Why Customers Would Rather Have a Smartphone than a Car explores some of the fundamental changes in consumer behaviour: Why do we buy less in shops and more on the internet? Why do we spend more on gadgets, smartphones and apps and not more on food, holidays or clothing? Why do most business people only look at symptoms and not the causes of changing customer behaviour? The new generation buys differently from the baby boomers; they have different priorities and preferences. The internet has changed us in the way we think, act and communicate. Whilst many retailers now understand the need for change, few of them have established convincing or sustainable models for the future. Cor Molenaar argues that by understanding the drivers behind these new consumer behaviours, retailers can identify the opportunities this represents and adapt their offering accordingly. The kind of relationship retailing he advocates involves the way the retailer interacts with their customer; the new environment that they need to sustain along with their ability to relate customer data, technology and new services. The author interweaves examples from traditional and virtual retailing with his research on consumer psychology and buying behaviour to offer a sophisticated and at times challenging guide for all those involved in retailing, as well as those responsible for planning and designing social and retail space.

Nature-Inspired Algorithms have been gaining much popularity in recent years due to the fact that many real-world optimisation problems have become increasingly large, complex and dynamic. The size and complexity of the problems nowadays require the development of methods and solutions whose efficiency is measured by their ability to find acceptable results within a reasonable amount of time, rather than an ability to guarantee the optimal solution. This volume 'Nature-Inspired Algorithms for Optimisation' is a collection of the latest state-of-the-art algorithms and important studies for tackling various kinds of optimisation problems. It comprises 18 chapters, including two introductory chapters which address the fundamental issues that have made optimisation problems difficult to solve and explain the rationale for seeking inspiration from nature. The contributions stand out through their novelty and clarity of the algorithmic descriptions and analyses, and lead the way to interesting and varied new applications.

When it comes to the field of organization and management theory, a philosophical perspective enables us to conduct organizational research imbued with the attitude of 'wonder'; it helps researchers question dominant images of thought underlying mainstream thinking, and provides fresh distinctions that enable the development of new theory. In bringing together a collection of key essays by Haridimos Tsoukas, this volume explores fundamental concepts, such as organizational routine, that have gained currency in the field, as well as revisiting traditional concepts such as change, strategy, and organization. It discusses organizational knowledge, judgment, and reflection-in-action, and, at the meta-theoretical level, suggests complex forms of theorizing that do justice to the complexity of organizations. The conceptual attention throughout is on process and practice, underlain by performative phenomenology and an emphasis on agents' lived experience. This provides us with the language to appreciate the dynamic character of organizational behaviour, the embeddedness of action, and the complexity of organizational life. The theoretical claims presented in this volume have important implications for practice, insofar as they help retrain our attention; from seeing structures and individuals, we can now appreciate processes, experiences, and practices. A phenomenological attitude makes organization theory more open, more creative, and more reflexive, and this book will be essential reading for researchers and students in the field of organization studies.

Exercising Agency is a book about decision making. In particular, it looks in detail at how a very important type of organizational decision gets made: whether or not to initiate a project. Making strategic decisions of this kind can never be a wholly rational and scientific process. And Exercising Agency lifts the lid on many of the important behavioural factors that inform project decisions: power and politics, personality, the 'rules' of an organization. Mark Mullaly draws on his research to provide practical guidance for decision makers; project shapers, approving executives and those responsible for how initiation decisions are made. By explaining the influence, value and risks associated with the elements that inform the way we make strategic decisions he will help you identify how individuals and organizations can best support the process to ensure project initiation decisions are effective and most closely underpin the priorities of the organization. If you are involved in framing or making decisions about the future of your organization; the projects that you do or don't decide to initiate, then read this book. It won't make the decisions any easier but it will help you improve the quality of the decisions you make and over time, the effectiveness of your organizational decision making.

Due to its societal and economic relevance, Project Management (PM) has become an important discipline and a concept critical to modern organizations, public and private. PM as an academic discipline is discussed both in Management Science and in Operations Research. Management Science tends to focus on quantitative tools and the soft skills necessary to manage projects successfully. Operations Research gives the essential scientific contribution to the success of project management through the development of models and algorithms. In Management Science, Operations Research and Project Management, Jose RamA(3)n San CristA(3)bal Mateo fills the gap between scientific research and the practical application of that research. Project managers need formal training in decision-making but sometimes, they do not have an in-depth knowledge of Operations Research or they lack the necessary theoretical background. This book, with its focus on the quantitative models of Operations Research and Management Science applied to Project Management, provides project managers with the tools and methods necessary to manage projects successfully. Project managers operate in a complex global environment, in which numerous factors need to be considered, such as minimizing total project costs, meeting contracted dates, and ensuring that activities achieve certain quality levels. The focus here on the application of quantitative models of Operations Research and Management Science applied to Project Management provides them with the tools and methods necessary to make sound decisions.

