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?

This title, first published in 1973, covers the period of 1959 to 1968. The study suggests that government policies had very little effect on the employment structures of the sub-regions at this time, despite government intervention and policy objectives in Great Britain to reduce levels of unemployment in the depressed regions and curb congestion in the Midland and South East England conurbations. Instead, regional employment structures seemed to be determined by what was happening to industries at a national level. This study will be of interest to economists, planners, regional scientists and geographers, as well as students in these fields.

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.

Environmental Management Systems (EMSs) offer an approach to regulatory policy that lies somewhere between free-market and traditional command-and-control methods. Worldwide, hundreds of thousands of private firms have adopted or are considering adopting these internally managed systems for improving environmental performance. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency has established a special recognition for firms that adopt EMSs. Already, numerous state agencies have proposed or adopted 'green-tier systems' that allow firms with EMSs to be exempted from otherwise applicable requirements. Yet while private- and public-sector interest in EMSs is booming, limited empirical evidence is available about the efficacy of EMSs. To close the gap between advocacy and analysis, Regulating from the Inside brings together cutting-edge work of leading scholars, providing the most comprehensive analysis to date of environmental management systems. Intended to frame the future policy and the research agenda about EMSs, the discussions are organized around two critical questions: How have EMSs worked in firms that have already adopted them? What potential and limitations do they have as policy tools in the future? Addressing the arguments of both advocates and skeptics, the chapters examine why firms adopt EMSs; how firms implement EMSs; how EMSs answer concerns about fairness, corporate social responsibility, and sustainability; and what kind of impact EMSs may have on the global economy.

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.

This book explores the distinct nature of innovation in medium technology industrial sectors - which are the key to European international competitiveness - and examines the recent changes of networks within regional clusters. The authors present best-practice management and regional strategies, and develop an original and coherent theoretical framework for the analysis of innovation processes called 'Territorial Knowledge Management'. They concentrate on the territorial dimension and the cognitive economics approach, and go beyond the traditional focus on R&D in high-tech sectors. The pivotal role of intermediate institutions in the governance of modern co-ordinated market economies is also highlighted. Working towards defining new guidelines for creating networks of competence centers and removing barriers to the enlargement of knowledge and innovation networks in Europe, this book will prove an enlightening read for those with an interest in postgraduate level management and innovation studies. Management and policy-making practitioners at both the regional and European level will also find much to interest them.

In this edited volume, we present the state-of-the-art views of the perspective of enterprise risk management, to include frameworks and controls in the ERM process with respect to supply chains, constructions, and project, energy, environmental and sustainable development risk management. The bulk of this volume is devoted to presenting a number of modeling approaches that have been (or could be) applied to enterprise risk management in construction.

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.

Knowledge management is the process of creating value from an organization's intangible assets. It is generally concerned with four major types of capital: human, the brainpower of the employees; structural, such as intellectual property rights or databases; social, knowledge acquired from customers and stakeholders; and competitive, knowledge learned about or from an organization's competitors. This concise, easy-to-read book provides guidance on the value and importance of knowledge management for organizations. Many organizations are reluctant to invest in knowledge management (KM) and competitive intelligence (CI) initiatives for their company's use. In his newest book, Jay Liebowitz discusses how value-added benefits can be derived from such efforts, with concepts and cases presented. Making Cents Out of Knowledge Management focuses on demonstrating ways to show the value of knowledge in organizations and discusses methods to measure knowledge management outcomes. Reinforcing these concepts are representative cases from leading practitioners and educators of how organizations have been doing this worldwide.

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.

