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Global Competition (global + competition)
Selected AbstractsOsteoporosis and the Global Competition for Health Care Resources,JOURNAL OF BONE AND MINERAL RESEARCH, Issue 7 2004L Joseph Melton III Abstract Global aging superimposed on existing infectious diseases and trauma will aggravate competition for health care resources to diagnose and treat osteoporosis. Efforts to implement public health measures are needed, but the targeted approach to assessment and treatment of high-risk individuals must also be refined. Increases in the elderly population worldwide will cause a dramatic rise in osteoporotic fractures, but other age-related diseases will increase as well. Changes will be superimposed on existing public health problems (e.g., malaria, alcoholism), and these acute health care needs will take priority in some areas. Societies in most parts of the world may have to limit osteoporosis control to broad public health measures, and such efforts (e.g., calcium and vitamin D supplementation) should be supported. In these regions, clinical decision-making will generally be limited to treating patients with fractures (who presumably have already failed any public health measures in place), or in a few wealthy countries, to patients with low bone density identified by case-finding. Case-finding approaches will vary with the resources available, although unselective (mass) screening by bone densitometry is largely ineffective and unaffordable anywhere. The key to clinical decision-making on behalf of individuals will be an assessment of absolute fracture risk, and the tools needed to predict the risk of an osteoporotic fracture over the next 10 years are now being developed. These include bone density measures, but also incorporate other risk factors (e.g., fracture history, corticosteroid use), which may allow extension of fracture risk prediction to nonwhite populations and to men. Even with a universal risk prediction tool, cost-effective treatment thresholds will vary by country based on the level of fracture risk in the region and on the resources available for health care. To better compete for these resources, efforts should be made to lower the cost of osteoporosis interventions. Additionally, evidence is needed that these interventions are really effective in reducing fractures in the community. [source] Like Exporting Baseball: Individualism and Global Competition in the High-Tech IndustryANTHROPOLOGY OF WORK REVIEW, Issue 3-4 2004Carrie Lane Chet Abstract Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among high-technology jobseekers in Dallas, Texas, during the period 2001-04, this article examines the response of unemployed U.S. tech workers to the intensification of the offshore outsourcing of white-collar work from the United States to lower-cost locations overseas. The researcher found that while a vocal minority of tech workers denounces offshore outsourcing, or offshoring, as unethical, unpatriotic, and economically shortsighted, most high-tech jobseekers see offshoring as a natural offshoot of an unstoppable and ultimately beneficial system of global capitalist competition. These "globalist" workers, who espouse a model of work that privileges individual responsibility and flexibility over loyalty and security, argue that nations and individuals must take the initiative in making themselves competitive with other countries' increasingly skilled, educated, and low-cost workforces if they are to survive in this newly global economy. This perspective is buttressed by globalists' individualist ethos and their remarkably resilient faith in the logic of the market economy. [source] Human Resource Management Practices at Subsidiaries of Multinational Corporations and Local Firms in TaiwanINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SELECTION AND ASSESSMENT, Issue 1 2000Tung-Chun Huang Global competition has forced corporations to invest overseas in order to gain or maintain competitive advantage. International investment entails not only the movement of capital, machinery, and products but also the spread of corporate cultures to host countries. This is so because, to maintain managerial consistency among its branches, a multinational corporation (MNC) will attempt to transplant its management system to any country in which it invests.However, it is also recognized that cultural contexts differ markedly among nations, and that multinational firms must adjust their management practices to accommodate specific conditions in host-country environments. [source] An Evaluation of Flexible Workday Policies in Job Shops,DECISION SCIENCES, Issue 2 2002Kum-Khiong Yang ABSTRACT Job shops have long faced pressures for improvement in a challenging and volatile environment. Today's trends of global competition and shortening of product life cycles suggest that both the challenges and the intensity of market volatility will only increase. Consequently, the study of tactics for maximizing the flexibility and responsiveness of a job shop is important. Indeed, there is a significant body of literature that has produced guidelines on when and how to deploy tactics such as alternate routings for jobs and transfers of cross-trained workers between machines. In this paper we consider a different tactic by adjusting