工商管理外文文献及翻译
工商管理文献翻译
Understanding Customer Requirements1 Listening to Customers Through Research1.1Using Marketing Research to Understand Customer ExpectationsFinding out what customers expect is essential to providing service quality, and marketing research is a key vehicle for understanding customer expectations and perceptions of services, In services, as with any offering, a firm that does no marketing research at all is unlikely to understand its customers. A firm that does marketing research, but not on the topic of customer expectations, may also fail to know what is needed to stay in tune with changing customer requirements. Marketing research must focus on service issues such as what features are most important to customers, what levels of these features customers expect, and what customers think the company can and should do when problems occur in service delivery. Even when a service firm is small and has limited resources to conduct research, avenues are open to explore what customers expect.One of the biggest challenges facing a marketing researcher is converting a complex set of data to a form that can be read and understood quickly by executives, managers, and other employees who will make decisions from the research. For example, database management is being adopted as a strategic initiative by many firms, but merely having a sophisticated database does not ensure that the findings will be useful to managers. Many of the people who use marketing research findings have not been trained in statistics and have neither the time nor the expertise to analyze computer printouts and other technical research information. The goal in this stage of the marketing research process is to communicate information clearly to the right people in a timely fashion. Among considerations are the following: Who gets this information? Why do the need it? How will they use it? Does it mean the same thing across cultures? When users feel confident that they understand the data, they are far more likely to apply it appropriately. When managers do not understand how to interpret the data, or when they lack confidence in the research, the investment of time, skill, and effort will be lost.1.2 Using Marketing Research InformationConducting research about customer expectations is only the first part of understanding the customer, even if the research is appropriately designed, executed, and presented. A service firm must also use the research findings in a meaningfulway–to drive change or improvement in the way service is delivered. The misuse(or even nonuse)of research data can lead to a large gap in understanding customer expectations. When managers do not read research reports because they are too busy dealing with the day-to-day challenges of the business, companies fail to use the resources available to them. And when customers participate in marketing research studies but never see changes in the way the company does business, they fell frustrated and annoyed with the company. Understanding how to make the best use of research – to apply what has been learned to the business – is a key way to close the gap between customer expectations and management perceptions of customer expectations. Managers must learn to turn research information and insights into action, to recognize that the purpose of research is to drive improvement and customer satisfaction.The research plan should specify the mechanism by which customer data will be used. The research should be actionable: timely, specific, and credible. It can also have a mechanism that allows a company to respond to dissatisfied customers immediately.1.3Upward CommunicationIn some service firms, especially small and localized firms, owners or managers may be in constant contact with customers, thereby gaining firsthand knowledge of customer expectations and perceptions. But in large service organizations, managers do not always get the opportunity to experience firsthand what their customers want.The larger a company is, the more difficult it will be for managers to interact directly with the customer and the less firsthand information they will have about customer expectations. Even when they read and digest research reports, managers can lose the reality of the customer if they never get the opportunity to experience the actual service. A theoretical view of how things are supposed to work cannot provide the richness of the service encounter. To truly understand customer needs, management benefits form hands-on knowledge of what really happens in stores, on customer service telephone lines, in service queues, and in face-to-face service encounters. If gap 1 is to be closed managers in large firms need some form of customer contact.2Building Customer Relationships2.1Relationship MarketingRelationship marketing essentially represents a paradigm shift within marketing –away from an acquisitions/transaction focus toward a retention/relationship focus.Relationship marketing (or relationship management) is a philosophy of doing business, a strategic orientation, that focus on keeping and improving relationships with current customers rather than on acquiring new customers. This philosophy assumes that many consumers and business customers prefer to have an ongoing relationship with one organization than to switch continually among providers in their search for value. Building on this assumption and the fact that it is usually much cheaper to keep a current customer than to attract a new one, successful marketers are working on effective strategies for retaining customers.It has been suggested that firms frequently focus on attracting customer (the “first act”) but then pay little attention to what they should do to keep them (the “second act”). Ideas expressed in an interview with James L. Schorr, then executive vice president of marketing at Holiday Inns, illustrate this point. In the interview he stated that he was famous at Holiday Inns for what is called the “bucket theory of marketing.” By this he meant that marketing can be thought of as a big bucket: It is what sales, advertising, and promotion programs do that pours business into the top of the bucket. As long as these programs are effective, the bucket stays full. However, “There’s only one problem,”he said, “there’s a hole in the bucket,”When the business is running well and the hotel is delivering on its promises, the hole is small and few customers are leaving. When the operation is weak and customers are not satisfied with what they get, however, people start falling out of the bucket through the holes faster than they can be poured in through the top.The bucket theory illustrates why a relationship strategy that focuses on plugging the holes in the bucket makes so much sense. Historically, marketers have been more concerned with acquisition of customers, so a shift to a relationship strategy often represents changes in mind set, organizational culture, and employee reward systems. For example, the sales incentive systems in many organizations are set up to reward bringing in new customers. There are often fewer(or not) rewards for retaining current accounts. Thus, even when people see the logic of customer retention, the existing organizational systems may not support its implementation.Relationship value of a concept or calculation that looks at customers from the point of view of their lifetime revenue and/or profitability contributions to a company.The lifetime or relationship value of a customer is influenced by the length of an average “lifetime,” the average revenues generated per relevant time period over the lifetime, sales of additional products and services over time, referrals generated by the customer over time, and costs associated with serving the customer. Lifetime value sometimes refers to lifetime revenue stream only; but most often when costs are considered, lifetime value truly means “lifetime profitability.”If companies knew how much it really costs to lose a customer, they would be able to accurately evaluate investments designed to retain customer. One way of documenting the dollar value of loyal customers is to estimate the increased value or profits that accrue for each additional customer who remains loyal to the company rather than defecting to the competition. This is what Bain & Co. has done for a number of industries, The percentage of increase in total firm profits when the retention or loyalty rate rises by 5 percentage points. The increases are dramatic, ranging from 35 to 95 percent. These increases were calculated by comparing the net present values of the profit streams for the average customer life at current retention rates with the net present values of the profit streams for the average customer life at 5 percent higher retention rates.With sophisticated accounting systems to document actual costs and revenue streams over time, a firm can be quite precise in documenting the dollar value and costs of retaining customers. These systems attempt to estimate the dollar value of all the benefits and costs associated with a loyal customer, not just the long-term revenue stream. The value of word-of-mouth advertising, employee retention, and declining account maintenance costs can also enter into the calculation.The emphasis on estimating the relationship value of customers has increased substantially in the past decade. Part of this emphasis has resulted from an increased appreciation of the economic benefits that firms accrue with the retention of loyal customer. (Our Strategy Insight for this chapter describes ways that firms explicitly demonstrate this appreciation to customer.) Interestingly, recent research suggests that customer retention has a large impact on firm value and that relationship value calculations can also provide a useful proxy for assessing the value of a firm. That is, a firm’s market value can be roughly determined by carefully calculating customer lifetime value. The approach is straightforward: Estimate the relationship value of a customer, forecast the future growth of the number of customers, and use these figures to determine the value of a company’s current and future base. To the extent that the customer base forms a large part of a company’s overall value, such a calculation can provide an estimate of a firm’s value —a particularly useful figure for young, high-growth firms for which traditional financial methods(e.g., discounted cash flow) do not work well.2.2Customer Profitability SegmentsCompanies may want to treat all customers with excellent service, but they generally find that customers differ in their relationship value and that it may be neither practical nor profitable to meet (and certainly not to exceed) all customers’expectations. Federal Express Corporation, for example, has categorized its customers internally as the good, the bad, and the ugly ––based on their profitability. Ratherthan treating all its customers the same, the company pays particular attention to enhancing their relationship with the good, tries to move the bad to the good, and discourages the ugly. Other companies also try to identify segments —or, more appropriately, tiers of customers — that differ in current and/or future profitability to a firm. This approach goes beyond usage or volume segmentation because it tracks costs and revenues for segments of customers, thereby capturing their financial worth to companies. After identifying profitability bands, the firm offers service and service levels in line with the identifying segments. Building a high-loyalty customer base of the right customers increases profits.Although some people may view the FedEx grouping of customers into “the good, the bad, and the ugly” as negative, descriptive labels of the tiers can be very useful internally. Labels are especially valuable if they help the company keep track of which customers are profitable.Virtually all firms are aware at some level that their customers differ in profitability, in particular, that a minority of their customers accounts for the highest proportion of sales or profit. This finding has often been called the “80/20 rule”— 20 percent of customers produce 80 percent of sales or profit.In this version of tiering, 20 percent of the customers constitute the top tier, those who can be identified as the most profitable in the company. The rest are indistinguishable from each other but differ from the top tier in profitability. Most companies realize that there are differences among customers within this tier but do not possess the data or capabilities to analyze the distinctions. The 80/20 two-tier scheme assumes that consumers within the two tiers are similar, just as conventional market segmentation schemes typically assume that consumers within