This book details the foundations, new developments and methods, applications, and current challenges of systems engineering (SE). It provides key insights into SE as a concept and as an approach based on the holistic view on the entire lifecycle (requirements, design, production, and exploitation) of complex engineering systems, such as spacecraft, aircraft, power plants, and ships. Written by leading international experts, the book describes the achievements of the holistic, transdisciplinary approach of SE as state of the art both in research and practice using case study examples from originating at universities and companies such as Airbus, BAE Systems, BMW, Boeing, and COMAC. The reader obtains a comprehensive insight into the still existing challenges of the concept of SE today and the various forms in which SE is applied in a variety of areas.

The spectacular economic performance of China, East Asia and India during the last ten years has ignited some profound changes in the world economy. The share of global demand, investments, trade and production of the traditional industrialized powers, the US, Europe and Japan, has gradually yet continuously declined. This rise of China also has implications for Latin America. On the one hand, booming Chinese demand for raw materials and food has sustained the economic performance of Latin America during the last decade. On the other hand, the competitiveness of China and as a hub for advanced manufacturing is threatening Latin America's attempt to diversify its economy from its dependence on the export of natural resource-based goods. Most Latin American countries are not however waiting passively for their economies to become ever more reliant on high prices for food, minerals and oil. Leveraging the economic and political stability that they achieved during the last decades, many countries in the region, such as Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica and Uruguay, are attempting to capture the growing market for knowledge intensive products and services by breeding their own Silicon Valleys. This book discusses the promotion of ICT clusters in Latin America by analyzing the development of the Costa Rican cluster in particular, an often celebrated case of successful policy in the region. Costa Rica, a small country traditionally known for its coffee and wildlife, managed to build an information technology cluster within ten years, becoming the leading producer of ICT per capita in Latin America. Studying the Costa Rican case provides a solid starting point for understanding the challenges of building ICT clusters in Latin America.

In this new book, Hara, Kambayashi and Matsushima gather together a collection of case studies of innovation in various industries in modern Japan, including automobile, electronics, semiconductor, component, chemical, pharmaceutical and service industries. Unlike other books in this area, this book focuses on a broader range of Japanese industries from the post world war era to the modern day and considers the relationships between the characteristics of innovation and the features of Japanese society. These chapters demonstrate Japan's shift from being product-oriented and domestic to being business system-oriented and global. Meanwhile the process of innovation in Japan continues to include the tendency of eliminating uncertainty through intimate in-process interaction between different functions, rather than through preset rule or contracts. This book goes some way in challenging accepted notions of Japanese innovation, emphasising new and diverse trends and practises.

More than thirty years ago the political turn that brought the dismantling of agricultural collectives and exclusive rights to small plots of farmland for rural families initiated a historic return to smallholding in the People's Republic of China. Today, agriculture in China is changing again. In many villages smallholder farming is giving way to large agricultural enterprises. This book explores this latest transformation of Chinese agriculture. It traces how the peasantry's frustration with the farming conditions, the priorities of national and local political agents and the changes in the management of collective land since the return to family-based farming have paved the way for a unique Chinese agrarian transition. The argument is based on careful analysis of agricultural politics since the early 1980s and data gathered in three field trips to Shandong, Sichuan, and Guizhou Provinces between 2008 and 2010. The findings highlight the importance of institutional path-dependencies and strategic government intervention (or its absence) for economic transformation. China's Agrarian Transition is one of the first comprehensive accounts of the latest developments in agriculture in the People's Republic and will provide a stimulating read for political scientists, sociologists, economists, and experts on China interested in the ongoing transformation of China's countryside.

The Progressive Era was among the most volatile times for the economy and labor in American History. Daniel E. Saros explores the institutional and economic conditions of this time, revealing new insight into the regulated nature of industry and the conditions of labor. Using the steel industry as a case study, Saros demonstrates how the United States Steel Corporation enhanced the performance of the steel industry by initiating a price and wage stabilization program. In an effort to combat potential threats from the federal government, the American public, and organized labor to the market stabilization program and mechanization drive, the steel companies introduced a paternalistic welfare program, company unions, and limited hours reform. Saros also contrasts this time with free market periods, examining the impacts on rates of profit, output growth, and capital accumulation.

This is the first book to examine the "nuts and bolts" of production processes. It proposes a truly consilient approach to modeling production processes - one that goes beyond the vague principles found in standard economics - and provides details that are consistent with the applied mechanics and engineering literature. Providing a credible analysis of some of the most pressing questions of our era, such as the productivity slowdown and the information paradox, and bridging the gap between engineering, applied physics, economics, and management science, this book is a fascinating read for anyone interested in industry, the modern economy, and how physical factors constrain productivity growth.

