Fraud, corruption and bribery in and around public services have become an increasing concern in recent years. The reported level of fraud and corruption affecting the public sector has remained unacceptably high despite numerous national and international initiatives intended to tackle these crimes and their consequences. Fraud and Corruption in Public Services is a definitive, practical guide to the diverse risks that arise in central and local government. There is guidance on civil and criminal law around fraud, bribery and corruption as well as the national and international governmental measures and initiatives for countering this form of criminality. Most importantly of all, the book offers advice, practical examples and strategies for preventing and combating fraud, bribery and corruption. The text is readable, well-informed and intensely practical; illustrated throughout with real-life examples from the author's 40 year career.

This book aims to synthesize different directions in knowledge studies into a unified theory of knowledge and knowledge processes. It explicates important relations between knowledge and information. It provides the readers with understanding of the essence and structure of knowledge, explicating operations and process that are based on knowledge and vital for society.The book also highlights how the theory of knowledge paves the way for more advanced design and utilization of computers and networks.

This book provides a clear overview of the legal rules relating to directors' disqualification in Australia, Germany, South Africa, the UK and the US, and to highlight the differences in the disqualification regimes of these jurisdictions. The book seeks to determine whether disqualification on application should be developed further as a corporate law and corporate governance tool to ensure that individuals who have a proven record of posing a particular risk to the business community, shareholders and creditors, are indeed disqualified from being directors. The book is unique as it provides a single source where the disqualification regimes of all these jurisdictions are explored and compared. The book will appeal to scholars of corporate law, regulators and policy-makers. The book will also be of particular interest to senior managers and directors to determine precisely what the laws regarding disqualification of company directors are, and what type of behaviour might expose them to potential disqualification.

The recent financial crisis has made it paramount for the financial services industry to find new perspectives to look at their industry and, most importantly, to gain a better understanding of how the global financial system can be made less vulnerable and more resilient. The primary objective of this book is to illustrate how the safety science of Resilience Engineering can help to gain a better understanding of what the financial services system is and how to improve governance and control of financial services systems by leveraging some of its key concepts. Resilience is the intrinsic ability of a system to adjust its functioning prior to, during, or following changes and disturbances, so that it can sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions. This definition is focused on the ability to function, rather than just to be impervious to failure, and thereby bridges the traditional conflict between productivity and safety. The core concept of the book is that the behaviour of the financial services system is the result of the tight couplings among the humans, organizations and technologies that are necessary to provide complex financial functions such as the transfer of economic resources. It is a consequence of this perspective that the risks associated with these systems cannot be understood without considering the nature of these tight couplings. Adopting this perspective, the book is designed to provide some answers to the following key questions about the financial crisis: - What actually happened? - Why and how did it happen? - Could something similar happen again? How can we see that in time and how can we control it? - How can sustainable recovery of the global financial system be established? How can its resilience be improved?

Technological advances in the last five years have allowed organizations to use Business Analytics to provide insights, increase understanding and it is hoped, gain the elusive 'competitive edge'. The rapid development of Business Analytics is impacting all enterprise competences profoundly and classical business professions are being redefined by a much deeper interplay between business and information systems.As computing capabilities for analysis has moved outside the IT glass-house and into the sphere of individual workers, they are no longer the exclusive domain of IT professionals but rather accessible to all employees. Complex open-source data analytics packages and client-level visualization tools deployed in desktops and laptops equip virtually any end-user with the instruments to carry out significant analytical tasks. All the while, the drive to improve 'customer experience' has heightened the demand for data involving customers, providers and entire ecosystems.In response to the proliferation of Business Analytics, a new Center and Masters of Science Program was introduced at the National University of Singapore (NUS). The Center collaborates with over 40 different external partner organizations in Asia-Pacific with which all MSBA students undertake individual projects. Business Analytics: Progress on Applications in Asia Pacific provides a useful picture of the maturity of the Business Analytics domain in Asia Pacific. For more information about the Business Analytics Center at NUS, visit the website at: msba.nus.edu/

This book examines the complex roles that texts serve as parts of an organizational cognitive infrastructure. Texts make knowledge and experience tangible and durable. They help shape interactions between people. As professions have become more writing-centered in recent decades, many organizations have instituted writing review practices to help newcomers produce better writing and thus become more effective organizational citizens.Dr. Swarts examines those writing review practices and questions whether available supportive technologies adequately prepare professional writers and professionals who write to appreciate the complex functions their texts serve. He reports on a study of the impact of two technologies (paper text and textual replay) on writing review. Unlike paper, which presents texts in a static form, textual replay presents texts as the products of writing practices. Textual replay records onscreen writing activity and creates a video that writers and reviewers use to supplement their discussion of revisions.

