Customer Requirements And Product Characteristics

Customer Requirements And Product Characteristics One of the main roles of any manufacturing plant is to produce product that caters to the demands of the market, and the best way to understand the market needs is to distinguish what is important to the customer/consumer. This understanding of the customer gives the manufacturer a competitive edge, as he knows more or less what the needs of the customer is, when he sells his product in the market. This competitive edge can be distinguished into various factors, for e.g. Quality, Speed, Dependability, Cost, and so on. A particular way of distinguishing which factor gives us more competitive edge is to distinguish between what Prof Terry Hill calls as â€Å"order winners† and â€Å"order qualifiers†. (Pycraft et al 1997) [Online] But before we dive into categorising the various competitive factors into order winners and order qualifiers, it will be helpful if we knew where the products lie in the Puttick Grid. The Puttick Grid, devised by the Warwick Manufacturing Group, defines product market position with respect to the complexity of the product and the level of uncertainty in the market. A point to note about the Puttick Grid is that over a period of time, product tends to move around in the grid and hence may change after a period of time. The Specialist DBPs have a very erratic demand profile, they are basically manufactured either one by one, or if they is more demand they probably in batches of 10. There is a peak in demand during the spring and summer seasons as a lot of people get back to riding their bikes after the winter, and hence become desirable during these seasons amongst the people who own vintage bikes. Also since these are vintage bikes, they dont mind spending a bit for getting replacement parts. The Aftermarket DBPs have a rather subdued demand as compared to the Specialist DBPs. Since these are DBP that are no longer in standard productions, there are a lot of organisations that have come out with their own version of the DBP and hence the customer has more choice. So, in such a case, the customer will go by brand image, price and the quality of the product. The Original Equipment DBPs on the other hand, will have a very stable demand that will be known to Friction Materials well in advance. Quality and price become very important for such a product and hence they become more of a commodity. Hence according to the above discussion, the products have been placed in the Puttick Grid as shown below in Figure 1.1.1 Super Value Product Responsive/Jobbing/Fashion Specialist DBP Consumer Durables Commodities Original Equipment DBP Now that we have an understanding of where the product lies with respect to the Puttick Grid, we can distinguish which competitive factor is an order winner and which is an order qualifier. Characteristic Aftermarket DBP Specialist DBP Design Brand Name 60 60 Price 40 40 Speed (Lead Time) Q Dependability (Availability) QQ Q Quality (Fit to purpose) Q QQ Table 1.1.1: Order Winners and Qualifiers. (Adopted for Hill 2000) [Note: Order Winners are marked out of 100. Q: Order Qualifier; QQ: Order Looser.] Characteristics Original Equipment DBP Design 40 Brand Name 10 Price 40 Speed (Lead Time) 10 Dependability (Availability) QQ Quality (Fit to purpose) QQ Table 1.1.2: Order Winners and Qualifiers. (Adopted for Hill 2000) [Note: Order Winners are marked out of 100. Q: Order Qualifier; QQ: Order Looser.] 1.1.1 Design The links between design, operations and markets are the very essence of the business. The way that these integrate, therefore, is fundamental to sound strategy development and implementation. Both design and operations aim is to provide products according to the technical and business specifications. (Hill Hill 2009) In case of Aftermarket DBPs, the dimensions of the DBP are calculated from the equivalent OE component and then some changes are made so as to avoid patent infringement. So in this case, the design of the DBP is not very important as it is only reverse engineered from an existing product. In case of Specialist DBPs, the dimensions are taken from records if they exist or taken from existing component and then designed as a made-to-order item. So in this case too, not much work goes into the design of the DBP as they are already available to the manufacturer. Hence, design of the DBP does not give the product any competitive edge over other competitor products. In case of Original Equipment Manufacturer, initially specifications will be given by the motorcycle manufacturer. But if Friction is selected as the preferred OE for DBP, it will be expected to design the brakes to meet the requirements given by the manufacturer. Hence, if not initially, over a period of time the designing of brakes for the OE product range will become the one of biggest competitive edge that the company could get in winning the order. 1.1.2 Brand Name Through a variety of activities, companies try to establish a brand name for their products in the market. Where this has been achieved and maintained, companies will win orders partly due to the image that has been created in the market. (Hill Hill 2009) In case of Aftermarket DBPs and the Specialist DBPs, the brand name, â€Å"Stop-Rite†, play a major role in winning orders for the company. Since these parts are no longer in standard production by the OEM, there is a lot of competition in the market to win orders for these products. And hence the brand image, which Friction Materials Ltd has maintained for the last 20 years, becomes the biggest competitive edge in the market to win orders. In case of the OE DBPs, initially Friction Materials is trying to win orders and hence it does not have a brand name in the OE market as of now. But as they start to win orders and establish them in the market, their brand name will start to help them win orders and hence, as time will progress, brand name will become an order winner. 1.1.3 Price In many markets, particularly in the growth, maturity and saturation phases of the product life cycle, price becomes a very important order winner. When there is a range of products to choose from, price comparisons with alternatives becomes an integral part of the customers evaluation of the product and hence price plays a very important part in winning orders. (Hill Hill 2009) In case of the Aftermarket and the Specialist DBPs, since there are a lot of alternatives in the market, price eventually become one of the main reasons why the customer chooses to buy the product, as if there are two products meeting his criteria, they are bound to buy the cheaper product. Hence they become an order winner. In case of the OE DBPs, since the manufacturer is going to buy the product in bulk, he is going to want to buy them from a manufacturer who is able to produce them in the cheapest possible way and who also meets their requirements. Hence price in this case becomes one of the biggest factors for choice. 