First published in 1999. The key to successful regional development is more a personality issue than a global one, contends social economist Dr. James Cecora. With a fresh new interdisciplinary approach, Cecora tackles traditional economic theory to show that a distinct type of individual, the 'innovative entrepreneur', can do more to secure economic stability in a particular region than any multinational corporation. Arguing that global economics have spiraled out of control, Cecora builds a case for supporting and promoting the development of entrepreneurs at the local and regional level. These individuals will, he says, work at strengthening the regional economy over the long term because of their permanent attachment to a region, as well as in vested self-interest. Cecora compares the personalities of corporate managers to self-starting entrepreneurs, drawing the conclusion that the risk-taking ability of entrepreneurial types prompts more creative thinking and regionally appropriate action and solutions. This willingness to try new approaches is often a key to success.

Every business area relies on an understanding of statistics to succeed. Statistics for Business and Economics by Carlos Cortinhas and Ken Black shows students that the proper application of statistics in the business world goes hand-in-hand with good decision making. Every statistical tool presented in this book has a business application set in a global context and the many learning features and easy to use structure will engage and reassure each business statistic student. Featuring a strong focus on European cases, data and scenarios throughout, Statistics for Business and Economics provides: *Decision Dilemma each chapter opens with a short case describing a real company or business situation, that raises questions to be answered using techniques presented in the chapter. Answers and explanations are given at the end of the chapter bringing closure. Each chapter uses different cases. *Ethical Considerations box underscores the potential misuse of statistics by discussing such topics as lying with statistics, failing to meet statistical assumptions, failing to include pertinent information, and other matters of principle. * Most cases, data and scenarios are based on real information students will recognise and relate to such as Caffe Nero, Nando s, Raleigh, online shopping, European Banks and more.

Industrialisation has brought great benefits to humankind but now, after 200 years of fossil fuel use, land clearance and pollution, the planet's boundaries are being stretched to their limits. Going beyond these confines would have severe consequences for humankind. To prevent this from happening, government, corporate and community initiatives must focus on reducing the environmental impact of approximately 400 million small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), given that they produce approximately 70% of the world's pollution, 60% of carbon emissions and have a significant impact on land. To date, research shows that SMEs have been environmental laggards and more needs to be understood to improve sustainability in the SME sector. Broadening the researcher's methodological focus, beyond traditional singular approaches, improves knowledge generation and better informs policy and practice. This book paves the way by showing the reader that a mixed method research design is able to provide a deep, diverse and holistic understanding of sustainability and SMEs. Importantly, the book also provides an in-depth mapping of mixed method sustainability and SME research at a regional level. As this book is about environmental sustainability framed in a business context, it will be of interest to researchers, academics, students and those in industry who are enquiring about the environmental sustainability of SMEs.

The world beyond 2020 will be profoundly different from today. Radical transformative technologies are changing the relationship between mankind and machines in a way that even Wells, Orwell, or Jobs could not fathom. Nobody can tell for certain what will emerge from these tectonic shifts, save for the fact that the status quo is already obsolete. In effect, humanity has entered a new age in its evolution: the Symbiocene era. Societal issues notwithstanding, the existential concern for businesses and organizations everywhere is pressing: how to survive, or better yet, thrive in this brave new scary world? The Binary Firm explores the orchestrating strategies to get in front of the technological tsunami that is sweeping the globe. Tsunami is not too strong a word: witness the threat posed by artificial intelligence to the very nature of work. This book constructs a conceptual management framework engineered to anticipate changes and empower the organization to exploit them to its immediate advantage. The exposition goes beyond worn-out buzzwords like innovation, disruption, and collaboration. It dives into the underlying foundation of an organization impacting its financial destiny. This book will resonate with managers and entrepreneurs who may struggle to master the often-mystifying rigors of digital forces. As goes the new adage, every business is a software company. But how to tame this feral beast? Readers will find pragmatic answers herein. No organization can afford the status quo in this era of pervasive interconnections. This is the playbook to change your game and succeed at digitally transforming your organization without breaking the bank.

