Adam Smith warned of the prevalence of corporate conspiracies more than two hundred years ago. Since then, interest in cartels has sometimes intensified (during the Great Depression, for example) and sometimes diminished, but the need for control has always remained on the antitrust agenda. This well-documented book reviews the economic case against corporate collusion, as well as the arguments made for a more permissive attitude. A survey of recent empirical research reveals not only the prevalence of a wide range of international cartels but also the size of the inefficiencies and costs that they impose on customers and consumers. The antitrust reaction has therefore intensified with greatly increased fines being imposed by the US, the EU and other authorities. At the same time, they have developed sophisticated leniency polices with the aim of destabilizing the illegal conspiracies. After reviewing these measures, the author concludes with the hope that this toughened approach is not modified or reversed during periods of recession. This insightful book will appeal to undergraduates in economics, business and law studying antitrust and law and economics.

Across Europe, regional development agencies (RDAs) have become a central feature of regional policy, both as innovative policy-makers and as the implementers of programmes and initiatives originating from the national or European level. By drawing on a combination of conceptual reflection, surveys, comparative research, and systematic use of critical case studies, this book provides a new point of reference by identifying key features of the current, and, indeed next, generation of regionally-based economic development organisations.

This book explores the concept, techniques and implications of establishing stakeholder collaboration in sustainable tourism. The importance of involving a wide range of stakeholders in tourism planning and management is increasingly recognised. This reflects a move to less top-down, more decentralised and more inclusive forms of governance in tourism and in other policy fields. Twenty-two leading researchers and practitioners from around the world contribute their views and expertise to this pioneering volume. Case studies examining key issues are drawn from Europe, North and South America, Australia and the Arctic. Section 1 examines the processes, patterns and typologies involved. Specific concerns addressed include stakeholder interaction and negotiation, boundary issues in regional and international partnerships and stages of collaborative development. Section 2 evaluates the effects of politics and power on the practice of collaboration. Specific topics here include the changing roles of the state in tourism governance, regime theory and tourism, the public sector and partnership development and partnerships in a post socialist context. Section 3 looks at emerging thinking and approaches, sums up key issues affecting collaborative tourism planning and suggests future research directions. The book will be invaluable for final year undergraduate tourism students, for postgraduate students in tourism, environmental studies or planning and of interest to tourism planners, managers and consultants.

Holistic in approach and rooted in the real world Ecological Economics and Industrial Ecology presents a new way of looking at environmental policy; exploring the relationship between ecological economics and industrial ecology. Concentrating on the conceptual background of ecological economics and industrial ecology, this book: provides a selection of recommendations for a product-oriented environmental policy, based on the author's case study of the IPP contributes to the development of a consistent body of knowledge regarding sustainable development. A topical and critical review, this book should be read by academics and policy makers alike, specifically those engaged with the concepts surrounding sustainable development and the rationale for more restrictive environmental policies.

First published in 1990, this work examines the link between the economic performance of companies and profit sharing. The relationship is a complex one: industrial relations may be improved by schemes, but good employers are likely to introduce profit sharing in any case; and though attitudes to work do change, schemes have more immediate impact on satisfaction an communications than on productivity and effort put into work.

In this new book, Hara, Kambayashi and Matsushima gather together a collection of case studies of innovation in various industries in modern Japan, including automobile, electronics, semiconductor, component, chemical, pharmaceutical and service industries. Unlike other books in this area, this book focuses on a broader range of Japanese industries from the post world war era to the modern day and considers the relationships between the characteristics of innovation and the features of Japanese society. These chapters demonstrate Japan's shift from being product-oriented and domestic to being business system-oriented and global. Meanwhile the process of innovation in Japan continues to include the tendency of eliminating uncertainty through intimate in-process interaction between different functions, rather than through preset rule or contracts. This book goes some way in challenging accepted notions of Japanese innovation, emphasising new and diverse trends and practises.

The spectacular economic performance of China, East Asia and India during the last ten years has ignited some profound changes in the world economy. The share of global demand, investments, trade and production of the traditional industrialized powers, the US, Europe and Japan, has gradually yet continuously declined. This rise of China also has implications for Latin America. On the one hand, booming Chinese demand for raw materials and food has sustained the economic performance of Latin America during the last decade. On the other hand, the competitiveness of China and as a hub for advanced manufacturing is threatening Latin America's attempt to diversify its economy from its dependence on the export of natural resource-based goods. Most Latin American countries are not however waiting passively for their economies to become ever more reliant on high prices for food, minerals and oil. Leveraging the economic and political stability that they achieved during the last decades, many countries in the region, such as Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica and Uruguay, are attempting to capture the growing market for knowledge intensive products and services by breeding their own Silicon Valleys. This book discusses the promotion of ICT clusters in Latin America by analyzing the development of the Costa Rican cluster in particular, an often celebrated case of successful policy in the region. Costa Rica, a small country traditionally known for its coffee and wildlife, managed to build an information technology cluster within ten years, becoming the leading producer of ICT per capita in Latin America. Studying the Costa Rican case provides a solid starting point for understanding the challenges of building ICT clusters in Latin America.