1.1.4 Speed (Lead Time) and Dependability (Availability) A company may be able to qualify for an order/win an order based on how quickly they are able to supply the product or if the product is already available for delivery/purchasing for the customer. Hence is it very important that the Operations Lead Time must be able to match the Customer Lead Time. (Hill Hill 2009) In case of the Aftermarkets DBPs, the ability to deliver the DBP faster than others may affect the spares stores to make an order to the manufacturer. This is possible if the lead time for the product is less and hence lead time becomes an order qualifier. With respect to the customers, the product being available on the store self become an order qualifier, i.e. they consider the product as a possible buy. But in case the product is not available on the shelf, means that even though their product is better than the competition, they will lose an order and hence this becomes an order looser. Similarly, in case of the Specialist DBPs, since these are mostly made-to-order items, the lead time does not give an influential competitive edge over the competition. But at the same time, availability/delivery of the product has to be on time and this becomes an important factor that the customer will take into consideration when he/she is looking to buy a DBP for his/her Vintage Motorbike. Hence availability of the product on time becomes an order qualifier in this case. In case of the OE products, the motorcycle manufacturer will be looking for a manufacturer who can produce the parts and deliver them in the shortest possible time. Hence speed or lead time becomes an order winner. Also, being a local supplier to the local motorcycle industry will give them a competitive edge over other outside competitors as they will be able to respond to the demand much quicker. But, in addition to this, being able to deliver the products on time is going to be a very important factor. So important that initially, some late deliveries may lead to the manufacturer going to an alternate supplier as you are not able to meet his demands on time. Hence dependability becomes an order looser. 1.1.5 Quality Quality or Quality Conformance can be defined as ability of a manufacturer to manufacture products according to the customers requirements. (Slack et al 2002) In case of the Aftermarkets and Specialist DBPs, no one is going to consider buying the product unless you are certain that the DBP is fit to use on their particular motorcycle model. Hence for both these product ranges, quality becomes an order qualifier. That is, only if the DBP is fit to use on a particular customers motorcycle, they will consider buying that DBP. In case of the OE products, since now they are trying to become suppliers of OE products for the first time, quality has to be bang on target. It has to meet all the customer requirements. Any lapse of quality may lead to a halt in the manufacturers assembly line and this is going to cost them a lot of money. Hence any lapse in quality of the OE suppliers part will give a bad impression and hence may lead to the supplier losing the order. Hence quality for the OE product range becomes an order looser. 1.2 Implications on Operations The Polar diagram (above) shows all the competitive factors for all the product range and their relevant importance for winning orders. Hence, in a way, the diagram also helps understand where Operations should concentrate more so that they will be able to produce more products that will be able to win the orders in the market. From the above diagram, we see that for all the three product ranges, Price, Quality and Dependability are the common performance objective that can help give them competitive edge in the market. Hence operations has to focus more on reducing the cost of the product and at the same time try to keep quality at a good level and always deliver the goods on time. Also, we see Brand Name is very important for the Aftermarket and Specialist market. But if operations is able to maintain price, quality and dependability; it will maintain and perhaps even built up the brand name of the product. Also, by concentrating on dependability, operations is going to keep the lead time (speed) of the product to as low as possible to meet the delivery times and hence speed is also taken care of. Hence by concentrating more on price, quality and dependability, operations will be able to cover all the order qualifier and winner factors of all the 3 product ranges. 2 Manufacturing Strategy for the OE product 2.1 Framework Hill, T. (2009) breaks down the process of developing an operation/manufacturing strategy into 5 simple objectives. 2.1.1 Defining the Corporate Objectives The recent future Corporate Objective of Friction Materials is to try and break into the OE product sector. This will help them isolate the financial burden that they have to carry due to the ever decreasing prices because of cheap Far Eastern Aftermarket DBP available in the market. Hence another Corporate Objective is to make them more stable financially by entering a highly profitable and long term contract product range. Other general corporate objective like Profit and Growth and ROI also apply to Friction Materials Ltd. 2.1.2 Defining the Market Strategies to meet these objectives As said in the Corporate Objectives, Friction Material Ltd. is now trying to enter the Original Equipment product market. Volumes initially (during sampling stage) will be low, to the order of 300. But once their samples get approved, they will start producing these products in very high volumes, to the order of about 3000 DBP/week. Keeping these facts in mind, the Marketing Strategy for the OE product range is to produce and deliver high quality low cost DBP on time, every time. 2.1.3 How do products win orders in the market place? As mentioned in Section 1, the major factors that win orders for the OE product is Price, Quality and Dependability (in terms of delivery). Once Friction Materials becomes the choice for OEM for DBPs, they will have to design the brakes themselves and hence Design also becomes an important order winner. 2.1.4 Establishing the most appropriate mode to manufacture these sets of products Process Choice We are in process of getting samples accepted for the new OE product range. Currently we are manufacturing only the Spares and Specialist product ranges and this is done in a batch process flow layout. This is ok for these ranges as they are in small quantities of about 300 DBP/week. But the new OE product range is going to require about 3000 DBP/week. Hence the Batch layout will not suffice to meet this quantity demand. The most appropriate process choice for such a huge demand is the Mass Layout or the Continuous Layout. But the continuous layout calls for a bigger investment in terms of the money involved. Since Friction Materials is only starting to try to establish itself in the OE market, it would not be wise to tie up a lot of the Companies money into something that might not work out to the magnitude expected. Hence the Mass Layout seems to be a more sensible choice. 