The world beyond 2020 will be profoundly different from today. Radical transformative technologies are changing the relationship between mankind and machines in a way that even Wells, Orwell, or Jobs could not fathom. Nobody can tell for certain what will emerge from these tectonic shifts, save for the fact that the status quo is already obsolete. In effect, humanity has entered a new age in its evolution: the Symbiocene era. Societal issues notwithstanding, the existential concern for businesses and organizations everywhere is pressing: how to survive, or better yet, thrive in this brave new scary world? The Binary Firm explores the orchestrating strategies to get in front of the technological tsunami that is sweeping the globe. Tsunami is not too strong a word: witness the threat posed by artificial intelligence to the very nature of work. This book constructs a conceptual management framework engineered to anticipate changes and empower the organization to exploit them to its immediate advantage. The exposition goes beyond worn-out buzzwords like innovation, disruption, and collaboration. It dives into the underlying foundation of an organization impacting its financial destiny. This book will resonate with managers and entrepreneurs who may struggle to master the often-mystifying rigors of digital forces. As goes the new adage, every business is a software company. But how to tame this feral beast? Readers will find pragmatic answers herein. No organization can afford the status quo in this era of pervasive interconnections. This is the playbook to change your game and succeed at digitally transforming your organization without breaking the bank.

In the last two decades, the quest for a widely accepted definition of social enterprise has been a central issue in a great number of publications. The main objective of the ICSEM Project (on which this book is based) was to show that the social enterprise field would benefit much more from linking conceptualisation efforts to the huge diversity of social enterprises than from an additional and ambitious attempt at providing an encompassing definition. Starting from a hypothesis that could be termed "the impossibility of a unified definition", the ICSEM research strategy relied on bottom-up approaches to capture the social enterprise phenomenon in its local and national contexts. This strategy made it possible to take into account and give legitimacy to locally embedded approaches, while simultaneously allowing for the identification of major social enterprise models to delineate the field on common grounds at the international level. Social Enterprise in Central and Eastern Europe - the last volume in a series of four ICSEM-based books on social enterprise worldwide - will serve as a key reference and resource for teachers, researchers, students, experts, policy makers, journalists and others who want to acquire a broad understanding of the social enterprise and social entrepreneurship phenomena as they emerge and develop in this region.

First published in 1997, this volume special feature is its combination of practical and psychological behavioural aspects of leadership, presented in an easy readable style, which is designed for practising managers and for business schools. It proposes a new concept of 'the learning leader' and considers: How effective leadership adds real value to organizations The Skills of foresight and vision The impact of leadership on individuals and teams Leadership competencies A blueprint for the Future - Continuous Leadership Development The authors combine academic knowledge with practical experience. Alan Hooper was a senior military officer with the Royal Marines and is now Director of the Centre for Leadership Studies at Exeter University, which runs the only MA/Postgraduate Diploma in Europe. John Potter is a behavioural scientist operating as an independent management consultant.

The rapid success of for-profit colleges and universities (FPCUs) only recently has caught the attention of scholars in academe. The continuing expansion of the proprietary higher education sector has lead to fundamental questions regarding the purpose and function of FPCUs. As new technologies continue to emerge, education is becoming of increasing import to employees seeking to upgrade their skills and employers in search of individuals who possess the necessary expertise and training to help their organizations succeed. For-profit institutions challenge traditional notions of the academy--such as shared governance, tenure, and academic freedom--by utilizing administrative practices that more aptly apply to the corporate arena. Moreover, they exclusively employ non-tenure-track faculty members. This study provides a framework for understanding faculty roles and responsibilities at for profit colleges and universities. The author employs a series of in-depth interviews with 53 faculty members, from four for-profit institutions. Utilizing a cultural framework, the study explores the attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions of faculty work with particular consideration given to faculty member's non-tenure-track status, participation in decision-making activities, and academic freedom. The study examines the culture of the faculty work by asking how the profit-seeking nature of the institution affects their efforts inside and outside of the classroom. The author introduces a new component to the cultural framework that illustrates how the close ties between FPCUs and business and industry affect the nature of faculty work.

First published in 1998, this volume takes an international approach to women's evolving perspectives on self-employment, with a particular focus on women in India. Author Uschi Kraus-Harper draws on ten years of research and interviews, visits and observations, gathering women's stories from around the world. This book deeply explores women's situations, empowerment, changing perceptions of enterprise, the effects of poverty and gender and what success really means. It is about poor women and their relation to self-employment. It is also about why change has come to some women and not to others.

First published in 1997, This book now opens the unduly delayed discussion about how Israel and the USA deal with immigration and how they are transformed by it. Approaching the discussion from the point of view of contemporary immigration research, this book prioritizes the economic processes of immigrant insertion in Israel and the USA, immigrant absorption and assimilation in both countries, policy debates, and women immigrants for extended treatment. Additionally, a photographic section mobilizes the new subject of visual sociology to continue the comparative analysis.