The University of Arizona Artificial Intelligence Lab (AI Lab) Dark Web project is a long-term scientific research program that aims to study and understand the international terrorism (Jihadist) phenomena via a computational, data-centric approach. We aim to collect "ALL" web content generated by international terrorist groups, including web sites, forums, chat rooms, blogs, social networking sites, videos, virtual world, etc. We have developed various multilingual data mining, text mining, and web mining techniques to perform link analysis, content analysis, web metrics (technical sophistication) analysis, sentiment analysis, authorship analysis, and video analysis in our research. The approaches and methods developed in this project contribute to advancing the field of Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI). Such advances will help related stakeholders to perform terrorism research and facilitate international security and peace. This monograph aims to provide an overview of the Dark Web landscape, suggest a systematic, computational approach to understanding the problems, and illustrate with selected techniques, methods, and case studies developed by the University of Arizona AI Lab Dark Web team members. This work aims to provide an interdisciplinary and understandable monograph about Dark Web research along three dimensions: methodological issues in Dark Web research; database and computational techniques to support information collection and data mining; and legal, social, privacy, and data confidentiality challenges and approaches. It will bring useful knowledge to scientists, security professionals, counterterrorism experts, and policy makers. The monograph can also serve as a reference material or textbook in graduate level courses related to information security, information policy, information assurance, information systems, terrorism, and public policy.

• Excel add-ins - Almost all of the examples in the text are solved with Excel, and solution files are included in the CD.
• Comprehensive Website - An abundance of teaching material exists on the website. The interactive tools can be used to re-enforce procedures taught in class, and an alternative teaching source is available to relieve the instructor of demonstrating procedures to students who are having difficulty with the material.
• Concise and Focused Presentation - Central ideas are easily located throughout the text, saving the student time from wading through unnecessary information. This also allows the instructor to focus on the core material of a topic without getting sidetracked.
• Examples and exercises throughout text use real data and real engineering situations. This motivates students to learn new concepts and gives them a taste of practical engineering experience.

This book is the first work to conduct the emergency logistics optimization problem under the epidemic environment (whether natural or man-made), which provides a new perspective for the application of optimization theory. In this book, the research methods involve epidemic dynamics, scenario-based emergency decision-making method, big data which combines the traditional and emerging technologies. The authors take epidemic outbreak as the research object and deeply integrate the epidemic spread model with the optimization model of emergency resource scheduling, which opens up a novel application area of operations research.

As the era of ever expanding markets and ample resources ends, governments and business will have to behave differently. The world is facing weak economic growth, limits to affordable resources and increasing concerns about environmental consequences. During the boom times, governments championed de-regulation and business responded by adopting an anything-goes attitude. In these straitened times, strategic analysis has to engage with the challenges that society faces to create resilient corporations fit for the 21st century. In Corporate Strategy in the Age of Responsibility, Peter McManners, who has for nine years run strategy workshops on the Henley MBA focusing on the global business environment, sets about providing a strategic framework for navigating the new economic environment. Chief Sustainability Officers (CSOs) now exist, but they struggle to find the strategic rationale for the improvements they champion. The author argues that their good intentions often lack traction, partly because others in management don't get it, but also because they are not ambitious enough. The book is not about preaching semi-charitable behaviour or how to enhance the reputation of the corporation instead it is about surviving and thriving in a challenging and changing environment. A corporate audience familiar with strategy books will relate to this book, but will find it steers them towards radically new strategic thinking suitable for a turbulent period of transition.

The idea of using models to inform business practice seems appealing, as it suggests the abstraction and control of a large, complex subject by means of a smaller, easily manipulated mechanism. In reality, however, many models prove inadequate when translated into business methods. Monitoring Business Performance - Models, Methods and Tools elucidates how the assumptions and perceptions that guide performance assessment are often based on models that are poor interpretations and descriptions of reality. In this book, the author scrutinizes the models underlying a number of well-known business methods and tools, and sheds light on the assumptions and subjective perceptions that undermine their effectiveness. In doing so, he offers a unique criticism of accepting business models without questioning their relevance and applicability, and highlights the need to treat models as hypotheses, rather than as certainties.

