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This chapter is a history of key computer applications in manufacturing across three periods of time, beginning in the 1940s and extending to the early 2000s. Key uses included business and accounting, numerical control, integrated computer manufacturing, CAD/CAM, Computer Aided Manufacturing, robotics, and flexible manufacturing systems (FMS). It concludes with a description of supply chains and extent of deployment of all uses in manufacturing.

Joe B. describes how he met and fell in love with his wife, Katharine, and tells of the births of their first two children. He talks about his work as a Heinz salesman and then at Kawneer Aluminum Manufacturing, followed by his first coaching job at a small high school in Shepherdsville, Kentucky, where the dilapidated infrastructure needed his personal labor to clean, paint, and repair. He details Katharine’s many responsibilities as the wife of a coach.

Although steel no longer plays as big a part as it used to in today's global economy, it remains a fundamental yet very heterogeneous commodity as it comes in several different types and its production involves a number of diverse processes. The quality of the material is thus dictated by the equipment it has been processed on, the people who deal with the material, and the process control. This chapter looks into the situation of three companies: 1) Tokyo Steel Manufacturing Co., a Japanese Level 2 IT user; 2) Nucor Corp., a Level 2 IT user from the U.S.; and 3) Nippon Steel, a Level 3 IT user from Japan. This chapter provides an overview of the industry in a Japanese setting and in a global setting, and studies the strategies and roles the IT plays for the three firms.

Hong Kong's economy has experienced rapid structural changes over the past three decades. The service sector grew speedily in terms of its share in employment, nominal GDP and real GDP, while the manufacturing sector shrank significantly. Such a rapid structural change can be attributed to the relocation of manufacturing industries to the Pearl River Delta. Ostensibly, the expansion of manufacturing production in mainland China gives rise to an enormous demand for all sorts of supporting services in Hong Kong. This chapter examines the growing service sector in the territory. It explores the changes in labour productivity over time, the rise of intermediate production services and the government's role in a service economy.

Thischapter argues that land and river phosphate mining led to a dynamic local fertilizer manufacturing industrywhich had a profound impact on Charleston and Beaufort, South Carolina, southern agriculture, and America’s fertilizer industry. The industry included local, regional, northern, and European entrepreneurs who used the nearby rock to increase production, lower prices, and overcome southern farmers’ skepticism of commercial fertilizers. Increasing state regulation also led to the growing importance of lawyers, and lawsuits over mining and environmental pollution had significant consequences for fertilizer companies. Sixteen companies had formed near Charleston by 1884, some of which maintained small urban factories, but the most successful established sprawling works on the Charleston Neck. Eight Charleston firms—Wando Mining and Manufacturing, Sulphuric Acid and Super-Phosphate [SASP], Carolina Fertilizer, Stono Phosphate, Atlantic Phosphate, Pacific Guano, and John B. Sardy’s Wappoo and Ashepoo ventures—provide salient examples with which to study the companies’ origins, plant, marketing, workers (including working conditions and the 1873 strike), and legal problems.

This chapter focuses on Mining and Manufacturing, detailing Gallman’s estimation of the current-price and constant-price (1860) values of the capital stock on a decadal basis from 1840 to 1900. It provides evidence that the census estimates reflected current replacement values (net reproduction costs), rather than underpreciated book values as scholars working before Gallman had asserted.

This chapter illustrates the series of post-suicide investigators, including the police, ombudsman and coroner. It examines the 2013-2016 suicide cluster at HMP Woodhill to illustrate these investigations, their value and their limitations. It concludes that the post-suicide investigations are broadly Article 2 compliant and offer no shortage of vigorous critique, but also explains that Article 2 does not require that lessons be learnt and does not direct accountability to those with the capacity to implement said lessons. This is a greater limitation in England and Wales than the more commonly recognised issues with family participation and independence. The discourse of lesson learning is shown to be unhelpful in many cases of prison suicide, manufacturing mystery where there is none. It is not a mystery when prisoners die with untreated mental health problems because the prison’s mental health team is severely understaffed and has been for years, as identified multiple times by multiple prison overseers. The discourse of lesson learning also obfuscates the role of deliberate political decisions in reducing staffing levels and increasing the prison population such that staff are set up to fail and cannot follow Prison Service Orders and Instructions.