segments are similar.However, more than two tiers are likely and can be used if the company has sufficient data to analyze customer tiers more precisely. Different systems and labels can be helpful. One useful four-tier system, includes the following:1.The platinum tier describes the company’s most profitable customer, typicallythose who are heavy users of the product, are not overly price sensitive, are willing to invest in and try new offerings, and are committed customers of the firm.2.The gold tier differs from the platinum tier in that profitability levels are not ashigh, perhaps because the customers want price discounts that limit margins or are not as loyal. The may be heavy users who minimize risk by working with multiple vendors rather than just the focal company.3.The iron tier contains essential customers who provide the volume needed toutilize the firm’s capacity, but their spending levels, loyalty, and profitability are not substantial enough for special treatment.4.The lead tier consists of customers who are costing the company money. Theydemand more attention than they are due given their spending and profitability and are sometimes problem customers —complaining about the firm to others and tying up the firm’s resources.Not that this classification is superficially reminiscent of, but very different from, traditional usage segmentation performed by airlines such as American Airlines. Two differences are obvious. First, in the customer pyramid profitability rather than usage defines all levels. Second, the lower levels actually articulate classes of customers who require a different sort of attention. The firm must work either to change the customers’ behavior — to make them more profitable through increases in revenue —or to change the firm’s cost structure to make them more profitable through decreases in costs.Examples of effective use of the customer pyramid approach exist in a number of business contexts. Financial services firms are leading the way, perhaps because of the vast amounts of data already housed in those firms. In 1994 Bank One realized that all financial institutions had grossly overcharged their best customers to subsidize others who were not paying their way. Determined to grow its top-profit customers, who were vulnerable because they were being underserved, Bank One implemented a set of measures to focus resources on their most productive use. Next it identified the profit drivers in this top segment and thereby stabilized its relationships with key customers.Once a system has been established for categorizing customers, the multiple levels can be identified, motivated, served, and expected to deliver differential levels of profit. Companies improve their opportunities for profit when they increase shares of purchases by customers who either have the greatest need for the services or show the greatest loyalty to a single provider. By strengthening relationships with the loyal customers, increasing sales with existing customers, and increasing the profitability on each sale opportunity, companies thereby increase the potential of each customer.Whereas profitability tiers make sense from the company’s point of view, customers are not always understanding, nor do they appreciate being categorized into a less desirable segment. For example, at home companies the top clients have their own individual account representative whom they can contact personally. The next tier of clients may be handled by representatives who each have 100 clients. Meanwhile, most clients are served by an 800 number, an automated voice response system, or referral to a website. Customers are aware of this unequal treatment, and many resist and resent it. It makes perfect sense from a business perspective, but customers are often disappointed in the level of service they receive and give firms poor marks for quality as a result.Therefore, it is increasingly important that firms communicate with customers so they understand the level of service they can expect and what they would need to do or pay to receive faster or more personalized service. The most significant issues result when customers do not understand, believe they have been singled out for poor service, or feel that the system is unfair. Although many customers refuse to pay for quality service, they react negatively if they believe it has been taken away from themunfairly.The ability to segment customers narrowly based on profitability implications also raises questions of privacy for customers. In order to know who is profitable and who is not, companies must collect large amounts of individualized behavioral and personal data on consumers. Many consumers today resent what they perceive as an intrusion into their lives in this way, especially when it results in differential treatment that they perceive is unfair.Prudent business managers are well aware that past customer purchase behavior, although useful in making predictions, can be misleading. What a customer spends today, or has spend in the past, may not necessarily be reflective of what he or she will do(or be worth) in the future. Banks serving college students know this well — a typical college student generally has minimal financial services needs ( i.e., a checking account) and tends to not have a high level of deposits. However, within a few years that student may embark on a professional career, start a family, and/or purchase a house, and thus require several financial services and become a potentially very profitable customer to the bank. Generally speaking, a firm would like to keep its consistent big spenders and lose the erratic small spenders. But all too often a firm also has two other groups they must consider: erratic big spenders and consistent small spenders. So, in some situations where consistent cash flow is a concern, it may be helpful to a firm to have a portfolio of customers that includes steady customers, even if they have a history of being less profitable. Some service providers have actually been quite successful in targeting customers who were previously considered to be unworthy of another firm’s marketing efforts. Paychex, a payroll processing company, became very successful in serving small business that the major companies in this industry did not think were large enough to profitably serve. Similarly, Progressive Insurance became very successful in selling automobile insurance to undesirable customers — young drivers and those with poor driving records — that most of the competition did not feel had a sufficient relationship value. Firms, therefore, need to be cautious in blindly applying customer value calculations without thinking carefully about the implications.2.3Relationship ChallengesGiven the many benefits of long-term customer relationships, it would seem that a company would not want to refuse or terminate a relationship with any customer. Yet, situations arise in which either the firm, the customer, or both want to end (or have to end) their relationship.The assumption that all customers are good customers is very compatible with the belief that “the customer is always right,” an almost sacrosanct tenet of business. Yet any service worker can tell you that this statement is not always true, and in some cases it may be preferable for the firm and the customer to not continue their relationship.A company cannot target its services to all customers; some segments will bemore appropriate than others. It would not be beneficial to either the company or the customer for a company to establish a relationship with a customer whose needs the company cannot meet. For example, a school offering a lock-step, daytime MBA program would not encourage full-time working people to apply for its program, nor would a law firm specializing in government issues establish a relationship with individuals seeking advice on trusts and estates. There examples seem obvious. Yet firms frequently do give in to the temptation to make a sale by agreeing to serve a customer who would be better served by someone else.Similarly, it would not be wise to forge relationships simultaneously with incompatible market segments. In many service businesses(such as restaurants, hotels, tour package operators, entertainment, and education), customers experience the service t ogether and can influence each other’s perceptions about value received. Thus, to maximize service to core segment, an organization may choose to turn away marginally profitable segments that would be incompatible. For example, a conference hotel may find that mixing executives in town for a serious educational program with students in town for a regional track meet may not be wise. If the executive group is a key long-term customer, the hotel may choose to pass up the sports group in the interest of retaining the executives.3 Service Recovery3.1 The Impact Of Service Failure And RecoveryService recovery refers to the actions taken by an organization in response to a service. Failures occur for all kinds of reasons —the service may be unavailable when promised, it may be delivered late or too slowly, the outcome may be incorrect or poorly executed, or employees may be rude or uncaring. All these types of failures bring about negative feelings and responses from customers. Left unfixed, they can result in customers leaving, telling other customers about their negative experiences, and even challenging the organization through consumer rights organizations or legal channels.Research has shown that resolving customer problems effectively has a strong impact on customer satisfaction, loyalty, word-of-mouth communication, and bottom-line performance. That is, customers who experience service failures but who are ultimately satisfied based on recovery efforts by the firm, will be more loyal than those whose problems are not resolved. That loyalty translates into profitability, Customers who complain and have their problems resolved quickly are much more likely to repurchase than are those whose complaints are not resolved. Those who never complain are least likely to repurchase.Similar results were reported in a study 720 HMO members in which researchers found that those who were not satisfied with service recovery were much more likelyto switch to a different health care provider than were those who happy with how their problems were addressed. The study also found that satisfaction with service recovery was the second most important factor out of 11 service attributes in predicting overall customer satisfaction. The most important, not surprisingly, was perceived medical outcome.An effective service recovery strategy has multiple potential impacts. It can increase customer satisfaction and loyalty and generate positive word-of-mouth communication. A well-designed, well-documented service recovery strategy also provides information that can be used to improve service as part of a continuous improvement effort. By making adjustments to service processes, systems, and outcomes based on previous service recovery experiences, companies increase the likelihood of “doing it right the right the first time.”In turn, this reduces costs of failures and increases initial customer satisfaction.Unfortunately, many firms do not employ effective strategies. A recent study suggests that 50 percent of customer who experienced a serious problem received no response from the firm. There are tremendous downsides to having no service recovery strategies. Poor recovery following a bad service experience a service failure, they talk about it to others no matter what the outcome. That recent study also found that customers who were satisfied with a firm’s recovery efforts3.2How Customer Respond To Service FailuresSome customers are more likely to complain than others for a variety of reasons. These consumers believe that positive consequences may occur and that there are social benefits of complaining, and their personal norms support their complaining behavior. They believe they should and will be provided compensation for the service failure in some form. They believe that fair treatment and good service are their due, and that in cases of service failure, someone should make good. In some cases they feel a social obligation to complain —to help others avoid similar situations or to punish the service provider. A very small number of consumers have “complaining”personalities — they just like to complain or cause trouble.Consumers who are unlikely to take any action hold the opposite beliefs. They often see complaining as a waste of their time and effort. They do not believe anything positive will occur for them or others based on their actions. Sometimes they do not know how to complain —they do not understand the process