This book discusses theories and frameworks addressing the adaptability and sustainable competitive advantages of firms, including dynamic capabilities. This work develops and examines a concept that makes dynamic capabilities more tangible and provides guidance to managers and researchers on how to develop and maintain sustainable competitiveness. The focus thereby lies on sensing, i.e., the capability of firms to recognize opportunities and threats in their environment, and its effect on a firm's financial success. The insights from this work will shift managers' attention from the more static resource-based view to the dynamic capabilities perspective on firms.

This book examines the complex relationship between corruption and entrepreneurship in countries of varying levels of economic development. The authors explore the ways in which social welfare policies have changed in current economic and political environments as well as key challenges faced by the welfare policies. In addition, this book addresses three key questions with regard to the impact of corruption on institutions and social welfare: * Is corruption an additional burden in extensive regulatory environment on different types of entrepreneurship---necessity entrepreneurship, opportunity entrepreneurship, total entrepreneurial activity, self-employment, and newly registered firms? * Is corruption helpful for entrepreneurs who have aspiration to operate outside their home country border in highly regulated environment? * How does corruption affect income distribution generated through entrepreneurial activity? Entrepreneurship is an important factor for local and national economies as it generates employment and income that are crucial for economic development. Corruption can significantly influence the nature of decisions made by entrepreneurs, with profound effects on business creation, institutional development, and economic performance. For example, an entrepreneur with resources and networks might be able to influence the regulatory agencies to overlook violations, expedite permits, or bribe corrupt program administrators to violate the rules of distribution, exacerbating income inequality and obstructing economic growth and development. While corruption is not a new phenomenon, the current globalized economy has introduced trade into the corruption question as globalization puts pressure on countries to open borders to attract investments and gain a competitive advantage. However, many country level institutions do not always change as fast as the economic activity across borders, which can encourage corruption in order to bypass inefficient regulations and to successfully engage in entrepreneurship. The authors of the book examine this phenomenon. Featuring policy implications and case studies, this book will appeal to graduate students, academics, professionals, practitioners, and researchers in entrepreneurship, international business and public policy.

This book examines the impact of multinational enterprises (MNEs) on local economies, and presents selected case studies of MNEs operating in low income countries. By balancing external social and environmental costs against its corresponding benefits, the book demonstrates that MNEs can have a positive net-impact on local development if they build up social capital by embedding themselves in local economies and engaging responsibly with local stakeholders. By doing so MNEs contribute to inclusive growth, a central pillar of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. In this context, the book challenges popular narratives in civil society and academia that frame foreign direct investment (FDI) merely as a threat to human rights and sustainable development. Moreover, it offers practical guidance for globally operating businesses seeking to establish progressive Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategies of their own.

This book is designed to meet the needs of CFOs, accounting and financial professionals interested in leveraging the power of data-driven customer insights in management accounting and financial reporting systems. While academic research in Marketing has developed increasingly sophisticated analytical tools, the role of customer analytics as a source of value creation from an Accounting and Finance perspective has received limited attention. The authors aim to fill this gap by blending interdisciplinary academic rigor with practical insights from real-world applications. Readers will find thorough coverage of advanced customer accounting concepts and techniques, including the calculation of customer lifetime value and customer equity for internal decision-making and for external financial reporting and valuation. Beyond a professional audience, the book will serve as ideal companion reading for students enrolled in undergraduate, graduate, or MBA courses.