This chapter describes the birth of the three industries, from the discovery of phosphate rock to the development of a viable if risky land mining business. After the war, Charleston’s gentlemen-scientists (Nathaniel A. Pratt, Francis S. Holmes, and St. Julien Ravenel) discovered that the “stinking stones” along the Ashley River could revolutionize fertilizer manufacture. They convinced local entrepreneurs (including Williams Middleton and F.H. Trenholm) and northern acquaintances to invest and together began to resurrect the local economy through mining phosphate rocks along the Ashley River. The industry did not begin as a colonial relationship with the North. Motivated by desperation, patriotism, and greed, the lowcountry’s entrepreneurs responded enthusiastically to opportunities and developed diversified companies(including the Philadelphian-dominatedCharleston Mining and Manufacturing Company and the mainly southern Wando Mining and Manufacturing Company) that strengthened rather than challenged the region’s agricultural economy.By 1870, land mining was well-established in the lowcountry, and elite whites envisioned the industry as the savior of South Carolina and perhaps the South.

This chapter examines the legal issues surrounding an employer's proselytization of its employees. When an employer engages in proselytizing of its employees, it may be violating Title VII because workers who find themselves in those circumstances are more likely to endure repeated violations of their rights rather than risk losing their jobs by reacting negatively to efforts to convert them. Similarly, a job applicant made aware of the religious beliefs and practices of an employer may decide to ignore its proselytization endeavors in hopes of gaining employment. This chapter considers a number of court cases to show that an employer is always skating on thin ice when it proselytizes in the workplace, including those involving the Sports and Health Club, the Townley Manufacturing Company, and Preferred Home Health Care.

This chapter explores the phosphate river mining industry, which had mainly different owners, laborers, and locations than land mining. Most laborers were Sea Islanders, and most river mining took place near Beaufort. The rivers were public domain so mining was subject to direct state regulation and taxation. Widespread debatesamong weakened Democrats and divided Republicans in legislative halls, on the pages of the Charleston Daily Courier, and at public meetingsover royalties, corruption, exclusive rights, monopolies, riparian rights, dredging, and navigation made regulation of this industry one of the most contentious issues during Reconstruction and beyond. Dangerous yet profitable for its workers, the river mining industry made a strong start in its first five years led by the most significant companies and businessmen,the Marine and River Phosphate Mining and Manufacturing Company (William L. Bradley), the South Carolina Phosphate and Phosphatic River Mining Company (black Republicans), the Oak Point Mines (Wyllie Campbell & Company), and especially the dominant Coosaw Mining Company (Robert Adger).

Despite environmental advantages and a rich ancient history of manufacturing and agriculture, centuries of unstable and corrupt rule has decreased and impoverished the population and meant Egypt was not able to fulfil its potential in production or cultivation. This chapter laments the lack of skilled workers and low quality of manual work, but also points to the areas in which Egyptians excel, namely architecture (mosques, public buildings, and private dwellings). It then turns to commerce: listing exports and imports from Europe, and the ways in which things are bought and sold, looking at merchants and merchandise, shops and markets, as well as beggars. Finally this chapter address water and irrigation, cultivation of Nile lands, according to seasons of the floods, and Nile navigation as a source of income.

This chapter discusses how Anthony Overton’s relocation to Chicago in 1911 proved to be one of the wisest moves of his life. Within a short period of time, the once frustrated entrepreneur established an important business niche in one of America’s leading cities. Yet Anthony Overton’s first years in Chicago were not without challenges. Within a year after his arrival, the sudden death of his wife, Clara, forced Overton to reorient both his personal and business affairs. He subsequently began to more fully incorporate his daughters and other attractive young females as the “public face” of his personal care products company. This maneuver helped increase the Overton-Hygienic Manufacturing Company’s prominence in an industry then dominated by his primary competitors, Annie Turnbo-Malone and Madam C. J. Walker.

