This book focuses on the cultural challenges often faced by international managers and global business operations. In the last few decades, the world has witnessed unprecedented economic turmoil, volatility, and uncertainty which has altered the political dynamics and sociocultural landscape around the globe and directly or indirectly affected international business activities. Further, new markets have opened up in every corner of the world. Brazil, Russia, India, and China, collectively known as BRIC, are strong emerging economic powers similar to the once captivated 'Asian Tigers' such as Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan which rose decades ago. The emergence of these markets has heightened both the opportunities and challenges for national and international businesses. Multinational firms are gradually expanding in the emerging markets and are expected to become giants in the foreseeable future. As they expand, they also need to assume increasing social responsibilities in a global context, and it is important that the ways business is conducted are developed accordingly. As such, understanding the practices, challenges, and strategies that companies have developed is critical to global firm's success. Against this background, the book highlights the importance of understanding cultural elements when managing multicultural human behaviors in the workplace. Based on conceptual and empirical work, it pushes the frontiers of knowledge of this emerging field in international business setup and management, and explores how globalization is changing the way in which multinational firms formulate their business strategies. "The editors of this text bring a wealth of expertise in this area, as is evidenced by their choice of topics, and the strength of the experts they have invited to contribute to the book. The combined chapters provide both strategic guidance as well as a focus on operational concerns that may arise in international business including expatriation and human resource mobility. The authors not only correctly identify the oncoming challenges, but also present evidence regarding the likely solutions such as culture and innovation and global change management. Overall, this book will be a tremendous resource for scholars in the international business field, but I believe the audience will be much wider. The international team of editors and authors bring a wide range of perspective as well as real-world contextual knowledge that will be useful for scholars and practitioners who seek to leverage culture and human capital to advance international business and drive the global economy. I applaud the editors for their vision and leadership in guiding us through one of the most challenging contemporary research areas and through one of the most pressing challenges of our day." -Dr. Richard L. Griffith, Executive Director, Institute for Cross Cultural Management, Florida Institute of Technology, Melbourne, FL, USA

The Yearbook on Space Policy, edited by the European Space Policy Institute (ESPI), is the reference publication analysing space policy developments. Each year it presents issues and trends in space policy and the space sector as a whole. Its scope is global and its perspective is European. The Yearbook also links space policy with other policy areas. It highlights specific events and issues, and provides useful insights, data and information on space activities. The first part of the Yearbook sets out a comprehensive overview of the economic, political, technological and institutional trends that have affected space activities. The second part of the Yearbook offers a more analytical perspective on the yearly ESPI theme and consists of external contributions written by professionals with diverse backgrounds and areas of expertise. The third part of the Yearbook carries forward the character of the Yearbook as an archive of space activities. The Yearbook is designed for government decision-makers and agencies, industry professionals, as well as the service sectors, researchers and scientists and the interested public.

This book uses sound theoretical frameworks and econometric techniques to rigorously analyze and explain the conditions of sustainable growth in agriculture. It further investigates how management of natural resources and technological advances can enhance productivity and ensure sustainable growth in agriculture. Optimal control theory, dynamic optimization problems and theory of risk and uncertainty are extensively used to create theoretical models for analyzing agricultural growth. The results demonstrate that crop diversification, rainwater harvesting and the use of organic fertilizers can ensure growth in agriculture from a dynamic perspective. Further, they show how excessive depletion of ground water, intensive farming and overuse of chemicals in connection with the adoption of modern technology in agriculture have placed tremendous strains on natural resources like land and water, and have called into question the sustainability of growth in the farming sector.

This book examines the impact of industry 4.0, and constructs a strategic digital transformation operational framework to prepare for it. It begins by examining the background of industry 4.0, exploring the industrial internet, new business models and disruptive technologies, as well as the challenges that this revolution brings for industries and manager. The research enhances our understanding of strategic digital transformation framework within industry 4.0. It will be valuable reading for academics working in the field of industry 4.0 and strategy, as well as practitioners interested in enhancing their firms' readiness for industry 4.0.

