American Factories Research Articles

Effect of exopolysaccharides on phage-host interactions in Lactococcus lactis.

In this study, we report that Lactococcus lactis strains producing exopolysaccharides (EPS) are sensitive to virulent phages. Eight distinct lytic phages (Q61 to Q68) specifically infecting Eps(+) strains were isolated in 47 buttermilk samples obtained from 13 North American factories. The eight phages were classified within the 936 species by the multiplex PCR method, indicating that these phages are not fundamentally distinct from those infecting Eps(-) L. lactis strains. The host range of these phages was determined with 19 Lactococcus strains, including 7 Eps(+) and 12 Eps(-) cultures. Three phages (Q62, Q63, and Q64) attacked only the Eps(+) strain SMQ-419, whereas the five other phages (Q61, Q65, Q66, Q67, and Q68) infected only the Eps(+) strain SMQ-420. The five other Eps(+) strains (H414, MLT2, MLT3, SMQ-461, and SMQ-575) as well as the 12 Eps(-) strains were insensitive to these phages. The monosaccharide composition of the polymer produced by the seven Eps(+) strains was determined. The EPS produced by strains MLT3, SMQ-419, and SMQ-575 contained glucose, galactose, and rhamnose. The EPS fabricated by H414 contained only galactose. The EPS made by MLT2, SMQ-420, and SMQ-461 contained glucose and galactose. These findings indicate that the sugar composition of the EPS has no effect on phage sensitivity. The plasmid encoding the eps operon was cured from the two phage-sensitive strains. The cured derivatives were still phage sensitive, which indicates that EPS are not necessary for phage infection. Phage adsorption assays showed that the production of EPS does not confer a significant phage resistance phenotype.

Historical cohort study of 10 109 men in the North American vinyl chloride industry, 1942–72: update of cancer mortality to 31 December 1995

OBJECTIVESTo update and assess mortality from neoplasms to 31 December 1995 among 10 109 men employed in a job exposed to vinyl chloride for at least 1 year between 1942...

Approches critiques du travail industriel entre les deux guerres: la place de Georges Friedmann

What place did Georges Friedmann have, between the two World wars and before his break with Communism, among other critical intellectuals and observers of the world of labor in industry? The works of three authors, L. Martin with his concrete method in the social sciences; the pastor Bremond with his differential sociology; and H. Dubreuil, a former member of the CGT labor union and a witness to the working conditions in American factories serve to highlight the originality and biases in Friedmann's thought. This article is an exercise in applying epistemology to problems of direct concern to us, namely: the relations between methods and commitments, between science and ideology, and between the scientific posture and the production of knowledge.

Technology Implementation: A Comparative Study Of Canadian And U.S. Factories

A study of 204 technology implementation projects found that there is a significant difference between the overall efficiency of American and Canadian factories. The superior efficiency of American plants at implementing technology is a result of better outcomes for factories which are part of multibranch networks. The specific technology under study is the implementation of CFC-alternative cleaning systems in the North American electronic circuit assembly industry. Results were obtained using data envelopment analysis and a Wilcoxon rank sum test to consider differences in project complexity, efficiency (time to implement), and effectiveness (ability to obtain all possible benefits).

Thinking ecologically: the next generation of environmental policy

Twenty-five years ago, the Cuyahoga River in Ohio was so contaminated that it caught fire, air pollution in some cities was thick enough to taste, and environmental laws focused on the obvious enemy: large American factories with belching smokestacks and pipes gushing wastes. Federal legislation has succeeded in providing cleaner air and water, but we now confront a different set of environmental problems-less visible and more subtle. This important book offers thought-provoking ideas on how America can respond to changing public health and ecological risks and create sound environmental policy for the future. The innovative thinkers of the Next Generation Project of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy-experts from business, government, nongovernmental organizations, and academia-propose reforms that balance environmental efforts with other public needs and issues. They call for new foundations for environmental law and policy, adoption of a more diverse set of policy tools and strategies (economic incentives, ecolabels), and new connections between critical sectors (agriculture, energy, transportation, service providers) and environmental policy. Future progress must involve not only officials from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and state environmental protection departments, say the authors, but also decision-makers as diverse as mayors, farmers, energy company executives, and delivery route planners. To be effective, next-generation policy-making will view environmental challenges comprehensively, connect academic theory with practical policy, and bridge the gaps that have caused recent policy debates to break down in rancor. This book begins the process of accomplishing these challenging goals.