How to lead the digital transformation of governments Digital Government Excellence: Lessons from Effective Digital Leaders delivers a fascinating treatment of digital leadership as governments around the world start or restart the digital transformation of their work and service delivery. The author provides a playbook on how to achieve digital excellence via interviews with 20 remarkable digital government leaders from around the world. Each one offers insights on strategies for how to incorporate the best of digital into public services and practical tips on leading digital reforms and delivery teams. The book also: Explores how to begin the task of making all of government to "go digital" or go deeper and bolder in this direction, including the first steps and beyond Highlights leadership styles and practices for effective and lasting delivery of digital strategies and reforms Provides food for thought about what it takes to be an impactful digital transformation leader - in government and beyond The book is ideal for Chief Digital/Information/Technology Officers or digital agency leaders in public service. Digital Government Excellence is also an indispensable resource for any practitioner, policymaker or political leader in governments at any level, as well as any student or advisor of governments looking into how to deliver digital transformation in the public sector.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Innovation is arguably an integral part of the knowledge management function and KM practice - as a popular "buzzword" over the past few years, and in the fast changing business world of today, it has become the mainstay of professional service organizations. The complexity of innovation increases with the growth in knowledge available to organizations, and with this comes the need to determine its place in business. Tomorrow's KM: Innovation, best practice and the future of knowledge management focuses on the relationship between innovation and KM, elaborating on the role of KM as the facilitator and enabler of change. Consisting of in-depth case studies and insight from experts within varied fields, this book offers some contextual trendspotting and a general overview of the market. In order to "innovate", one needs to know what it actually means. What is innovation and how does it relate to KM? Where does it start and end within the organization? How do you find out what you need to know in order to innovate?

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.

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.

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.

This book argues that the current international intellectual property rights regime, led by the World Trade Organization (WTO), has evolved over the past three decades toward overemphasizing private interests and seriously hampering public interests in access to knowledge and innovation diffusion. This approach concentrates on tangible and codified knowledge creation and diffusion in research and development (R&D) that can be protected via patents and other intellectual property rules and regulations. In terms of global policy initiatives, however, it is becoming increasingly clear that the WTO in particular is mostly a conflict-resolution facility rather than a global governance body able to generate cooperation and steer international coordinated policy action. At the same time, rent extraction and profits streaming from legal hyperprotection have become pervasively important for firm strategies to compete in a globalized marketplace. "Knowledge Governance: Reasserting the Public Interest" offers a novel approach - knowledge governance - in order to move beyond the current regime.

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 New Knowledge Management' is the story of the birth of "second-generation knowledge management," told from the perspective of one its chief architects, Mark W. McElroy. Unlike its first-generation cousin, second-generation Knowledge Management seeks to enhance knowledge production, not just knowledge sharing. As a result, 'The New Knowledge Management' expands the overall reach of knowledge management to include "innovation management" for the very first time. 'The New Knowledge Management' introduces the concept of "second-generation knowledge management" to the business community. Mark W. McElroy has assembled a collection of his own essays, written over the past four years, chronicling the development of related thinking in the field. Unlike first-generation KM, mainly focusing on value derived from knowledge sharing, second-generation thinking formally adds knowledge making to the scope of KM. In this way second-generation KM expands the overall reach of KM to include "innovation management" for the very first time. 'The New Knowledge Management' finally begins to bridge the gap between KM and the field of organizational learning, which up until now have been viewed as miles apart.

Business Analytics for Decision Making, the first complete text suitable for use in introductory Business Analytics courses, establishes a national syllabus for an emerging first course at an MBA or upper undergraduate level. This timely text is mainly about model analytics, particularly analytics for constrained optimization. It uses implementations that allow students to explore models and data for the sake of discovery, understanding, and decision making. Business analytics is about using data and models to solve various kinds of decision problems. There are three aspects for those who want to make the most of their analytics: encoding, solution design, and post-solution analysis. This textbook addresses all three. Emphasizing the use of constrained optimization models for decision making, the book concentrates on post-solution analysis of models. The text focuses on computationally challenging problems that commonly arise in business environments. Unique among business analytics texts, it emphasizes using heuristics for solving difficult optimization problems important in business practice by making best use of methods from Computer Science and Operations Research. Furthermore, case studies and examples illustrate the real-world applications of these methods. The authors supply examples in Excel (R), GAMS, MATLAB (R), and OPL. The metaheuristics code is also made available at the book's website in a documented library of Python modules, along with data and material for homework exercises. From the beginning, the authors emphasize analytics and de-emphasize representation and encoding so students will have plenty to sink their teeth into regardless of their computer programming experience.