Business and Management : oso

Reshaping Retirement Security

Raimond Maurer, Olivia S. Mitchell, and Mark J. Warshawsky — 2013-01-24

Author:: RaimondMaurerEndowed Chair of Investment, Portfolio Management, and Pension Finance, the Goethe University of FrankfurtOlivia S.MitchellInternational Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans Professor of Insurance and Risk Management, the Wharton School, University of PennsylvaniaMark J.WarshawskyDirector of Retirement Research, Towers Watson
ISBN:: 9780199660698
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Pensions and Pension Management
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199660698.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2013-01-24

The worldwide financial crisis has wrought deep changes in capital and labor markets, old-age retirement systems, and household retirement and consumption patterns. Around the world, plan sponsors, fiduciaries, policymakers, and households have gained a new awareness of retirement risk. When pressed to reform postcrisis, many would recommend enhancing financial advice for plan participants, emphasizing flexibility and the positive effect of working another one or two years to make up for investment losses in the downturn. Adding to this is the continuing need for financial education, essential as the retirement system moves increasingly toward personal account pensions. But perhaps most important of all is the need for greater understanding of risk throughout the retirement security system, along with new approaches to reengineering retirement pensions.

New Spirits of Capitalism?

Paul du Gay and Glenn Morgan — 2013-01-24

Author:: Pauldu GayProfessor of Organization Studies, Copenhagen Business SchoolGlennMorganProfessor of International Management, Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University
ISBN:: 9780199595341
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Political Economy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199595341.001.0001
Published in print:: 2013
Published Online:: 2013-01-24

After many years in which it appeared to be losing the pre-eminent position it once occupied in the lexicon of the social and human sciences, the term ‘capitalism’ has once again become a matter of critical concern both theoretically and substantively in a range of disciplinary fields. The global financial and environmental crises, and the shifting economic power geometry associated with the rise of the BRICS and the sovereign debt contagion in the Eurozone, for example, have all put the norms, practices and devices of capitalist conduct under the spotlight once again. In the social and human sciences, a revived engagement with the nature and effects of contemporary capitalism received a remarkable boost with the publication of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello's The New Spirit of Capitalism. This text became something of a publishing sensation in its native France, and later in the UK and the USA, sparking debate not simply about the meaning, significance and effects of contemporary mutations in economic and organizational life, but becoming a reference point in political discussions about the future of the welfare state and the possibilities both of collective action in a ‘networked’ world, and of reconciling the interests of social justice with the ‘laws of the markets’. Such a reception is not as surprising as it might first appear, not simply because the themes of the text spoke to a popular sense of discontent concerning the nature, direction and consequences of the ‘neo-liberal’ experiment, but also because the book offered a comprehensive and subtle series of discrete but interrelated arguments combining sociological and cultural analysis, socio-historical narrative, political economy, and engaged advocacy that chimed with ongoing debates about the meaning, significance and effects of changing forms of capitalism and the role of neo-liberalism as these were being articulated in sociology, management and organization studies, economic geography, and political economy, for example. When taken together these arguments offered some important clues as to how and why neo-liberalism had proven so resilient and adaptable when faced with evidence of its own hubris. This edited book offers the first comprehensive attempt to interrogate both the explanatory power and reach of Boltanski and Chiapello's thesis, and the theoretical and methodological perspectives, tools and techniques they developed, and to do so in relation to the development of neo-liberal capitalism in the period since their original publication, and in particular the culmination of these developments in the ongoing crisis since the financial collapse of 2007. The volume provides both a balanced critique and overview of New Spirit, but also shows how it can be used in a variety of empirical studies to develop new insights into the functioning and regulation of capitalism in the contemporary era. The volume brings together leading scholars from a range of disciplinary fields where Boltanski and Chiapelllo's work has received its most serious engagement. Luc Boltanksi and Eve Chiapello also offer their thoughts on the continuing relevance and reach of the New Spirit, over a decade after its publication, and in the context of contemporary global economic and political developments.

Materiality and Organizing

Paul M. Leonardi, Bonnie A. Nardi, and Jannis Kallinikos — 2013-01-24

Author:: Paul M.LeonardiPentair-Nugent Associate Professor in the Departments of Communication Studies and Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern UniversityBonnie A.NardiProfessor, Department of Informatics, the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, the University of California, IrvineJannisKallinikosProfessor, London School of Economics
ISBN:: 9780199664054
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Organization Studies
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199664054.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2013-01-24

The book is a collective meditation on the role of materiality in social affairs. The recent and growing interest in the concept of “materiality” certainly has diverse origins. Yet, it is closely associated with the diffusion of technological objects and artifacts through society and many have questioned how human choice and social practice are conditioned by the characteristics of such devices and systems. Many traditional technologies are easy to call “material” — they are made up of wood, steel, and other physical substrates that afford and constrain particular uses. Other technologies, such as software and rhetorical tropes, are not made up of such physical substrates, but they still have implications for human action in many of the same ways as the more traditional technologies. Thus, it is unclear how to talk about the materiality of technology in a way that includes both physical and nonphysical artifacts while still accounting for their effects. The book gathers together a group of scholars from various disciplines who approach the issues materiality raises from various angles, making evident that there is no single answer as to how the concept can be used to approach the perennial question of the ways technologies and humans bear upon one another. The book contributes to untangling the various meanings of materiality and clarifying the positions or perspectives from which they are produced.

Innovation, Human Capabilities, and Democracy

Reijo Miettinen — 2013-01-24

Author:: Reijo Miettinen
ISBN:: 9780199692613
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Innovation, Political Economy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199692613.001.0001
Published in print:: 2013
Published Online:: 2013-01-24

The Nordic welfare states have been at the top of the lists of national competitiveness throughout the 2000s. The Nordic welfare model is deemed able to combine equality, welfare and economic efficiency. Among the Nordic countries, Finland has been considered as an epitome of information society, of high-quality education and systemic innovation policy. In order to make sense of the Finnish development, this book puts political economy, innovation studies, welfare state research, organizational institutionalism and cultural-historical psychology into dialogue with each other. It develops an approach of studying institutional change and learning based on cultural-historical activity theory. This approach is used to analyze the emergence and development of the Finnish comprehensive school system. The steadfast success of Finnish students in the PISA studies shows, against neoliberal principles, that a public school system inspired by educational equality can achieve excellent results with moderate costs. The book outlines a model of an enabling welfare state which develops further the capability cultivating universal services created by the welfare state in the 1960s–1980s. In future these services — produced by multi-professional collaboration — will be increasingly tailored to meet the needs of different individuals and specific life situations. They enable citizens to cope with risks and to meet the challenges of the rapidly changing labour market. An enabling democratic welfare state fosters local experimentation as well as learning in collaborative communities and developmental associations. It mobilizes well-educated professionals and practitioners to innovate in all spheres of society and in this way deepens democracy within the society.

Consultation at Work

Mark Hall and John Purcell — 2013-01-24

Author:: Mark Hall, John Purcell
ISBN:: 9780199605460
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, HRM / IR, Organization Studies
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199605460.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2013-01-24

The practice of consultation between senior managers and employee representatives has a long history in British employment relations yet has often been a poor cousin to collective bargaining. Two trends have elevated the importance of consultation. First, the decline in trade union membership and the retreat from collective bargaining in the private sector has meant that consultation is often the only form of collective employee voice available. Second, since the 1970s the European Union (EU) has embarked on programme of legislative support for consultation, most recently in the information and consultation directive of 2002. The United Kingdom's Information and Consultation of Employees (ICE) Regulations implementing the directive became fully operational in 2008. The book charts the meaning and development of consultation in the twentieth century and explores the justifications for the practice. The way EU intervention to promote consultation evolved and changed is analysed with particular attention to the adoption of the ICE directive. The half-hearted response to EU consultation initiatives in Britain is analysed with a critical assessment of UK governments' handling of the issue, employer hostility, and union ambivalence. The take-up and impact of consultation regulations, especially ICE, is assessed and the processes involved in effective consultation explored. The dynamics of consultation are described drawing a contrast between ‘active’ consultation, and more limited consultation used as a means of communication. The UK experience is compared with practices in Europe. Suggestions are made to improve take-up of consultation and changes needed to the EU directive and ICE regulations.

The Constitutionalization of the Global Corporate Sphere?

Grahame F. Thompson — 2013-01-24

Author:: Grahame F. Thompson
ISBN:: 9780199594832
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, International Business, Political Economy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199594832.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2013-01-24

Modern constitutions are relatively recent instruments of rule and are closely associated with the formation of national states from the eighteenth century onwards. So what is this term doing in respect to global business practices and corporate affairs? This question is the one the book sets out to explore. The argument is that with the advent of globalization — where corporate organizations and the commercial relations that accompany them are argued to have become increasingly transnational — the locus of powers, authorities, and responsibilities has shifted to the global level. The nation-state arena is losing its capacity to regulate and control commercial processes and practices as a transformational logic kicks-in, associated with new forms of global rule making and governance. And it is this new arena of global rule making can be considered as a surrogate form of global constitutionalization, or ‘quasi-constitutionalization’. But as might be expected, this surrogate process of constitutionalization is not a coherent program or a set of rounded outcomes but is full of contradictory half-finished currents and projects: an ‘assemblage’ of many disparate advances and often directionless moves — almost an accidental coming together of elements. Thus, the book is about governance, law, and constitutional matters. these are discussed in the context of international corporate constitutional governance. So, the emphasis is upon how and why the business world, commercial relations, and particularly company activities have increasingly become subject to legal and constitutional forms of regulation and governance at the international level. The questions asked is how to characterize the process that has seen the international corporate sphere increasingly subject to juridical and constitutional-like regulatory initiatives and interventions. Does this amount to a new attempt to subject international commercial relations to the ‘rule by law’ and, indeed, to rule the world through these very means?

World Insurance

Peter Borscheid and Niels Viggo Haueter — 2012-09-20

Author:: PeterBorscheidProfessor Emeritus of Economic and Social History at the Philipps-University of MarburgNiels ViggoHaueterCorporate History, Swiss Re
ISBN:: 9780199657964
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, International Business, Business History
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199657964.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-09-20

Since the end of the eighteenth century, the insurance industry has cast a safety net around the world, first in the British Isles and then further afield, irrespective of cultural, political, and ideological divides. This book focuses on the creation of networks across borders from the end of the eighteenth century to the present day. The chapters draw upon examples from twenty countries across the continents to demonstrate how what was called the ‘British system’ of risk management spread out in waves, and describes the forces that made this possible — first among them migration from Europe and international trade. The book explores the economic, political, religious, and cultural obstacles that blocked the path of this European invention — not only religious law and traditional practices, but above all protectionism, inflation, and political ideologies. It examines the process of transformation through which modern insurance supplanted traditional forms of protection against perils and risks and was able to keep on offering new ways of dealing with the risks of modern life. As well as discussing primary insurance, it also considers the role played by reinsurance, without which the losses arising out of today's natural and man-made disasters would be immeasurably greater. Finally, taking modern-day disaster scenarios as examples, the book shows just what the limits of insurability are and what risks worldwide networks entail.

The Virtues of Leadership

Arménio Rego, Miguel Pina e Cunha, and Stewart R. Clegg — 2012-09-20

Author:: Arménio Rego, Miguel Pina e Cunha, Stewart R. Clegg
ISBN:: 9780199653867
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Organization Studies, HRM / IR
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199653867.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-09-20

The book draws from the Positive Organizational Scholarship approach, a research stream in which the virtues of leaders have been understudied, at least in terms of the holistic approach that we adopt. The book explores how virtues and character strengths may deliver positive organizational performance. It stresses that virtues represent the ‘golden mean’ between the extremes of excess and deficiency, and discuss the perverse consequences of ‘excessive virtuousness’. The book is intended to be neither a sermon nor a collection of pious guidelines aimed to preach virtuous virtuosity to global leaders. Nor is it a sustained attack on capitalism — not because we see no alternative or that it is the only game on the globe but because there are many different kinds of capitalisms and we think it more pragmatically possible to effect reform in these than their transformation into some utopia that, in practice, will never be what it was proposed to be in theory. Capitalism is a meaningless category, we would maintain: what is important is the constitution of different types of capitalisms, in which three complexes of actors — state, civil society and business leaders — play a constitutive role. The book addresses the book primarily to business leaders, seeking to enlighten them as to how to follow a values‐based capitalism paradigm, according to which the best companies will fulfil three conditions: (1) they will obey the laws and regulations, (2) they will be guided by enlightened self‐interest, and (3) be guided by values that stimulate them to make a positive difference.

The Origins of International Banking in Asia

Shizuya Nishimura, Toshio Suzuki, and Ranald C. Michie — 2012-09-20

Author:: ShizuyaNishimuraProfessor Emeritus, Hosei University, Tokyo, JapanToshioSuzukiProfessor of Business History, Faculty of Economics, Tohoku UniversityRanald C.MichieProfessor of History, University of Durham
ISBN:: 9780199646326
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Business History
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199646326.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-09-20

The book is the product of international collaboration extending across Asia and Europe. Through the different perspectives produced by international experts from Britain and France on the one hand and Japan on the other a new interpretation is developed on the history of international banking over the last 150 years. Using the study of individual banks and financial centres as the basis the book explores the evolution and changing fortunes international banking. In the years before 1914 they were at the centre of global finance, and were much more than the tools of European governments bent on imperial expansion. Instead, they provided the very foundations upon which the first era of globalisation was founded and this involved the active participation of banks from across the world, including Asia. In the difficult years between 1914 and 1945 international banking was in retreat and this helps explain the collapse of the world economy at that time. After the Second World War international banking had to re-invent itself in the face of hostility from national governments. It was only in the wake of the global economic crisis of the 1970s that international banking was, once again, able to flourish, in the second age of globalisation. The result was another period of rapid and sustained economic growth. However, today international banking again faces the hostility of governments as it is blamed for the Global Financial Crisis of 2008.

