Mark Strathern

Workforce agility: the new employee strategy for the knowledge economy

The notion of the agile workforce has been discussed as central to creating the agile organization, which achieves superior environmental responsiveness in contexts of turbulence and change. Previous agility research has focused overly on the organization, paying scant attention to the workforce. This paper addresses a significant gap in agility research by reporting on the first empirical study to examine how the pressures of organizational agility impact upon the workforce. Survey evidence from 515 UK organizations is used for eliciting an initial indicator of workforce agility. The data suggest that agile workforces acquire the five capabilities of intelligence, competencies, collaboration, culture and information systems (IS). From an information technology (IT) perspective the determinants of workforce agility are flexible infrastructure platforms that support the rapid introduction of new IS and the enhancement of IT competencies across the entire workforce. The survey also revealed that information and communications technology applications increase workforce agility most when used for collaborative working.

A cladistic classification of commercial aerospace supply chain evolution

Purpose – This paper aims to address the advantage of considering an evolutionary classification scheme for commercial aerospace supply chains. It is an industry wide approach. By going beyond the performance of the single firm and considering the whole supply chain for a product a better understanding of present states and performances of the firms within the chain can be achieved.Design/methodology/approach – The approach is presented as evolutionary steps by introduction of key supply chain characters. These steps are brought together by applying cladistics to classify the evolutionary relationships between supply chain forms.Findings – Key character states define the change of supply chain forms in the evolutionary adaptation to market realities and to proactive responses to increased competition.Originality/value – The potential benefits of this approach include a benchmark of best practice, a strategic tool for policy development, and the creation of future scenarios.

Complexity: The Evolution of Identity and Diversity

The consequences of complexity science is inevitable for our understanding of the emergence and evolution of identity and diversity in ecologies and human social systems. Resulting from evolutionary processes in which successive behavioural explorations occurred which enabled the capturing of resources in the system. By comparing examples studying the evolution and co-evolution of Darwin’s Finches, of economic markets and organizational forms and of social entities, the chapter offers a view of evolution in human systems that challenges traditional and reductionistic theories of biological determinism. Identities are created and co-evolve in an on-going evolutionary process. Even though one cannot understand what exactly creates the micro-diversity underlying a system, it can be established that all the underlying phenomena obey the same kind of behaviour – that of evolving complex systems. By allowing ourselves to be “evolvers” and by exploring our own diversity, a richer set of possibilities are created on which the collective system can thrive.

The evolution of commercial aerospace supply chains and the facilitation of innovation

The paper sets out to explore the effects relationships in commercial aerospace supply chains have on innovation and competitive advantage. A perspective of supply chains as complex activity systems is used for data analysis. Competitive advantage is searched through product innovation facilitated by risk-sharing partnerships. This is characterised by expansive learning processes of creating instruments for initialising, implementing and nurturing these relationships. These processes take place in a terrain of complex power exercises. The long-term effects are totally dependent on the success of nurturing the relationships.

Complexity: the Integrating Framework for Models of Urban and Regional Systems

Traditionally, science has attempted to understand urban systems using a reductionist approach in which the behaviour of a system (city or region) is represented as being an equilibrium, mechanical interaction of its components. These components are “representative agents” for the different categories of supply and demand that inhabit the system, and it is assumed that their spatial distribution reflects an optimised value of profit (supply) and utility (demand). Over recent decades many attempts have been made to introduce more dynamic approaches, in which equilibrium is not assumed, and there are many models and methods that attempt to do this. However, this still denies the essential complexity of the urban or regional system, in which activities, natural endowments, culture, skills, education, health, transport, house prices, the global economy, all combine to affect the evolution of the system. Just as in ecology, the key to the long-term structures that may emerge is the diversity, innovative and adaptive power of people and society to counter new difficulties and create new opportunities. This fluid, adaptive power is a product of the complex system, and can only be modelled and anticipated to a limited degree. However, cities and regions can limit the possibility of successful adaptation if they are too “wellorganized” or too unimaginative. New models of adaptive organisation allow us to understand better the need for integrated views linking land-use changes to environmental and socio-economic and cultural factors. These provide a new, more open way of considering the importance of adaptable, emergent networks, and the need for multiple and burgeoning accessibility to others.

Evolution, Diversity and Organization

This book applies ideas and methods from the complexity perspective to key concerns in the social sciences, exploring co-evolutionary processes that have not yet been addressed in the technical or popular literature on complexity. Authorities in a variety of fields – including evolutionary economics, innovation and regeneration studies, urban modelling and history – re-evaluate their disciplines within this framework. The book explores the complex dynamic processes that give rise to socio-economic change over space and time, with reference to empirical cases including the emergence of knowledge-intensive industries and decline of mature regions, the operation of innovative networks and the evolution of localities and cities. Sustainability is a persistent theme and the practicability of intervention is examined in the light of these perspectives.

The contribution of fatigue usage monitoring systems to life extension in safe life and damage tolerant designs

Fatigue usage monitoring systems (Fums) offer considerable potential for life extension of aircraft parts. In this work the life extension benefits of Fums is assessed by adopting a probabilistic approach. The roles of damage law type and of service usage variability is explored. It is shown by analysis that in the absence of cycle to cycle load interaction effects, load sequence has no effect on eventual life in either linear or non linear damage laws, provided that the function describing the rate of damage growth has separable variables of stress and damage. This condition includes fracture mechanics crack growth laws. Monte Carlo simulations have been conducted of fatigue life distributions in helicopter rotor components. Variability in manoeuvre damage, when summed over a large number of manoeuvres, has little effect on scatter in overall lives. A fixed manoeuvre usage spectrum will result in very small scatter in lives, whereas keeping the usage constant for each helicopter and allowing it to vary between helicopters, produces a significantly increased variability. The influence of load factors on life is also assessed. The extent of possible maintenance credits is discussed together with the use of Bayesian updating to make optimum use of both prior design data and current loads or damage information provided by Fums.