In one sense, managing customer relationships is as old as the hills. Kristin Anderson?s grandfather operated a grain elevator in a small town in Minnesota. Carl T. Anderson knew every farmer by name. These were his customers .. . and his neighbors. He knew the names of their families, where they went to church, and whether they or their parents or their parent?s parents had immigrated from Nor…

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 …

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 …

Since 1959 Ashridge has earned the reputation of being one of the world?s leading business schools. Through all our activities, from executive education and post-graduate qualification programmes to research and consulting, we combine leading-edge thinking with a strong practical focus. We believe that learning must be involving, challenging and above all real, so that it does make a significan…

Although political communication can trace its roots to the earliest classical studies of Aristotle and Plato, modern political communication research is very much an interdisciplinary field of study, drawing on concepts from communication, political science, journalism, sociology, psychology, history, rhetoric, and other fields. In their seminal Handbook of Political Communication, Nimmo and S…

The information technology (IT) revolution is surely coming in this century, just as did the agricultural and industrial revolutions that have already so enriched our lives. As the IT revolution progresses, it is expected that almost all social structures and economic activities will be changed substantially. In order for the IT revolution to penetrate our societies and enrich our lives, everyo…

Multimedia communications have emerged as a major research and development area. In particular, computers in multimedia open a wide range of possibilities by combining different types of digital media such as text, graphics, audio, and video. The emergence of the World Wide Web (WWW), two decades ago, has fuelled the growth of multimedia computing. Because the number of multimedia users is incr…

The worldwide popularity of both personal computers and the Internet has been a mixed blessing. The immediate popularity of the IBM PC was not anticipated. The DOS operating system installed on the original personal computers back in 1982 was never intended for commercial use and therefore was not designed to be secure. In the interest of maintaining compatibility with the early versions of DOS…

We decided to write this book while traveling together on a business trip. Returning from a meeting with a supplier whom we wanted to place on kanban scheduling, we were discussing how resistant the supplier had been to the idea. Our discussion migrated to how most companies and individuals were resistant at first, but that they soon came on board once they understood the benefits of using kanb…

With remarkable regularity a ?new idea? surfaces in the management community. Often it results from repackaging a long-lived management issue or truth. Conversely, the current vogue, Knowledge Management, is a genuinely new concept. In summary this involves the processes that ensure all the knowledge, explicit and implicit, that exists in the organisation is organised in a way that enables it t…