2.1.5 Provide the manufacturing infrastructure required to support production Providing the infrastructure to support production of the new OE product is going to involve some amount of trade off in the sense of a balance between the various competitive factors that will affect the ability of the product to win orders. For instance, from the polar diagram (Sector 1.2) we see that dependability and cost of product play a very important role in helping the product win orders. In order to always deliver the product on time, we must always have enough stock with us to meet the demand. This can mean that we make-to-stock the product. But if we have a lot of inventory, it means that we have a lot of money held up as inventory and this may lead to increase in the price of the product to help insulate this cost. But this increase of cost may lead to loss of an order. Hence what amount of inventory would be sufficient to always meet customer demands and not hold a lot of money in inventory would be the trade off that we will be keen to look for. This process of trade o ff balance will help the manufacturing/operations to align itself with the corporate strategy. (Slack et al 2002) 2.2 Analysis of Current Operations System Before we can start formulating and making changes to the production system, we must first define what the current system is. We can do this with the help of various tools. We are going to use the SWOT analysis tool to do the same. Once we know where the current production capabilities are, we will be able to make decision taking into account the current scenario. 2.2.1 SWOT Analysis Strengths Weakness The brand name â€Å"Stop Rite† Established producer of aftermarket DBPs in the UK and Western Europe Competency in making the brake pad mixture * Good liquidity and turnover * Bad production planning system even though a MRP system is in place for the same Opportunities Threats OE market will lead to more opportunity in the EU market. OE market will help insulate the competition and market share because of the Far Eastern Competition * Growing to a medium scale company will help in being capable of handling more customers * Competition for cheaper Far Eastern Competition Table 2.2.1: SWOT Analysis Tool The brand name â€Å"Stop-Rite† is one of the main strengths of Friction Materials Ltd. This is what is helping them win orders in the Specialist market and the aftermarket market. This brand name that they have, they have been able to establish it because of being one of the main trusted DBP manufacturer in the UK and Western Europe market. This is also one of the strengths that they should exploit. They have a competency in creating their own mixture for the DBPs, which helps keep the cost of the product down. Also, as we can see from the financials, their Quick Ratio is about 1.03 and their Current Ratio is about 1.8, both of which are very near the acceptable values and hence the company is doing very well financially. And as they say â€Å"Cash is King†, this is their main strength. But even though they are strong in these areas, their production planning system is not very good, or up to industry standards. Even though they have a MRP II system in place, the Planning Controller has to fire fight situation that should not arise because of the system. This shows one of the two situations, either the Planning Controller is not familiar with the system or there is something wrong with their planning system. This can cause a lot of problems if they are to start production for about 3000DBP/week for the OE product. Opportunity wise, the OE product can help gain more market share in the Western European market and hence improve their brand name even further. Also, since this will be a more steady market, this will help insulate some of the market share loss due to the cheaper Far Eastern Competitor products in the Spares market. This will help the company grow financially which is always the main aim of any organisation. Once the organisation has more market share and money, they can easily transition to a medium scale company and hence cater to more customers. The only threat that the company faces is due to the Far Eastern products. They are almost as good as their DBPs, but they are far cheaper than Frictions DBPs and hence this sometimes leads to loss of market share. Entry to the OE product market will help them to insulate this loss. Now that we are clear on where the organisation current strengths and weakness lie, we can develop our manufacturing strategy to complement the strengths and negate the weakness of the organisation. 2.3 Elements of Manufacturing Strategy Miltenburg (2005) divides manufacturing strategy in six main sub-systems and terms them as Manufacturing Levers to reflect the concept that each sub-system can be adjusted to align according to market demands and corporate mission. 2.3.1 Sourcing Current list of all the suppliers to Friction Materials Ltd. are largely UK based. This is good as this help in decreasing the manufacturing lead time of the component. Since currently, their production demands are very low, to the order of 300DBPs/week; they were unable to convince their suppliers to deliver Just-in-Time. But now since they are looking to produce to the order of about 3000DBPs/week; they should be able to convince the suppliers to deliver Just-in-Time. Along with this, they should bring the list down in number and probably sign long term contracts with their most reliable supplier as the demand for the OE market is very stable and this long term contracts will help with the demand and also improve relations with their suppliers. But care should be taken when such contracts are framed, so that if the supplier does not make the delivery, then Friction Materials is free to buy that demand from another supplier. (Quinn and Hilmer 1995) In terms of the product range, since making DBPs is their main expertise, I feel that they should continue to produce all their existing product range so that they do not lose their current market share and customer base. The level of vertical integration should be kept to a minimum and Friction Materials should concentrate on its main competency of making the DBPs. Smaller parts of the product like the packing materials should be bought from an external vendor. 2.3.2 Process Technology Hill (2009) uses a profiling method to help decide what kind of production process is good for a particular type of product depend on the profile of the product. We will use this profiling approach to decide the type of process that we will implement for the OE range of product. Relevant Aspects Characteristics of Process Choice Product Job Batch Line Type Special Standard Range Wide Narrow Order Size Small Large Level of Change High Low Rate of NPD High Low Order-Winner Del. Speed Price Process Technology G.P. Dedicated Flexibility High Low Volumes Low High Key Tasks Meet Spec. Cost Investment Low High Table 2.3.2.1: Hills Profiling Approach (Source: Hill and Hill 2009) For the OE product range, we know the following: The order volume is going to be very high; hence the product is going to be standardised. Since the product is standardised, it is logical to have machinery dedicated to the product so that it can churn out more product and help meet the high demand. This in turn will decrease the flexibility of the process, but that is a trade-off that has to be taken to meet the high demand. We are going to produce only a certain types of DBPs, hence range is very narrow. The variations in the design of the DBPs are going to be minimal. New designs will only be developed when there is a requirement for it, hence the rate for new