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This book explores current thinking on corporate governance by way of a detailed study of the governance practices of fourteen Japanese companies. The author of this book was granted extensive access to these Japanese companies, as well as to their partner companies, their shareholders, and their banks, and was therefore able to provide a detailed insight into the way that Japanese companies are actually governed on a day-to-day basis. The book suggests that current mainstream conceptualizations of corporate governance are inadequate, as they do not help to understand the way that these Japanese companies are directed and controlled in practice. In the majority of cases, governance operates through a system which draws on the reciprocal obligations, responsibilities, and trust generated in everyday interactions at the individual and organizational level. The conclusions of the research have important implications not only for our understanding of the Japanese system of corporate governance, but also for international corporate governance policy and research in general. In particular, the book commends greater recognition that alongside the currently dominant concern ‘controlling’ the behaviour of company managers, the governance of companies might equally be considered in terms of the responsibilities, reciprocal obligations, and trust inherent in everyday interactions.

The United Kingdom has more than 4.2 million public closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras—one for every fourteen citizens. Across the United States, hundreds of video-surveillance systems are being installed in town centers, public transportation facilities, and schools at a cost exceeding $100 million annually, and now other Western countries have begun to experiment with CCTV to prevent crime in public places. In light of this expansion and the associated public expenditure, as well as pressing concerns about privacy rights, there is an acute need for an evidence-based approach to inform policy and practice. This book assesses the effectiveness and social costs of not only CCTV, but also other surveillance methods to prevent crime in public space, such as improved street lighting, security guards, place managers, and defensible space. It goes beyond the question of “Does it work?” and examines the specific conditions and contexts under which these methods may have an effect on crime as well as the mechanisms that bring about a reduction in crime. At a time when cities need cost-effective methods to fight crime and the public gradually awakens to the burdens of sacrificing their privacy and civil rights for security, the authors provide this guide to the most effective and non-invasive uses of surveillance to make public places safer from crime.

A closely held firm is not a smaller version of a large public firm, anymore than a child is a miniature adult. While realizing that like large corporations, value comes from a business' ability to generate future cash flows, this book emphasize the differences between the two. The primary question is does a separate entity exist or is the business just an extension of its principal owner or manager? If yes, how does this business vary from a large publicly traded firm with market and not management control? This book gets to the fundamental differences between the two and the adjustments made to value correctly. It avoids the traditional multiples of earnings or multiple of sales and other cookie-cutter approaches, to focus on the basic ability to create value. The book also avoids specifics in tax laws as they change and vary between countries.

Information is not taken seriously. Much is said about the information age, the information economy, the information society, and particularly about information technology, but little about information itself. Information has some very odd characteristics, conveniently overlooked by senior managers passionate about knowledge-based, learning organizations; by politicians and public servants, compensating with policy and programme for the information failure of organization and market; and by the IT and dotcom communities, bent on adding value to what they treat as just a commodity. This book looks at innovation from an information perspective; one that puts information first. Its information perspective is applied to eighteenth-century agriculture and high technology, to technology transfer and espionage, to corporate strategy and intellectual property.

The United States has a large number of well-educated, experienced professional women ready, willing, and able to move into the boardrooms and executive suites of corporate America. They represent a great, untapped economic resource and this book argues that this is America’s competitive secret. Drawing on in-depth interviews with top executives and middle managers, and the latest research on working women and organizational change, the author describes the unique contribution of female professionals. Her profiles of top women managers reveal that they cope well with ambiguity, are comfortable sharing power, and tend to empower others' leadership traits that lead to increased employee productivity, innovation, and profits. The book offers evidence that the changes that help organizations more fully utilize the talents of women are the same changes that will give them an important edge in today’s global workplace. The author explains why the glass ceiling still prevents many competent women from reaching the upper echelons of management. She analyses why women and men are perceived and evaluated differently at work, and provides new insight into the feelings of men who are asked to interact with women in new roles when there are few new rules. The book shows that removing the glass ceiling can no longer be viewed solely in terms of social equity—it is now an economic imperative.

This book uses political philosophy to examine the role of the corporation in our culture and its place in creating The Good Society. This book aims to provide business leaders with a practical “compass” to help them navigate the turbulent waters of social change and political conflict. The device helps managers to identify the ideological origins of contemporary political disagreements and understand the philosophical and ethical sources of our differences of opinion about such issues as executive compensation, plant closings, and environmental regulation. The beauty of this “compass” is that it provides a framework for the executive to create order out of the growing chaos of cultural diversity and conflict of values. It is aimed at expanding understanding of the interrelationship of fundamental values.

