News, including science, technology, business and culture.
Friday, February 01, 2008
Help For Busy Travellers At Busy Airports
London's Heathrow Airport is notorious. Not only is it the biggest U.K. airport, Heathrow is also Europe's busiest airport for passenger traffic, and handles more international passenger traffic than any other airport in the world. It serves an astounding 67 million annual passengers.
Gatwick, Stansted and Manchester airports are not that far behind, either. If you are on a tight schedule, you may be happy to learn about the easy accommodations you can find close by at hotels at competitive rates at London Heathrow, London Gatwick, Stansted Airport and at Manchester Airport.
Anyone who comes in tired to one of these large airports will be likely relieved that there are competitive rates even for last minute travellers. Of course, you can book 365 days in advance as well, for a conference or meeting perhaps.
This post was brought to you by your friends at Cheaperthanhotels.com.
Multinational Firms Should Hold Own Management Styles In China
When it comes to breaking into the lucrative Chinese market, foreign multinational retailers should keep largely to their own, time-tested management techniques, according to new research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
Rather than struggle to adapt to the Chinese cultural environment, firms from the UK and elsewhere are better advised to hone and refine existing managerial and technical expertise, argues Jos Gamble, of Royal Holloway, University of London.
A fluent Chinese speaker, he interviewed management and staff in eight Chinese cities, including Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu, as well as key people in the UK and Japan. His findings also dispel claims that foreign retailers offer only ‘dead-end’ jobs in their Chinese subsidiaries. On the contrary, he says, such organisations can provide workers with significant opportunities to prosper and improve their skills. Rising prosperity and a rapidly commercialising economy have transformed China into the world’s most important emerging market. Multinational retailers have rapidly built up their presence since foreign participation was allowed in 1992.
By conducting case studies of UK and Japanese retailers and their off-shoots in China, Gamble set out to examine how these global organisations transfer management practices and retail concepts to their overseas subsidiaries. In China, the main approach of the Japanese and UK firms was to try to replicate the store procedures, employment relations and customer service standards of their parent company.
For both customer service and people management, this meant that companies often reflected their home country practices, so they were different from each other, as well as from local Chinese norms and practices.
However, the study found that, in some ways, retailers did diverge from practices back at home.
Japanese firms, for instance, took on far more women supervisors in China compared with their stores in Japan. And a UK multinational followed local practice with its use of large numbers of sales staff employed by product suppliers rather than directly by the stores.
Gamble says: “These findings indicate that while it is possible to transfer culturally innovative practices, those that run counter to institutional features - such as the nature of the local labour markets - are much harder to implement.” Japanese companies were more prescriptive and detailed in their way of dealing with customers than the UK-owned stores, which encouraged workers to adapt behaviour they used in everyday life.
Says Gamble: “The Japanese approach to customer service was particularly innovative in the Chinese context. Whilst, initially, local customer response was quite negative, it rapidly achieved acceptance as a form of ‘best practice’.” Most employees believed that their jobs would improve their skills level and employability, contradicting widely held concerns about ‘de-skilling’ of labour in the service sector.
Contrary to expectations, a UK firm examined for the study provided at least as much opportunity in this respect as Japanese companies.
Light Humor in the Workplace is Good Thing, Says MU business Professor
It is commonly believed that kidding around at work isn’t a good thing. Well, it is, says a University of Missouri-Columbia researcher, who has examined how workplace humor affects the working environment.
Chris Robert, assistant professor of management in MU’s Robert J. Trulaske, Sr. College of Business, says that humor – particularly joking around about things associated with the job – actually has a positive impact in the workplace. Occasional humor among colleagues, he says, enhances creativity, department cohesiveness and overall performance. The conclusion was made by examining theories on humor and integrating literature from a wide variety of disciplines that touch on the subject. Several hundred sources were analyzed by Robert and collaborator Wan Yan, a business doctoral student, who have attempted to bring together literature from numerous disciplines to make the case that humor is serious business.