This book places knowledge, learning and innovation at the heart of cross-sector collaborations. Collaboration for innovation is a topic that has attracted widespread interest from academics, business strategists and government officials. To date the collaborations have focused on the performance management process and more specifically on how to encourage collaboration. However, businesses across the world are realizing that for cross-sector collaboration to be successful, it is necessary for firms to share knowledge and innovation through a process of learning. The book contributes to this by providing fresh insights into ways to stimulate cross-sector collaboration. It presents diverse methods and approaches to unify the dimensions of knowledge, learning and innovation and discusses how collaboration can be created, sustained, and expanded.

This book highlights the innovations in textile fibres, that is the starting point of the supply chain. There are numerous innovations made in terms of making the existing fibres sustainable and also to discover new sustainable fibres. This book deals with those innovative sustainable textile fibres in detail. It also presents an overview of various current textile fibres, their issues associated with sustainability and how new, sustainable fibres overcome those issues. Finally it discusses the challenges and implications of these sustainable fibres on technical and economic fronts.

Will higher pay provide an incentive for better work? Can productivity be increased by changing the way workers are compensated? In response to the urgent need to improve productivity performance in American industry, leading economists examine alternative compensation schemes to assess their efficiency in raising productivity.

Over the years a number of suggestions have been made for improving labor productivity by changing the manner in which laborers are compensated for their efforts. The ideas presented and analyzed in this volume have all been put into practice, in modified form or on a small scale, in the United States or elsewhere. Some are new; others quite old.

David I. Levine and Laura D'Andrea Tyson consider the effects of employee participation in decisionmaking on firm performance, and Martin L. Weitzman and Douglas L. Kruse discuss the implications of profit sharing and related forms of pay for group performance. Michael A. Conte and Jan Svejnar analyze employee stock ownership plans in the United States and other forms of worker ownership in Europe; Masanore Hashimoto uses a transaction-cost perspective to assess Japanese employment and wage systems. Daniel J. B. Mitchell, David Lewin, and Edward E. Lawler III give an overall analysis of traditional and alternative pay systems, their history, development, and curent use, and recommend further experimentation with alternative compensation plans to ensure more adaptability on the part of U.S. firms. Blinder provides an overview of the findings and conclusions.

This book examines key aspects of the increasingly important phenomenon of reshoring - the decision of companies to reverse offshoring by bringing manufacturing back from overseas. The aim is to equip readers with a full understanding of the current extent of reshoring, its drivers, and the associated opportunities and challenges. The impact of governments' economic policies on the location choices of entrepreneurs in an era of globalization is carefully analyzed, drawing on experiences in the United States and Italy, where contrasting encouragement is provided for reshoring decisions. The effect on reshoring of recent developments regarding technology, the environment, and other factors is assessed in depth, and readers will also find close scrutiny of the relationship between reshoring and manufacturing performance. The book will be of interest to all academics, researchers, and practitioners with an interest in the manufacturing industry and will be an excellent teaching aid for a variety of courses in different disciplines at both undergraduate and postgraduate level.

This book is the first of two volumes presenting a business model to add value through Procurement. Including several case studies of successful implementation, it demonstrates how the increasing complexity of the business environment requires a significant intervention on the management of processes and information within individual organizations and through inter-company relations. Agile Procurement presents the application of the Agile method which optimises and digitizes processes in order to reduce wastage and defects. As a method, tool and a culture aimed at effectiveness, efficiency and economy of organisations, agile procurement requires a change of paradigm. This volume examines these areas of improvement and presents best practice in improving processes. Each chapter of the book presents and substantiates the costs and benefits of process improvement through agile procurement. This is is seen as the integration of Lean Six Sigma and digitization.

