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This chapter shows how the firm can coordinate its new product designs, production processes, and pricing strategies when only secondary (market-level) data are available. In particular, it examines the conditions under which firms should use price or other market signals (e.g., product warranties) when they introduce new products into the marketplace.

Citigroup is believed to be the top player in international retail banking because of its ability to make the most of technological advances in electronic banking. Domestically however, Sanwa Bank—which is now a member of the UFJ Group and Financial One alliance, also possesses a high rank in terms of retail banking strategies in Japan. It could be observed though that Citi accounts for Japan's highest growth consumer-market segment. This chapter examines the role of IT in consumer banking, specifically in the case of the said two banks through discussing retail banking in Japan, the development of Sanwa Bank, Citigroup's consumer operations specifically on financial services and banking industries, and the Level 3 IT support structure strategy that Citigroup practices across the globe.

The chapter analyses changes within the Spanish unemployment protection system in response to developments in the labour market between 1990 and 2010. Persistent mass unemployment and temporary employment, together with high job turnover and opportunistic behaviour, have failed to prompt structural policy change. The remaining two-tier system reflects, and contributes to, the prevailing labour market segmentation. The emergence of new assistance schemes, such as the RAI (Renta Activa de Inserción) in 2000 and extensions of agricultural programmes, illustrates the ineffective protection for the long-term unemployed, thus highlighting the restrictive nature of unemployment insurance. Fragmentation is supported by persisting benefit disparities between several tiers of protection, age- and family-related differences, and by the extension of unemployment assistance for older persons (pre-retirement). By contrast, many younger jobseekers have remained excluded from unemployment protection. Due to the scale of unemployment and because of policy coordination problems after the decentralization of public employment services, actual procedures within activation policy have remained below standards as envisaged in the European Employment Strategy.

Until 1991, Argentina experienced rising immigration from border countries to fulfill a segmented demand for labour within specific sectors; but structural economic change had negative consequences for employment, as the number of jobs in construction, industry, and services contracted. Given the narrowing of employment options and the shrinking of Argentine employment, it is not clear what will happen to immigration from border countries, but the data presented here suggest that the concentration of border workers will increase in construction and services and that within these sectors they will be employed on increasingly unfavourable terms.

This chapter describes how one such firm—Mars, Incorporated—has become a leader in innovating new product concepts. In fact, the chapter sees how teams inside the company synthesized many of the methods described in this book: segmenting markets for growth, diving deep into user needs, defining new product line architectures to incorporate modular platforms and flexible manufacturing processes, and combining all these factors into business models different from the company's standard fare. The chapter also suggests how new market applications can change the way a company thinks about itself as a business—not just what it makes, but how it sells and how it makes money. It then provides instructive examples for the business model before and the financial modeling and business process.

Every process, to be effective, requires an owner. This chapter states that owners of the framework should be a few select executives who take personal responsibility and who are intellectually and emotionally committed to organic, enterprise growth. They comprise a special-purpose executive board. The new market applications development process and the projects flowing through it are their direct responsibility. This executive body should be thought as owning the corporation's new market applications for internal, organically grown ventures. The chapter refers to it simply as “the Board.” The Board defines strategic opportunities at the highest level, new product line or service opportunities that may exist in current or new market segments, launches teams and then responds to progress at key checkpoints in the development process, and provides the necessary funding to support the next phase of a team's growth.

Segmenting markets for growth should provide one or more clear targets to which a company can extend its core technologies and other business assets. Those targets are some combination of new users or new product or service uses relative to the company's existing customers and applications. The next step is to define user needs within those target markets. This type of activity—often called ethnography—is the best way to truly understand the needs and frustrations of potential customers. Target users are often served by existing solutions that must be displaced by a superior offering. That superiority must be based on more than cost. Clayton Christensen argued in The Innovator's Dilemma that new product lines that have a disruptive impact on an established market typically provide better functionality in addition to cost advantages. User-centered design links the needs, goals, and aspirations of target users to the design of new products and services.

This study documents four key facts about informal economic activities: (1) the size of the informal sector varies greatly across nations; (2) this size is strongly correlated with economic development, the tax burden, and the rule of law; (3) the informal sector emphasizes small‐scale, self‐financed, and unskilled labour- intensive economic activities; and (4), while financial markets are generally segmented along formal/informal lines in developing nations, there is no compelling evidence that this is true for labour markets. The chapter reviews the existing theoretical literature on the informal sector and describe a simple model with a trade‐off between tax evasion and access to formal sources of outside finance that is consistent with much of the existing evidence. Finally, the study discusses the challenges associated with measuring informal sector assets.

Outlines models that tackle the puzzle of wage rigidity existing under conditions of severe unemployment or underemployment in developing countries. It begins with efficiency wage models of agricultural labour markets in which employers pay wages above market‐clearing levels for reasons of nutrition, morale, or the prevention of shirking and absenteeism. Next, a repeated game‐based formalization of implicit cooperation among workers that prevents wage undercutting is presented. A discussion of other, mainly social reasons for segmented labour markets follows. The last section considers rationales for labour‐tying, such as seasonality and heterogeneity in tasks.

