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- Creators: Department of Supply Chain Management
- Creators: Romero, Mary
Supply chain management is becoming an increasingly vital component in the success of an organization. Business and government leaders continue to recognize the importance of having robust and resilient supply chains. This trend has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic which brought to light the fragility of the modern global supply chain network. Decades of offshoring has led to the inability of businesses to adequately manufacture critical supplies in times of crisis. This reality is most prevalent in the healthcare industry. Antibiotics, pharmaceuticals, PPE, testing equipment are almost entirely sourced from Chinese manufacturers. Building a more resilient healthcare supply chain requires a revaluation of critical items, cooperation between businesses and government, and recognizing the precarious situation for the United States which has become completely reliant on foreign manufacturers. <br/> Businesses are looking to develop more resilient supply chains which can respond and predict unforeseen market circumstances. The federal government is reckoning the national security concern of sourcing nearly all antibiotics, and pharmaceuticals from Chinese manufacturers. Aligning the goals of key stakeholders and developing the necessary incentive structure to encourage domestic manufacturing is necessary to respond to this crisis. As the global economy becomes increasingly interconnected and dependent on changes to markets anywhere on the globe, a renewed focus on proactive strategies is necessary to ensure the security and resiliency of the United States healthcare supply chain.
The surge of United States high-tech firms offshoring operations to China was driven by economic incentives of the early 1990s, low costs of labor, and ample access to an abundance of resources required in high-tech manufacturing. The dawn of the 21st century served as the advent of technological advancement and innovation in congruence with China’s rapid ascension as a prime high-tech manufacturing hub. However, increased allegations of foreign intellectual property (IP) infringement in outsourced research and development (R&D) and manufacturing on behalf of China’s state-owned enterprises (SOE) have evoked concern amongst international speculators, who allege China of weakened intellectual property enforcement and collusive tactics with state-owned enterprises in the cultivation of an anti-competitive marketplace. This thesis applies a trilateral approach to determine the optimal legal, supply chain management, and business strategies to safeguard the intellectual property of high-tech firms with outsourced operations in China.<br/><br/>Firstly, this thesis explores China’s rapid acceleration of manufacturing capabilities in tandem with nationalist initiatives, historical background, and subsequent influence cultural notions; aspirations in attaining global dominance as a high-tech innovator via nationalist programs and incentives. Succeeding is a comparative analysis of intellectual property between the United States and China, associations between intellectual property protection and economic development, and global intellectual property agreeance as set forth by the World Trade Organization (WTO). Following is a legal analysis of China, which assesses legislation, judicial structure, and litigation. Lastly, is an assessment of supply chain management in China, which assesses high-tech outsourcing practices, the vulnerability of intellectual property in research and development, instances of patent infringement, unfair licensing practices, and trade secret misappropriation.
This dissertation draws upon the data from in-depth interviews with different kinds of participants involved with e-commerce at different places in which e-commerce-related activities occur through multi-site fieldwork across six East China provinces, together with data from secondary data gathering, to scrutinize interactions of four parties at each level. At the national level, this dissertation investigates the coevolution of the Digital Developmental Village model and finds that the bureaucratic evolution and emergence of new economic sector initially created and subsequently developed by private actors will be eventually subjected to the influence of China’s state capitalism. At the local level, in consideration of the factors of local governance approach, the pre-existing robust local economic sectors, and migration patterns, this dissertation creates a typological framework to explore the formation of e-commerce villages in varied settings of the combinations of three factors above. At the individual level, this dissertation finds that rural e-commerce entrepreneurs may achieve economic successes through some more intense forms of embeddedness, which are deemed commercially unwise in the extant literature, within differing local socioeconomic and politico-institutional contexts in China. Lastly, this dissertation analyzes the expansion of the Communist Party of China into rural e-commerce in the business incubator role and sees such organizational expansion as the efforts to implicitly exercise control over rural e-commerce. In sum, through top-down policy directives and bottom-up party organizational expansion, the Chinese state has been gradually transforming rural e-commerce to a new form of state capitalism with potential global impacts, which can empower resource-scarce villages and infuse two kinds of industrial policies to stimulate technological advances.
In response to the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides of the 1990’s, the United Nations created the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine as part of its 2005 World Summit Outcome document. The goal of R2P is to promote the idea that the international community should act to protect populations from mass atrocity crimes (genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and ethnic cleansing) in the case a State fails to meet their responsibility. This report seeks to examine the Responsibility to Protect principle and see how its concepts are perceived and implemented in the private sector, given the sector’s significant influence in the world today. Using R2P as a frame of reference, I explored the concept that private sector organizations, through their actions and operations, have a responsibility to not profit from or enable systems that perpetuate mass atrocity crimes against populations. This was done through an analysis of private sector firms, regulatory frameworks, industry norms, organization initiatives, and perspectives of actors engaging with the subject matter, in addition to a modern case study regarding the experience of Uighurs and Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang, China. The scope of this project was focused on select American companies that are multinational publicly traded companies with a market capitalization of over $200 billion. This report is meant to serve as a guide for into the concepts of R2P in the private sector and provides access to resources for further exploration.