This paper reports the findings of a longitudinal study into manufacturing performance, lean production principles and buyer supplier relations in the Japanese, US and UK automotive industries. A total of 26 first tier component makers in the three countries were subject to detailed benchmarking...

This paper provides a rigorous analysis of the impact of training upon the employment growth characteristics of small and medium sized firms. Using appropriate statistical techniques to cope with sample selection biases and heterogenerous employment growth patterns it reveals that training is...

There is growing evidence of the importance of co-operation between managers and workers for improving industrial performance. One manifestation of this is the growing use of human resource management (HRM) strategies to increase the involvement of employees. The survey of small and medium sized...

Notwithstanding their remarkable recent growth, surprisingly little research has hitherto been conducted on the evolving geography of professional and business services in Britain. This paper analyses the results of a detailed survey of 300 small and medium-sized management and engineering...

This paper explores the impact of management characteristics and patterns of collaboration on a firmÕs innovation performance in transforming innovation resources into commercially successful outputs. These questions are investigated using a recent firm level survey database for 465 innovative...

Innovative firms face two major kinds of risks in developing new technologies: competence destruction and appropriability. High levels of technical uncertainty and radical changes in knowledge in some fields generate high technical failure risks and make it difficult to plan research and...

After a brief recent empirical sketch of Islamic finance, the paper turns to its main theoretical and conceptual purpose. It seeks to relate the concepts of Islamic and conventional finance, and to examine certain important questions which arise from the interaction between these systems. The...

The paper analyses the relationship between, on the one hand, markets, competition and cooperation, and on the other hand, firms' innovative behaviour. Drawing on ESRC Centre for Business Research survey results, the paper uses descriptive statistics and a qualitative response model to examine...

This paper tries to cast a theoretical bridge between two important phenomena which have characterised the evolution of advanced capitalist countries over the second half of this century: namely, the shift from the so-called golden age to the "unstable" macroeconomic environment of the '70s and...

This paper examines the extent to which contemporary business-led approaches designed to maximize female human capital are effective in reducing the gendered pay gap in the British labour market. In particular it asks whether the approach outlined by the latest Cabinet Office Review on women's...