product development is also low. Order-winner for the OE product as discussed above is a balance between delivery speed and cost. Hence the key task for the process is bringing the cost of the product down. Hence we see from the above table, most of the profile of the OE product fits the Line Process choice. Hence in our case, for the OE product range, it is advisable that we go for a Line process. Currently, the Spares and Vintage DBPs are being produced in a Batch Equipment Paced Line Flow. They are currently running operations with 3 machining centres, each consisting of a pair of inter linked CNC machines with magazine feed. But even with a demand of only 300 DBPs/week compared to a demand of 3000 DBPs/week, the 3 machining centres are running at full capacity and often require overtime to meet the demand. Hence it is only logical for Friction Materials to in some new machining centres for the new OE production line that will be mainly be used for OE production, as they will find it very difficult to cope up with the demand with the existing infrastructure available. In fact, Friction Materials should look to start to invest into some of the other machines that they require for the production of DBPs to help cope up with this new OE demand. It is also advisable to make this new investments into the shop floor as the OE market is a profitable market which has a very stable demand and this demand will be there for quite a few years and hence this investment can be easi ly recovered during the life cycles of not OE product, but probably two or three OE products. The current manufacturing process layout should be adopted for the OE production also. The process has been setup taking into consideration the capacity of the mixer, setup time on the presses and stock levels and hence they are designed to give the whole process a flow. But setting up a completely new production line demands a lot of capital being invested and it will take quite some time before you will be able to break even for this investment. Hence the logical thing to do for Friction would be to invest in some new machining centres, so that they would be able to able to cope with the demand. But these new machining centres should be dedicated to only for the OE products. And over time, with increasing profits from the OE business, they can keep adding more machining centres to create a separate line for the OE product. 2.3.3 Production Planning and Control The production of DBPs has been broken down majorly into two process; namely Pressing and Finishing. The Pressing team takes care of making the brake pads; the Finishing team takes care of machining the DBPs to ensure consistency of the physical dimensions of the pad. Since both these processes are independent of each other, they are connected to each other with some decoupling or WIP inventory (Miltenburg). In our case, the baking process is the decoupling process. The two bin system can be used for inventory control for raw materials. In this system, the buffer stock in kept in the second bin and the current stock in kept in the first bin. Once the first bin is emptied and the buffer stock is brought into use, the purchase team should place orders to the respective material supplier for replenishing the material. For quality control, the organisation is already running on Statistical Process Control charts for the Spares and Specialist market. But this is acceptable for these products as their production volumes are not very large. The OE volumes are going to be very huge and hence SPC may not be the right choice for quality control. SPC looks at maintaining the quality of the products that the processes inside the organisation. Since OE is such a big market and where it is always important to â€Å"get things right the first time, every time†; it is better that Friction Materials looks into implementing Total Quality Management (TQM). TQM not only looks into the quality of parts being produced inside the organisation, but it takes the whole supply chain into account and sees to it that not only are the part being produced are up to quality standards, but also parts entering into the system are of optimum quality as it is unlikely to product good quality parts out of sub-standard part s. (GE Systems). Also in TQM, each worker becomes responsible for keeping the quality of their output up to standard. Hence this virtually removes the requirement of a quality control team in the organisation. 2.3.4 Human Resources The major machines, that require training in the whole manufacturing process at Friction Materials, are the press machines and the machining centres. The current workforce employed at Friction Materials is very well trained and are flexible enough to work on any process within their block. But we see that there is considerable time that goes into the setup of the presses when there is a need to change the design of the pad. So the employees can be further trained in how they can reduce the set up time for the presses. Regular maintenance is being carried out at Friction Materials by the current

The Self in the World: the Social Context of Sylvia Plath’s Late Poems

The Self in the World: The Social Context of Sylvia Plath's Late Poems, [(essay date 1980) In the following essay, Annas offers analysis of depersonalization in Plath's poetry which, according to Annas, embodies Plath's response to oppressive modern society and her â€Å"dual consciousness of self as both subject and object. â€Å"] For surely it is time that the effect of disencouragement upon the mind of the artist should be measured, as I have seen a dairy company measure the effect of ordinary milk and Grade A milk upon the body of the rat.They set two rats in cages side by side, and of the two one was furtive, timid and small, and the other was glossy, bold and big. Now what food do we feed women as artists upon? –Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own The dialectical tension between self and world is the location of meaning in Sylvia Plath's late poems. Characterized by a conflict between stasis and movement, isolation and engagement, these poems are largely about what st ands in the way of the possibility of rebirth for the self.In â€Å"Totem,† she writes: â€Å"There is no terminus, only suitcases / Out of which the same self unfolds like a suit / Bald and shiny, with pockets of wishes / Notions and tickets, short circuits and folding mirrors. † While in the early poems the self was often imaged in terms of its own possibilities for transformation, in the post-Colossus poems the self is more often seen as trapped within a closed cycle. One moves–but only in a circle and continuously back to the same starting point. Rather than the self and the world, the Ariel poems record the self in the world.The self can change and develop, transform and be reborn, only if the world in which it exists does; the possibilities of the self are intimately and inextricably bound up with those of the world. Sylvia Plath's sense of entrapment, her sense that her choices are profoundly limited, is directly connected to the particular time and place in which she wrote her poetry. Betty Friedan describes the late fifties and early sixties for American women as a â€Å"comfortable concentration