the length of workdays. Hours in excess of a 40-hour week are exchanged for compensatory time off at time and a half, and the total amount of accrued compensatory time is limited to no more than 160 hours in accordance with pending legislation. We propose several simple flexible workday policies that are based on an input/output control approach and investigate their performance in a simulated job shop. We find significant gains in performance over a fixed schedule of eight hours per day. Our results also provide insights into the selection of policy parameters. [source] Combining Economic and Conjoint Analysis to Determine Optimal Academic ServicesDECISION SCIENCES JOURNAL OF INNOVATIVE EDUCATION, Issue 1 2004Mona Whitley Howard ABSTRACT In today's era of global competition, organizations must manage their functions and activities in a manner such that they are responsive to customers' needs and can provide excellence in service to the customer while also being efficient and cost conscious. These issues are extremely common in corporate organizations, but such concerns are equally relevant in service industries, including institutions of higher education. This study is conducted at a private, undergraduate institution of higher education. We utilize focus group evaluation and conjoint analysis combined with economic analysis in the form of a newly designed preferred utility economic cost diagram to pick the ideal services that should be provided to enrolled students at the institution. The package of ideal services accounts for preferred utility expressed by students and a new methodology (preferred utility function) to balance these against financial considerations to optimize services and financial gains for a college adult education program. This combination of focus groups and mathematical techniques can be easily employed by educational institutes. [source] Design, Economic Development, and National Policy: Lessons from KoreaDESIGN MANAGEMENT REVIEW, Issue 4 2004Dong-Sung Cho In recent years, design has been a conscious and important element in Korea's growth strategy. Dong-Sung Cho reviews the impressive outcomes linked to this decision and confirms that the "design revolution" continues. Indeed, it is evolving to provide significant future opportunities not only for global competition, but also as a force for improving the quality of life within Korea itself. [source] LIMITED DISPERSAL, BUDDING DISPERSAL, AND COOPERATION: AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDYEVOLUTION, Issue 4 2009Rolf Kümmerli Numerous theoretical studies have investigated how limited dispersal may provide an explanation for the evolution of cooperation, by leading to interactions between relatives. However, despite considerable theoretical attention, there has been a lack of empirical tests. In this article, we test how patterns of dispersal influence the evolution of cooperation, using iron-scavenging in the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa as our cooperative trait. We found that relatively limited dispersal does not favor cooperation. The reason for this is that although limited dispersal increases the relatedness between interacting individuals, it also leads to increased local competition for resources between relatives. This result supports Taylor's prediction that in the simplest possible scenario, the effects of increased relatedness and local competition exactly cancel out. In contrast, we show that one way for cooperation to be favored is if individuals disperse in groups (budding dispersal), because this maintains high relatedness while reducing local competition between relatives (relatively global competition). [source] Transportation and the Geographical and Functional Integration of Global Production NetworksGROWTH AND CHANGE, Issue 4 2006JEAN-PAUL RODRIGUE ABSTRACT The growing interest in the relationships between transportation and globalization has spurred many inquires in the nature of production, consumption and distribution, especially within transport geography. It is widely acknowledged that improvements in transport and distribution have contributed to significant changes in the geographies of production (and vice versa). In a context of intense global competition and diminishing profit margins, logistics and the formation of global production networks offer additional opportunities to improve the efficiency of production through distribution strategies. The spatial and functional fragmentation of manufacturing and attempts at reducing inventories have led to smaller, more frequent and synchronized shipments, transforming the logistics industry, but placing intense pressures on transport systems to support these flows. The benefits derived from global production networks thus cannot be achieved without improvements in logistics and supply chain management. This article seeks to assess the conditions driving the global forms of production, distribution, and transport mainly by looking at the levels of geographical and functional integration of global production networks in view of the high level of fragmentation observed within them. However, there are still many uncertainties and delays in distribution, which can only be compensated by a better organization of freight distribution systems supporting global production networks. [source] Structured