Power and influence are key processes in organizations, and anyone wanting to learn how to lead or manage organizations effectively must first understand the dynamics associated with such processes. One interesting but not surprising fact about knowledge in this area is that scientific theory and empirical research are not new, having first appeared about 50 years ago. However, the rate of knowledge advancement in this domain has not been rapid, and there is still much to learn about organizational power and influence processes. Thus, this fifth volume in Research in Management is devoted to highlighting new theoretical and empirical perspectives that advance the frontiers of knowledge about power and influence in organizations.The chapters of this volume are all related to power and influence, albeit conceptualized somewhat differently and dealing with different substantive domains. However, that these chapters represent interesting and important contributions to knowledge concerning power and influence in organizations, and that each should spark future research that will further enhance the field.

Asia is a continent of contradictions and boundaries; it offers exciting business opportunities, but is also characterized by unpredictability and conflict. While flexibility and creativity are in the DNA of many startups in China, major players like Xiaomi and Alibaba have also emerged as global giants, challenging established global competitors. The authors of this book show that these companies are crossing various boundaries - between cultures, mindsets, and perspectives. At the same time, Western companies entering Asian markets face challenges that are very different from those on their home turf. This book addresses the needs of current and future managers doing business in Asia, who need to understand the individual, social and business challenges that can arise from crossing boundaries. The respective case studies provide essential insights on how several Asian companies have made impressive strides towards becoming established players; how the revival of local brands and growing pride in local products has become a major challenge for global competition; how the need to actively practice corporate social responsibility in Asian markets is currently challenging many companies; and how the need for individual and team coaching among the members of management to support a company's development has grown tremendously, calling for new solutions.

Resource Allocation (RA) involves the distribution and utilization of available resources in the system. Because resource availability is usually scarce and expensive, it becomes important to find optimal solutions to such problems. Thus RA problems represent an important class of problems faced by mathematical programmers. This book focuses on development of models and heuristics for six new and complex sub-classes of RA problems in Supply Chain (SC) networks, focusing on bi-objectives, dynamic input data, and multiple performance measures based allocation and integrated allocation, and routing with complex constraints. It considers six set of variants of the RA problems normally encountered in practice but have not yet been studied. These variants of the classical RA are complex and pertaining to both manufacturing and service industry.

Addressing the area of shared leadership, also known as collective or distributed leadership, this edited book embraces the underlying idea that leadership is a dynamic process that intersects closely with followership. While some authors present rigorously researched qualitative and quantitative case studies that investigate the dynamics of followership in distributive leadership in terms of collective decision-making, leadership identity, roles and demographic composition of groups in a variety of settings, other authors take a critical look at distributed leadership models by viewing them through the lens of nature and ecosystems as well as human development processes. The chapters aim to inspire readers to challenge the current definition of leadership and explore more inclusive and holistic paradigms. Distributed Leadership provides a comprehensive and constructive contribution to the field of leadership and will be an essential read for academics and scholar-practitioners interested in business management.

Why does management encounter people problems whenever organizations attempt to change? Green and Butkus say this occurs because organizations overlook one of the most critical problems of change: how employees react it emotionally. Change is not about work processes or information systems alone. It is also about what people believe and feel--emotions such as anger, anxiety, confusion, and fear. Yet managers are usually unaware of these things, and those who are aware usually lack skills to manage these emotions effectively. They tend to rely on traditional incentive systems, which usually do not work. What does work? The one approach that has been applied consistently with positive results is Green's belief system of motivation and performance.

Green and Butkus show how the belief system helps to bring negative feelings and convictions to the surface. They provide ways to identify the underlying emotional problems and find effective solutions. The belief system works, say the authors, because it goes directly to the source of the problem--employees themselves--to discover why motivation and performance problems occur and what can be done to solve them. This book describes applications of the belief system in a variety of work situations, including a recent effort at organizational transformation with AT&T's Business Communications Services (BCS) Division. It outlines in detail the process that BCS used to implement the belief system, starting at the highest management levels and cascading down to the organization's front lines. With a clear exposition of the belief systeM's theoretical underpinnings and nuts-and-bolts methods, Green and Butkus provide executive decision makers and planners throughout the organization with critical insights into the pitfalls in the implementation process and workable guidance on how to avoid them.