or may not realize that avenues are open to them to voice their complaints. In some cases noncomplainers may engage in “emotion-focused coping” to deal with their negative experiences. This type of coping involves self-blame, denial, and possibly seeking social support. They may feel that the failure was somehow their fault and that they do not deserve redress.Personal relevance of the failure can also influence whether people complain. If the service failure is really important, if the failure has critical consequences for theconsumer, or if the consumer has much ego involvement in the service experience, then he or she is the more likely to complain. Consumers are more likely to complain about services that are expensive, high risk, and ego involving (like vacation packages, airline travel, and medical services) than they are about less expensive, frequently purchased services (fast-food drive-through service, a cab ride, a call to a customer service help line). There latter services are simply not important enough to warrant the time to complain. Unfortunately, even though the experience may not be important to the consumer at the moment, a dissatisfying encounter can still drive him or her to a competitor next time the service is needed.If customers initiate actions following service failure, the action can be of various types. A dissatisfied customer can choose to complain on the spot to the service provider, giving the company the opportunity to respond immediately. This reaction is often the best-case scenario for the company because it has a second chance right at that moment to satisfy the customer, keep his or her business in the future, and potentially avoid any negative word of mouth. Customers who do not complain immediately may choose to complain later to the provider by phone, in writing, or via the Internet. Again, the company has a chance to recover. Researchers refer to these proactive types of complaining behavior as voice responses or seeking redress.Some customers choose not to complain directly to the provider but rather spread negative word of mouth about the company to friends, relatives, and coworkers. This negative word-of-mouth communication can be extremely detrimental because it can reinforce the customer’s feelings of negativism and spread that negative impression to others as well. Further, the company has no chance to recover unless the negative word of mouth is accompanied by a complaint directly to the company. In recent years, customers have taken to complaining via the Internet. A variety of websites, including web-based consumer opinion platforms, have been created to facilitate customer complaints and, in doing so, have provided customers with the possibility of spreading negative word-of-mouth communication to a much broader audience. Some customers become so dissatisfied with a product or service failure that they construct websites targeting the firm’s current and prospective customers. On these sites, angry customers convey their grievances against the firm in ways designed to convince other consumers of the firm’s incompetence an evil.Finally, customers may choose to complain to third parties such as the Better Business Bureau, to consumer affairs arms of the government, to a licensing authority, to a professional association, or potentially to a private attorney. No matter the action (or inaction), ultimately the customers determine whether to patronize the service provider again or to switch to another provider.3.3Customers’ Recovery ExpectationsWhen they take the time and effort to complain, customers generally have high expectations. They expect the firm to be accountable. They expect to be helped。
外文文献翻译-工商管理企业文化
Corporate Culture and Enterprise Management FORM: Bryan M.Rakes. Corporate Culture and Enterprise Management[J].International Journal of Electronic Business.2017, (05):149-150 Abstract: the enterprise culture is a kind of spiritual wealth of an enterprise from the establishment to operation, growth and development in the course of all accumulated, it reflects the enterprise management concept, development direction and strategic objectives, but also support the invisible power of enterprises continue to move forward, to constantly improve the enterprise management mode provides a thought the guide. To some extent, the innovation of enterprise culture and the innovation of enterprise management are complementary and inseparable. According to the relationship between enterprise culture and management innovation, based on the enterprise culture and the enterprise management on the basic concepts of preliminary understanding, influence on the innovation of enterprise culture to enterprise management innovation is discussed.Keywords enterprise; cultural innovation; management innovation; influence;企业文化与企业管理来源：Bryan M.Rakes.企业文化与企业管理[J].国际电子商务杂志.2017,(05):149-150摘要：企业文化是一个企业从成立到运营、成长和发展全部历程中所积累的一种精神财富，它是企业经营理念、发展方向以及战略目标的集中体现，也是支撑企业不断前行的无形动力，为企业经营管理模式的不断完善提供着思想上的指导。
工商管理专业外文翻译--企业公民的阶段
外文原文Stages of Corporate CitizenshipBusiness leaders throughout the world are making corporate citizenship a key priority for their companies.1 Some are updating policies and revising programs; others are forming citizenship steering committees, measuring their environmental and social performance, and issuing public reports. Select firms are striving to align staff functions responsible for citizenship and move responsibility—and accountability—into lines of business. Vanguard companies are trying to create a broader market for citizenship and offer products and services that aim explicitly to both make money and make a better world.Amid the flurry of activity, many executives wonder what’s going on and worry whether or not their myriad citizenship initiatives make sense. Is their company prepared to take appropriate and effective actions on transparency, governance, community economic development, work-family balance, environmental sustainability, human rights protection, and ethical investor relationships?Is there any connection between, say, efforts in risk management, corporate branding, stakeholder engagement, supplier certification, cause related marketing, and employee diversity? Should there be? Studies conducted by the Center for Corporate Citizenship at Boston College suggest that the balance between confusion and coherence depends very much on what stage a company is in its development of corporate citizenship.Comparative neophytes, for instance, often lack understanding of these many aspects of corporate citizenship and have neither the expertise nor the machinery to respond to so many diverse interests and demands. Their chief challenges are to put citizenship firmly on the corporate agenda, get better informed about stakeholders’ concerns, and take some sensible initial steps.At the other extreme are companies that have already made a full-blown foray into citizenship. Their CEO is typically leading the firm’s position on social and environmental issues, and their Board is fully informed about company practices. Should these firms want to move forward, they might next try to connect citizenship to corporate branding and everyday employees through a “live the brand” campaign like those at IBM and Novo Nordisk or establish citizenship objectives for line managers, as DuPont and UBS have done.When it comes to making sense of corporate citizenship, much depends on what acompany has accomplished to date and how far it wants (and has to) go. The Center’s surveys of a random sample of American businesses find that roughly ten percent of company leaders don’t understand what corporate citizenship is all about. On the other end of the spectrum, not quite as many firms have integrated programs and are setting new standards of performance. In the vast majority in between, there is a wide range of companies in transition whose knowledge, attitudes, structures, and practices represent different degrees of understanding of and sophistication about corporate citizenship.Knowing at what stage a company is, and what challenges it faces in advancing citizenship, can clear up an executive’s confusion about where things stand, frame strategic choices about where to go, aid in setting benchmarks and goals, and perhaps speed movement forward.Stages of DevelopmentWhat does it mean that a company is at a “stage” of corporate citizenship?The general idea—found in the study of children, groups, and systems of all types, including business organizations—is that there are distinct patterns of activity at different points of development. Typically, these activities become more complex and sophisticated as development progresses and therefore capacities to respond to environmental challenges increase in kind. Piaget’s developmental theory, for example, has children progress through stages that entail more complex thinking and finer judgments about how to negotiate the social world outside of themselves. Similarly, groups mature along a developmental path as they confront emotional and task challenges that require more socially sensitive interaction and sophisticated problem solving.Greiner, in his groundbreaking study of organizational growth, found that companies also develop more complex ways of doing things at different stages of growth. They must, over time, find more direction after their creative start-up phase, develop an infrastructure and systems to take on more responsibilities, and then “work through” the challenges of over-control and red-tape through coordination and later collaboration across work units and levels.Development of CitizenshipThere are a number of models of “stages” of corporate citizenship. On a macro scale, for example, scholars have tracked changing conceptions of the role of business in society as advanced by business leaders, governments, academics, and multi-sectorassociations. They document how increasingly elaborate and inclusive definitions of social responsibility, environmental protection, and corporate ethics and governance have developed over recent decades that enlarge the role of business in society. Others have looked into the spread of these ideas into industry and society in the form of social and professional movements.At the level of the firm, Post and Altman have shown how environmental policies progressively broaden and deepen as companies encounter more demanding expectations and build their capability to meet them. In turn, Zadek’s case study of Nike’s response to challenges in its supply chain highlights stages in the development of attitudes about social responsibilities in companies and in corporate responsiveness to social issues. Both of these studies emphasize the role of organizational learning as conceptions of company responsibilities become more complex at successive stages of development, action requirements are more demanding, and the organizational structures, processes, and systems used to manage citizenship are more elaborate and comprehensive.What such firm-level frameworks have not fully addressed are the generative logic and mechanisms that drive the development of citizenship within organizations. Here we consider the development of citizenship as a stage-by-stage process where a combination of internal capabilities applied to environmental challenges propels development forward in a m ore or less “normal” or normative logic.Greiner’s model of organizational growth illustrates this normative trajectory. In his terms, the development of an organization is punctuated by a series of predictable crises that trigger responses that move the organization forward. What are the triggering mechanisms? They are tensions between current practices and the problems they produce that demand a new response from a firm. For instance, creativity, the entrepreneurial fire in companies in their first stage, also generates confusion and a loss of focus that can stall growth. This poses a “crisis of leadership” that is resolved—and a stage of orderly growth results—once the firm gains direction, often under new leadership and with more formal structures. A later tension between delegation and its consequences, sub-optimization and inter-group conflict, triggers a “crisis of control” and moves toward coordination. In development language, companies in effect “master” these challenges by devising progressively more effective and elaborate responses to them.The model presented here is also normative in that it posits a series of stages in thedevelopment of corporate citizenship. The triggers for movement are challenges that call for a fresh response. These challenges center initially on a firm’s credibility as a corporate citizen, then its capacities to meet expectations, the coherence of its many subsequent efforts, and, finally, its