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Since the large-scale manufacture of personal timepieces began, industry leadership has shifted among widely disparate locations, production systems, and cultures. This book recounts the story of the quest for supremacy in the manufacture of watches--from the cottage industries of Britain; to the preeminence of Switzerland and, later, the United States; to the high-tech plants of Japan and the sweatshops of Hong Kong. Glasmeier examines both the strategies adopted by specific firms and the interplay of such varying influences as technological change, cyclical economic downturns, war, and national trade policies. In so doing, she delineates a cohesive framework within which to address such broader questions as how sustained regional economic development takes place (or starts and then stops); how decisions made by corporations are structured by internal and external forces; and the ways industrial cultures with different strategic learning capabilities facilitate or thwart the pursuit of technological change.
World watch production today is concentrated in three countries: Switzerland, Japan and China. Former centres such as Great Britain, France, the United States and Russia saw the industrial manufacture of watches disappear from their territory during the twentieth century. How did this situation come about? The business of time aims to answer this question by presenting the first comprehensive history of the sector. It traces the evolution and transformation of the global watch industry from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, highlighting the conditions that enabled watch production to expand across the globe and revealing how multinational companies gradually emerged to dominate the industry.
This survey of the rise and decline of English watchmaking fills a gap in the historiography of British industry. Clerkenwell in London was supplied with 'rough movements' from Prescot, 200 miles away in Lancashire. Smaller watchmaking hubs later emerged in Coventry, Liverpool, and Birmingham. The English industry led European watchmaking in the late eighteenth century in output, and its lucrative export markets extended to the Ottoman Empire and China. It also made marine chronometers, the most complex of hand-crafted pre-industrial mechanisms, crucially important to the later hegemony of Britain’s navy and merchant marine. Although Britain was the 'workshop of the world', its watchmaking...
There is a shortage of skilled watchmakers and clockmakers in America, and soon millions of timepieces of a bygone age will likely be gathering dust in a bottom drawer or attic, or worse, scraped for the gold or silver content of their cases, and in the case of clocks just thrown away. Every year young Americans graduate from high school with no plans for college and no job skills. But under their nose, at least for a select few, is a trade that can provide for them a chance to be self-employed in a society where only a small number out of a hundred have the courage to even think of such a thing and a chance to earn much more than they ever will as an employee. Many may have been told that w...