Quantitative Approaches in Business Studies provides a clear and accessible introduction to quantitative methods, ideal for students of business and management on undergraduate, Masters and professional courses. With a uniquely user-friendly style, Clare Morris' popular treatment of this challenging subject is carefully designed to build students' confidence in the use and interpretation of quantitative methods. Encouraging conceptual understanding as well as practical aptitude, the text leads the reader from an initial chapter revising basic mathematics through to a concluding chapter discussing statistical research methods for student projects. Practical guidance on the use of Excel for quantitative analysis runs throughout the text, integrated with an online Excel workbook. New for this edition Access to MyMathLab Global, an unrivalled online tutorial and assessment system. Many new 'Quantitative Methods in Practice' examples, drawn from recent and topical articles in the press and beyond. Substantial case-studies at the end of each chapter, integrating the material of the chapter. Revised and updated throughout. MyMathLab Global will generate a personalised study plan for you and provide extensive practice questions exactly where you need them. Interactive questions with randomised values allow you to practise the same concept as many times as you need until you master it. Guided solutions break down the question for you step-by-step. A full e-book links out to the relevant part of the text while you are practising. Students, if interested in purchasing this title with MyMathLab Global, ask your instructor for the correct package ISBN and Course ID. Instructors, contact your Pearson representative for more information. Visit www.pearsoned.co.uk/morris or www.mymathlab.com/global to access MyMathLab Global. Clare Morris has taught quantitative methods to students of business, from HND to PhD level, at institutions including Bristol Polytechnic, Warwick Business School and Cardiff Business School. She is currently Emeritus Professor at the University of Gloucestershire.

This book presents the key interactions in local government and public enterprise, drawing together the challenges for local governance in the practice of public entrepreneurship and its response to collaboration, place and place making. Specifically, this book includes the impact of local partnerships and public entrepreneurs in local policy implementation. It is written by established authors bringing together their experience and practice of local partnerships and public entrepreneurship in place-based strategies, and will be of value to local government, new forms of enterprise partnerships, wider agencies and public entrepreneurship scholars as well as policymakers responsible for implementation of place-based regeneration. This text will be of key interest to students, scholars and practitioners in public administration, business administration, local government, entrepreneurship, public sector management and more broadly to those with interests in public policy, business and management, political science, economics, urban studies and geography.

Originally published in 1989, this book analyses the economic and political position of the small firm in the 1980s, and in particular the relationship between small and large firms in an advanced capitalist economy. Focusing on the printing and clothing industries, it examines the industrial relation practices in these two contrasting sectors and shows that apparent industrial relations harmony - for example, the lack of strikes - should be put down to the powerlessness of the workforce rather than to contentment.

This is one of the first books of its kind to highlight family firms in a Latin American context, helping students to understand the distinctive nature and challenges of Latin American family businesses and how these issues compare to family businesses around the world. Building on their experience in teaching, research, speaking, and consulting on the subject of family firms in Latin America, the editors explain the need to implement and adapt traditional frameworks in the changing Latin American reality. Each section provides background on the most important topics in the management of family firms, including strategy, entrepreneurship, and performance, followed by illustrative cases and a discussion of how this knowledge is similar to or different from other parts of the world. The book's clear writing and in-depth approach will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students of international business, business in Latin America, and family business.