commitment to institutionalize citizenship in its business strategies and culture.Movement along a single development path is not fixed nor is attaining a penultimate “end state” a logical conclusion. This means that the arc of citizenship within any particular firm is shaped by the socio-economic, environmental, and institutional forces impinging on the enterprise. This effect is well documented by Vogel’s analysis of the “market for virtue” where he finds considerable variability in the business case for citizenship across firms and industries and thus limits to its marketp lace rewards. Notwithstanding, a company’s response to these market forces also varies based on the attitudes and outlooks of its leaders, the design and management of its citizenship agenda, and firmspecific learning. Thus, there are “companies with a conscience” that have a more expansive citizenship profile and firms that create a market for their good works.Dimensions of CitizenshipTo track the developmental path of citizenship in companies, we focus on seven dimensions of citizenship that vary at each stage:Citizenship Concept: How is citizenship defined? How comprehensive is it? Definitions of corporate citizenship are many and varied. The Center’s concept of citizenship considers the total actions of a corporation (commercial and philanthropic). Bettignies makes the point that terms such as citizenship and sustainability incorporate notions of ethics, philanthropy, stakeholder management, and social and environmental responsibilities into an integrative framework that guides corporate action.Strategic Intent: What is the purpose of citizenship in a company? What it is trying to achieve through citizenship? Smith observes that few companies embrace a strictly moral commitment to citizenship; instead most consider specific reputational risks and benefits in the market and society and thereby establish a business case for their efforts. Rochlin and Googins, in turn,see increasing interest in an “inside-out” framing where a value proposition for citizenship guides actions and investments. Leadership: Do top leaders support citizenship? Do they lead the effort? Visible, active, top level leadership appears on every survey as the number one factor drivingcitizenship in a corporation. How well informed are top leaders are about citizenship, how much leadership do they exercise, and to what extent do they “walk the talk”? Structure: How are responsibilities for citizenship managed? A three-year indepth study of eight companies in the Center’s Executive Forum on Corporate Citizenship found that many progressed from managing citizenship from functional “islands” to cross-functional committees and that a few had begun to achieve more formal integration through a combination of structures, processes, and systems.Issues Management: How does a company deal with citizenship issues that arise? Scholars have mapped the evolution of the public affairs office in corporations and stages in the management of public issues. How responsive a company is in terms of citizenship policies, programs, and performance?Stakeholder Relationships: How does a company engage its stakeholders? A wide range of trends—from increased social activism by shareholders to an increase in the number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) around the world—has driven major changes in the ways companies communicate with and engage their stakeholders.Transparency: How “open” is a company about its financial, social, and environmental performance? The web sites of upwards of 80% of Fortune 500 companies address social and environmental issues and roughly half of the companies today issue a public report on their activities.Citizenship at Each StageThe model in Figure 1 presents the stages in the development of corporate citizenship along these seven dimensions. We illustrate each stage with selected examples of corporate practice. (Note, however, that we are not implying that these companies currently operate at that stage; rather, at the times noted, they were illustrative of citizenship at that development stage.) A close inspection of these companies reveals instances where they had a leading-edge practice in some dimensions but were less developed in others. This should come as no surprise. For example, the pace of a child’s physical, mental, and emotional development is seldom uniform. One facet typically develops faster than another. In the same way, the development of group and organizational capabilities is uneven. Firm-specific forces in society, industry dynamics, and other environmental influences feature in how citizenship develops within a firm.Stage 1. ElementaryAt this base stage, citizenship activity in a company is episodic and its programs are undeveloped. The reasons are straightforward: scant awareness of what corporate citizenship is all about, uninterested or indifferent top management, and limited or one-way interactions with external stakeholders, particularly in the social and environmental sectors. The mindset in these companies, and associated policies and practices, often centers on simple compliance with laws and industry standards.Responsibilities for handling matters of compliance in these firms are usually assigned to the functional heads of human resources, the legal department, investor relations, public relations, and community affairs. The job of these functional managers is to make sure that the company obeys the law and to keep problems that might arise from harming the firm’s reputation. In many cases, they take a defensive stance toward outside pressures—e.g., Nike’s dealings with labor activists in the early 1990s.Some corporate leaders, for example, have espoused economist Milton Friedman’s notion that their company’s obligations to society are solely to“make a profit, pay taxes, and provide jobs.”20 Others, particularly those heading smaller and mid-size businesses, comply willingly with employment and health, safety, and environmental regulations but have neither the resources nor the wherewithal to do much more for their employees, communities, or society.Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch is an exemplar of this principled big-business view. “A CEO’s primary social responsibility is to assure the financial success of the company,” he says. “Only a healthy, winning company has the resources and capability to do the right thing.”21GE’s financial success over the past two decades is unquestioned. However, the company’s reputation suffered toward the end of Welch’s tenure when it was revealed that that one of its business units had discharged tons of the toxic chemical PCB into the Hudson River. When challenged, Welch was defensive and pointed out that GE had fully complied with then existing environmental protection laws.This illustrates one of the triggers that move a company forward into a new stage of citizenship. Welch’s sta nce was plainly out of touch with changing expectations of corporate responsibilities and the contradiction between GE’s success at wealth creation and loss of reputation was palpable. Welch’s successor,Jeffrey Immelt, reversed this course, accepted at least partial financial responsibility for the clean up, and thereafter reprioritized citizenship on the company’s agenda.中文译文企业公民的阶段全世界的商界领袖都认为企业公民是他们公司的一个优先环节。
工商管理英文论文翻译
外文资料翻译AbstractThis paper introduces the concept of knowledge networks toexplain why some business units are able to benefit from knowledgeresiding in other parts of the c ompany while others arenot. The core premise of this concept is that a proper u nderstandingof effective interunit knowledge sharing in a multiunitfirm requires aj oint consideration of relatedness in knowledgecontent among business units and t he network of lateral interunitrelations that enables task units to access related k nowledge.Results from a study of 120 new product developmentprojects in 41 bu siness units of a large multiunit electronicscompany showed that project teams o btained more existingknowledge from other units and completed their projects fas terto the extent that they had short interunit network paths to unitsthat possessed related knowledge. In contrast, neither networkconnections nor extent of related k nowledge alone explainedthe amount of knowledge obtained and project completi on time.The results also showed a contingent effect of having directinterunit relations i n knowledge networks: While establisheddirect relations mitigated problems of tra nsferring noncodifiedknowledge, they were harmful when the knowledge to be tra nsferredwas codified, because they were less needed but stillinvolved maintenance costs. These findings suggest that researchon knowledge transfers and synergies i n multiunit firmsshould pursue new perspectives that combine the concepts ofnetwork connections and relatedness in knowledge content.Why are some business u nitsable to benefit from knowledgeresiding in other parts of the company while othersare not? Both strategic management and organization theoryscholars have ex tensively researched this question,but differences in focus between the various ap proacheshave left us with an incomplete understanding of whatcauses knowledge sharing to occur and be beneficialacross business units in multiunit firms. In one line ofresearch, scholars have focused on similarity in knowledgecontent among b usiness units, arguing that a firmand its business units perform better tothe exten t thatunits possess related competencies that can be used bymultiple units (e.g., Rumelt 1974, Markides and Williamson1994, Farjoun 1998). While this knowledg e content viewhas demonstrated the importance of relatedness in skillbase, it doe s not shed much light on the integrative mechanismsthat would allow one busine ss unit to obtainknowledge from another (Ramanujam and Varadarajan1989, Hill 1994). When sharing mechanisms are consideredin this research, it is often assu med that the corporatecenter is able to identify and realize synergies arisingfrom similarity in knowledge content among businessunits, but this assumption is typic ally not tested empiricallyand excludes a consideration of lateral interunit relation s(Chandler 1994, Markides and Williamson 1994,Farjoun 1998).In other lines of research, in contrast, scholars havedemonstrated the importanc e of havinglateral linkagesamong organization subunits for effective knowledgesha ring to occ ur. Researchhas shown that a subunit’sinformation processing capacity is enhanced by lateralinterunit integration mechanisms (e.g., Galbraith 1973,1994; Egelhoff 1993; Gupta and Govindarajan 2000),product innovation knowledge flow s more efficientlythrough established relationships spanning subunitboundaries (Tu shman 1977, Ghoshal and Bartlett 1988,Nobel and Birkinshaw 1998,Hansen 199 9), and bestpractices are transferred more easily when a positive existingrelations hip exists between the two parties to atransfer (Szulanski 1996). These lines of r esearch on linkageshave, however, not incorporated opportunities forknowledge sh aring based on commonality in knowledgecontent among subunits, but has taken this aspect asgiven.Yet the existence of both related knowledge in thefirm—i.e., expertise in the f irm’s business units that canbe useful for tasks per formed in a focal business un itand a set of established linkages among business unitsseems necessary for inter unit knowledge sharing to occurand be effective. In this paper, I consider both d imensionsand develop theconcept of task-specific knowledge networks,which comp rise not only those business units thathave related knowledge for a focal task un it, but also theestablished direct and indirect interunit relations connectingthis sub set of business units.I define establishedinterunit relations as regularly occurring informal contactsbet ween groups of people from different businessunits in a firm, and I assume thatt ask units will be abletouse these relations to search for and access knowledgeresi ding in other business units.I make two main arguments. First, with respect to indirect relations (i.e., conne ctions throughintermediaries),I argue that task teams in focal business units with shortpath lengths in a knowledge network (i.e., few intermediariesare needed to c onnect with other units) are likelyto obtain more knowledge from other business units andperform better than those with long path lengths becauseof search benef its accruing to business units with shortpath lengths. Long path lengths, in contra st, lead to informationdistortion in the knowledge network, makingsearch for usef ul knowledge more difficult. Second, I arguethat a focal unit’s direct established relations in aknowledge network are a two-edged sword: While theyprovide im mediate access