An important update to this roadmap for the development of a corporate intelligence program Market intelligence is the distinct discipline by which organisations systematically gather and process information about their external operating environment in order to facilitate accurate and confident decision making that is based on insight. For companies to thrive in the global post-recession marketplace, their management needs future-oriented business information. The Handbook of Market Intelligence provides a one stop shop, step-by-step roadmap for establishing, conducting and further developing corporate intelligence programs within an organisation and then shows how organisations can turn market data into actionable insights. Full of best practice advice from hundreds of real-life international case studies Outlines the anticipated future trends in Strategic Market Intelligence based on unique global survey data Provides guidance on extracting relevant, useful and accurate market information that can be used for successful business development

Wilhelm Griga explores benefits of inpatriation, issues, remediation strategies, and factors influencing inpatriate assignment effectiveness to better fulfill individual and organizational demands. The author covers inpatriation theory and presents empirical research results on inpatriates from China and USA in Germany. Antecedents to inpatriate's competence build-up, goal achievement, and career development are explored and established. Significant insights and recommendations on the transfer of employees from foreign subsidiaries of multinational corporations to the headquarters of the parent company are provided.

In recent years, luxury goods markets have faced significant changes that have influenced both the dynamics of the competition, as well as their strategies. The principal changes include the following: new geographical market development, such as in the Far East, India, and some parts of Africa (these countries are added to a list of already relevant countries that are involved in luxury goods consumption, such as the Emirates, Russia, and South America); diffusion of new media and new technologies in communication, which is characterized by a high degree of interaction; the evolution of distribution channels is underway - these channels are moving towards new forms of integration that utilize both physical digital channels. This has forced firms to revise their strategies and implement multichannel marketing strategies to continue to operate in increasingly international markets that are characterized by increasingly more demanding and informed consumers. This book will enable readers to gain a clear insight into how the luxury goods market operates and amongst other things, focuses on: recent internet and social media strategies adopted by luxury companies and their brands; how luxury companies manage their communication and distribution channels to compete in the market and the impact of digital marketing on their competition; the main models of direct and indirect distribution in the digital channels; how consumers react to multichannel strategies; trends, social commerce and CSR and how luxury companies react; identifying the different social media strategies for luxury companies.

Addressing the entire care chain, this book presents the outcomes of advanced research on healthcare operations management based on real-world data and practices in China. It includes hands-on methods and applications in this interdisciplinary research field, which combines healthcare service, operations management, industrial engineering and information technology. The content is divided into three parts, reflecting the entire care chain. The first part discusses the pre-hospital service stage and explores resource deployment problems in emergency medical service, such as ambulance allocation. The second part focuses on inpatient care services, including staffing and task allocation among nurses and doctors based on multi-project management under uncertainties. In addition, a highly promising diagnosis approach is proposed and a specific algorithm is derived on the basis of real-world datasets which can improve the diagnosis accuracy remarkably. In turn, the third part considers the post-hospital service stage, which most often takes place at community hospitals, and provides a quantitative evaluation and optimization of scheduling for tasks and team members for home care services. The book is intended for a broad audience, including students, researchers and practitioners working in various areas of healthcare management, service management, and operations management.

The nature of work is changing, due to demographic shifts, globalization, and digitization. Regional local labor markets are in global competition for (highly) qualified and specialized workers. At the same time, the workforce's desire for flexibility and the increasing speed at which skill requirements are changing are producing disparities at the spatial, social, and economic levels. This book discusses the global and local drivers behind these developments. It explores the factors which cause global inequalities between urban and rural areas, and highlights how cities, regions and countries attract these sought-after employees to address skills shortages. The book includes an in-depth case study on high-skilled workers in South Tyrol, Italy. No single academic discipline can adequately capture the dynamics of the future labor market, and the authors therefore take an interdisciplinary approach, combining insights from different disciplines. This book will be a valuable resource for policymakers, students and researchers seeking to understand the driving forces behind the ever-changing labor market and the future of high-skilled work.

This edited volume examines global power-rivalry in and around South Asia through Bangladeshi lenses using imperfect and overlapping interest concentric-circles as a template. Dynamics from three transitions -the United States exiting the Cold War, China emerging as a global-level power, and India's eastern interests squaring off with China's Belt Road Initiative, BRI-help place China, India, and the United States (in alphabetical order) in Bangladesh's "inner-most" circle, China, India, and the United States in a "mid-stream" circle, and the United States and Latin America, among other countries, in the "outer-most" circle, depending on the issue. In an atmosphere of short-term gains over-riding long-term considerations, the desperate, widespread search for infrastructural funding inside South Asia enhances China's value, raises local heat, releases new challenges, with costly default consequences looming, issue-specific analysis overtaking formal bilateral relations and a stubborn uncertainty riddling the Bangladeshi air as its policy preferences stubbornly show more certainty.