“Humor has a significant impact in organizations,” says Robert, who also teaches psychology in MU’s College of Arts and Science. “Humor isn’t incompatible with goals of the workplace. It’s not incompatible with the organization’s desire to be competitive. In fact, we argue that humor is pretty important. It’s not just clowning around and having fun; it has meaningful impact on cohesiveness in the workplace and communication quality among workers. The ability to appreciate humor, the ability to laugh and make other people laugh actually has physiological effects on the body that cause people to become more bonded.”
Computing Change: Researcher Traces History of the Personal Computer
Carbon paper? Punch cards? What are those?
The Internet, personal computers, word processing and spreadsheets are so embedded in today’s society that it’s hard to remember that just 35 years ago they didn’t exist.
Thomas Haigh, assistant professor of information studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM), is among a very small number of computer experts in the world who are also historians, studying the role of technology in broader social change. These new experts are tracing how computers have changed business and society.
Researching late 20th century technology has given Haigh the opportunity to talk to many pioneers who developed both computers and the software that powers them. He conducted a series of oral history interviews for the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and has written about the history of word processing and the development of databases.
One constant Haigh has found in the “froth of change” in technology is that businesses and employees are constantly trying to figure out how to make the new gadgets and processes work for them.
“There’s this feeling that anything more than five years old is irrelevant, but one of the things I’ve found is that people are facing the same types of problems now as they did in the mid-1950s – projects using new technology are usually late and filled with bugs, the return on investment is hard to measure and computer specialists are expensive and speak an alien language.”
Specializing in the history of computers Haigh is one of a growing number of historians tackling the story of 20th century computer technology.
“We’re a small, chummy group,” he says. His special interest group on computers, information and society within the Society for the History of Technology has only 150 members, and that includes graduate students, interested non-academics and computer history teachers as well as researchers.
After earning undergraduate and graduate degrees in computer science, a Fulbright fellowship brought the British Haigh to America, where he earned his doctorate in the history and sociology of science from the University of Pennsylvania.
While most computer histories focus on the hardware – Univac and inventors tinkering in garages – Haigh also looks at the software – from word processing to spreadsheets to databases – that has changed the modern world.
Among other research projects, Haigh is currently working on a social history of the personal computer.
“Despite the shelves of books on the history of the personal computer there has been no serious historical study of how people used their computers or why they bought them.”
The first computer books quickly followed the development of the programmable computers in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
“The authors of these pieces wasted few superlatives in celebrating the unprecedented speed and power of these machines,” Haigh writes in an article for the Business History Review published by the Harvard Business School. “Indeed, the earliest and most influential of the books was entitled ‘Giant Brains, or Machines That Think,’ a title that more sober computer experts spend decades trying to dispel from the public imagination.”
Those science fiction-like promises didn’t accurately reflect the reality, leading to inevitable disappointment, Haigh adds. “People would ask why they spent three years building it and writing computer code and it still made mistakes.”
Haigh’s research has shown that while new computer technology has been sometimes oversold as a complete solution for all business programs, it has also often been brushed aside as too newfangled or expensive for practical use.
“Firms tried to build enormous computer systems, into which they would place information on every aspect of their operations, and from which would flow exactly the information (including models and simulations) required by each manager,” he writes in the Business History Review.
At the same time, managers were often reluctant to invest in new technology. Charles Bachman, creator of IDS, the first data base management system and winner of the ACM Turing award, the top prize in computer science, told Haigh one such story in an oral history interview.
Bachman comments on an early data management project that a department manager discontinued. “Maybe, (it was) because he thought it was too risky and was going to cost him too much money.”
In the 1960s and 1970s, says Haigh, people viewed computers as just another business machine, like an adding machine. Computers also were seen as big central processors and nobody really foresaw today’s iPods and MP3 players.
Haigh says he studies the history of technology and computers for the same reason any historian researches the past. “It’s a platitude, but if we don’t understand who we are and where we’re coming from, how can we understand where we’re going. That’s true of religion, culture, Iraq and it’s equally true of science and technology.”