Bridging an identified gap between research and practice in the domain of risk and organizational learning with respect to human/organizational factors and organizational behaviour, this book highlights the common and recurring threads in contributory factors to accident causation. Based on an extensive research project, it investigates how shipping companies as organizations learn from, filter and give credence/acceptability to differing risk perceptions and how this influences the work culture with special regard to group/team dynamics and individual motivation. The work is presented in the context of the literature regarding conceptual links between risk and the theoretical and operational themes of organizational learning, and in light of interviewees' comments. The themes include processes and structures of knowledge acquisition, information interpretation and distribution, organizational memory and change/adaptation and also levels of learning. The book concludes by discussing some practical implications of the research carried out in various maritime contexts and gives recommendations for the industry and other stakeholders.

Big data are changing the way we work as companies face an increasing amount of data. Rather than replacing a human workforce or making decisions obsolete, big data are going to pose an immense innovating force to those employees capable of utilizing them. This book intends to first convey a theoretical understanding of big data. It then tackles the phenomenon of big data from the perspectives of varied organizational theories in order to highlight socio-technological interaction. Big data are bound to transform organizations which calls for a transformation of the human resource department. The HR department's new role then enables organizations to utilize big data for their purpose. Employees, while remaining an organization's major competitive advantage, have found a powerful ally in big data.

Within corporate governance the accountability of the board of directors is identified as a major issue by governments, international bodies, professional associations and academic literature. Boards are given significant power in companies, and as a consequence it is argued that they should be accountable for their actions. Drawing on political science, public administration, accounting, and ethics literature, this book examines the concept of accountability and its meaning in the corporate governance context. It examines the rationale for making boards accountable, and outlines the obstacles and drawbacks involved in providing for accountability. The book goes on to examine how current mechanisms for ensuring accountability are assessed in terms of fairness, justice, transparency, practicality, effectiveness and efficiency, before discussing the ways that accountability might be improved. Andrew Keay argues that enhanced accountability can provide better corporate governance, helping to reduce the frequency and severity of financial crises, and improve confidence in company practice. As an in depth study of a key element within the exercise of authority and management in corporate entities, this book will be of great use and interest to researchers and students of corporate governance, business and management, and corporate social responsibility.

The increasing globalization, the battle for talents, and global trends are changing the work patterns in organisations around the globe. Enterprises are working across country and cultural borders alongside complex supply and demand networks. Global incidents such as the financial crisis in 2008 and the recent COVID-19 pandemic have forced global organizations to find innovative ways to continue to connect globally and maintain a competitive advantage. Therefore, innovative enterprises have established global and virtual organisations including members of the value chain on supply and demand side. This book outlines these new work and leadership styles, and agile organisations, which are necessary to work virtually and globally. It provides case studies and experiences from different global organizations in different industries and sectors with a focus on value-adding processes and services.

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.

This book is about the role of knowledge spillovers and strategic entrepreneurship in the management context. It focuses on how knowledge spillovers and strategic entrepreneurship are crucial to the process of creative destruction and construction. The book aims to provide insights into and discussion on how firms combine entrepreneurial action that creates new opportunities for industries, regions and economies. This book is first of its kind to link knowledge management perspectives to strategic entrepreneurship to understand the co-creation process. Being interdisciplinary in nature, this book appeals to entrepreneurship and knowledge management scholars, students and practitioners.

Increasingly, information technology governance is being considered an integral part of corporate governance. There has been a rapid increase in awareness and adoption of IT governance as well as the desire to conform to national governance requirements to ensure that IT is aligned with the objectives of the organization. Information Technology Governance and Service Management: Frameworks and Adaptations provides an in-depth view into the critical contribution of IT service management to IT governance, and the strategic and tactical value provided by effective service management. A must-have resource for academics, students, and practitioners in fields affected by IT in organizations, this work gathers authoritative perspectives on the state of research on organizational challenges and benefits in current IT governance frameworks, adoption, and incorporation.

The notion of property in work has deep historical roots in the common law tradition, but is yet to receive the attention it deserves. In this timely and thought-provoking book, Wanjiru Njoya contrasts ideas of ownership and property rights in English, American and European labour law, and considers their practical implications. The author's contention that shared ownership within a stakeholder theory of the firm allows better protection of both shareholders' and employees' interests in the large public corporation, puts employee-participation firmly back on the corporate governance agenda. The book offers a refreshing new perspective on how a more socially desirable balance between economic flexibility and job security may be achieved.