To whom does a father, retiring from his life as a successful entrepreneur, pass control of the business he has built? Once it would always have been his eldest son, but increasingly women are becoming involved in family firms having risen to positions of influence and leadership. Using revealing case studies from the daughters who succeeded their entrepreneur fathers in a wide variety of challenging situations, cultures and continents, Father-Daughter Succession in Family Business discusses the changes which have led to daughters gaining influence in more and more family businesses. It looks at the tensions this succession can produce between old notions of how men and women should behave, and the new style of leadership that often comes about when a woman takes the helm. This book will help consultants, business educators, and researchers, as well as those who are themselves involved in significant family managed enterprises to better understand why it can no longer be assumed in any part of the World that the first born son will take over the reins of the family business.

In today's increasingly competitive business environment, organizations must be able to adapt to the ever-changing business landscape where traditional business concepts no longer ensure success. The future will be driven by value and competing ideas -- creating an environment where old alignments and equations will be replaced by a global network of projects and brand equity can evaporate quickly. Scale business relationships or perish is becoming the new mantra. Written by a team of authors from the world's largest software outsourcer, Web-Based and Traditional Outsourcing explains how to leverage the Web to effectively manage and deploy people, resources, and competencies -- regardless of their location. It introduces ground-breaking business models and frameworks that add significant value to outsourcing. This cutting-edge reference: * Integrates sourcing, acquisition, payment, and sales into a single end-to-end solution * Addresses outsourced project management, as well as the offer and acceptance of technology services * Details how to reduce costs and improve delivery times in software projects through reuse * Explains risk sharing, co-ownership, win-win business approaches, and equity-based contracts Examining emerging trends and the future of outsourcing, the text provides authoritative insights into what are becoming the new ways of doing business. The authors supply the enterprise-wide vision of corporate capabilities needed to address contemporary outsourcing issues and include helpful tools for evaluating offshore vendors and determining the best location for your infrastructure needs.

While there were many factors that triggered the widespread financial crisis of 2008-2010, at least one may have been increasing inequality in the United States economy. With the distributional divide wider than at any time since the Great Depression, the wealthy poured money into increasingly speculative investments even as those at the bottom of the income distribution borrowed just to stay above water.

Long before the national meltdown helped to make this point, the notion that inequality might actually damage economic growth was gaining ground at another geographic level: that of the metropolitan region. Throughout the US, many key metropolitan actors, including collaboratives of business, civic and community leaders, have accepted the notion that a more inclusive economic approach could actually shore up the social consensus and human capital needed to compete in a global economy.

So what are the possibilities for this "Just Growth"? This book seeks to address this and other key questions with a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis. Utilizing a sample of the largest 192 metropolitan regions in the United States, the authors use a quantitative approach to identify those regions with above average performance in terms of economic growth and social equity indicators, and conduct regression-style analysis to explore the demographic, political and economic determinants behind the phenomenon.

Breaking new ground in its innovative blend of quantitative and qualitative methods, the book essentially argues that another sort of growth is indeed possible. While offering specific insights for regional leaders and analysts of metropolitan areas, the authors also draw a broader - and quite timely - set of conclusions about how to scale up these efforts to address a U.S. economy still seeking to recover from economic crisis and ameliorate distributional divisions.

This book examines the political origins of financial institutions across fifteen developed democracies, with focused case studies on the US, France, Japan, Austria, and Germany. The institutional arrangements of financial systems are widely seen as a central distinguishing feature of 'varieties of capitalism'. Through a wide-range of case studies, this book contends that political battles between landed interests, labor, and owners of capital have fundamentally shaped modern financial arrangements. Demonstrating how these conflicts have shaped contemporary financial architecture in a number of different contexts, author Richard W. Carney offers an innovative approach to explaining the distinctive capitalist arrangements of nation-states. By demonstrating the importance of landed interests to nations' institutional configurations, the book has clear implications for developing countries such as India and China. Providing a detailed account of the development of financial institutions, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of political science, sociology, business, finance, and law. It will also offer insights valuable to government policymakers, analysts at international organizations, and the business community.

This book examines how businesses manage their labour systems, and particularly how they manage the complex interaction of factors which give rise to instances of 'partnership' style relations between businesses and their employees. The book draws from the literature concerning 'Varieties of Capitalism' (VoC) and the different institutional and regulatory designs inherent in different types of political economy. The book is informed by a new and extensive set of empirical data from Australia that examines the activities of national and multinational business corporations, their outlooks and relationships with stakeholders, and relates these to new and evolving theoretical frameworks based in political economy and law. The book places the Australian regulatory model within this international debate, and assesses the extent to which the system does or does not fit into the general categorisation created in the VoC literature.

Research in Health Economics has developed into a separate discipline during the last 25 years. All this intense research activity has come about through the teaching of courses on health economics, mostly at graduate level. However, the Industrial Organization aspects of the health care market do not occupy a central place in those courses. We propose a textbook of health economics whose distinguishing feature is the analysis of the health care market from an Industrial Organization perspective. This textbook will provide teachers and students with a reference to study the market structure aspects of the health care sector.