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Many observers have long claimed there is something special about Silicon Valley that promotes entrepreneurship. Are these claims true? Is Silicon Valley more entrepreneurial, and if so, is there a special "it" factor, or are the rates due to factors already known to produce entrepreneurs? A study released by the Office of Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration answers these questions by showing that while high, Silicon Valley's entrepreneurship rates are not unique, although the factors that drive them may be.
"There appears to be something special about Silicon Valley," says Chad Moutray, chief economist for the U.S. Small Business Administration's Office of Advocacy. "Controlling for the factors we know contribute to entrepreneurship still doesn't explain what has happened in the Valley. While not the highest in the country, Silicon Valley's consistently high rates of entrepreneurship appear to bedriven by factors that have yet to be measured."
Entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley during the Boom and Bust, written by Robert Fairlie of the University of California Santa Cruz with funding from the Office of Advocacy, examines the reasons for the rates of entrepreneurship in the dot com boom and post-boom periods.
The study found that Silicon Valley's entrepreneurship rate, asmeasured by the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity, was consistently higher than the national rate during the dot com boom of the late 1990s. However, several other metropolitan areas had higher rates of entrepreneurship during the same period.
The Silicon Valley rate rose in the post-boom period, suggesting thatthe tight labor market, high wages, and available stock options suppressed entrepreneurship. After controlling for factors such as education andnative/non-native birth, the Silicon Valley rate remained high, lending credence to the idea that Silicon Valley has a special, unmeasured factor that drives entrepreneurship.
The Office of Advocacy, the "small business watchdog" of the federal government, examines the role and status of small business in the economy and independently represents the views of small business to federal agencies, Congress, and the president. It is the source for small business statistics presented in user-friendly formats, and it funds research into small business issues.
Study: China's Attempts At Economic Coercion Have Limited Success
China has had only limited success in using economic pressure to win political concessions from Taiwan, although Taiwan's increasing ties with China leave it vulnerable to economic coercion, according to a recent RAND Corporation study.
“China has moved to a much more conciliatory and seductive policy toward Taiwan in the last 18 months or so,” Tanner says. “But if China comes to feel that economic and other non-violent levers aren't going to be effective, then it might use greater force in the future.”
The study by RAND, a nonprofit research organization, finds that China and Taiwan are currently in a state of “asymmetric interdependence.” For the past two decades, Taiwan has tried to balance two goals: avoiding excessive dependence on mainland China while trying to take advantage of China's booming economy to rescue Taiwan's own competitive position. Both Taiwan's current president, Chen Shui-bian, and his predecessor, Lee Teng-hui, have struggled to limit Taiwan's dependency on China even in the face of exploding cross-strait economic ties. “Although Taiwan is, overall, more economically dependent upon mainland China than China is on Taiwan, there are key regions and sectors of China's economy that are enormously dependent upon Taiwan investment — most notably China's information technology sector — and these would suffer very badly in the event of a serious cutoff of trade and investment,” the study notes. Officially, the People's Republic of China (PRC) maintains that it is the legitimate government of all Chinese territories, including Taiwan, and believes that Taiwan and China will eventually be reunified. Taiwan, however, officially considers itself the “Republic of China,” but for the most part operates as though it were a de facto independent state. Beijing fears ethnic Taiwanese will try to establish a legally independent Republic of Taiwan, and both presidents Lee and Chen have repeatedly asserted that Taiwan is a state separate from the PRC. Beijing has repeatedly employed or threatened economic coercion to prevent any formal declarations of independence. Taiwan's economy is more vulnerable to some forms of economic pressure than others, including:
Selective harassment or intimidation of Taiwanese businesspeople who are heavily invested in the mainland (called Taishang).
Mainland sanctions against Taiwan's imports.
Mainland sanctions against Taiwan's investments.
Economic disruption, damage and sabotage of Taiwan's stock and financial markets or its information networks.
