Research and Publications

There’s a misconception that becoming a low-cost leader in an industry can be achieved by implementing one-off programs aimed at efficiency improvement and waste reduction. But the reality is much different. The author has spent decades studying how extraordinary low-cost organizations differ from their competitors, and he distills what he has learned in this article. Companies that have enjoyed sustained low-cost positions have unique leadership styles and cultures. Their CEOs, for instance, share some notable characteristics: respect for people, a long-term commitment to the organization, a preference for decentralized decision-­making, and a zeal for making change happen. Low-cost exemplars also take a distinctive approach to the design and execution of their operating systems. They eliminate long-standing industry barriers to lower costs; ensure that product design and process design reinforce each other; develop original multipurpose technologies that connect the company to the customer and reduce cost; and use cycle time and variance as a management tool. The article offers executives three questions to ask to assess their company’s prospects for becoming the low-cost leader in their industry.

The New York Convention is the blueprint of the international arbitration system. The history of the Convention in Colombia reveals the complexity of the interactions between domestic decision-makers and international law. Even though Colombia was an active participant in the 1958 Conference on International Arbitration, congressional approval for the Convention proved a challenging crusade. Decades of setbacks concluded with the ratification of the Convention in 1979, only to be followed by a new challenge, as the law approving the treaty was declared unconstitutional in 1988. The Convention was re-Approved in 1990. From 1990 to 2011, however, the Supreme Court was reluctant to apply the Convention in accordance with its spirit. In 2011, the Court turned around its own jurisprudence on arbitration, adopting a pro-Arbitration approach that has lasted until today. The Court has dealt with many aspects of the Convention, including its interaction with domestic rules of civil procedure, the notion of arbitral award, public policy, reciprocity, and the interplay between the New York Convention and other international treaties. The history of the Convention in Colombia is a global south example of the manifold challenges involved in the use and implementation of international law instruments at the domestic level.

While scholarship has demonstrated a link between workers’ right to organize and improved factory safety, research has paid less attention to how the voice of workers can be strengthened. This chapter explores two initiatives to strengthen worker rights in Bangladesh with different approaches to meeting this goal: The Amader Kotha Helpline (AKH) which grew out of the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety and the Social Dialogue Program (SDP) as part of the Joint Ethical Trading Initiative (JETI). Using as a lens a focus on collective process rights and individual outcome rights, the chapter demonstrates that in the absence of domestic political support for the rights of Bangladesh workers to organize the SDP collective rights approach supported by European brands, there is no wider take-up in other parts of the RMG industry. In contrast, the AKH's focus on empowering individuals has seen an impressive spread among factories, in usage by workers and, among brands joining the scheme.

The graying and fraying of the liberal international order in the 2020s has triggered a tsunami of autopsies about what went wrong in the 1990s. Many scholars have concluded that the United States emphasized global governance structures that were divisive, triggering blowback from without and within. This chapter argues that such critiques rest on a faulty analytical premise. In lumping 1991 with previous “ordering moments” such as 1918 and 1945, international relations scholars mistakenly treat the beginning of the post–Cold War period as akin to other postwar critical junctures. The end of the Cold War, however, legitimated rather than discredited the liberal international order. The recursive power of global governance structures obviated any kind of “clean slate” option for the post–Cold War era. The fateful decisions of the 1990s that led to subsequent instability had more to do with American politics driving domestic policy choices than faulty global governance structures.

This book engages in a creative process of historical retrieval of visions for substantive democracy and federal union during the struggle for freedom that remained unrealized during the postcolonial transition. Structured in three parts, the book examines the historical trajectory of South Asia in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in its full complexity. Contributors to the book place the momentous event of independence and partition of India in a global perspective. Resisting the triumphalist nationalist narratives – that see the present-day nation-states of India and Pakistan, and also Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Burma as the preordained goal of the anticolonial struggle – the chapters analyze the process of South Asian independence, partition, and constitution-making. The book examines the relationship between nation, partition, and federation in the aftermath of liberal imperialism. Exposing the hollowness of celebratory accounts of liberal democracy in postcolonial South Asia, this book squarely confronts the historical roots of the contemporary crisis of authoritarianism in a global context. By identifying the requirements of genuine and substantive democracy in the subcontinent, the book charts a creative way toward a better constitutional and political future. Raising questions that are fundamental to our understanding of modern South Asia and its place in the world, the book will be of interest to students and researchers of South Asian history, politics, and decolonization.

In 1975 democracy broke down in India giving way to a 19-month spell of authoritarianism. A pliant president invoked the constitutional provision to declare a state of emergency at the instance of the prime minister. More than 100,000 political opponents, independent journalists, and dissenters were imprisoned. Fundamental rights were suspended, and courts could not entertain writs of habeas corpus. This chapter assesses different explanations for the breakdown in India’s democracy, ranging from personal and proximate triggers to structural and deep historical factors. It shows that the breakdown of India’s democracy had historical roots in colonial jurisprudence that formed the basis of the postcolonial republic. Today, India’s electoral autocracy arguably poses a graver challenge to the world’s largest democracy than the one that was overcome in 1977. A postcolonial constitution retaining the myriad states of exception of the colonial era does not afford sufficient protection against democratically elected authoritarian rulers.

This concluding essay brings together the different strands of the argument on the relationship between nation, partition, and federation in the aftermath of liberal imperialism. It shows how this volume squarely confronts the historical roots of the contemporary crisis of authoritarianism in a global context and, by identifying the requirements of genuine and substantive democracy in the subcontinent, charts a creative way toward a more hopeful constitutional and political future.

This introductory essay shows how this volume pays close attention to the global context of South Asia’s freedom in the mid-1940s, particularly with an eye to the under-appreciated, if not altogether forgotten, political alternatives to the nation-state, in the form of regional and global anticolonial federations, that have been deemed feasible and attractive at certain key moments of contemporary history. Alongside rethinking the nation, the volume revisits partition as a failure of federation and its long aftermath. Several essays assess the role of partition in shaping democracy and authoritarianism in South Asia, including the making of the Indian Constitution and its states of exception.