The Japanese World of Work and North American Factories

This paper argues that the Japanese advantage in the world market is not, as is frequently claimed, based on a set of techniques for the organization and management of production. As a result, neither the simple export nor the emulation of these techniques can insure Japanese levels of labor peace, productivity and quality outside of Japan. Instead, the Japanese advantage is based on the aggregate result of these techniques in the context of Japanese society, or the so-called Japanese "world of work." The world of work in Japan is then discussed in detail. This paper shows that although Japanese companies strenuously tried to recreate this world of work in North America, they have failed because of important differences between North American and Japanese societies.

Car Industry

The European and North American automotive industries are facing a strong challenge posed by the Japanese automotive industry. Recent investigations predict the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs when the import restrictions on the European automotive market are completely lifted. What is the basis for these prognoses? The success of Japanese companies on the world market and their significant growth rates over the last few years are often explained by references to Far Eastern entrepreneurialism, based on an autonomous cultural identity. In addition, new manufacturing technologies and organisational innovations such as KANBAN and JIT are said to be involved. An MIT study covering the last five years concluded that Japanese companies produce two or three times as many cars per worker as European or American factories. This also applies to so-called transplants, assembly plants in Europe or North America under Japanese management. The advantages of this high productivity have been summarized in the expression ‘lean production’, which describes an integrated approach to the manufacturing process. This comprehensive approach is based on a simultaneous engineering process which combines product and manufacturing tool design and development, material requirement planning, close ties with suppliers and not least, continuous improvements to the quality of the manufacturing process. This paper deals with three alternative reactions to this challenge. The means of combatting this challenge are presented using concrete examples. Individual stages in the supply chain will be examined in greater detail, and opportunities for improvement proposed.

Fair Play in the Marketplace: The First Battle for Pure Food and Drugs by Mitchell Okun

