Business and Management

If an organization has customers, it needs to understand marketing. To achieve the best results from marketing requires a subtle blend of art and science. It can also benefit from recommendations for practice rather than lists of options from which to choose. The art of marketing comes from the doing of marketing — implementing programs to attain and retain customers, and seeing what actually works. This is the province of marketing managers, direct marketers, advertisers, and consultants. The examples of good and bad practice used throughout this book illustrate this approach. The science of marketing comes from research — about markets, customers, competitors, and how effectively various types of marketing programs work. This is the province of academics and market researchers. The science of marketing provides the foundations for good marketing practice. Sometimes this science is ignored in the rush to embrace new ideas and technologies. For example, the long scientific history of the adoption and diffusion of innovations says that the Internet will take a long time to fundamentally change the way large numbers of customers buy their products and services. If more managers and investors had understood this, then many dot. coms would not have become dot. bombs. This book blends art and science to provide insight for marketing managers about how to implement marketing more effectively to both create and capture the value of the offers they make to their target customers. In the process it questions the usefulness of some of the more recent marketing fads.

Leadership is still much discussed, studied, and sought after, even though we now live in supposedly more democratic times with flatter organizations and empowered employees. But how can we best understand leadership? Are leaders born or made? Do they have particular traits or are we all potential leaders? Do the requirements for leadership change over time or are there timeless patterns? Do traditional approaches help us to pick and develop leaders or are there alternative ways that advance our understanding? This book investigates the notion of leadership in a series of historical case studies and rich essay portraits of some of the most famous, and infamous, leaders (e.g. Florence Nightingale, Richard Branson, Horatio Nelson, Martin Luther King, Henry Ford, etc.). The scenarios are drawn from right across the spectrum to include business, politics, society, and the military. The first part of the book considers four sets of parallel cases where leadership appears to be a major explanation of success and failure. The second part takes the four critical issues arising from these parallel cases (identity, strategic vision, organizational tactics, and persuasive communication) and explores them in detail. One main reason we have such difficulty in explaining and enhancing leadership, the author argues, is because we often adopt perspectives and models that obscure rather than illuminate the issues involved. The reliance upon traditional scientific analysis has not provided the anticipated advances in our understanding because leadership is more fruitfully considered as an art, or more exactly an array of arts, rather than as a science.

This book uses research on Japanese firms in the UK to contribute to broader debate about the role of international firms in reconstructing contemporary work and employment relations. Japanese manufacturing subsidiaries in Britain have often been portrayed as carriers of Japanese best practice models of work organization and employment relations. This research challenges this view on the basis of intensive comparative workplace case studies of several Japanese manufacturing plants in Britain. It develops an analysis of system, society, and dominance effects to identify the competing pressures upon such firms, and argues that factory managers have to negotiate the implications of these cross pressures. Thus, the analysis focuses on the ways in which Japanese and British managers have sought to construct distinctive production and employment regimes in the light of their particular branch plant mandates and competencies, the evolving character of management-worker relations within factories, and the varied product and labour market conditions they face. It also explores the scope and bases of consent and dissent among employees working in these modern workplaces. On this basis, it highlights the constraints as well as the opportunities facing managers of such greenfield workplaces, the uncertainties that arise from intractable features of capitalist employment relations, and the ways in which employment and production regimes are adapted and remade in specific corporate and local contexts. Finally, it assesses the strengths and weaknesses of three competing contemporary images of international subsidiaries, as transplants, as hybrids, and as branch plants.

Since the early 1980s there has been an explosion of auditing activity in the United Kingdom and North America. In addition to financial audits there are now medical audits, technology audits, value for money audits, environmental audits, quality audits, teaching audits, and many others. Why has this happened? What does it mean when a society invests so heavily in an industry of checking and when more and more individuals find themselves subject to formal scrutiny? This book argues that the rise of auditing has its roots in political demands for accountability and control. At the heart of a new administrative style, internal control systems have begun to play an important public role and individual and organizational performance has been increasingly formalized and made auditable. The author argues that the new demands and expectations of audits live uneasily with their operational capabilities. Not only is the manner in which they produce assurance and accountability open to question but also, by imposing their own values, audits often have unintended and dysfunctional consequences for the audited organization.