In 2009 three consultants, green to the consulting industry were tasked with a new challenge, the activation and licensing of a new, 100 bed hospital, in only 90 days. Pulling from concept of "Day in the Life" simulations used in the military, the Hospital Incident Command System (HICS), and adult learning theories the consultants developed a method that healthcare facilities could use to ensure readiness. Thus, was born the concept of Dress Rehearsal. A Guide to Healthcare Facility Dress Rehearsal Simulation Planning: Simplifying the Complex provides a step-by-step scalable framework to coordinate an Interdisciplinary Dress Rehearsal event for a project or facility of any size. Developed for use as a resource throughout your Dress Rehearsal journey, each chapter of this guide builds upon the last and should be read in succession. We hope you leverage our lessons learned and experience and apply them to your facility to support a safe Day 1 activation.

Increasingly in the public discourse there are references to the knowledge economy, knowledge society, knowledge workers and knowledge organisations. The argument is that knowledge is becoming the main economic resource, replacing the natural resources that drove the industrial revolution. The new knowledge economy is driven by knowledge development, innovation and highly skilled employees. Increasing investment in higher education and in universities is in line with this strategy and understanding. In an earlier book, Creating Collaborative Advantage edited with Richard Ennals, Professor Hans Christian Garmann Johnsen argued that it is knowledge that links social and economic processes. He believes that what is missing in the current discussion on innovation is a conceptualisation of exactly what knowledge is. In The New Natural Resource, he digs deeper into what it is and how it develops and subsequently leads to widespread change. The author argues that knowledge is inherently a social phenomenon. That is why social processes are closely linked to economic development, and why this relationship becomes even more apparent in the new knowledge economy. Knowledge is not an objective entity, established once and for all. Knowledge development is interrelated with values, norms, perceptions and interpretations. We need to know what the mechanisms are by which knowledge becomes legitimate, true and relevant.

We need strategy. The world is changing, the future uncertain. What is required is vision: What might the future bring? Where is our business going? What are our fundamental business values? This book is a manual for all those who want to apply strategy in organisations. It is intended for everyone who wants to put the future on the agenda, to look beyond the short term and beyond mere profit. It describes in practical terms the eight questions we must continually discuss in order to pursue a future-proof strategy in a dynamic and uncertain world: mission, trends, scenarios, options, vision, roadmap, action and monitoring. If you are dissatisfied with an approach to strategy based on simple backward looking analysis, management controls and problems solving after the fact, but would like to make a positive contribution to thinking about the future, Scenario-based Strategy offers the instruments to turn your intention into practice. The text provides examples from commercial to government and trade organizations; showing how others have undertaken future explorations and how they used these explorations to create a dynamic strategy. Paul de Ruijter has a deep insight into the theory, alongside practical experience working with some of the most highly regarded and resilient organizations. The result is a rich combination of methodology and practical, engaging examples that shows you how to go about creating an agenda for the future.

Collateral - generally defined as an asset used to provide security for a lender's loan - is an important feature of credit contracts and all the available evidence suggests that its use is getting more pervasive. This informative book builds upon recent research into this topic. Sena analyses three case-studies that revolve around the impact that financial constraints have on economic outcomes. In the first case-study, the relationship between firms' technical efficiency and increasing financial pressure is explored. The author then goes on to show, in the second case study, that under specific circumstances, increasing financial pressure and increasing product market competition can jointly have a positive impact on firms' technical efficiency, while not being true for all types of firms. In the third case, she analyses the impact that finance constraints have on women's start-ups. Unique and revealing, this is the first book to deal so extensively with the topic of collateral, and as such, is a valuable reference to postgraduates and professionals in the fields of macroeconomics, monetary and business economics.

This book provides new and innovative insights into the field of management and organization inquiry through theory, method, and research. It provides extensive coverage of the 7S structure that has been so transformational for the field: Storytelling, System, Sustainability, Science, Spirit, Spirals, and Sociomateriality, showing how they evolved, how they interact, and possible futures for this discipline. These themes emerged during the 25 years of the Standing Conference for Management and Organizational Inquiry (Sc'Moi). We realized that we have to make space and time to get off the path of 'business-as-usual' ways of working. We know how to make organizations more efficient, but we cannot steer them away from a short-term, quarterly return mindset. It takes a long temporal horizon to understand how we are depleting the resources that future generations will need to survive. The Emerald Handbook of Management and Organization Inquiry shines a light on a brighter way of working for the future: one that accommodates living and working within the limits of the world's resources.