From authors used to operating between the commercial, public and independent sectors of the mixed cultural economy, Understanding Creative Business bridges the gap between creative practice and mainstream business organisation, entrepreneurship and management. Using stories, case studies and exercises it discusses the positioning of creative practice within professional and business development, cultural policy-making and the wider cultural economy, and suggests what the broader field of business and management studies can learn from the informal structure and working practices of creative industries networks. Consideration is given to how ethical and moral value orientations animate creative practice and how they play into the wider debate about social responsibilities within business and public policy. The authors also explore the way creative business practices often coalesce around emergent and self-organized networks and how this signals alternative approaches to management, entrepreneurship, business organisation and collaboration. Above all else this book is about relationships; the practical examples expose the ways creative business can professionalise research, develop and sustain routes to growth through 'open' collaborative innovation and the lessons this holds for more general business innovation and policy engagements with the public domain. Written in accessible language, this book will be useful to researchers, students, educators and practitioners within the creative industries; to those working within cultural policy, arts and cultural management; and to all with an interest in management and leadership.

The Covid-19 pandemic has induced a crisis grasping the world abruptly, simultaneously, and swiftly. As a critical juncture, it ignited a change of era for international business. This book illustrates how governments have dealt with the pandemic and the consequent impacts on international business. It also explores the disrupted operations and responses of businesses as their worldwide interconnectivity has been seriously threatened. The book discourses multidirectional aspects of the effects of Covid-19 on international business, ranging from the juxtaposing forces disrupting globalization and installing a change of era through decoupling of technological, production and knowledge flows to its stimulating aspects to the strategic response on business, industry and state level. The book contains thirty chapters that offer a multidimensional interpretation of impacts of Covid-19 on international business theory and practice. Employing the latest state of knowledge on the topic, the book is aimed at international business audience - scholars, students and managers who need to understand better the nature, scope and scale of the impacts of the pandemic on international business.

The Psychology of Entrepreneurship: New Perspectives is an update of the earlier landmark volume in the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology Organizational Frontiers Series. This new book takes stock of the advances in the field of the psychology of entrepreneurship with all new chapters and presents the latest findings on traditional topics, such as cognition, motivation, affect, personality, and action. The Psychology of Entrepreneurship: New Perspectives compiles research of the most prolific scholars in the field to produce an overview of the most important psychological topics relevant to entrepreneurship. It includes novel insights into topics such as entrepreneurial cognition, intrapreneurship and innovation, leadership, entrepreneurial competencies, action theory, entrepreneurship training, and the process of entrepreneurship. Additionally, the updated volume presents new topics that have become more and more important in entrepreneurship research. These topics include affect, clinical psychology and disorders, biological correlates of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial teams, culture, identity, starting capital, failure and exit, contextual factors, age and demographic change, evidence-based entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurs' well-being. With a collection of authors comprising experts who have developed the field over the last decade, The Psychology of Entrepreneurship: New Perspectives is vital to all students, scholars, and instructors interested in staying abreast of the most current, novel research and insights into the psychology of entrepreneurship.

How to Account for Sustainability offers an inspiring and practical framework for building your company's sustainability efforts. It takes you from concept to innovation and back to action for all aspects of sustainability. Each chapter has four sections: (1) a specific description of a sustainability challenge, (2) an example of a business making a profit by confronting the challenge, (3) an exercise to tease out a range of possible business solutions for you and your company, and (4) simple and memorable takeaways. This short, expert guide is structured around the world's most accepted guidelines for sustainability reporting: the Global Reporting Initiative. By the time you've finished it you'll have a framework for measuring, managing and accounting for sustainability in your business -- in clear, simple and feasible steps.

Analytics is one of a number of terms which are used to describe a data-driven more scientific approach to management. Ability in analytics is an essential management skill: knowledge of data and analytics helps the manager to analyze decision situations, prevent problem situations from arising, identify new opportunities, and often enables many millions of dollars to be added to the bottom line for the organization. The objective of this book is to introduce analytics from the perspective of the general manager of a corporation. Rather than examine the details or attempt an encyclopaedic review of the field, this text emphasizes the strategic role that analytics is playing in globally competitive corporations today. The chapters of this book are organized in two main parts. The first part introduces a problem area and presents some basic analytical concepts that have been successfully used to address the problem area. The objective of this material is to provide the student, the manager of the future, with a general understanding of the tools and techniques used by the analyst.