to other business units that possessrelated knowledge, they are als o costly to maintain.They are, therefore, most effective when they help teamssolve difficult transfer problems, as when the knowledgeto be transferred is noncodified (Szulanski 1996, Hansen1999). Whenthere is no transfer problem, they are likelyto be harmful fort ask-unit effectiveness because of theirmaintenance costs.This knowledge network model seeks to advance ourunderstanding of knowled ge sharing in multiunit companiesin several ways. First, by integrating the conce ptsof related knowledge and lateral network connections thatenable knowledge sharing, the model seeks to extend extantresearch that has addressed only one of th ese aspects.Second, while extant research on knowledge transferstends to focus o n direct relations (i.e., the dyadic linkbetween a recipient and a source unit of k nowledge), Ialso consider the larger organization context of indirectrelations, which are conduits for information about opportunitiesfor knowledge sh aring (cf. Ghoshal and Bartlett1990). This approach enables a richer understandin g ofsearch processes forknowledge use in multiunit firms.Third, while scholars of ten consider the positive effectsof network relations on knowledge sharing, I also considermaintenance costs of n etworks byincorporating thistime commitment in analyzing the impact of interunit networkrelations on knowledge-sharing effectiveness inmultiunit firms.Knowledge Networks in Multiunit FirmsThe joint consideration of related knowledge and lateralinterunit relations of a knowledge network is illustratedin Figure 1 for a new product development team, whichis the unit of analysis in this paper. Diagram 1a illustratesa network of re lations among all business units in a firm,but does not partition these units into those that have relatedknowledge for the focal new product developmentteam, A (i.e., a pure network consideration). Diagram 1b,in contrast, partitions the busines s units in the firm intothose that have related knowledge for the focal productde velopment team (A) and those that have not, but thereis no consideration of then etwork among the units (i.e.,a pure related knowledge consideration). Diagram 1 illustratesa project-specific knowledge network: Businessunits are partitioned into t hose that have related knowledgefor the focal product development team (A), an d thecomplete set of network ofrelations among them are included,including both direct and indirect relations (i.e.,intermediarylinks connecting the focal unit with othersin the knowledge network). Both the indirect and directrelations affect the extent to which a focal product developmentteam is able to obtain knowledge fr om otherbusiness units and use it to perform better.Effects of Indirect Relations in Knowledge NetworksA product development team’s direct and indirect interunitrelations in its know ledge network affect the effectivenessof its search for useful knowledge by being importantconduits for information about opportunities the existence, whereabouts, a nd relevance of substantiveknowledge residing in other business units. While busi nessunits in the network may not be able to pass onproduct-specific knowledge directly, as such knowledgeoften requires direct interaction with the source to be extracted,a focal team that hears about opportunitiesthrough the network can cont act the source directly toobtain the knowledge. Sucknowledge,as defined here,incl udes product-specific technical know-how, knowledgeabout technologies and mark ets, as well as knowledgeembodied in existing solutions, such as already develop edhardware and software.Although direct relations in the knowledge networkprovide immediate access a nd hence areespecially usefulfor a focal team inquiring about opportunities, indire ctrelations are beneficialas well, because information aboutopportunities is likely t o be passed on by intermediaryunits and eventually reach the focal team, provide d thatbusiness units in the knowledge networkare reachable.1The idea that interm ediaries pass on messages and thatthey help forge connections has been well sup ported incommunications and social network research. Studies investigatingthe “s mall-world” phenomenon demonstratedthat the path length (i.e., the minimum nu mber of intermediaries)needed to connect two strangers from differentstates in the United Stateswas remarkably short and consistedof about five to seven intermedia ries (Milgram1967, Kochen 1989, Watts 1999). Early work on innovationresearch showed that new product developmentteams benefited from having a gatekeeper o r boundaryspanner, that is, a person who scans and interprets theteam’s environm ent and then passes on information to therest of the tea (Allen 1977, Katz and Tushman 1979).In social network research, Granovetter (1973) showedthat intermediary persons who are weakly tied to a focalperson are uniquely plac ed to pass on information aboutnew job opportunities because they are more likely thanstrongly tied connections to possess nonredundant information.The common thread in these lines of work is thatindirect relations are pervasi ve conduits for information.Intermediaries help forge connections and pass on me ssagesthat bridge two otherwise disconnected actors.However, indirect interunit relations may not be perfectconduits of informationa bout opportunities. As informationgets passed on across people from different uni ts,there is likely to be some degree of imperfect transmissionof the message abo ut opportunities for knowledgeuse. In particular, when information about opportun itieshas to be passed on through many intermediaries (i.e.,through long paths, cf. Freeman 1979), it is likely to becomedistorted (Bartlett 1932, March and Simon 1958).People who exchange such information are prone to misunderstandingeach other, forgetting details, failing tomention all that they know to others, filtering, or deliberatelywithholding aspects of what they know (Collinsand Guetzkow 1964 Huberand Daft 1987, Gilovich1991). The distortion may be unintentional or delib erate(O’Reilly 1978). Huber (1982) relates a drama tic example,originally provided by Miller (1972), of a mistakemade during the Vietnam War. The chain of mess ageswas as follows: The order from headquarters to the brigadewas “on no occas ion must hamlets be burned down,”the brigade radioed the battalion “do not bur n down anyhamlets unless you are absolutely convinced that the VietCong are in them;” the battalion radioed the infantry companyat the scene “if you think there are any Viet Congin the hamlet, burn it down;” the company commanderordered his troops “burn down that hamlet.” Thus, themore intermediaries needed, the hig her the chances ofsuch distortion, and hence the less precise is the informationth at is passed on (Miller 1972, Huber 1982).The implication of receiving imprecise information inthis context is that a proj ect team cannot easily focus ona few opportunities that are especially relevant, b ut mustinstead check anumber of imprecise leads to verifywhether they are releva nt for the team, resulting in a moreelaborate interunit search process that takes ti me. For example,a project manager in my study told me that he hadbeen told b y a third party in the company about a groupof engineer in another unit who were supposed to havesome useful technical know-how, but when he was ableto r each them after trying for a while, it turned out thatthe know-how was not relev ant for the project. Such fruitlesssearches not only take time, but also cause dela ys inthe project to the extent that the needed knowledge inputholds up the comp letion of other parts of he project.Because of the problem of information distorti on whenrelying on intermediary units, a focal team is likely tobenefit from short path lengths in the knowledge network(i.e., few intermediaries required to connec t a team in afocal unit with other units). Short path lengths enable theteam to k now about precisely described opportunities involvingrelated knowledge and allow it to discard informationabout irrelevant opportunities. The team can thenfocus on opportunities with a high degree of realizationpotential and can quickly contact p eople in these unitsand begin working with them to extract and incorporatetheir knowledge into the focal project. Thus, less time isspent evaluating and pursuing opportunities, reducing effortsdevoted to problemistic search, including search effo rtsthat establish that no useful opportunities exist(Cyert and March 1992). Teams with short path lengthsare thus more likely than teams with long path lengths to hear about more opportunities that overall yield more usefulknowledge, to the ext ent that opportunities are notredundant to one another. All else equal, this benefi tshould reduce a focal team’s time to complete t he project.The arguments can be summarized in two hypotheses.HYPOTHESIS 1. The shorter a team’s path lengths inthe knowledge network, the more knowledge obtainedfrom other business units by the team. HYPOTHESIS 2. The shorter a team’s path lengths inthe knowledge network, the shorter th project completiontime.Effects of Direct Relations in Knowledge NetworksThe shortest possible path length is to have an establisheddirect relation to all other business units in a knowledgenetwork. Such a network position does not re quire anyintermediary units and should remove the informationdistortion caused by using intermediaries. However, unlikeindirect relations, which are maintained by intermediarybusiness units, direct interunit relations need to bemaintained by peo ple in the focal business unit, possiblyincluding focal team members, and require their own setof activities that take time. In the company I studied, forexample, product developers spent time outside of theirprojects traveling to other business units on a regular basisto discuss technology developments, market opportunities,a nd their respective product development programs.Such interunit network mainten ancecan be adistraction from completing specific project tasks: Timespent on mai ntaining direct contacts is time not spent oncompleting project-related tasks. Although direct interunit relations involve maintenancecosts, they also provide a benefit incertain situations:Established direct relations between a focal team and anotherbusiness unit may be helpful when the team identifiesknowledge that requ ires effort to be moved from thesource unit and incorporated into the project. Fo r example,in a number of projects in my sample, team memberswere frequently able to obtain software code from engineersin other business units, but sometime s the engineerswho wrote the code needed to explain it and help the teamto inc orporate the code into the new project. Receivingsuch help was often much easie r when the team and theengineers providing the code knew each other beforehan d.This likely positive aspect of direct relations needsto be compared with their maintenance costs.Direct relations are especially helpful when a team isexperienci ng transfer difficulties—i.e., spending significanttime extracting, moving, and inco rporating knowledgefrom other subunits—because the knowledge is noncodified,w hich is defined as knowledge that is difficultto adequately articulate in writing (Zander and Kogut1995, Hansen 1999). Relying on establisheddirect relationsmay ease the difficulties of transferring noncodifiedknowledge, because the team and people in the directlytied unit have most likely worked with each other beforean d have thus established some heuristics for workingtogether, reducing the time itt akes to explainthe knowledgeand understand one another (Uzzi 1997, Hansen199 9). When a focal team experiences significant transferdifficulties because of noncodified knowledge, having establisheddirect relations to related business units is li kelyto reduce the amount of time spent transferring knowledge,which may offset the costs of maintaining such relationsand shortening project completion time. In particular,having a number of direct relations in a knowledgenetwork increases th e likelihood that a team will be ableto use one of them in transferring noncodifi ed knowledge.Thus, while indirect relations are beneficial to the extentthat they serve as inte rmediaries that provide a focal unitwith nonredundant information, direct relations are beneficialto transferring noncodified knowledge, implyingthat the benefit of ha ving intermediaries supplying nonredundantinformation is relative (cf. Burt 1992).I n contrast, this transfer benefit of direct relations isless important when a focal t eam can easily extract andincorporate the knowledge that was identified in anoth ersubunit, as when that knowledge is highly codified. Inthese situations, direct int erunit