131 research outputs found
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US Biopharmaceutical Finance and the Sustainability of the Biotech Boom
Full text linkIn the decade before the current economic crisis, the US biotechnology industry was booming. In a 2006 book, Science Business: The Promise, the Reality, and the Future of Biotech, Gary Pisano implies that, given the 10-20 year time-frame for developing biotech products and the lack of profitability of the industry as a whole, the US biotech boom should not have happened. Yet the biotech industry has received substantial funding from venture capital firms as well as from established companies through R&D alliances. Why would money from venture capitalists and big pharma be flowing into an industry in which profits are so hard to come by? The purpose of this article is to work toward a solution of what might be called the “Pisano puzzle”, and in the process to provide a basis for analyzing the industrial and institutional conditions under which the growth of the US biopharmaceutical (BP) industry is sustainable. One part of the answer has been the willingness of stock-market investors to absorb the initial public offerings (IPOs) of a BP venture that has not yet generated a commercial product, and indeed may never do so. The other part of the answer is that the knowledge base that BP companies can tap to develop products comes much more from government investments and spending than from business finance. Indeed, we show that, through stock buybacks and dividends, established corporations in the BP industry have been distributing substantial sums of cash to shareholders that may be at the expense of R&D. We use the framework that we have developed for analyzing the sustainability of the US BP business model to pose a number of key areas for future research, with an emphasis on the implications of the financialization of this business model for the generation of safe and affordable BP drugs
Driving Lives: An Ethnography of Chicago Taxi Drivers
Full text linkTaxi drivers are central to the transportation systems of major urban areas; drivers’ work lives exemplify contemporary labor conditions; their personal networks and associations demonstrate the social dynamics of a global city—and yet, taxi drivers’ experiences often remain hidden from public and scholarly view. The research project from which this paper derives, part of an ongoing collaboration with the United Taxidrivers Community Council (UTCC), a grassroots drivers’ rights organization in Chicago, hopes to redress this omission by chronicling the everyday lives of drivers, in their individual careers and when they come together as a community, by examining drivers’ experiences at multiple scales, from the small intimate space of a cab’s interior to the broad dynamics of the global economy. As drivers chart their transnational courses, map the city in which they live and work, and claim territory for themselves and their concerns, they transfigure the spaces, both material and metaphoric, of the global workforce
Public-Private Institutions, Upgrading, and Accessing Knowledge Resources in Emerging Market Societies
Full text linkThis article argues that the ability of a firm to access a variety of knowledge resources, and in turn upgrade its products, depends on being tied not simply to any or many organizations and institutions but rather to those that act as social and knowledge bridges across previously isolated producer communities. Through a multi-method analysis of the recent transformation of the Argentine wine industry, we highlight how distinct governance rules for new government support institutions can anchor their multiplex, cross-cutting network qualities, which underpin their ability to provide improved collective resources and reshape the ties between firms
How Value Chains Grow in the IT Sector - R&D, Software Development and IT Support Services and How This Affects Work
Full text linkThis contribution examines companies’ and public-sector organisations’ external restructuring processes, with consideration of emerging or lengthening value chains and network relationships in the service sector. Focusing on three business functions – software development in the IT industry, R&D in the IT industry and IT services for public-sector organisations – the paper describes the types of inter-organisational relations that emerge and analyses the impact of restructuring on employment conditions and work organisation. The business functions clearly differ according to the form that restructuring takes and with regard to the impact of restructuring on work and employment. Common trends include increased insecurity, growing flexibility demands and higher levels of standardisation and formalisation of work
Are One Track Pony Clusters Sustainable? The Israeli Biotechnology Industry
Full text linkIndustrial clusters are deemed to be critical for industrial development and local economic growth. These concentrations include related industries which may collaborate as well as compete with each other. One of the factors behind the success of clusters is the combination of a large number of companies, of various sizes, working along many stages of production. The availability of different suppliers, human resources from competing companies or local universities as well as customers promotes the growth of a cluster. However, in the last two decades, many industrial districts have become more specialized in particular stages of production. Considering the above factors for cluster success, important questions rise: what is the danger of specialization? Exactly how narrow a stage of production is too narrow for cluster sustainability? This paper examines an innovation based cluster, the biotechnology industry in Rehovot, Israel.*
*The city of Rehovot is located inland, half an hour from Tel Aviv. In the city we can find the Weitzman Institute and the Hebrew University’s agriculture department. In this paper the Rehovot cluster will include also the firms located in “Kiryat Weizmann”, which was built in Nes Tziona, Rehovot's smaller neighbour. The two clusters are closely located, and are less than five minutes apart. This industrial district, which is the largest biotechnology cluster in Israel, is based on innovative companies, many spun out of university research. This paper used both quantitative and qualitative research methods. The dynamic of the industry was investigated using qualitative methods through field research including site visits and interviews. This paper argues that while innovation can be the base of an industry, and R&D is the base of several successful industrial districts around the world, it may not be sufficient for local economic growth and sustainability
Competitive Strategies In The Us Retail Industry: Consequences For Jobs In Food And Consumer Electronics Stores
Full text linkUS retail markets are characterized by consolidation, globalization, and the spread of big-box discounters. What do these trends mean for job quality and workers? For compensation, skill content of jobs, and opportunities for promotion? What role do institutions—regulatory, or representative—play in shaping company strategies, and outcomes for jobs as well as workers?