This book explores a range of prospective avenues, models, and operational and strategic approaches to Lean Six Sigma (LSS), a contemporary Continuous Improvement (CI) practice for achieving a quality-based competitive edge in organisations. Lean Six Sigma project case studies from banking organizations help to illustrate the operational dimensions of LSS, while the case-specific and cross-case analyses presented here demonstrate its strategic value. While the case data used to arrive at the findings come from the Banking firms, it allows generalizability beyond the Banking and Financial Services sector. The book contends that LSS is not merely a CI practice, but a higher-order organizational capability, more precisely a dynamic capability, that allows firms to gain a competitive edge based on quality. Addressing the interests of practitioners and researchers alike, the book strikes a balance between theory and practice. For practitioners, it offers guidance on using LSS to gain a competitive advantage, and on evidence-based practice in quality management and operational excellence. For researchers, it presents a wealth of literature and expands the body of knowledge on quality management. Accordingly, the book is of immense value to both practitioners and researchers, helping the former unlock the value of LSS as both an operational and strategic resource, and highlighting potential research directions and applications for the latter. "This book provides a deep understanding of Lean Six Sigma applications. It inspires by transferring the principles of the concept into uncommon areas of operations and management behind the usual quality and project management. While reading the book I got hit by a great idea of applying Lean Six Sigma in my digital business as well. My impression at the end of the book was that sky is the limit for the right employment of Lean Six Sigma, especially while viewing it from a dynamic capabilities' lens. Readers of this book will surely receive insights for improving their business processes both operationally and strategically. Although the book is focused on banking, it is actually suitable for a really wide audience. This is a brilliant piece of research as a book that will serve as a guide for transformation by the prism of Lean Six Sigma." - Professor. Dr. ZornitsaYordanova, Chief Assistant Professor of Innovation Management, University of National and World Economy, Sofia, Bulgaria "Lean Six Sigma needs to be understood from a systems perspective and there exists a huge knowledge gap in this area of finding holistic solutions to business problems. This book is a very welcome work that addresses this call. It integrates quality management resources and dynamic capabilities view towards practice. Banking and Financial Services was aptly chosen as it has the most direct applicability for social enterprises. Anyone interested in creating more impact with less will surely benefit from reading the book" -Alex Abraham, Chief Executive Officer, Lean Success Partners, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada "The book is a refreshing booster to the world of Quality Management especially in the context of Banking and Financial Services. Concepts and terms like "Rapidness of Lean & robustness of Six Sigma to solve operational problems" "Hybrid methodology" resonate very well with what we do in the industry today. Another interesting fact about the book is applying "Dynamic Capabilities approach" to Quality Management, that sets a fresh Quality Oven and ensures this book is definitely a good investment of authors' intellect.Best part - Even if a reader is new to the world of Quality,this book will be appropriate and resonating. For Researchers and Practitioners, both being leaders orfresh entrants, this book stands out to be a must-read, as it demonstrates the success of the Lean Six Sigma methodology via case studies and practical applications." -Udit Salvan, Director, Global Transformation & Engineering Network,An American Multinational Financial Services Corporation, New York, USA

This volume provides a rigorous examination of key issues relating to employment in small businesses. These include an anlysis of the true extent of job crreation provided by small firms, the rleative quality of jobs in small firms, the growth of self-employment during the 1980s and the way in which the small firm interacts with its local labour markets. These issues are examined in an international context, wth comparative examples from the USA, the UK and Europe.

This book, originally published in 1996, develops a model of information gathering for small businesses. Whilst all small business owners gather and process some information, the quality and types of information gathered is limited. Size and resource constraints force small business owners to make difficult decisions related to the research that they conduct. The model developed in this book is tested in part through a study of the information gathering practices of small owners/managers in the landscaping industry in Wisconsin, USA.

This book takes its reader on a journey through Apache Giraph, a popular distributed graph processing platform designed to bring the power of big data processing to graph data. Designed as a step-by-step self-study guide for everyone interested in large-scale graph processing, it describes the fundamental abstractions of the system, its programming models and various techniques for using the system to process graph data at scale, including the implementation of several popular and advanced graph analytics algorithms. The book is organized as follows: Chapter 1 starts by providing a general background of the big data phenomenon and a general introduction to the Apache Giraph system, its abstraction, programming model and design architecture. Next, chapter 2 focuses on Giraph as a platform and how to use it. Based on a sample job, even more advanced topics like monitoring the Giraph application lifecycle and different methods for monitoring Giraph jobs are explained. Chapter 3 then provides an introduction to Giraph programming, introduces the basic Giraph graph model and explains how to write Giraph programs. In turn, Chapter 4 discusses in detail the implementation of some popular graph algorithms including PageRank, connected components, shortest paths and triangle closing. Chapter 5 focuses on advanced Giraph programming, discussing common Giraph algorithmic optimizations, tunable Giraph configurations that determine the system's utilization of the underlying resources, and how to write a custom graph input and output format. Lastly, chapter 6 highlights two systems that have been introduced to tackle the challenge of large scale graph processing, GraphX and GraphLab, and explains the main commonalities and differences between these systems and Apache Giraph. This book serves as an essential reference guide for students, researchers and practitioners in the domain of large scale graph processing. It offers step-by-step guidance, with several code examples and the complete source code available in the related github repository. Students will find a comprehensive introduction to and hands-on practice with tackling large scale graph processing problems using the Apache Giraph system, while researchers will discover thorough coverage of the emerging and ongoing advancements in big graph processing systems.

