The seventh edition of The Business Environment has been perfectly tailored to cover the core topics that will be studied on an introductory Business Environment module. This fully updated new edition provides comprehensive coverage of the varying factors that make up the business environment, with a particular focus on how these factors impact business organisations and the decisions organisations make.Key Features:Up-to-date coverageThe business environment continues to evolve, and this new edition takes on board recent issues including: The after-effects of the ‘credit crunch’ The emerging economic power of China, India and Brazil Data security and privacy Business ethics Cultural identity Climate change Real life examplesNew opening vignettes introduce the main topic and show the business environment in real life. In addition, the book contains a wealth of shorter and longer case studies featuring companies such as Google, Amazon and Virgin Trains.PedagogyClearly written and user friendly, the book boasts a full range of learning tools which include: Learning Objectives, Thinking Around the Subject boxes, Review Questions, and Activities.

Updated annually, this is the most comprehensive and up-to-date reference available on information security and assurance. Bringing together the knowledgerequired of IT security professionals, it facilitates the up-to-date understanding required to stay one step ahead of evolving threats, standards, and regulations. Reporting on the latest developments in information security and recent changes to the (ISC)2 CISSP Common Body of Knowledge (CBK), this volume features 27 new chapters on topics such as BYOD, IT consumerization, smart grids, security, and privacy.

Fourteenth in a series of annual reports comparing business regulation in 190 economies, Doing Business 2017 measures aspects of regulation affecting 10 areas of everyday business activity: • Starting a business • Dealing with construction permits • Getting electricity • Registering property • Getting credit • Protecting minority investors • Paying taxes • Trading across borders • Enforcing contracts • Resolving insolvency These areas are included in the distance to frontier score and ease of doing business ranking. Doing Business also measures features of labor market regulation, which is not included in these two measures. This year’s report introduces major improvements by expanding the paying taxes indicators to cover postfiling processes—tax audits, tax refunds and tax appeals—and presents analysis of pilot data on selling to the government which measures public procurement regulations. Also for the first time this year Doing Business collects data on Somalia, bringing the total number of economies covered to 190. Using the data originally developed by Women, Business and the Law, this year for the first time Doing Business adds a gender component to three indicators—starting a business, registering property, and enforcing contracts—and finds that those economies which limit women’s access in these areas have fewer women working in the private sector both as employers and employees. The report updates all indicators as of June 1, 2016, ranks economies on their overall “ease of doing business†?, and analyzes reforms to business regulation †“ identifying which economies are strengthening their business environment the most. Doing Business illustrates how reforms in business regulations are being used to analyze economic outcomes for domestic entrepreneurs and for the wider economy. It is a flagship product produced in partnership by the World Bank Group that garners worldwide attention on regulatory barriers to entrepreneurship. More than 137 economies have used the Doing Business indicators to shape reform agendas and monitor improvements on the ground. In addition, the Doing Business data has generated over 2,182 articles in peer-reviewed academic journals since its inception.

This Book, Structured Around The Strategic Management Process Model, Focuses On Conceptual Understanding Of Process And Articulation Of Strategies. Uptodate And Well Researched, It Includes Many Case Studies, Numerous Exhibits And Boxed Highlights And Review Questions.

The ESRC/GEC programme has made a major contribution in terms of environmental social science research. The chapters in this book provide incisive, detailed and reflective critiques of the development of knowledge over the last ten years and provide powerful and important messages about the challenges presented by the complex relationship between environmental and social change. The book should be essential reading for all researchers and also for all policymakers who are grappling with questions about how to respond to environment/society controversies. Judith Petts, Birmingham University, UK and Member of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution Global environmental change will be with us forever. But how it happens in the future, and with what effect on the planet and its peoples depends to a large extent on how the international agreements, national politics and local actions play out. This collection provides the most comprehensive assessment yet of these critical interconnections, and reveals how social scientists are making an invaluable contribution to the creation of more science and just livelihoods in a future world. Tim O Riordan, University of East Anglia, UK An aphrodisiac to the tepid response of positivist social science. People are not merely actors, perpetrators and victims, in an environmental drama. The critical social theorists in this book constructively show us how people are improvising the stage and the script as we update our understanding of nature, what constitutes a good life, and our individual and collective options. Richard B. Norgaard, University of California, Berkeley, US Negotiating Environmental Change is a child of the ESRCs Global Environmental Change Programme, by far the biggest piece of work by social scientists in the United Kingdom during the 1990s. At the beginning of the twenty-first century the balance sheet needs to be drawn up: what do our policies, insights and values owe to the collaborative efforts of social scientists? This book suggests that ideas and approaches that were conceived at a time when the Ozone Hole , Global Warming and Biodiversity Losses were beginning to resonate in academic and policy circles have now entered the British and European psyche. The challenge of forward thinking in the twenty-first century, in which the environment is central to most of the issues that concern social science, is to demonstrate that the environment is not a separate territory . Environmental thinking and practice affects us in various guises: governance and democracy, business and management, risk and everyday consumption: the substance of this book. Negotiating Environmental Change makes clear the contribution that new thinking is making to problems that were not looked upon as environmental a decade ago, but which we now see as being at the forefront of global research and policy agendas. Michael Redclift, King s College London, UK Major advances have been made recently in environmental social science but the context and importance of this research has also changed. Social and natural science studies of the environment have begun to interact more closely with each other and many analysts now agree that an understanding of environmental problems often depends on an understanding of the attitudes and behaviour of people and organisations. Moreover, policy and public debates have also shown that many assumptions that underpin arguments about sustainable development need to be reconsidered and re-framed. This book by leading researchers presents a critical review of debates in environmental social science over the past decade. Three broad areas are covered in ten chapters: the problems of scientific uncertainty and its role in shaping environmental policy and decisions; the development of institutional frameworks for governing natural resources; and the link between economic and technological change and the environment. The book begins with an overview essay exam