relations are not usefulfor transfer, but they still carry maintenance costsw hichtake time away from the completion of the project to theextent that team me mbers d not have slack resources thatcan be devoted to maintaining these relatio nships. Themore suchrelations that are maintained by a focal unit,the higher the maintenance costs, and the more time istaken away from completing a project. T he arguments canbe summarized as follows:HYPOTHESIS 3A. The higher a team’s number of directrelations in the know ledge network, the shorter the projectcompletion time when the knowledge to be transferredis noncodified.HYPOTHESIS 3B. The higher a team’s number of directrelations in the knowl edge network, the longer the projectcompletion time when the knowledge to be tr ansferred iscodified.Data and MethodsSettingI tested the knowledge network model in a large, multidivisionaland multinatio nal electronics company (hereaftercalled “the Company”). I negotiated access to t hecompany through three senior corporate R&D managersand initially visited 14 divisions where I conducted openendedinterviews with 50 project engineers and managersto better understand the context, and todevelop surveyinstruments. The c ompany, which has annual sales ofmore than $5 billion, is involved in developin g, manufacturing,and selling a range of industrial and consumerelectronics produc ts and systems, and is structured into41 fairly autonomous operating divisions tha t are responsiblefor product development, manufacturing, and sales.By focusing on these divisions, I was able to compareunits that occupy the sa me formal position in the Company,thereby controlling for a potential source of variationin formal structure. They all had the same formalstatus as a business uni t with profit-and-loss responsibility,all had a general manager, and none of the di visionsreported to another division. In additio to interunit relations,there were a f ew other integrative mechanismsacross divisions, notably divisionwide conferences andelectronic knowledge management systems, but initial interviewsrevealed that these did not vary much among thedivisions.Selecting Product Development ProjectsI used two surveys: a network survey administered to theR&D managers in th e 41 divisions and a survey for theproject managers of the product development projects includedin this study. In selecting projects, I first createda list of all projects that the di visions had undertaken duringthe three-year period prior to the time of data colle ction.I then excluded very small projects (i.e., those withless than two project engineers) and projects that had notyet moved from the investigation to the developmentphase and were therefore ha rd to track I also excludedidiosyncratic projects that had no meaningful start and end (e.g., special ongoing customer projects). Includingonly successfully complete d projects may lead to an overrepresentationof successful projects, biasing the res ults.I therefore included both canceled projects and projectsstill in progress. After having removed too-small, premature,and idiosyncratic projects, I ended up with a listof 147 projects. The project managers of 120 of thesereturned their survey, yielding a response rate of 85%. Ofthe 120 projects, 22 were still in progress at the time ofdata collection, four had been canceled, and 54 reporteda significant t ransfer event involving another division.Specifying Project-Specific Knowledge NetworksIdentifying Related Subunits. Together with the threecorporate R&D managers, I developed a list of 22 technicalcompetencies that constituted related knowledgea reas(see Appendix 1 for the list of technical competencies).2 I asked the R&D managers in the divisions toindicate up to four specific competencies of their divisionson this list and to add any if they thought the listwas incomplete. The three corporate R&D managers r eviewedthe responses to verify whether it made sense togroup those divisions tha t had reported the same competence.The project managers of the 120 projects we rethen asked to indicate what technical competencies thespecific project required and were presented with thesame list that was presented to the divisional R&D managers.Thus, for a given project, a number of divisionshad a competence that matche d the requirements listedby the project manager (see Appendix 1 for the distribut ionof projects per competence). For example, a projectmanager indicated that his project required technicalcompetencies in three areas: distributed measurement,communication system monitoring, and optics. Twelve different divisions had at least one of these technical competenciesand thus constituted theknowledge network fo rthis particular project.Specifying Interunit Relations. A group of engineers ina di vision typically maintained an informal regular contactwith a group of engineers inanother division, and aproject team would use such contacts to access other di visions.These relationships were common knowledge inthat most product develope rs seemed to know about theirexistence and how to use them, and I was told in preliminaryinterviews that a main responsibility of a division’sman agers was to p rovide these contacts for his or herproject teams,should the need arise. I therefor e assumedthat at least one member of a project team woul knowabout the divisi onal-level contacts and that the teammembers could access these contacts if they wanted to.Because of the importance of these interdivisional contactsin the compa ny, I chose to focus on these types ofcontacts.Following previous research, I use d a key informant toobtain information on interdivisional relations (Knokeand Ku klinski 1982, Marsden 1990). I considered the divisionalR&D managers to be the most appropriate informantsbecause they were “in the thick of things” in theR& D department in their division. The R&D manager ineach of the 41 divisions re ceived a questionnaire asking,“Over the past two years, are there any divisions fr omwhom your division regularly sought technical and/ormarket-related input?”3 T he question was followed by alist of the 41 divisions included in the study, allo wingrespondents to indicate whether they had a tie to any onthe list, leading to a complete network where everybodywas asked whether a tie existed with everyb ody else(Marsden 1990). Because I asked everybody to indicatewhether a tie exis ted with each of the other 40 divisions,I avoided a potential bias resulting from having to asksomeone to ascertain whether ties exist among others(Krackhardt an d Kilduff 1999).To validate the responses, I employed the crossvalidationmethod used by Krac khardt (1990by askingthe R&D managers who comes to them for input. Anactual tie exists when both divisions agree that one comesto the other for input. I then sent an e-mail to all of theR&D managers, asking them about the ones about whichthere was no joint agreement. On the basis of their responses,I included som e of these suspect ties and excludedothers.Merging Network and Project Data. I constructedproject-specific knowledge net works by including all relationsamong divisions possessing related knowledge fora given project. For example, for the aforementioned projectfor which there were12 related divisions, I includedall relations among these 12 divisions, and this ne tworkconstituted the project-specific knowledge network. Toconstruct these project -specific networks, I merged theproject data with the divisional network data by ass igninga division’s network relations to its projects. Thus, interdivisionalties bec ame the equivalent of interdivisionalproject ties. It is important to record thevalu es on thenetwork variables prior to the start of a project becausemy theoretical a rguments assume that a project team usesestablished preexisting interunit ties to s earch for andtransfer knowledge. Following the approach of Burt(1992) and Podo lny and Baron (1997), I handled this issueby measuring the interdivisional netwo rk relationsover several years by only assigning network ties thatexisted prior to the start of the project. This proceduregenerated time-varying network data from informationthat the respondents could recall.The potential bias in this approach is that it may excludesome relations that e xisted prior to a project’s startbut that ceased to exist by the time the R&D ma nagerscompleted the survey. This problem can be partially controlledfor. This pot ential bias should be more of a problemfor projects in divisions in which relatio ns come andgo than in divisions with long-lasting relations. If a division’srelatio ns are long lasting, then it is less likelythat there were some relations that cease d to exist betweenthe time just prior to the project’s start and the timeof surveying. To control for this potential bias, I entereda control variable for th e average age of direct relationsto related subunits (Age relations).Dependent VariablesProject Completion Time. To assess project task performance,I measured project completion time as thenumber of months from the start of concept developmen tto the time of marketintroduction for a given project (ortime to the end of the study period or cancellation forongoing and canceled projects, respectively). I def inedstarting time as the month when a dedicated personstarted working part or f ull time on the project, whichtypically coincided with the time an account was o penedfor the project. I defined the end date as the date on whichthe product was released to shipment, which is a formalmilestone date in this co mpany because it signifies thatthe product is ready to be manufactured and shipp ed ona regular basis. These definitions turned out to be veryclear and provided f ew problems in specifying the startand completion times, which were 14.8 months on averagefor completed projects. Scholars have proposed two alternative measures ofcompletion time. First, com pletion timecan be measuredas the extent to which the project is finished on sch edule(e.g., Ancona andCaldwell 1992). The assumption in thisschedule measure is that inherent project differences areaccounted for in the original schedule, but als o that everybodysets equally ambitious schedules, which was mostlikely not true in this company, where individual projectmanagers set their own targets. A second approach is togroup projects according to some similarity measure andthen take a project’s deviation from the mean completiontime of the group (Eisenhardtan d Tabrizi 1995). Theproblem with this approach is that the mean deviationrelies on a clearsimilarity measure that was not easy toattain in this setting. Given that these two alternativemethods seemed problematic, I chose to use the numberof m onths as the dependent variableand then add projectspecificvariables to control for inherent differences betweenthe projects.Amount Acquired Knowledge. During field interviewsI was told that the most c ommon knowledge that projectteams received from other divisions took the form of technicalsolutions embodied in already developed softwarecode and hardware components. T here were two types of“ware” being used in the projects—standar input to theproducts being made (e.g., components that were used innearly all os cilloscopes being manufactured), and warethat helped solve ad hoc problems that。
工商管理 文献翻译(DOC)
中小企业融资扬·尔迪[丹麦],切萨里奥·马特乌斯[英国]，《中小企业融资》,伦敦商业观察.2007(9):43-45.工商管理摘要中小企业融资的主要来源有：股权融资、按时兑现的贸易信贷融资、中长期银行信贷融资、延迟兑现的贸易信贷融资以及其他债务融资，每种融资方式的边际成本取决于与其滞纳金相关的信息不对称成本和交易成本。
根据啄食理论，企业在融资时，会优先选择成本最低的融资方式；而根据静态权衡理论，企业在进行融资时，各种资金来源的边际成本都是相同的；再者，根据优序融资理论，企业进行融资时要结合企业自身具体情况，是考虑多重因素下的优序融资。
在本文中，我们认为，以上这些理论都忽略了一点，那就是边际成本的确定主要依赖于融资资金的使用，以及资产负债表中资产方作为融资来源的重要影响作用。
一个来自葡萄牙中小企业的数据分析证实，企业资产负债表资产方对于融资方式的选择有着重要的影响，而这是静态权衡理论和优序融资理论所不能接受的。
中小企业的融资主要来源于股权（内部融资），商业信用，银行信贷和其他债务。
融资方式的选择取决于资金成本，而资金成本又是由信息不对称成本和基于无债务负担情况下的预期成本决定的。
信息不对称成本主要是为了支持管理决策而收集和分析信息所产生的费用，无债预期成本主要产生于企业为收回债务而收集和出售抵押品时的费用。
由于中小企业的管理层和股东往往是同一个人，股权和内部产生的资金没有信息不对称成本，因此股权融资是成本最低的融资渠道。
2 中小企业资产融资理论在前面的论述中，我们曾建议，葡萄牙的中小企业多采用内部资金、廉价贸易信贷、中长期银行信贷、高价贸易信贷和其他贷款进行融资。
接下来，我们将对以上各种类型的融资动机进行讨论。
2.1 廉价贸易信贷首先，我们将讨论的是贸易信贷。
贸易信贷很有意思，因为它们代表的非金融企业与金融中介机构在提供金融服务方面的竞争。
这一领域内的早期研究关注于贸易信贷同的信贷渠道的作用（或所谓的“梅尔策”影响）之间的关系，以及同货币政策的效率之间的关系。
中小型民营企业内部控制研究——工商管理类外文文献翻译、中英文翻译
本科毕业设计（论文）外文参考文献译文及原文学院专业年级班别学号学生姓名指导教师年月日摘要 (1)1 选题背景 (2)2内部控制理论的概述 (3)2.1 内部控制的根本性质 (3)2.2内部控制的责任 (3)3 确保内部控制的充分性 (5)4 先天的内部控制 (9)5 结论 (11)Abstract (12)1Background Topics (13)2 Internal control theory outlined (15)2.1 The Fundamental Nature Of Intaral Control (15)2.2 Responsibillty For Internal Control (15)3 Ensuring that the internal control adequacy (17)4 Inherent limitations of internal control (22)5 Conclusion (25)内部控制这个概念已经不是一个新概念。
这篇文章将研究每个公共部门财政经理和董事会成员应该了解的关于内部控制的内容。
在分析了虚假的财政报告的根本原因以后，Treadway 委员会把大部分的责任归咎于内部控制管理的不足。
作为回应，建立Treadway委员会的各个组织成立了一个赞助组织委员会（COSO），设法补救的Treadway委员会揭露出来的问题。
