From the back cover: The fundamental question addressed by this study is the extent to which service functions formerly performed within industrial firms have been contracted out. If the service sector has grown primarily because manufacturing and other industries have contracted out janitorial, security and other business services, then there in not much economic significance to service sector growth. This also implies that observed declines in manufacturing employment may also represent nothing more than inter-sectoral shifts in the location of employment. This study breaks new ground in developing a series of statistical approaches to the measurement of contracting out. Based on a solid theoretical framework, three new empirical measures of contracting out are presented. The results vary somewhat by method but the overall conclusion is that contracting out is an important phenomenon.

This book evaluates how and why vertical disintegration has occurred in the global corporate hotel industry, as it undergoes a structural transformation. It provides a unique insight into the new competitive landscape. Underpinned by academic literature, it includes first-hand accounts from the most eminent senior executives of firms in and around the industry. It provides an in-depth perspective of a modern industrial phenomenon and makes observations as to the profitable way forward for the industry. This text is an important read for those working, advising and investing in the sector as well as for students, graduates and researchers.

Successful corporate strategies, says this leading professor of management, depend upon dynamic marshaling of a firm's "invisible assets"--information-based resources such as technological know-how, the visibility of a brand name, or knowledge of a customer base--as well as tangible assets such as people, goods, and money. Hiroyuki Itami emphasizes the ways strategy must fit the firm's external environment (customers, competitors, and ever-changing technology) and also the importance of internal fit within the organization. He uses invisible assets as a single organizing concept to discuss the appropriateness of strategy in each area.Strategy, Itami insists, must be adapted to rapidly changing conditions and must sometimes be prepared in advance of expected change. The most powerful strategy may often intentionally create imbalance in the short run in order to accumulate invisible assets and energize the organization. Itami examines successful strategies of Japanese firms, which have always operated in an environment of uncertainty and all-pervasive change. Sony and Honda are not the only examples, however--Itami also discusses IBM, Volkswagen, and the Swiss watch industry. The range of examples gives the book wide applicability and appeal to American business executives, who are now facing a similar situation of rapid change.The clarity and sound construction of Itami's argument will make it useful not only to MBAs and theorists of international business and comparative management, but also to "real world" planners and managers who are currently coping with just the sort of situations Itami describes.

A pragmatic vision of how democratic socialism can overcome the economic, workplace, political, environmental, social, and international crises that we face today.

In this paper, the authors describe and explore a new algorithmic approach to constructing concordances between the International Patent Classification (IPC) system and industry classification systems that organize economic data. This ‘Algorithmic Links with Probabilities’ (ALP) approach incorporates text analysis software and keyword extraction programs and applies them to a comprehensive patent dataset. The authors conclude with a discussion on some of the possible applications of the concordance and provide a sample analysis that uses their preferred ALP concordance to analyze international patent flows based on trade patterns.

A commanding survey of the world economy from 1950 to the present, from the author of the acclaimed The Boom and the Bubble.