camp†Ã¢â‚¬â€œphysically luxurious, mentally oppressive and impoverished.The recurring metaphors of fragmentation and reification–the abstraction of the individual–in Plath's late poetry are socially and historically based. They are images of Nazi concentration camps, of â€Å"fire and bombs through the roof† (â€Å"The Applicant†), of cannons, of trains, of â€Å"wars, wars, wars† (â€Å"Daddy†). And they are images of kitchens, iceboxes, adding machines, typewriters, and the depersonalization of hospitals. The sea and the moon are still important images for Plath, but in the Ariel poems they have taken on a harsher quality. The moon, also, is merciless,† she writes in â€Å"Elm. † While a painfully acute sense of the depersonalization and fragmentation of 1950's America is cha racteristic of Ariel, three poems describe particularly well the social landscape within which the â€Å"I† of Sylvia Plath's poems is trapped: â€Å"The Applicant,† â€Å"Cut,† and â€Å"The Munich Mannequins. † â€Å"The Applicant† is explicitly a portrait of marriage in contemporary Western culture. However, the â€Å"courtship† and â€Å"wedding† in the poem represent not only male/female relations but human relations in general.That job seeking is the central metaphor in â€Å"The Applicant† suggests a close connection between the capitalist economic system, the patriarchal family structure, and the general depersonalization of human relations. Somehow all interaction between people, and especially that between men and women, given the history of the use of women as items of barter, seems here to be conditioned by the ideology of a bureaucratized market place. However this system got started, both men and women are implica ted in its perpetuation.As in many of Plath's poems, one feels in reading â€Å"The Applicant† that Plath sees herself and her imaged personae as not merely caught in–victims of–this situation, but in some sense culpable as well. In â€Å"The Applicant,† the poet is speaking directly to the reader, addressed as â€Å"you† throughout. We too are implicated, for we too are potential â€Å"applicants. † People are described as crippled and as dismembered pieces of bodies in the first stanza of â€Å"The Applicant. † Thus imagery of dehumanization begins the poem.Moreover, the pieces described here are not even flesh, but â€Å"a glass eye, false teeth or a crutch, / A brace or a hook, / Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch. † We are already so involved in a sterile and machine-dominated culture that we are likely part artifact and sterile ourselves. One is reminded not only of the imagery of other Plath poems, but also of the control ling metaphor of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, written at about the same time as â€Å"TheApplicant†Ã¢â‚¬â€œin 1962–, and Chief Bromden's conviction that those people who are integrated into society are just collections of wheels and cogs, smaller replicas of a smoothly functioning larger social machine. â€Å"The ward is a factory for the Combine,† Bromden thinks. â€Å"Something that came all twisted different is now a functioning, adjusted component, a credit to the whole outfit and a marvel to behold. Watch him sliding across the land with a welded grin . . . In stanza two of â€Å"The Applicant,† Plath describes the emptiness which characterizes the applicant and which is a variant on the roboticized activity of Kesey's Adjusted Man. Are there â€Å"stitches to show something's missing? † she asks. The applicant's hand is empty, so she provides â€Å"a hand† To fill it and willing To bring teacups and roll away headaches And do whatever you tell it Will you marry it? Throughout the poem, people are talked about as parts and surfaces. The suit introduced in stanza three is at least as alive as the hollow man and mechanical doll woman of the poem.In fact, the suit, an artifact, has more substance and certainly more durability than the person to whom it is offered â€Å"in marriage. † Ultimately, it is the suit which gives shape to the applicant where before he was shapeless, a junk heap of fragmented parts. I notice you are stark naked. How about this suit– Black and stiff, but not a bad fit. Will you marry it? It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof Against fire and bombs through the roof. Believe me, they'll bury you in it.The man in the poem is finally defined by the black suit he puts on, but the definition of the woman shows her to be even more alienated and dehumanized. While the man is a junk heap of miscellaneous parts given shape by a suit of clothes, the woman is a wind-up toy, a puppet of that black suit. She doesn't even exist unless the black suit needs and wills her to. Will you marry it? It is guaranteed To thumb shut your eyes at the end And dissolve of sorrow. We make new stock from the salt. The woman in the poem is referred to as â€Å"it. Like the man, she has no individuality, but where his suit gives him form, standing for the role he plays in a bureaucratic society, for the work he does, the only thing that gives the woman form is the institution of marriage. She does not exist before it and dissolves back into nothingness after it. In â€Å"The Applicant† there is at least an implication that something exists underneath the man's black suit; that however fragmented he is, he at least marries the suit and he at least has a choice. In contrast, the woman is the role she plays; she does not exist apart from it. Naked as paper to start,† Plath writes, But in twenty-five years she'll be silver, In fifty, gold. A living doll, everywhe re you look. It can sew, it can cook. It can talk, talk, talk. The man, the type of a standard issue corporation junior executive, is also alienated. He has freedom of choice only in comparison to the much more limited situation of the woman. That is to say, he has relative freedom of choice in direct proportion to his role as recognized worker in the economic structure of his society. This should not imply, however, that this man is in any kind of satisfying and meaningful relation to his work.The emphasis in â€Å"The Applicant† upon the man's surface–his black suit–together with the opening question of the poem (â€Å"First, are you our sort of person? â€Å") suggests that even his relationship to his work is not going to be in any sense direct or satisfying. It will be filtered first through the suit of clothes, then through the glass eye and rubber crotch before it can reach the real human being, assuming there is anything left of him. The woman in the p oem is seen as an appendage; she works, but she works in a realm outside socially recognized labor.She works for the man in the black suit. She is seen as making contact with the world only through the medium of the man, who is already twice removed. This buffering effect is exacerbated by the fact that the man is probably not engaged in work that would allow him to feel a relationship to the product of his labor. He is probably a bureaucrat of some kind, and therefore his relationship is to pieces of paper, successive and fragmented paradigms of the product (whatever it is, chamberpots or wooden tables) rather than to the product itself.And of course, the more buffered the man is, the more buffered the woman is, for in a sense her real