Structuralism and history: Levi-Strauss, Althusser, Foucault
Essay - 10 pages - Business strategy
Structuralism may originate from Saussurian linguistics. In the Course of General Linguistics, Saussure defines one essential methodological principle: in response to previous methodologies, which defined historical evolution as the main object of linguistics, Saussure assumes that language must...
Barclays versus RBS, Santander and Fortis
Essay - 9 pages - Business strategy
ABN Amro bank comes from the merger between two Dutch banks Algermene Bank Netherlands N.V. and Amsterdam Rotterdam Bank N.V. in 1991. ABN Amro's strategic focus is on consumer and commercial clients in local markets and on corporations and financial institutions in the global market. Currently...
Corporate Strategy: Chop Chop Analysis of Total Group
Essay - 3 pages - Business strategy
Total is France's largest corporation as well as the fourth largest publicly-traded integrated oil and gas company in the world. Total is involved in three major segments: downstream, upstream, and chemicals. In the following report, we carefully analyzed these three business segments to...
How do Toy industries react about the problem of counterfeiting & product piracy?
Essay - 9 pages - Business strategy
The fight against counterfeiting is a battle which requires an approach on many levels. It is estimated that counterfeit toys account for 12 per cent of the European toy market. Counterfeiting is a danger for the health of the consumer whose undermines industries and makes criminal organisations...
Cultural diversity is a source of competitive advantage. Discuss
Essay - 4 pages - Business strategy
« To succeed internationally, we need to understand the cultures of the world; and we have all the cultures of the world represented right here - a tremendous competitive advantage. » ? Ernest Thompson, Proctor and Gamble Nowadays, globalisation, which is a phenomenon mainly generated by the...
Introduction to research & development decision analysis
Essay - 5 pages - Finance
A firm optimizes its market value when it successfully implements strategies that generate positive discounted cash flows applied against initial investments with net present value (NPV) greater than zero. One purely economic analysis, which serves as a guidepost to this work, applies a...
"Corporate virtue" strategies are more likely to cause "good governance" than stricter "compliance and control" regimes
Essay - 4 pages - Management
What is good corporate governance? And how an enterprise can achieve to have it? A number of writers and researchers gave their contribution to this subject. Nevertheless, some disagreements and conflicting points of view appeared among them. Indeed, some suggested that corporate...
Francotours: A human resources strategy
Essay - 4 pages - Human resources
Organizational Development is a term used to define the growing process of an organization. An organization's successful development and evolution depends on its ability to create the following: a vision (or identity) that clearly defines its purpose; the leadership capacity to clearly...
General Motors Company : an analysis
Essay - 13 pages - Business strategy
It is hard to imagine that General Motors, one of the leading car companies, occupying 15% of the automobile market and that in 2003 alone earned $3.8 billion on record revenue of $185.5 billion, was founded in the small town of Flint, Michigan, by an ingenious salesman and labourer, William...
An Irish firm in the Chinese Market
Market study - 9 pages - Business strategy
Enterprise Ireland, positioned in the cosmetics field, is willing to enter an international market. With 15% of annual growth in the global market, China becomes more and more attractive for businesses all around the world. In Europe, the attractiveness is intensified by the amount of trade...
Britain and the euro: not for yesterday, not for today, not for ever...?
Essay - 14 pages - Finance
The EMS's Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) has long been a source of political controversy, playing for instance a relevant part in the final drama of Margaret Thatcher's resignation as a serving Prime Minister. Britain entered the ERM in 1990 to exit from it in 1992 and afterward, the new...
Oracle Systems Corporation
Essay - 4 pages - Business strategy
In 1990, the CEO of Oracle Systems Corporation is facing increasing pressure from analysts about the aggressive revenue-recognition policy. As a result, the stock price is plumbed and the CEO is worried about the cost of new equity capital to finance future growth and the firm may become a...
Easy Jet, Strategic management project
Essay - 12 pages - Business strategy
The airlines industry has been highly perturbed by many new external and internal events since the last five years (September 11th, increasing of fuel value, and recently many technical incidents in some flights). All these components transform major stakes and keys of the different airlines...
Textbooks say that banks transform risks: What are the risks involved? and how are they transformed?
Essay - 4 pages - Finance
Financial crisis may be very damaging for the whole society, as bank failures can either lead to runs or to panic. Bank runs occurs when problems at a bank undermine depositors' confidence. The depositors' reaction is to rush to withdraw their money since they know that the bank's...
What is High Performance Measurement? Should every organisation adopt this system? If not, what kind of organisations should adopt it if they wish to improve their performance? Explain how it should help them
Essay - 6 pages - Human resources
The evolution from the notion of Manpower Management to the concept of Strategic Human Resources Management has made it fashionable to say in organisations that people are the greatest asset. But it can be hypocrite to make such a hollow statement, given the lack of tool to measure accurately the...
