COMPETING BY DESIGN, SPECIALIZATION AND CUSTOMIZATION: MANUFACTURING LOCKS IN THE WEST MIDLANDS (UK)

The past thirty years have seen major shifts and improvements in manufacturing productivity, bringing greater output but fewer jobs. As a result, manufacturing is now less visible in "post-industrial" societies. Nevertheless, manufacturing still matters in developed market economies but our understanding of manufacturing has failed to evolve with developments in the management and organization of production processes. This paper explores the lock industry in the West Midlands (UK), a traditional low-tech manufacturing sector. West Midlands lock companies that produced standardized, mass-produced products have experienced intensive competition from low-cost producers. Many of these firms have downsized their operations in the UK. Nevertheless, this is only one response to intensified competition. Lock firms located in the West Midlands are unable to compete on price and have shifted away from the production of mass-produced locks to concentrate on high value-added niche markets. The firms have developed inimitability strategies based around design, expertise, specialization, customization and nearness to market that assist them in maintaining their revenue and profit streams. Niche manufacturers have been far less susceptible and relatively immune to foreign competition and they continue to diversify product ranges by targeting specialist end-users. The emphasis is on producing high-quality locks in small batches that can be produced just-in-time to meet customers' requirements. The continued survival of these lock firms is based upon a strategy that includes the development of product-based competitive advantage combined with locational advantage and supported by efficient, responsive and customer-focused manufacturing processes.     

Cancelling March Madness exposes opportunities for a more sustainable sports tourism economy

Abstract

One of the earliest signals of the severity of the spread of COVID-19 in the United States and other countries was the swift cancelation of many highly prominent amateur and professional sporting events and seasons like the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament, known as “March Madness.” The loss of March Madness is treated as a moment of creative tension, when disruptions can facilitate reflection and lead to positive change. We discuss the economic, socio-cultural, and environmental effects of shuttering the tournament and suggest that an understanding of the impacts of COVID-19 offers an opportunity to bring about an alternative, more sustainable sports tourism economy. The cancellation of March Madness resulted in the loss of millions of dollars in tourism revenue for local economies and deprived traveler-fans of pilgrimages to arenas, important socio-cultural gathering spaces for American basketball fans. However, it also prevented the emission of a sizable quantity of greenhouse gasses based on our carbon footprint calculated from the previous year’s tournament. Ultimately, from the disruptive closing down of sport and event tourism, a post-pandemic sports tourism landscape should emerge that takes more seriously the triple-bottom line notion of balancing a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions with the creation and maintenance of resilient local economies all while both acknowledging the important role sport plays in society and keeping tourism actors healthy.     

Organ donation,genetics, race and culture: The making of a medical problem (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Within transplant medicine in the UK, the relationship between organ donation and ethnicity has been characterized as problematic, with a specific focus on the apparent reluctance of black and Asian people in Britain to act as blood and organ donors. In this article, we show that transplant medicine, in trying to work out a solution to this ‘problem’, has culturalized the issue by treating it as something that falls outside its own domain of practice, with racialized responsibility being entrenched through the mapping of donor pools to cultural difference. We urge a rethink of what is increasingly becoming a one‐sided discussion. A concentration on ethnicity alone fails to take into account the ways in which low donation rates become a problem as a result of the specific ways in which transplant medicine in the UK has been configured and reconfigured over time, constituting different publics along the way. In order to understand the relationship between ethnicity and organ donation, it is important that we as anthropologists examine where and how the problem has in large part been forged (i.e., within transplant medicine), as much as where and in what terms that problem has been fixed in place (i.e., as a problem of black and minority ethnic publics).     

Heretic or Traitor? Spinoza’s Excommunication and the Challenge That Judaism Poses to the Study of Religious Diversity

ABSTRACT

When political theorists talk about “religious diversity,” they usually intend the multiplicity of “religions” in a given society. Yet we now know that the secular, liberal framing of the problematic presupposes a controversial definition of “religion.” My primary goal, in this paper, is to reorient scholarly discussion around what we might call “the critical religion conception of diversity” – not the multiplicity of “religions,” but the myriad ways that the sacred intersects with national and political identity, some of which resist assimilation to the “religious” paradigm. Toward this end, I relate a story about Spinoza’s Hebrew reception in the interwar period. For Zionist intellectuals, Spinoza symbolized the deformations that “religion” imposed on Judaism’s self-understanding and the constraints that it placed on Jewish intellectual horizons. Studying the Zionist critique of “religion” exposes the limitations of received theoretical frameworks, which cannot address the kinds of diversity that were politically consequential for twentieth-century Jews.     

The Sound of Debate in Georgian England: Auralising the House of Commons

St Stephen's Chapel, Westminster became the first permanent home of the house of commons in 1548. The building had to be adapted to conform to its new use. Visual and architectural adaptations to the space have been discussed in detail, but the building's new role also required improvements to the working use of the space as a forum for public debate. In this essay, acoustic techniques are used to explore how speeches and debate would have sounded during the Georgian period and consider how St Stephen's was adapted for this new use. The results demonstrate that, despite these alterations, the 18th‐century house of commons was not ideally suited to speaking or listening to debate. The listening experience was not uniform across the chamber, and its former use as a medieval chapel may have influenced how well certain positions in the chamber would have experienced speech.