Construction Cost Estimating equips a new generation of students and early-career professionals with the skills they need to bid successfully on projects. From developing bid strategies to submitting a completed bid, this innovative textbook introduces the fundamentals of construction estimating through a real-life case study that unfolds across its 24 chapters. Exercises at the end of each chapter offer hands-on practice with core concepts such as quantity take-offs, pricing, and estimating for subcontractor work. Online resources provide instant access to examples of authentic construction documents, including complete, detailed direct work estimates, subcontractor work estimates, general conditions estimates, markups, and summary schedules. Through its unique mix of real-world examples and classroom-tested insights, Construction Cost Estimating ensures that readers are familiar with the entire estimating process even before setting foot on the jobsite.

This book examines how businesses manage their labour systems, and particularly how they manage the complex interaction of factors which give rise to instances of 'partnership' style relations between businesses and their employees. The book draws from the literature concerning 'Varieties of Capitalism' (VoC) and the different institutional and regulatory designs inherent in different types of political economy. The book is informed by a new and extensive set of empirical data from Australia that examines the activities of national and multinational business corporations, their outlooks and relationships with stakeholders, and relates these to new and evolving theoretical frameworks based in political economy and law. The book places the Australian regulatory model within this international debate, and assesses the extent to which the system does or does not fit into the general categorisation created in the VoC literature.

The Progressive Era was among the most volatile times for the economy and labor in American History. Daniel E. Saros explores the institutional and economic conditions of this time, revealing new insight into the regulated nature of industry and the conditions of labor. Using the steel industry as a case study, Saros demonstrates how the United States Steel Corporation enhanced the performance of the steel industry by initiating a price and wage stabilization program. In an effort to combat potential threats from the federal government, the American public, and organized labor to the market stabilization program and mechanization drive, the steel companies introduced a paternalistic welfare program, company unions, and limited hours reform. Saros also contrasts this time with free market periods, examining the impacts on rates of profit, output growth, and capital accumulation.

While there were many factors that triggered the widespread financial crisis of 2008-2010, at least one may have been increasing inequality in the United States economy. With the distributional divide wider than at any time since the Great Depression, the wealthy poured money into increasingly speculative investments even as those at the bottom of the income distribution borrowed just to stay above water.

Long before the national meltdown helped to make this point, the notion that inequality might actually damage economic growth was gaining ground at another geographic level: that of the metropolitan region. Throughout the US, many key metropolitan actors, including collaboratives of business, civic and community leaders, have accepted the notion that a more inclusive economic approach could actually shore up the social consensus and human capital needed to compete in a global economy.

So what are the possibilities for this "Just Growth"? This book seeks to address this and other key questions with a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis. Utilizing a sample of the largest 192 metropolitan regions in the United States, the authors use a quantitative approach to identify those regions with above average performance in terms of economic growth and social equity indicators, and conduct regression-style analysis to explore the demographic, political and economic determinants behind the phenomenon.

Breaking new ground in its innovative blend of quantitative and qualitative methods, the book essentially argues that another sort of growth is indeed possible. While offering specific insights for regional leaders and analysts of metropolitan areas, the authors also draw a broader - and quite timely - set of conclusions about how to scale up these efforts to address a U.S. economy still seeking to recover from economic crisis and ameliorate distributional divisions.

This research review is a unique resource for those seeking a historical overview of the development of corporate governance. The papers trace the evolution of US corporate governance from the time when the subject became prominent in the 1970s to the present day. Topics canvassed include the board of directors, executive pay, shareholder activism and the regulatory structure that shapes corporate governance in the US. The primary focus is on the governance challenges posed by the separation of ownership and control, a hallmark of larger US public companies.

This book examines the political origins of financial institutions across fifteen developed democracies, with focused case studies on the US, France, Japan, Austria, and Germany. The institutional arrangements of financial systems are widely seen as a central distinguishing feature of 'varieties of capitalism'. Through a wide-range of case studies, this book contends that political battles between landed interests, labor, and owners of capital have fundamentally shaped modern financial arrangements. Demonstrating how these conflicts have shaped contemporary financial architecture in a number of different contexts, author Richard W. Carney offers an innovative approach to explaining the distinctive capitalist arrangements of nation-states. By demonstrating the importance of landed interests to nations' institutional configurations, the book has clear implications for developing countries such as India and China. Providing a detailed account of the development of financial institutions, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of political science, sociology, business, finance, and law. It will also offer insights valuable to government policymakers, analysts at international organizations, and the business community.