relationship to the world of labor is that of consumer rather than producer. Therefore, her only relationship to socially acceptable production–as opposed to consumption–is through the man. In another sense, however, the woman is not a consumer, but a commodity. Certainly she is seen as a commodity in this poem, as a reward only slightly less important than his black suit, which the man receives for being â€Å"our sort of person. It can be argued that the man is to some extent also a commodity; yet just as he is in a sense more a laborer and less a consumer than the woman–at least in terms of the social recognition of his position–so in a second sense he is more a consumer and less a commodity than the woman. And when we move out from the particularly flat, paper-like image of the woman in the poem to the consciousness which speaks the poem in a tone of bitter irony, then the situation of the woman as unrecognized worker/recognized commodity becomes clearer.The man in â€Å"The Applicant,† because of the middle class bureaucratic nature of his work (one does not wear a new black suit to work in a steel mill or to handcraft a cabinet) and because of his position vis-a-vis the woman (her socia l existence depends upon his recognition), is more a member of an exploiting class than one which is exploited. There are some parts of his world, specifically those involving the woman, in which he can feel himself relatively in control and therefore able to understand his relationship to this world in a contemplative way.Thus, whatever we may think of the system he has bought into, he himself can see it as comparatively stable, a paradigm with certain static features which nevertheless allows him to move upward in an orderly fashion. Within the context of this poem, then, and within the context of the woman's relationship to the man in the black suit, she is finally both worker and commodity while he is consumer. Her position is close to that of the Marxist conception of the proletariat.Fredric Jameson, in Marxism and Form, defines the perception of external objects and events which arises naturally in the consciousness of an individual who is simultaneously worker and commodity. Even before [the worker] posits elements of the outside world as objects of his thought, he feels himself to be an object, and this initial alienation within himself takes precedence over everything else. Yet precisely in this terrible alienation lies the strength of the worker's position: his first movement is not toward knowledge of the work but toward knowledge of himself as an object, toward self-consciousness.Yet this self-consciousness, because it is initially knowledge of an object (himself, his own labor as a commodity, his life force which he is under obligation to sell), permits him more genuine knowledge of the commodity nature of the outside world than is granted to middle-class â€Å"objectivity. † For [and here Jameson quotes Georg Lukacs in The History of Class Consciousness] â€Å"his consciousness is the self-consciousness of merchandise itself . . . † This dual consciousness of self as both subject and object is characteristic of the literature of min ority and/or oppressed classes.It is characteristic of the proletarian writer in his (admittedly often dogmatic) perception of his relation to a decadent past, a dispossessed present, and a utopian future. It is characteristic of black American writers; W. E. B. Du Bois makes a statement very similar in substance to Jameson's in The Souls of Black Folk, and certainly the basic existential condition of Ellison's invisible man is his dual consciousness which only toward the end of that novel becomes a means to freedom of action rather than paralysis.It is true of contemporary women writers, of novelists like Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and Rita Mae Brown, and of poets like Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, and Marge Piercy. In a sense, it is more characteristic of American literature than of any other major world literature, for each immigrant group, however great its desire for assimilation into the American power structure, initially possessed this dual consciousness.Finally, a di alectical perception of self as both subject and object, both worker and commodity, in relation to past and future as well as present, is characteristic of revolutionary literature, whether the revolution is political or cultural. Sylvia Plath has this dialectical awareness of self as both subject and object in particular relation to the society in which she lived. The problem for her, and perhaps the main problem of Cold War America, is in the second aspect of a dialectical consciousness–an awareness of oneself in significant relation to past and future.The first person narrator of what is probably Plath's best short story, â€Å"Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams,† is a clerk/typist in a psychiatric clinic, a self-described â€Å"dream connoisseur† who keeps her own personal record of all the dreams which pass through her office, and who longs to look at the oldest record book the Psychoanalytic Institute possesses. â€Å"This dream book was spanking new th e day I was born,† she says, and elsewhere makes the connection even clearer: â€Å"The clinic started thirty-three years ago–the year of my birth, oddly enough. This connection suggests the way in which Plath uses history and views herself in relation to it. The landscape of her late work is a contemporary social landscape. It goes back in time to encompass such significant historical events as the Rosenberg trial and execution–the opening chapter of The Bell Jar alludes dramatically to these events–and of course it encompasses, is perhaps obsessed with, the major historical event of Plath's time, the second world war.But social history seems to stop for Plath where her own life starts, and it is replaced at that point by a mythic timeless past populated by creatures from folk tale and classical mythology. This is not surprising, since as a woman this poet had little part in shaping history. Why should she feel any relation to it? But more crucially, the re is no imagination of the future in Sylvia Plath's work, no utopian or even antiutopian consciousness.In her poetry there is a dialectical consciousness of the self as simultaneously object and subject, but in her particular social context she was unable to develop a consciousness of herself in relation to a past and future beyond her own lifetime. This foreshortening of a historical consciousness affects in turn the dual consciousness of self in relation to itself (as subject) and in relation to the world (as object). It raises the question of how one accounts objectively for oneself. For instance, if I am involved in everything I see, can I still be objective and empirical in my perception, free from myth and language?Finally, this foreshortening of historical consciousness affects the question of whether the subject is a function of the object or vice versa. Since the two seem to have equal possibilities, this last question is never resolved. As a result, the individual feels t rapped; and in Sylvia Plath's poetry one senses a continual struggle to be reborn into some new present which causes the perceiving