implementation of information systems for concurrent engineeringHUMAN FACTORS AND ERGONOMICS IN MANUFACTURING & SERVICE INDUSTRIES, Issue 4 2001Walter W.C. Chung This article presents a collaboration approach to assimilate the best practice of concurrent engineering (CE) in a small manufacturing enterprise for gaining sustainable improvements. The major challenge in CE is sharing a mental model of parallel working across departments in a company to shorten the cycle time, and across organizations to form a supply chain for global competition. Action learning is found useful to develop self-discipline in individuals to initiate changes and align the views with others both inside and outside the company for a vested interest to use information systems to make innovations for gaining competitive advantage. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [source] Multicriteria group decision making under incomplete preference judgments: Using fuzzy logic with a linguistic quantifierINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS, Issue 6 2007Duke Hyun Choi In the face of increasing global competition and complexity of the socioeconomic environment, many organizations employ groups in decision making. Inexact or vague preferences have been discussed in the decision-making literature with a view to relaxing the burden of preference specifications imposed on the decision makers and thus taking into account the vagueness of human judgment. In this article, we present a multiperson decision-making method using fuzzy logic with a linguistic quantifier when each group member specifies incomplete judgment possibly both in terms of the evaluation of the performance of different alternatives with respect to multiple criteria and on the criteria themselves. Allowing for incomplete judgment in the model, however, makes a clear selection of the best alternative by the group more difficult. So, further interactions with the decision makers may proceed to the extent to compensate for the initial comfort of preference specifications. These interactions, however, may not guarantee the selection of the best alternative to implement. To circumvent this deadlock situation, we present a procedure for obtaining a satisfactory solution by the use of a linguistic-quantifier-guided aggregation that implies the fuzzy majority. This is an approach that combines a prescriptive decision method via mathematical programming and a well-established approximate solution method to aggregate multiple objects. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Int Syst 22: 641,660, 2007. [source] Building on formal education: employers' approaches to the training and development of new recruits in the People's Republic of ChinaINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT, Issue 3 2003Katharine Venter Conceptions of modern management and of skill in China have developed out of quantitative, production oriented traditions that have tended to downplay the human side of management, training and development. Based on recent survey and case study research this paper argues that some organisations are moving away from such narrow definitions. These tend to be resource rich, larger enterprises, often in modern growth sectors and organisations exposed to foreign practice (either by virtue of foreign ownership or investment, or as a result of exposure to the pressures of global competition through operation in international markets). Skills shortages are faced by organisations throughout China. However, employers do not generally feel that the education system is serving to address these skills needs. The varying conceptions of modern management shape the manner in which organisations recruit from, and build, on formal education provision. Many resource rich employers are using formal education as a selection mechanism, selecting the educational elite and continuing to develop them. Those organisations that have limited access to highly qualified recruits are also least likely to be in a position to provide extensive or high quality training. Consequently the divide between resource rich and resource poor organisations, in terms of both organisational resources and employees' opportunities for skill acquisition, learning and development, seems likely to widen. [source] Local discourse and global competition: production experiences in family workshops of the BrianzaINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH, Issue 4 2003Simone Ghezzi One of the most important consequences of post-Fordist global restructuring has been the ,deterritorialization' of capital and its increasing geographic expansion. Another and quite different view emphasizes the fact that capitalist activity can be organized by means of localized or territorially based systems of specialized production. In this article my purpose is to show how these two disciplinary discourses are actually not mutually exclusive. Developed local economies are not immune from concerns of deterritorialization, nor should their economic achievement gloss over the glitches that are emerging at the local level due to stiffer global competition. These two aspects become immediately apparent as I illustrate the local discourse that emerges among workshop owners within an industrial district of the Brianza in the Italian region