The quality of transport logistics is now recognized as being vital to the success of many organizations. The ability to transport goods quickly, safely, economically and reliably is seen as vital to a nation's prosperity and capacity to compete in a rapidly globalising economy. Logistics has advanced significantly during since the 1980s as companies have appreciated the gains from such initiatives as limiting inventories, making use of "seamless" distribution services and taking advantage of advances in telecommunication and information technologies. Institutional changes, such as deregulation and privatization, have in many countries led to contexts in which these changes could take place. The integration of transportation into the production process through advanced information systems and the application of modern management techniques is now at the centre of logistics. This volume contains commissioned refereed papers that cover the main elements of transport logistics. The authors were selected from around the world and asked to provide critiques of their subject areas as well as a review of the state of the art and case study examples. These up-to-date contributions cover all the main areas of transport logistics, providing those in the field with current information whilst at the same time offering easy access for those who are new to the field and are seeking review material.

Based on extensive archival research, Beyond Market and Hierarchy reconstructs how Fan waged modern China's war of salts. Led by his Jiuda Salt Industries, the nascent refined salt industry battled revenue farmers who, as a group, monopolized the production and distribution of evaporated salt.

The authors describe in detail what makes today's online retailing different and provide 8 central success factors for the new generation of Internet sales. Based on internationally recognized best practices, it becomes obvious what makes online retailers successful. The authors pull together "lessons learned" from the last 10 years, and give readers a tour of the future of online selling.

China's trade surplus is an essential question, but there are many popular misconceptions about it, a fact that prompted the creation of this book, On China's Trade Surplus. It will help readers to understand the manner in which China's foreign trade and China's role in global trade have developed, and to how to benefit from trade with China. In this book, many hot topics are analyzed, such as: What promotes China's trade surplus? Why doesn't it have a trade deficit? What are the relations between trade frictions and China's trade surplus, and how can trade frictions be reduced? What is the deeper meaning of the U.S. trade deficit with China?

The first book focusing specifically on talent management, retention and leadership in the luxury industry. It explores how to lead and manage the people this industry attracts, and the major HR challenges the industry is about to face as the previous generation of luxury pioneers retire and Asia becomes a major player in the luxury world.

Information Systems: The e-Business Challenge Indisputable, e-Business is shaping the future inspiring a growing range of innovative business models. To bring it to the point: the Internet has redefined the way electronic business is performed. In an electronic supported business all relationships are transformed -may it be a seller-to buyer relationship or a an agency-to-citizen relationship. So for instance in commerce new business models incorporate various activities: promoting and communicating company and product information to a global user base; accepting orders and payments for goods and services; providing ongoing customer support; getting feedback and spurring collaboration for a new product development. There are several ways of further differentiating e-Business such as sketching some diversions on various levels: e-Commerce, e-Government; B2C, B2B, B2G, G2C; Customer Relationship Management, Business Intelligence and so on. Further distinctions may follow divergent criteria such as separating in business stages. Thus particular problem domains emerge. They all state of its own guiding the development of adequate information systems.

Brand Revolution offers a radical new approach to brand management. With big brand case studies including L'Oreal and Jaguar, the author draws on her extensive experience as a marketing consultant to put together this highly engaging and practical book for developing, improving and controlling the identity of your brand.

BE 2002 is the second in a series of conferences on eCommerce, eBusiness, and eGovemment organised by the three IFIP committees TC6, TC8, and TCll. As BE 2001 did last year in Zurich, BE 2002 continues to provide a forum for users, engineers, and researchers from academia, industry and government to present their latest findings in eCommerce, eBusiness, and eGovernment applications and the underlying technologies which support those applications. This year's conference comprises a main track with sessions on eGovernment, Trust, eMarkets, Fraud and Security, eBusiness (both B2B and B2C), the Design of systems, eLearning, Public and Health Systems, Web Design, and the Applications of and Procedures for eCommerce and eBusiness, as well as two associated Workshops (not included in these proceedings): eBusiness Models in the Digital Online Music and Online News Sectors; and eBusiness Standardisation - Challenges and Solutions for the Networked Economy. The 47 papers accepted for presentation in these sessions and published in this book of proceedings were selected from 80 submissions. They were rigorously reviewed (all papers were double-blind refereed) before being selected by the International Programme Committee. This rejection rate of almost 50% indicates just how seriously the Committee took its quality control activities.

This volume addresses profound issues in international economics, with contributions from leading researchers on the implications of trade. Empirical studies address preferential trading arrangements, global imbalances and exchange rates, facilitating an understanding of how the economy functions and enabling detailed policy evaluation.