This book offers a general theoretical framework for approaching innovation and entrepreneurship, using practical and up-to-date examples to demonstrate three different levels of innovation and entrepreneurship: the macro-level, which concerns the impact of innovation activity on economic growth and production systems; the meso-level, which concerns the relations between firms, research institutes and governmental bodies and their role in innovation activity; and the micro-level, which concerns the dynamics of innovations within firms and organisations. Providing a critical overview of existing research and demonstrating the importance of a transdisciplinary framework for studies of innovation and entrepreneurship, the author advances a general concept of 'collective entrepreneurship' that emphasises the social and collaborative nature of innovation and entrepreneurship, thus shedding light on processes of innovation and entrepreneurship as active practices of social construction. As such, it will appeal to scholars of economic sociology, political science, economic geography and economists, as well as those with interests in innovation policy.

The Beatles are considered the most influential popular music act of the twentieth century, widely recognized for their influence on popular culture. The inability of other bands and artists to imitate their fame has prompted questions such as: How did the Beatles become so successful? What factors contributed to their success? Why did they break up? The Beatles and Economics: Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and the Making of a Cultural Revolution answers these questions using the lens of economic analysis. Economics provides the prism for explaining why their success-while legendary in scale-is not mythic. This book explores how the band's commercial achievements were intimately tied to the larger context of economic globalization and rebuilding post-World War II. It examines how the Beatles' time in Hamburg is best understood as an investment in human capital, and why the entrepreneurial growth mindset was critical to establishing a scalable market niche and sustaining the Beatles' ability to lead and shape emerging markets in entertainment and popular music. Later chapters consider how the economics of decision making and organizational theory helps us to understand the band's break-up at its economic peak. This essential text is of interest to anyone interested in the economic dynamics and social forces that shape cultural change.

This book intends to theoretically conceptualize and empirically investigate upcoming and established practices of community-based initiatives in various countries in which both citizens and governments join efforts and capacities to solve wicked issues. It aims to include and compare cases from various countries, departing from the notion that community-based initiatives take place in an institutional context of governmental structures, rules, procedures, regulations, and routines. This leads to government involvement in these initiatives and sharing the public space. Furthermore, the editors take into account what kind of leadership roles, knowledge, and resources are present and how they evolve in this collaborative or coordinative effort, which in turn can enhance the capacities of community-based initiatives. This book joins excellent researchers from renowned universities all over the world, aiming for a balance between upcoming scholars and renowned scholars in the field of community-based initiatives and governance capacity. Contributors were carefully selected on the basis of their experience in the field of community-based initiatives, citizens' engagement and governance capacity approaches. Aimed at researchers and academics, this volume will be of interest to those in the fields of business, economics, public administration, political science, social enterprise, sociology and third sector studies.

The Early Development of the Aviation Industry: Entrepreneurs of the Sky provides an introduction to the world of the early aviation industry and the business endeavours of the original aviators. Many of the first pioneers who flew heavier-than-air planes went on to develop considerable industrial concerns. In doing so they exhibited a number of entrepreneurial qualities, which provide useful case studies for those interested in studying how successful entrepreneurs create or develop opportunities at the inception and emergence of high-tech industries. This book looks at the careers of pioneer aviators in the United States, Britain and France such as A.V. Roe, Thomas Sopwith, Glenn Curtiss and William Boeing. It examines this group of entrepreneurs during the start-up and early development stages of an emerging industry undergoing considerable technological change, and relates this experience to contemporary studies and experiences of entrepreneurship. The book explores what made these men successful in their entrepreneurial endeavours to help promote a better understanding of what makes an entrepreneur and what business and economic conditions are needed to allow such men to be successful. This book makes a major contribution to our knowledge of the development of the twentieth century economy and is essential reading for students and academics who are interested in the development of aviation and the nature of entrepreneurial behaviour.

Information technology has come to play an important role in organizations over the last few decades. Though it began as an entity dealt with by specialists, IT has evolved to become an everyday tool with both operational and strategic impacts. Most modern organizations have adopted different forms of IT, and become dependent on their computer-based information systems and their peripherals for everyday operations. Information technology offers opportunities to increase efficiency, customer value, and competitiveness.

Given the financial investment in IT required by organizations to remain competitive, IT has become a resource that needs to be managed. Management and Information Technology evaluates organizations? utilization of IT including knowledge management and e-learning, accounting, and business relationships. Presenting theories to help the reader understand the varying roles IT can occupy in different organizations, this volume illustrates the ways in which IT has become a key strategic tool.