of Lombardy. After a discussion about the origin and the characteristics of this regional economy, I illustrate by way of ethnographic examples how innovation and competitiveness within and outside this industrial district mask forms of exploitation and contradictions amidst family-run workshops. In discursive terms, exploitation is articulated in various ways, but two in particular seem to be most recurrent in the narrative of small entrepreneurs of this region. One is the ideology of ,hard work' and the other, more recently heard of, is the ideology of ,high quality product'. In the brief concluding section I will stress the point that these two discourses emerging from exploitative social relations of production are to be viewed as responses to the concerns regarding the possible deterritorialization of some factories and the increasing competition with crossboundary markets. L'une des plus importantes conséquences de la restructuration mondiale post-fordiste a été la ,déterritorialisation' du capital et son expansion géographique croissante. Une autre opinion, tout à fait différente, avance que l'activité capitaliste peut s'organiser grâce à des systèmes localisés,ou liés à un territoire,de production spécialisée. Cet article a pour but de démontrer que ces deux discours disciplinaires ne sont, en fait, pas mutuellement exclusifs. Les économies locales développées ne sont pas à l'abri de problémes de déterritorialisation, pas plus que leurs résultats économiques ne doivent dissimuler les complications locales qui naissent d'une concurrence mondiale plus dure. Ces deux aspects se dégagent immédiatement du discours local émanant d'artisans du district industriel italien de Brianza en Lombardie. Après avoir présenté l'origine et les caractéristiques de cette économie régionale, l'article illustre par des exemples éthnographiques les façons dont innovation et compétitivité internes et externes à ce district masquent des formes d'exploitation et des contradictions au sein d'entreprises familiales. Logiquement, l'exploitation s'articule de manières diverses, mais deux d'entre eles semblent revenir très souvent dans le récit des petits entrepreneurs locaux. L'une tient à l'idéologie du ,dur labeur' et l'autre, plus récente, à celle du ,produit de qualité supérieure'. Une courte conclusion souligne que ces deux discours issus de relations sociales d'exploitation industrielle doivent être considérés comme des réactions aux préoccupations liées à la déterritorialisation de certaines usines et à la concurrence accrue avec des marchés transfrontaliers. [source] The Future of Japanese Manufacturing in the UKJOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT STUDIES, Issue 8 2002Glenn Morgan The expansion of Japanese FDI into the UK manufacturing sector during the 1980s and early 1990s gave rise to the debate on the Japanization of British industry. The paper argues that this debate was constructed from a Western perspective. It did not locate the strategies and structures of Japanese subsidiaries within the broader context of how Japanese multinational corporations were evolving in this period. The necessity to look at these issues from a more global perspective is reinforced by the changes which have occurred since the mid 1990s in the environment for Japanese multinationals. The global economy offers more choices to firms about their location as well as facing them with a more competitive environment. In the Japanese case, this is leading to a growing differentiation between standardized mass production (which can be located in Asia and Eastern Europe) and science,led sectors of industrial production (which necessitate location near to centres of research and development expertise in the USA and Europe). This means that Japanese firms are reconsidering the strategy and structure of their subsidiaries in the UK. Standardized mass production will only survive in the UK as long as costs can be pushed further down and productivity increased, both of which are difficult conditions to meet given possibilities elsewhere in the world for cheap mass production. The growing area of investment will be in science,based manufacturing, though here the UK will be competing against the USA and Germany for Japanese investment. Here, however, the organizational and management characteristics of Japanese subsidiaries will make the necessary connections with local managers and local networks of expertise difficult to achieve. Thus Japanese subsidiaries in the UK are in a period of prolonged uncertainty about their role in the future. These changes open up the necessity for a new agenda of research which goes beyond the Japanization approach and is concerned with the organization and management of Japanese multinationals in an era of global competition. [source] GEOGRAPHIC SCALE AND FUNCTIONAL SCOPE IN METROPOLITAN GOVERNANCE REFORM: THEORY AND EVIDENCE FROM GERMANYJOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS, Issue 2 2006Joachim K. Blatter New dichotomies emerge, for example, "jumping of scale" versus "relativation of scales"; "deterritorializiaton" versus "reterritorialization"; "spaces of place" versus "space of flows." These dichotomies can be interpreted as different proposals and/or diagnoses in respect to the geographic scale and functional scope of emerging institutions of