In the time-worn traditions of the transportation industry, ship pers and carriers regard one another as enemies. There is, to be sure, a certain degree of validity to such a viewpoint. An element of conflict will naturally be present in any vendor-purchaser relationship. The two, after all, are seeking distinctly different things from that relationship; and to a con siderable extent each party's success in realizing its own goals must be achieved at the expense of the other. At the same time, however, viewing that relationship as strictly zero-sum-a gain by one side always resulting in an equal and offsetting loss by the other-is a gross misconception. It overlooks the key reality that, no matter which party comes closest to its own objectives, the relationship, and the business transactions that flow from it, must ultimately benefit both. Without that level of mutual benefit the relationship will simply not exist (or will soon founder if it somehow does come into being); for it is only the self-interest of the two parties that impels them to establish and continue that relationship at all. In transportation, however, this element of mutuality-the attitude that the parties share a common interest in nurturing their relationship-is often forgotten. Instead of working to gether as, fundamentally, partners in a business transaction from which both expect to derive gains, they dedicate the bulk of their energies to fighting, rather than cooperating, with one another."

Post-colonial Africa is littered with regional trade agreements that amounted to little more than a photo opportunity for the leaders that signed them. This book explores conventional explanations for past failures and posits a new theory rooted in the symbiotic relationship between authoritarian politics and crony-capitalism.

Written by experts in Luxury and Fashion Management at SKEMA Business School this exciting new book offers a new perspective that challenges the established rules of the luxury and fashion industry. The authors and contributors examine the evolution of luxury strategy and how the luxury industry is being redefined in the twenty-first century.

In the fall of 1990, the Danish government started a comprehensive research pro gramme to improve the competitiveness of the Danish food sector: The Research and Development Programme in the Danish Food Sector (Det F Ildevareteknologiske Forsk nings- og Udviklingsprogram, F0TEK). The programme was based on a combination of basic research to be carried out by universities and other research institutions, and a series of collaboration projects between researchers and food companies. The programme was originally designed as a technological research programme. However, in the planning phases of the research programme, the view that the development of new technologies and products may not be sufficient to improve competitiveness made some ground. A small comer of the overall research effort was therefore set aside for market-oriented research. This comer was filled by the research programme Market-based process and product innovation in the food sector (MAPP). MAPP was a joint research programme in which researchers from several Danish universities and business schools participated; it was coordinated by the Aarhus School of Business. MAPP set out to achieve a difficult task: to conduct high quality research on various aspects of the marketing of food products, to do so in cooperation with food companies, and to win under standing and recognition from the colleagues in the food technology departments."

Wachsende Komplexitat pragt die Unternehmenswelt seit Jahren auf fast allen Ebenen. Die Autoren beschreiben einen praxiserprobten, ganzheitlichen Ansatz, um Komplexitat in Unternehmen beherrschbar zu machen und Wettbewerbsvorteile zu generieren. Dafur verbinden sie Methoden aus Wissensmanagement, Kundenbeziehungsmanagement (CRM) und Change Management mithilfe von wissensbasierten Softwarelosungen. Der Band bietet Managern und Projektleitern einen Handlungsleitfaden zum Aufbau von Mehrwerten fur unterschiedliche interne und externe Zielgruppen."

Maritime transport has been the main driver of trade growth, and the emergence and development of a global economy. This collection of essays from distinguished economists and historians takes an international and comparative perspective, covering topics ranging from technological advance and the role of the state to maritime business development.

ED-L2L, Learning to Live in the Knowledge Society, is one of the co-located conferences of the 20th World Computer Congress (WCC2008). The event is organized under the auspices of IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) and is to be held in Milan from 7th to 10th September 2008. ED-L2L is devoted to themes related to ICT for education in the knowledge society. It provides an international forum for professionals from all continents to discuss research and practice in ICT and education. The event brings together educators, researchers, policy makers, curriculum designers, teacher educators, members of academia, teachers and content producers. ED-L2L is organised by the IFIP Technical Committee 3, Education, with the support of the Institute for Educational Technology, part of the National Research Council of Italy. The Institute is devoted to the study of educational innovation brought about through the use of ICT. Submissions to ED-L2L are published in this conference book. The published papers are devoted to the published conference themes: Developing digital literacy for the knowledge society: information problem solving, creating, capturing and transferring knowledge, commitment to lifelong learning Teaching and learning in the knowledge society, playful and fun learning at home and in the school New models, processes and systems for formal and informal learning environments and organisations Developing a collective intelligence, learning together and sharing knowledge ICT issues in education - ethics, equality, inclusion and parental role Educating ICT professionals for the global knowledge society Managing the transition to the knowledge society

Ontologies have been developed and investigated for some time in artificial intelligence to facilitate knowledge sharing and reuse. More recently, the notion of ontologies has attracted attention from fields such as databases, intelligent information integration, cooperative information systems, information retrieval, electronic commerce, enterprise application integration, and knowledge management. This broadened interest in ontologies is based on the feature that they provide a machine-processable semantics of information sources that can be communicated among agents as well as between software artifacts and humans. This feature makes ontologies the backbone technology of the next web generation, i.e., the Semantic Web. Ontologies are currently applied in areas such as knowledge management in large company-wide networks and call centers, and in B2C, B2G, and B2B electronic commerce. In a nutshell, ontologies enable effective and efficient access to heterogeneous and distributed information sources. Given the increasing amount of information available online, this kind of support is becoming more important day by day.

