Overview
Aims and objectives
Manufacturing firms have been undergoing a number of organisational and technological changes aimed at improving competitiveness of the manufacturing business units and their overall contribution to firm competitiveness. However, despite the implementation of organisational and technological changes firms have found it difficult to compete in their operating environment. In order to understand the ‘missing link’ between manufacturing strategy and competitiveness, we used an approach that related the strategic decision-making process in manufacturing to that of the overall firm, under the influence of changes in a firm’s external environment.
This survey of 205 high technology manufacturing firms in the UK was designed to address the following questions:
- what is the role of manufacturing operations under different types of firm level strategies and environmental conditions?
- what are the drivers of firm competitiveness in terms of strategy (firm and manufacturing business unit) and organisational structure, under given external environment?
The database consists of several hundred variables for each firm.
Dates of survey
June to July 1999
Number of responses
The dataset consists of replies from 205 respondents.
Dataset
Manufacturing Strategy and Competitiveness Dataset, 1994-1999 (SN4434)
Principal investigators
Andy Cosh
Mike Gregory
Alan Hughes
Shekhar Jayanthi