metropolitan governance. The paper aims to trace the empirical question of which direction we are heading by analyzing recent metropolitan governance reforms in six West German metropolitan areas. The findings show that there is a general trend to create soft institutions of governance on a larger scale as a reaction to global competition and continental integration. Beyond this commonality, we discover quite different institutional trajectories. The regions which are strongly embedded in the global economy tend toward a "deterritorialized" form of metropolitan governance with rather weak institutions characterized by large geographic scales and functional specialization. In contrast, the regions which are not as much embedded in the global economy have been able to create strong governance institutions on a regional level characterized by a rather small geographic scope and based on a territorial logic of functional integration and geographic congruence. [source] Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights and Access to Medication: Does Egypt Have Sufficient Safeguards Against Potential Public Health Implications of the AgreementTHE JOURNAL OF WORLD INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, Issue 1 2010Heba Wanis The implementation of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement) in Egypt raised concerns over public health implications, resulting from pharmaceutical patents, especially because the Egyptian pharmaceutical industry is heavily dependent on generic production. The current level of global competition in the pharmaceutical market, together with the lack of local pharmaceutical research, threaten the industry, and, as a result, access to affordable medication is expected to be impaired. Determinants of access to medicines are analysed. An epidemiological overview of the most prevalent diseases in Egypt has been done in light of the results of surveys about changes in medicine prices and availability, to speculate about potential limitations in access to medicines. Considering domestic pharmaceutical pricing and marketing regulations, which are mainly concerned with affordability, together with the flexibilities in the TRIPS Agreement, short-term solutions to potential access problems will be possible. Egypt has the necessary theoretical safeguards against negative implications of the TRIPS Agreement on access to treatment. However, this does not necessarily mean that these safeguards will be implemented in a way that will protect against the implications of patent protection on medicines in the long term. [source] Global Commodity Chains and the Marxian Law of ValueANTIPODE, Issue 2 2010Guido Starosta Abstract:, This paper develops a Marxian critique of the "global commodity chain" (GCC) paradigm. It is argued that this approach fails to provide an actual explanation of the phenomenon it sets about to investigate. Instead, it offers a typological description of the immediate manifestations of the determinations at stake. As a consequence, the GCC approach one-sidedly conceptualises the relations among individual capitals within a commodity chain as the simple result of relations of power (or co-operation), that is, of direct social relations. By contrast, this paper argues that the latter are concrete mediations of the inner laws regulating the indirect social relations among individual capitals: the process of global competition through which the formation of the general rate of profit asserts itself. On this basis, it develops an alternative account of the social determinations underlying the genesis, structure and evolving configuration of GCCs as an expression of the unfolding of the Marxian "law of value". [source] Managing grapevines to optimise fruit development in a challenging environment: a climate change primer for viticulturistsAUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF GRAPE AND WINE RESEARCH, Issue 2010M. KELLER Abstract Grapevine reproductive development extends over two seasons, and the genotypic expression of yield potential and fruit composition is subject to environmental impacts, which include viticultural manipulations, throughout this period. This paper reviews current knowledge on yield formation and fruit composition and attempts to identify challenges, opportunities and priorities for research and practice. The present analysis of published information gives a critical appraisal of recent advances concerning variables, especially as they relate to global climate change, that influence yield formation and fruit composition at harvest. Exciting discoveries in fundamental research on the one hand and an increasing focus on outcomes and knowledge transfer on the other are enabling the development and implementation of practical recommendations that will impact grape production in the future. Future research should aim to minimise seasonal variation and optimise the profitable and sustainable production of high-quality fruit for specific uses in the face of climate change, water and labour shortages, shifting consumer preferences and global competition. Better control of product quantity and quality, and differentiation to meet consumer demands and market preferences will enhance the competitiveness and sustainability of the global grape and wine industries. [source] | ||||||||||||||||