The book is structured in three parts. The first part will present the basic principles of economics. It will bring all readers to the required level of knowledge to follow subsequent parts. Part II will review the main concepts of health economics. The third part will contain the core of the book. It will present the industrial organization analysis of the health care market, based on our own research.

Written by eminent scholars who are well known within their fields across Europe, this book explores changes in the international economic environment, their impacts on the strategy of firms and the spatial consequences of these changes in strategy. The economic environment in which major companies operate is subject to rapid and important changes. Such changes have their impact on the strategy of major and even smaller companies and changes in these firm's strategies often have important implications for the location choice of their activities, be it production, outsourcing, R&D or administrative activities. Addressing these issues in a clear yet rigorous manner, this book is an excellent resource for students and researchers working and studying in the areas of international business, corporations, business strategy, economic geography and business geography.

Stability of the electricity industry is crucial for economic growth of all nations. Sustainable economic growth cannot be accomplished without secured energy supply. The book underlines how management of the electricity industry should be conducted and the efficient form of electricity market structure. The book also studies the electricity industry in Korea which has been a strongly supportive and vital factor in the economic development of Korea for the last few decades. The book focuses on the three market players of the electricity market and they are the suppliers, consumers and the government-related organizations. It includes detailed information on generation and finances at the generator level and analyzes the efficiency differences among generators, plants and business units by using different performance measurement methods. It identifies and analyzes different production factors' effectiveness and relationships in generation. The comprehensive analysis helps to provide explanations in the differences in the performance of the studied units. The book also discusses the implications of the findings for future resource allocation and how we can further enhance the efficiency of the industry. The book will appeal to those interested in energy and energy policies, as well as researchers and practitioners in the economic development and electricity and utilities industry.

First published in 1974, Trade Unions and Society examines the process by which trade unions sought and achieved recognition in the three decades after 1850. It shows a parallel process: on the one hand, trade unionists struggling to attain the indispensable Victorian virtue, 'respectability', without sacrificing their essentially protective functions; on the other hand, employers recognizing the value of an ordered system of industrial relation in which trade unions could exert discipline and control over their workers. While this was going on, middle-class radicals (often themselves employers) continued their attack on aristocratic domination of political institutions and looked to a 'labour aristocracy' as allies. The book shows the manner in which, thanks to their own efforts and those of their indefatigable publicists, unionists became identified with the respectable elite of the working class. It deals with a crucial period in the trade union development but looks at it not merely from the point of view of the unions, but also that of the employers, politicians, the press, intellectuals, political economists, giving for the first time a rounded picture of trade unionism and industrial relations in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. This book will be of interest to students of economics and history.

First published in 1987, Incentives and Economic Systems is a selection of papers presented at the Eighth Arne Ryde Symposium at Frostavallen, Sweden on how institutions attempt to guide individual behaviour by manipulating the social and economic incentive system. These economic and social aspects of incentives determine 'rational' and 'irrational' behaviour by individuals and organizations across various economic systems. The essays in the volume deal with various aspects of the incentive problems and the various manifestations of such problems, along with moral and ethical issues. The essays will be an enlightening read for students of economics, policymaking and international politics.

A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR A call to action for the creative class and labour movement to rally against the power of Big Tech and Big Media. Corporate concentration has breached the stratosphere, as have corporate profits. An ever-expanding constellation of industries are now monopolies (where sellers have excessive power over buyers) or monopsonies (where buyers hold the whip hand over sellers) - or both. Scholar Rebecca Giblin and writer and activist Cory Doctorow argue we're in a new era of 'chokepoint capitalism', with exploitative businesses creating insurmountable barriers to competition that enable them to capture value that should rightfully go to others. All workers are weakened by this, but the problem is especially well illustrated by the plight of creative workers. By analysing book publishing and news, live music and music streaming, screenwriting, radio, and more, Giblin and Doctorow deftly show how powerful corporations construct 'anti-competitive flywheels' designed to lock in users and suppliers, make their markets hostile to new entrants, and then force workers and suppliers to accept unfairly low prices. In the book's second half, Giblin and Doctorow explain how to batter through those chokepoints, with tools ranging from transparency rights to collective action and ownership, radical interoperability, contract terminations, job guarantees, and minimum wages for creative work. Chokepoint Capitalism is a call to workers of all sectors to unite to help smash these chokepoints and take back the power and profit that's being heisted away - before it's too late.