Innovative Firms in Emerging Market Countries

Edmund Amann and John Cantwell — 2012-09-20

Author:: EdmundAmannReader in Development Economics, University of ManchesterJohnCantwellProfessor of International Business, Rutgers University
ISBN:: 9780199646005
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, International Business, Innovation
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199646005.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-09-20

The rise of innovative firms in emerging market economies is an increasingly topical issue. However, the literature has lagged behind in helping us understand this phenomenon. Aiming to shed more light on the processes through which innovative firms in emerging markets have developed, this book analyzes a variety of firm‐level experiences. These are drawn from a range of key countries, sectors, and institutional contexts. The book finds that the rise of innovative firms in emerging market countries has been influenced by shifts in the institutional, technological, and policy environment — in particular, by the opening up of emerging market economies over the past three decades, and the consequent increase in international business interactions. Across the different countries surveyed, we find that firm-level innovation has been strongly influenced by capabilities that had previously been built up in a relatively closed environment. However, in the current more open environment, we find that innovation among firms also reflects differences in these national historical contexts, as well as in the different forms of interaction with international business that have subsequently emerged. Across all countries, however, it is found that the type of firm that will prove a successful innovator varies according to its goodness of fit with its surrounding environment. Two key facets of this environment are found to be the nature of the industrial and technology policy regime and the scope of international business connections.

The Handbook of Mergers and Acquisitions

David Faulkner, Satu Teerikangas, and Richard J. Joseph — 2012-09-20

Author:: DavidFaulknerDean of Magna Carta College, OxfordSatuTeerikangasLecturer, University College LondonRichard J.JosephProvost, Hult International Business School, Boston
ISBN:: 9780199601462
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Finance, Accounting, and Banking, Strategy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199601462.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-09-20

Despite decades of practice and research, many mergers and acquisitions (M&A) findings remain contested and inconclusive. M&A scholars have voiced concern about this state of affairs, and have lamented the lack of integrative perspectives and theories on M&A. This book argues that the field is in need of ‘re-rooting’. The book stresses the need to reconcile the strategic, financial, and sociocultural aspects of M&A. To break the silo mentality through which scholars have traditionally approached the study of M&A, the book presents a three-dimensional model of M&A management, founded on the strategic, financial, and sociocultural dimensions of M&A. Throughout the book, eminent scholars and practitioners offer thought-provoking, state-of-the-art analyses of M&A as seen through strategic, financial, sociocultural, and sectorial lenses. Based on these findings, the book argues that the difficulty of making M&A transactions work stems from the multiplicity of drivers, disciplines, contexts, levels of analysis, and actors involved. The book concludes with a set of dynamic syntheses which portray M&A in terms of the changing characteristics and drivers of this activity since the end of the 19th century, the ways in which M&A transactions differ from one another, and a contextual phase-based framework of M&A execution. It concludes with an allusion to future trends in M&A, as well as pointers for future research.

East Asian Capitalism

Andrew Walter and Xiaoke Zhang — 2012-09-20

Author:: AndrewWalterReader in International Political Economy, London School of Economics and Political ScienceXiaokeZhangProfessor, Manchester Business School, University of Manchester
ISBN:: 9780199643097
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Political Economy, International Business
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199643097.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-09-20

This book brings together conceptual and empirical analyses of the evolving patterns of East Asian capitalism against the backdrop of global market integration and periodic economic crises since the 1980s. More specifically, it seeks to provide an interdisciplinary account of variations, continuities, or changes in institutional structures that govern financial systems, industrial relations, and product markets and shape the evolution of national political economies. The geographical focus of the volume is China, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Thailand. In line with this analytical focus, the volume has three different yet interrelated objectives. First, building on extant comparative institutional analyses, it develops a typology of East Asian capitalism that can identify key institutional domains to be included in cross-national comparisons and establish the guiding principles for categorizing political economies across the region. Second, it provides an analytical framework to elucidate the nature and mode of institutional changes in East Asian countries over the past two decades. Finally, the volume advances theoretical propositions concerning the potential causes of these institutional changes. While particular chapters emphasize different causal variables, collectively they constitute a coherent effort to theorize the changing varieties of East Asian capitalism.

The Consequences of the Global Financial Crisis

Wyn Grant and Graham K. Wilson — 2012-09-20

Author:: WynGrantProfessor of Politics, the University of WarwickGraham K.WilsonProfessor and Chair, Department of Political Science, Boston University
ISBN:: 9780199641987
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Political Economy, Finance, Accounting, and Banking
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199641987.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-09-20

The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) is the most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression. Many books have explored its causes, but this book systematically explores its consequences. The focus is primarily on the policy and political consequences of the GFC. This book asks how governments responded to the challenge and what the political consequences of the combination of the GFC itself and policy responses to it have been. Based on workshops held in the United States and the United Kingdom, it brings together leading academics to consider the divergent ways in which particular countries have responded in different ways to the crisis, including China, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Part of what is happening is a structural shift in economic power from east to west, but China has its fragilities while Germany offers an example of a largely successful Western model. The book also assesses attempts to develop global economic governance and to reform financial regulation and looks critically at the role of credit rating agencies. Unlike earlier crises, no new paradigm has emerged to challenge existing ways of thinking, meaning that neoliberalism has emerged relatively unscathed. The crisis has lacked a coherent and innovative intellectual response and has been characterized by remarkable policy stability.

Capitalisms and Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century

Glenn Morgan and Richard Whitley — 2012-09-20

Author:: GlennMorganProfessor of International Management, Cardiff Business School, University of CardiffRichardWhitleyEmeritus Professor of Organizational Sociology, Manchester Business School, University of Manchester
ISBN:: 9780199694761
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Organization Studies
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199694761.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-09-20

This book provides a series of inter-disciplinary perspectives on how capitalism and national capitalisms are changing in the twenty-first century. It aims to bring perspectives on how the international economic order is changing as a result of the rise of emerging economies countries, the increasing influence of regional organizations such as the EU, NAFTA etc. and new forms of private and public international regulation together with analyses of how states are adapting their economic policies and processes and what the consequences of these are for adaptations for different societies. In turn, it links these changes to how firms are developing new strategies for organizing global value chains and applying scientific knowledge to the commercialization of products. The book contextualizes these processes in a world where financial markets have become increasingly uncertain and crisis prone at the same time as demands from different social groups for new forms of corporate governance and corporate social responsibility are emerging. It draws on examples from Europe, North and Latin America as well as Asia in order to illustrate the complex ways in which different forms of national capitalism are adapting and changing their institutions. The book builds on earlier comparative accounts of how institutions, firms, and markets co-devolve to analyze current changes in these relationships and suggest likely developments in them, and in this way move the frontiers of research forward to a global and inter-disciplinary perspective on twenty-first century capitalism and capitalisms.

The Work of Managers

Stefan Tengblad — 2012-05-24

Author:: StefanTengbladProfessor in Business Administration, School of Technology and Science, University of Skövde, Sweden
ISBN:: 9780199639724
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Organization Studies
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199639724.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-05-24

This book addresses one of the most central issues in the field of management and answers the following questions: What do managers actually do at work? How do they tackle their responsibilities and work pressures? The book takes a practice perspective by using the behaviour and activities of knowledgeable, experienced, and skilful managers as the primary data for theorizing about management. In this perspective, successful management requires understanding and artistry in addition to knowledge, experience, and skills. The practice perspective calls attention to how widespread certain management practices are, how management practices are performed in everyday work, and what the outcomes of such practices are. Moreover, the book tackles fundamental management questions such as: Why do managers work in a very different ways than most management literature describes? What can we learn from the everyday work practices of successful managers? What are the similarities and differences in work behaviour among different kinds of managers? This book presents thirteen chapters on various kinds of managers: from construction site managers to university vice chancellors and from front-line health-care managers to CEOs of large companies. Another chapter reviews the classic studies on managerial work. Other chapters address research design and research methodology related to management studies.

Valuing an Entrepreneurial Enterprise

David B. Audretsch and Albert N. Link — 2012-05-24

Author:: David B. Audretsch, Albert N. Link
ISBN:: 9780199730377
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Innovation
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199730377.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-05-24

The number of new small closely held business start-ups, which may be referred to as entrepreneurial enterprises, is growing and they continue to be the primary source for employment growth in the United States and in most industrialized nations. However, the topic of the valuation of an entrepreneurial enterprise has for the most part been ignored because, in the view of many, traditional valuation methods are not applicable. This is because entrepreneurial enterprises do not have a history of sales and revenues upon which traditional valuation methods are built. Through conceptual discussions and numerical examples a more accurate method for dealing with the valuation issues that are relevant to an entrepreneurial enterprise is suggested.

Saving for Retirement

Gordon L. Clark, Kendra Strauss, and Janelle Knox-Hayes — 2012-05-24

Author:: Gordon L. Clark, Kendra Strauss, Janelle Knox-Hayes
ISBN:: 9780199600854
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Pensions and Pension Management, Political Economy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199600854.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-05-24

Understanding the ways in which people save for their retirement is an urgent issue. So much has changed in the last 10 to 15 years, especially in the area of the provision of pensions and retirement income. Around the world, greater and greater responsibility is being allocated to individuals while governments discount their contributions to social security and employers retreat from the provision of supplementary retirement income. In this book, we begin with the behavioral revolution and its implications for understanding financial decision-making and saving for the future. Recognizing the profound implications of this research program, we go beyond issues of risk aversion, framing, and decision-making to consider how social identity and the resources due to people by virtue of their place in society figure in savings behavior. We take seriously the context of environment in which people make financial decisions arguing that this allows us to better understand the coexistence of sophistication and naivety apparent in patterns of retirement saving. Utilizing databases from the United Kingdom, we give empirical life to our theoretical arguments demonstrating how an integrated approach to individual financial decision-making is necessary if we are to address the apparent shortfall in many people’s planning for the future. The book concludes by setting the agenda for the design, governance, and regulation of pension savings schemes consistent with delivering cost-effective solutions to pension adequacy. In these ways, our book is a manifesto for rethinking individual behavior as well as the design of retirement income systems.

Restoring Trust in Organizations and Leaders

Roderick M. Kramer and Todd L. Pittinsky — 2012-05-24

Author:: Roderick M.KramerStanford University Graduate School of BusinessTodd L.PittinskyStony Brook University
ISBN:: 9780199756087
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Organization Studies, Corporate Governance and Accountability
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199756087.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-05-24

Recent events around the world, especially in the financial sector and with respect to government performance, have severely undermined people’s trust in both private organizations and public institutions. In no small measure, these substantial and enduring declines in trust reflect widespread disenchantment with the leadership of such organizations and institutions. In recognition of this pervasive problem, policymakers and scholars alike have argued the need to restore trust in our organizations and their leadership. But precisely how to restore trust is less evident and often unspecified in these exhortations. The present volume addresses this important and timely issue by assessing the state of social science theory and evidence regarding effective trust repair. The volume presents multi-disciplinary perspectives, including insights from social psychology, organizational theory, and behavioral decision theory. The first part of the volume examines some of the reasons why trust and its restoration are problematic from a variety of perspectives. The second part of the volume examines constructive approaches for restoring trust, including psychological and structural perspectives.

Normal Organizational Wrongdoing

Donald Palmer — 2012-05-24

Author:: Donald Palmer
ISBN:: 9780199573592
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Organization Studies, Corporate Governance and Accountability
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199573592.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-05-24

Normal Organizational Wrongdoing critically reviews theory and research on wrongdoing in and of organizations, focusing on the individual level of analysis. The book considers a wide variety of organizational misconduct, including corporate crime, white-collar crime, unethical behaviour, and socially irresponsible behaviour. It begins by developing an overarching framework for classifying existing theories of organizational wrongdoing. Then it uses this framework to guide its presentation, evaluation, and extension of theories currently in use in the field. The overarching framework distinguishes between two broad classes of theories of wrongdoing; one, shared by most students of wrongdoing, considers wrongdoing an abnormal phenomenon and the other, championed by the author, considers wrongdoing a normal occurrence. Two existing explanations of wrongdoing, the rational choice and culture accounts, fall into the former category. Four existing theories, the administrative system, situational social influence, power structure, and accidental accounts, fall into the latter category. One current theory, the behavioural decision account, serves as a bridge between the two approaches. The book's overarching framework also suggests the need for an eighth explanation of organizational wrongdoing that has largely been overlooked to this point, the social control account. The theoretical arguments advanced in the book are illustrated by rich case studies of instances of organizational wrongdoing. The book concludes with a discussion of the practical implications that the theory reviewed and developed in the book holds for those seeking to curb wrongdoing in and of organizations.