When originally published in 1986, this book was one of the first to deal solely with the urban and regional incidence and development implications of new firm formation in particular EU countries. It reviews the extent of and reasons for geographical variation in numbers of new firms, examines the nature of such firms and assesses the regional impact and policy implications in various EC countries.

After more than 30 years of reformations in agriculture, manufacturing and trade and industry, China's economy has grown to become the second largest in the world. This book examines the contributions of dynamic entrepreneurs to the economic development of mainland China and Hong Kong - an analysis that is largely lacking in existing studies China's economic stronghold. This book adopts theories of entrepreneurship and market processes as major analytical frameworks to conclude that entrepreneurship is the true engine of growth in mainland China and Hong Kong. Chinese Entrepreneurship focuses on the knowledge drivers and systemic challenges of these businesses to examine how entrepreneurs under uncertainty identify and pursue profit opportunities, and how their efforts have enhanced China's economic dynamics. This book offers vital insight to students, teachers and researchers of Chinese business and economics, along with Chinese culture and expanding economies.

The knowledge economy is a notion that has been used, since the end of the last decade, to describe a new economic order perceived by scholars and practitioners. The authors argue that this order, triggered by new information and communication technologies, has resulted in a different set of challenges for effective management of the contemporary firm. Knowledge will play an important role in managing these challenges, with the onus being on new hardware and software as much as how businesses can be organised with regard to relationships with customers and suppliers. This book shows how 'intelligent management will be key to how internal operations can be organised in order to take advantage of opportunities brought about by new technologies. This change in management is discussed throughout the book from a wide array of perspectives ranging from contextual and philosophical aspects, through tools and methods to case studies concerning the organization of business, its management and application in the knowledge economy. Intelligent Management in the Knowledge Economy will be of great interest to academics and researchers of management - knowledge management in particular - ICT and organisational studies. Business practitioners will also find much to engage them within this book.

This book uncovers the idea of understanding cybersecurity management in FinTech. It commences with introducing fundamentals of FinTech and cybersecurity to readers. It emphasizes on the importance of cybersecurity for financial institutions by illustrating recent cyber breaches, attacks, and financial losses. The book delves into understanding cyber threats and adversaries who can exploit those threats. It advances with cybersecurity threat, vulnerability, and risk management in FinTech. The book helps readers understand cyber threat landscape comprising different threat categories that can exploit different types of vulnerabilties identified in FinTech. It puts forward prominent threat modelling strategies by focusing on attackers, assets, and software and addresses the challenges in managing cyber risks in FinTech. The authors discuss detailed cybersecurity policies and strategies that can be used to secure financial institutions and provide recommendations to secure financial institutions from cyber-attacks.

When this book was originally published in 1988, this book was the first to include a large number of reports on British and US companies' experience with computers in company training in such areas as banking, finance, insurance, manufacturing, IT, the retail industry, transport, telecommunications and energy. It provided a critical analysis of the situation and discusses company experiences, development, testing and implementation as well as cost-effectiveness and future trends.

This companion provides broad and in-depth insights into family business in Asia and how Asian family firms navigate in the digital economy. The first part of the book looks at key concepts of family business while the second part presents Asian family firms' cases from Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia and other Asian economies. This comprehensive reference will help readers understand how family firms in Asia compete and survive in the world market especially in the digital age and why and how Asian economies can emerge as one of the most dynamic regions in the world.

Business intelligence (BI) has evolved over several years as organizations have extended their online transaction processing (OLTP) capabilities and applications to support their routine operations. With online analytical processing (OLAP), organizations have also established the capability to extract internal and external data from a variety of sources to specifically obtain intelligence about non-routine and often less-structured arrangements. BI therefore refers to applications and technologies that are used to gather, provide access to, and analyze data and information about the operations of an organization. It has the capability of providing comprehensive insight into the more volatile factors affecting the business and its operations, thereby facilitating enhanced decision-making quality and contributing to the creation of business value. Larger and more sophisticated organizations have long been exploiting these capabilities. Business Intelligence for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) guides SMEs in replicating this experience to provide an agile roadmap toward business sustainability. The book points out that successful BI implementations have generated significant increases in revenue and cost savings, however, the failure rates are also very high. More importantly, it emphasizes that a full range of BI capabilities is not the exclusive purview of large organizations. It shows how SMEs make extensive use of BI techniques to develop the kind of agility endowing them with the organizational capability to sense and respond to opportunities and threats in an increasingly dynamic business environment. It points to the way to a market environment in which smaller organizations could have a larger role. In particular, the book explains that by establishing the agility to leverage internal and external data and information assets, SMEs can enhance their competitiveness by having a comprehensive understanding of the key to an agile roadmap for business sustainability.