Retail generates a large and growing volume of entry-level jobs and is a rare industry with few educational requirements at entry. It is a highly relevant area of the labor market to examine to understand opportunities for low skill and mid level skill workers.
Findings come from case studies in eight food and eight consumer electronics companies; a total of 18 cases because two companies had both lines of products. Food retail is the largest subsector and employs a majority of women while consumer electronics employs a majority of men. Data include 195 interviews with: headquarter managers for human resources and operations; regional managers; store managers; union representatives, and frontline workers—part-time and full-time. These are complemented with company HR numbers and sectoral statistics.
Retail jobs are affected by significant change as companies struggle to survive and grow in an increasingly saturated market. Strategies include seeking to increase service, and product quality or variety (altering the mix of products and services), on one hand, while also cutting costs on the other hand. However, increased demands on workers combined with low compensation undermine service improvements. The paper explores the match between competitive strategy and labor strategy in the cases. It examines market and institutional conditions in which this two-pronged strategy succeeds and others where it encounters major challenges
The Role of DARPA in Seeding and Encouraging New Technology Trajectories: Pre- and Post- Tony Tether in the New Innovation Ecosystem
Full text linkThis paper, a case study of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), sheds new insights into the role of the U.S. State in innovation. The study uses grounded theory building methods to unpack the processes by which DARPA fosters new technology trajectories within the institutional ecosystem supporting the computing industry. At the heart of the paper
are 50 in-depth field interviews of DARPA program managers and related Microsystems technologists within start-ups, universities, government institutions, and the five established computing firms. Going further, the paper triangulates this qualitative interview data with participant observation, archival data, and bibliometric data to provide a holistic view of the
forces driving technological change. The results find DARPA to be a uniquely adaptive organization. Yet, throughout such adaptations, DARPA program managers use the same five step process to influence technology. With its latest shift, DARPA may be effectively (1) narrowing the valley of death, (2) coordinating innovation within a vertically fragmented industry, and (3) influencing innovation to serve military needs despite primary demand being in commercial applications. This “new DARPA” may, however, leave the U.S. technology pipeline without new sources
Toward Labor Flexibility with Chinese Characteristics? The Case of the Chinese Construction Machinery Industry
Full text linkThis paper takes an institutional perspective to study the roles of institutional change and continuity in shaping Chinese enterprises’ labor flexibility strategies. Based on intensive field research in seven construction machinery enterprises, I find that employment practices in these workplaces are converging toward extremely numerical flexibility including the use of temporary labor, short-term labor contracts, termination of labor relationships, internal retrenchment and flexible working time. I argue that both institutional change and continuity have played important roles in shaping these labor flexibility practices. On the one hand, the changing household registration system, the changing social protection system, the establishment of the labor contract system, the weakening workers’ representation in the workplace, and the ambiguous labor regulations and weak enforcement have directly provided pre-conditions for the spread of extreme numerical flexibility practices in the Chinese workplace. On the other hand, the continuity of other institutions including the macroeconomic control of the state, the underdeveloped business credit system, the cultural preference of extremely short lead time, and the vocational education and training system has indirectly imposed imperatives of extreme numerical flexibility on these enterprises by increasing uncertainties and fluctuations of product markets and worsening the labor market condition of excess low skilled and scarce high skilled labor
Social Structure And Marketplace Formation Within California Biotechnology
Full text linkRecent studies link the performance of regional technology clusters to their social organization. In an influential study of the success of Silicon Valley, Saxenian (1994) argues that the region benefits from a decentralized structure encouraging the formation of diffuse social ties linking scientists and engineers across local companies. This article examines the emergence of social structures supporting biotechnology across three regions of California: San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. Social network analysis methods are used to trace the formation of social ties linking some 2500 senior managers working within California biotechnology between 1976 to 2005. Findings show that San Francisco biotechnology succeeded quickly because it inherited an appropriate social structure for the sector from the Silicon Valley electronics industry. San Diego, on the other hand, was a region with no previous high-technology. Social networks supporting biotechnology were constructed in the region through the unanticipated collapse of an early key firm, Hybritech, which lead to the formation of over a dozen spin-offs linked through founder networks. Los Angeles, despite being home to the industry’s leading firm, Amgen, has not developed a successful biotechnology industry, nor has it developed a social structure to support marketplace formation in the region. In sum, through exploring scenarios by which social structures supporting high-technology industry emerge (or, in the case of Los Angeles, fail to emerge), the article aims to contribute to broader debates theoretical exploring the sociological basis of economic development
What Makes a District? "Created" Externalities in Craft-Like Manufacturing -- The Garment Industry
Full text linkThis paper documents the emergence of “new” industrial districts using evidence from longitudinal and retrospective studies of garment districts in France, Italy, the UK, and the United States. “Traditional” district externalities – proximity to customers and suppliers, access to skilled labor supplies, knowledge about products and production processes -- matter as much to the smaller craft-like firms that survive as they did to the larger firms that are now disappearing. However, we also find an emerging set of externalities being “created” by surviving firms that are “craft-like” in that they are quick and flexible in their production methods and tend to serve markets for more individualized products with short product cycles. We identify three distinct patterns among the new externalities being created by firms: (1) strengthening traditional sources of externalities, (2) intensifying market and/or social incentives for higher effort and lower costs, and (3) fostering a district-wide culture of broad-based Schumpeterian innovation by firms. While the institutional history of each district and the nation-specific structure of supply chains shape these responses, the patterns we observe transcend national boundaries