Management Innovation

William Lazonick and David J. Teece — 2012-05-24

Author:: WilliamLazonickProfessor, University of Massachusetts Lowell and Director, the UMass Lowell Center for Industrial CompetitivenessDavid J.TeeceChaired Professor, Haas Business School, University of California, Berkeley
ISBN:: 9780199695683
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Innovation, Business History
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199695683.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-05-24

Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. was, by general consensus, the pre-eminent business historian of the twentieth century. Through a prodigious body of work, Chandler made the study of the evolution of business enterprise integral to the study of the evolution of economy and society. His work combined detailed historical investigations with grand sociological syntheses. As a result, Chandler's study of the modern business enterprise invited social scientists and business academics as well as historians to contribute to our understanding of a central institution of our time. Chandler revealed how managerial activity was central to the functioning of successful industrial corporations, and hence to the performance of the economy as a whole. This book gathers together contributions from management scholars fundamentally influenced by the work of Chandler to discuss management innovation, the ways in which people who exercise strategic control over the allocation of resources put in place organizational structures that can enable an enterprise to prosper and grow. The volume offers a range of perspectives to examine the challenges that corporate management encounters.

Constructing Identity in and around Organizations

Majken Schultz, Steve Maguire, Ann Langley, and Haridimos Tsoukas — 2012-05-24

Author:: MajkenSchultzProfessor, Copenhagen Business SchoolSteveMaguireAssociate Professor, the Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University, Montreal, CanadaAnnLangleyProfessor of Management, HEC MontréalHaridimosTsoukasProfessor, the University of Cyprus and Warwick Business School
ISBN:: 9780199640997
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Organization Studies
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199640997.001.0001
Published in print:: 2012
Published Online:: 2012-05-24

The constructing of identities—those processes through which actors in and around organizations claim, accept, negotiate, affirm, stabilize, maintain, reproduce, challenge, disrupt, destabilize, repair, or otherwise relate to their sense of selves and others—has become a critically important topic in the study of organizations. This volume attempts to amplify—and possibly refract—contemporary debates among identity scholars that question established notions of identity as “essence,” “entity,” or “thing.” It calls for alternative approaches to understanding identity and its significance in contexts in and around organizations by conceptualizing it as “process”—that is, being continually under construction. On the basis of diverse theoretical and philosophical traditions and contexts, contributions by leading scholars to this volume offer new perspectives on how individual and organizational identities evolve and come to be constructed through ongoing activities and interactions.

The Responsible Corporation in a Global Economy

Colin Crouch and Camilla Maclean — 2012-01-19

Author:: ColinCrouchProfessor of Governance and Public Management, Warwick Business SchoolCamillaMacleanLecturer, Governance and Public Management, Warwick Business School
ISBN:: 9780199592173
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Corporate Governance and Accountability
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199592173.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2012-01-19

Once just a slogan used by corporate PR departments, the idea of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has now become a serious business for many firms and a major object of academic research. It is also a field replete with disagreement and diversity of opinion. Some corporations try to solve these dilemmas by projecting an image that is ‘responsible’ in specific and often isolated ways. This volume, based on a conference organized jointly by the Social Trends Institute and the University of Warwick Business School, takes the debate a stage further by examining the place of CSR in the role played by major corporations within global economic governance. One of the principal tasks in this volume is to bring the study of CSR into political science debate. Accordingly, authors from varied and even opposed perspectives consider what defines a ‘responsible’ corporation in today's global economy whilst a few authors discuss the limits to CSR and asks whether this approach is an appropriate means to address issues in the global ‘public’ domain in the first instance.

Reconnecting Marketing to Markets

Luis Araujo, John Finch, and Hans Kjellberg — 2012-01-19

Author:: LuisAraujoLancaster University Management SchoolJohnFinchUniversity of Strathclyde Business SchoolHansKjellbergStockholm School of Economics
ISBN:: 9780199578061
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Marketing
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199578061.001.0001
Published in print:: 2010
Published Online:: 2012-01-19

This book proposes a novel research agenda for marketing to reconnect with markets. The historical link between marketing and markets, prevalent until the 1960s, gave way to a view of marketing as addressing generic rather than economic exchange. By focusing on generic exchange, marketing portrays itself as portable set of tools applicable to markets and non-markets alike. This book challenges this view, proposing instead a close examination of what makes exchanges economic in nature, and how economic exchanges aggregate to produce markets. By re-establishing the connection between marketing and markets, this book argues that marketing produces markets: marketing practices and theories play a significant role in the production of markets and in the configuration of the entities and phenomena that populate markets. The book brings together scholars from the fields of marketing, organization studies, economic sociology, and science and technology studies, who share an interest in markets as socio-technical constructions and the performative role of academic and lay theories in producing economic orderings. The chapters cover a wide range of empirical settings including consumption, traditional and online retailing, product development, category management, trading zones and obstacles to exchange, business associations and political actors, liberalized markets, loyalty schemes and competition rules, and Fair Trade goods. These chapters illustrate the variety of agents, beyond buyers and sellers, that partake in the construction of markets such as the specialist trade press, business associations, regulatory bodies, and NGOs.

Public Administration

Jos C. N. Raadschelders — 2012-01-19

Author:: Jos C. N. Raadschelders
ISBN:: 9780199693894
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Public Management
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199693894.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2012-01-19

Public administration seeks to develop a comprehensive understanding of the internal structure and functioning of government, in all its complexity, and its interaction with society and its citizens. The book provides an account of the discipline, considering its history, growth, boundaries, and underlying assumptions. It tracks the emergence of the field against a background of the expanding conception of the state and the growth of public services, and situates it within the three branches of knowledge – natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. It maps out the sources of knowledge of public administration, and how this is fragmented within the discipline’s specializations, the social sciences, and government and society at large. It examines how leading authors map the discipline, the application of different theories, the associated schools of thought and intellectual debates, and the role of knowledge integration. Scholars in public administration initiated much debate as to whether it should be treated as a science, a craft or profession, or an art. This book argues that to develop a comprehensive understanding of government and its complexity requires a truly interdisciplinary approach.

The Political Economy of Collective Skill Formation

Marius R. Busemeyer and Christine Trampusch — 2012-01-19

Author:: Marius R.BusemeyerProfessor of Political Science, University of KonstanzChristineTrampuschProfessor of International Comparative Political Economy and Economic Sociology, University of Cologne
ISBN:: 9780199599431
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Knowledge Management
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199599431.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2012-01-19

Education, skill formation, and training continue to be important areas of consideration for both public policy and research. This book examines the particular types of vocational training known as collective skill formation systems, whereby the training (often firm-based apprenticeships) is collectively organized by businesses and unions with state support and cooperation in execution, finance, and monitoring.With contributions from leading academics, this book is the first to provide a comprehensive analysis of the varying historical origins of, and recent developments in, vocational training systems, offering in-depth studies on coordinated market economies, namely Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Denmark. It also contains comparative chapters that analyze how these countries react to common challenges such as deindustrialization, labor market stratification, academic drift, gender inequalities, and Europeanization.Whereas previous research has focused on the differences between various kinds of skill regimes, this book focuses on explaining institutional variety within the group of collective skill formation systems. The development of skill formation systems is regarded as a dynamic political process, dependent on the outcome of various political struggles regarding such matters as institutional design and transformations during critical junctures in historical development.

Local Business Voice

Robert J. Bennett — 2012-01-19

Author:: Robert J. Bennett
ISBN:: 9780199584734
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Business History
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199584734.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2012-01-19

This book is the first scholarly and systematic history of chambers of commerce. It challenges academic commentary on the early chambers by showing they were more numerous, persistent, and active than previously recognized. It demonstrates common origins in protest leading to a reform agenda, with diffusion down the size spectrum of cities, eventually reaching all towns and communities. Chamber voice increasingly linked lobbying with supplying a ‘bundle’ of business services. Using multiple theoretical frameworks, overlapping in time, the book traces for the first time the importance of commercial arbitration, coffee and reading rooms, and information and consultancy services as critical parts of the chambers' unique market position. For later developments it demonstrates the challenges arising from increasing partnerships with government, and competition with rival sector bodies. The book gives a critical overview of the key lobbies against the Corn Laws, over tariff reform and free trade, municipal socialism, and regulatory burden. A systematic analysis of members shows their links with early protest campaigns and religious dissent; in modern chambers it demonstrates the forces that underpin joining and lapsing decisions: exit, voice, and loyalty. The chambers investigated are those in the UK, Ireland, and the early USA and Canada, because this grouping has common origins and retains the unifying characteristics of being formed under common law as independent voluntary bodies. The book seeks to be definitive and exhaustive, covering all local chambers, in order to provide to other researchers, and current chamber managers, a firm foundation of assessment and long-term aligned local data.

Financial Literacy: Implications for Retirement Security and the Financial Marketplace

Olivia S. Mitchell and Annamaria Lusardi — 2012-01-19

Author:: Olivia S.MitchellInternational Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans Professor Chair and Professor of Insurance and Risk Management, and Professor of Business and Public Policy Director, Pension Research Council & Boettner Center for Pensions and Retirement ResearchAnnamariaLusardiJoel Z. and Susan Hyatt Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research
ISBN:: 9780199696819
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Pensions and Pension Management, Finance, Accounting, and Banking
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199696819.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2012-01-19

As financial markets become increasingly complex and integrated, individuals and their families are increasingly faced with making highly sophisticated and all-too-often irreversible economic decisions. Nowhere is this more evident than with regard to retirement decision-making: a half-century ago, traditional defined benefit pension schemes were the norm in the United States, Japan, Australia and much of Europe, but these have now been largely replaced with defined contribution pensions. In the process, employer and government judgment regarding how much to save and where to invest has been replaced by individuals having to make these choices on their own (perhaps assisted by advisers they also select on their own). Additionally, participants in defined contribution plans must also decide how to spend down their pension assets and determine whether to annuitize or take their benefits in a single lump sum. The trend toward increased individual responsibility and greater financial complexity extends into other realms of life as well, for example regarding decisions over credit cards, adjustable rate mortgages, and when to claim retirement benefits. This volume focuses on key lessons for financial decision-making in the wake of that crisis, exploring how financial literacy can enhance peoples' skills and abilities to make more informed economic choices. Moreover, given the demographic forces at work and the structure of the labor markets, where workers change jobs and employers many times before retiring, the increase in individual responsibility with regard to financial security after retirement will continue to be a feature of many economies around the world.

Contingent Capital

Michel Goyer — 2012-01-19

Author:: Michel Goyer
ISBN:: 9780199578085
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Corporate Governance and Accountability
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199578085.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2012-01-19

Corporate governance has become a major topic of interest for academics and policymakers in recent years. The advent of major financial scandals in the early 2000s (Enron, WorldCom, Ahold, Parmalat) has been followed by important financial market turmoil by the end of the decade. A common theme associated with these developments is the increased power of finance – especially shareholder value-oriented institutional investors — across advanced capitalist economies. Will the pressures of financial market globalization force companies to converge on a shareholder-based model of corporate governance? This book which highlights the importance of the institutional context in which companies are embedded, focuses on the divergence in the allocation of capital by shareholder value-oriented institutional investors in Europe's two largest nonliberal market economies: France and Germany. The major difference between these two economies is that France has proven to be twice as attractive to short-term, impatient shareholders with short-term horizon as compared to Germany — a disparity that disappears for investors with a longer term horizon. These empirical findings highlight the importance of providing a sophisticated differentiation between different categories of institutional investors in order to assess the impact associated with the greater prominence of finance. Goyer points to the importance of firm-level institutional arrangements in the process by which companies coordinate their activities as the key variable for understanding the investment allocation of impatient investors. The implication is that the governing of corporations is not about whether or not strategies of shareholder value are being adopted — but rather what types of strategies of shareholder value are being pursued.

After the Great Complacence

2012-01-19

Author:: Ewald Engelen, Ismail Ertürk, Julie Froud, Sukhdev Johal, Adam Leaver, Mick Moran, Adriana Nilsson, Karel Williams
ISBN:: 9780199589081
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Finance, Accounting, and Banking, Political Economy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199589081.001.0001
Published in print:: 2011
Published Online:: 2012-01-19

This book addresses two important questions: first, why did financial innovation lead to the crisis in the banking sector that developed in 2007–8; and, second, why the political reform of finance has apparently proved so difficult across a variety of political jurisdictions? This ambitious book draws on a team of researchers from different disciplines to develop an innovation and distinctive argument in response to these two critical issues. In the first half of this book our question is about how crisis was generated. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 develop our answer, which is that innovation in and around the financial markets took the form of bricolage which did not consider the risks, uncertainty, and unintended consequences of volume-based business models and complex circuits. The direct implication is that finance needs to be simplified, rather than regulation made more sophisticated. In the second half of the book, our question is about why democratic political control both before and after the crisis has proved so difficult? Chapters 5, 6, and 7 develop our answer, which is that self-serving financial elites are not easily controlled by technocratic elites who are themselves recovering from knowledge failure, or by the rest of the governing classes concerned with political positioning for electoral advantage on issues which are technical, opaque, and illegible to the electorate at large. In Chapter 8, we discuss some of the implications of this analysis for how reform of both banking regulation and democracy is required.