Inspired by the podcast Dear Multi-Hyphenate, this book explores how to be a multi-hypenate - an artist with multiple proficiencies - in the entertainment industry. Answers questions about individual mission-driven entrepreneurship in the Theatre industry. Each chapter features an interview with a notable theatre artist.

This open access book provides an overview of the dissertations of the five nominees for the Ernst Denert Award for Software Engineering in 2019. The prize, kindly sponsored by the Gerlind & Ernst Denert Stiftung, is awarded for excellent work within the discipline of Software Engineering, which includes methods, tools and procedures for better and efficient development of high quality software. An essential requirement for the nominated work is its applicability and usability in industrial practice. The book contains five papers describing the works by Sebastian Baltes (U Trier) on Software Developers'Work Habits and Expertise, Timo Greifenberg's thesis on Artefaktbasierte Analyse modellgetriebener Softwareentwicklungsprojekte, Marco Konersmann's (U Duisburg-Essen) work on Explicitly Integrated Architecture, Marija Selakovic's (TU Darmstadt) research about Actionable Program Analyses for Improving Software Performance, and Johannes Spath's (Paderborn U) thesis on Synchronized Pushdown Systems for Pointer and Data-Flow Analysis - which actually won the award. The chapters describe key findings of the respective works, show their relevance and applicability to practice and industrial software engineering projects, and provide additional information and findings that have only been discovered afterwards, e.g. when applying the results in industry. This way, the book is not only interesting to other researchers, but also to industrial software professionals who would like to learn about the application of state-of-the-art methods in their daily work.

This book, originally published in 1987, evaluates the human and managerial implications of new office information technology, based on the actual experiences of organisations using the new technology. A variety of issues are examined including those centred on the role of the manger, producitivity, unemployment, physical and mental health. Major emphasis is placed on describing and discussing the implementation of new technology and ways of utilization which maximise benefits.

This book undertakes to marry the concepts of "Concept Mapping" with a "Design Thinking" approach in the context of business analysis. While in the past a lot of attention has been paid to the business process side, this book now focusses information quality and valuation, master data and hierarchy management, business rules automation and business semantics as examples for business innovation opportunities. The book shows how to take "Business Concept Maps" further as information models for new IT paradigms. In a way this books redefines and extends business analysis towards solutions that can be described as business synthesis or business development. Business modellers, analysts and controllers, as well as enterprise information architects, will benefit from the intuitive modelling and designing approach presented in this book.Thepragmatic and agile methodspresented can be directly applied to improve the wayorganizations manage their business concepts and their relationships.

"This book is a great contribution to the information management community. It combines a theoretical foundation with practical methods for dealing with important problems. This is rare and very useful. Conceptual models that communicate business reality effectively require some degree of creative imagination. As such, they combine the results of business analysis with communication design, as is extensively covered in this book."

Dr. Malcolm Chisholm, President at AskGet.com Inc.

Truly understanding business requirements has always been a major stumbling block in business intelligence (BI) projects. In this book, Thomas Frisendal introduces a powerful technique business concept mapping that creates a virtual mind-meld between business users and business analysts. Frisendal does a wonderful explaining and demonstrating how this tool can improve the outcome of BI and other development projects ."