The focus of this book is on educating on the strategic principles fundamental to using information technology to gain market control. It provides case examples of how to use IT to enhance existing core competencies and strategies. The book is designed to help managers struggling with how to advantageously harness the new information revolution. It can also support executive and business education programs on managing technology when few such studies exist. While Internet and information technologies are currently hot topics, many firms and executives are without the tools and knowledge of how to actually use them to improve results. This book describes how major non-information technology companies are doing this and the strategic principles employed.

The MBA is probably the hottest ticket among the current university graduate degree offerings—every year, more than 120,000 students enroll in MBA programs in the United States, and the estimates in Europe do not lag far behind. In addition, job prospects have never looked better for business-school graduates; corporations are hiring more business-school graduates every year, and compensating them more handsomely. This book is a review of the major contemporary debates on management education. At the same time, it makes a proposal that will certainly have an impact in business schools: that managers need to develop a series of qualitative tacit skills which could be appropriately developed by integrative curricula brought from different disciplines, including sociology, philosophy, and other social sciences. The book's authors, both involved in the integrative business-education program at the Rotheman School of Management, provide a guide on how to design a reliable integrated program for management students.

The European Union's (EU) market integration project has dramatically altered economic activity around Europe. This book presents evidence on how trade has increased, jobs have been created, and European business has been reorganized. The changes in the economy have been accompanied by dramatic changes in how people from different societies interact. This book argues that these changes have produced a truly transnational European society. The book explores the nature of that society and its relationship to the creation of a European identity, popular culture, and politics. Much of the current political conflict around Europe can be attributed to who is and who is not involved in European society. Business owners, managers, professionals, white-collar workers, the educated, and the young have all benefited from European economic integration, specifically by interacting more and more with their counterparts in other societies. They tend to think of themselves as Europeans. Older, poorer, less educated, and blue-collar citizens have benefited less. They view the EU as intrusive on national sovereignty, or they fear its pro-business orientation will overwhelm the national welfare states. They have maintained national identities. There is a third group of mainly-middle class citizens who see the EU in mostly positive terms and sometimes — but not always — think of themselves as Europeans. It is this swing group that is most critical for the future of the European project. If they favor more European cooperation, politicians will oblige. But, if they prefer that policies remain wedded to the nation, European cooperation will stall.

The nature of Higher Education in the UK has changed over the last three decades. Academics can no longer be said to carry out their work in ‘ivory towers’, as increasing government intervention and a growing ‘target culture’ has changed the way they work. Increasingly universities have transformed from ‘communities of scholars’ to ‘workplaces’. The organization and administration of universities has seen a corresponding prevalence of ideas and strategies drawn from the ‘New Public Management’ ideology in response, promoting a more ‘business-focussed’ approach in the management of public services. This book examines the issues that these changes have had on academics, both as the ‘knowledge-workers’ managed, and the ‘manager-academic’. It draws on a study of academics holding management roles in sixteen UK universities, exploring their career histories and trajectories, and providing accounts of their values, practices, relationships with others, and their training and development as managers. Examining debates around ‘New Public Management’, knowledge management, and knowledge workers, the wider implications of these themes for policy innovation and strategy in HE and the public sector more generally are considered, developing a critical response to recent approaches to managing public services, and practical suggestions for improvements which could be made to the training and support of senior and middle managers in universities.

There is a dearth of literature on management history as a key factor in modern economic society. This book aims to rectify that. It covers the period since the Second Industrial Revolution that started around 1870, when new organizational structures and managerial systems and skills became necessary. It focuses on manufacturing and larger-scale business, since these are the areas which have caused the greatest controversy about the weaknesses displayed by British industry in comparison to other countries such as the USA, Germany, and later Japan in the move to managerial capitalism. The book uses two main sets of explanatory factors. First, it uses a wide range of twenty-six ‘drivers’ or influences on the development of management, which are brought together in three categories (technological-cum-market; institutional/cultural; and business policy and practice). Second, it takes up four main themes that explain why Britain may have fallen behind: the persistence of personal and proprietorial capitalism; organizational structure and transaction costs; social attitudes towards industry; and the slow transition towards professionalism. The twelve chapters in the book are divided into five sections in which management is analysed according to different perspectives: a scene-setting and theoretical introduction; a focus on organizational development; a contextual focus concentrating on managers as a group; a focus on key managerial functions; and a concluding chapter which reflects on the recent changes in the themes.