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International business.

Undergraduate level course in international business.

Two fellow students at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Wen-Szu Lin and Joseph Sze, reconnected after finishing their MBAs and decided to launch a franchise together in China. The franchise they decided upon was Auntie Anne’s Pretzels. The company had experienced strong growth in Asia with over 85 stores in Thailand, 30 stores in Korea, 25 stores in Malaysia and 8 stores in Japan. Because of these successes, Win and Sze had forecast smooth sailing for their franchise in Beijing. However, things were not as smooth as they had expected. The first challenge was the impounding of their second shipment of pretzel mix for a few weeks. Other problems that they faced had to do with Lin’s inability to write Chinese, although he could speak the language, the lack of regulation of food and ingredients in China which led to their producing some poisonous products, and problems they had with their own employees. Lin and Sze were searching for ways to overcome the cultural and other challenges they faced in Beijing with their franchise.

At the conclusion of the case discussion, students should be able to identify the appropriate global strategy for Auntie Anne’s in China; identify whether Lin and Szu were intending to use a production orientation or the marketing concept in introducing Auntie Anne’s Pretzels into China; list and describe challenges the two entrepreneurs encountered in China; develop a list of actions that American businesspeople should follow in anticipating setting up a business in China; and outline a strategy for Lin and Szu to use in attempting to save the Auntie Anne Pretzel franchise in China.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

CSS 5: International Business.

Evaluating mechanical properties of simply made samples by 3D printing technology at nanoscale provides a clear path to better understand larger-scale responses of complex natural rocks. Therefore, to realize the similarity between synthetically manufactured materials and natural geomaterials, this study focused on nanoscale mechanical characterization of a 3D printed object with only two constituent components (gypsum powder and infiltrant).

The study method includes nanoindentation technique combined with numerical simulation via discrete element method (DEM).

Four typical load-displacement curves were identified from nanoindentation of total test points indicating a typical elastic-plastic behavior of the 3D printed gypsum rock sample. Mechanical parameters such as Young’s modulus and hardness were calculated by energy-based methods and a positive correlation was observed. The infiltrant was found to considerably be responsible for the majority of the sample nano-mechanical behavior rather than the gypsum particles, thus expected to control macroscale properties. This was decided from deconvolution and clustering of elastic modulus data. Particle flow modeling in DEM was used to simulate the nanoindentation process in a porous media yielding rock-alike mechanical behavior.

The results show a matching load-displacement response between experimental and simulation results, which verified the credibility of simulation modeling for mechanical behavior of 3D printed gypsum rock at nanoscale. Finally, differential effective medium theory was used to upscale the nanoindentation results to the macroscale mechanical properties, which provided an insight into the geomechanical modeling at multiscale.

Presents over sixty abstracts summarising the 1999 Employment Research Unit annual conference held at the University of Cardiff. Explores the multiple impacts of globalization on work and employment in contemporary organizations. Covers the human resource management implications of organizational responses to globalization. Examines the theoretical, methodological, empirical and comparative issues pertaining to competitiveness and the management of human resources, the impact of organisational strategies and international production on the workplace, the organization of labour markets, human resource development, cultural change in organisations, trade union responses, and trans‐national corporations. Cites many case studies showing how globalization has brought a lot of opportunities together with much change both to the employee and the employer. Considers the threats to existing cultures, structures and systems.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

By the end of this session, students should be able to: explain what a business model is; summarize the case firm’s business strategy using the elements of business model canvas proposed by Alexander Osterwalder and practice how to apply the business model canvas to analyze the business model of a firm; understand how a firm can seize an opportunity for innovation; and discuss how the case firm navigated through problems that came up as it grew.

Creative Design was a start-up company in Taiwan. To fulfill a course requirement while she was still in school, the founder had formed a team and entered an entrepreneurship competition. They won the second runner up award in that competition and impressed some firms who enquired if they would be interested in doing corporate identity system (CIS) design. They discovered that without establishing a corporate structure their prospective clients would be unable to pay an invoice. As a consequence, the founder and one of the team members established Creative Design Ltd. This case discusses the challenge Creative Design faced at the end of 2012. Wonderland farmers’ association (WFA) wanted to market locally grown jasmine but did not know how to go about it. They reached out to the founder and her company for assistance. The case of WFA was uncharted territory. Creative Design already had extensive experience in CIS design, but it did not have any experience in handling agriculture products. In this case, they had to deal with the full supply chain from production to exhibition. The risk for this project was high but Creative Design accepted the case and became the first design firm offering a “total solution.” Currently, Creative Design works with all kinds of cases, from simple CIS designs to more complicated total solutions of various scales. The founder now has to contemplate if the design house should develop more total solution cases. Doing so would require recruiting more staff and the dilemma of balancing revenue and costs.

The case study is designed for the undergraduate and graduate students of the College of Management; the case can be adopted for the courses of management, innovation and entrepreneurship, etc.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only.

CSS: 3 Entrepreneurship.

Examines the problem of using CAT ME Plus in conjunction with SE‐LIN spine labels and how the problem was solved at Virginia Commonwealth University. Describes the develoment of the solution using the Turbo Pascal program LABELS.PAS, how Pascal works with CAT ME Plus, and CAT ME export to disk files.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the Granger causal link between the stock market index and housing prices in terms of apartment and villa prices.

Monthly data from September 2005 to October 2013 on apartment prices, villa prices, the stock market index, mortgage rates and the consumer price index were used. Statistical methods were applied to explore the long-run co-integration and Granger causal link between the stock market index and apartment and villa prices in Sweden.

The results indicate that the stock market index and housing prices are co-integrated and that a long-run equilibrium relationship exists between them. According to the Granger causality tests, bidirectional relationships exist between the stock market index and apartment and villa prices, respectively, supporting the wealth and credit-price effects. Moreover, variations in apartment and villa prices are primarily caused by endogenous shocks.

To the authors’ best knowledge, this study represents a first analysis of the causal nexus between the stock market and the housing market in terms of apartment and villa prices in the Swedish context using a vector error-correction model to analyze monthly data.

Explains the strengths and weaknesses of neural networks and uses them to analyse racial patterns in 1994 mortgage (conventional and FHA) data for the city of Atlanta (USA). Admits the difficulty of interpreting the results of neural network models but suggests that race does have an impact on lending patterns. Compares the results from a regression analysis and finds that as the percentage black increases in a neighbourhood FHA loans increase, conventional loans decreased and conventional loans denied increase; but these trends reverse when the black percentage rises further. Considers the practical reasons for the findings and concludes that race remains an important factor in the spatial distribution of lending.

In this chapter, we explicate two related techniques that help quantify the sensitivity of a given causal inference to potential omitted variables and/or other sources of unexplained heterogeneity. In particular, we describe the Impact Threshold of a Confounding Variable (ITCV) and the Robustness of Inference to Replacement (RIR). The ITCV describes the minimum correlation necessary between an omitted variable and the focal parameters of a study to have created a spurious or invalid statistical inference. The RIR is a technique that quantifies the percentage of observations with nonzero effects in a sample that would need to be replaced with zero effects in order to overturn a given causal inference at any desired threshold. The RIR also measures the percentage of a given parameter estimate that would need to be biased in order to overturn an inference. Each of these procedures is critical to help establish causal inference, perhaps especially for research urgently studying the COVID-19 pandemic when scholars are not afforded the luxury of extended time periods to determine precise magnitudes of relationships between variables. Over the course of this chapter, we define each technique, illustrate how they are applied in the context of seminal strategic management research, offer guidelines for interpreting corresponding results, and delineate further considerations.