This second volume is a direct outgrowth of the work Joel Demski and Jerry started in their 1978 Accounting Review paper, Economic Incentives in Budgetary Control Systems. This paper later received the AAA 1994 Seminal Contribution to Accounting Literature Award. Joel is referenced many times throughout this volume because he has produced a number of significant papers dealing with agency theor…

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…

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 …

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…

Much of contemporary public finance can be described as being either Wicksellian or Edgeworthian in character. In the former, fiscal phenomena arise through complex processes of exchange: in the latter, they arise through acts of choice by some maximizing agent. This chapter traces these alternative orientations in the history of thought as far back as the Cameralists, compares these writers wi…

Each discipline optimizes its task to the best of its ability. Each manufacturing discipline has its own objectives and criteria of optimization according to its function. For example: the designer main objective is meeting product specifications: the process planner?s main objective is that the items will meet drawing specifications: the production planner?s main objectives are meeting the due…

This publication originated in the European Science Foundation (ESF) exploratory workshop on ''Innovative comparative methods for policy analysis. An interdisciplinary European endeavour for methodological advances and improved policy analysis/evaluation'' held in Erfurt from 25 to 28 September 2004 (ref. EW03-217). This volume brings together a selection of contributions to this workshop, whic…