SummaryThe focus of many European and American companies is currently on "modular"strategies in product design and production. A modular product has individualelements which are designed independently but function together as a seamless whole.In this article Mari Sako and Fiona Murray compare...

What factors facilitate and constrain the sustained development and replication of organizational capabilities at suppliers? This question is addressed in a comparison of historical case studies at Toyota, Nissan and Honda in Japan. First, as expected, replication difficulty is overcome by...

This comparison of labor-management relations at Deutsche Telekom (DT) and NTT Group (formerly Nippon Telephone and Telegraph) demonstrates the value of considering both institutions and strategic decision-making to understand the interaction between companies and unions. As corporations...

This paper investigates how employee representation affects, and is affected by, the way corporations structure themselves. In the analytical framework employed in the paper, the structure of the corporation and national labour institutions constitute key constraints on the goals of unions and...

This paper provides a discussion of key issues which emerged from a review of the debate on offshoring and outsourcing. Although offshoring is not a new phenomenon, the current phase of offshoring is marked by the increased tradability of services enabled by ICT. The paper puts forward a clear...

This Briefing Note considers recent trends in specialisation, outsourcing and offshoring of business services. Specialisation within a firm happens when a firm organises an activity in a specialised unit, for example, when a firm moves payroll activities out of the back office of a factory, and...

Books reviewed in this article: Masahisa Fujita and Jacques-Francois Thisse - Economics of Agglomeration: Cities, Industrial Location, and Regional Growth Timothy J. Bartik - Jobs for the Poor: Can Labor Policies Help? Miriam Solomon - Social Empiricism Nicole Pohl - Mobility in Space and Time:...

The global value chain (GVC) governance framework by Gereffi et al (2005) posits that ‘governance', i.e. the character of linkages in business networks, tends to vary in specific ways (market, modular, relational, captive, hierarchy) depending on transactional characteristics (complexity,...