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 315 Fair Play in the Marketplace: The First Battlefor Pure Food and Drugs. By Mitchell Okun. De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986. pP· xv+ 345; illustrations, notes, appendixes, bibliography, index. $27.50. This book, based on Mitchell Okun’s 1983 doctoral dissertation in history at the City University of New York, explores federal and state efforts to regulate the quality of food and drugs in the decades pre­ ceding the passage of the landmark Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906. It focuses on the enactment and enforcement of regulatory laws be­ tween 1848, when Congress first passed such legislation, prohibiting the importation of adulterated drugs, and 1886, when the same body voted for the first time to regulate a domestic food product, oleo­ margarine. Although three states—New York, New Jersey, and Mas­ sachusetts—enacted food-and-drug legislation during this period, Okun devotes most of his attention to events occurring between the mid-1860s and the mid-1880s in New York, where a mixed bag of reformers sought in the name of public health to enhance their own professional and economic well-being. No doubt because the regu­ lation of drugs has been treated in such works as James Harvey Young’s The Toadstool Millionaires: A Social History of Patent Medicines in America before Federal Regulation (1961), Okun looks most carefully at the pre­ viously neglected debates over the manufacture and sale of foodstuffs, from sugar and spices to coffee and mustard. Efforts to prevent the adulteration of milk, regarded by reformers as “the most central of all foods,” and to restrict the production of oleomargarine, which generated the most “acrimony and excitement,” receive special attention. In passages scattered throughout his book, Okun attributes the heightened concern about pure food and drugs to technological de­ velopments that led to the rapid expansion of the pharmaceutical and food-processing industries and placed the production and distribution ofthese commodities in the hands of strangers. He notes, for example, that “The sudden ubiquity of canned and packaged foods, ‘the ready sale of myriad food products brought from all parts of the world by means of ever swifter transportation and improved methods of re­ frigeration,’ was a revolutionary change for the city dweller” (p. 88), who became increasingly suspicious about the possibility of adulter­ ation. But Okun never spells out the connection between fear of technological development and support for antiadulteration laws, and he cites little direct evidence to support his claim. What he does very well is to expose the mixed motives behind the agitation for food-and-drug legislation and the often questionable ethics of those most actively involved. Despite all the rhetoric about protecting the public health, support for legislation came in large part from businessmen who wished to “regularize the market, quash neg­ 316 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE ative publicity, improve their public image, eliminate ‘unfair’ com­ petition, and in general, increase sales” (p. 289). Like so many other “reformers,” they turned to the government to ensure “fair play in the marketplace.” Ronald L. Numbers Dr. Numbers is professor of the history of medicine and the history of science at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. His publications include Sickness and Health in America: Readings in the History ofMedicine and Public Health (2d ed.; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), coedited with Judith Walzer Leavitt, and Medicine in the New World: New Spain, New France, and New England (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987). A Concrete Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and European Modern Ar­ chitecture. By Reyner Banham. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986. Pp. ix + 266; illustrations, notes, index. $25.00. Reyner Banham’s A Concrete Atlantis entices the reader with the promise of a fascinating tour through early-20th-century American industrial architecture. His purpose is not simply to examine the his­ tory of industrial buildings but to lead us eventually to the beginnings of European modern architecture. To European architects, suggests the author, American factories and grain elevators represented a new society based on scientific rationality. Banham compares the new in­ dustrial society to Bacon’s “New Atlantis”; hence the book’s title. He argues that “there is a...

A Concrete Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture by Reyner Banham

316 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE ative publicity, improve their public image, eliminate ‘unfair’ com­ petition, and in general, increase sales” (p. 289). Like so many other “reformers,” they turned to the government to ensure “fair play in the marketplace.” Ronald L. Numbers Dr. Numbers is professor of the history of medicine and the history of science at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. His publications include Sickness and Health in America: Readings in the History ofMedicine and Public Health (2d ed.; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), coedited with Judith Walzer Leavitt, and Medicine in the New World: New Spain, New France, and New England (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987). A Concrete Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and European Modern Ar­ chitecture. By Reyner Banham. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986. Pp. ix + 266; illustrations, notes, index. $25.00. Reyner Banham’s A Concrete Atlantis entices the reader with the promise of a fascinating tour through early-20th-century American industrial architecture. His purpose is not simply to examine the his­ tory of industrial buildings but to lead us eventually to the beginnings of European modern architecture. To European architects, suggests the author, American factories and grain elevators represented a new society based on scientific rationality. Banham compares the new in­ dustrial society to Bacon’s “New Atlantis”; hence the book’s title. He argues that “there is a causal, cultural, and conscious connection” between the utilitarian structures and the work of Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, leaders of the modern movement (p. 3). He examines the connection through the writings and buildings of both architects as they look to American builders who “have retained a natural feeling for large compact forms fresh and intact” (p. 9). Historians of technology will appreciate Banham calling attention to these interesting and important structures, but Banham’s primary audience is the architectural historian, for he concentrates on the aesthetics of the individual buildings rather than on what went on inside or how and why a new factory type emerged. His scrupulous attention to architectural changes brought by new construction tech­ nology belies his neglect of the industrial demands that lay behind the transformation of early-20th-century factories. The period cov­ ered (1900—1925) was a time of great change in American industry, when engineers rationalized both production and the buildings that housed it. Banham overlooks the practicality of the owners of industry and overemphasizes the role of aesthetics in the designing of factories and grain elevators. The engineering ideal—scientific production— rather than architectural aesthetics was the main force behind the transformation of the American factory. TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 317 The book is divided into three long chapters—“The Daylight Fac­ tory,” “The Grain Elevator,” and “Modernism and Americanism.” In the first two, Banham surveys dozens of industrial buildings, describ­ ing their structural and design details. “The Daylight Factory” pro­ vides a lengthy discussion of the transition from wood and masonry mill buildings to the reinforced concrete and steel-framed daylight factory. He illustrates the transition by examining several factories in Buffalo, New York, most notably the Larkin Company’s plant. The second chapter is a unique contribution to the literature for there is little written about grain elevators. Here Banham pays more attention to functional concerns; he tells us how a grain elevator works and why it looks the way it does and describes the problems ofgrain storage as well as solutions experimented with during the 19th century. In chapter three, Banham presents his thesis. Discussing the work of Gropius and Le Corbusier and looking closely at their architecture, writing, and lectures, Banham constructs a persuasive argument show­ ing the ways in which the architects drew on American industrial models. American structures (in North and South America, not just the United States) fascinated Gropius; he wrote that they “can almost bear comparison with the work of the ancient Egyptians in their over­ whelming monumental power” (p. 202). One wishes that this intrigu­ ing thesis had been drawn out, extended beyond European industrial architecture, and sprinkled through the rest of the work. One of the book’s strengths lies in the rich illustrations, including reprints from early sources such as...