Businesses must constantly adapt to a dynamically changing environment that requires choosing an adaptive and dynamic information architecture that has the flexibility to support both changes in the business environment and changes in technology. In general, information systems reengineering has the objective of extracting the contents, data structures, and flow of data and process contained within existing legacy systems in order to reconstitute them into a new form for subsequent implementation. Information Systems Reengineering for Modern Business Systems: ERP, Supply Chain and E-Commerce Management Solutions covers different techniques that could be used in industry in order to reengineer business processes and legacy systems into more flexible systems capable of supporting modern trends such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), supply chain management systems and e-commerce. This reference book also covers other issues related to the reengineering of legacy systems, which include risk management and obsolescence management of requirements.

India is still perceived by some as a developing country that has yet to create world-class products of its own. However, this book shows that in recent years India has emerged as a lead market for frugality-driven innovations that are affordable, robust and successful even outside its geographic boundaries. Many global companies have recognized these changes and are ramping up their local R&D capabilities. At the same time, several Indian firms are venturing out to international shores and gaining access to new markets. Using a top-down approach, the book takes a closer look at systems of innovation at work and presents examples of successful, corporate innovations in multiple industries and their contextual conditions.

This book highlights the concept and applications of Remanufactured Fashion. The first book on this subject, it covers reverse logistics, exemplars, and case studies of remanufactured fashion design. Textile waste is a major issue for all countries, and converting that waste into useful products offers a sensible solution. Remanufactured Fashion is one such sustainable waste management strategy. It involves the conversion of discarded garments into useful retail products, without which they would be dumped at landfills, posing a number of environmental issues. Remanufacturing recovers a product's inherent value once that product no longer fulfills the user's desired needs. The application and use of discarded clothing in remanufacturing processes could greatly reduce the percentage of clothing waste (and mitigate related waste management issues), while also contributing to resource conservation. There has been scant research investigating what is actually involved in the fashion remanufacturing process and how the process could be up-scaled to the mass market in order to achieve greater environmental gains. This book addresses that gap in the literature and examines all aspects pertaining to the concept and applications of Remanufactured Fashion.

Examining the importance of cultural attitudes on human resource practices, this book addresses an important, but often neglected aspect of cross-cultural leadership. First providing an overview of globalization processes and a description of the global mindset concept, the author discusses how the mindset of a manager can influence cross-cultural leadership behavior and behavioral intentions. Global Mindset and Cross-Cultural Behavior: Improving Leadership Effectiveness shows how an intercultural and global approach improves managerial attitudes towards different cultural values, intercultural interactions and motivation. Using a behavioral intentions model to provide a tool for predicting cross-cultural leadership behavior, the author demonstrates how this can be applied to human resource strategy and practice.

This book provides a practical approach to designing and implementing a Knowledge Management (KM) Strategy. The book explains how to design KM strategy so as to align business goals with KM objectives. The book also presents an approach for implementing KM strategy so as to make it sustainable. It covers all basic KM concepts, components of KM and the steps that are required for designing a KM strategy. As a result, the book can be used by beginners as well as practitioners. Knowledge management is a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, capturing, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing all of an enterprise's information assets. These assets may include databases, documents, policies, procedures, and previously un-captured expertise and experience in individual workers. Knowledge is considered to be the learning that results from experience and is embedded within individuals. Sometimes the knowledge is gained through critical thinking, watching others, and observing results of others. These observations then form a pattern which is converted in a 'generic form' to knowledge. This implies that knowledge can be formed only after data (which is generated through experience or observation) is grouped into information and then this information pattern is made generic wisdom. However, dissemination and acceptance of this knowledge becomes a key factor in knowledge management. The knowledge pyramid represents the usual concept of knowledge transformations, where data is transformed into information, and information is transformed into knowledge. Many organizations have struggled to manage knowledge and translate it into business benefits. This book is an attempt to show them how it can be done.

