Institutional investors, primarily pension funds, drive global financial markets. The result is investors vulnerable to the risks companies face in global consumer and capital markets. Though some market risks are inevitable, others, such as reputation risk, can be mitigated through increased...

Scandals of corporate governance in the United States and Europe in the aftermath of the TMT bubble captured the public imagination. In play were the interests of senior executives in relation to investors, prompting debate over countries' standards of corporate governance in the global market...

Believed to be a robust alternative to Anglo-American market capitalism, the virtues of the German model are increasingly disputed as doubts are raised about its long-term prospects. At the core of the German model is a system of corporate governance that is characterized by concentrated...

For some, global finance is ubiquitous. The growth of advanced electronic communications combined with computer-driven, top-down investment strategies has provided institutional investors access to the most sheltered capital markets, including those of continental Europe. By contrast, many...

This thesis describes the application of a novel decision support process formachined part estimating in small and medium-sized engineering companies. ManySMEs tend to adopt manual estimating techniques, however this dependence on humanexpertise represents a risk to such organizations. Better...

Product support is a key aspect in the marketing of high-technologyproducts, since it strongly influences customer satisfaction and can also be animportant source of revenue. Typical forms of support include operatortraining, equipment maintenance and, if necessary, repair - all of these...

Where there was a settled political geography of state power and responsibilities, the remarkable growth of global finance has put enormous pressure on national economic, political and social institutions. Furthermore, the looming crisis facing many continental European social security systems...

If its prospects were doubted in the early 1990s, London is now the pre-eminent international financial centre. It dominates its European rivals and is joined with New York and Tokyo in a non-stop reciprocal global embrace. Whereas some analysts approach this topic concentrating on the nature...

European integration has prompted great interest in the adjustment capacities of small and medium enterprises in regions characterized by high levels of unemployment and lower-than-average incomes. At issue, in these circumstances, is the extent to which economic competitiveness can be enhanced...

The objective of this article is to reconceptualize understanding of the economic and spatial processes of corporate restructuring and market exit. We ask what economic logic explains plant closure and firms’ exit from industries, and develop a comprehensive perspective on the nature of the...