Technical Labor Research Articles

Trust, Discretion and Responsibility: The Division of Technical Labour

Trust, Discretion and Responsibility: The Division of Technical Labour

Management and the Control of Technical Labour

Management and the Control of Technical Labour

Trust, Discretion and Responsibility: The Division of Technical Labour

This paper examines the role which multinational corporation (MNC) branch plants play in the development and maintenance of the boundaries between technical occupations in the Irish Republic. In doing so, it examines recent attempts to characterise such workers as incumbents of `high-discretion high-trust' work roles and also as `trusted workers'. This paper argues that such attempts are lacking in explanatory power because they fail to account for other factors. In the Irish case, these include levels of qualification, the higher status of theoretical and abstract knowledge, the fusion of technical and managerial functions and the greater organisational importance of the more senior technical positions.

To Retain Or Not to Retain? Multinational Firms and Technical Labour

This article examines one of the core ideas in the human resource management rubric: that employers should seek to retain and develop their human resources, in particular professional personnel, since they are a source of competitive advantage. This idea is evaluated in the critical case of employers of technical staff. It finds, contrary to the prescriptive HRM literature, that employers were more concerned with having a steady turnover of staff, for which they saw a number of advantages, than with the development of policies which would enable them to retain scientists and engineers. These employers had, instead, developed a dual labour market approach which was contingent on the turnover of existing staff. This consisted of a general inclination to exploit the benefits of the prevailing labour market conditions while simultaneously engaging in a policy which allowed them to selectively retain certain key human resources.

Numerical stability issues in fast least-squares adaptation algorithms

The concepts of backward consistency and minimality are shown to be the essential tools in studying error propagation in fast least-squares adaptive filters. A conceptual framework identifying the principal error propagation mechanisms is developed, allowing the numerical stability of new or existing algorithms to be ascertained withoutthe technical labor previously thought necessary. The key findings show that arithmetic instability is <i>not</i> a fundamental feature of fast least-squares algorithms. Rather, unstable propagation can only derive from the violation of backward consistency constraints. The absence of minimality (in the system theory sense) is identified as the principal culprit in this regard, although the issue of stability for predictable sequences also plays an intriguing role. The concepts are illustrated for some popularly used algorithms, and order-recursive algorithms are confirmed to have intrinsic advantages over their transversal counterparts.

The Net is Gross

Veterinarians are in a natural position to interact with dairymen within the scope of financial herd health. They are on the dairies frequently, see management as it is and not as it is supposed to be, understand the interactions of feeds, facilities, cows, labor and management, and are among the most trusted of service providers.&#x0D; Today dairy farmers rely more on capital and less on labor and land. Additionally, major changes in the lending business climate has resulted in a decrease in commercial banks willing to make loans of less than one million dollars. Liability concerns and awards have made bankers reluctant to offer management advice or counsel of any type.&#x0D; Veterinarian's ongoing monitoring programs within the herd health area, including reproduction, calf, mastitis and nutritional programs, fit well with financial monitoring. There are more non-veterinary consultants promoting their services, frequently in areas traditionally thought of as within the veterinarian's scope of expertise. The profession needs to solidify its position with the dairy industry and providing seivices within the financial area can help both dairymen and veterinarians. Accumulating and reporting this data along with other herd management monitors makes sense. The profession needs to continue its movement towards a fee for knowledge reward system and away from being paid only for technical labor. Finally, veterinarians are also lenders to dairymen, and need to protect their investment by assisting their debtors to be profitable, liquid and solvent.

Lost Managers or Industrial Dinosaurs? A Reappraisal of Front-line Management

A narrow concept of industrial supervision continues to dominate discussion on the future rôle of the supervisor. Although the nature and purpose of workplace supervision has continuously evolved, there remains a general reluctance to accept the significance of these changes. Substantive shifts in supervisory control indicate that there is a far broader range of policy options available in the development of supervision than is currently suggested in the literature. It is therefore important that management understand what constitutes supervision if they wish to be active and constructive shapers rather than passive observers of tomorrow's front-line management. This paper examines the need to reconceptualise supervision and go beyond the simple dichotomy of technical competency and labour regulation. It is argued that the supervisor is neither an “Industrial Dinosaur” nor simply a “Lost Manager”, but a key organisational player whose position should be realigned to meet current organisational needs.

