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Focus: Business Reference Reviews | Business Information at Work | International Executive Development Programmes | Thomson Derivatives and Risk Management Directory | International Business Information: How to Find It, How to Use It | The Blackwell Encyclopedic Dictionary of Human Resource Management | Business Reference Sources and Services: How End Users and Librarians Work Together | The Gower Handbook of Management | World Directory of Business Information Web Sites | Directory of Consumer Brands and Their Owners | Japan Economic Almanac | The Blackwell Encyclopedic Dictionary of Marketing Current Weekly Research Review and previous reviews index Every week Emerald Intelligence + Full Text provides free access to the full text of two journals from their business management and professional research article database. Here we provide a weekly review of the most relevant articles from those journals, selected for the interests of friends of the Asian Business Strategy and Street Intelligence Ezine and the Asian Research Center. Each weekly review focuses on a specific professional or management topic. The selection changes each week on a Monday around Hong Kong/Singapore/Malaysia time 6pm or GST 10am.
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Reference Reviews is a British publication that reviews reference material. Although it has a strong European focus, both in their selection of resources to review and their reviewers, we have selected some of the more international business focused reviews for publication here. On that criteria, Reference Reviews provides some highly valuable pointers for those who need to access detailed reviews of publications before purchase. Indeed only one of the recent reviews focused on Asia, and that is included here. Our Research Review this week departs from the usual formula of providing abstracts of research articles, and instead provides short abstracts of the more extensive reviews available in the publication. Again, clicking on the "Journals of the Week" link will allow you to access the full reviews this week only!
Business Information at Work The right information is vital to the success of every organisation and increasingly managers are recognising its valuable role in their decision-making processes. The aim of this book is “to consider what businesses need to know about their external environment in order best to position themselves in it, and to help in finding and using the information which can provide the answers”. Lowe has pulled together a book which is both theoretical but, at the same time, also practical.
Keywords: Business, planning, Information
International Executive Development Programmes 3rd edition As business becomes increasingly global, there is a growing need to develop managers who can adapt to different environments and ways of doing business. The development and training of managers is an ongoing part of good business practice. This guide claims “to offer a complete guide to management education around the world”.
Keywords: Management education
Thomson Derivatives and Risk Management Directory 1999 The volume of futures and options contracts traded on the world’s derivatives exchanges in 1998 amounted to £2.2bn with most of the main markets recording impressive growth in business. Derivatives are risk-shifting devices. Properly used, they can provide great benefit. If they are mishandled, the results can be catastrophic as was seen when Leeson brought Barings to its knees. The Thomson Derivatives and Risk Management Directory claims to be “the most comprehensive and reliable guide to this most changeable of industries”. It presents a wealth of information on the derivatives and risk management industry throughout the world.
Keywords: Risk management
International Business Information: How to Find It, How to Use It 2nd edition Distribution deals are a complication in our business, although not necessarily harmful ones when, as in this case, a title drops in price in the process (albeit by a modest £2.50). Having already had this title reviewed under its original imprint by our expert (RR 98/434: “... a well written, authoritative and an extremely useful directory”) we now find it re-presented by Fitzroy Dearborn who have taken over its distribution from the original importers, Eurospan. It seems that only the publisher/distributor, price, ISBN and (perhaps rather sneakily) year of publication have changed in the intervening two or three months; so, we are content to repeat Christine Reid’s conclusion that this title still (for those who did not buy it at our first recommendation) “merits purchase by any reference library collection”.
Keywords: Companies, Information
The Blackwell Encyclopedic Dictionary of Human Resource Management This reviewer has difficulty with the phrase “human resource management”, so what better way to find out what it means than by consulting an “encyclopedic dictionary” on the subject. Especially so since the editors in their preamble volunteer that “many of the persons we interacted with daily regularly asked for basic, definitional information about human resource management topics”. Their book has 13 entries starting with the phrase “human resource(s)” (I will adopt their shorthand “HR”). HR audits provide “a framework for imposing the way in which the firm manages people”; an HR department is there to “develop and implement policies, programs, and procedures for the acquisition and development of the firm’s human capital; HR department effectiveness uses such phrases as ‘employees’ and ‘workforce’, which are effective to the extent that ‘internally consistent systems of high performance work practices meet the needs of the department’s constituencies’”; HR information systems are concerned with “personnel activities, and organisation unit characteristics”; HR inventories “accumulated stores of employee characteristics within an organisation that have value to the organisation.”; HR management in the USA, we are told, emerged “as the personnel department”; HR resource programming talks about employees and human resource surpluses and shortages; and so on. Are we talking about staff, I wonder? I tried “Staffing” and found that “Staffing has its roots in the fact that individuals differ from one another” and is concerned with an individual’s progress through an organisation.