Work and Pay in the United States and Japan

Clair Brown, Michael Reich, Lloyd Ulman, and Yoshifumi Nakata — 2011-10-03

Author:: Clair Brown, Michael Reich, Lloyd Ulman, Yoshifumi Nakata
ISBN:: 9780195115215
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, International Business
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195115215.001.0001
Published in print:: 1998
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book provides an integrated and detailed analysis of the components of firm human resources systems in the U.S. and Japan. It examines the relationship between company practices and national economic institutions. The authors address a number of key questions about employer–employee relations. How have major Japanese manufacturing companies been able to convert the assurance of “lifetime” employment security into a source of superior employee efficiency and adaptability, when job and income security have been feared as a source of “shirking” and wage inflation in the U.S.? How have higher economic and real wage growth rates been associated with greater equality in earned income distribution in Japan, when the incentive role of income inequality to worker effort and savings has been stressed in the U.S.? How could the Japanese emphasis on employment security in the firm be reconciled with greater price stability and lower unemployment than in the U.S.? This work analyses elements such as employee training and involvement programs, wage behavior as an incentive system and an alternate channel of savings, and synchronous wage determination (shunto) at work in the Japanese economy, which provide for such successes. It also explores the costs that have been associated with these Japanese accomplishments, as well as who must bear them. Finally, it examines the outlook for these distinctive Japanese institutions and practices in a period of slower growth and economic “maturity.” Based on a research project carried out in both countries, it concludes with the lessons that each country can learn much from the employment practices of the other.

Work and Family—Allies or Enemies?

Stewart D. Friedman and Jeffrey H. Greenhaus — 2011-10-03

Author:: Stewart D. Friedman, Jeffrey H. Greenhaus
ISBN:: 9780195112757
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Strategy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195112757.001.0001
Published in print:: 2000
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

We've come a long way since the book The Organization Man first introduced the “ideal” two-person career: a full-time male breadwinner and a stay-at-home wife. What typified the '50s good life is in stark contrast to contemporary reality: in the USA 63% of all married women with children under six years old are in the workforce and 40% of all workers are part of a dual-earner couple. This book offers a new lens for viewing the real struggles that business professionals — particularly women — face in their daily battle to find ways of “getting a life” and “having it all.” Based on a study that surveyed more than 800 business professionals, this volume will help readers understand and deal with the effects of gender, professional culture, and social expectations, on the evolving roles of men and women in crafting an integrated life. In this look at how work and family affect the lives of men and women trying to manage the complexities of modern living, the authors argue that it is critical to learn how to manage the boundaries between work and family, to handle ambiguity, to manage multiple tasks simultaneously, and to build networks of support at work and in the community. The book offers a prescription for success that requires that all parties — individuals, employers, and society — clarify what is important, recognize and support the whole person, and continually experiment with new ways to achieve meaningful goals.

What is an Exchange?

Ruben Lee — 2011-10-03

Author:: Ruben Lee
ISBN:: 9780198297048
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Finance, Accounting, and Banking, Political Economy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198297048.001.0001
Published in print:: 2000
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

New technology has revolutionised the nature and threatened the existence of traditional stock and future exchanges. This book analyses how stocks and shares have responded to developments in automation, by covering topical, controversial issues and linking financial economics, law, and business.

Universal Banking

Jordi Canals — 2011-10-03

Author:: Jordi Canals
ISBN:: 9780198775065
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Finance, Accounting, and Banking, Strategy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198775065.001.0001
Published in print:: 1997
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

The deregulation and disintermediation process, the globalisation of financial markets, the emergence of new competitors, and the introduction of new information technologies have brought about profound changes in the banking industry. Banks have lost market share and show decreasing economic performance. In the wake of this the author addresses several important questions: Are universal banks bound to disappear? What is the role of universal banks in modern financial markets? What should banks' strategic reactions be to these changes in the industry?

Understanding Psychological Contracts at Work

Neil Conway and Rob B. Briner — 2011-10-03

Author:: Neil Conway, Rob B. Briner
ISBN:: 9780199280643
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, HRM / IR, Organization Studies
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199280643.001.0001
Published in print:: 2005
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book is the first to provide a comprehensive and critical overview of what is now the major way of trying to understand the employment relationship — the concept of the psychological contract. Written contracts often specify very little in terms of the important details about what we are prepared to do for our employer and what we want back in return. The psychological contract considers these implicit or unwritten aspects of the employment relationship. What do employees really expect from work? What happens when the contract, or ‘the deal’, with their employer is broken? How well does the psychological contract help us understand what happens at work between an employee and their employer? Is this idea of practical value in managing employees? How can our understanding of this important concept be developed in the future? Starting with a history of the concept, from its emergence in the 1960s through to it finding wider acceptance in the 1990s, the book traces the conflicting and changing definitions of the psychological contract. The shifting meaning of the concept allows possible methodological and conceptual weaknesses of the psychological contract to be explored, such as the conceptual emphasis on process within the employment relationship, which has so far been neglected by researchers. The authors start to address this issue by considering whether employees and employers can use what is known about the psychological contract to better manage the employment relationship.

The Unbounded Mind

Ian I. Mitroff and Harold A. Linstone — 2011-10-03

Author:: Ian I. Mitroff, Harold A. Linstone
ISBN:: 9780195102888
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Innovation
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195102888.001.0001
Published in print:: 1996
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Global markets, Japanese competition, the service economy, the sophisticated consumer — American business today faces challenges undreamed of just a few decades ago, and traditional approaches to corporate problems are becoming increasingly less effective. And yet MBA programs still preach — and thousands of American firms hold sacred — an antiquated system of business thinking that is wholly inadequate to the problems they face. In this book, the authors pinpoint the profound changes that must occur in the way business executives think, make decisions, and solve problems, if America is to remain competitive. They put forth a radically new approach — “new thinking” — and show executives exactly how to employ these special critical and creative tools to clear the hurdles businesses now face. Varying perspectives, multiple realities, and openness to multiple solutions are the secrets of contemporary problem-solving, and lead us to the cutting edge of innovation. In illustrating how “new thinking” differs from the usual ways in which American firms have handled problems, they analyze a wealth of examples including the decline of the American auto industry and the consequences of this country's blind exporting of technology. They also revisit and interpret some of the gravest crises corporate America has faced: the Bhopal disaster, the Tylenol scare, and the accident at Three Mile Island. This book argues that if we are to produce products and services that can compete in the information age, we must challenge the very foundations of our thinking, and learn how to approach decision-making in a truly creative way.

Transforming Management in Central and Eastern Europe

Roderick Martin — 2011-10-03

Author:: Roderick Martin
ISBN:: 9780198775690
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, International Business, Political Economy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198775690.001.0001
Published in print:: 1999
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book analyses changes in enterprises in seven European countries since 1989 — Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Russia, and Slovakia. Economic trends have differed vastly between these countries, but nevertheless, there are common objectives, common problems, and significant similarities in developments. This book shows the continuities, as well as the discontinuities, between the Socialist and post-Socialist periods. It argues that Central and Eastern European countries are developing a distinctive, hybrid form of post-Socialist economic system, largely dominated by enterprise managers in alliance with state administration DS politicized managerial capitalism. Privatization has not transformed management practices, but competition has.

The Transformation of Labour Relations

John Thirkell, Krastyu Petkov, and Sarah Vickerstaff — 2011-10-03

Author:: John Thirkell, Krastyu Petkov, Sarah Vickerstaff
ISBN:: 9780198289791
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, HRM / IR, International Business
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198289791.001.0001
Published in print:: 1998
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

The substantial political changes in Eastern Europe and Russia since 1989 have been accompanied by the attempted transfer, imposition, and imitation of labour relations practices and mechanisms from other market economies, primarily of Western Europe. This book addresses the extent to which these transferred labour relations institutions are likely to take root. The book offers a comparative analysis of changing labour relations at the national level in a range of countries, and the role of governments, international institutions, trade unions, and other agencies. This is supported by in-depth case studies on the processes of transformation at enterprise level. Drawing on the findings of an international research team, analysis of the change process and recent developments is related to the legacies of the socialist system.

Traders

Mark Fenton-O'Creevy, Nigel Nicholson, Emma Soane, and Paul Willman — 2011-10-03

Author:: Mark Fenton-O'Creevy, Nigel Nicholson, Emma Soane, Paul Willman
ISBN:: 9780199269488
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Finance, Accounting, and Banking, Organization Studies
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199269488.001.0001
Published in print:: 2004
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This is a book about traders in financial markets: what they do, the kind of people they are, how they perceive the world they inhabit, how they make decisions and take risks. This is also a book about how traders are managed — the best and the worst examples — and about the institutions they inhabit: firms, markets, cultures, and theories of how the world works. How these institutions function, how traders are managed, and how traders view the world, all have profound effects on the wider financial environment. This book explores these relationships and their implications theoretically and empirically. The data discussed in this book draw on a three-year project researching the psychological and social influences on the behaviour and performance of traders in investment banks. 118 traders and managers in four leading organizations participated. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews supplemented by questionnaires, measures of personality, risk propensity and a novel computer based measure designed to assess illusion of control and other cognitive biases. The book draws on sociology, psychology, and economics in order to illuminate the work of traders and the world they inhabit.

Telecommunications in Africa

Eli M. Noam — 2011-10-03

Author:: Eli M.NoamColumbia University Business School
ISBN:: 9780195102017
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Information Technology
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195102017.001.0001
Published in print:: 1999
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Telecommunications is becoming an essential infrastructure in the global economy. The electronic flow of information around the world favors those nations that have invested in the technology to participate in this international commerce. This book provides a comprehensive view of what individual African countries are doing to build a telecommunications capability. Special attention is paid to telecommunications as a link in the chain of the regional development process.

The Tale of the Scale

Solly Angel — 2011-10-03

Author:: Solly Angel
ISBN:: 9780195158687
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Innovation
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195158687.001.0001
Published in print:: 2004
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

In the mid-1980s, the author had a technological mini-vision. He saw in his mind's eye a quarter-inch thick personal scale weighing a pound, a travel scale, and he decided to make it a reality, to bring it to market. This book gives a first-person account of the process of invention and design as it unfolds in the remaking of the familiar bathroom scale. It is rare because inventors seldom have the inclination to articulate their thought processes and to recount their experiences in great detail. Angel, an urban planner by profession, had no mechanical skills as he embarked on his journey. This book records his transformation, over the course of a decade, from a bungling ignoramus to an expert on thin scales. Readers know as much about scales, or about invention for that matter, as Angel does at the beginning of the journey. Listening to Angel's unfolding story, this book shows the intricacies of invention and design. The pursuit of the thin scale travels to fascinating places, from Bangkok to Rolling Hills, California, from Groningen in the Netherlands to Murrhardt in Germany, and from New York to Tokyo. But the places Angel explores are not only visually different. They are realms of knowledge inhabited by people with diverse yet complementary outlooks on the invention process, such as engineers, designers, lawyers, product development specialists, corporate functionaries, and friends who philosophize on the deeper meanings of one's life pursuits.

Strategic Human Resource Management

Lynda Gratton, Veronica Hope Hailey, Philip Stiles, and Catherine Truss — 2011-10-03

Author:: Lynda Gratton, Veronica Hope Hailey, Philip Stiles, Catherine Truss
ISBN:: 9780198782049
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, HRM / IR, Strategy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198782049.001.0001
Published in print:: 1999
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Life is tough in organizations, both for managers and the managed. Negotiating the rapids of restructuring, downsizing, and refocusing the core business brings with it huge upheavals in job security, the smashing of traditional career structures, and a constant imperative for employees to update their skills while working in an environment of great uncertainty. Based on close collaboration with a number of high profile organizations — BT, Citibank, Glaxo, Wellcome, Hewlett Packard, Kraft Jacobs, Suchard, Lloyds–TSB Group, the NHS, and WH Smith — this book sheds light on the organizational responses to large scale changes and details the changing demands made of employees in the process. This book goes beyond fashionable management rhetoric to uncover the reality of human resource management. A team of top researchers examines: the organizational strategies pursued in the face of fast-changing circumstances, the links between what is intended and what is realized, the way in which HR interventions impact on the individual, and the influence which HR strategies have on everyday management behaviour.

Storytelling in Organizations

Yiannis Gabriel — 2011-10-03

Author:: Yiannis Gabriel
ISBN:: 9780198290957
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Organization Studies
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198290957.001.0001
Published in print:: 2000
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Myths, stories, and folklore are part of the fabric and life of all organizations, enabling us to understand, identify, and communicate the character of the organization — its ambitions, conflicts, and peculiarities. Drawing on extensive fieldwork of storytelling in five organizations, this book argues that stories open valuable windows into the emotional and symbolic lives of organizations. By collecting stories in different organizations, by listening and comparing different accounts, by investigating how narratives are constructed around specific events, by examining which events in an organization's history generate stories and which ones fail to do so, researchers can gain access to deeper organizational realities, closely linked to their members' experiences. In this way, stories enable researchers to study organizational politics, culture, and change in uniquely illuminating ways, revealing how wider organizational issues are viewed, commented upon, and worked upon by their members. The book's first part develops the theory of storytelling by building on various approaches, including narrative, folkloric, ethnographic, symbolic, social constructionist, and psychoanalytic, while the second offers a set of four studies which make use of stories in exploring particular aspects of organizational life.

Steel City

Geoffrey Tweedale — 2011-10-03

Author:: Geoffrey Tweedale
ISBN:: 9780198288664
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Business History
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198288664.001.0001
Published in print:: 1995
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

The book focuses on the historical evolution of firms and industry leaders and their strategies. Sheffield's experience is then related to current historical and economic debates about industrial structure, entrepreneurship, and UK decline. Sheffield is revealed (with some important qualifications) as a remarkably enduring and successful centre; and also a highly complex one, which cannot be fitted easily into present theories of mass production and entrepreneurial failure.