COST ANALYSIS OF DRAWINGS FOR DESIGN SUPPORTED BY COMPUTER SYSTEMS

The design of civil engineering constructions extends to wide range. Each design drawing has so different contens that such drawings all by hands needs highly skill. It is said now that technical labor powers are short. And experiments of auto-drawing supported by computer systems have been carried out in many fields. The author examines a method to manage labor shortage by introducing auto-drawing systems and tries to compare its cost with the cost of hand-drawing systems.

Tracking and the Educational Spiral: Arab and Jewish Patterns of Educational Expansion

The Israeli system of secondary education consists of two separate subsystems. Jewish secondary education maintains an elaborate system of tracking with over half of all students attending non-college-bound tracks. In contrast, the Arab system is predominantly academic and college bound in curriculum. This study compares patterns of educational expansion for Arabs and Jews across recent birth cohorts. I demonstrate that tracking can enable an expansion of secondary education while, at the same time, alleviating expansionary pressures from the tertiary system. Educational attainment rates have increased substantially in most societies over the century. Several explanations for the expansion of educational systems have been proposed.' First, according to the technofunctional account, schooling was or is expanded in response to two important social needs: the growing industrial demand for technical and skilled labor and the growing societal need for a socialized, normatively integrated populace.2 The integrative function of schooling is most pronounced in immigrant societies where schools are entrusted with the responsibility of desocializing and resocializing the immigrants into the value and normative systems of the host society.3 Similarly, the neo-Marxist accounts argue that schooling may be expanded in response to capitalism's needs for a docile and skilled labor force.4 Schooling also serves to legitimate social inequalities in that it presumes to select and promote students on the basis of ability and merit. The expansion of primary and then secondary schooling in the United States is said to have been a response to the changing and growing needs of capitalism.

Vocational-Technical Education in Tropical Africa

In all African countries the role of education is a fiercely debated subject, and discussions are sharpened by the growing charges that the present context and structure of education are irrelevant in preparing African youth for meaningful occupations in their country. There has been a general consensus among education policymakers in Africa that a greater emphasis must be placed on vocational-technical education. Yet, there is a growing gap between policy and practice which is further compounded by the perceptions of African youth as to the importance and value of vocationaltechnical education. The well-being of a nation, its standard of living, and its potential for economic and industrial development depend on a large pool of expertly trained middle-level technicians, craftsmen, and other specialists. These are directly related to the priority that a nation places on developing and maintaining an efficient system of vocational-technical education. It was only in the past few years, however, that African countries began to realize that these relationships exist. Presently, technical education tends to be a response to industrial activity in a given region, and its success is dependent on the extent of the immediate demand for lucrative employment of the individuals who were trained. This case-by-case training is a reflection of colonial rule, under which most African countries depended on the European metropolitan (home) countries for their manufactured products, and therefore, had no need to train a large technical labor force. After independence, many African countries began to recognize the need to be self-reliant. An increasing part of the efforts to produce a cadre of welltrained manpower has involved the introduction of vocational-

House building, profits and social efficiency in Sweden and Britain

Abstract The paper examines why the housing sector in Britain performs so badly in producing housing. Completion rates are decreasing, dwelling quality is getting worse, while both construction costs and consumer costs are increasing. It does this through discussion of alternative routes to profitability in house building, supported by a comparative analysis of two contrasting cases: Britain and Sweden. In Britain land development gains and speculative extra profits are significant profit sources for house‐builders. Making profits through building itself is neglected; the concomitant is a fragmented labour process, loss of scale economies, low capitalisation, inadequate technical innovation and stagnant labour productivity. In Sweden house‐builders do not have easy access to land development gains or extra profits. Moreover, they are faced by a well organised and well paid labour force. They are pushed onto the road of making profit through increasing labour productivity and through product improvement. T...

A community hospital laboratory computer system: an eight-year longitudinal study of economic impact.

An analysis of the intralaboratory economic effects of installation of a dedicated laboratory computer system in a 450-bed acute care general hospital laboratory is presented using data accumulated during an eight-year period. Data collection and analytic conventions used included: (1) an inflation factor derived from the CPI to adjust costs; (2) semilogarithmic plotting; (3) patient procedure counts tallied as the raw count for patient specimens according to the CAP Workload Recording Method; and (4) total workload (including patient standard and control items) recorded according to the CAP WRM. The authors conclude that computerization has produced: (1) a decrease in inflation adjusted labor costs per unit of work; (2) a decrease in inflation adjusted direct cost per unit of work; (3) A decline in the ratio of clerical to technical labor force; and (4) An increase in overall productivity of approximately 7%.