consciousness, when it opens its eyes, to discover that it has instead (as in â€Å"Lady Lazarus†) made a â€Å"theatrical / Comeback in broad day / To the same place, the same face, the same brute / Amused shout: ‘A miracle! † This difficulty in locating the self and the concomitant suspicion that as a result the self may be unreal are clear in poems like â€Å"Cut,† which describe the self-image of the poet as paper. The ostensible occasion of â€Å"Cut† is slicing one's finger instead of an onion; the first two stanzas of the poem describe the cut finger in minute and almost naturalistic detail. There is a suppressed hysteria here which is only discernible in the poem's curious mixture of surrealism and objectivity.The images of the poem are predominantly images of terrorism and war, immediately suggested to the poet by the sight of her bleeding finger: â€Å"out of a gap / A million soldiers run,† â€Å"Saboteur / Kamikaze man–,† and finally, â€Å"trepanne d veteran. † The metaphors of war are extensive, and, though suggested by the actual experience, they are removed from it. In the one place in the poem where the speaker mentions her own feelings as a complete entity (apart from but including her cut finger) the image is of paper. She says, O my Homunculus, I am ill. I have taken a pill to killThe thin Papery feeling. Paper often stands for the self-image of the poet in the post-Colossus poems. It is used in the title poem of Crossing the Water, where the â€Å"two black cut-paper people† appear less substantial and less real than the solidity and immensity of the natural world surrounding them. In the play Three Women, the Secretary says of the men in her office: â€Å"there was something about them like cardboard, and now I had caught it. † She se es her own infertility as directly related to her complicity in a bureaucratic, impersonal, male-dominated society.Paper is symbolic of our particular socioeconomic condition and its characteristic bureaucratic labor. It stands for insubstantiality; the paper model of something is clearly less real than the thing itself, even though in â€Å"developed† economies the machines, accoutrements, and objects appear to have vitality, purpose, and emotion, while the people are literally colorless, objectified, and atrophied. The paper self is therefore part of Plath's portrait of a depersonalized society, a bureaucracy, a paper world.In â€Å"A Life† (Crossing the Water), she writes: â€Å"A woman is dragging her shadow in a circle / About a bald hospital saucer. / It resembles the moon, or a sheet of blank paper / And appears to have suffered a private blitzkrieg. † In â€Å"Tulips† the speaker of the poem, also a hospital patient, describes herself as â€Å"fl at, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow / Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips. † In â€Å"The Applicant,† the woman is again described as paper: â€Å"Naked as paper to start / But in twenty-five years she'll be silver, / In fifty, gold. Here in â€Å"Cut,† the â€Å"thin, / Papery feeling† juxtaposes her emotional dissociation from the wound to the horrific detail of the cut and the bloody images of conflict it suggests. It stands for her sense of depersonalization, for the separation of self from self, and is juxtaposed to that devaluation of human life which is a necessary precondition to war, the separation of society from itself. In this context, it is significant that one would take a pill to kill a feeling of substancelessness and depersonalization. Writing about American women in the 1950's, Betty Friedan asks, â€Å"Just what was the problem that had no name?What were the words women used when they tried to express it? Sometimes a w oman would say, ‘I feel empty somehow . . . incomplete. ‘ Or she would say, ‘I feel as if I don't exist. ‘ Sometimes she blotted out the feeling with a tranquilizer. † A papery world is a sterile world; this equation recurs throughout the Ariel poems. For Sylvia Plath, stasis and perfection are always associated with sterility, while fertility is associated with movement and process. The opening lines of â€Å"The Munich Mannequins† introduce this equation. Perfection is terrible,† Plath writes, â€Å"it cannot have children. / Cold as snow breath, it tamps the womb / Where the yew trees blow like hydras. † The setting of â€Å"The Munich Mannequins† is a city in winter. Often, Plath's poems have imaged winter as a time of rest preceding rebirth (â€Å"Wintering,† â€Å"Frog Autumn†), but only when the reference point is nature. The natural world is characterized in Sylvia Plath's poems by process, by the ebb and flow of months and seasons, by a continual dying and rebirth. The moon is a symbol for the monthly ebb and flow of the tides and of a woman's body.The social world, however, the world of the city, is both male defined and separated from this process. In the city, winter has more sinister connotations; it suggests death rather than hibernation. Here the cold is equated with the perfection and sterility to which the poem's opening lines refer. Perfection stands in â€Å"The Munich Mannequins† for something artificially created and part of the social world. The poem follows the male quest for perfection to its logical end–mannequins in a store window–lifeless and mindless â€Å"in their sulphur loveliness, in their smiles. The mannequins contrast with the real woman in the same way that the city contrasts with the moon. The real woman is not static but complicated: The tree of life and the tree of life Unloosing their moons, month after month, to no purpose. The blood flood is the flood of love, The absolute sacrifice However, in Munich, â€Å"morgue between Paris and Rome,† the artificial has somehow triumphed. Women have become mannequins or have been replaced by mannequins, or at least mannequins seem to have a greater reality because they are more ordered and comprehensible than real women.It is appropriate that Plath should focus on the middle class of a German city, in a country where fascism was a middle class movement and women allowed themselves to be idealized, to be perfected, to be made, essentially, into mannequins. In â€Å"The Munich Mannequins,† as in â€Å"The Applicant,† Plath points out the deadening of human beings, their disappearance and fragmentation and accretion into the objects that surround them. In â€Å"The Applicant† the woman is a paper doll; here she has been replaced by a store window dummy.In â€Å"The Applicant† all that is left of her at the end is a kind of saline solut ion; in â€Å"The Munich Mannequins† the only remaining sign of her presence is â€Å"the domesticity of these windows / The baby lace, the green-leaved confectionery. † And where the man in â€Å"The Applicant† is described in terms of his black suit, here the men are described in terms of their shoes, present in the anonymity of hotel corridors, where Hands will be opening doors and setting Down shoes for a polish of carbon Into which broad toes will go tomorrow. People accrete to their things, are absorbed into their artifacts.Finally, they lose all sense of a whole self and become atomized. Parts of them connect to their shoes, parts to their suits, parts to their lace curtains, parts to their iceboxes, and so on. There is nothing left; people