Building Factories Without Bosses: The Movement of Worker-Managed Factories in Argentina

In the 1990s and 2000s, Argentina suffered one of the quickest and most extreme processes of neoliberal state reforms in the world, leading to the closure of numerous factories. To resist the increased unemployment produced by neoliberalism, workers started to organize in a movement aimed at defending their only source of income: their labor. In this article, I analyze the main characteristics of the movement of worker-managed factories in Argentina by exploring how factories were occupied, what motivated the workers' decision to create co-operatives, what made the factories economically viable, how they were legitimated by the community, which legal reforms workers achieved to support their struggle, and how they manage their factories.     

THE DISTRIBUTION OF POLITICAL POWER, THE COSTS OF RENT-SEEKING, AND ECONOMIC GROWTH

Poor economic growth in many countries can be explained by the misallocation of entrepreneurial resources to activities that do not foster growth. This paper deals with the relation between the distribution of political power, the allocation of entrepreneurial resources and growth. We model growth as deriving from Schumpeterian entrepreneurs who try to increase profits through innovation. We endogenize the choice of time devoted to this activity vis-a-vis other ways of increasing income, such as obtaining government subsidies. More unequal access to the political redistribution mechanism makes rent-seeking activities less profitable, and results in higher growth.     

Afghanistan: A Change of Course?

The situation in Afghanistan today is not what the international community was planning it to be, 7 years ago when the Bonn Agreement was signed. Deterioration of security, weak governance, corruption, high narcotic production and trade, slow reconstruction process and consequent people’s disappointment are some of the features of that situation. Kabul and its international partners had a very little success in restoring peace and security, and a new phase of strategic re-thinking is in process. This article analyzes the different aspects of Afghan reconstruction and military intervention, their strengths and weaknesses, and outlines some urgent actions to be taken by all concerned actors.

Engineer-to-order (ETO) production planning and control: an empirical framework for machinery-building companies

This paper illustrates the results of an empirical study involving 21 engineer-to-order (ETO) companies, operating in the machinery-building industry. The study investigates the needs and requirements of such companies in terms of software support for governing the businesses, with particular emphasis on production planning and control (PPC) processes. An empirical analysis investigated two main aspects: (i) the set of business activities performed by the companies in the analysed industry and (ii) the relevant, high-level software functionalities required for the execution of such activities. As an answer to the observed compelling need for reviewing the general approaches to PPC in machinery-building companies, we develop an empirical, high-level production planning and scheduling reference framework, encompassing all the activities involved in the order fulfilment process.     

Total cost of ownership along the supply chain: a model applied to the tinting industry

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is a consolidated purchasing tool applied across different industries. However, in some cases, existing models are not satisfactory. The paper analyses the tinting industry, where manufacturers of colourant dispensing machines sell products and related services to paint producers, who install them in retail stores to sell the colour paints to the final consumers. Authors develop a TCO model integrating those existing in literature and including the following specifications: (i) all relevant costs along the product life cycle are considered; (ii) both goods and service-related costs are considered; (iii) both explicit and hidden costs are considered; (iv) the model adapts to the perspectives of various actors in the supply chain. The TCO model is tested with real data and provides useful insights on real costs sustained by each actor.     

Effective strategizing practices in pluralistic settings: the case of Academic Medical Centers

Pluralism in organizations is dramatically and progressively increasing today, which makes it difficult for managers to capture a clear picture of what is really going on at the moment and to make strategic decisions. How strategy is formed and implemented in pluralistic contexts has been substantially underestimated for many years. This article investigates how specific strategy processes are constructed and which practices can be successfully adopted in pluralistic contexts, such as in Academic Medical Centers. We drew from a strategy as practice approach and adopted an ethnographic methodology to conduct the study. This paper demonstrates that some practices (strategy workshops, brutal facts and graphic charts) can reduce the risks of setting the strategy agenda in pluralistic organizations. Implications for managers and scholars are discussed.     

Rural Residence as a Determinant of Attitudes Toward US Immigration Policy

Between 1990 and 2000, the foreign-born population in the United States increased by 57 per cent, compared to a 13 per cent increase in the native-born population. This growth has fueled considerable media attention and has fomented some anti-immigrant sentiments. Although a number of authors have charted changes in support for restrictionist immigration policies, few have examined their determinants. In this paper, we focus on region of residence and use data from a 2004 telephone survey of a nationally representative sample of 1888 adults to test the hypothesis that rural Americans are more likely to support restrictive immigration policies than individuals in urban and suburban communities. In a series of regression analyses, this hypothesis is confirmed; rural residents hold the most restrictionist views. Additional analyses indicate that this effect of rural residence on policy attitudes is mediated by attitudes toward multiculturalism, the perceived traits of immigrants, and perceptions about the costs of immigration. Ultimately, the analyses indicate that the perceived cost of immigration is the single strongest predictor of support for restrictive immigration policies, and that it best accounts for rural residents'more restrictionist views.     

Describing extra-binomial variation with partially correlated models

Data in the form of proportions are often analyzed under a binomial model. However, because genuine random sampling is often infeasible, the subjects in the sample may be collected in clumps and the variances of the observed proportions may be considerably larger than those corresponding to the binomial model. A set of data from a study of the proportion of subjects testing positive to the disease toxoplasmosis is used in this article to motivate partially correlated binomial models capable of describing data observed in practical situations where clumped sampling is likely to appear, According to these models, the extra-binomial variance of the observed frequencies may range from a linear to a quadratic function of the sample size. An efficient algorithm for the evaluation of the resulting probability mass function is given.     

Hedging against disruptions with ripple effects in location analysis

Supply systems are subject to disruptions whose impact may not remain confined, but might actually propagate across the network. We consider the problem of optimally protecting a capacitated median system with a limited amount of protective resources subject to disruptions. Specifically, the type of disruption studied is characterized by correlation effects between the facilities, and may result in partial or complete disruption of the facilities involved. The model optimizes protection plans in the face of large area disruptions; i.e., disruptions that affect regions rather than single elements of the system. Examples may be earthquakes, storms, floods, fires, hurricanes, droughts, the spread of diseases, the spread of chemical agents, and cascading failures. The model is also a general framework for the family of fortification problems in the context of location analysis, as it includes uncapacitated facilities and single-target disruptions as special cases. We provide a tri-level formulation of the problem, and we propose an exact solution algorithm which makes use of a tree-search procedure to identify which facilities to protect. The procedure is enhanced by a dual-based pruning rule. The underlying disruption problem is reformulated as a single-level mixed-integer program. The algorithm has been tested on a dataset based on the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake. We verify empirically the efficiency of the pruning rule, and we provide an evaluation of the importance of considering propagation effects in the disruptions.     

Fiducial distribution in a power series family

Abstract

In this article the interest is on finding the fiducial distribution of the parameter, when the probability distribution belongs to the power series family, as in Johnson et al. (1992 Johnson, N. L., S. Kotz, and A. W. Kemp. 1992. Univariate discrete distributions. New York, NY: John Wiley and Sons. [Google Scholar]). Recently in Nájera and O’Reilly (2017 Nájera, E., and F. O’Reilly. 2017. On fiducial generators. Communications Statistics - Theory Methods 46 (5):2232–2248. doi:10.1080/03610926.2015.1040505.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) an argument is given to obtain a unique fiducial in the Bernoulli case. An attempt is made here to define some sort of invariance in a power series distribution so that, as was done in the Bernoulli case, one may find a unique invariant fiducial for the parameter. The Bernoulli case is reviewed in detail and the Poisson and negative binomial cases are addressed.