Science, technology, and regional economic development: Review and prospects

This paper reviews the literature on the location and regional effects of science and technology (S&T) in the context of developed economies. Two processes associated with the creation of new products, agglomeration and spin-off, act to attract further innovative activity in those regions. Other regions, where R&D and related activities do not take place, are unlikely to be the locations of new-product production, and instead will tend to specialize in the production of standardized products. Both corporate and government R&D rely on pools of technical labor for technological and new-product activities; these pools of mobile workers are most attracted to large urban areas. In only some of these areas, however, does the spin-off process result in the generation of new technology-based firms. The availability of local venture capital appears to be the principal influence on this variation. Government policy regarding science and technology has impacts on regions by contributing to the agglomeration of R&D. Government policy also often fails to recognize that S&T policy and industrial policy have regional effects that may be long-term in nature and most detrimental to those regions whose economies are least competitive. Finally, some priorities for future research on innovation in a regional setting are identified.

Technical Change, Manufacturing Organisation and Labour Markets

A wave of discussion about the consequences of recent technical change has come to sweep industrialised countries. The topic is mainly the development, production, and use of integrated electronic circuits, specifically in the sophisticated form of microelectronics. The technology of information and control has made striking advances, and it effects important changes throughout all manner of products, production processes, and administrative procedures. Conspicuous and often‐quoted examples are watch‐making and newspaper production. These branches are often held up as showing what is to come everywhere: a radical transformation of technology, the death of established trades and vocations, and large‐scale redundancy and unemployment. Furthermore, such prospects are often associated with a change in the international division of labour, whereby recently industrialising countries of the Third World, such as Algeria, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Korea, and many others, have come to produce industrial goods and import them to Europe and North America on an increasing scale. Because of higher labour costs here, there is a constraint to rationalise production and strengthen technical improvement, both of which are facilitated by new semiconductor technologies, particularly microelectronics, and the automation associated with it.

Commentary: Clinical laboratory information systems

Clinical laboratory testing accounts for over eight percent of health care expenditures in the U.S. The use of computer technology has led to improved analytical instrumentation as well as to data acquisition and data management systems. Clinical laboratory, information systems have demonstrated their ability to reduce clerical and technical labor costs while providing more accurate and readable reports to the physician. The majority of systems currently operating were developed by commercial systems houses, and costs can range from under $100 000 to over $1 000 000. A major challenge is the use of such systems for the collection and analysis of large databases for clinical research.

Technical progress and labor protection All-Union Conference on ?Technical progress and problems of Labor Protection and Safety in Ferrous Metallurgy?

Technical progress and labor protection All-Union Conference on ?Technical progress and problems of Labor Protection and Safety in Ferrous Metallurgy?

Scientific-technical seminar on the theme “Upgrading of Technical Level and Labor Productivity in the Construction of Hydroelectric Plants”

Scientific-technical seminar on the theme “Upgrading of Technical Level and Labor Productivity in the Construction of Hydroelectric Plants”

An econometric study to evaluate proposal estimates

It is hypothesized that contract historical cost data can be used to provide a guide for evaluating proposal estimates generated by the organization. This hypothesis was tested for various input factors by examining multiple regressions of specific characteristics of fifty-five contracts. Of the various input factors examined, the multiple regression model explained from a high of over 94 per cent of the variation for engineering labor, to a low of 37 per cent of the variation for electronic development technical labor. The explanatory variables were highly significant with t values ranging from a low of 1·2 to a high of 26·6, with the vast majority greater than 2·0.

Screening for and Biological Characterization of Antitumor Agents Using Microorganisms

This chapter discusses screening for biological characterization of antitumor agents using microorganisms. The chapter illustrates that great advances have been and are being made (1) in the understanding of some causes of cancer with the promise of being able to reduce cancer incidence by removing or controlling these causative factors and (2) in treatment by surgery and ionizing radiation and supportive post-surgical treatment. Successful biological research efforts demand: (1) inductive reasoning to establish reasonable hypotheses, and (2) usable experimental tools to put the hypotheses to objective test. Searching for anticancer agents in human cancer patients is a practical impossibility for a variety of reasons. Tumor-bearing experimental animals have been the test systems of choice in researches for evaluation of anticancer agents. Screening for effective new anticancer agents and evaluation of congeners of known anticancer agents against a variety of experimental animal tumors demand time, laboratory space, technical labor, money, experimental animals, and the drugs being tested. The use of antitumor-agent-resistant microorganisms as tools for preliminary identification of new anticancer agents and of drug-sensitive or drug-resistant bacteria for gaining information concerning possible sensitive metabolic sites inhibited by new anticancer agents has great potential.