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This time is different
Throughout history, rich and poor countries alike have been lending, borrowing, crashing--and recovering--their way through an extraordinary range of financial crises. Each time, the experts have chimed, \"this time is different\"--claiming that the old rules of valuation no longer apply and that the new situation bears little similarity to past disasters. With this breakthrough study, leading economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff definitively prove them wrong. Covering sixty-six countries across five continents, This Time Is Different presents a comprehensive look at the varieties of financial crises, and guides us through eight astonishing centuries of government defaults, banking panics, and inflationary spikes--from medieval currency debasements to today's subprime catastrophe. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, leading economists whose work has been influential in the policy debate concerning the current financial crisis, provocatively argue that financial combustions are universal rites of passage for emerging and established market nations. The authors draw important lessons from history to show us how much--or how little--we have learned.
eBook
Reconceptualizing English for International Business Contexts
This book presents a critique of current English as a Business
Lingua Franca (BELF) practices using research conducted in Bosnia
and Herzegovina. The authors identify English communication
behaviors that hinder or promote success in the workplace, and
trace these back to curricula and teaching practices. The authors
suggest which skills employers need and expect from employees, and
question whether English courses concerned with general academic
English skills and business vocabulary are sufficient training for
linguistically-complex workplaces. The book also examines whether
the focus on achieving native-like proficiency with high
grammatical standards and a strong emphasis on form are adequately
preparing students who aspire to use English in professional
contexts as a means to 'get their job done'.
eBook
From the Editors: Explaining theoretical relationships in international business research: Focusing on the arrows, NOT the boxes
Distinctive features of articles accepted by the
Journal of International Business Studies
are that they are multidisciplinary in scope and interdisciplinary in content and methodology, and they make a substantial theoretical contribution to international business studies. Failure to meet this last requirement is an often cited reason given by reviewers for article rejection. Sometimes reviewers mean that a manuscript does not conform to the dominant paradigm, in that it is not the next logical step in the study of a phenomenon, or they mean that there is little if any integration of several theories used to explain a phenomenon. However, perhaps the most common underlying meaning when reviewers cite “lack of a theoretical contribution” for rejection is that the nature of the relationships proposed is not well explained. While the first two meanings may be influenced by the specific discipline or methodology involved, this final one is not. In this editorial we provide a set of guidelines that authors can use to ensure that their paper meets the standard of explaining the logic of the relationships they propose.
Journal Article
Making Virtual Worlds
The past decade has seen phenomenal growth in the development and use of virtual worlds. In one of the most notable, Second Life, millions of people have created online avatars in order to play games, take classes, socialize, and conduct business transactions. Second Life offers a gathering point and the tools for people to create a new world online.
Too often neglected in popular and scholarly accounts of such groundbreaking new environments is the simple truth that, of necessity, such virtual worlds emerge from physical workplaces marked by negotiation, creation, and constant change. Thomas Malaby spent a year at Linden Lab, the real-world home of Second Life, observing those who develop and profit from the sprawling, self-generating system they have created.
Some of the challenges created by Second Life for its developers were of a very traditional nature, such as how to cope with a business that is growing more quickly than existing staff can handle. Others are seemingly new: How, for instance, does one regulate something that is supposed to run on its own? Is it possible simply to create a space for people to use and then not govern its use? Can one apply these same free-range/free-market principles to the office environment in which the game is produced? \"Lindens\"-as the Linden Lab employees call themselves-found that their efforts to prompt user behavior of one sort or another were fraught with complexities, as a number of ongoing processes collided with their own interventions.
InMaking Virtual Worlds, Malaby thoughtfully describes the world of Linden Lab and the challenges faced while he was conducting his in-depth ethnographic research there. He shows how the workers of a very young but quickly growing company were themselves caught up in ideas about technology, games, and organizations, and struggled to manage not only their virtual world but also themselves in a nonhierarchical fashion. In exploring the practices the Lindens employed, he questions what was at stake in their virtual world, what a game really is (and how people participate), and the role of the unexpected in a product like Second Life and an organization like Linden Lab.
eBook
Reinvent your business model : how to seize the white space for transformative growth
Business model innovation is the key to unlocking transformational growth--but few executives know how to apply it to their businesses. In Reinvent Your Business Model, Mark Johnson reveals the playbook. Johnson lays out an eminently practical framework that identifies the four fundamental building blocks that make business models work. In a series of in-depth case studies, he goes on to vividly illustrate how companies are using innovative business models to achieve transformational growth by - fulfilling unmet customer needs in their current markets - serving entirely new customers and creating new markets - and responding to tectonic shifts in market demand, government policy, and technologies that affect entire industries. He then lays out a structured process for designing a new model and developing it into a profitable and thriving enterprise, while investigating the vexing and sometimes paradoxical managerial challenges that have commonly thwarted so many companies in their unguided forays into the unknown. Business model innovators have reshaped entire sectors--including retail, aviation, and media--and redistributed billions of dollars of value. With road-tested frameworks, analytics, and diagnostics, this book gives executives everything they need to reshape their businesses and achieve transformative growth. Thoroughly updated to, Johnson has also added a new chapter on digital transformation, that presents a framework for digital business models and four new case studies.-- Provided by publisher.
Book
SMEs and CSR: An Approach to CSR in Their Own Words
The academic literature reveals the need to undertake more in-depth field studies in order to discover the organisational culture, the difficulties and the perceptions surrounding CSR in SMEs. This study presents the results of analysis of four case studies on Catalan companies that stand out for their social and environmental practices. The conclusions of this paper are the result of dialogue with the main actors - four medium-sized companies - focusing on their actions, understandings and resistance with regard to CSR. The methodological perspective used was Grounded Theory, with the aim of the study being to contribute towards formalising CSR in SMEs, in their daily practices, by analysing some primary data. The results obtained show how difficult it is for SMEs to understand CSR, beyond the explanation of the specific practices carried out by the companies. They highlight the role played by the values of the founding director in the implementation of CSR programmes; they reveal that SMEs still have a long way to go towards learning how to inform both internal and external stakeholders of their best practices, and; finally, they show the interesting links that SMEs establish between responsible practices, improved competitiveness and economic results. Finally, the text points out the implications that the results of this analysis may have on creating ways of promoting CSR in SMEs. We believe that, in light of the opinions expressed by the companies, public organisations should try to concentrate on creating a favourable framework for responsible competitiveness, as a way to deal with CSR when addressing SMEs.
Journal Article