Research in Health Economics has developed into a separate discipline during the last 25 years. All this intense research activity has come about through the teaching of courses on health economics, mostly at graduate level. However, the Industrial Organization aspects of the health care market do not occupy a central place in those courses. We propose a textbook of health economics whose distinguishing feature is the analysis of the health care market from an Industrial Organization perspective. This textbook will provide teachers and students with a reference to study the market structure aspects of the health care sector.

The book is structured in three parts. The first part will present the basic principles of economics. It will bring all readers to the required level of knowledge to follow subsequent parts. Part II will review the main concepts of health economics. The third part will contain the core of the book. It will present the industrial organization analysis of the health care market, based on our own research.

In this book, Haridimos Tsoukas, one of the most imaginative organization theorists of our time, examines the nature of knowledge in organizations, and how individuals and scholars approach the concept of knowledge. Tsoukas firstly looks at organizational knowledge and its embessedness in social contexts and forms of life. He shows that knowledge is not just a collection of free floating representations of the world to be used at will, but an activity constitute of the world. On the one hand, the organization as an institutionalized system does produce regularities that can be captured via propositional forms of knowledge. On the other, the organization as practice as a lifeworld, or as an open-ended system produce stories, values, and shared traditions which can only be captured by narrative forms of knowledge. Secondly, Tsoukas looks at the issue of how individuals deal with the notion of complexity in organizations: Our inability to reduce the behavior of complex organizations to their constituent parts. Drawing on concepts such as discourse, narrativity, and reflexivity, he adopts a hermeneutical approach to the issue. Finally, Tsoukas examines the concept of meta-knowledge, and how we know what we know. Arguing that the underlying representationalist epistemology of much of mainstream management causes many problems, he advocates adopting a more discursive approach. He describes what such an epistemology might be, and illustrates it with examples from organization studies and strategic management. An ideal introduction to the thinking of a leading organizational theorist, this book will be essential reading for academics, researchers, and students of Knowledge Management, Organization Studies, Management Studies, Business Strategy and Applied Epistemology.

Written by eminent scholars who are well known within their fields across Europe, this book explores changes in the international economic environment, their impacts on the strategy of firms and the spatial consequences of these changes in strategy. The economic environment in which major companies operate is subject to rapid and important changes. Such changes have their impact on the strategy of major and even smaller companies and changes in these firm's strategies often have important implications for the location choice of their activities, be it production, outsourcing, R&D or administrative activities. Addressing these issues in a clear yet rigorous manner, this book is an excellent resource for students and researchers working and studying in the areas of international business, corporations, business strategy, economic geography and business geography.

Stability of the electricity industry is crucial for economic growth of all nations. Sustainable economic growth cannot be accomplished without secured energy supply. The book underlines how management of the electricity industry should be conducted and the efficient form of electricity market structure. The book also studies the electricity industry in Korea which has been a strongly supportive and vital factor in the economic development of Korea for the last few decades. The book focuses on the three market players of the electricity market and they are the suppliers, consumers and the government-related organizations. It includes detailed information on generation and finances at the generator level and analyzes the efficiency differences among generators, plants and business units by using different performance measurement methods. It identifies and analyzes different production factors' effectiveness and relationships in generation. The comprehensive analysis helps to provide explanations in the differences in the performance of the studied units. The book also discusses the implications of the findings for future resource allocation and how we can further enhance the efficiency of the industry. The book will appeal to those interested in energy and energy policies, as well as researchers and practitioners in the economic development and electricity and utilities industry.

Globally, private universities enrol one in three of all higher education students. In Japan, which has the second largest higher education system in the world in terms of overall expenditure, almost 80% of all university students attend private institutions. According to some estimates up to 40% of these institutions are family businesses in the sense that members of a single family have substantive ownership or control over their operation. This book offers a detailed historical, sociological, and ethnographic analysis of this important, but largely under-studied, category of private universities as family business. It examines how such universities in Japan have negotiated a period of major demographic decline since the 1990s: their experiments in restructuring and reform, the diverse experiences of those who worked and studied within them and, above all, their unexpected resilience. It argues that this resilience derives from a number of 'inbuilt' strengths of family business which are often overlooked in conventional descriptions of higher education systems and in predictions regarding the capacity of universities to cope with dramatic changes in their operating environment. This book offers a new perspective on recent changes in the Japanese higher education sector and contributes to an emerging literature on private higher education and family business across the world.

Research on the topic of clusters and industrial districts is very extensive. However, most of it has focused more on understanding the past than on trying to map out the future. The aim of this book is to fill this gap by identifying and discussing the main research topics that populate the current scientific debate and highlight the emergent lines of research that will constitute the future research agenda. It does so by drawing on the debate started with the "rethinking clusters" workshops, which in a short time have become a rich place for discussion among cluster scholars around the world. Rethinking Clusters: Towards a New Research Agenda for Cluster Research collects contributions from authoritative colleagues, who cover a number of relevant and timely issues, such as the territorial roots of radical innovation processes, new ways of understanding and measuring the role of place in economic development, path renewal, internationalization and entrepreneurship. The final section is devoted to the critical analysis of policies that support smart specialization. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal European Planning Studies.