have become reified and dispersed into a cluttered artificial landscape of their own production. Because the world she describes is a place created by men rather than women (since men are in control of the forces of pr oduction), Plath sees men as having ultimate culpability for this state of affairs which affects both men and women.But men have gone further than this in their desire to change and control the world around them. In â€Å"The Munich Mannequins† man has finally transformed woman into a puppet, a mannequin, something that reflects both his disgust with and his fear of women. A mannequin cannot have children, but neither does it have that messy, terrifying, and incomprehensible blood flow each month. Mannequins entirely do away with the problems of female creativity and self-determination.Trapped inside this vision, therefore, the speaker of the Ariel poems sees herself caught between nature and society, biology and intellect, Dionysus and Apollo, her self definition and the expectations of others, as between two mirrors. Discussion of the Ariel poems has often centered around Sylvia Plath's most shocking images. Yet her images of wars and concentration camps, of mass and indivi dual violence, are only the end result of an underlying depersonalization, an abdication of people to their artifacts, and an economic and social structure that equates people and objects.Like the paper doll woman in â€Å"The Applicant,† Sylvia Plath was doubly alienated from such a world, doubly objectified by it, and as a woman artist, doubly isolated within it. Isolated both from a past tradition and a present community, she found it difficult to structure new alternatives for the future. No wonder her individual quest for rebirth failed as it led her continuously in a circle back to the same self in the

Effect Of Inflation, Pro and Cons Of Inflation

This graph above show the inflation rate and gdp rate in Malaysia for the year 2005 until 2012. http://zaidzainuddin. wordpress. com/2012/12/14/the-effect-of-inflation-on-malaysias-economic-growth/ The effect of inflation on economic growth is debatable and can act as either a positive or a negative influence. Local and international researchers have conducted studies on the relationship of Malaysia’s inflation rate and economic growth. It can be concluded that over the past decades, there has been a general non-linear relationship between inflation rate and economic growth in Malaysia. However, in the long run inflation has a positive effect on Malaysia’s economic growth. This correlates with econometric study as they too reported a positive impact of inflation in the long run. Pro & Cons Of Inflation Inflation may have a positive effect in Malaysian economy. This is because deflation is very harmful, inflation enables adjustment of prices and wages and boost economy growth. The first advantage is deflation is very harmful. Deflation is a negative effect of inflation. For example, the Japanese economy has suffered lower growth because of deflation. When prices are falling people are reluctant to spend money because they are concerned that prices will be cheaper in the future, therefore, they keep delaying purchases. Second advantage is moderate inflation enables adjustment of prices and wages. It is argued a moderate rate of inflation makes it easier to adjust relative wages and prices. For example, it may be difficult to cut nominal wages (workers resent wage cut). But, if average prices are rising, it is easier to increase good workers’ wages more than unproductive workers. Third advantage is inflation can boost growth. At times of very low inflation the economy may be stuck in a recession. Arguably targeting a higher rate of inflation can enable a boost to growth. This view is controversial. Not all economists would support targeting a higher inflation rate. However, some would target higher inflation, if the economy was stuck in a prolonged recession. Inflation is considered to be a problem when the inflation rate rises above 2%. The higher the inflation, the more serious the problem it is. The first problem is inflation tends to discourage

Bill Nichols and the Discourse of Sobriety - 2932 Words

Do mockumentary films retain any trace of the ’discourse of sobriety’? Throughout film history, documentary and fiction films have denoted the polar opposites of film form with each representing two distinct and separate traditions, the cinema of reality and the cinema of fiction (Doherty 16). However what was once a clear distinction has become blurred as the increasing popularity of mockumentary continues to weaken the assumed boundaries between fact and fiction (Sicinski). Prior to this ‘blurring of the lines’ the documentary genre enjoyed a privileged position amongst screen forms due its ‘the truth claim’ (Glick). Reflecting Bill Nichols’ observation that documentary employs the ‘discourse of sobriety’ (3), the truth claim is†¦show more content†¦Despite multiple documentary conventions being incorporated throughout the film, 24 hour Party People retains little trace of sobriety as Winterbottom’s use of interviews, direct address, archival footage and narration aims to portray a predomin antly fictional world as an actual real world, rather than depicting the world as it is. Although real archival footage of Joy Division performing at Wilson’s club, as well as actual footage of Wilson’s television show Granada Tonight is used throughout the film, Winterbottom ensures that such footage is subtly interwoven within sequences of fictional events thus eliminating any trace of sobriety that the use of real footage may have allowed for. Furthermore it can be argued that 24 hour Party People retains little evidence of Bill Nichols’ observation that documentary employs the ‘discourse of sobriety’, as a number of incidents are exaggerated throughout the film. For example, following a scene in which Wilson’s wife is shown ‘getting close’ with musician Howard Devoto, the cleaner present in the scene faces the camera, reveals himself as the real Howard Devoto and states that he has no recollection ofShow MoreRelatedMy Chosen Programme Of Gok Wan1460 Words   |  6 Pageswith visual images which is used when Gok Wan is not presenting. According to Bill Nichols the expository mode adopts voice-of-god commentary or voice of authority commentary, in this case voice-of-god is used because the speaker is heard but is not seen, instead there are visual images being used ‘the commentary is typically being presented as distinct from the images of the historical world that accompany it (Bill Nichols, Introduction to documentaries, page 107)’. The images are used to make senseRead MoreHow Do Documentaries Produce ‘Truth Effects’? Essay1379 Words   |  6 Pageswhich are often referred to as mockumentaries, also come within the category of documentaries (Corner Rosenthal, 2005), for example This is Spinal Tap (1984) and Best In Show (2000) Bill Nichols explains documentaries as, â€Å"One of the discourses of sobriety that include science, economics, politics and history discourses that claim to describe the real, to tell the truth†. He further adds despite the truth-telling characteristic a documentary film is known to straddle between â€Å"the categories of fact