This chapter discusses the politics and economics of the Egyptian film industry before its nationalization in the 1960s. It shows that the economic crisis experienced by Egyptian filmmakers during the mid-1950s was not entirely or predominantly caused by the hegemony of American and European cinemas. The chapter stresses that Egyptian cinema should be understood as segmented, and that the implications of this segmentation have been hidden by a systematic attention to the most accessible segments of the market.

This chapter introduces the concept of dualization. Poverty, inequality, and social exclusion are back on the political agenda in many rich democracies of Western Europe and North America, not only as a consequence of the Great Recession that hit the global economy in 2008. It argues that the translation of structural pressures into policies and outcomes has to be understood as a political process. Dualization is a political process that is characterized by the differential treatment of insiders and outsiders and that can take the form of newly created institutional dualisms or the deepening of existing institutional dualisms (policy output). Thereby, changes in the labor market are translated into the social policy realm, where new distinctions arise or old institutional distinctions are re-activated. Feedback effects and vicious circles are likely to strengthen this effect because weak labor attachment and social exclusion are associated with weaker political representation.

Brand extension is the practice of introducing a new brand (differentiated by market segment) using a well-established brand name as leverage. Most major hotel companies have at least one brand extension, implying that hotel chains consider the strategy to be successful. This chapter examines whether hotels can increase customer loyalty by introducing brand extensions. The results show that customers are less likely to switch brands when the length of brand extension is around three. That is, when they offer up to three extensions, brands are able to retain additional customers by offering a choice of segments under the same name. Below three extensions, however, the switching rate rises, perhaps because the number of choices is too limited to cover a wide enough set of customer needs. Beyond three extensions, the switching rate also rises. Stretching a brand beyond three extensions (that is, into several diverse market segments) may strain customers' credulity. Thus, contrary to other findings, this study strongly suggests not only that there is an optimum number of hotel brands within a family but also that this number appears to be three.

This concluding chapter places the text's empirical findings into perspective, arguing that the current media trends holds increasingly disparate views of reality. It is safe to assume that news firms will cater even more closely to audience demands as time goes on, as the use of current technology improves. And, as costs of delivering news and advertising decrease over time, people should also expect a more segmented media market. Some degree of segmentation has always been present. Cities have long hosted multiple newspapers and television stations, each addressing different demands. However, the common sources of news have lost considerable audience share in the last three decades as the current media market allows each individual to choose his or her own news; as a result, citizens are not exposed to the stories that are important. The chapter concludes with suggestions on how to solve the problem of an audience-driven media.

This chapter explores how global and regional macroprocesses become embedded in the local reality of one specific country, in this case Italy, generating new realities, new jobs, and new economic and social relations. Specifically, the chapter looks at how the feminization of migration generated through political and economic transformations both in sending and receiving countries came to intersect with the growing need for short and long-term eldercare in Italy, a need generated not only by demographic processes but also by cultural, social, and economic transformations. In addition, the chapter explores the role that migration policies, both at the regional and national level, play in creating a segmented, gendered, and racialized labor force.

The resource squeeze and uncertainty exacerbated by marketization can lead to disorganization trends in employment relations and tight management control in the labor process. This chapter presents findings from interviews with managers, worker representatives, and front-line workers concerning worker voice, pay setting, job insecurity, performance management, professional autonomy, and staff–client interactions. Management control in the labor process is directly related to the quality of the service, since they include the amount of interaction (whether there is a speedup), its nature (whether it is narrowly focused on job outcomes), and its distribution (whether there is creaming and parking). We show that the extent to which these outcomes differ within countries depends on degrees of resource scarcity and uncertainty specific to each market segment.

This chapter investigates the economic returns to bilingualism. The analysis is staged in Kazakhstan, a multi-ethnic country with complex ethnic settlement patterns that has recently switched its official state language from Russian to Kazakh. We find a surprising negative effect of bilingualism on earnings and generally low returns to speaking Kazakh. We believe that individuals assess their proficiency in a language relatively to their peers. Hence, bilinguals who rate themselves as “fluent” in Russian and whose peers are Russian speakers are more likely to be genuinely fluent in Russian. In contrast bilinguals who rate themselves as “fluent” in Russian but whose peers are Kazakh speakers are less likely to be genuinely fluent in Russian but rather more fluent than their Kazakh-speaking peers. Thus, the wage penalty for bilingualism is in fact the wage penalty for being less fluent in Russian language which is valued in the labor market in Kazakhstan.

Erik Thorbecke’s work has had a major impact on thinking about developing countries’ employment problems. This chapter reassesses important ideas from his work: the definition of employment and unemployment; a problem of employment, not unemployment; towards better jobs; stratified (some workers having a better range of options than others, perhaps for reasons of skill and human capital, for instance) and segmented (some workers of a given skill level being able to obtain better jobs than others at the same skill level) labour markets; informal sector and informal employment; self-employment and own-account work; labour absorption; priority policy challenges; and a policy evaluation framework. Some have stood the test of time, some not. Finally, the chapter highlights some newer lines of thinking about priorities for development.