Search results

Companies have difficulties in extending their capabilities in new unfamiliar areas. This paper outlines how the Teaching Company Scheme (TCS) helps companies overcome such difficulties by supporting links between academics and industry. Firms are having to find ways to cope with the intensifying international competition and with the emergence of a cluster of new, pervasive technologies. Their response is based increasingly on the application of technology and modern management methods to the development of new products of consistent high quality and their efficient manufacture. The complexities of the new product development processes, shortening product life‐cycles, the transformation of production processes, the growing use of computer‐based innovations such as Materials Requirement Planning, and organisational innovations such as Total Quality Management all demand that firms learn to do things in new ways (Dodgson, 1993). It takes time and effort for firms to understand technologies which are new to them, and to accumulate technological expertise. Acquiring such understanding may require investment in new competences, in training and retraining. Firms which fail to employ graduate level staff have limited capacity to learn, or to use technology and modern management and marketing methods properly and systematically. Employees who have received a university education acquire ‘knowledge of knowledge’: when they are confronted with technical problems beyond their capability, they know how to seek out external information to solve such problems (Gibbons & Johnston, 1974). A key part of the learning process is concerned with the identification of information which can add value to the business, and with integrating new knowledge into a company's existing accumulated knowledge (Tiler & Gibbons, 1991). Various studies show that external technology acquisition cannot substitute for in‐house R&D capability (Mowery, 1983; Granstrand et al, 1992), nor is recruitment generally the first step by which firms acquire capability in new technological fields (Faulker and Senker forthcoming). Firms often form links with university experts to learn something about the new field before committing themselves to recruitment. In the absence of procedures to ensure internal diffusion of new knowledge, firms which attempt to build up their knowledge through the use of a consultant or the recruitment of an expert are likely to gain little from their investment: It is necessary to ensure that knowledge which is received from external sources is communicated and utilised effectively throughout the organisation. For example, Dale (1986) has shown that it is dangerous for an organisation to rely on individual IT experts. The organisation as a whole must learn to use IT, so that it can draw upon the complex blend of skills and talents over which it has control, locating and drawing upon the strengths in its knowledge base. The effective introduction of new technology requires not only technical expertise, but managers who appreciate the wider implications of introducing new technology. Studies of firms involved in automation implementation have shown that they very often fail to secure the anticipated benefits from their investment largely as a consequence of senior management failure to understand the need to manage new technology introduction according to a strategy which covers work and its organisation in addition to technical aspects (Senker, 1984; Bessant & Haywood, 1988; Senker & Simmonds 1991). Organisational learning may also be constrained by a firm's culture, which is generally conservative and sustains existing structures of belief (March et al, 1991). A recent research project sought to assess the extent to which the programmes supported by British Teaching Company Scheme have contributed to the solution of these very difficult problems, and to make proposals for enhancing its effectiveness (Senker et al, 1993). This paper describes the Scheme and its objectives, outlines the aims of our study and reviews its findings.

Manufacturing has changed considerably in Britain in the last several years. There have been changes in management style, in particular from the authoritarian style traditional in Britain to more participative, open styles which emphasize communication upwards, as well as from the top of the hierarchy downwards. Senior managers now try to be more responsive to ideas from more junior management, supervisors and the shopfloor, although the industrial relations climate has changed eroding the influence of workers on output.

Three serious threats face the level of employment in the UK economy: declining international competitiveness; the manpower implications of technical change; and demographic factors outside the scope of this article. Preliminary findings of a research programme at the Scienee Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex, are presented in this contribution. The research was designed to improve understanding of relationships between success in international competition, technical change and patterns of manpower and skill deployment in the UK engineering industry.

Three important problems face managers in coming to terms with the advent of microprocessors. Microprocessors offer radical new possibilities for designing products and systems but the latter need to be conceptualised as wholes rather than seen as series of discreet but interconnected sub‐systems. The second difficulty lies in evaluating and choosing a CAD system in that confining the evaluation to the implications for the drawing office can result in failure to consider factors vital to the company's future. The third problem lies in the implications of automation for production. The benefits spill out beyond the boundaries of the department in which a particular piece of capital equipment is installed, emphasising the need for a strategic approach.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

American Sociological Review, October 1983 issue carries two relevant articles. In the first Shelley Coverman writes about “Gender, Domestic Labor Time, and Wage Inequality”. This study examined connections between family and employment activities by testing the often noted proposition that women's domestic activities affect their labour force achievements. The results supported the hypothesis that the time currently married women and men spend in housework and child care exerts a negative influence on their wages. These findings imply that there are important linkages between the familial and economic spheres, whereby sexual inequality in the familial division of labour helps perpetuate sexual inequality in the labour market.

Considers an EITB report which suggests that although British industry is buying CAD, it is not exploiting the advantages to the full. Highlights the suggestion with a case study of a British handling equipment manufacturer which first bought a CAD system in 1979 and has failed to implement a thorough strategy to benefit from it. Surmises that the main barriers to effective Cad use are the divide between resource allocators and change managers, and a serious lack of commitment to CAD training.

The monograph analyses (a) the potential impact of information technology (IT) on organisational issues that directly concern the personnel function; (b) the nature of personnel’s involvement in the decision making and activities surrounding the choice and implementation of advanced technologies, and (c) their own use of IT in developing and carrying out their own range of specialist activities. The monograph attempts to explain why personnel’s involvement is often late, peripheral and reactive. Finally, an analysis is made of whether personnel specialists – or the Human Resource Management function more generally – will play a more proactive role in relation to such technologies in the future.

TCS (previously the Teaching Company Scheme), claimed to be the UKs premier technology transfer mechanism, employs recent graduates to improve the competitiveness of primarily small and medium‐sized enterprises. The data are drawn from the author's experience of acting as academic supervisor on a two‐year TCS programme in PaperProds. Structuration theory acts as a “sensitising device” to the way in which the actions and discourses of owner‐managers in small firms exercise power. The author demonstrates the way in which managerial concerns with the “bottom line” gradually subverts broader conceptions of company “competitiveness” which include improving the skills, knowledge and commitment of shopfloor employees. In this particular programme the TCS associate found that he constantly had to reconcile the managing director's view that workers were disposable factors of production with his own implicitly “humanist” perspective.