Based on two experimental studies Christine Cowen-Elstner explores the possibilities of influencing the sensory product perception and thereby also the perceived product quality. The results of her studies not only show that this influence is happening but also that the expectation and experience of an individual play a crucial role in this context. Based on these findings she then develops recommendations for product design and communication.

Contemporary research in strategic management, with an emphasis on different tools and skills created by scholars in the field, is evident throughout Neostrategic Management. This book is specially designed to accommodate the needs of strategy students worldwide in our fast-changing twenty-first century. The authors integrate cutting-edge research on topics including corporate performance, governance, strategic leadership, technology and internationalization. Based on real-world practices and current research in the field, Neostrategic Management features an increased emphasis on the changing global economy and its role in strategic management.

This brief explores the concept of moral leadership in organizations. Specifically, it examines ways in which companies can strengthen their reputation in the market and increase performance by taking leading positions in the realm of business ethics. It presents research from top scholars of Eastern Europe contemplating the future of our global information and knowledge society. How will the economic power nexuses of the world shift in the foreseeable future? Are we becoming so interconnected and at the same time divided that social capital (together with business integrity and customer feedback) may matter more than money and resources? How will education and creativity bridge the shrinking gap between producers and consumers? Such questions and many more are tackled by this brief. In the current global economy, we have never before been more tightly-knit and never before has it been easier to distribute goods as well as ideologies. However, in the global marketplace we are only as good as our word, or our reputation, proves to be. Integrity studies by Transparency International show a correlation between corruption and national threat and lists corruption among the most harmful factors to impact local and regional economies. Therefore, successful businesses cannot afford to simply remain materially successful; they have to consider their community impact and become moral leaders before they can be world leaders in their respective field. Featuring innovative tools, recommendations, case studies and checklists, this brief will be of interest to students, academics, scholars, practitioners and policymakers alike in the fields of leadership, corporate governance, business ethics and corporate social responsibility.

This book compiles the presentations and discussions from the international symposium "Beyond Global Capitalism" that was held with the contributions of Emmanuel Todd, Ha-Joon Chang, and other scholars in Kyoto, Japan, in 2013. The book is intended make the reader aware that global capitalism, or globalism, has increased its power in recent years, bringing about a variety of harmful effects to the peoples of the world. Drawing upon a variety of academic disciplines including economics, political economic science, economic thought, anthropology, history, and political science, the contributors to this book identify theories and strategies for overcoming the worldwide problems that have been caused by global capitalism. The discussions presented here foster the development of theoretical and practical frameworks for a global economy that moves beyond global capitalism. They also argue for the development of a stable, rich, and resilient economy and society that enhances the well-being of people all over the world in the twenty-first century.

The organization of interfirm networks, such as alliances, cooperatives, franchise and retail chains, has become an important research topic in the field of economics, marketing, strategic management, and organization theory. This book contributes to the literature on formal and informal inter-organizational governance by providing new insights on contract design, ownership, evolution of cooperation, role of social capital and performance in franchising networks; includes topics of loyalty, reputation and organizational form as well as performance of cooperatives, and discusses the relationship between formal and relational governance in alliances, governance structures of innovation activities, dynamics of interfirm conflicts, and network externalities and alliance formation.

A major objective of this book is to identify the key determinants of successful inter-firm collaborations in the telecommunications industry in Australia and China, utilizing both qualitative and quantitative research methods as complementary methodologies. The findings will provide essential information and suggestions for businesses, researchers and policy makers and shed light on how to concretely improve the performance of business collaborations. Inter-firm collaboration has become increasingly important in the global economy, as firms now rely on collaborations to access new resources, new technologies, skills, the latest market information, new markets and knowledge, to accelerate innovation, to reduce costs, and to overcome government policy barriers.

