Items where Year is 1988

Flow of funds data are used to compare methods of finance in 5 countries over the period 1970 to 1985. Many of the problems associated with previous studies are avoided by estimating net instead of gross financing proportions. The degree of consolidation of accounts, reciprocal arrangements between borrowers and lenders and compensating deposit requirements on borrowers no longer distort financing patterns. Corrections for inflation are provided by employing flow rather than stock figures and using own aggregation procedures to derive stock measures. Significant variations in financing emerge. These are not readily explained by traditional descriptions of corporate finance, in particular taxation. As an alternative, the paper suggests that relationships between borrowers and lenders establish forms of commitment that are conducive to the provision of long term finance. The separation between investment and finance, which has been the starting point of corporate finance theory, is untenable in a multiperiod context in which terms of finance define future allocation of control.

Whilst there has been quite a lot of research and speculation about the ability of the unions to adapt to the changed environmental circumstances of the 1980s, there has been no consideration of the impact of such changes on the financial status and performance of trade unions. It is suggested that, contrary to popular opinion, the unions have fared reasonably well during the period of membership decline, in part because they did not benefit very much during the growth phase of the 1970s. Increased membership will not necessarily solve financial problems.

In this article we model the financing decisions of a firm as a sequential signaling game. We prove that, when insiders have perfect information regarding the firm's future case flows, the application of 'refinements' to the set of admissible equilibria leads to the dominance of debt over equity financing. However, we show that when insiders observe the firm's cash flows imperfectly, there may exist sequential equilibria in which this 'pecking order' breaks down and some firms strictly prefer equity to debt financing. We also prove that, despite the breakdown of the pecking order, the announcement effect of equity financing will be negative relative to debt financing.

Multi-skilling at GKN Hardy Spicer is a phased program that exhibits many principles of socio-technical job design theory. This leading supplier of joint and driver shafts for front-wheel drive vehicles is introducing new technology to reduce costs, improve quality, and reduce working capital. The strategy for implementation of the new technology is a blend of new and old styles in which first-level decisions are made by the operator with specialist assistance available for more complex problems. The goal of self-motivation is central to the retraining of technical operatives, although it also requires changes in human resource management. The changes occur in supervision, production management, salary, over-education, and skill interfaces.

Looks at the changes in the business environment and examines the changes in human resource management which reflect this. Discusses in detail the response of human resource management to the need for a supply of skills through recruitment and training programmes. Also discusses the recognition of the role of human resources departments within industry and commerce.

This paper presents a novel and distinctive approach to the study of change within the NHS. Central to the paper's approach is the view that research on change in health care systems should be processual, comparative, pluralist, and historically based. Guiding such a view is a meta-analytical framework which contends that theoretically sound and practically useful research on change should involve the continuous interplay between ideas about the context, the process, and the content of change together with skill in regulating the relations between the three (Pettigrew 1985a, 1985b). The paper has five sections. Section one examines some of the contemporary pressures for change in the NHS and draws attention to the gap which often exists between statements of strategic intention and their operational implementation. Section two reveals our distinctive analytical approach to the study of service changes and clarifies the theoretical underpinnings of our work. Section three offers an extended critical review of recent research and writing on change in health care organizations. Section four summarizes our findings from the literature review and reaffirms the novelty and significance of our chosen approach. Section five provides an overview.

Examines how companies in the computer sector have responded to the restructuring within their industry and in particular the changes they have made to their approach to personnel issues. Examines their approach to redundancies, recruitment and retention; training and career development; managing corporate culture; and organisation restructure. Also examines the role of the personnel function.

Describes Halford's expansion and introduction of new technology which changed their approach to human resource management. Looks at the changes of attitude in Halford's top management and the restructuring process. Describes the introduction and training of EPOS (Electronic Point of Sale) technology, skills training for the staff, and management training for new super stores. Examines development and training needs for the future

Looks at the factors which drive and stabilise training activity. These include business strategic factors such as new products; the external/ internal labour markets; internal factors such as management commitment or existing training systems; and external training stimuli and support. Examines how these factors can interact to influence the extent of a firm's training effort.

It is rare for a single store opening in Warrington, north-west England, to arouse concern amongst UK retailers. However, when that store is a 182,000 sq ft outlet for the Swedish furniture and home furnishings retailer IKEA, representing the Company's first foray into the UK market, the disquiet becomes understandable. IKEA have established an enviable reputation for combining competitive pricing with high quality merchandise, within an attractive store setting. IKEA's high level of customer service is well-known and contrasts with the current practices of many flat-pack retailers in the UK. The Company's apparent ability to translate similar store formats and product ranges internationally, whilst encouraging a certain degree of product sourcing from within the host country, is effective. These features are derived from a corporate culture and spirit personally driven, until recently, by the Company's founder, Ingvar Kamprad. This article reviews the history of IKEA, its level of international representation, its marketing and presentational style.

Six interviewing panels which had assessed candidates for places at a medical school in 1984 were reconvened in 1987 to assess videotapes of the interviews conducted by themselves and by other panels. Overall recommendations made by panels showed excellent reliability within panels and high reliability between panels.

Technological, economic and market forces are causing organizations to make radical changes in both their strategy and human resource management (HRM). This study examines the impact of change on computer supplier firms using interviews with 11 personnel directors and executives and three industry experts, supported by secondary evidence. In response to strategic change firms are pursuing four streams of HRM activity: the management of culture; the development of skills; productivity improvements by the integration of roles, tasks and skills; and improving the quality of managerial processes and customer service. Firms are trying to match their HRM and strategy by developing rudimentary human resource plans, focusing the skills of employees on ‘niche’ markets, and setting up employment policies for a core group of flexible employees. A number of difficulties in HRM are emerging, however, including a lack of strategic management, organizational difficulties in managing across functions, personal and cultural problems in attempting to create the necessary synergy of skills in core functions, and a potential lack of internal consultancy skills in the personnel function. It is concluded that successful change will only be achieved by addressing these four problems simultaneously.

This paper considers the nature of routing flexibility in manufacturing systems and proposes methods for its quantification. Firstly, a measure of flexibility appropriate to Markovian routing is presented. It is shown that various other measures of the flexibility of systems so modelled presented in the literature are unrepresentative of the degree of routing flexibility.

The information-theoretic approach to the Markovian model is then extended to a more realistic grammatical model, along with an example. It is shown that an adequate measure of the flexibility of the manufacturing system is given by the entropy of the language produced by the productions of its grammar. Shortcomings of such a measure are discussed along with proposals for future work.

The study of Japanese manufacture continues to focus on certain elements of the JIT/kanban approach. A recent study tour found that these elements might be broadened to include planning systems and people development initiatives, examples of which are described. The degree to which JIT is a system at all, or has been fully understood in the West, is considered and future research directions proposed.

This article argues that the prevailing dichotomization of organizational studies into voluntarist and deterministic orientations is too simple, and that this simplicity has dangerous consequences for accounts of strategic choice. Determinism has been equated exclusively with the operation of environmental constraint, with the implication that the agency necessary for strategic choice can be secured simply by the removal of this constraint. This focus on external constraint has obscured the continuing influence of ‘action determinist’ positions, in which action is determined by mechanisms internal to the actor him/herself. This article argues that many recent theorists of strategic choice have relied too much on the interpretive voluntarist dissolution of environmental structure and neglected to safeguard themselves from the action determinism latent in the Carnegie tradition. the article proposes an alternative Realist account that, by contrast with interpretive voluntarism, incorporates environmental structure as an essential precondition to actors’ internal and external capacities for strategic choice.