Activity-based pricing: the new paradigm for maximum profitability

Pricing for Profitability introduces activity-based pricing, a new paradigm for improving profitability by reducing the occurrence of pricing mistakes and placing less emphasis on increasing revenue and more on improving profits. Activity-based pricing will help any company set prices that are attractive to buyers and profitable for the company. Pricing for Profitability teaches activity-based pricing to help you make better pricing decisions based on customer demand and a better understanding of what really causes profits. It will help you prevent underpricing and generate a healthier financial return.

Simply organized and nontechnical, this in-depth treatment covers the ten vital topics of activity-based pricing. A wealth of examples that illustrate the points made in the text include activity-based pricing models used in real industries. Designed for everyone involved with the pricing process, Pricing for Profitability provides a comprehensive understanding of how to use pricing to gain the competitive advantage.

This volume showcases the presentations and discussions delivered at the 2018 POMS International Conference in Rio. Through a collection of selected papers, it is possible to review the impact and application of operations management for social good, with contributions across a wide range of topics, including: humanitarian operations and crisis management, healthcare operations management, sustainable operations, artificial intelligence and data analytics in operations, product innovation and technology in operations management, marketing and operations management, service operations and servitization, logistics and supply chain management, resilience and risk in operations, defense, and tourism among other emerging Operations Management issues. The Production and Operations Management Society (POMS) is one of the most important and influential societies in the subject of Production Engineering and, as an international professional and academic organization, represents the interests of professionals and academics in production management and operations around the world.

The Advanced Planner and Optimiser (APO) is the software from SAP dedicated to supply chain management. This book addresses the question of how to implement APO in a company. It is written from a long years' experience in implementation projects and provides project managers and team members with the necessary know-how for a successful implementation project. The focus is on introducing modeling approaches and explaining the structure and interdependencies of systems, modules and entities of APO. Another concern is the integration with the R/3 system(s), both technically and from a process point of view. Since APO projects differ significantly from other SAP projects, some key issues and common mistakes concerning project management are covered.

Corporate laws are based on the idea that the interests of shareholders should be the primary concern of company directors. However, some argue that the proper role for shareholders is to sit back and let the corporation's managers do their job, or that the pursuit of shareholders' interests detracts from the concerns of employees or victims of corporate wrongdoing or other stakeholders. Stephen Bottomley argues that instead of consigning shareholders to this passive role, they should be given opportunities to be active members of corporations. Corporations are constitutional arrangements rather than mere contractual agreements. They are decision-making organizations in which questions of process and structure are important. Thus, instead of using economic criteria such as efficiency as the sole measure for deciding what constitutes 'good' corporate governance, this book examines whether ideas of accountability, deliberation and contestability provide a valuable framework for assessing corporate structures and process and for encouraging greater shareholder participation.

Strategy Journeys starts from the premise that strategic planning suffers from a bad press: it can be seen as complex, technical, remote from the day-to-day reality of an organisation, undertaken by an elite specialist executive group, producing threatening changes whose rationale is barely understood - or, perhaps worse still, having no worthwhile impact at all. For many senior executives, strategic planning is too daunting a task, which is why they often seek help from those with the expertise to guide the process: they have a severe lack of confidence in their own ability to design, plan and implement such an important and major project. Yet organisations have never had greater need for a flexible, resilient and engaging approach to strategic planning than now. How do those leading an organisation know where to start, what approach to take and how to go about the process of strategic planning? David Booth aims to help them by demystifying the concept and propounding a 'first principles' approach to developing a strategic plan within the context of the individual organisation and with the flexibility to adapt the process to focus on what really matters. He suggests the key questions that should be asked when considering embarking on a strategic planning 'journey' to help design and guide the process.

This volume brings together a multidisciplinary group of scholars from diverse fields including computer science, engineering, archival science, law, business, psychology, economics, medicine and more to discuss the trade-offs between different "layers" in designing the use of blockchain/Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) for social trust, trust in data and records, and trust in systems. Blockchain technology has emerged as a solution to the problem of trust in data and records, as well as trust in social, political and economic institutions, due to its profound potential as a digital trust infrastructure. Blockchain is a DLT in which confirmed and validated sets of transactions are stored in blocks that are chained together to make tampering more difficult and render records immutable. This book is dedicated to exploring and disseminating the latest findings on the relationships between socio-political and economic data, record-keeping, and technical aspects of blockchain.

