Bøger i Routledge Focus on Business and Management serien

Management and labor have been adversaries in American and Canadian workplaces since the time of colonial settlement. Labor lacked full legal legitimacy in Canada and the United States until the mid-1930s and the passage of laws that granted collective bargaining rights and protection from dismissal due to union activity. The US National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act) became the model for labor laws in both countries. Organized labor began to decline in the United States in the late 1960s due to a variety of factors including electoral politics, internal social and cultural differences, and economic change. Canadian unions fared better in comparison to their American counterparts, but still engaged in significant struggles.This analysis focuses on management and labor interaction in the United States and Canada from the 1930s to the turn of the second decade of the twenty-first century. It also includes a short overview of employer and worker interaction from the time of European colonization to the 1920s. The book addresses two overall questions: In what forms did management and labor conflict occur and how was labor-management interaction different between the two countries? It pays particular attention to key events and practices where the United States and Canada diverged when it came to labor-management conflict including labor law, electoral politics, social and economic change, and unionization patterns in the public and private sectors.This book shows that there were key points of convergence and divergence in the past between the United States and Canada that explain current differences in labor-management conflict and interaction in the two countries. It will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of management and labor history, employment and labor relations, and industrial relations.

With the world in the midst of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, associated labor market challenges are bringing changes to how business schools offer executive education to the future workforce. The COVID-19 pandemic has further underlined the need for such change through impacts on today's workforce and the expected developments that ongoing technological advancements will have on the workforce of the future.This book explores the need for business schools to strategically work to redefine the concept of an innovative business school ecosystem through commitment to experimentation and innovation. The authors advocate for such change to be realized through partnerships supporting actions that ensure graduates' and workers' access to skills building and reskilling and upskilling. The book presents selected case studies exemplifying such an approach and highlights best practices that can be implemented in public-private as well as private-private partnerships.The Innovative Management Education Ecosystem: Reskilling and Upskilling the Future Workforce offers readers from industry and academia as well as government institutions insights that will benefit the development of innovative curricula and training programs and, at the same time, labor markets.

Accounting skills are increasingly important in many walks of life. This concise book provides readers with a primer on accounting which focuses on its uses for managers. With additional online resources for further study, this unique and focused text will be welcomed by all those looking to develop an employable competency in accounting and finance.

Entrepreneurs who start out with no network, no money, no market and scarce resources find a big contrast between what they read in books and the success stories from the Valley and their reality, specially first-timers. Most entrepreneurial books focus on the Business Canvas Model, simplifying the process of building a start-up. Many entrepreneurs who have no previous business experience embrace quick and lean methods without the foundations needed to build solid value proposals.This book stands out because it deals with entrepreneurship in environments far removed from large cities with fewer infrastructures, connections and resources but which also need companies that provide services to citizens and society. This book focuses on the basics, treating each part of the business canvas as a discipline itself that must be mastered. The book illustrates key lessons learned and offers guidance on essential topics for new venture success in mainstream markets. It expands critical lessons learned and points of guidance across several key topics for new venture creation. Noteworthy is the role of context, financial understanding, building business development skills and start-up communications.Entrepreneurship for Rural Start-ups will be of interest to students, academics and researchers in the field of entrepreneurship, and will be of use to individuals looking to start a local business to take advantage of the rural environment and the possibilities it offers.

The most important goals for an organization in the Fourth Industrial Revolution will be innovation and enhanced performance. Creativity is a means for promoting these goals - a creative person is a productive person who uses all their resources to attain specific goals. Da Vinci Creativity should be understood as being focused on improving performance both at individual and organizational levels. Traditional organizations can be hierarchical, and thus rigid, at a time when the external environment is undergoing very rapid change. The aim of this book is to present an organizational model that develops leaders who are able to cope with the demands of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.In light of the increasing levels of innovation being experienced in society around us, Creativity, Innovation and the Fourth Industrial Revolution: The da Vinci Strategy offers an organizational theory that can be applied in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This book will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of leadership, strategy, and technology and innovation management.

In Search of Excellence was the book that launched a thousand popular management books. In this concise book, David and Jack Collins demonstrate the emptiness of business excellence and in so doing reveal the flawed foundations of popular management theory.Focusing upon the conduct of those organizations vaunted as 'exemplars of excellence' the authors build upon insightful case reports to demonstrate wholesale misconduct at the very heart of the excellence project. Indeed, The Emptiness of Business Excellence demonstrates that the exemplars of excellence indulged bribery, corruption, racism, sexism and anti-Semitism... and more besides! Furthermore, the book demonstrates that, despite their claims to knowledge, Peters and Waterman often knew little about the financial performance of their excellent organizations and were either unaware of or had chosen to overlook reports which highlighted deeply problematic conduct within those formations, which they offered as beacons for change and renewal.This book will be of interest to researchers, scholars and students with an interest in business and management, especially those focusing on the realities of managerial practice.

This concise book uses narrative fiction to address how researchers can conduct qualitative research using both online and first-hand data and digital and face-to-face methods. The book is structured around four phases of the research process - accessing management field research, writing the literature review, collecting and analysing data and enacting qualitative research and finally the creative process of writing qualitative research. Theory and practice are merged through a situation-based case study within each chapter, with the methods and tools employed in each context explored through narrative fiction. The protagonists of each case have specific questions, emotions and ambiguities that qualitative researchers need to face, offering a unique approach to the practice of qualitative research and how it is used in real-life situations. Founded on the idea of enacting and not just doing qualitative research, this book offers toolkits that the researcher can use to operationalize research from start to finish. It will be of interest to postgraduate students conducting research-based projects in Business and Management, PhD researchers and academics looking for a fresh approach.

This book introduces new approaches that deploy concepts from Marx's critique of political economy to renew the study of labour, value and social antagonisms in the broad area of management and organisation studies.Exploring established and emergent strands of Marxian theorising inside and outside management and organisation studies, it delves into, beyond and behind the 'hidden abode' of production to examine a range of issues including: the relationship between the workplace and the market; the relationship between conflicts at work and wider social and political movements; the role of class, gender and race in capitalist society; and the interconnection of work and labour with the environmental crisis.The book will be of interest for academics, postgraduate students and researchers interested in radical perspectives on work, organisation and economic life. Representing both a critical introduction to existing theories and a theoretical contribution to the development of the field of study in its own right, it condenses challenging ideas into a short, readable volume without losing their complexity or sophistication.

Focusing on the issue of power as the main building block of relationships between business buyers and sellers, this book explains the complex nature of power with its multidimensional and multi-directional character.As a complex construct, inter-firm power is treated as a matter of perception as well as in terms of total and relative power. The book analyses extensively the issue of power asymmetry with its dynamics and its consequences for business-to-business (B2B) relationships, particularly analyzing the dynamic mechanism of power. Various theoretical domains or research streams regarding managing an asymmetrical business relationship by the weaker partner are also examined. Based on the studies of other scholars as well as on the authors' own research, this book shows how weaker suppliers or buyers deal with high-power partners in business relationships and the approaches of more powerful parties to asymmetrical relationship development. Additionally, the book presents the specific nature of power in international B2B relationships, including its connection to culture and conflict, as well as how to handle power in managing export performance within international B2B relationships.It is written for scholars and students who are interested in academic research concerning B2B marketing and B2B relationship marketing domains, specifically those who are interested in literature dealing with supply chain management, key account management, relationship portfolio management, distribution channel management and the network approach.