The author systematically introduces the notion of ontologies to the non-expert reader and demonstrates in detail how to apply this conceptual framework for improved intranet retrieval of corporate information and knowledge and for enhanced Internet-based electronic commerce. He also describes ontology languages (XML, RDF, and OWL) and ontology tools, and the application of ontologies.

In addition to structural improvements, the second edition covers recent developments relating to the Semantic Web, and emerging web-based standard languages.

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The internet and the electronic economy are a technological revolution whose secular importance is apparent. The internet eliminates the temporal and spatial constraints on the exchange of information. It changes deeply the world of production and of labour. It transforms the exchange relationships between producers and consumers as well as between the suppliers within the supply-chain. The electronic economy is able to generate more accurate con sumer profiles and, therefore, a more powerful and effective marketing di rected to the individual consumer. There is no industry that is not undergoing thorough changes caused by the internet. The volume at hand gives an analysis of the internet revolution. It covers questions reaching form the highly controversial thesis of the end of property rights in the internet caused by the non-rivalry of the "consumption" of in formation to questions regarding the repercussions of the internet on our understanding of the human person. Technological changes like the introduction of the electronic economy pose the question of how to handle it and how to manage reasonably its ethi cal problems and dilemmas. The ethical problems and the business ethics of the electronic economy in the fields of production and labour, of consump tion, and in handling trust and the abuse of trust are analysed by the contribu tions from applied ethics and business ethics."

As potentially the largest retail market, China has attracted a great number of foreign retail operations. Based on case study research, this book provides valuable insights international retailers need for success in China. The newly developed theoretical model helps to extend the body of knowledge on firm internationalization.

This book investigates the transfer of parent country organizational practices by the retailers to their Chinese subsidiaries, providing insights into employment relations in multinational retail firms and changing labour-management systems in China, as well as their impact on consumer culture.

China has become such an important element of the global economy that its influence cannot be ignored in almost any field of endeavour. The phenomenal impact of FDI in China and its (largely trade-related) consequences has been well documented and now there is a significant literature on the phenomenon of outward investment from China too. This book is an in depth study of the international business relationships of China covering both inward and outward foreign direct investment, its impact and related theoretical and policy issues. This volume of highly renowned author Peter Buckley's collected papers from 2005-8 continues his interest in the theory of international business (Section I) and policies towards foreign direct investment (FDI) (Section IV) but has a major concentration on China, both as regards outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) from China (Section II) and FDI in China (Section III).

Learning how to build useful e-commerce applications is challenging and exciting because it involves knowing a little about a lot of different computing technologies including networking, security, programming, human computer interface design and database design. This is a book that brings breadth in its coverage of technologies and discusses how to integrate them to achieve business aims.

It covers the full range of relevant web technologies and protocols and it focuses particularly on techniques that are most suitable for e-commerce application building.

"highly recommendable ...The major strength of the book is the fact that it is comprehensive, and that by following the code examples, readers will be able to actually see how e-commerce web sites can be put together. "
Fintan Clear , Brunel University

"the text clearly provides an extremely full and appropriate coverage of the issues. As such it has major market potential as a core text for both postgraduate and undergraduate e-commerce programmes."
Ian Chaston, Reader in Management University of Plymouth, UK

"a very comprehensive and up to date description of the use of the internet to buy and sell goods and services. It covers all the major types of e-commerce, Business to Business (B2B), Business to Consumer (B2C), Consumer to Business (C2B) and Consumer to Consumer (C2C)."
David Wortley, Mass Mitec.

"the technical content is excellent"
Maxime Bombardier, Senior Computer Systems Analyst, Sintaks, a Canon USA Division

The aim of EUROPEAN RETAIL RESEARCH is to publish interesting manuscripts of high quality and innovativeness with a focus on retail researchers, retail lecturers, retail students and retail executives. As it has always been, retail executives are part of the target group and the knowledge transfer between retail research and retail management remains a part of the publication's concept.

Imagine planning an event like the Olympics. Now imagine planning the same event but not knowing when or where it will take place, or how many will attend. This is what humanitarian logisticians are up against. Oversights result in serious consequences for the victims of disasters. So they have to get it right, fast.

Gaming markets are evolving rapidly. Spearheading this change is the internet, which has enabled cross-border gambling on an unprecedented scale. This book explores the changing landscape of the gaming market and is a crucial companion for all looking for informed discussion on the future of gaming.