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Around the world, 250 million children cannot read, write, or perform basic mathematics. They represent almost 40 percent of all primary school-aged children. This situation has come to be called the “Global Learning Crisis,” and it is one of the most critical challenges facing the world today. Work to address this situation depends on how it is understood. Typically, the Global Learning Crisis and efforts to improve primary education are defined in relation to two terms: access and quality. This book is focused on the connection between them. In a mixed-methods case study, this book provides detailed, contextualized analysis of Ugandan primary education. As one of the first countries in sub-Saharan Africa to enact dramatic and far-reaching primary education policy, Uganda serves as a compelling case study. With both quantitative and qualitative data from over 400 Ugandan schools and communities, the book analyzes grade repetition, private primary schools, and school fees, viewing each issue as an illustration of the connection between access to education and education quality. This analysis finds evidence of a positive association, challenging a key assumption that there is a trade-off or disconnect between efforts to improve access to education and efforts to improve education quality. The book concludes that embracing the complexity of education systems and focusing on dynamics where improvements in access and quality can be mutually reinforcing can be a new approach for improving basic education in contexts around the world.

In Automated Machine Learning for Business, we teach the machine learning process using a new development in data science: automated machine learning. AutoML, when implemented properly, makes machine learning accessible to most people because it removes the need for years of experience in the most arcane aspects of data science, such as the math, statistics, and computer science skills required to become a top contender in traditional machine learning. Anyone trained in the use of AutoML can use it to test their ideas and support the quality of those ideas during presentations to management and stakeholder groups. Because the requisite investment is one semester-long undergraduate course rather than a year in a graduate program, these tools will likely become a core component of undergraduate programs, and over time, even the high school curriculum.

Business Ethics for Better Behavior concisely answers the three most pressing ethical questions business professionals face: 1. What makes business practices right or wrong? 2. Why do normal, decent businesspeople of goodwill sometimes do the wrong thing? 3. How can we use the answer to these questions to get ourselves, our coworkers, our bosses, and our employees to behave better? Bad behavior in business rarely results from bad will. Most people mean well much of the time. But most of us are vulnerable. We all fall into moral traps, usually without even noticing. Business Ethics for Better Behavior teaches business professionals, students, and other readers how to become aware of those traps, how to avoid them, and how to dig their way out if they fall in. It integrates the best work in psychology, economics, management theory, and normative philosophy into a simple action plan for ensuring the best ethical performance at all levels of business practice. This is a book anyone in business, from an entry-level employee to CEO, can use.

This book synthesizes and interprets existing knowledge on technology upgrading failures as well as lessons from successes and failures in order to better understand the challenges of technology upgrading in emerging economies. The objective is to bring together in one volume diverse evidence regarding three major dimensions of technology upgrading: paths of technology upgrading, structural changes in the nature of technology upgrading, and the issues of technology transfer and technology upgrading. The knowledge of these three dimensions is being synthesized at the firm, sector, and macro levels across different countries and world macro-regions. Compared to the old and new challenges and uncertainties facing emerging economies, our understanding of the technology upgrading is sparse, unsystematic, and scattered. While our understanding of these issues from the 1980s and 1990s is relatively more systematized, the changes that took place during the globalization and proliferation of GVCs, the effects of the post-2008 events, and the effects of the current COVID-19 and geopolitical struggles on technology upgrading have not been explored and compared synthetically. Moreover, the recent growth slowdown in many emerging economies, often known as a middle-income trap, has reinforced the importance of understanding the technology upgrading challenges of catching-up economies. We believe that the time is ripe for “taking stock of the area” in order to systematize and evaluate the existing knowledge on processes of technology upgrading of emerging economies at the firm, sector, and international levels and to make further inroads in research on this issue. This volume aims to significantly contribute towards this end.

The spread of competition into all areas of society is one of the master trends of modern society. Yet, social scientists have played a surprisingly modest role in the analysis of its implications as the discussion of competition has largely been confined to the narrow context of economic markets. This book opens up competition for the study of social scientists. The central message of the book is that competition seems ubiquitous but it should not be taken for granted or be naturalized as an inevitable aspect of human existence. Its emergence, maintenance, and change are based on institutions and organizational efforts, and a central challenge for social science is to learn more about these processes and their outcomes. With the use of a novel definition of competition, more fundamental questions can be addressed than merely whether or not competition works. How is competition constructed—and by whom? Which institutional and organizational foundations need to be considered? Which behaviours result from competition? What are its consequences? Can competition be removed? And, how do these factors vary with the object of competition—be it money, attention, status, or other scarce and desired objects? The chapters in the book investigate these and more questions in studies of competition among and within schools, universities, multinational corporations, auditors, waste-disposal firms, and fashion designers and users. The chapters are written by scholars from several social science fields: management, organization studies, sociology, anthropology, and education.

Strategists are encouraged to identify sustained competitive advantages. This volume takes a different tact and provides a perspective on how organizations adapt over time to changing circumstances. This process is characterized as not driven by the inspired wisdom of a grand strategist, but by an ecology of initiatives within the organization. A central role of the organization is to mediate between the market forces in which it operates and the culling and amplification of these initiatives within the organization. In this spirit, a useful touchstone is that of Mendel, who sits intermediate between the blind watchmaker of a purely Darwinian process and a “chess master” strategist as suggested by stylized rational choice approaches. The “Mendelian executive” operates with intentionality, but this intentionality is with respect to the design of the experimental process rather than the identification of specific pathways forward. The two core conceptual pillars of the work are that of path-dependence, what are the adjacent “spaces” to which an organization might move, and “artificial selection,” how the organization mediates aggregate immediate outcomes and the allocation of resources and rewards to the various initiatives and actors within the organization. Entities that have a sustained lifespan are not static, but engage in processes of renewal, whether cells in the human body or lines of business within a firm. A conceptual framework is provided to illuminate some of the fundamental mechanisms underlying this process.