In the wake of the global financial crisis, Heads or Tails answers the question: what changes should financial institutions undergo to ensure reliable protection against extreme risks? Recent massive failures among large and respected financial institutions, clearly demonstrate that contemporary risk management and regulation fail to provide adequate responses to the challenges set by extreme risks. Dr Evgueni Ivantsov combines analysis of the nature of extreme risk (so-called tail risk), risk management practices and practical solutions to build a robust, enterprise-wide, extreme risk management framework which includes three lines of defence, ranging from strategic to tactical, designed to help address the tail risk during different stages of its development. The author also discusses: c Why modern 'sophisticated' risk management frameworks, strong capitalisation and liquidity do not prevent banks from failure in the face of systemic crisis; c What it means to build an effective defence against systemic and catastrophic losses; c What risk architecture should look like to ensure that extreme risk events are identified early and efficiently mitigated; c How modern management practices, regulation and risk and business culture need to change to guarantee sustainability. While the context of Dr Ivantsov's writing is financial services, the book contains an important message for specialists from any industries exposed to the extreme risks (oil/gas, energy, mining, chemical productions, transportation, etc.). Until the shortcomings of current risk management and regulation are resolved, financial services and other at risk industries will repeat the painful mistakes of the past, over and over again.

Small businesses make up some 90-95 percent of all global firms. Many undervalue the importance of information and communication technology (ICT). Within the small business segment there can be significant differences amongst the avid early adopters of ICT and the laggards. Research on early adopters tends be more prevalent as they are perceived to have a more interesting and positive story. However, late adopters and 'laggards' also have their own interesting stories that are under-reported. Small Business and Effective ICT draws on research undertaken over several years and documents the adoption/use of ICT across 'better' users of ICT (Leaders), typical ICT users (Operationals) and late adopters (Laggards). The findings are presented using a re-formulation of the LIASE framework which addresses a number of areas that include ICT literacy (L), information content/communication (I), Access (A), Infrastructure (I), Support (S) and Evaluation (E). Some 60 businesses were investigated in Australia and the UK, with each business presented as a concise vignette. The vignettes serve to show that small businesses are not as conservative in their use of ICT as the literature suggests, with examples of innovative uses of ICT in small businesses provided. Lessons for the effective use of ICT by small businesses are presented. The research design, methods adopted, presentation of findings through the vignettes, and 'take away' lessons have been written in manner to appeal to a broad range of readers including academics, researchers, students and policy makers in the discipline.

With the advance of an increasingly globalized market, the opportunities for, and scale of, corruption is growing. The size of corporations and their wealth relative to nations provides the resources for corrupt practices. The liberalization of international financial markets makes transferring and hiding the proceeds of corruption easier. Moves towards privatization in East and West are providing once-only incentives for corruption on an unprecedented scale, as officials not only deal with the income of the state, but with its assets as well. In this book, Transparency International's (TI) world-renowned 'Corruption Perception Index' (CPI) and 'Bribery Perception Index' (BPI) are explained and examined by a group of experts. They set out to establish to what extent they are reliable measures of corruption and whether a series of surveys can measure changes in corruption and the effectiveness of anti-corruption strategies. The book contains a variety of expert contributions which deal with the complexity, difficulty and potential for measuring corruption as the key to developing effective strategies for combating it.

Defining Management charts the expansion of management as an idea and practice from a time when it was limited to churches and households to its current ubiquity, focusing in particular on the role of business schools, consultants, and business media in this process. How did an entire industry develop around business schools, consultants, and business media who are now widely considered the authorities regarding best management practice? This book shows how these actors - on their own and in interaction - became taken-for-granted and gained such definitional power over management and managers, expanded across the globe from often modest and not always respected origins, and impacted, and continue to impact businesses and, increasingly, the broader economic and social context. Building on extant and some new research, the book is unique in bringing together issues and actors that have been examined elsewhere separately. Any student or professional of management interested in the evolution of their field or the rise of business schools, consultants and business media will find this book both novel and thought-provoking.

Although we live in an era in which we are surrounded by an ever-deepening fog of data, few of us truly understand how the data are created, where data are stored, or how to retrieve or destroy data-if that is indeed possible. This book is for all of you, whatever your need or interest. Electronically Stored Information: The Complete Guide to Management, Understanding, Acquisition, Storage, Search, and Retrieval, Second Edition explains the reasons you need to know about electronic data. It also gets into great detail about the how, what, when, and where of what is known in legal circles as electronically stored information (ESI). With easy-to-understand explanations and guidelines, this book provides the practical understanding you need to effectively manage the complex world of ESI. Whether you are an attorney, judge, paralegal, business manager or owner, or just one of the ever-growing population of computer users, you will benefit from the information presented in this book.