Suggestion rates and sociotechnical systems in Japanese versus American factories: beyond quality circles

Available information for two samples of factory organizations on the US and Japan are compared. Japanese factories are found to differ systematically from those in America in terms of several characteristics. These include marketing outputs, input of materials, machine automation, methods of production, human resource development, motivating incentives, and willingness to work. Moreover, available data suggest that the Japanese plants are outperforming those in the American sample. It is proposed that one reason is the higher rate of suggestions by employees in Japan. Causes and consequences of suggestion rates in the two nations are studied.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Oral History and the Old Left

On April 12, 1898, Laura Camella Hudson, daughter of a slave and wife of a sharecropper in Wilkes County, Georgia gave birth to a son, Hosea. Two years later and several thousand miles to the East, Joe Rapoport was born in the small Ukranian Jewish shtetl of Stanislavchik. And still another three years later, Stjepan Mesaros (later Steve Nelson) was born in Subocka, a village of fewer than one hundred families in the fertile farming region of Croatia. Few people would be surprised to learn that these three boys from such geographically dispersed preindus trial and rural settings would spend their adult years in American factories. After all, such sagas of the uprooted fill high school history textbooks and (with a little sex thrown in) popular paperback novels. What is remarkable here?and perhaps unsettling to those who still adhere to the dominant myths of our past?is that Hudson, Rapoport, and Nelson did not join the American middle class and struggle for social and economic success, but rather joined the American Communist party and struggled for social and economic justice. And what is even more remarkable is that these three fascinating life stories are now available to us in oral autobiogra phies collected and edited by professional historians and published by eminently respectable university presses. Both the lives of Hudson, Rapoport, and Nelson and the form of their presentation?as oral histories?command our attention. For to examine these life stories is to re-examine some of our most common assumptions about the Ameri can Communist party, to recognize that the party's history has been much richer and more complex than we have been led to believe by either the polemics of many anti-Communists or the apologetics of many Communists. Yet, while appre

Organizing for Innovation: Beyond Burns and Stalker's Organic Type

This paper investigates the extent to which characteristics of the organic model of organization are correlated with innovation rates in a sample of 110 American factories. The more organic rather than mechanical the socio-technical structure of the organization, the higher the innovation rate. However, the organic design rules work best in a small-scale, high technology niche. This result transcends Burns and Stalker by suggesting that there is more than one best way to organize for innovation. Some of the problems of organizing for innovation in large-scale, high technology environments are explored at the conclusion of the paper.

Systematic Management: The Search for Order and Integration

A comparative examination of late nineteenth-century worker productivity, machine utilization, and management methodology reveals the importance of process-oriented organization in American factories, where the highest technical skills were directed not at making products, as in Europe, but at making production lines. This orientation, together with a rapidly changing environment, required a particular kind of management and a new awareness of the management function.

