歷年考研英語閱讀理解1998年02

[00:05.90]1998 Passage2 [00:08.42]Well, no gain without pain, they say. [00:12.66]But what about pain without gain? [00:16.19]Everywhere you go in America, [00:18.40]you hear tales of corporate revival. [00:21.43]What is harder to establish [00:23.15]is whether the productivity revolution [00:25.36]that businessmen assume they are presiding over is for real. [00:30.32]The official statistics are mildly discouraging. [00:33.88]They show that, if you lump manufacturing [00:36.80]and services together, [00:38.72]productivity has grown on average by 1.2% since 1987. [00:45.48]That is somewhat faster than the average [00:47.89]during the previous decade. [00:50.61]And since 1991, productivity has increased [00:54.36]by about 2% a year, [00:57.29]which is more than twice the 1978-1987 average. [01:02.54]The trouble is that part of the recent acceleration [01:05.86]is due to the usual rebound [01:07.76]that occurs at this point in a business cycle, [01:10.88]and so is not conclusive evidence of a revival [01:13.90]in the underlying trend. [01:16.19]There is, as Robert Rubin, [01:18.27]the treasury secretary, says, [01:20.48]a "disjunction" between the mass of business anecdote [01:24.23]that points to a leap in productivity [01:26.54]and the picture reflected by the statistics. [01:30.07]Some of this can be easily explained. [01:33.30]New ways of organizing the workplace [01:36.12]--all that re-engineering and downsizing [01:38.53]--are only one contribution to the overall productivity [01:42.47]of an economy, [01:44.39]which is driven by many other factors [01:46.93]such as joint investment in equipment and machinery, [01:50.56]new technology, and investment in education and training. [01:55.42]Moreover, most of the changes that companies make [01:58.95]are intended to keep them profitable, [02:01.57]and this need not always mean increasing productivity: [02:05.40]switching to new markets or improving quality [02:08.33]can matter just as much. [02:11.15]Two other explanations are more speculative. [02:14.79]First, some of the business restructuring [02:17.33]of recent years may have been ineptly done. [02:21.37]Second, even if it was well done, [02:24.19]it may have spread much less widely than people suppose. [02:28.93]Leonard Schlesinger, a Harvard academic [02:32.15]and former chief executive of Au BonPain, [02:35.89]a rapidly growing chain of bakery cafes, [02:39.10]says that much "re-engineering" has been crude. [02:42.74]In many cases, he believes, [02:44.95]the loss of revenue has been greater [02:47.13]than the reductions in cost. [02:49.55]His colleague, Michael Beer, [02:51.58]says that far too many companies have applied re-engineering [02:55.41]in a mechanistic fashion, [02:57.82]chopping out costs without giving sufficient [03:00.75]thought to long-term profitability. [03:03.68]BBDO's Al Rosenshine is blunter. [03:07.91]He dismisses a lot of the work of [03:10.13]re-engineering consultants as mere rubbish [03:13.05]--"the worst sort of ambulance-chasing."

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