COSO为了确保此架构足够及全面的内部控制，确定了5个重要组成部分：1、控制环境；2、风险评估；3、政策及程序；4、沟通；5、监测与追踪。
一个健全的架构与内部控制是必要的，同时必须意识到这类框架是难于达到一个完美的境界。
内部控制在本质上是一种管理责任。
1选题背景内部控制这个概念已经是毫无新意的。
同样，由于私营部门最近的丑闻事件使得联邦法律重申了这个经常被忽略和议题的重要性，这篇文章将研究每一个公共部门的财政经理及董事会成员还应当了解内部控制的哪些制度。
工商管理企业员工培训中英文对照外文翻译文献
中英文对照外文翻译中英文对照外文翻译On the job training for employees of SMEs in China and avoidthe riskAbstract: The in-service training, as a high return on investment in human capital, faced with the inevitable problems and risks. In this paper, the employees working Risk aversion training capacity as the research object, through job training for SMEs and influencing factors of the study, discusses the risks of investment in small and medium-job training and benefits, and attempts by the costs, benefits, risks and other aspects of analysis to identify problems, and proposes the solutions and recommendations.Keywords: SMEs;-the-job training; training in risk; risk aversionWith the knowledge economy era, the face of fierce competition and rapid development of science and technology, creating high-quality employees has become the inevitable choice to adapt to the times. Gary, the founder of human capital theory. Becker balanced with the traditional microscopic method for analyzing equilibrium model of human capital investment, he thought to increase the stock of human capital more proactive approach is to-the-job training. Property rights theory based on human capital, human capital characteristics of their owners can not be separated, resulting in job training process, the company invested in physical capital investment costs can not be as straightforward as the back or free assignment. It is precisely because such features can not be separated, the current number of SMEs in China is often adilemma-job training, leading to the importance of human capital investment and a serious lack of investment. SMEs in China caused by the low level of staff in-service training for many reasons, including their own problems, including the training methodology, in order to find solutions to the enterprise employees must conduct in-depth analysis of job training. Therefore, this article attempts to above-the-job training of human capital characteristics and risk aversion and other issues specific analysis, to explore leading-job training of SME employees at risk reasons, and thus targeted measures to mobilize investment in human capital initiative, This is the sustainable development of SMEs in China is very important.First, job training and the status of SMEs in ChinaJob training is simply the practice of employees in the work practice of the activities of education, investment in human capital is a way. In-service training aimed at increasing knowledge and skills of workers to improve their productivity and income, and in the process, both enterprises and workers to pay the costs, including financial, material and energy, time, etc., both enterprises and employees can derive long-term benefits, so this is an investment activity, an investment in people, namely, human capital investment. Most companies from the point of view the purpose of job training, job training can be divided into general and specific job training. General training mainly for the training of general human capital. General human capital not only for the current enterprise value, and the other companies on the market have the same value, such as writing skills, computer skills, reading skills, communicationskills,etc.,for any job, any job or are notLack of human capital from one industry to another business does not depreciate. Special training is the training of the dedicated human capital. Specific human capital refers only to the current enterprise value of human capital, once the employee leaves the current company, then no value of human capital, such as the specific procedures, specific job skills, it can only be in one enterprise create value, once they left the business to powerless. Compared to Western countries, China's enterprises in-service training of the late start of the study, theoretical system is also not perfect, so the existence of enterprise-job training is often a variety of problems, the situation is notoptimistic. Especially ChinaSMEs, due to existence of their own problems and external constraints, the lack of a comprehensive training system, its training effectiveness is not satisfactory, it increases the risk of investment into human capital and the importance of the dilemma. Job training of SMEs in China there are many problems. For example, the lack of systematic training management system, including training needs analysis, institution building and systems, evaluation feedback. It is precisely because of the lack of a sound system, causing increased risk of training, training effectiveness reduced, resulting in corporate leadership, "On the training of pale", and thus greatly reduce the in-service training business concerns, do not want to increase investment in job training.Second, the existence of the risk of job training for SMEsIn-service training as a human capital investment companies, natural and human capital are inextricably linked, so a series of characteristics of human capital will inevitably bring about the in-service training to various risks. These characteristics are in-service training to bring a variety of risks, mainly in the following areas.1, leaving the riskJob training, whether general or specific job training, are facing a great risk that staff turnover. As the indivisibility of human capital people, once the employee leaves the company, its in-service training of human capital investment to vanish, resulting in huge losses of enterprises. Attrition risks include not only the resignation of younger workers, but also service workers because of age, physical health, emotional and other factors personal retirement or resignation. In life, career staff, there is always the experience of several job-hopping, which is often the case with its own staff and businesses closely related to the work environment, therefore, enterprises in job training, not only to pay attention to the selection of trainees, but also attention to employee career planning.2, the devaluation riskLike human capital and physical capital, subject to the risk of devaluation. The main job Training of staff is to enrich the content knowledge, enhance staff skills,knowledge and skills such as depreciation occurs, this devaluation devaluation can be divided into tangible and intangible depreciation. Which mainly refers to the physical depreciation of the unfamiliar, forgotten, etc., causing reduction of the knowledge and skills, thus affecting the current human capital investment return and future human capital investment. Intangible depreciation is due to the rapid development of science and technology knowledge and skills to make the original become relatively backward. Rapid technological development, market dynamics, shorter product life cycles have accelerated dramatically in-service training of enterprise intangible human capital depreciation. Replacement of electronic products increased rapidly, people's minds are quick to change. In this context, if the job Training content can not be closely integrated with the actual needs and to date, will face the risk of devaluation invisible.3, the moral hazardIn the special training course is to rely on the results of its training investment in the enterprise and the efforts of staff to the double conditionCompleted, so prone to bilateral moral issue, that is lazy and corporate employees to hide this bilateral ethics. When the staff effort is hidden action, and special training in the output results are private information of enterprises, employees may take "lazy" strategy, because employees can not share the results of training. On the other hand, companies may deliberately underestimate the output of human capital investment, or delay the results of training in production, thereby reducing human capital investment, leading to bilateral moral hazard problem. Even among the general training, but also of moral hazard, the risk of unemployment and competition usually comes from the possibility. In the "apprenticeship training" or "learning by doing" training in the old company employee in order to avoid competitive pressure and the pressure of unemployment will reduce the training of new employees in order to reduce competition.Third, the formation of small and medium-the-job training, riskfactor analysisThe risk of the enterprise is in-service training by many factors, this article mainlyfrom the perspective of human capital characteristics analysis. The so-called human capital characteristics, including the inseparability with people, mobility of human capital and human capital investment and other indirect compensation.1, the inseparability of human capitalFirst, human capital, natural personal property, which its owner has not separation. Thus, in corporate training, although the investment business as a main-job training, but through the formation of human capital training investment property and will be trained staff, rather than enterprises. The investors and owners of the main property of human capital makes the separation of complicated relations. We say that the formation of corporate training and human capital and business training is not only incremental, but also to the existing stock of human capital related. Second, the subject of enterprise investment in training ambiguity. Job training investment enterprises in the same time, training the employees have to pay the physical and mental energy, time or money, or give up some of the income or the opportunity to form a double main-job training investment, business investment is often manifested in the main dominant and the staff is hidden investors.2, the impact of human capital mobilityHuman capital is the will has its own flow of capital. This is because the carrier of human capital is the employees, and employees have their own consciousness and acts. Because employees who have the economic attributes that each engaged in economic activities and individuals in economic decision-making for the purpose of utility maximization. Once reach this goal, there will be interest maximization behavior, to provide consistent value added to the work of other enterprises, so that human capital investment can not be recovered. Such as remuneration, age, work environment or marriage relations.3, the human capital impact of indirect return on investmentA direct result of investment in staff training is to increase the stock of human capital, it must be with the combination of physical capital stock can be converted into real productivity enterprises, to produce the expected benefits. Therefore, investment in employee training not directly in the production process, nor the direct production of material wealth, investment income can not be directly reflected in the materialproduction process, thus the training of trainees each year after the expected return value is no way to get a direct guarantee. Although research on the human capital theory has been entered into the stage of construction and quantitative analysis, but has not yet made a breakthrough, it is difficult to find convincing accurate calculation of investment income method. Indirect investment income diversity and the coexistence of investment, so that the human capital to establish clear property right structure to become difficult, there is likely to exacerbate the contradictions in the income distribution, thereby increasing investment risk.Fourth, to resolve the risk of job training measures for SMEs Although research on the job training is not very in-depth, theoretical system is also not perfect, but the face in theExposed in the course of vocational training in various problems of SMEs in China or made effective way to combat these risks, which means job training in large measure to solve the risk problem. For example, through the development of the contract binding mechanism, through the upgrading of training content, or to provide more advanced training methods, or by the use of appropriate incentives to strengthen the training costs through the budget and risk prediction. Although these pathways to avoid the risk to some extent, but not completely avoid. The following is based on the factors that affect the job training and job training for SMEs in China There is a real problem, and proposed measures to avoid the risk of job training.1, attention to foster team spirit and corporate cultureTeam spirit is the part of corporate culture, good teamwork, good corporate culture, in the spirit of giving employees the sense of belonging, often more than the contract to retain employees this hard and fast rules. Starbucks employees of