Search Results

By penetrating the knowledge filter and trying out ideas that might otherwise never have made it through, entrepreneurship serves as the missing link to innovation and ultimately economic growth and job creation. Entrepreneurship is an important mechanism permeating the knowledge filter to facilitate the spillover of knowledge and ultimately generate economic growth. Entrepreneurship provides the missing link to innovation and growth in virtually every context where people have ideas and starting a new firm is not blocked or impeded. For example, universities can be interpreted as being hotbeads for generating new knowledge and ideas. Entrepreneurship provides the vision to use this knowledge. If there is no vision there is no entrepreneurship. If there is a vision, but no action or activity, there is also no entrepreneurship.

This chapter examines the role of enterprise resource planning (ERP) in industrial management in the U.S. in the new economy. ERP grew out of the reengineering of the early 1990s, taking the single business processes that were the concern of reengineers. The most well-known maker of ERP software was SAP whose products comprised three chief elements which include logistics, financials and human resources. Since the mid-1990s ERP has been the driving force in the reshaping of American business, particularly in service industries.

This chapter focuses on the process by which Sweden's Social Democratic Party (Socialdemokratiska Arbetarpartiet, or SAP) became a national party, and how it began to position itself as the architect of the welfare state. SAP drew on ethnic, civic, and mixed ethnic-civic definitions of the Swedish nation, which represented a strategy to solve a potential crisis for the Social Democrats in a context where they were balancing national and class interests. The party aimed to establish the Swedishness of the nation on partially ethnic grounds, but this strategy turned out to be expansive as a context where ethnicity is more—not less—inclusive than class categories. The party achieved success by providing a set of highly resonant conceptions of the nation, but these were conceptions that privileged SAP and their ideas about the social system.

This chapter examines the relationship between the imposition of the International Monetary Fund’s Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) and the occurrence of social unrest, and identifies a well-defined set of circumstances under which the imposition of an SAP can be expected to lead to social unrest and find support for this in the data. It suggests that if a country has an SAP, it will tend to experience social unrest if it has a comparative advantage in primary products and at the same time undergoes deeper (i.e., greater/increased) trade integration.

When they are not meeting, retreating, fund-raising, and planning, administrators claim to be managing the fiscal and other operational business of the university. And to bolster their claims of specialized managerial competence, an increasing number of university administrators have gone so far as to add MBA degrees to their dossiers. Some have actually attended business school, while others, as you may recall from chapter 1, simply added MBA degrees to their dossiers. In point of fact, whether or not they hold MBAs, many deanlets’ managerial savvy consists mainly of having the capacity to spout last year’s management buzz words during meetings, retreats, and planning exercises. I often ask for clarifications when I hear a deanlet using such acronyms as SWOT, ECM, TQM, or MBO, the term “benchmarking,” or the ubiquitous “best practices.” Of course, ambitious administrators hope that by demonstrating their familiarity with the latest managerial fads and buzz words they will persuade recruiters and search committees from other universities that they are just the sort of “visionary” academic leaders those schools need. Since the corporate headhunters that control the recruitment of senior administrators generally know next to nothing about academic life and little about the universities they nominally represent, this strategy is often successful. And, why not? In the all administrative university it is entirely appropriate that mastery of managerial psychobabble should pass for academic vision. There are many reasons why the affairs of the university should not be controlled by members of the administrative stratum. Some of these reasons are academic, that is, related to the substance of the university’s core teaching and research missions. We shall turn to these in the next chapter. The other reasons to be concerned about the growing power of administrators and managers within the university are essentially managerial. The university’s organizational and institutional interests are not well served by the expanded role of its management cadre. Indeed, the growing power of management and the decline of the faculty’s role in governance has exposed the university to such classic bureaucratic pathologies as shirking, squandering, and stealing.

The relationship between the Swedish Social Democrats (SAP) and Trade Union Confederation (LO) served as a prototype of a successful historical cooperation between parties and unions. This chapter demonstrates that although Sweden has undergone several economic, social, and political changes since the 1970s, the links between the party and the confederation are still multifarious: there are still personnel overlaps between LO and SAP, and LO still holds representation in the party’s board and executive committee. The support from LO, in terms of financial resources and manpower during election campaigns, is very important for SAP. One important party–union link has disappeared during the past thirty years, namely collective affiliation. In spite of this change, the relationship between SAP and LO appears to be vital.