“Sustainable prosperity” denotes an economy that generates stable and equitable growth for a large and growing middle class. From the 1940s into the 1970s, the United States appeared to be on a trajectory of sustainable prosperity, especially for white-male members of the U.S. labor force....

How are Asian countries preparing children to have skills—including creativity, innovation, and technical capability—to compete in the 21st Century global economy? Countries including China, Korea, Japan and Singapore have begun to integrate education policy and practice into a key component...

This article uses Bourdieu’s theory of practice (BTOP) to understand immigrants’ acculturation. It synthesizes research findings by discussing acculturation as: (1) equalization of immigrants’ and natives’ development (convergence); (2) language and social practices related to economic,...

Organizational change has become the norm rather than the exception among U.S. hospitals. Downsizing, service diversification, and affiliation with healthcare systems are but a few notable examples. In this paper, we review the rationale and consequences of organizational change in U.S....

Technological innovation sometimes requires industry incumbents to shift to a completely new core technology. In order to successfully navigate a technological transition, firms often face the ambidextrous challenge of "exploiting" existing complementary assets in order to support the new...

There is widespread and growing concern about the availability of good jobs in the U.S. economy. Inequality has been growing for thirty years and is now at levels not seen since the 1920s. Stable and remunerative employment has become harder for U.S. workers to find. With the widespread plant...

This is the first chapter in Part 3. Its purpose is to contrast the value structure of platform systems with step processes from a technological perspective. I first review the basic technical architecture of computers and argue that every computer is inherently a platform for performing...

The IBM PC was the first digital computer platform that was open by as a matter of strategy, not necessity. The purpose of this chapter is to understand the IBM PC as a technical system and set of organization choices in light of the theory of how technology shapes organizations. In Chapter 7, I...

In Chapter 2 we saw that the most economical locations for transactions in a task network are the so-called thin crossing points—places where transfers are easy to define, count and pay for. However, in many places in the task network, transfers of material, energy, and information are so...

Functional analysis as set forth in the last chapter decomposes a technical system into functional components that do things to advance the system’s purpose and the goals of its designers. Functional analysis in turn can be used to construct value structure maps of technical systems. Such maps...