This book bridges two essential aspects of assessing and achieving business excellence in 21st-century organizations. The author argues that transnational companies face a twofold challenge: managing global knowledge networks and multicultural project teams on the one hand; and interacting and collaborating across boundaries using global communication technologies, on the other. The author also argues that this dual challenge calls for the creation of a business excellence program that fits and thrives within these multicultural environments. In response, he reviews corporate practices in quality management and business excellence frameworks that have been extensively used on a transnational scale to drive organizational performance. The book approaches quality management as an element that is no longer a choice, but has now become a necessity if companies want to compete in highly globalized environments.

This contributed volume presents the experiences, challenges, trends, and advances in Service Science from Japan's perspective. As the global economy becomes more connected and competitive, many economies depend the service sector on for growth and prosperity. A multi-disciplinary approach to Service Science can potentially transform service industries through research, education, and practice. Offering a forum for best practices in Service Science within Japan, the volume benefits its audience by sharing viewpoints from a wide range of geographical regions and economies. The book is organized as follows: * Foundations of Service Science and the service industry sector * Public/Private sector partnerships, policies, trade in services, future prospects * Contributions from science, social science, management, engineering, design as well as industry sector perspectives * Road-maps, methodology, business development, strategies and innovative models, application of information technology, performance measures, and service system design * Education and workforce development * Case studies from practice, research and educational community * Future Directions in Japan This book includes three Forewords written by key leaders in Service Science:* Takayuki Aso (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science & Technology in Japan) * Yasuhiro Maeda (Director, Service Affairs Policy Division METI) * Norihisa Doi (Professor Emeritus, Keio University and Service Science, Solutions and Foundation Integrated Research (S3FIRE) Program Officer, JST/RISTEX)

This book addresses a broad range of problems commonly encountered in the fields of financial analysis, logistics and supply chain management, such as the use of big data analytics in the banking sector. Divided into twenty chapters, some of the contemporary topics discussed in the book are co-operative/non-cooperative supply chain models for imperfect quality items with trade-credit financing; a non-dominated sorting water cycle algorithm for the cardinality constrained portfolio problem; and determining initial, basic and feasible solutions for transportation problems by means of the "supply demand reparation method" and "continuous allocation method." In addition, the book delves into a comparison study on exponential smoothing and the Arima model for fuel prices; optimal policy for Weibull distributed deteriorating items varying with ramp type demand rate and shortages; an inventory model with shortages and deterioration for three different demand rates; outlier labeling methods for medical data; a garbage disposal plant as a validated model of a fault-tolerant system; and the design of a "least cost ration formulation application for cattle"; a preservation technology model for deteriorating items with advertisement dependent demand and trade credit; a time series model for stock price forecasting in India; and asset pricing using capital market curves. The book offers a valuable asset for all researchers and industry practitioners working in these areas, giving them a feel for the latest developments and encouraging them to pursue further research in this direction.

This book addresses the considerations and factors that accounting professionals should take into account when pivoting from practice to higher education, think tanks, or other non-practitioner roles. Breaking down this transition, the book addresses issues connected to the types of job opportunities, where and when these opportunities might arise, and how any practitioner can reimagine their professional persona. Crafted from a first-hand perspective, the advice and anecdotes included throughout the book add a tangible and real-world feel to the concepts and ideas discussed in this book.

This book provides a comprehensive review of industry 4.0 and its applications, discussing the history of industry evaluation, including industry 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0, and the future structure of industry evaluation. It also examines the effects and impact of various technologies in industry and presents new interdisciplinary business models based on advanced technologies with the help of use cases. Lastly, it highlights the benefits of technological implementation in industry using examples of real-world applications, providing a robust and reliable technological conceptual framework and roadmap for decision-makers in all areas of industry involved transformation.