This book is a wide-ranging exploration of PR and communication in the construction industry, with a strong emphasis on communications theory, strategy and technique. The editors begin with an introduction to the UK construction industry and its supply chains, as well as various elements of PR in relation to the construction process. Subsequent chapters provide a strategic overview, practical examples, success stories, case studies and personal perspectives on PR for different parts of the built environment and reputational issues in construction. Chapters include expert advice on communications for architecture, planning, building consultancy, building products and manufacturers, general and specialist contractors, construction technology, infrastructure and communicating sustainability in the built environment. The conclusion looks at the current and upcoming reputational priorities for communicators in construction, as well as the top ten priorities for implementing PR as a strategic management discipline in the industry. This book is essential reading for all construction PR teams, students studying both for built environment and PR/marketing degrees and CPD courses, and anyone working in the built environment sector who needs to consider PR and marketing as part of their role.

This innovative book portrays the state-of-the-art of coopetition strategy regarded as a compelling mindset to exploit entirely the potential of actors' interdependencies (firms, governments, suppliers, customers, scientists and partners) in today's global scenarios. It provides the rudiments for navigating an exploration journey into a virtually new and emergent management subfield. This volume presents three key distinctive features: it is the first attempt that delves systematically and rigorously into coopetition strategy and coopetitive behaviour; it clearly elucidates the contribution of coopetition to the advancement of strategic management and managerial practice; it is the outcome of the collective brains of several scholars, with diverse geographical roots and backgrounds, who cultivate original research on co-opetition strategy from a variety of perspectives (economic, managerial, political) and multiple methods (theory building, game-theoretical, experimental and inductive case-based inquiries). Looking into this volume, the reader will realize that, while the topic is at the beginning of its lifecycle, coopetition strategy has touched an important crossroads which solicits a more comprehensive and systematic assessment. If mindfully formulated and implemented, this hybrid strategic option is able to increase returns and generate value for shareholders, entrepreneurs, managers and coopetitors.

Over the past twenty years air fares in Europe have fallen steadily. New entrant airlines such as Ryanair and Easyjet have become the largest passenger airlines in Europe, old national airlines have become commercialised and staff productivity of airlines and airports now compete. The reason behind these changes was the change in policy from protecting national airlines to market competition. This book documents a dramatic change in the economic policy surrounding the low-cost airlines and the airport industry as a whole. In this fascinating monograph, Dr Barrett provides a full deregulation case study from market control by national airlines through regulatory capture of governments to the transformed competitive market today. The topics covered include the deregulation of Europe's busiest route - London to Dublin, the market entry of Ryanair and its sustainability, the outlook for full service airlines, the commercialisation of national airlines and the impact of airports on competing airlines. Through a discussion of controversial issues such as the regulation capture of government by protected airlines, the dominance of producers over consumers in protected markets and the costs of protectionism in aviation to the wider economy, Dr Barrett's book will be of interest to anyone involved in the airline business, as well as to wider public or competition policy-makers.

This book explores the relationship between space and economy, the spatial expressions of the knowledge economy. The capitalist industrial economy produced its own space, which differed radically from its predecessor agrarian and mercantile economies. If a new knowledge-based economy is emerging, it is similarly expected to produce its own space to suit the new circumstances of production and consumption. If these spatial expressions do exist, even if in incomplete and partial forms, they are likely to be the model for the future of cities.

It's a new era of business and consumerism--and you play a role in defining it

Today's biggest trends--the mobile web, social media, real-time--have produced a new consumer landscape. "The End of Business As Usual" explores this complex information revolution, how it has changed the future of business, media, and culture, and what you can do about it.

"To be successful in business, you need to see what others don't. Start with this book. Someone's going to do it, why not you?"
--Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and Chairman of HDNet

"Innovation has always changed the business landscape. People expect to access information anywhere, anytime, and on any device. Collaborative, cloud, and video technologies are leading this change. As Mr. Solis correctly writes, companies have to lead this change, not follow."
--John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, Inc.

"Winning the hearts and minds of customers with new media experiences will turn them into your most valuable sales force. Solis's book is the map to unleash this treasure."
--Peter Guber, author of "Tell to Win: Connect, Persuade, and Triumph with the Hidden Power of Story"

"Your customers will share their experiences both good and bad. Now that everyone is connected, it's amplified and incredibly influential. This book will help you rethink your vision and mission to survive in a new era of digital Darwinism."
--Mark Burnett, Television Executive Producer