This book draws on Plato’s philosophy to throw light on contemporary leadership theory and practice. It combines an account of his thought with applications to modern case studies and approaches, in both politics and business. Rather than attempting to give a single ‘one-size-fits-all’ definition of leadership, his strategy was to break it into its different strands. He presents several ‘models’ of leadership, most of them images or analogies: the leader as doctor, navigator, artist, teacher, shepherd, weaver, or sower. Each model points to features of leadership that we intuitively recognize to be important (e.g. curing a social malaise, charting a new course, or weaving together the social fabric). Some were already in wide circulation in Plato’s time, like the shepherd and the navigator. What he did was to make them much richer and more complex. The book goes through the models individually, setting out the essentials of Plato’s thought and then illustrating each model with modern case studies—eighteen in total, including presidents, CEOs, and Nobel laureates. There is also a chapter comparing Plato’s models with four recent leadership approaches. Highly innovative in its approach, this book presupposes no prior knowledge of Plato, although those familiar with his philosophy will find it a fruitful way of re-reading his work. But the focus is first and foremost on leadership, rather than celebrating Plato’s achievements: the priority is to present a multi-faceted approach, which does justice to the complex phenomenon of leadership.

Evolutionary thinking has grown significantly and has had a profound impact on various fields such as economics, strategy, and technological innovation. An important paradigm that underlies the evolutionary theory of innovation is neo-Darwinian evolution. According to this paradigm, evolution is gradualist and is based on the mechanisms of variation, selection, and retention. Starting from the 1970s, new theoretical advancements in evolutionary biology have recognized the central role of punctuated equilibrium, speciation, and exaptation. However, despite their significant influence in evolutionary biology, these advancements have been reflected only partially in evolutionary approaches to economics, strategy, and technological innovation. The aim of this book is to review these advancements and explore their implications, with a particular emphasis on the role of serendipity and unpre-stateability in innovation and novelty creation.

This book examines the effectiveness of corporate social responsibility on improving labor standards in global supply chains. The book charts the development and effectiveness of corporate codes of conduct to ameliorate “sweatshop” conditions in global supply chains. This form of private voluntary regulation, spearheaded by Nike and Reebok, became necessary given the inability of third world countries to enforce their own laws and the absence of a global regulatory system for labor standards. Although private regulation programs have been adopted by other companies in many different industries, we know relatively little regarding the effectiveness of these programs because companies don't disclose information about their efforts and outcomes in regulating labor conditions in their supply chains. The book presents data from companies, multi-stakeholder institutions, and auditing firms in a comprehensive, investigative dive into the world of private voluntary regulation of labor conditions. The picture painted is wholistic and raw, but it considers several ways in which this private voluntary system can be improved to improve the lives of workers in global supply chains.

Since the 1980s, Spain and South Korea have experienced a dramatic transformation from middle-income to advanced economies. How did Spain and South Korea upgrade? While market liberalization and globalization were important forces for change, and states continue to be central in the organization of the Spanish and Korean economies, the liberal and the developmental state perspectives do not provide an comprehensive explanation of these transformations. Building on a combination of historical institutionalism and international business literatures, this book argues that upgrading was underpinned by cooperative models based on interdependencies and quid pro quo exchanges between national governments and large firms. The negotiated nature of these arrangements opened the door to institutional variation and enabled Spain and Korea to pursue different strategies. Spain adopted an integrational approach based on foreign direct investment, technological outsourcing, and regional integration. Korea pursued a techno-industrial strategy that prioritized self-sufficiency and the development of local technological capacity. These strategies enabled Spanish and Korean firms across multiple complex sectors to reach the efficiency frontier, but resulted in different productive specializations in complex services and manufacturing respectively. Through this comparative study of transformation in Spain and Korea, this book shifts our perspective on the political economy of economic transformation from markets or states to state–firm coordination as a driver for economic transformation, from one to at least two different pathways to upgrading, and from a world divided into emerging economies and world leaders to a more nuanced perspective that recognizes the perspective of new advanced economies.

This is the first book to comprehensively and critically examine the nature and background of the Chinese phenomenon of guanxi. It does this by reviewing and taking account of the major theoretical frameworks that relate to these closely bonded long-term relationships that are developed in order to pursue instrumental advantage in a society marked by relatively weak legal and regulatory institutions. The book locates such theorizing in the major features of the rapidly evolving Chinese market society, whilst paying attention to the historical origins and cultural sources of this highly particularistic approach to the acquisition of social and material resources, an approach which relies on obligatory relations of favour exchange between persons who self-consciously and strategically select their associates and goals. The book goes on to develop an improved way of understanding this extremely significant and distinct feature of social, political and economic relations that are characteristic of mainland China’s relentlessly active population. The book uniquely proposes an inclusive approach to guanxi based on comprehensive theorizing which both challenges many conventions and at the same time introduces a research orientation which captures the pertinent psychological dispositions, cultural expressions, and institutional frameworks that underpin guanxi.