Standards, Strategy, and Policy

Peter Grindley — 2011-10-03

Author:: Peter Grindley
ISBN:: 9780198288077
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Innovation, Strategy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198288077.001.0001
Published in print:: 1995
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book discusses how compatibility standards may be used to ensure business success. It provides a framework for standards strategy and policy, together with a series of case-studies which interpret the economics of standards in practical settings. The book considers the problems of establishing a new standard in the market and winning standards contests. It studies the questions of how to maintain the profitability of a standard and how to compete within an established standard. It combines the strategic analysis with an evaluation of standards policy, and suggests ways in which markets and policy intervention may effectively be used together. Cases include contests for standards for video cassette recorders, digital audio tapes, personal computers, open computer systems, high-definition television, and Telepoint cordless phones. Standards have long been seen as a technical problem, yet in a large number of industries they are central to business strategy and technical aspects are only part of the effort needed for product success. They imply very different strategies and policies than for conventional products.

Social Economy of the Metropolis

Allen J. Scott — 2011-10-03

Author:: Allen J. Scott
ISBN:: 9780199549306
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, International Business, Political Economy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199549306.001.0001
Published in print:: 2008
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book is about the renaissance of cities in the 21st century and their increasing role as centers of creative economic activity. It attempts to put some conceptual and descriptive order around issues of urbanization in the contemporary world, emphasizing the idea of the social economy of the metropolis, which is to say, a view of the urban organism as an intertwined system of social and economic life played out through the arena of urban space. The book opens with a review of some essentials of urban theory. It aims to re-articulate the urban question in a way that is relevant to city life and politics in the present era. It then analyses the functional characteristics of the urban economy, with special reference to the rise of a group of core sectors such as media, fashion, music, etc. focused on cognitive and cultural forms of work. These sectors are growing with great rapidity in the world’s largest cities at the present time, and they play a major role in the urban resurgence that has been occurring of late. The discussion then explores the spatial ramifications of this new economy in cities and the ways in which it appears to be ushering in major shifts in divisions of labor and urban social stratification, as marked by a growing divide between a stratum of elite workers on the one side and a low-wage proletariat on the other.

Restructuring Networks in Post-Socialism

Gernot Grabher and David Stark — 2011-10-03

Author:: GernotGrabherhttp://www.hcu-hamburg.de/research/arbeitsgebiete/gernot-grabher/personen-staff/gernot-grabher/DavidStarkStanford University
ISBN:: 9780198290209
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Organization Studies, Political Economy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198290209.001.0001
Published in print:: 1996
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book is about change in Central and Eastern Europe, and social and economic change more generally. In contrast to the dominant ‘transition framework’ that examines organizational forms in Eastern Europe according to the degree to which they conform to, or depart from, the blueprints of already existing capitalisms, this book examines the innovative character, born of necessity, in which actors in the post-socialist setting are restructuring organizations and institutions by redefining and recombining resources. Instead of conceiving these recombinations as accidental aberrations, it explores their evolutionary potentials. The starting premise of this book is that the actual unit of entrepreneurship is not the isolated individual personality but the social networks that link firms and the actors within them. Drawing insight from evolutionary economics and from the new methods of network analysis, sociologists, economists, and political scientists present their findings from Hungary, Poland, Eastern Germany, Russia, and the Czech Republic.

Response

Lois K. Geller — 2011-10-03

Author:: Lois K. Geller
ISBN:: 9780195158694
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Strategy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195158694.001.0001
Published in print:: 2002
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Marketing experts know that direct marketing is the single most effective way to sell products and services. It is the only form of marketing that is testable, trackable, and, when done the right way, always profitable. This book has been updated to include the latest tips and techniques, plus expanded coverage of direct marketing in the age of the Internet. This new revised edition offers a strategy for creating and sustaining a profitable direct marketing program—both on- and off-line. Leading the reader through this program of planning, budgeting, forecasting, testing, building lists, choosing suppliers, selling overseas, and developing loyal customers, the book explains how to create profitable direct-mail packages, print ads, television and radio commercials, inbound and outbound telemarketing programs, and more. Plus, the book shows how all of these strategies can be applied to Internet direct marketing, including loyalty programs, online catalogues, fulfillment and customer service, and more. The book provides examples drawn from companies large and small, including Ford Motor Company, American Express, and 1–800-Flowers.

Representing Organization

Simon Lilley, Geoffrey Lightfoot, and Paulo Amaral M. N. — 2011-10-03

Author:: Simon Lilley, Geoffrey Lightfoot, Paulo Amaral M. N.
ISBN:: 9780198775416
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Information Technology, Organization Studies
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198775416.001.0001
Published in print:: 2004
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This textbook provides an accessible theoretical analysis of the organizational impact of information technologies. It seeks to examine and comment upon the myriad ways in which actors, organizations, and environments are represented through these technologies. Contemporary threats to organizational form and stability are considered alongside the potential that information technologies offer to both exacerbate and overcome them. It examines, amongst others, issues surrounding the material and symbolic aspects of information systems; risk and prediction; systems implementation and systems success; knowledge management practices; accountability and other management practices; computerised modelling; and virtual organization. To this end it deploys a number of different theoretical lenses including: systems theory, social constructivism, labour process theory, post-structuralism, and actor network theory. These offer complementary and contrasting insights into the computerisation of managerial work. In order to ensure that the book is both relevant and approachable to students from a range of backgrounds, these theories are applied to real examples of the development and implementation of information systems. This combination fosters practical knowledge that is theoretically informed. The book thus aims to bridge the gap between the abstractions of current theories of organization and the grounded material that forms the bulk of Information Systems literature. It offers a novel way into the ongoing debates surrounding technological change and the perennial problems of managerial control.

The Representation Gap

Brian Towers — 2011-10-03

Author:: Brian Towers
ISBN:: 9780198289463
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, HRM / IR, Organization Studies
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198289463.001.0001
Published in print:: 1997
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

For up to twenty years after the Second World War both in Britain and the US boasted ‘mature’ industrial relations systems supported by their governments and, allowing for some differences in degree, by most employers. Since the early 1980s, these systems have been critically weakened. This comparative industrial relations text explains this development primarily through the withdrawal of public policy support and, mainly in Britain's case, its replacement by government hostility. An important consequence of this is the erosion of the effective defence and representation of employee interests as the managerial prerogative has been allowed, even encouraged, to extend its authority in the workplace. The ‘representation gap’ has grown so that six out of seven US employees, and two out of three British, are not represented at work, at the same time as there has been increasing discussion of ‘team’ working etc. This could be a serious negative development for economic performance. A growing body of research is indicating that employers who bargain with trade unions, or enter into partnerships with them, are likely to be more productive than their non-union competitors. More importantly, the size of the representation gap presents a clear denial of the democratic rights of citizens, in their role as employees, with potentially serious implications for social stability both within and beyond the workplace.

The Relationship Advantage

Thomas Kern and Leslie P. Willcocks — 2011-10-03

Author:: Thomas Kern, Leslie P. Willcocks
ISBN:: 9780199241927
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Information Technology
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199241927.001.0001
Published in print:: 2001
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

The relationship in information technology (IT) outsourcing determines the difference between a successful, a less successful, and a failing outsourcing deal. IT managers will commonly spend seventy per cent of their time on making the client-supplier relationship work, while thirty per cent of their time will focus on the contract, personnel, and problem issues. This book provides longitudinal research into Xerox's global, British Aerospace's total, ESSO's selective, British Petroleum's alliance, and the UK Inland Revenue's public sector outsourcing deals. It highlights relationship practices and recurring post-contract management issues that demand careful attention and management. By use of a novel client-supplier relationship framework developed from transaction cost, relational contract, and interorganisational relationship theory, the authors carefully analyse these five longitudinal case studies and identify what the key dimensions of an outsourcing relationship are. Together the framework and the case studies provide advice for both practitioners and academics on how to achieve a relationship advantage.

Regulation and Risk

Bridget M. Hutter — 2011-10-03

Author:: Bridget M. Hutter
ISBN:: 9780199242504
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Public Management, Organization Studies
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199242504.001.0001
Published in print:: 2001
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Regulating the risks associated with economic activities is a feature of modern societies and one in which the state increasingly seeks to co-opt the regulatory powers of corporations. This book examines the impact of a system of enforced self-regulation on the corporate life of British railways. It uses this case study of occupational health and safety regulation to focus on broader theoretical and empirical discussions of regulation, risk, and corporate activities. A central organizing perspective of this book is that regulation is a form of risk management. It examines how workplace risks in modern societies are managed by businesses and the individuals within them, and considers what influence the law has in this. The tensions between the constitutive and controlling aspects of regulatory law are analysed with reference to in-depth empirical data about corporate and individual compliance and non-compliance. Related concerns about the social control of organizational and economic life are explored and their policy and theoretical implications examined. These issues are especially significant following the privatization of Britain's rail network and the introduction of regulatory systems which are highly reliant on industry self-regulation.

Regions and the World Economy

Allen J. Scott — 2011-10-03

Author:: Allen J. Scott
ISBN:: 9780198296584
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, International Business, Political Economy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198296584.001.0001
Published in print:: 1999
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

As we enter the twenty-first century, one of the dramatic shifts in the world system is the increasing openness and interpenetration of national economies and sovereign states. This shift is associated on the one hand with the beginnings of a progressive transfer of certain economic and political functions upward to the pluri-national and global levels; and on the other hand with a countervailing trend to the reinforcement of economic and political life at the sub national, regional level. This book is a wide-ranging exploration of the economic logic and political meaning of these developments, with special reference to a reconceptualisation of the economic geography of the modern world as an emerging global mosaic of regional systems of production and exchange. The steady globalisation of economic activity over the last few decades has intensified the re-assertion of the region as a critical locus of economic order and as a potent foundation of competitive advantage. As a corollary, many regions in the modern world are also beginning to acquire an intense self-consciousness of themselves as socio-political and economic entities, and all the more so as they increasingly find themselves bound together in both competitive and collaborative relationships across national borders. The significance of these tendencies for new kinds of political mobilisation is explored, and their potential impacts of substantive forms of democracy and citizenship in the new world order are assessed.

Reengineering Health Care

Terry McNulty and Ewan Ferlie — 2011-10-03

Author:: Terry McNulty, Ewan Ferlie
ISBN:: 9780199269075
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Public Management, Organization Studies
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199269075.001.0001
Published in print:: 2004
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Organizations are being urged to experiment with new structures and processes. A ‘process perspective’ on organizing is emerging as a major challenge to ‘functional’ principles of organizing established during the last century. Business process reengineering is one exemple of process thinking that has received great attention amongst organizational theorists and practitioners. This in-depth account of business process reengineering within a major NHS hospital is an important contribution to the very limited stock of empirical knowledge about new organizational forms, especially in the public sector. The book combines empirical data gathered through an intensive, comparative case study method with strategic choice and neo-institutional theories to analyse the changing context of public organizations, the importation of models of organizing from private to public organizations, and the dynamics of public sector transformation. The outcomes of the change programme add to our more general organizational knowledge about the impact of corporate change programmes, particularly in professionalized and public sector settings, impediments and enablers of lateral organizing structures and processes, and contradictions within the New Public Management between functional and process principles for organizing.

Reasons and Rationalizations

Chris Argyris — 2011-10-03

Author:: Chris Argyris
ISBN:: 9780199268078
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Organization Studies, Strategy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199268078.001.0001
Published in print:: 2004
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

What is the purpose of social science and management research? Do scholars/researchers have a responsibility to generate insights and knowledge that are of practical (implementable) value and validity? We are told we live in turbulent and changing times, should this not provide an important opportunity for management researchers to provide understanding and guidance? Yet there is widespread concern about the efficacy of much research: These are some of the puzzles/pressing problems which are addressed in this short book. This book questions many of the assumptions of organizational theory and research, and the investigation is not confined to academic analysis. It also scrutinizes that capacity for ‘unproductive reasoning’ (self-deception and rationalization) that is common amongst managers, consultants, and indeed generally. As well as engaging with the work of leading organizational researchers the book also ponders the work of the consultants, commentators, and accountants who endorsed Enron.

Reason's Neglect

Barbara Townley — 2011-10-03

Author:: Barbara Townley
ISBN:: 9780199298358
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Organization Studies
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199298358.001.0001
Published in print:: 2008
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Reason, and the need to Be Rational, are essential dimensions of society and the organizations we live and work in. Yet the ‘rationalization’ of working and administrative processes, or the ‘rationality’ studied in social sciences, is all too often, used, understood, and interpreted in an extremely narrow sense. This book does three things. Firstly, it argues that rationality is a leitmotif of organization studies, but one that has often been neglected. Secondly, it deploys Foucault's work to recover the neglected dimensions of rationality. In doing this, it allows for a revisionary exploration of key subjects in organization studies: organization theory, bureaucracy, technology, culture, practice, etc. Finally, the book presents the case of new rational management techniques being introduced in an organization, allowing individuals to ‘speak for themselves’, and examining how they respond to these innovations, and how they make sense of them. Arguing that rationality should be seen as disembedded, embedded, or embodied, each chapter goes on to explore a different aspect of reason, such as economic, bureaucratic, technocratic, institutional, or contextual.

