Consumer electronics and computers redefined life and work in the twentieth century. In Inventing the Electronic Century, Pulitzer Prize-winning business historian Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., traces their origins and worldwide development. This masterful analysis is essential reading for every manager and student of technology.
Our Choice: Democracy or Corporate Rule A handful of corporations and financial institutions command an ever-greater concentration of economic and political power in an assault against markets, democracy, and life. It's a “suicide economy,” says David Korten, that destroys the very foundations of its own existence. The bestselling 1995 edition of When Corporations Rule the World helped launch a global resistance against corporate domination. In this twentieth-anniversary edition, Korten shares insights from his personal experience as a participant in the growing movement for a New Economy. A new introduction documents the further concentration of wealth and corporate power since 1995 and explores why our institutions resolutely resist even modest reform. A new conclusion chapter outlines high-leverage opportunities for breakthrough change.
Contains nine contributions which range from Internet business research, ESL students, and underprivileged, nontraditional students to networking with community business sources and the Internet's impact on government documents.
Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is one avenue for offering assistance to developing countries in their efforts to grow. Small countries typically have limited resources to direct toward investment attraction programs, so the ability to segment the market (of Multinational Corporations looking to invest) is a crucial skill. This book develops and employs an investment preference analysis model to give evidence that homogenous groups of investors can be identified. Once these groups are identified, their needs - specific preference requirements for laws, regulations, incentives, and general conditions - can be more efficiently addressed.
Modern industrial agriculture is in crisis. The dream of global abundance promised by chemical and biological technology is becoming a nightmare of health risks, degraded land and ailing communities. There is mounting public distrust of conventional agricultural practices. From the Ground Up explores the fundamental principles which underlie the growth- at-any-cost thinking of modern society and highlights some of the most promising alternative ways of producing environmentally healthy food.
The dean of business historians continues his masterful chronicle of the transforming revolutions of the twentieth century begun in Inventing the Electronic Century. Alfred Chandler argues that only with consistent attention to research and development and an emphasis on long-term corporate strategies could firms remain successful over time. He details these processes for nearly every major chemical and pharmaceutical firm, demonstrating why some companies forged ahead while others failed. By the end of World War II, the chemical and pharmaceutical industries were transformed by the commercializing of new learning, the petrochemical and the antibiotic revolutions. But by the 1970s, chemical science was no longer providing the new learning necessary to commercialize more products, although new directions flourished in the pharmaceutical industries. In the 1980s, major drug companies, including Eli Lilly, Merck, and Schering Plough, commercialized the first biotechnology products, and as the twenty-first century began, the infrastructure of this biotechnology revolution was comparable to that of the second industrial revolution just before World War I and the information revolution of the 1960s. Shaping the Industrial Century is a major contribution to our understanding of the most dynamic industries of the modern era.
Citing case histories such as Chevron, Shell, and Mitsubishi, CORPORATE WATCH editor Joshua Karliner brilliantly exposes how transnationals--aided by free trade agreements, World Bank policies, and massive consumer campaigns--play central roles in environmental destruction. This important and timely book is a significant contribution to the battle against irresponsible corporate behavior.