Wayne Eckerson, executive director, BI Leadership Forum

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Recent decades have seen a significant transformation of the not-for-profit (NFP) sector. This includes rise in the number of organisations and people employed, shift from charities and philanthropic agencies to hybrid social enterprise business models, competing stakeholder interests and increasing expectations regarding accountability and transparency. The role of NFPs has also become more complex - they not only serve the disadvantaged and fulfil social needs but also actively advocate for and implement public policies and promote social and economic inclusion. The growth and complexity has brought with it a need for innovative and entrepreneurial approaches to leadership that stems from an in-depth understanding of the changing nonprofit landscape. Addressing this need, for Not for Profits and Social Enterprises will help readers navigate extant challenges by drawing on conceptual literature, both theoretical and empirical and emphasising practical real world experience through case studies and vignettes The key aim of this book is to help existing and future NFP leaders at all organisational levels to support their organisations and employees and in turn clients and communities, through theoretical insights and practical approaches by focusing on transformational leadership aspects for contemporary Not for Profits. for Not for Profits and Social Enterprises is key reading for researchers, academics and policy makers in the areas of Non-profit Management, Leadership, Public Sector Management and Charity Management as well as related disciplines such as Philanthropy and Social Entrepreneurship.

Islamic Macroeconomics proposes an Islamic model that offers significant prospects for economic growth and durable macroeconomic stability, and which is immune to the defects of the economic models prevailing both in developed and developing countries. An Islamic model advocates a limited government confined to its natural duties of defence, justice, education, health, infrastructure, regulation, and welfare of the vulnerable population. It prohibits interest-based debt and money, and requires full liberalization of all markets including labor, financial, commodity, trade, and foreign exchange markets. The government should be Sharia-compliant in its taxation power and regulatory intervention; it ought to reduce unproductive spending in favor of productive spending. This book is essential reading for students and academics of Islamic economics and finance, economists, practitioners, and researchers.

This book, originally published in 1984, established the need for a strategic managerial response to the new technology, which relies on an understanding of the real effects of technology - on organisational structure, manageemnt style and employee relations. It assesses the impact of the new information technology on manufacturing systems, employment levels and types, industrial relations and finally on marketing and external relationships.

This book illustrates the applications of mobile robot systems in warehouse operations with an integrated decision framework for their selection and application. Mobile robot systems are an automation solution in warehouses that make order fulfillment agile, flexible and scalable to cope with the increasing volume and complexity of customer orders. Compared with manual operations, they combine higher productivity and throughput with lower operating costs. As the practical use of mobile robot systems is increasing, decision-makers are confronted with a plethora of decisions. Still, research is lagging in providing the needed academic insights and managerial guidance. The lack of a structured decision framework tailored for mobile robot system applications in warehouses increases the probability of problems when choosing automation systems. This book demonstrates the characteristics of mobile robot systems which reinforce warehouse managers in identifying, evaluating and choosing candidate systems through multiple criteria. Furthermore, the managerial decision framework covering decisions at strategic, tactical and operational levels in detail helps decision-makers to implement a mobile robot solution step-by-step. This book puts special emphasis on change management and operational control of mobile robots using path planning and task allocation algorithms. The book also introduces focus areas that require particular attention to aid the efficiency and practical application of these systems, such as facility layout planning, robot fleet sizing, and human-robot interaction. It will be essential reading for academics and students working on digital warehousing and logistics, as well as practitioners in warehouses looking to make informed decisions.

This book outlines an integrative framework for business-model innovation in the paradigm of the Internet of Things. It elaborates several tools and methodologies for the quantitative, qualitative, analytical and effectual evaluation, and analyzes their applicability and efficiency for several phases of the business-model innovation process. As such, it provides guidance to managers, decision-makers and entrepreneurs on how to systematically employ the business-model concept with the aim of achieving sustainable competitive advantages. For researchers the book introduces cases and examples for successful business-model innovation and presents an integrated approach to the methods and tools applied.

Social Mobility for the 21st Century addresses experiences of social mobility, and the detailed processes through which entrenched, intergenerationally transmitted privilege is reproduced. Contributions include (but are not limited to) family relationships, students' encounters with higher education, narratives of work careers, and 'mobility identities'. The book intends to challenge both the framework of the more traditional approach, and the politicisation of mobility which casts 'mobility' as a possession, a commodity or a character trait, and threatens to castigate the 'non-mobile' as carrying a personal responsibility for their situation. This book presents critical analyses of routes into social mobility, the experience of social mobility, and the political and social implications of social mobility's 'panacea' status. Drawing on the work of established scholars and more recent entrants, the chapters offer a fresh look at social mobility, opening up the topic to a wider readership among the profession and beyond, and stimulating further debate. This book will appeal to higher level students and scholars of sociology alike, as well as having a broad cross-disciplinary appeal.