Re-Forming Capitalism

Wolfgang Streeck — 2011-10-03

Author:: Wolfgang Streeck
ISBN:: 9780199573981
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Political Economy, International Business
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199573981.001.0001
Published in print:: 2010
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book addresses some of the key issues in the field of comparative political economy and institutional theory: the role of history in institutional analysis, the dynamics of slow institutional change, the limitations of rational design and economic-functionalist explanations of institutional stability, and the recurrent difficulties of restraining the effects of capitalism on social order. In the classification of the ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ school, Germany has always been taken as the chief exemplar of a ‘European’, coordinated market economy. The book explores to what extent Germany actually conforms to this description. Its argument is supported by original empirical research on wage-setting and wage structure, the organization of business and labor in business associations and trade unions, social policy, public finance, and corporate governance. From this evidence, this book traces the current liberalization of the post-war economy of democratic capitalism by means of a historical approach to institutional change.

The Production of Knowledge

William H. Starbuck — 2011-10-03

Author:: William H. Starbuck
ISBN:: 9780199288533
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Organization Studies, Knowledge Management
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199288533.001.0001
Published in print:: 2006
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book reflects on a number of challenges associated with management and social science research — the search for a ‘behavioral science’, the limits of rationality, the unreliability of many research findings, the social shaping of research agendas, cultures, and judgements. The book is chronologically structured and includes discussions of research projects and various methodological debates. This is a feisty argument based on all aspects of research — carrying out research programmes, evaluating research, tirelessly questioning the assumptions and claims of social science research, and never avoiding the awkward theoretical or practical challenges that face organizational researchers.

The Priesthood of Industry

Derek Matthews, Malcolm Anderson, and John Richard Edwards — 2011-10-03

Author:: Derek Matthews, Malcolm Anderson, John Richard Edwards
ISBN:: 9780198289609
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Finance, Accounting, and Banking, Business History
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198289609.001.0001
Published in print:: 1998
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

The leading professional accounting bodies in Britain today boast more than a quarter of a million qualified members and accountants are moving into top management positions in increasing numbers. Accountants have become the foremost professional grouping in British business management. This book documents the rise of the accountancy profession, from the handful of accountants listed in the trade directories of the major cities in the late 18th century to the huge commercially-oriented firms of the late 20th century. The book focuses on the individual – the professional accountant – and adopts an economic determinist analysis to explain the rise of public practice and the transfer of staff to industry in increasing numbers. It also considers the routes through which this transfer of skills took place, and identifies demand and supply side factors to explain the professional accountant's present hegemony in business management.

The Politics of Working Life

Paul Edwards and Judy Wajcman — 2011-10-03

Author:: PaulEdwardsProfessor of Industrial Relations, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Judy Wajcman
ISBN:: 9780199271900
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, HRM / IR, Organization Studies
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199271900.001.0001
Published in print:: 2005
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

How does the politics of working life shape modern organizations? Is our desire for meaningful, secure work increasingly at odds with corporate behaviour in a globalized economy? Does the rise of performance management culture represent an intensification of work, or create opportunities for the freewheeling individual career? This timely and engaging book, by leading authorities in the field, adopts the standpoint of the ‘questioning observer’. The book is unique in its multi-dimensional approach, weaving together analysis of individual work experience, political processes in organizations, and the wider context of the social structuring of markets. It identifies central questions about working experience and has a strong analytical foundation based on a political economy framework, giving particular weight to the contradictory character of organizations. These contradictions turn on the competing demands placed on organizations and the different political projects of groups within them. Numerous scholarly debates are addressed — including those on identity projects, gender and work, power and participation, escalation in decision-making, and the meaning of corporate social responsibility.

Political Determinants of Corporate Governance

Mark J. Roe — 2011-10-03

Author:: Mark J. Roe
ISBN:: 9780199205301
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Corporate Governance and Accountability, Business History
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199205301.001.0001
Published in print:: 2006
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Before a nation can produce, it must achieve social peace. That social peace has been reached in different nations by differing means, some of which have then been embedded in business firms, in corporate ownership patterns, and in corporate governance structures. The large publicly held, diffusely owned firm dominates business in the United States despite its infirmities, namely the frequently fragile relations between stockholders and managers. But in other economically advanced nations, ownership is not diffuse but concentrated. It is concentrated in no small measure because the delicate threads that tie managers to shareholders in the public firm fray easily in common political environments, such as those in the continental European social democracies. Social democracies press managers to stabilize employment, to forego some profit-maximizing risks with the firm, and to use up capital in place rather than to downsize when markets no longer are aligned with the firm's production capabilities. Since managers must have discretion in the public firm, how they use that discretion is crucial to stockholders, and social democratic pressures induce managers to stray farther than otherwise from their shareholders' profit-maximizing goals. Moreover, the means that align managers with diffuse stockholders in the United States-incentive compensation, hostile takeovers, and strong shareholder-wealth maximization norms-are weaker and sometimes denigrated in continental social democracies. Hence, public firms there have higher managerial agency costs, and large-block shareholding has persisted as shareholders' best remaining way to control those costs. Social democracies may enhance total social welfare, but if they do, they do so with fewer public firms than less socially responsive nations. The book therefore uncovers not only a political explanation for ownership concentration in Europe, but also a crucial political prerequisite to the rise of the public firm in the United States, namely the weakness of social democratic pressures on the American business firm.

Planning for Change

James E. Vestal — 2011-10-03

Author:: James E. Vestal
ISBN:: 9780198290278
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, International Business, Political Economy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198290278.001.0001
Published in print:: 1995
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

What has been the role of government industrial policy in Japan's extraordinary post-war development? How has the role changed in successive phases of growth? What ‘lessons’ can be learnt from this experience by other nations, be they in the West, or developing countries or economies in transition attempting to introduce competitive market structures? These are some of the main questions addressed in this study. Dividing the period into three main phases, the book shows that policy played a crucial role in the initial period of post-war recovery. It did so not by ‘picking winners’ but by creating a stable base from which development could occur by spreading the cost of introducing market competition over time. In the succeeding high growth period, and more recently, Japan's industrial policy attempts only to promote the development of new technology, and smooth the decline of sectors that are no longer globally competitive. That Japan itself no longer practices industrial policy on a wide scale is an irony little appreciated by those advocating the adoption of a ‘Japan-style’ industrial policy elsewhere.

Performance or Compliance?

2011-10-03

Author:: Christopher Pollitt, Xavier Girre, Jeremy Lonsdale, Robert Mul, Hilkka Summa, Marit Waerness
ISBN:: 9780198296003
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Public Management
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198296003.001.0001
Published in print:: 1999
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Performance audit is now in fashion, but has in the past been a somewhat closed world, little studied by outsiders. Now an international team of researchers has studied the work of five national audit offices – France, Finland, The Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK. The picture thus revealed contains elements of technical innovation, methodological challenge, and crucial strategic choice.

Pattern in Corporate Evolution

Neil M. Kay — 2011-10-03

Author:: Neil M. Kay
ISBN:: 9780199242115
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Strategy, Organization Studies
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199242115.001.0001
Published in print:: 2000
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Questions relating to the existence and nature of firms have become major issues in economics in recent years. This book provides original explanations for many individual phenomena in this area. The analysis is set in the context of an integrative framework for analysing the boundaries and structure of the firm. The book analyses the firm as a complex system in which links composed of shared resources constitute basic building blocks. The evolution of the firm from simple beginnings to a complex system is then studied in a number of areas, including vertical integration, diversification, multi-national enterprise, joint venture, alliance, network, and internal organization.

Organizational Traps

Chris Argyris — 2011-10-03

Author:: Chris Argyris
ISBN:: 9780199586165
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Organization Studies, Strategy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199586165.001.0001
Published in print:: 2010
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book questions why organizations often do not function effectively, focusing on leadership, cultural change, and organizational design. It considers how organizations often espouse a particular objective and yet frequently employ means of implementation that contradict that objective. The book illustrates how dysfunctional behaviour abounds in organizations and conflict is frequently avoided rather than dealt with openly, with the same arguments erupting repeatedly. It argues that people who feel like victims at work are not trapped by some oppressive regime, but they are trapped by their own behaviour; they themselves are responsible for making the status quo so resistant to change. The book reflects on the controversies that previous researchers have encountered on the subject: on the one hand, there is substantial agreement that these traps are counterproductive to effective performance, but on the other hand, there is almost no focus on how organizational traps can be reduced. The book ultimately concludes that whatever theory is used to understand such situations, should be used to implement interventions that prevent them.

The New Public Management in Action

Ewan Ferlie, Lynn Ashburner, Louise Fitzgerald, and Andrew Pettigrew — 2011-10-03

Author:: Ewan Ferlie, Lynn Ashburner, Louise Fitzgerald, Andrew Pettigrew
ISBN:: 9780198289029
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Public Management, Organization Studies
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198289029.001.0001
Published in print:: 1996
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book analyses the changes in the organization and management of the UK public services over the last fifteen years, looking particularly at the restructured NHS. The book presents an up-to-date analysis around three main themes: the transfer of private sector models to the public sector; the management of change in the public sector; and management reorganization and role change. In doing so it examines the extent to which a New Public Management has emerged and asks whether this is a parochial UK development or of wider international significance. Important analytic themes include: an analysis of the nature of the change process in the UK public services; characterisation of quasi markets; and the changing role of local Boards and possible adaptation by professional groupings. The book also addresses the important and controversial question of accountability, and contributes to the development of a general theory of the New Public Management.

Networks of Innovation

Ilkka Tuomi — 2011-10-03

Author:: Ilkka Tuomi
ISBN:: 9780199269051
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Knowledge Management, Innovation
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199269051.001.0001
Published in print:: 2006
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book argues that innovation is about creating meaning; that it is inherently social; and is grounded in existing social practices. To understand the social basis of innovation and technology development we have to move beyond the traditional product-centric view on innovations. Integrating concepts from several disciplinary perspectives and detailed analyses of the evolution of Internet-related innovations, including packet-switched computer networks, the World Wide Web, and the Linux open source operating system, the book develops foundations for a new theoretical and practical understanding of innovation. For example, it shows that innovative development can occur in two qualitatively different ways, one based on evolving specialization and the other based on recombination of existing socially produced resources. The expanding communication and collaboration networks have increased the importance of the recombinatory mode making mobility of resources, sociotechnical translation mechanisms, and meaning creation in communities of practice increasingly important for innovation research and product development.

National Labour Relations in Internationalized Markets

Franz Traxler, Sabine Blaschke, and Bernhard Kittel — 2011-10-03

Author:: Franz Traxler, Sabine Blaschke, Bernhard Kittel
ISBN:: 9780198295549
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, HRM / IR, Political Economy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198295549.001.0001
Published in print:: 2001
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

The regulation of the labour market by industrial-relations institutions has been an important theme in sociology, political science, economics, and jurisprudence. What has particularly attracted attention from a comparative perspective is the astonishing variety of national labour-relations institutions. This variety, when confronted with persistent economic internationalisation raises two main questions. First, does internationalisation impose pressures for change and, more specifically, for convergence on institutions? If such pressures are at work, is there a superior model the national systems are converging on? Second, under economic internationalisation, cross-national differences in national arrangements may have an increasing impact on national economic performance. Hence the question is whether national labour-relations systems perform differently, and to what extent their performance has changed over time due to shifting circumstances. This book investigates these questions on the basis of a cross-national comparison, including comparable data from twenty OECD countries.

Multinationals as Flagship Firms

Alan M. Rugman and Joseph R. D'Cruz — 2011-10-03

Author:: Alan M. Rugman, Joseph R. D'Cruz
ISBN:: 9780199258185
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Strategy, International Business
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199258185.001.0001
Published in print:: 2003
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

The international dimension of business networks has remained relatively unexplored, mainly because international business writers focus upon multinational enterprises and network writers ignore international issues. This book bridges the literature on networks and multinationals by introducing the new concept of the flagship firm. In each business network strategic leadership is provided by the flagship firm, which is defined as a multinational enterprise. It has other partners: key suppliers; key customers; key competitors; and key partners in the non-business infrastructure. These business networks are usually located in the ‘triad’ regions of the European Union, North America, and Japan. There are strong cross-border network linkages within these regions, but less globalisation than regional economic integration. The theory of the flagship firm/five-partners model is applied to the telecommunications, chemicals, automotive, and electronics sectors, amongst others, and the book reports on both empirical studies and field research of the international competitiveness of these sectors.

The Multilateral Investment System and Multinational Enterprises

Thomas L. Brewer and Stephen Young — 2011-10-03

Author:: Thomas L. Brewer, Stephen Young
ISBN:: 9780198293156
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, International Business, Political Economy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198293156.001.0001
Published in print:: 1998
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

The multinational enterprise has been one of the foremost economic, political, and social influences in the world economy for many decades. As its role and influence have grown, so has the regime of institutions and rules concerning international investment from the proposal to create the ITO in the 1940s to the establishment of the WTO in the 1990s. Investment issues are now important items on the agenda of international economic policy-making and international business-government relations. This book provides a detailed analysis of the evolution of the international investment framework in the second half of the 20th century — the issues, the organisations, and current policy challenges. For instance, the book includes chapters on issues concerning the relationship of investment policy to trade and technology, competition, and economic development. In addition to a clear and well-informed description of the role of several organizations, including ITO, GATT, the OECD, and the WTO, the book presents numerous examples, cases, and appendices to give context and ‘real’ world examples. It also discusses many key regional arrangements, such as NAFTA and the EU, as well as bilateral investment agreements.