This edited monograph contains a comprehensive overview of educational developments in the fields of operations research (OR) and management science (MS). The book outlines key factors in OR/MS curricular programs and analyses different approaches regarding student enrollment and failure rates. The approach is genuinely international, whereas the focus lies on the European level. The target audience primarily comprises public policy planners in education, deans and school directors as well as program coordinators.

Much has been said and written about the 'financial tsunami' and subsequent economic dislocation that occurred in the opening decade of the 21st Century. Professor Ivo Pezzuto is described by business scholars as an expert on the global financial crisis. He has lectured about it at conferences and seminars; written some of the most read and quoted papers; contributed to what is considered the most authoritative book on the subject; and to one of the best known US-based blogs dealing with it. In Predictable and Avoidable, Dr Pezzuto offers business school students; academics; and industry experts in the fields of finance, risk management, audit, corporate governance, economics, and regulation, a truly independent and unbiased analysis of the financial crises starting in 2007 and one of the first fully considered expositions of the financial, governance and regulatory reforms needed for the future. Augmented with personal interviews involving selected global thought leaders and industry experts, the author's narrative focuses on the technical issues that led to the global crisis, but also addresses the human, cultural, and ethical aspects of the events from both sociological and managerial perspectives. The book exposes the root causes and contributes significantly to the debate about the change needed in the banking and finance industries and to supervisory frameworks and regulatory mechanisms. This analysis enables readers to understand that the crisis we have seen was predictable and should have been avoidable, and that a recurrence can be avoided, if lessons are learned and the right action taken.

Over the past thirty-five years, a tremendous body of both theoretical and empirical research has been established on the science of transportation'. The Handbook of Transportation Science has collected and synthesized this research into a systematic treatment of this field covering its fundamental concepts, methods, and principles. The purpose of this handbook is to define transportation as a scientific discipline that transcends transportation technology and methods. Whether by car, truck, airplane - or by a mode of transportation that has not yet been conceived - transportation obeys fundamental properties. The science of transportation defines these properties, and demonstrates how our knowledge of one mode of transportation can be used to explain the behavior of another. Transportation scientists are motivated by the desire to explain spatial interactions that result in movement of people or objects from place to place. Its methodologies draw from physics, operations research, probability and control theory. It is fundamentally a quantitative discipline, relying on mathematical models and optimization algorithms to explain the phenomena of transportation. The fourteen chapters in the handbook are written by the leading researchers in transportation science in an effort to define and categorize for the first time the scientific nature and state of the art of the field. As such, it is directed to the broader research community, transportation practitioners, and future transportation scientists.

Projects are constantly beset by problems, often caused by seemingly small mistakes which collectively lead to larger issues. Why do project managers and teams appear to repeat the same mistakes? Can they make better choices without introducing complex decision analysis processes? How can they make better estimates? Project management is the art and science of human interactions. Project Think identifies and explains the paths of those intentional and unintentional actions that lead to trouble. It provides advice and guidance in analysing information and risk and explains how 'choice-engineering' can facilitate decision-making and encourage everyone involved in a project to follow the right procedures and work collaboratively.

Value aggregation to goods and services is unbelievably important to the balance of trade of modern nations, yet it receives minute attention by economists and policy-makers alike. In Competitiveness in the Real Economy, Rui Vinhas da Silva shows that the nature and dynamics of contemporary global competition requires a sharper focus on value aggregation. He provides a rounded, integrative and multi-disciplinary perspective linking national competitiveness, economics and management. The emphasis is on a transversal philosophy of value aggregation as a key driver of national competitiveness across sectors in the real economy and from production to the consumption of goods and services. The links between exports, inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI) and country competitiveness are examined along with the role of exports and the attraction of FDI inflows in building national GDP. The author emphasises that culture, the notion of being cosmopolitan and understanding aspirational and discriminatory consumers with high disposable income are key drivers of success in the global economy. Acknowledging that the complexity of problems comes from diversity of global actors, the author highlights the limitations of current economics in responding to contemporary challenges. His concern about the management sciences and management learning is that solutions do not lie in the formulation and prescription of universal laws, but are contextually-laden and derive from an informed intuition that is partly taught and partly experiential. The book addresses the implications of all this for how the management skills needed for competitive advantage might best be developed.

DLP denotes a dynamic-linear modeling and optimization approach to computational decision support for resource planning problems that arise, typically, within the natural resource sciences and the disciplines of operations research and operational engineering. It integrates techniques of dynamic programming (DP) and linear programming (LP) and can be realized in an immediate, practical and usable way. Simultaneously DLP connotes a broad and very general modeling/ algorithmic concept that has numerous areas of application and possibilities for extension. Two motivating examples provide a linking thread through the main chapters, and an appendix provides a demonstration program, executable on a PC, for hands-on experience with the DLP approach.

