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Services provided to customers are often taken for granted by them; but suppliers are having to examine these benefits, which can nullify any profits made. Gordon Hill, vice president of management consultants A T Kearney Ltd, outlines areas where changes can cut costs without adversely affecting service levels.

The future of higher education for business and management is discussed against the framework providedby the 1959 Gordon‐Howell and Pierson reports, and the 1988 Porter and McKibbin report. In light of the concern for rapid and uncertain environmental change,a model of business school roles in contemporary society ‐ passive provider, participating provider, and pathfinding provider ‐ is presented. Implications forbusiness curricula and faculty are examined. Further attention is given to the needs for greater vertical and horizontal integration of business schools with their external environments. A final caution advises that business schools should seek to respond to future challenges without sacrificing their own identities which are essential to the emergence of true institutional excellence.

While there is no question that women on movie screens are frequently eroticised, with countless shots of heaving bosoms or curvaceous rear ends, action stars do occasionally get a reprieve. Pam Grier, the first female action star, was not so lucky. While Grier's Amazonian status should be celebrated, the dark side of her career should also be noted as a cautionary tale of just how much misogyny and racism lurks behind Hollywood doors and intertwined into American cinema history. This chapter examines how Grier's career forces us to rethink both femininity and racism, as well as action films themselves.

The purpose of this paper is to develop the international opportunity identification (IOI) scale through psychometric evaluation in an emerging economy context.

Samples consist of international firms operating in the apparel industry in Bangladesh. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted on the first wave of responses to unfold the underlying dimensions of IOI. The second wave of data was used to confirm the validity of IOI scale through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).

EFA suggests a unidimensional scale, which is supported by CFA. The relationship between IOI and financial performance is significant and confirms nomological validity. Results also confirm the validity and reliability of the IOI scale.

This study indicates that IOI is a reliable and valid scale to measure the strategic action of the international firms operating in emerging economies, and has a positive relationship with financial performance.

This chapter discusses a bottom-up design strategy to support the principles of Universal Design and Universal Design for Learning adapted for online course development. The concept of Universal Design demands a holistic, bottom-up instructional design model for online course development that integrates technology, accessibility, recent instructional and learning theories, and a participatory postmodern worldview. This study is intended for faculty, instructional designers, administrators, assistive technology staff, and Web multimedia software vendors associated with higher education. The research assists these target audiences to design and develop online courses that are accessible without special adaptation or modification. The components of Universal Design for online learning support newer emergent approaches to instructional design, various programming solutions used in the software engineering field for efficiency, Universal Design for Learning, and legal guidelines associated with accessibility.

Gives the highlights of the 2004 annual conference of the American Library Association (ALA) held in Orlando, Florida, in June 2004. These included differing viewpoints on publishing and licencing scholarly work and technology trends.

A national survey of small manufacturing businesses (fewer than 100 employees) reveals prevailing attitudes about doing business with public agencies. Respondents describe a two tiered, nine variable model as representative of the public sector procurement process. Findings provide government agencies and private sector marketers with operational clues on what may help initiate and sustain procurement relationships with smaller suppliers.

Worker cooperative practitioners and developers often claim that democratic worker ownership advances egalitarianism within and beyond the workplace, but most of the empirical evidence in the USA is based on ethnographic case studies or small-scale surveys. This study aims to leverage the first national survey about individuals' experiences in these unique firms to test for the presence of inequalities by gender, race and immigration status in the broader sector.

The study uses a 2017 survey comprising a sample of 1,147 workers from 82 firms. This study focuses on measures of workplace benefits that capture material and psychological ownership, wealth accumulation, wages, workplace autonomy and participation in governance. This study uses ordinary least squares regression models with fixed effects alongside pooled models to determine the effects of gender, race, immigration status and the intersection of gender and race on these outcomes, both within and between firms.

This study finds no evidence of wage gaps by gender, race or immigration status within worker cooperatives, with job type, tenure and worker ownership status instead explaining within-firm variation in pay. Still, this study documents sector-wide disparities in material and non-material outcomes by gender, race and immigration status, reflecting differences in individual-level human capital and job characteristics as well as widespread occupational segregation and homophily.

The paper offers a novel contribution to the literature on workplace empowerment and inequality in participatory firms by analyzing race, gender and immigration status in the most robust dataset that has been collected on worker cooperatives in the USA.

This article rests on a comparative study between Turkish firms that form international corporate alliances and domestic firms in the same industry. The findings indicate that firms with foreign partners are not significantly different from domestic firms with respect to the degree of competition and turbulence in the environment, type of technology used, diversification policy, risk taking propensity and goals of top management. Resting on this finding, which allows for the control of several variables affecting the financing decision, the impact of international diversification on capital structure is investigated. The results indicate that firms which join in foreign alliances are similar to domestic firms with respect to capital structure. The research reveals that firms with foreign partners have lower performance and are younger than domestic firms. This finding is supported with the evidence for the negative relation between performance and tendency to perceive international diversification as a new source of finance. Consequently, foreign alliances seem to constitute a means for capital provision and rapid growth for the recently established and low performing firms which have limited access to external sources of financing.

This chapter intends to contribute to the debate on the determinants of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and their impact on performance measurement and communication systems. It aims at analyzing the relationship between the reasons why firms adopt CSR and the importance given to voluntary CSR disclosure.

Two main categories of CSR determinants have been identified: the external ones, coming from the environment outside the firm, and the internal determinants, which are linked to some specific characteristics of the enterprise and to the objectives it pursues.

The analyzed sample consists of 120 large Italian manufacturing and nonmanufacturing enterprises. The research hypotheses concerning the relationship between external and internal determinants of CSR and CSR disclosure were verified using an independent sample t-test, evaluating the equal variances of clusters using the Levene’s test.

Main results point out that in companies giving importance to CSR disclosure, the internal drivers are more relevant than the external ones in determining the attitude toward CSR. Among the internal determinants, drivers related to company and management values and ethics are quite relevant.

This study is subject to the limitations that generally apply to cross-sectional survey-based research.

Our research findings show that legitimacy theory represents the most relevant theory in explaining CSR disclosure practices of Italian large firms, as well as the operational implementation of stakeholder theory, such as stakeholder management. On the contrary, institutional theory only partially explains CSR disclosure, with respect to the pressures coming from financial markets.