Mobilizing the Information Society

Robin Mansell and W. Edward Steinmueller — 2011-10-03

Author:: Robin Mansell, W. Edward Steinmueller
ISBN:: 9780198295570
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Information Technology, Innovation
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198295570.001.0001
Published in print:: 1993
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book examines the interaction between social, regulatory, and market developments underlying the growing use of new technologies such as the personal computer and the Internet. Based upon empirical research by an international team, it offers insights needed to understand public policy, corporate strategy, and individual choices taken in response to the deluge of new technological opportunities. A principal theme of the book is that changes are governed by public decisions that establish the institutional framework in which the private sector operates. The quality and value of the information society for the citizen is not the inevitable consequence of market and technological forces. Policy choices that however fail to take market and technical influences into account will prove ineffective. The book lays the foundation for improved theories of the process of change, more appropriate strategies to achieve desired aims, and more effective policies for mitigating the effects of dislocation and exclusion from the information society.

The Mismanagement of Talent

Phillip Brown, Anthony Hesketh, and Sarah Williams — 2011-10-03

Author:: Phillip Brown, Anthony Hesketh, Sarah Williams
ISBN:: 9780199269532
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, HRM / IR, Political Economy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199269532.001.0001
Published in print:: 2004
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

The challenge confronting governments around the world today is to enhance the employability of the workforce. Every effort must be made to expand access to higher education, disregard social circumstances, gender, and other such barriers to talent, and to harness human creativity and enterprise to meet the demands of the new economy. However, people who have attained higher education are having trouble finding jobs, with rising stakes for the winners and losers. This book examines what determines the outcome of this race when a degree loses its badge of distinction. It shows how some graduates are playing ‘the game’ to win a competitive advantage, and what really happens in the selection events of leading-edge employers. It also argues that talent is being mismanaged by employers that have yet to come to terms with the realities and possibilities of mass higher education.

Miracle to Meltdown in Asia

Norman Flynn — 2011-10-03

Author:: Norman Flynn
ISBN:: 9780198295525
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, International Business, Political Economy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198295525.001.0001
Published in print:: 1999
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

The crisis in Asia has caused economic hardship and brought an end to the ‘economic miracle’ of fast economic growth in the region. This book asks whether the 1997/8 crisis marks a break with the past and signals an end to ‘Asian’ ways of running economies. During the period of rapid growth there were strong connections between governments and business in the region. ‘Cronyism’, or close connections between family, business, and government, was exposed when the stock markets and currencies dived. Pressure from overseas investors and international organisations has produced reforms in the region. The book examines the social, economic, and political modes of governance in the region. It finds that there is a shifting balance between rule by the market, rule by connections, and rule by force. In the sphere of economic management, it shows that the period of the ‘developmental state’ in Japan and Korea has come to an end, but that it has not yet been replaced by a liberal market. Elsewhere the close connections between governments and business have been weakened but not yet broken. There are still special ‘Asian’ characteristics in economic management and in politics. The forces of ‘globalisation’ are strong, but they are confronted with political and economic cultures that are not rooted in liberal market ethics.

Media Ownership and Concentration in America

Eli Noam — 2011-10-03

Author:: Eli Noam
ISBN:: 9780195188523
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Information Technology
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195188523.001.0001
Published in print:: 2009
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

The concentration of private power over media has been the subject of intense public debate around the world. Critics have long feared waves of mergers creating a handful of large media firms that would hold sway over public opinion and endanger democracy and innovation. But others believe with equal fervor that the Internet and deregulation have opened the media landscape significantly. How concentrated has the American information sector really become? What are the facts about American media ownership? In this contentious environment, the book provides a comprehensive survey of media concentration with a methodical, scientific approach. It assembles a wealth of data from the last twenty-five years about mass media such as radio, television, film, music, and print publishing, as well as the Internet, telecommunications, and media-related information technology. After examining 100 separate media and network industries in detail, the book provides a powerful summary and analysis of concentration trends across industries and major media sectors. It also looks at local media power, vertical concentration, and the changing nature of media ownership through financial institutions and private equity. The results reveal a reality much more complex than the one painted by advocates on either side of the debate. They show a dynamic system that fluctuates around long-term concentration trends driven by changing economics and technology.

Market, Class, and Employment

Patrick McGovern, Stephen Hill, Colin Mills, and Michael White — 2011-10-03

Author:: Patrick McGovern, Stephen Hill, Colin Mills, Michael White
ISBN:: 9780199213375
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Business History
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199213375.001.0001
Published in print:: 2007
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Drawing on a range of employee and employer surveys, this study presents an examination of the conditions, attitudes, and experiences of British employees over the last twenty years. Based on the ‘Future of Work’ research programme this book aims to shape understanding of employment in Britain for the foreseeable future.

Manufacturing Rationality

Yehouda Shenhav — 2011-10-03

Author:: Yehouda Shenhav
ISBN:: 9780199250004
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Organization Studies, Business History
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199250004.001.0001
Published in print:: 2002
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Management is a powerful mode of thought and code of conduct in the modern world, closely associated with the American way and a natural extension of economic progress. This is a book about the history and development of management and managerial rationality in the United States of America in the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th century. Through careful analysis of contemporary records in the engineering profession, the author shows how management invented itself and carved its own domain in the face of hostility and resistance from both manufacturers and workers. The book demonstrates how the new language and rhetoric of management emerged, and how it confronted and replaced the language of traditional capitalism: ‘system’ instead of ‘individuals’; ‘jobs’ instead of ‘natural rights’; ‘planning’ instead of ‘free initiatives’. It can be read simultaneously as an historical account of the genesis of modern management, a chapter in the history of American capitalism, a critical analysis of industrial engineering, and as a sociology of (managerial) knowledge.

Managing the Unions

Roger Undy, Patricia Fosh, Huw Morris, Paul Smith, and Roderick Martin — 2011-10-03

Author:: Roger Undy, Patricia Fosh, Huw Morris, Paul SmithRoderickMartinGlasgow University
ISBN:: 9780198289197
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, HRM / IR, Organization Studies
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198289197.001.0001
Published in print:: 1996
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

During the 1980s, the government aimed to reform industrial relations through imposing the following measures: political initiatives and campaigning; a changed economic and social environment; and a programme of industrial relations legislation that increasingly curtailed the role and influence of trade unions. This book examines the policies and legislation intended to change union behaviour. It considers its origins, purpose, and impact on union behaviour and structure, focusing on the role of ballots as the central mechanism chosen for changing union decision making. The changes that occurred as a consequence of this legislation are placed in the wider union context and the relative influence of the balloting legislation is assessed against other developments affecting union behaviour, including the strategies adopted by the unions' leaders. It finds that the results were not always as intended by the Conservative governments. The concluding chapter compares and contrasts the UK's union structures with those of other EU countries.

Managing Production

Graham M. Winch — 2011-10-03

Author:: Graham M. Winch
ISBN:: 9780198288411
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Organization Studies
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198288411.001.0001
Published in print:: 1994
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

The management of production is faced with ever greater challenges as global competition mounts. The problems revolve around the paradox of flexibility and productivity in the organization of production: how to compete on price while retaining the capability to respond quickly to market changes; how to develop new products faster without jeopardizing product integrity; how to increase quality while reducing costs. The recent research on lean production has explored some of these questions in the context of the motor industry. This book takes a broader audit of these issues across the full range of the metalworking sector in the United Kingdom. Focusing on the engineering/manufacturing interface, the research presented here explores how fifteen leading British firms are facing up to the challenges of the 1990s.

Managing Global Customers

George S. Yip and Audrey J.M. Bink — 2011-10-03

Author:: George S. Yip, Audrey J.M. Bink
ISBN:: 9780199229833
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Strategy, International Business
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199229833.001.0001
Published in print:: 2007
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Multinational companies need to manage their relationships with multinational customers with a globally integrated approach. This book provides a systematic framework for developing and implementing such global customer management programmes. It draws on in-depth research at over twenty major US and European multinational companies, such as ABB, Bechtel, BP, Bosch, British Airways, Carrefour, Daimler–Chrysler, Hewlett–Packard, HSBC, IBM, Schlumberger, Shell, Siemens, Tesco, Unilever, Vodafone, Wal–Mart, and Xerox. The book teachers how to think about managing global customers in the context of their overall global strategy, develop effective global customer management programmes, overcome barriers to implementation and success, build better relationships with important customers, and get the entire company to engage with managing global customers. This book takes a strategic, total business, and not just sales, approach to managing global customers. It also takes a customer as well as a supplier perspective. The book provides guidance on both strategy and implementation. It takes a systematic and logic driven approach, yet provides many creative insights and practical advice. The book highlights the rewards of taking a step beyond global account management to create a Global Customer Management approach, integrating globally all aspects of the relationship between supplier and customer. The book gives a framework that guides international companies in using their relationships with global customers to their full potential.

Managing Employment Change

Huw Beynon, Damian Grimshaw, Jill Rubery, and Kevin Ward — 2011-10-03

Author:: Huw Beynon, Damian Grimshaw, Jill Rubery, Kevin Ward
ISBN:: 9780199248698
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, HRM / IR, Organization Studies
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199248698.001.0001
Published in print:: 2002
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book looks at how large organizations have managed and adapted to changing conditions of employment shaped by the recent economic and political environment. Additional data are presented based on evidence from other significant actors such as agency employment firms and trade unions. The book also engages with important North American debates on the changing nature of work, careers, and employment.

Managing Corporate Growth

Jordi Canals — 2011-10-03

Author:: Jordi Canals
ISBN:: 9780198296676
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Finance, Accounting, and Banking, Strategy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198296676.001.0001
Published in print:: 1999
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

As economic growth in Western countries shows signs of fatigue, companies are battling hard to discover how to generate and sustain corporate growth. The restructuring and reengineering processes of the early 1990s, and the massive lay-offs they brought about, have only given an additional boost to the need for expansion. Corporate efficiency is indispensable, but is not a sufficient condition for corporate survival. Firms need to think about their future growth. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the phenomenon of corporate growth, offering a multi-functional, general management approach and a full discussion of main theories and approaches.

The Management of Innovation

Tom Burns and G. M. Stalker — 2011-10-03

Author:: Tom Burns, G. M. Stalker
ISBN:: 9780198288787
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Innovation, Organization Studies
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198288787.001.0001
Published in print:: 1994
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

First published in 1961, this book is a very influential book on organization theory and industrial sociology. The central theme of the book is the relationship between an organization and its environment — particularly technological and market innovations. Based on first-class scholarship, the book presents the now famous and ubiquitous classifications of ‘mechanistic’ and ‘organic’ systems. For this it has become justly famous, but the book is also a penetrating study of social systems within organizations and organizational dynamics.

Magic Mineral to Killer Dust

Geoffrey Tweedale — 2011-10-03

Author:: Geoffrey Tweedale
ISBN:: 9780199243990
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Business History
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199243990.001.0001
Published in print:: 2001
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Asbestos was once known as the ‘magic mineral’ because of its ability to withstand flames. Yet since the 1970s, it has become a notorious and feared ‘killer dust’ that is responsible for thousands of deaths and an epidemic that continues into the new millennium. This book gives an account of the UK asbestos health problem, providing an in-depth look at the occupational health experience of one of the world's leading asbestos companies — British asbestos giant, Turner & Newall. Based on a company archive recently released in American litigation, it gives an insight into all aspects of the asbestos hazard — dust control, workmen's compensation, government regulation, and the development of medical knowledge. In particular, the book looks at the role of industrialists, doctors, factory inspectors, and trade unionists, highlighting the failures in regulation that allowed the commercial development of a material that has been known to be lethal since at least 1900.

Life on the Line in Contemporary Manufacturing

Rick Delbridge — 2011-10-03

Author:: Rick Delbridge
ISBN:: 9780198292333
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Organization Studies, HRM / IR
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198292333.001.0001
Published in print:: 1998
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Much is stated and written about the new world of work but how much do we know about the contemporary workplace? What influence have Japanese management techniques (Just-in-Time Production and Total Quality Management, for example) had on the way work is organized in ‘transplants’, and more broadly in other firms and sectors? Have the systems and mechanisms of control changed radically in recent years, or are they much the same as they have always been? This book is in a long tradition of ethnographic research in industrial sociology and management/labour studies. Not only does it offer rich empirical data on the lived reality of work and a management practice that may share little in common with that found in the textbooks, it also raises a number of important issues about the best ways to understand the complex and changing nature of work.

Lessons From the Edge

Jana Matthews, Jeff Dennis, and Peter Economy — 2011-10-03

Author:: Jana Matthews, Jeff Dennis, Peter Economy
ISBN:: 9780195168259
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Innovation
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195168259.001.0001
Published in print:: 2003
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Entrepreneurs often struggle with many aspects of business: planning and financing company growth, creating a company vision, recruiting, leading, and managing people, as well as personal costs. In this book, more than fifty business owners and entrepreneurs offer a wealth of real-life stories—in their own words—that provide rare insights about keeping a company healthy and growing. Here is a unique collection of first-person accounts by entrepreneurs, who describe their mistakes in business and the lessons they have learned as a result. The stories cover a wide range of experiences, from the trials and tribulations of partnerships, to the loss of key customers, theft, finding and retaining employees, and the personal cost of living on the edge. The authors have drawn on interviews with more than 50 entrepreneurs, all of whom are under forty-five years of age and are founders or presidents of companies with revenues over $1 million and growing rapidly. They volunteered to share their stories, describing why they lost or almost lost their companies, what they did wrong, and the lessons they have learned. Their narratives are full of mistakes, failure, courage, moments of realization, and timely moves that saved the day.