Keywords: Human resource management
Business Reference Sources and Services: How End Users and Librarians Work Together This volume is a collection of nine papers which aim to illustrate some of the many ways librarians and users have worked together effectively on projects. This collection has also been published as The Reference Librarian, No. 58, 1997. The papers are split into two distinct sections - business services and the Internet, and networking. Three papers comprise the Internet section. These consider how the Internet can be used to teach business research in the USA to those whose first language is not English; the development of a Web site for school business officials; and company information on the Web, which describes how the Web can provide additional company information to that found in traditional library resources.
Keywords: Business, Library services, Reference services
The Gower Handbook of Management (4th ed.) If any book was designed to intimidate a reviewer, or to be coveted by the user, then surely it is this 1,300-page, three-inch thick, 72-chaptered book by management publishers Gower, on everything to do with management! To take the user first, I can see the morning’s first-comers diving straight to the reference shelves to claim The Gower for the day, and so joining that select band of standard texts like Haralambos on Sociology, or Cheshire and Fifoot on the Law of Contract which are never there! The three-inch gap on the shelf will, I am certain, become a pretty permanent feature, showing that Gower have scored a winner - and rightly so; you name it - risk management, benchmarking, marketing, product management, property rights, or pay - Gower has got it. I have reservations about those three inches though. However well produced physically, no book that thick will survive heavy use for long; the opening lies flat, it is true, but the gullet is tight and the book is awkward to hold open in the hand. In fact, the binding looks very weak; it is stitched, but not onto fabric bands incorporated into the endpapers, so the three inches and 1,300 pages are attached to the covers by the mere strength of thick endpapers. A few awkward knocks or shoves onto tight shelves will see covers and pages part company. A serious product fault for the information systems manager.
Keywords: Management
World Directory of Business Information Web Sites Various seemingly rash or exaggerated claims about the Internet and its usefulness seem to be made quite regularly now, which need expert and constant survey and evaluation of sites to establish or substantiate them. The importance of the Internet for business is often stated, and now increasingly is being demonstrated, not least by this directory. It really is remarkable just how much valuable information worldwide is available free of charge, some of it carrying a high cash value when presented by different means even by the same agencies in some cases. This is the first edition of an inevitable new directory of potentially enormous (indeed incalculable) and actually considerable value, directing the user to first-stop sources of data and information around the world, and saving both time and unnecessary purchase costs. In any business research environment these are particularly important considerations to set against the cost of the directory.
Keywords: Business, Information, Internet
Directory of Consumer Brands and Their Owners 1998: Europe 3rd Edition This third edition promises “vastly expanded coverage” and quotes that more than 54,000 brands are included, a 45 per cent increase on the previous edition, with the number of companies covered increased to 6,000. For the first time retailer own-brands are also now included, while some brands from the earlier edition have been excluded as falling outside the strict scope of this directory (specifically, prescription pharmaceuticals and non-consumer products). This volume excludes Eastern Europe, the subject of its own volume in the series (other volumes for Asia-Pacific and Latin-America are to follow during 1998); all four volumes together are also available on a CD-ROM which includes North America as well and so presents the entire Euromonitor database of 80,000 brands from 11,000 companies.
Keywords: Brand names, Europe
Japan Economic Almanac 1998 1997 saw a financial meltdown in the Asian region, a meltdown which saw enormous turmoil in the Japanese economy. Yamaichi Securities, one of the Big Four brokerage houses collapsed, consumption tax was raised and increased the taxpayer’s burden, the yen had a triple fall, and the Nikkei Stock Average dropped at the year end. Nine companies listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange filed bankruptcy petitions. Despite this, many Japanese manufacturers retain a global competitive edge, and Japan’s plans to reform its financial sector, referred to as the Big Bang (announced in November 1996) start in 1998. The aim is to revise the nation’s markets by making them more efficient, transparent and fair by 2001.
Keywords: Economics, Japan
The Blackwell Encyclopedic Dictionary of Marketing This volume forms part of the 12-volume Blackwell Encyclopedia of Management. It sets out to provide “clear, concise, up-to-the minute, and highly informative definitions and explanations of the key concepts covering the whole of the fast changing field of contemporary marketing”. The editors state in their introduction that compiling a dictionary on the subject of marketing presented them with “an interesting challenge” for although marketing as a practice has long been with us, it is only since the 1950s that it began to become accepted as an academic discipline. Hence, there is much on-going debate as to what constitutes marketing. The core terms on which there is some agreement form the basis of this dictionary.
Keywords: Marketing
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