When I hear businessmen speak eloquently about the “social responsibilities of business in a free-enterprise system”, I am reminded of the wonderful line about the Frenchman who discovered at the age of 70 that he had been speaking prose all his life. The businessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned “merely” with profit but also with promoting desirable “social” ends; that business has a “social conscience” and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers. In fact they are — or would be if they or anyone else took them seriously -preaching pure and unadulterated socialism. Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.

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The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits

Drawing on existing research on e-business and the small firm, this article presents a review of the literature and the formulation of a conceptual framework of e-business development Macro-level,

E-business Development An Exploratory Investigation of the Small Firm

The presumed effect of export assistance programmes and distributor support on the export performance of SMEs, though intuitively rational, has not been tested or validated in any systematic fashio...

Effects of Export Assistance and Distributor Support on the Performance of SMEs The Case of Portuguese Export Ventures

The purpose of this research is to investigate the relationships between supply chain relationships/integration, innovative capabilities and manufacturing performance. The study adopts Institutional Theory and Resource-Based View Theory to assess relationships in 171 organisations drawn from three rapidly developing countries – Brazil, India and China. Data were collected using the International Manufacturing Strategy Survey (IMSS VI) and analysed using structural equation modelling. The study found that supply chain relationships and integration relate positively to both product and process innovative capabilities. The study also found that both product and process innovative capabilities relate positively to manufacturing performance. Furthermore, there was a positive relationship between product innovative capabilities and process innovative capabilities. The findings provide new insights into manufacturers in the three countries and show that the relationships they build with their customers have enco...

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The impact of supply chain relationships and integration on innovative capabilities and manufacturing performance: the perspective of rapidly developing countries

Recent studies find that exporters are more productive than non‐exporters and that entry into exporting does not increase firms’ productivity. Thus, firms self‐select into foreign markets. This paper examines productivity before entry into exporting. Using Chilean plant‐level data, we find that productivity and investment increase before plants begin to export. Moreover, productivity of entrants to exporting, but not that of non‐exporters and exporters, increases in response to increases in foreign income, before entry but not after that. The results suggest that the productivity advantage of future exporters may be the result of firms increasing their productivity in order to export.

Do Firms Increase Productivity in Order to Become Exporters

This is an updated edition of the popular workbook, written to match the latest syllabus. It has been written for students studying the "International Marketing Strategy" module in the CIM Diploma; it is endorsed by Trevor Watkins, the CIM Chief Examiner, and contains sample exam questions. The layout of this text is lively and interactive. Each unit has the same structure with the intention of making learning easier and more consistent, and contains objectives, test tasks, practical examples and case studies. There are also questions to test the reader's knowledge, advice on where to find out more, a succinct chapter summary, and revision tips.

K. Lewis

Papers

International marketing strategy