processes, and assesses emerging strategies for organization and trade in services.     

Deregulation in Australia,by design or default

This article traces the debate on the deregulation of telecommunications in Australia from initial private sector lobbying in 1977. Although the recommendations of the Davidson Report were seemingly sunk by the defeat of the Fraser government in 1983, the authors believe that the Labor government's commitment to monopoly public sector telecommunications may give way to deregulation by default under increasing fiscal restraint and private sector demands.     

The dynamics of edi standards development

This paper explores the development of standards for electronic data interchange (EDI), which are needed to allow the inter-organizational exchange of structured information between computer system. It focuses on the EDIFACT message development process which began informally as a mechanism for developing international standards for EDI. Since its inception, the rapidly growing scope of the process—in terms of the numbers of message being developed., geography and range of industrial sectors—has forced the process to become increasingly formalized. As the process has widened outside Europe, it has become necessary for it to accommodate a wider range og business practices and reconcile the competing objectives of user groups. For many user groups, the focus of their interest in message develpment has moved from the development of EDIFACT standard message to agreement on the use of subsets of these message. A particular issue has been teh moves in the US to align the national EDI standard ANSI X12 with EDIFACT, where, in addition to the technical changes required to satisfy the EDIFACT syntax, participation in EDIFACT represents a culture change from a domestic consensus process to an international delegated hierarchy. The paper describes how the EDIFACT process has adapted to these pressures through the formalization of its internal structures and processes, and considers whether or not there is a future for EDIFACT as a global process.     

The Effectiveness of Incomes Policies, in Australia Bargaining and Inflation Targetting Enterprise

This paper updates earlier estimates that show the existence of a range of equilibrium rates of unemployment in Australia. Within the range of equilibria framework, the paper goes on to test the effectiveness of incomes policies, enterprise bargaining and inflation-target based monetary policy for influencing the rate of inflation in Australia in the period 1965 to 2001. Incomes policies, especially the Accord, and enterprise bargaining are shown to have caused permanent reductions in the rate of inflation. The inflation-target based monetary policy is shown to be associated with, but is not shown to have caused, a reduced impact on inflation of changes in the level of activity.