Input tariff liberalisation and servitisation in manufacturing: Evidence from China's WTO accession

This paper links the sharp drop in China's manufacturing servitisation (MS) in early 21st century to China's accession to WTO featured by conspicuous input trade liberalisation (ITL). The results show that manufacturing industries exposed to higher degree of ITL suffer more MS declines after China's accession to the WTO. Heterogeneous analysis shows that industries with high import intensity, capital intensity or technology intensity suffer more MS declines following input trade liberalisation. Further analysis shows that input trade liberalisation increases the import of intermediate inputs while significantly reduces the proportion of service imports for manufacturing industries. The results are robust to a series of robustness checks.     

Analyzing manufacturer and the insurance-based risk mitigation policy with equipment service contracting

ABSTRACT

Manufacturing are recently investing in performance provision for customers focusing on equipment availability. However, performance-based contracts (PBC) between them suffer from the risks of downtime, opportunistic behavior, financial distress etc. We study the PBC strategy considering insurance-based risk mitigation policy. The service process with increasing failure rate is focused on where manufacturers decide to repair and replace by the equipment retirement age. The business interruption (BI) insurance is jointly purchased. Results show that insurance and PBC incentive exist partial substitutes and interactions. BI insurance not only mitigates PBC-induced risks but also provides a feasible way for improving the usage life.     

Manufacturing servitisation and duration of exports in China

In recent years, manufacturing servitisation has become a growing characteristic of global firms. Firms develop their service factors, to realise more values and increase their international competitiveness. China, as an important manufacturing centre of the world, has abundant manufacturers seeking for getting more involved in the international market. This paper makes use of detailed customs data and firm‐level data from China, to find how the servitisation in China affects the export durations of Chinese manufacturers. The results demonstrate that manufacturing servitisation input in China contributes to export performance. The service factors have become the important production factors in Chinese manufacturing enterprises. However, China is still at the primary stage of manufacturing servitisation, and Chinese manufacturing enterprises should pay more attention to the whole value chain and seek the transformation from a pure manufacturing enterprise to a service manufacturing enterprise.     

The role of ICTs in the servitisation and degradation of IT professional work

Recently IT work has been subjected to management approaches that apply production methods to service work. Specialised information and communication technologies (ICTs) used by IT professionals have played an important role in this ‘service turn’, but this has not been adequately explored in the literature. Via a qualitative study of IT professionals situated across the servitised IT functions of five UK‐based organisations, this article considers how these ICTs are inscribed with managerial logics that afford control benefits to managers while undermining professional autonomy and job quality. The article makes two main contributions to the literature. Firstly, it sheds light on how ICTs introduced into organisational IT functions support managerial control objectives and impact the job quality of IT professionals. Secondly, it suggests that ICTs may infect the logic of professionalism that takes pride in the quality of the work performance with a dominant managerial logic that places an emphasis on meeting management objectives.