Cathrin Huber investigates the reputation of multinational corporations and provides novel insights and important implications for researchers and managers based on theoretical considerations and empirical analyses. She shows that country-specific factors like cultural or political factors, but also institutional differences between countries as well as firm-specific resources in a country influence the corporate reputation-consumer behavior relationship. Additionally, an overview of the main cultural approaches and how they influence consumers' corporate reputation perceptions is given.

In an era of globalization, technological innovation, and social transformations, universities face the challenge of training students with the competencies needed to meet the demands of the market and to successfully integrate into today's workforce. This book looks at the university as a dynamic source of essential competencies and explores various skill management models, methodologies and innovations applied by educational institutions around the world. The demands of today's society represent a major challenge for universities and their teaching staffs. Professors need to adapt their teaching methods to meet these new challenges. For example, universities need to prepare new generations of students with the ability to select, update and use knowledge, rather than processing facts and formulas. Students need to be capable of learning in different contexts and modalities throughout their professional careers and learn to adapt their knowledge to new situations. In response, a conceptual and methodological change has taken place in the university organizational culture and in student curriculums. This book presents a variety of cases and observations on the competencies developed in the curriculums of universities around the world, with the aim to assure that graduates leave fully prepared to face the challenges of the new economy.

Despite the fact that the globalization process tends to reinforce existing inequality structures and generate new areas of inequality on multiple levels, systematic analyses on this very important field remain scarce. Hence, this book approaches the complex question of inequality not only from different regional perspectives, covering Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin and Northern America, but also from different disciplinary perspectives, namely cultural anthropology, economics, ethnology, geography, international relations, sociology, and political sciences. The contributions are subdivided into three essential fields of research: Part I analyzes the socio-economic dimension of global exclusion, highlighting in particular the impacts of internationalization and globalization processes on national social structures against the background of theoretical concepts of social inequality. Part II addresses the political dimension of global inequalities. Since the decline of the Soviet Union new regional powers like Brazil, China, India and South Africa have emerged, creating power shifts in international relations that are the primary focus of the second part. Lastly, Part III examines the structural and transnational dimension of inequality patterns, which can be concretized in the rise of globalized national elites and the emergence of multinational networks that transcend the geographical and imaginative borders of nation states.

This book presents hidden champions in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and Turkey that have been studied as a joint project between CEEMAN and IEDC-Bled School of Management, Slovenia. This is an outcome of extensive research undertaken by over 30 researchers and covers 15 countries from Russia to Albania; covering many contexts, political systems, cultures and infrastructures. The reader is provided with a detailed introduction to the concept of hidden champions and describes the cases studied in this project. This book is an invaluable resource providing a culmination of interdisciplinary, cross-study chapters ranging from leadership to performance drivers; from organization to culture and governance; from innovativeness to sustainability and further to the financial aspects of hidden champions business models. These meta level chapters are followed by 15 country-specific chapters which provide an overview of each country's history, economic indicators and vignettes of the cases involved in this study.

This book addresses two countervailing challenges to theory and policy in law and economics. The first is the rise of legal origins theory, which denies the comparative law view of convergence between common law and civil law by the assertion of an economic superiority of common law. The second is the series of economic crises in the very financial markets on which that assertion was based. Both trends unsettled certainties about the rule of law and institutional economics. Meeting legal origins theory in its main areas of political science, sociology and economics, the book extends the interdisciplinary reach to neglected aspects of comparative law, legal history, dynamic econometric analysis and "quasi-natural experiments" with counterfactual evidence of different institutional regimes in divided countries. These combined methodological tools make tests of the economic impact of different legal origins much more reliable. This is shown for developed and newly industrialized countries as well as developing, transforming and emerging countries with or without financial center advantage, affected or not by financial crises. The Asian financial crises and the American subprime crisis have been, or could have been resolved using the resources of common law or civil law. These cases and data on access to justice in Africa, Asia and Latin America reveal the problem of substantive law remaining "law on the books" without efficient procedural rules and judicial structures. The single most striking common law-civil law divide is that lawyer-dominated common law procedure is slower and costlier than judge-managed civil law procedure. Countries as diverse as the Netherlands, Japan, and China show functional interaction between culture and law in legal reforms. Such interaction can reduce the occurrence of legal disputes as well as facilitate their resolution. It can use economic crises as catalysts for legal reforms or rely on regional integration, and it should replace the discredited method of legal "transplants" by sustained dialogue between legal advisors and all actors involved in legal reforms.