Personal authenticity was once a reference point from which critics and labour activists sought to challenge the domination of the corporation. Now it has entered into the parlance of managerial discourse. This book critically investigates the increasing popularity of personal authenticity in corporate ideology and practice. Rather than have workers adhere to depersonalising bureaucratic rules or homogenous cultural norms, many large corporations now invite employees to simply be themselves. Alternative lifestyles, consumption, ethic identity, sexuality, fun, and even dissent are now celebrated since employees are presumed to be more motivated if they can just be themselves. Does this freedom to express ones authenticity in the workplace finally herald the end of corporate control? To answer this question, this book places this concern with authenticity within a political framework and demonstrates how it might represent an even more insidious form of cultural domination. The book especially focuses on the way in which private and non-work selves are prospected and put to work in the firm. The ideas of Hardt and Negri and the Italian autonomist movement are used to show how common forms of association and co-operation outside of commodified work is the inspiration for personal authenticity. It is the vibrancy, energy, and creativity of this non-commodified stratum of social life that managerialism now aims to exploit. Each chapter explores how this is achieved and highlights the worker resistance that is provoked as a result. The book concludes by demonstrating how the discourse of freedom underlying the managerial version of authenticity harbours potential for a radical transformation of the contemporary corporate form.

This book provides a coherent overview of the most important theories and insights in the field of business ethics, together with a substantiated development of ethical norms and values with which organizations must comply. At the end of each chapter is a case study (e.g., Shell, KPN Telecom, IHC Caland, Herald of Free Enterprise disaster, etc.), ideal for graduate courses in business ethics and corporate social responsibility.

This book explores the evolution and origins of contemporary moral culture, with a particular focus on the challenges it poses for managers and business leaders. It is argued that in today’s bimoral society, people govern their lives by two contrasting sets of principles: those associated with traditional morality and its duties and obligations, which remain powerful even though the authorities supporting them have been considerably weakened; and those associated with the pursuit of self-interest, which have escaped their traditional constraints and acquired a degree of social legitimacy unparalleled in history. The tensions arising from this situation are apparent in all areas of social life, but are especially so in business. The same developments that have led to the bimoral society have also led to new, more flexible forms of organizing that have released people’s entrepreneurial energies and significantly enhanced the creative capacities of business organizations. Working within such organizational cultures, however, is fraught with moral tensions as obligations and self-interest conflict and managers are pulled in all sorts of different directions. As the technical problem-solving that previously characterized managerial work is increasingly accomplished by technology and market mechanisms, the key tasks of management become those of political and moral leadership: determining purposes and priorities, reconciling divergent interests, and nurturing trust in interpersonal relationships. The book also explores the challenge for societies developing forms of corporate governance appropriate to the new environment.

This book explores the ways in which the word ‘network’ has been deployed in literature. In particular, it offers a commentary on how the idea of networks has been used to illustrate contemporary forms of socio-economic organisation (as with the idea of a ‘network society’ or a ‘network state’), broadly conceived to also include the political aspects of networks. The term ‘network’ has become a ubiquitous metaphor to describe too many aspects of contemporary life. In doing so, the book argues, the term has lost much of its analytical precision and has no clear conceptual underpinnings. This study brings some intellectual clarity to the discussion of networks by asking whether it is possible to construct a clearly demarcated idea of a network as a separable form of socio-economic coordination and governance mechanism with its own consistent logic. In doing this, the primary contrast is with hierarchies and markets as alternative and already well understood forms of socio-economic coordination each with their own distinctive logic. The book identifies two underlying programmatic issues: the question of whether there can be a particular logic to the network form of organisation, and whether there are any limits to networks. The book contends that if networks are to mean anything then they must not apply to everything, so this raises an obvious limit to their embrace. The questions thus become where and how to draw these limits. These are reviewed in the light of the concrete organisational forms that networks have taken in the contemporary period.

In the case of an acquisition or a merger, it is very often the case that when an individual or company perceives itself to be the winner, subsequent events will show that the victory was overvalued. Both psychological and market based forces often lead managers to greatly overestimate what they are buying, resulting in the “winner’s curse”. In an effort to grow their companies, competitive and overly confident managers with high compensation packages make rash decisions. The pressure put on values by the stock market, stock analysts, and investment bankers is coupled with the presence of a bidding psychology. When senior management experiences “buyer’s remorse”, having made overly optimistic forecasts about the future of the company, a true financial “curse” often ensues. In the event that a company does “win” by making it to the top of its industry, complacency or hubris caused by a sense of invulnerability often conspire to move the company out of the winner’s column. This book examines the phenomenon of the “winner’s curse”. It presents a number of cases illustrating the curse, and examines the reasons for it in each instance. It also looks at situations where CEOs decided to walk away from “winning” because of their sober ability to trade-off the risks of winning versus the real returns. In particular, the last chapter presents a series of “take-aways” for any manager to follow to avoid the winner’s curse.