This third volume in the Routledge Focus on Women Writers in Organization Studies series challenges us to think again about the implications of gender, embodiment and fluidity for organizing and managing. The themes of this book disrupt our understanding of dualisms between sex (men and women), gender (masculinity and femininity) and mind / body, and in so doing analyze the ways in which dominant power relations constitute heteronormativity throughout organizational history, thereby reinforcing mainstream management research and teaching. By centring the work of women writers, this book gives recognition to their thinking and praxis; each writer making political inroads into changing the lived experiences of those who have suffered discrimination, exclusion and marginalization as they consider the ways in which organizational knowledge has tended to privilege rather than problematize masculinity, fixity, control, normativity, violence and discrimination. The themes and authors (Acker, de Beauvoir, Halberstam, Kosofsky Sedgwick, Kristeva, Yourcenar) covered in this book are important precisely because they are not generally encountered in mainstream writing on management and organization studies. They are significant to the study and analysis of organizations because they demonstrate how our understanding of managing and organizing can be transformed when other voices/bodies/genders write on what it is work, live, lead and relate to self and others. All the writers turn to the ways in which individuals matter organizationally, acknowledging that lived experiences are a source of political and ethical practice. Each Woman Writer is introduced and analyzed by experts in organization studies. Further reading and accessible resources are also identified for those interested in knowing more. This book will be relevant to students, researchers and practitioners with an interest in business and management, organizational studies, critical management studies, gender studies and sociology. Like all the books in this series, it will also be of interest to anyone who wants to see, think and act differently.

The Logistics, Supply Chain and Operations Management Case Study Collection contains real-life scenarios from leading companies including Volvo, Vortex, Honda of America, Green Cargo and Swedish Transport Administration. It includes a foreword by Martin Christopher. Comprehensive in scope and scrupulous in detail, this collection includes actual events experienced by businesses of every size, from SMB's to some of the most successful corporations in manufacturing, transportation, hospitality and other industries. Readers will discover proven tactics and innovative solutions for handling uncertainties, solving problems and circumventing risk, plus a wealth of information to guide strategy and decision making. Readers involved in logistics and supply chain management will find the Logistics, Supply Chain and Operations Management Case Study Collection full of: immediate application of strategies and tactics to situations and challenges; valuable tools for testing management proficiency in crisis mitigation and resolution; independent learning modules and professional training programmes; expanded question-and-answer sections designed to measure knowledge transfer and lessons learned; engaging, topical situations highly relevant to the fields of logistics, supply chain management and operations. Students and prospective managers will learn crucial skills to meet current challenges, qualify for professional advancement and achieve success.

We are living in the post-information age, the era of so-called 'Big Data'. It is a practical possibility for corporations to report, chart and analyse every action, transaction and click that happens inside and outside their business. In Decision Sourcing Roberts and Pakkiri examine what this means to organisational decision making. They explode the myth that good decisions need only be informed ones through an examination into how business really make choices. They lay bare the poverty of decision making processes in today's corporate world and offer fresh and fascinating insight into how social tools are providing new sources of information, how they are challenging hierarchy and how they are providing opportunities for growth and agility through aligned and inclusive decision making. This book is for those organisations that want to get beyond the corporate Facebook account and are ready for the next bold step. It is for those businesses that want to engage their workforce and their customers in collaborative relationships that are at the heart of the successful social enterprise.

Building upon the previous editions, this textbook is a first course in stochastic processes taken by undergraduate and graduate students (MS and PhD students from math, statistics, economics, computer science, engineering, and finance departments) who have had a course in probability theory. It covers Markov chains in discrete and continuous time, Poisson processes, renewal processes, martingales, and option pricing. One can only learn a subject by seeing it in action, so there are a large number of examples and more than 300 carefully chosen exercises to deepen the reader's understanding. Drawing from teaching experience and student feedback, there are many new examples and problems with solutions that use TI-83 to eliminate the tedious details of solving linear equations by hand, and the collection of exercises is much improved, with many more biological examples. Originally included in previous editions, material too advanced for this first course in stochastic processes has been eliminated while treatment of other topics useful for applications has been expanded. In addition, the ordering of topics has been improved; for example, the difficult subject of martingales is delayed until its usefulness can be applied in the treatment of mathematical finance.