Some may wonder why public relations is a deserving topic for the extensive analysis it receives in this encyclopedia. After all, many might think, it is ?just PR.? In the view of some or even many, public relations is the art of sham, spin, buzz, sandbagging, and ?being nice.? Others fear it as deep-pockets lobbying that gives privilege to powerful companies and special interests. Having said …

Business is the backbone of American society and is one of the keys to making our system work as well as it has for more than two hundred years. Yet as a body of knowledge, business is much younger. There has been, to this point, no organized work that has attempted to present the discipline of business in a single place. The major purpose of the Encyclopedia of Business and Finance is to summa…

This book is the result of relentless hard work on the part of many talented people. While conducting research for the book and developing content, we had the pleasure of meeting and working with many marketers and hearing their stories? many of which became the foundations for case studies in this book: Lisa Gregg at American Express, Tim Riesterer at Ventaso, and David Perry at Aspen Skiing C…

Business people these days are becoming weary of new fads, movements, and revolutions, and rightly so. We have, in less than a decade, been taken through such ?revolutionary? transformations as total quality management, business process reengineering, enterprise resource planning, activity-based costing, and retail e-commerce. Companies have downsized, outsourced, empowered employees, shifted p…

Since the 1960s, Joel Demski has been a potent force in the accounting scholarship and education. Always the rebel, Joel sees any set of received doctrines as more of a target (in the military sense) than as being set in stone. Early in his career, Joel was part of a group of pioneers that broke from tradition and began the amazing expansion of accounting thought into the era of information eco…

Essentials of Knowledge Management is a practical survey of the field of Knowledge Management (KM)?a business optimization strategy that identifies, selects, organizes, distills, and packages information essential to the business of the company in a way that improves employee performance and corporate competitiveness. The preservation and packaging of corporate knowledge (i.e., information in t…

Few textbooks confront this scarsity problem direcctly. Some one-semester books are nearly as long as full-blown principles texts. The shorter ones tend to condense topics and omit the additional explanations, illustrations, and applications that are especially important in survey souses. Students and teachers alike get frustrated trying to pick out tahe essentials from abridged principles texts.

Financial Management and Analysis is an introduction to the concepts, tools, and applications of finance. The purpose of this textbook is to communicate the fundamentals of financial management and financial analysis. This textbook is written in a way that will enable students who are just beginning their study of finance to understand financial decision-making and its role in the decision-maki…

If there was ever a time when higher education needed sustained scholarly reflection on finance, it is now. The reality of globalization for higher education suggests an increase in competition?competition for students, faculty, and resources. Member states of the European Union are currently making a speedy and concerted effort to harmonize their curricula and educational processes. This exerc…

The history of communications is a branch of the history of technology but, strictly speaking, it is in a category of its own. The goods produced by technology, whether a piece of machinery, a piece of clothing or a piece of furniture, are tangible: they perform some useful function. The goods produced by communications are messages. They are mostly useless but when they are useful they can be …