This volume showcases contributions from leading academics, educators and policymakers derived from two workshops hosted by the Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science (ICES) at George Mason University on internationalization and competitiveness. It aims to present key areas of current research and to identify basic problems within the field to promote further discussion and research. This book is organized into two sections, focusing on: science and economics and innovation policy and its measurement, with an underlying emphasis on exploring connections across disciplines and across research, practice and policy. The first workshop was held at George Mason University (GMU) in Arlington, VA, USA in March 2013 and a second, building on the key results from the first, was held at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden in October 2013. A variety of problems were discussed and several interdisciplinary concepts in internationalization and competitiveness have already emerged from these workshops. For example, many of the presentations emphasized a need for productivity, which is a key goal of economic development. It was proposed to shift the emphasis from productivity towards creativity by examining property right regimes and their measurement to provide incentives for creative idea generation. These regimes span across higher education, invention, labor markets, and many other markets and institutions. Addressing fundamental issues along four dimensions--economics, higher education, strategic collaboration, and new research methods--this book provides a multidimensional, interdisciplinary perspective on the challenges and opportunities for future development. This excellent collection of essays provides new insights as to how the development and diffusion of knowledge are facilitating convergence in the structure of research organizations across the globe -- a process that has enormous implications for how actors in all parts of the world compete with one another in an increasing array of arenas. The essays have valuable implications for understanding how producers of all kinds of knowledge across the globe are competing with one another and how geographical space and nation states are less important in the competition for novelty. Rogers Hollingsworth University of Wisconsin (Madison) University of California San Diego

With a series of experiments, Lena Himbert highlights the influence of the unit price's unit of measure on the consumer's price-level perception and quality perception. Furthermore, this thesis shows that the unit price availability and prominence influences the consumer's store price image. When shopping for pre-packaged products, consumers are offered a variety of product and price information at the point of purchase. The unit price represents price information given to the consumer for which the factor package size is removed and thereby lowers the information load for consumers in the shopping situation. However, retailers have considerable leeway concerning the unit price format. Aspects that can be varied are for example the unit of measure (e.g., price per kg vs price per 100 g) or font size. There is little to no previous research that gives advice to retailers how they should indicate the unit price on the price label.

This volume explores the value of business integrity and ethics as a "best practice" model in business strategy. The authors define business integrity, explore areas in which integrity is often absent or discredited, and provide a framework and tools to help build better business ethics and corporate social responsibility. The volume aims to reveal that beyond the immediate economic effect, corruption can ruin entire countries by destabilizing key economic and political players, warping their vision for state development. Against the backdrop of global financial and ethical crises, the authors argue that integrity in business is a key component for long-term success. Integrity includes the ability to be consistent with one's moral values and principles and places society's wishes at the center of business decision-making. The cornerstone upon which a culture of integrity is built within a certain business is the ethics code. It explicitly states the values and principles to which a company adheres. The continuous promotion, support and communication of the ethics code stipulations provide the basis upon which integrity in business is built. Featuring case studies from countries such as Sweden, Great Britain and France and companies such Starbucks, Nike, PSEG, and Anglo-American PLC, this volume provides a comprehensive study of business integrity and social responsibility that will be of interest to students, scholars, professionals and policy-makers from around the world.