The UK house-building industry has often been criticized for the quality of its products. Its business drivers are less focused on the needs of customers compared with much of the manufacturing sector. A recent survey revealed considerable dissatisfaction among buyers of newly built homes,...

Small firms are much less likely than large firms to provide their employees and their managers with formal training. Storey and Westhead offer two explanations of this, which they refer to as the 'ignorance' explanation and the 'market' explanation. This paper reviews recent research findings...

Recent work on competitiveness has emphasized the importance of business networking for innovativeness. Until recently, insights into the dynamics of this relationship have been fragmented. This paper presents a systematic review of research linking the networking behaviour of firms with their...

In 1994 PowerGen, a UK electricity generating company, conducted a business improvement project. The project used a participative approach involving soft OR and systems thinking, an approach that was developed in earlier projects in food retailing and mining. The aim of the project was initially...

Globalization has allowed construction companies to become part of the global economy. However, this economic survival is dependent on their ability to attain the levels of technology development, which can make them globally competitive. The UK Construction sector is a highly knowledge...

We present a model of training investments and employment outcomes. In this model training may enhance trainees' tastes for particular types of career (taste shift) and/or shift their wage offer distributions (pay-off). An empirical analysis is conducted with a unique data-set of UK graduates....

In this paper, we assess complexity in organizations in terms of the dimensions of 'depth' and 'breadth'. We examine how this operates in firms, indicating how different fields of research have tended to highlight only certain aspects of complexity, for instance, technology or products. In...

This paper examines the highly political nature of innovation appropriation processes. The central focus is on the role of networks, networking, and knowledge in these processes. The data presented is drawn from two case study companies, both of which were implementing Enterprise Resource...

An attempt has been made to examine some aspects of transaction structure of the small business sector in Japanese manufacturing. It has been found that there are some interesting findings in the industrial organization of the sector (1) In the transactions of intermediate goods with...

Simple (equally weighted) moving averages are frequently used to estimate the current level of a time series; with this value being projected as a forecast for future observations. A key measure of the effectiveness of the method is the sampling error of the estimator, which this paper defines...