Why does information technology disappoint or enslave us? Why do so many information systems projects collapse? How can we do better? There are many technical, social, economic and other aspects to consider. How do we ensure we take all these into account as we research ITC or employ them? ICT affects our lives and world more profoundly than ever before. How may we understand it? This book employs philosophy to lay foundations for understanding the complexity of ICT, in five areas: The nature of information and computers, and artificial intelligence; The use of ICT at work and home, for serious and less-serious use; The ICT features that annoy or delight us; Societal issues, such as surveillance, e-government, ICT in developing countries, climate change, what technological progress is and what is the role of ICT as a whole and of the information systems field; ICT development - including computer programming, knowledge engineering and project management. The ideas in this book emerge from five decades of experience of the author with ICT, across industry, the professions and academic life. Information systems researchers will enjoy this book because it offers them new ideas and fresh perspectives. On the 500th anniversary of the European Reformation, this book introduces and applies the Reformational Philosophy of mid-20th-century Dutch thinker, Herman Dooyeweerd, to contemporary challenges of the 21st century. Excitingly, this accessible philosophy is grounded in everyday experience and yields a rich seedbed of ideas, which researchers and practitioners can develop to their advantage.

Plenty of software testing books tell you how to test well; this one tells you how to do it while decreasing your testing budget. A series of essays written by some of the leading minds in software testing, How to Reduce the Cost of Software Testing provides tips, tactics, and techniques to help readers accelerate the testing process, improve the performance of the test teams, and lower costs. The distinguished team of contributors-that includes corporate test leaders, best paper authors, and keynote speakers from leading software testing conferences-supply concrete suggestions on how to find cost savings without sacrificing outcome. Detailing strategies that testers can immediately put to use to reduce costs, the book explains how to make testing nimble, how to remove bottlenecks in the testing process, and how to locate and track defects efficiently and effectively. Written in language accessible to non-technical executives, as well as those doing the testing, the book considers the latest advances in test automation, ideology, and technology. Rather than present the perspective of one or two experts in software testing, it supplies the wide-ranging perspectives of a team of experts to help ensure your team can deliver a completed test cycle in less time, with more confidence, and reduced costs.

First published in 1999, this volume offers contrasting views from a variety of academic disciplines, including agriculture, anthropology, economics, geography, management studies, planning, and sociology, which focus on the single two-fold problem of how to understand these issues and what, practically, might be done about them.

During much of the twentieth century, informal employment and entrepreneurship was commonly depicted as a residue from a previous era. Its continuing presence was seen to be a sign of "backwardness" whilst the formal economy represented "progress". In recent decades, however, numerous studies have revealed not only that informal employment is extensive and persistent but also that it is growing relative to formal employment in many populations. Whilst in the developing world, the informal economy is often found to be the mainstream economy, nevertheless, in the developed world too, informality is currently still estimated to account for notable per cent of GDP. The Informal Economy: Exploring Drivers and Practices intends to engage with these issues, providing a much-need 'contextualised' approach to explain the persistence and growth of forms of informal economic practices and entrepreneurial activities in the twenty-first century. Using a diverse range of empirical case studies from Europe, Africa, North Africa and Asia, this book unpacks the different varieties of forms of informal work and entrepreneurship and provides a critical analysis of existing theorisations used to explain such phenomena. This book's aim is to examine the nature and persistence of informal work and entrepreneurship, across a variety of empirical settings, from within the developed world, the developing world and within transformation economies within post-socialist spaces. Given its worldwide, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approach and recent interest in the informal economies by a number of disciplines and organisations, this book will be of vital reading to those operating in the fields of: Economics, political economy and management, Human and economic geography and Economic anthropology and sociology as well as development studies

Whether it's because of a lack of understanding, poor planning, or a myriad of other things, 50 to 60 percent of the IT effort in most companies can be considered waste. Explaining how to introduce Lean principles to your IT functions to reduce and even eliminate this waste, Lean Management Principles for Information Technology provides the tools and understanding to make better decisions, increase efficiencies, and make IT a major force in delivering sustainable improvements to your supply chain.

The proven Toyota Production System principles described in this book have already helped many IT organizations double and triple their output. It introduces some of the most powerful Lean tools and techniques-including Six Sigma, value stream mapping, and spaghetti charting-and provides a methodology for implementing them to reduce waste in your IT environment. Discussing information production processes, IT systems, and change management through the lens of Lean principles, the book:

• Provides step-by-step guidance through the processes of implementing Lean principles in your IT supply chain management system
• Illustrates successful implementation across a range of industries and countries
• Examines how to use Lean methods to achieve ongoing improvement in IT personnel
• Explains how to implement Lean in the supply chain, while reducing IT cycle time and costs

The text reviews the major management challenges facing IT and illustrates solutions with stories, examples, and case studies of how Lean IT has led to unprecedented improvements in the private and government sectors. Demonstrating how to structure the components of your IT system in accordance with Lean, the book details the measures required to achieve and sustain a world-class Lean IT supply chain management system.