Learning and Innovation in Organizations and Economies

Bart Nooteboom — 2011-10-03

Author:: Bart Nooteboom
ISBN:: 9780199241002
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Innovation, Organization Studies
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199241002.001.0001
Published in print:: 2001
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book develops a general ‘logic’, or heuristic of discovery, to explain the emergence of novelty in individual thought, organizations, industries, and economies. It draws on a variety of literatures, discussing theories of organizational learning, evolutionary and institutional economics, knowledge, and language. It brings these together in a unifying framework and applies that for an analysis of innovation systems and the management of learning. Unification is based on the resource- or competence-based view in economics, in combination with a theory of learning by interaction. The central theme of the book is the relation between stability and change. In business literature this theme appears in the relation between exploitation and exploration. In evolutionary economics it appears in the relation between selection and adaptation. The general heuristic shows how exploitation can provide the basis for exploration. The analysis is illustrated with many phenomena and empirical results from the different literatures.

Knowledge Frontiers

Wendy Faulkner, Jacqueline Senker, and Léa Velho — 2011-10-03

Author:: Wendy Faulkner, Jacqueline Senker, Léa Velho
ISBN:: 9780198288336
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Information Technology, Knowledge Management
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198288336.001.0001
Published in print:: 1995
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Fostering interaction between industry and academic and government laboratories is widely seen as an important means of facilitating growth and innovation in the technology-based industries. This book investigates the research links and knowledge flows between industrial and public sector research in three new and promising fields of advanced technology — biotechnology, engineering ceramics, and parallel computing. Differences between these fields suggest that policies to promote public-private research links should be more effectively targeted. Similarities highlight the general importance to innovation of frontier research in universities, and the need to encourage informal interaction between industrial and public sector researchers.

Knowledge Capitalism

Alan Burton-Jones — 2011-10-03

Author:: Alan Burton-Jones
ISBN:: 9780198296225
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Knowledge Management, Strategy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198296225.001.0001
Published in print:: 1999
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book looks at how the shift to a knowledge-based economy is redefining firms, empowering individuals, and reshaping the links between learning and work using economic, management and knowledge-based theories, supported by empirical data, illustrations, and trends. The book argues that industrial-era models of firm-market boundaries, work arrangements, and ownership and control are inhibiting firms and individuals success in the emerging knowledge economy. New models are proposed based on knowledge-centred organisation, knowledge-led growth, and knowledge supply as distinct from labour supply or flexible employment. Continuous learning is shown to be critical to firms as integrators of disparate knowledge resources, and the only practical route for individuals to become free agents. The book illuminates the new business landscape and provides a practical tool-set for business practitioners and theorists to interpret and manage change in a rapidly deconstructing economic environment.

Knowledge Assets

Max H. Boisot — 2011-10-03

Author:: Max H. Boisot
ISBN:: 9780198296072
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Knowledge Management, Organization Studies
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198296072.001.0001
Published in print:: 1999
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

It is now widely recognized that the effective management of knowledge assets is a key requirement for securing competitive advantage in the emerging information economy. Yet the physical and institutional differences between tangible assets and knowledge assets remain poorly understood. In the case of knowledge, the ownership and control of assets are becoming ever more separate, a phenomenon that is actually exacerbated by the phenomenon of learning. If we are to meet the challenges of the information economy, then we need a new approach to property rights based on a deeper theoretical understanding of knowledge assets. This book provides some of the key building blocks that are needed for a theory of knowledge assets. The author develops a conceptual framework, the Information-Space or I-Space, for exploring the way knowledge flows within and between organizations.

Keeping Better Company

Jonathan Charkham — 2011-10-03

Author:: Jonathan Charkham
ISBN:: 9780199243198
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Corporate Governance and Accountability, Strategy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199243198.001.0001
Published in print:: 2008
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

How should companies be organised? To whom should boards of directors be responsible — shareholders, or a wider group of stakeholders? In this fiercely competitive world we cannot judge our own system of corporate governance in isolation; it must bear comparison with the best. The second edition of this book aims to do just that. Since publication of the first edition interest in corporate governance has greatly increased, codes have proliferated, and principles laid down nationally and internationally. The author describes developments in the system of corporate governance — both the business environment and the particular structures of company organisation — in five major industrial countries: Germany, Japan, France, the USA, and the UK. This second edition is fully revised, updated and expanded, and includes a new conclusion looking at a number of ongoing issues in corporate governance, and an appendix discussing the role of international organisations.

The Internet Galaxy

Manuel Castells — 2011-10-03

Author:: Manuel Castells
ISBN:: 9780199255771
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Information Technology
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199255771.001.0001
Published in print:: 2002
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book presents a stunning insight on the impact of the Internet and communication technologies on society in the beginning of the twenty-first century. The author puts forward the case that the Internet is not just a technology, but the very fabric and backbone of the New Economy, and of the Network Society. It is essential that people understand its language, its logic, its constraints, and its freedoms in order to manage and to change their reality.

International Research Management

Philip H. Birnbaum, Frederick A. Rossini, and Donald R. Baldwin — 2011-10-03

Author:: Philip H.BirnbaumUniversity of Southern CaliforniaFrederick A.RossiniGeorgia Institute of TechnologyDonald R.BaldwinUniversity of Washington
ISBN:: 9780195062526
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Public Management
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195062526.001.0001
Published in print:: 1990
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book presents a group of papers that describe the preconditions, processes, and outcomes of interdisciplinary research projects from the United States, Canada, Israel, Japan, Brazil, the German Democratic Republic, and Romania. The papers describe the problems and approaches to successfully managing projects in government, private firms, and universities. The book also includes a comprehensive, annotated bibliography.

Integrating Mission and Strategy for Nonprofit Organizations

James A. Phills Jr. — 2011-10-03

Author:: James A. Phills Jr.
ISBN:: 9780195171280
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Strategy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195171280.001.0001
Published in print:: 2005
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Today's nonprofit organizations face an environment characterized by higher levels of competition for funding, clients and audiences, talent, and recognition. In addition, they confront greater pressures from donors, government, and the public to demonstrate efficiency, effectiveness, sustainability, and accountability, while intense social needs and problems, as well as the desire for growth, drive them to expand their programs and activities. Collectively, these challenges go to the heart of fundamental issues of mission and strategy. This book applies and adapts the core body of general management knowledge about mission, strategy, and execution to help nonprofit leaders deal with the special challenges they face. It strives to draw on this knowledge in a way that does not dilute or oversimplify, and at the same time recognizes the unique features of the nonprofit or voluntary sector. The book develops an action-oriented framework that combines rigorous analysis with the practical challenge of execution and change. In addition to helping nonprofit leaders think through important decisions and make concrete choices, the book also provides a shared language and a discipline that can serve as the basis for more productive discussions between the individuals who lead nonprofits, the business executives who serve on their boards, and the philanthropists who support their organizations and programs. This last objective is critical, because too often nonprofit leaders and board members complain that they can't reap the benefits of the expertise of their supporters, funders, and volunteers from the business sector.

Inside the Communication Revolution

Robin Mansell — 2011-10-03

Author:: RobinMansellDixons Chair in New Media and the Internet, London School of Economics and Political Sciencehttp://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/whosWho/robinMansell.htm
ISBN:: 9780198296553
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Information Technology, Innovation
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198296553.001.0001
Published in print:: 2002
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book analyses different aspects of life and work within ‘the heart of the ICT Revolution’. The book engages with the disciplines of sociology, political science, media and communication studies, and management, providing information for business practitioners and policy makers who wish to understand the significance of digital technologies for society, the economy, and social organisation.

Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Technological Change

Albert N. Link and Donald S. Siegel — 2011-10-03

Author:: Albert N. Link, Donald S. Siegel
ISBN:: 9780199268825
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Innovation, Strategy
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199268825.001.0001
Published in print:: 2007
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book presents an analysis and synthesis of the key economic and management approaches to innovation, entrepreneurship, and technological change. The book provides precise definitions of key concepts, presents numerous historical examples to illustrate these concepts, outlines a framework for analyzing key topics, compares and contrasts different theoretical frameworks, and emphasizes international comparisons of innovation infrastructure and technology policy.

Information Technology Strategies

William V. Rapp — 2011-10-03

Author:: William V. Rapp
ISBN:: 9780195148138
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Information Technology
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195148138.001.0001
Published in print:: 2002
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

The focus of this book is on educating on the strategic principles fundamental to using information technology to gain market control. It provides case examples of how to use IT to enhance existing core competencies and strategies. The book is designed to help managers struggling with how to advantageously harness the new information revolution. It can also support executive and business education programs on managing technology when few such studies exist. While Internet and information technologies are currently hot topics, many firms and executives are without the tools and knowledge of how to actually use them to improve results. This book describes how major non-information technology companies are doing this and the strategic principles employed.

Information Technology and Organizations

Brian P. Bloomfield, Rod Coombs, David Knights, and Dale Littler — 2011-10-03

Author:: Brian P.BloomfieldLancaster University, Rod Coombs, David Knights, Dale Littler
ISBN:: 9780198289395
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Information Technology
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198289395.001.0001
Published in print:: 1997
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This book is concerned with the ways in which organizations design, build and use information technology (IT) systems. In particular it looks at the interaction between these IT-centred activities and the broader management processes within organizations. The authors adopt a critical social science perspective on these issues, and are primarily concerned with advancing theoretical debates on how best to understand the related processes of technological and organizational change. To this end, the book examines and deploys recent work on power/knowledge, actor-network theory and critical organization theory. The result is an account of the nature and significance of information systems in organizations, which is an alternative perspective to pragmatic and recipe-based approaches to this topic that dominate much contemporary management literature on IT.

The Information Society and the Welfare State

Manuel Castells and Pekka Himanen — 2011-10-03

Author:: Manuel Castells, Pekka Himanen
ISBN:: 9780199256990
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Information Technology
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199256990.001.0001
Published in print:: 2002
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Silicon Valley has been considered as the model that societies must imitate to succeed in the information age. However, recently another alternative has attracted strong international interest: the Finnish model. This is equally dynamic in technological and economic terms, but combines the information society with the welfare state. This book looks at what the Finnish model really is. The chapters analyse the factors that have enabled Nokia to become the world's leading telecommunications company, for example, and Linux to become the biggest challenger to Microsoft in the operating systems market. They discuss the development of Nokia and the Finnish innovation model, with important lessons for businesses and national technology policies. However, the Finnish model's most radical and interesting feature is its attempt to combine technological and economic success with social justice and equality. The book shows how Finland has uniquely created a ‘virtuous cycle’ out of the information society and the welfare state: the successful information society makes the continued financing of the welfare state possible and the welfare state generates well-educated people in good shape for the information society's continued success. This model has significant implications for all societies where policy debates about the information society and/or public policy are on the agenda. Ultimately, the Finnish model proves that there is no one model for the information age, but that there is room for different policies and values.

Information for Innovation

Stuart Macdonald — 2011-10-03

Author:: Stuart Macdonald
ISBN:: 9780199241477
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Innovation, Organization Studies
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199241477.001.0001
Published in print:: 2000
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

Information is not taken seriously. Much is said about the information age, the information economy, the information society, and particularly about information technology, but little about information itself. Information has some very odd characteristics, conveniently overlooked by senior managers passionate about knowledge-based, learning organizations; by politicians and public servants, compensating with policy and programme for the information failure of organization and market; and by the IT and dotcom communities, bent on adding value to what they treat as just a commodity. This book looks at innovation from an information perspective; one that puts information first. Its information perspective is applied to eighteenth-century agriculture and high technology, to technology transfer and espionage, to corporate strategy and intellectual property.

3i Fifty Years Investing in Industry

Richard Coopey and Donald Clarke — 2011-10-03

Author:: Richard Coopey, Donald Clarke
ISBN:: 9780198289449
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, Business History
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198289449.001.0001
Published in print:: 1995
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

3i (Investors in Industry, and formerly the Industrial and Commercial Finance Corporation, etc.) is Britain's leading venture capital company. Founded in 1945 as a result of a combination of pressures and counter-pressures from political parties, Whitehall, the Bank of England, and the clearing banks, the organization has played a significant role in post-war investment banking and industrial development. The first part of the book traces 3i's history, from the early years of post-war reconstruction and the role played by Piercy and Kinross, through the years of consolidation, to the higher-profile years of the change of name and style and the 1994 flotation. The second part offers an inside view of the workings of this unique institution — the controllers, 3i's role in developing MBOs, methods of assessing risk and return, its relationship with capital markets, etc. During its first fifty years 3i has invested in numerous well known and successful companies — many of these are detailed in the text (such as British Caledonian, Oxford Instruments, Laura Ashley, etc.).

HRM and Performance

Jaap Paauwe — 2011-10-03

Author:: Jaap Paauwe
ISBN:: 9780199273904
Publisher:: Oxford University Press
Subjects:: Business and Management, HRM / IR, Organization Studies
DOI:: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199273904.001.0001
Published in print:: 2004
Published Online:: 2011-10-03

This title adopts a broad perspective that takes into account not only the strategic dimension of human resources management (HRM), but the professional and societal dimension. It combines academic research with a focus on practical conclusions and recommendations.