This innovative book portrays the state-of-the-art of coopetition strategy regarded as a compelling mindset to exploit entirely the potential of actors' interdependencies (firms, governments, suppliers, customers, scientists and partners) in today's global scenarios. It provides the rudiments for navigating an exploration journey into a virtually new and emergent management subfield. This volume presents three key distinctive features: it is the first attempt that delves systematically and rigorously into coopetition strategy and coopetitive behaviour; it clearly elucidates the contribution of coopetition to the advancement of strategic management and managerial practice; it is the outcome of the collective brains of several scholars, with diverse geographical roots and backgrounds, who cultivate original research on co-opetition strategy from a variety of perspectives (economic, managerial, political) and multiple methods (theory building, game-theoretical, experimental and inductive case-based inquiries). Looking into this volume, the reader will realize that, while the topic is at the beginning of its lifecycle, coopetition strategy has touched an important crossroads which solicits a more comprehensive and systematic assessment. If mindfully formulated and implemented, this hybrid strategic option is able to increase returns and generate value for shareholders, entrepreneurs, managers and coopetitors.

Over the past twenty years air fares in Europe have fallen steadily. New entrant airlines such as Ryanair and Easyjet have become the largest passenger airlines in Europe, old national airlines have become commercialised and staff productivity of airlines and airports now compete. The reason behind these changes was the change in policy from protecting national airlines to market competition. This book documents a dramatic change in the economic policy surrounding the low-cost airlines and the airport industry as a whole. In this fascinating monograph, Dr Barrett provides a full deregulation case study from market control by national airlines through regulatory capture of governments to the transformed competitive market today. The topics covered include the deregulation of Europe's busiest route - London to Dublin, the market entry of Ryanair and its sustainability, the outlook for full service airlines, the commercialisation of national airlines and the impact of airports on competing airlines. Through a discussion of controversial issues such as the regulation capture of government by protected airlines, the dominance of producers over consumers in protected markets and the costs of protectionism in aviation to the wider economy, Dr Barrett's book will be of interest to anyone involved in the airline business, as well as to wider public or competition policy-makers.

First Published in 1936, Industrial Employment and Unemployment in West Yorkshire presents the trends of employment and unemployment on the basis of official statistics. West Yorkshire is in many respects a representative British industrial region. Though not enjoying as great prosperity as London and the South Midlands, it has escaped the severe depression experienced in Lancashire, South Wales, Scotland, and the North of England. The position in the predepression years, the magnitude of the depression and the course of the recovery are brought under review. These changes inevitably affect the industrial structure of an area. An estimate is made of the surplus of labour in the area and of the possibility of reabsorbing this surplus into industry. This book is an essential archival resource for scholars and researchers of British economy, labour economics, labour history and economics in general.

This book explores the relationship between space and economy, the spatial expressions of the knowledge economy. The capitalist industrial economy produced its own space, which differed radically from its predecessor agrarian and mercantile economies. If a new knowledge-based economy is emerging, it is similarly expected to produce its own space to suit the new circumstances of production and consumption. If these spatial expressions do exist, even if in incomplete and partial forms, they are likely to be the model for the future of cities.

Originally published in 1965 and written by a noted economist and leader in the field of conflict resolution, this book traces the forces which have brought the 20th century 'post-civilisation' into being: the ever-increasing power of science and the scientific attitude, the global communication network, the high efficiency of industrial societies. New conditions pointed to a life of ease but also enormous problems. The book discusses how though our technical resources have become immense, social and psychological conflicts remain. The author's training in psychology and economics combines with a deep sense of history to create a book which is as relevant now as when it was first published.

Defines the correct cost optimization process Provides detailed explanation of cost estimating techniques Presents cost estimating techniques for various manufacturing processes Offers cost based negotiation training Explains how to build a cost engineering organization

Focusing on the design and implementation of computer-based automatic machine tools, David F. Noble challenges the idea that technology has a life of its own. Technology has been both a convenient scapegoat and a universal solution, serving to disarm critics, divert attention, depoliticize debate, and dismiss discussion of the fundamental antagonisms and inequalities that continue to beset America. This provocative study of the postwar automation of the American metal-working industry--the heart of a modern industrial economy--explains how dominant institutions like the great corporations, the universities, and the military, along with the ideology of modern engineering shape, the development of technology. Noble shows how the system of "numerical control," perfected at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and put into general industrial use, was chosen over competing systems for reasons other than the technical and economic superiority typically advanced by its promoters. Numerical control took shape at an MIT laboratory rather than in a manufacturing setting, and a market for the new technology was created, not by cost-minded producers, but instead by the U. S. Air Force. Competing methods, equally promising, were rejected because they left control of production in the hands of skilled workers, rather than in those of management or programmers. Noble demonstrates that engineering design is influenced by political, economic, managerial, and sociological considerations, while the deployment of equipment--illustrated by a detailed case history of a large General Electric plant in Massachusetts--can become entangled with such matters as labor classification, shop organization, managerial responsibility, and patterns of authority. In its examination of technology as a human, social process, "Forces of Production" is a path-breaking contribution to the understanding of this phenomenon in American society.