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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.

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 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.

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.

The young and mechanically minded Fleming was an expert in automobiles at a time when the film industry was just beginning to use them. He competed in one auto race in Santa Monica, providing the basis of a legend that he’d been a race car driver before becoming a director. Fleming also became interested in camera mechanics, photography, and film, and worked as a mechanic, chauffeur, and amateur photographer. He had a brief and unhappy marriage to Clara West Strouse in 1909 (the divorce was finalized in 1915), but then moved to Santa Barbara and began a relationship with actress Charlotte Burton. Here, he worked as a repairman, a driver, and eventually as an assistant cameraman in the American Film Manufacturing Company (also known as Flying “A” Studios) under directors/producers Allan Dwan, Marshall Neilan, and cameraman Roy Overbaugh. His work with these men on their successful silent films—mostly Westerns and action/adventures—led Dwan to take him to the Triangle Film Corporation in New York.

This chapter aims at studying the interplay between the so-called “China factor” and the dollar peg in Hong Kong in the run up to the 1997 handover, through the Asian financial crisis and beyond. It begins by describing the general changes in the economy following the adoption of the peg, and the factors precipitating the complete migration of Hong Kong's manufacturing industries across the border to China. This is followed by a detailed analysis of how the manufacturers’ exodus helped to expand the economic base of Hong Kong's export industries on the one hand, while keeping Hong Kong's exports internationally competitive on the other, despite a bout of accelerated domestic inflation caused by the peg before 1997/1998. This chapter concludes that despite the increased integration of the Hong Kong and mainland China economies, the likelihood of the Hong Kong dollar being de-pegged from the US dollar and re-pegged to the Chinese currency is yet remote.

This chapter explores the manufacturing workforce. Data indicates a growing need to upgrade the manufacturing workforce to higher levels of skills, which appears to be a prerequisite for advanced manufacturing. Indeed, the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) reports placed much stress on workforce training and education, at both the skilled worker and engineering levels. The manufacturing institutes appear to be positioned to help fill the gap in U.S. labor markets for high-skill training. The Lightweight Innovations for Tomorrow (LIFT) institute in particular appears to be developing models for workforce training, systematically engaging state governments and firms in its core states in new training program elements, with programs linked to secondary schools, community colleges, participating employers, and area universities. LIFT sees that workforce training programs are critical for advanced manufacturing technology dissemination, not only training for the sake of training. It is a key way the institutes can scale their new technology developments.

This chapter describes Jack Reed’s business interests. Along with being an advocate for public education, a crusader for racial reconciliation, a leader in regional economic development, a gubernatorial candidate, and an active citizen in various civic organizations throughout northeast Mississippi, Reed was dedicated to his family’s businesses: Reed’s Department Store and Reed Manufacturing.

This chapter describes the practical techniques, skills, and business realities involved in the capture, manufacture, and marketing of white fox pelts, all of which affected the lives of northern trapping families.

De Bow’s fervent support of southern economic development became the foundation for a growing southern nationalist movement. This chapter focuses on his changing feelings about American nationalism and sectionalism. He worried that the South was falling further behind northern economic development and that it would become a colony of the North. He urged southern readers to diversify the region’s economy and invest in manufacturing, railroads, and better plantation management. He viewed Manifest Destiny and western expansion as main sources of sectional conflict. Debates over slavery and sectional development became intertwined in De Bow’s mind. The editorial content of the Review changed to reflect his feelings as a southern fire-eater and proslavery ideologue.