This paper presents an adapted GRAI grid approach to modelling the decision making processes of vertically related fInns in a business network. A framework for assessing case studies is used to model part of the supply chain in three different industries, and identify areas for improving the connectivity between the individual companies. The key factors affecting the effectiveness were found to be opacity of infonnation concerning demand, and delays due to uncoordinated decision making processes in linked fInns.

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It is the purpose of this paper to set manufacturing into its historical and economic context and to explain the trends and issues that have led us to this conference. The implications of collaboration are explored both in the defmition and the context of the national value chain.

This essay argues for a re-evaluation of the eponymous heroine of George du Maurier's 1894 bestselling novel, Trilby . Trilby's tragic end is generally understood to come at the hands of that archetypally evil impresario, Svengali, who purportedly mesmerizes and manipulates her into becoming Europe's greatest singing star. However, a closer examination of her life reveals that Trilby's fate in the novel can more properly be linked to a lifelong dehumanization that shatters her sense of autonomous self and reduces her to a most rudimentary version of the human. In her progression from aspiring subject to tractable 'singing-machine,' Trilby can, in fact, be positioned as belonging to the cultural genealogy of the automaton, a figure that symbolizes a particular nineteenth-century concern about the fate of human subjectivity in an increasingly rationalized, systematized world.

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