Swiss Watch Research Articles

Cannes 2004 Report

THE "NEW" 57eme FESTIVAL DE CANNES 2004 FOR a quarter century the Cannes film festival has been associated, for better or for worse, with one name – Gilles Jacob. As the délégué général of the Festival International du Film for all of 23 years (since 1978), he selected the films, set its pace, and stood at the top of the stairs to welcome producers, directors, and stars to their premiere screenings in the Palais. Pierre Viot, the former festival president and Gilles’s right-hand man, took care of the diplomatic honneurs, while Christine Aimé ran the Service de presse like a Swiss watch. That’s all in the past. Cannes, the kingpin of all international film festivals, now has a new name, a new team, a new vision. First of all, the name. When guests arrived at this year’s event – the 57th – they saw the emblem...

Technological discontinuities and flexible production networks: The case of Switzerland and the world watch industry

The twentieth-century history of the Swiss watch industry illustrates how cultures and industrial production systems experience great difficulty adapting to external change at different points in time. The current emphasis on production networks - unique reservoirs of potential technological innovation realized through cooperation rather than competition among firms - lacks a detailed appreciation of historic networks, and in particular their fragile character in times of economic turmoil. While networks can and do promote innovation within an existing technological framework, historical experience suggests their fragmented, atomistic structure is subject to disorganization and disintegration during periods of technological change. An exclusive focus on “production” ignores other constraints that are powerful forces governing the reaction abilities of regions. Previous research has largely relied on a model of oligopolistic competition to explain how the Swiss lost control of the world watch industry. I conclude, on the contrary, that the Swiss experience must be understood from the standpoint of how technological change challenges previous ways of organizing production, industry, culture, and society. Technology shifts present a series of strategic turning points that industrial leaders must navigate during a period of technological change.

The Risks of Phenacetin Use

ALMOST 25 years ago, Dubach and his colleagues noted that many women working in Swiss watch factories took large amounts of analgesic drugs daily because of occupation-related aches and pains. The ...

Alternatives to Romanticism: The Traditions of Polish Positivism and KOR

The political writer Adam Bromke sees an enduring dichotomy between idealists and in Polish politics, a dichotomy which produces specific historical cycles. Periods of (i.e., unrealistic) struggle for national independence alternate with retreats into realistic efforts to survive and adapt to limited or non-existent autonomy. The realists do not abandon freedom as an ultimate goal, but repudiate hopeless struggle in order to protect the nation and to secure a normal as possible internal development. Such retreats, in the inevitable cycle, are followed by new, supposedly romantic efforts to expand or to regain national sovereignty.1 Cyclical, bipolar interpretations of history are appealing. They are direct, uncomplicated explanations, both attractive to the popular imagination and possessing the comforting assurance of apparent scientific certitude. While not denying the pre-eminence of idealism and realism as major currents in Polish political culture, the dichotomy is simplistic. It obscures the lineal continuity, evolution, and complexity of Polish political thought over the past two centuries, and exacerbates the stereotype of the romantic Pole. In reality, both trends have co-existed since 1795 in diverse forms and numerous political figures defy easy categorization. The democratic opposition of the 1970s, particularly individuals associated with the Committee for the Defence of the the Workers (KOR- Komitet Obrony Robotnikow), is an especially interesting example of the difficulty of rigidly affixing labels and of the complexity of the relationship between idealism and realism. Bromke, within his own schema, harshly assesses the programme of the post- 1968 democratic opposition, whose activities significantly contributed to Solidarity's emergence. With Spenglerian presumption, he writes: The cycle of Polish history has once more worked with the precision of the proverbial Swiss watch. After a period of political realism in the 1950s and 1960s, with the

The activities of the Swiss watch industry in the fields of patent information and documentation

The rapid technological evolution has caused an increased demand for patent information in the Swiss watch industry, which is catered for by the Swiss Documentation Centre in the Field of Microtechnology. The Centre maintains a library with a computer terminal for on-line searches, and issues several series of publications; weekly and monthly bulletins; translations of relevant Japanese patent documents and file cards with abstracts of patents on horology issued by the most important countries. The latter amounts to about 2600 cards per year with information on approximately 1000 new inventions. To make retrieval of the cards easier a system of index cards is also maintained.

Health-related effects of repetitive activities

Two hundred workers of the Swiss watch industry were examined in a study of repetitive work effects on the well-being of workers. Repetitive work has shown to have two main influences on well-being: Relationships were found between subjective assessment of variety and autonomy, job satisfaction, psychosomatic complaints and headache. Repetitive work was always done under some positional constraint. This was shown to result in an increased rate of "arm, neck, shoulder syndrome" and visual problems.

HOW THE SWISS WATCH GIVES AMERICAN CHEMICALS A $34,027,000 LIFT

RETURN TO ISSUEPREVAdvertisementNEXTHOW THE SWISS WATCH GIVES AMERICAN CHEMICALS A $34,027,000 LIFTCite this: Chem. Eng. News 1957, 35, 34, 34Publication Date (Print):August 26, 1957Publication History Published online12 November 2010Published inissue 26 August 1957https://doi.org/10.1021/cen-v035n034.p034Copyright © 1957 AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETYArticle Views61Altmetric-Citations-LEARN ABOUT THESE METRICSArticle Views are the COUNTER-compliant sum of full text article downloads since November 2008 (both PDF and HTML) across all institutions and individuals. These metrics are regularly updated to reflect usage leading up to the last few days.Citations are the number of other articles citing this article, calculated by Crossref and updated daily. Find more information about Crossref citation counts.The Altmetric Attention Score is a quantitative measure of the attention that a research article has received online. Clicking on the donut icon will load a page at altmetric.com with additional details about the score and the social media presence for the given article. Find more information on the Altmetric Attention Score and how the score is calculated. Share Add toView InAdd Full Text with ReferenceAdd Description ExportRISCitationCitation and abstractCitation and referencesMore Options Share onFacebookTwitterWechatLinked InReddit PDF (210 KB) Get e-Alerts