Case study of General Electric
Essay - 4 pages - Business strategy
Jack Welch was the CEO of General Electric (GE) from 1981 until 2001. He is regarded as one of the most successful CEOs of the 20th century. This essay intends to analyze Jack Welch's two-decade leadership by answering the question of what made him the "Manager of the Century" and GE the...
Effect of psychological contract forms on employee attitudes toward Affirmative Action
Essay - 71 pages - Human resources
Psychological contracts are individual beliefs in reciprocal obligations between employees and employers. In a sample of 1377 South African white collar-employees, this study examined the effects of Affirmative Action on psychological contract attributes and how these changes influence employees'...
Brand analysis and recommendation: Carlton Draught
Essay - 5 pages - Business strategy
The survey we made about Carlton Draught showed us the positive and negative points of its brand image in customers' minds. In order to improve the brand image we will proceed in three parts. First, in the brand analysis we will analyse all the aspects of the marketing mix (product, price,...
Green or environmental logistics
Essay - 5 pages - Logistics
For a number of years, environmental issues have been a growing concerns in society, particularly in the business practices. Under influences of lobby, customers or stakeholders, the idea of sustainable development and of ecological respect has become more popular. Thus, as many other activities...
What does 'MNE'S need to be both "global" and "local"?' mean
Essay - 9 pages - Business strategy
Since the rise of liberalisation with the opening of markets in the mid 1980's, the business world has entered the era of globalisation where companies have dramatically expanded their business abroad. Indeed, the abolition of barriers of entry was one of significant opportunities for...
The New organisation of Auchan France
Thesis - 8 pages - Management
Most of the biggest French firms are doing new organisations in order to save operating cost. It is directly linked with the fact that the growth of yearly turnover is very low (less than 2%). Indeed, there is a structural decline of the purchasing power. The companies have to find solutions to...
Futures and options: working
Thesis - 4 pages - Finance
Since the 1970's, the trade of derivative securities has over expanded and has characterised most of the transactions in the world financial marketplaces. However, derivatives do not constitute a new notion in the financial world, since they first appeared in the 17th century, with the trade of...
Heinz case
Thesis - 5 pages - Business strategy
Heinz is one of the most profitable companies operating in the food processing industry. This essay will try to describe the industry and environment of this company. Then, we will see how the competitive advantage has been developed within this industry. By reading the Vision of the firm, we...
Strategy Analysis on the gambling industry with the example of MGM Mirage
Thesis - 64 pages - Business strategy
We selected the gambling industry as a group because we thought it would be interesting, challenging and because the industry has recently felt a new impulse with the internet. The gambling industry is not one of the most recent industries though, and to understand it fully we decided to analyse...
Business report: Nikon
Thesis - 7 pages - Business strategy
Advertising and co., our agency is pleased to present the business report of the advertising campaign we want to implement throughout this closing date April 2006-March 2007 for the camera Coolpix on behalf the Japanese company Nikon. After understanding the target consumers' motives and the...
Compare and contrast the main claims of Goal Setting and Expectancy Theories with regard to Employee Performance Appraisal. What are the implications for the design of employee appraisal systems?
Essay - 8 pages - Human resources
The history of performance appraisal in the literature is quite recent. Its roots in the early 20th century can be traced to Taylor's pioneering time and motion studies, which interestingly also sets the beginning of the goal-setting theory. But this may not be very helpful, for the same can...
How to evaluate the performance of the human resource department?
Thesis - 4 pages - Human resources
It is important for companies to evaluate the quality and performance of their different departments (Baruch, 1997). Evaluating the human resource department (HRD) is even more important due to its many links with and influences on other items -for example, with increased productivity (Fox et al,...
Work Motivation: Review of the literature
Tutorials/exercises - 19 pages - Management
Work motivation has been an important component of industrial and organizational psychology since the 1930s (Donovan, 2001:55) and continues to play an important role in organizational research (Büssing, 2001:372). The amount of research on motivation has varied through time. During the 1930s and...
Accounting report to the board of direction
Essay - 3 pages - Finance
Today our company is using a cost-plus pricing approach to price its product. In fact this method used to price our products can be inadequate in certain cases for our firm. In the usual course this method is used in a monopoly situation. Today, we have to try to notify if our company has a...
Leadership : Review of the literature
Essay - 19 pages - Human resources
Research on leadership has been part of organisation behaviour for the last one hundred years and is seen as one of social science's most researched subject (Antonakis, Cianciolo and Sternberg, 2003:5). It is believed that in 1896, the Library of congress in the USA had no book on leadership but...