In 1916, Anthony Overton established the Half-Century Magazine as a venue to more effectively market Overton Hygienic Manufacturing Company products. To deflect charges of shameless self-promotion, Overton put forward a female employee as the owner, editor, and public face of this women-oriented periodical. Overton’s skullduggery included submitting anonymous editorials and publishing articles under a pseudonym (McAdoo Baker) to convey his beliefs regarding business enterprise, racial identity, and personal conduct. Above and beyond Overton’s deception, the Half-Century created a commercial environment where black female readers were not exposed to racially insulting personal care products ads. This advertising policy, along with Half-Century’s sponsorship of a contest extolling the beauty of African American women, enhanced Overton-Hygienic’s position in the marketplace.

In late 1929, Anthony Overton was perceived to be the nation’s most successful black businessman. Yet, by the mid-1930s, the public’s perception of Overton had shifted dramatically. The Great Depression’s negative impact on African American real estate values negatively impacted the profitability of both the Douglass National Bank and the Victory Life Insurance Company. Also, disclosure of Overton’s long-standing, unauthorized funneling of Victory Life funds into Douglass National resulted in his ouster as president of Victory Life. Moreover, despite creative efforts to keep it afloat, the Douglass National Bank ultimately became a casualty of the Depression. In the end, Anthony Overton retained control of the Overton Hygienic Manufacturing Company and the Chicago Bee newspaper but had lost the honorific moniker “the Merchant Prince of his Race.”

The early1940s witnessed a rehabilitation of Anthony Overton’s public image. Thus, at the time of his death in 1946, much of the negativity associated with the early 1930s had dissipated. Anthony Overton’s son, Everett, presided over the Overton Hygienic Manufacturing Company from 1946 until his own death in 1960. Everett’s son, Anthony Overton III, ran the company from 1960 until 1983 (when Overton Hygienic closed). Shortly after the Overton Hygienic Manufacturing Company disappeared from the landscape of US business, a consortium of Chicagoans began a campaign to honor the legacy of the company’s founder, Anthony Overton. Their efforts ultimately resulted in the physical restoration of the Overton Building and the Chicago Bee Building, as well as their designation as municipal landmarks.

Roughly two thousand years later, a tribe of “middlemen and merchants” transformed a small strip of land in modern-day Lebanon into the hub of intercontinental trade. Considered one of the ancient world’s most entrepreneurial and inventive cultures, the merchant-sailors of Phoenicia connected Africa, Europe, and Asia Minor into a network of trade so vast and profitable that their success was marveled at by Ezekiel and other authors of the Old Testament. The chapter also highlights more recent discoveries pertaining to this vanished civilization of seaborne merchants, such as its conversion of a sparsely populated Sicilian island into the site of a thriving wine-making and trading industry.

This chapter looks at the nature of production jobs in the US and the mix of skills demanded in blue-collar jobs. Data include a nationally representative survey of 885 American manufacturers and a wide-ranging set of interview with manufacturing firms in regions around the country. The authors find widespread demand for basic hard skills, but demand for advanced skills is modest. The majority of manufacturers do not face a skill shortage. A subset of manufacturing establishments do have long-term vacancies, best predicted by demands for advanced math and reading skills, as well as low wages and frequent product innovation.

At the same time as the tensions between Britain and its thirteen colonies led to the American Revolutionary War, the development of industrial cotton cloth manufacturing in Britain made possible older hopes of imperial control and monopoly. British innovations in production processes and product development were extended to emulate and reinvent a range of other Indian goods, from hookah pipes to palanquins, which had no markets in Britain but growing markets in India. Nevertheless, British production did not necessarily domesticate such goods, and people in Britain and the United States instead adopted other goods manufactured and fashionable in India. Old economic and fashion patterns continued even as major shifts began in the global geography of production. Once again, the British government needed to craft a regulatory compromise amongst interests in Britain, and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

The changes to the Company charter in 1813 were not confined to the Company’s trade; they reflected the rise not only of British cotton manufacturing but of Company rule and of evangelical sentiment. British and American evangelicals, missionaries in India, and Company servants debated whether spiritual and material conversions in India would or should happen together and the proper modes and aesthetics of British rule. Rather than fading away, contests over the adoption of Indian goods and norms continued. Nevertheless, India and America had, in some measures, been converted. America had finally become the cotton-cultivating India dreamed of by seventeenth-century English thinkers and adventurers, though it remained unclear the extent to which India had become a new America.