MILL CONSTRUCTION

After a brief survey of building constructions in old-time spinning mills and weaving sheds, the author describes the ideal all-purpose single-storey building, and lists the materials at the builder's disposal. Concrete roofs and steel framed roofs are considered in detail. Next, after touching briefly on problems of heating and noise, the various types of floors available are described, and a plea is made for fair treatment of floors. Division of the building to lessen risk of fire is thought desirable and fluorescent lighting is preferred. The single-storey building so far described is compared with typical modern American factories. Two-storey and multi-storey buildings are discussed briefly and there follows a section dealing with the particular problems of buildings for wet processes. The paper ends with a view of the economics or building in relation to the undertaking as a whole.

America's Role in the Orient

Europe, the Far East is truly today an undeveloped economic frontier. There we find one and one-half billion people inhabiting lands which abound in unexploited riches and treasures of the earth. Those lands are inhabited by people who in their millions and hundreds of millions have yet to enjoy the fruits and goods of modern industry and industrial civilization. They are hungry for the products of American factories and workshops. They, in turn, have the raw materials which are needed throughout all the world today. What they lack is economic organization, social justice, and political stability. They have awakened to the realities of the twentieth century. They do not as yet have the tools or the instruments or the political conditions which will enable them to become a truly integral part of a modern and intelligently managed world economy.

The Case of the Nazi Saboteurs

At four o'clock on the morning of June 13, 1942, four men, in the fatigue uniforms of the German Marine Infantry, were landed in a rubber boat by two German sailors on the beach at Amagansett near the tip of Long Island, 125 miles east of New York City. They changed to civilian dress and then buried in the sand their uniforms and a supply of explosives, incendiaries, fuses, detonators, timing devices, and acids. They carried with them some $90,000 in American currency and had an elaborate list of American factories, railroad centers, bridges, power plants, water supply systems, and the like. They were accosted by an unarmed Coast Guard patrol. Alleging that they were fishermen, the four men sought the silence of the patrol first by threats to kill him and then by a bribe. He accepted $260, promptly reported the incident, and a squad of Coast Guardsmen shortly discovered the buried articles. A submarine was seen and heard off shore. The four men went to New York City.

Vegetable oil production in Brazil

From this short description it may be concluded that in Brazil there already exist good factories for the extraction of cottonseed oil by the American process, good refineries and factories for vegetable butter and similar products, and that it would be in the interests of American capitalists to study the possibilities of this industry in Brazil. In 1928 Brazil exported oleaginous seeds to the value of 71,835 contos, and 733 contos' worth of vegetable oils. However, as the Government of Brazil is kennly interested in the exploitation of the nuts and seeds, the Secretary of Agriculture has been able to obtain from the Federal Congress the necessary means for the installation of a laboratory for the specialized study of oils and their sub-products. This laboratory forms part of the Escola Superior de Agriculture, a Federal institution, and its equipment, with the exception of the Zeiss material, was purchased in the United States. It possesses all the apparatus necessary for the control of oils, fats, waxes, and resins, and for research work on those products. Besides the departments of analysis and research, it has an industrial department, in which there will be installed within the next two months the most modern equipment of American manufacture for the extraction of cottonseed oil by the American process and of oil from other seeds rich in fat (coconut, babassu, and other nuts), and for the manufacture of soaps and other articles. The Government has also inaugurated a specialized course in vegetable oils and derivatives; this will be the first post-graduate-course established in Brazil for chemists and agriculturists who have received their degrees in the agricultural colleges and other university institutions of the country. The material already acquired by the oils laboratory is valued at some $43,000, but the Government proposes to complete the installation with apparatus for essential oils, the extraction of glycerine, and the manufacture of candles and other articles. There could be no greater evidence of the confidence felt by the Government and people of Brazil in the future of its vegetable oil industry.