The authors bring the disciplines of accounting and economics to bear on an examination of the critical role played by the major accounting firms in the ongoing economic recovery of Pacific Rim nations from the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. Accounting firms, through their service offerings, are having an impact not only on economic indicators, but also on longer-term growth prospects and development patterns in the newly industrialized nations of Southeast Asia (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan), emerging nations (Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia) and selected Pacific island nations (including Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and Vanuatu). For practitioners in the private and public sectors and their academic colleagues. Demonstrating the full extent of the influence of global accounting firms on Pacific economies, the authors provide an overview of domestic accounting institutions for each grouping of nations in order to lend valuable context to the discussion of the role of international services firms in each individual jurisdiction. For those whose work or academic accounting services in Southeast Asia, or the role in the region of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and various regional development banks and United Nations agencies.

This book features not only the latest trends but also academic and industry practitioner stakeholders’ perspectives on language and functional role issues facing the rapidly developing corporate communication (CC) profession in the Greater China region. The book also explores the implications for Western societies that cross-culturally engage with Chinese partners in CC practices. The book’s chapters are oriented on five main themes, namely: Development of the CC Profession, Bilingual Practices in Corporate Communication, Corporate Social Responsibility, Employee Communications, and Media Discourse & Persuasive Communication. The first two cluster themes feature a review of the PR/CC profession’s evolutionary path to its current status as a more distinct and diversified CC profession emphasizing the role of language and particularly the bilingualism phenomenon, whereas the other cluster themes, which adopt the perspectives of academics and those of CC practitioners, span from cross-cultural, profession-wide and bilingual communication issues to applications of heuristic knowledge within industry-specific workplace contexts.

Right now, our energy system is highly dependent on fossil sources. This dependency causes two major problems: First, it causes the scarcity of these non-renewable energy sources, and climate change. There are two alternatives to fossil energy sources that are on the one hand, nuclear energy, and on the other hand, renewable energy sources. The process of nuclear energy is fascinating for the energy outcome of one kilogram of uranium equals the stored energy of about 3.000 tons of coal. Nuclear energy can reduce the problems that cause climate change for, the process is carbon neutral but, it leads to several other problems as nuclear proliferation, incidents, and the unsolved problem of waste disposal. Renewable energy sources are carbon neutral, and by definition renewable, and therefore, they could solve both major problems of the energy sector. Right now, the drawbacks are at first that most of them are not competitive, and need to be subsidized by governments, and second, the technical challenge to store the produced energy. It is easy to understand that the future of the energy sector is highly uncertain, and that under these circumstances, tools are of no use as far as they are extrapolating past trends. In the last years, several energy scenarios have been conducted in order to display the major uncertainties. It is not surprising that the results are strongly varying, and therefore, the results lead to the question of the characteristics and the quality of the scenarios. But, there has been no analysis of the characteristics and the quality of energy scenarios so far. However, the author analyzes these in this study. The author begins with a short introduction about the history of scenarios, and continues with the development of a general framework of the scenario development process. Further, he lists its possible variations. The scenario typology that consists of 15 variables that can be used to examine the characteristics and the quality of scenarios is then applied at a total of 5 scenarios. The sample of scenarios was chosen to display the broad range of different scenario developers. It consists of the DESERTEC scenario of a charitable trust, the EU-Roadmap 2050 of a political institution, the Greenpeace [R]evolution of an NGO, the World Energy Outlook of an intergovernmental institution, and the Shell Energy scenarios of a company that deal within the energy sector.