Reinventing the WorkPlace: How Business and Employees Can Both Win
Author: David I Levin
What is the future shape of the American workplace? This question is the focus of a national debate as the country strives to find a system that provides a good standard of living for workers while allowing U.S. businesses to succeed at home and compete abroad. In this book, David Levine uses case studies and extensive evidence to show that greater employee involvement in the workplace can significantly increase both productivity and worker satisfaction. Employee involvement has many labels, including high-performance workplaces, continuous improvement, or total quality management. The strongest underlying theme is that frontline employees who are actually performing the work will always have insights about how to improve their tasks. Employee involvement encompasses policies that, at the minimal end, permit workers to suggest improvement, and at the substantive end, create an integrated strategy to give all employees the ability, motivation, and authority to constantly improve the organization's operations. Despite the evidence of its benefits, substantive employee involvement remains the exception in the U.S. work force. Levine explores the obstacles to its spread, which include legal barriers, capital markets that discourage investment in people, organizational inertia, and the costs of implementation. Levine concludes with specific public policy recommendations for increasing the extent of employee involvement, including changes in government regulation of capital and labor markets to encourage long-term investment and labor-management cooperation. He recommends macroeconomic policies to sustain high employment, less regulation for high-involvement workplaces, and training in schools and on the job to teach high-involvement practices. He also suggests new roles for unions and provides a checklist for employers to assess their progress in implementing employee involvement.
Library Journal
Levine, a member of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, argues that reengineering through greater employee involvement will significantly improve productivity and employee satisfaction. He presents his evidence through a case study of the New United Motor Manufacturing plant, a GM-Toyota venture. Once an old GM plant with problems of low quality, poor labor relations, and high absenteeism, the new factory is now at the top of U.S. plants in terms of quality and low absenteeism and has improved productivity by about 40 percent even though it employs the same workers. Levine covers methods of creating and fostering employee involvement, explores why U.S. companies ignore evidence of the benefits of this involvement, and explains how public policy discourages these actions. This highly practical guide will be of interest to managers and human resources personnel.Gary W. White, Pennsylvania State Univ., Harrisburg
Booknews
Increasing worker participation will not instantly dissipate the traditional antagonism between workers and bosses, says economist Levine, but can provide a framework for creating more rewarding jobs and increasing company productivity and profitability. He points to the US economic and political system as a main obstacle to such changes, and recommends reforming laws against employee investment, and financial and macroeconomic policies that penalize companies for long-term investment in their workforce. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Interesting book: Hitlers Priests or Countdown to Crisis
Camembert: A National Myth
Author: Pierre Boisard
Camembert--delectably fragrant, creamy-centered, neatly boxed--is the most popular and most famous French cheese. Originally made by hand in the Norman countryside, it is now mass-produced internationally, yet Camembert remains a national symbol for France, emblematic of its cultural identity. In this witty and entertaining book, Pierre Boisard investigates the history of Camembert and its legend. He considers the transformation of France's cheese-making industry and along the way gives a highly selective, yet richly detailed history of France--from the Revolution to the European Union. Camembert: A National Myth weaves together culinary and social history in a fascinating tale about the changing nature of food with implications for every modern consumer.
As the legend goes, by coincidence, grand design, or clever marketing, the birth of Camembert corresponds almost exactly in time with the birth of the French republic. In this book, republicans and Bonapartists, revolutionaries and priests are reconciled over the contents of a little round box, originating a great myth and a great nation. The story of the cheese's growing fame features Napoleon, Louis Pasteur, the soldiers of the First World War, and many others.
Beneath this intriguing story, however, runs a grittier tale about the history of food production. We learn, for example, how Camembert became white--a topic that becomes a metaphor for the sanitation of the countryside--and how Americans discovered the secrets of its production. As he describes the transformation of the Camembert industry and the changing quality of the cheese itself, Boisard reveals what we stand to lose from industrialization, the hallmark ofthe past century.
Today, small producers of raw-milk, ladle-molded Camembert are fighting to keep their tradition alive. Boisard brings us to a new appreciation of the sensual appeal of a lovely cheese and whets the appetite for a taste of the authentic product.
Library Journal
Boisard, a social sciences professor at the Centre d'Etudes de l'emploi in Noisy-le-Grand, France, has written a book ostensibly about a cheese: Camembert. The text accordingly discusses its production, from gathering the milk to aging the cheese. A brief chapter further discusses the sensual aspects of Camembert-its taste, aroma, and softness. Boisard's real topic, however, is what the growing ubiquity of the cheese in contemporary France tells us about French society. This renders his book both a little dry and speculative. Boisard is not above shaky generalizations based on his observations, and though he notes archival records and interviews with elderly cheesemakers, he occasionally forces the story of the cheese to fit the cultural history of a nation. Non-French readers may more readily associate Brie with Gaul, and had Boisard somehow accommodated such a foreign view of his topic, he might have written a more interesting book that would have appealed to a broader readership. Suitable only for academic food and French studies collections.-Peter Hepburn, Univ. of Illinois at Chicago Lib. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Table of Contents:
| Preface. Opening the Box | ||
| 1 | A Myth Is Born | 1 |
| 2 | Marie Harel and Her Descendants | 25 |
| 3 | Camembert Goes National | 69 |
| 4 | The Reign of the Great Families | 116 |
| 5 | The War of the Two Camemberts | 160 |
| 6 | The Image of Camembert | 196 |
| 7 | Permanence of the Myth | 221 |
| Notes | 227 | |
| Index | 241 |
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