each entry must be carried out induction training, training content in addition to their professional qualities and skills training, more importantly, the training process, to strengthen the links between employees, contact between the staff running feelings. Starbucks believes that the training process, employees tend to create a team spirit, this spirit will help the enterprise to improve employee loyalty, reduce turnover rate. Therefore, enterprises in the training process, we should pay attention to build team spirit amongstaff, attention to staff's personal values, so that each employee feels valued, is to reduce the risk of job training effective way to leave.2, to enhance training cooperation between enterprises, to play the training scale Enterprise-job training usually requires a certain amount of fixed investment in training, large enterprises because the training staff, therefore the unit costs of training staff to small, so large companies have a cost advantage of formal training, which is called "scale effect." For SMEs, because the training object less to the size of their training alone is not realistic, a solution is mutual cooperation with other enterprises, joint training, in order to reduce the unit cost of training staff. Of course, this method is only suitable for general-job training, job training for special, because it relates to their special technology, does not apply to this kind of "scale" approach.3, enhance staff motivation and self-study learning abilityTraining of staff self-learning ability, enhance staff self-learning, is to reduce the cost of business investment in job training and improve training effectiveness and reduce the risk of job training the most direct route. First, enhance staff self-learning ability, can reduce the moral hazard. In the "apprenticeship" training process, we can reduce the "master" deliberate obstruction "apprentice" learning effect, employees can self-learning to improve skills and abilities. Secondly, to enhance staff self-learning can reduce training costs. Employees through self-learning, more quickly master the necessary knowledge and skills, reducing training time, reduce training costs. Finally, the staff through self-learning, and enhance the enthusiasm of learning, better grasp of the technology in practice and better use of the training results and improve the training effect.4, job rotation and strengthen the communication between departmentsThe job rotation job training and conduct your business one way, because it is in-house training, becauseThis largely reduces the cost of job training. Job rotation, means to transform trained staff to work with each other, so that trained staff to work in the corresponding field study on the necessary skills and knowledge. In addition to job rotation to reduce training costs, the training effect is also evident. Job rotation because it is field training in the workplace, and avoid the difficulties from the theory and practice, toavoid direct staff to give up training after the training results. Enhance communication between departments on the one hand can contact the department, the relationship between employees at all levels to improve the cohesion of the enterprise, on the other hand, in fact, also through the communication between employees, between employees of various departments to share skills and abilities , to a certain extent, also help strengthen the effectiveness of staff training.5, to improve the external policy of support for job trainingThe impact of job training before the face of factors of external policy, we can see the impact of training on the job, the external policy, including national and local labor laws and regulations, changes in market demand and the development of science and technology. Job training for local government support for the enterprise can improve the business-to-the-job training investment in this regard, enterprises should strengthen communication with local governments, local labor policies for more support on the job training enterprises, such as on-the-job training provide certain concessions or help and so on. Market demand and technology for the shorter replacement cycle, companies need to do is more comprehensive and accurate grasp of the subtle changes in the market, understand market dynamics, in response to market trends and their actual circumstances, combined with practical in-service training , so as to avoid the risk of depreciation in-service training to improve training effectiveness.我国中小企业员工在职培训风险及规避摘要：在职培训，作为一种具有高报酬率的人力资本投资，不可避免的面临各种问题和风险。
工商管理外文文献
Thomas M. Krueger. University of Wisconsin-La CrosseGreg Filbeck. Schweser Study Program2009-09-28An Analysis of Working Capital Management Results Across IndustriesABSTRACT：Firms are able to reduce financing costs and/or increase the funds available for expansion by minimizing the amount of funds tied up in current assets. We provide insights into the performance of surveyed firms across key components of working capital management by using the CFO magazine’s annual Working Capital Management Survey. We discover that significant differences exist between industries in working capital measures across time. In addition. we discover that these measures for working capital change significantly within industries across time.Key words: capital management; measures ;funds analysisIntroductionThe importance of efficient working capital management is indisputable. Working capital is the difference between resources in cash or readily convertible into cash (Current Assets) and organizational commitments for which cash will soon be required (Current Liabilities). The objective of working capital management is to maintain the optimum balance of each of the working capital components. Business viability relies on the ability to effectively manage receivables. inventory. and payables. Firms are able to reduce financing costs and/or increase the funds available for expansion by minimizing the amount of funds tied up in current assets. Much managerial effort is expended in bringing non-optimal levels of current assets and liabilities back toward optimal levels. An optimal level would be one in which a balance is achieved between risk and efficiency.A recent example of business attempting to maximize working capital management is the recurrent attention being given to the application of Six Sigma® methodology. Six Sigma® methodologies help companies measure and ensure quality in all areas of the enterprise. When used to identify and rectify discrepancies. inefficiencies and erroneous transactions in the financial supply chain. Six Sigma® reduces Days Sales Outstanding (DSO). accelerates the payment cycle. improves customer satisfaction and reduces the necessary amount and cost of working capital needs. There appear to be many success stories. including Jennifer Towne’s (2002) report of a 15 percent decrease in days that sales are outstanding. resulting in an increased cash flow of approximately $2 million at Thibodaux Regional Medical Center. Furthermore. bad debts declined from $3.4 million to $600.000. However. Waxer’s (2003) study of multiple firms employing Six Sigma® finds that it is really a “get rich slow”technique with a rate of return hovering in the 1.2 – 4.5 percent range.Even in a business using Six Sigma® methodology. an “optimal” level of working capital management needs to be identified. Industry factors may impact firm credit policy. inventory management. and bill-paying activities. Some firms may be better suited to minimize receivables and inventory. while others maximize payables. Another aspect of “optimal” is the extent to which poor financial results can be tied to sub-optimal performance. Fortunately. these issues are testable with data published by CFO magazine. which claims to be the source of “tools and information for the financial execut ive.” and are the subject of this research.In addition to providing mean and variance values for the working capital measures and the overall metric. two issues will be addressed in this research. One research question is. “are firms within a particular industry clustered together at consistent levels of working capital measures?” For instance. are firms in one industry able to quickly transfer sales into cash. while firms from another industry tend to have high sales levels for the particular level of in ventory . The other research question is. “does working capital management performance for firms within a given industry change from year-to-year?”The following section presents a brief literature review. Next. the research method is described. including some information about the annual Working Capital Management Survey published by CFO magazine. Findings are then presented and conclusions are drawn.The importance of working capital management is not new to the finance literature. Over twenty years ago. Largay and Stickney (1980) reported that the then-recent bankruptcy of W.T. Grant. a nationwide chain of department stores. should have been anticipated because the corporation had been running a deficit cash flow from operations for eight of the last ten years of its corporate life. As part of a study of the Fortune 500’s financial management practices. Gilbert and Reichert (1995) find that accounts receivable management models are used in 59 percent of these firms to improve working capital projects. while inventory management models were used in 60 percent of the companies. More recently. Farragher. Kleiman and Sahu (1999) find that 55 percent of firms in the S&P Industrial index complete some form of a cash flow assessment. but did not present insights regarding accounts receivable and inventory management. or the variations of any current asset accounts or liability accounts across industries. Thus. mixed evidence exists concerning the use of working capital management techniques.Theoretical determination of optimal trade credit limits are the subject of many articles over the years (e.g.. Schwartz 1974; Scherr 1996). with scant attention paid to actual accounts receivable management. Across a limited sample. Weinraub and Visscher (1998) observe a tendency of firms with low levels of current ratios to also have low levels of current liabilities. Simultaneously investigating accounts receivable and payable issues. Hill. Sartoris. and Ferguson (1984) find differences in the way payment dates are defined. Payees define the date of payment as the date payment is received. while payors view payment as the postmark date. Additional WCM insight across firms. industries. and time can add to this body of research.Maness and Zietlow (2002. 51. 496) presents two models of value creation that incorporate effective short-term financial management activities. However. these models are generic models and do not consider unique firm or industry influences. Maness and Zietlow discuss industry influences in a short paragraph that includes theobservation that. “An industry a company is located in may have more influence on that company’s fortunes than overall GNP” (2002. 507). In fact. a careful review of this 627-page textbook finds only sporadic information on actual firm levels of WCM dimensions. virtually nothing on industry factors except for some boxed items with titles such as. “Should a Retailer Offer an In-House Credit Card” (128) and nothing on WCM stability over time. This research will attempt to fill this void by investigating patterns related to working capital measures within industries and illustrate differences between industries across time.An extensive survey of library and Internet resources provided very few recent reports about working capital management. The most relevant set of articles was Weisel and Bradley’s (2003) article on cash flow management and one of inventory control as a result of effective supply chain management by Hadley (2004).The CFO RankingsThe first annual CFO Working Capital Survey. a joint project with REL Consultancy Group. was published in the June 1997 issue of CFO (Mintz and Lezere 1997). REL is a London. England-based management consulting firm specializing in working capital issues for its global list of clients. The original survey reports several working capital benchmarks for public companies using data for 1996. Each company is ranked against its peers and also against the entire field of 1.000 companies. REL continues to update the original information on an annual basis.REL uses the “cash flow from operations”value located on firm cash flow statements to estimate cash conversion efficiency (CCE). This value indicates how well a company transforms revenues into cash flow. A “days of working capital” (DWC) value is based on the dollar amount in each of the aggregate. equally-weighted receivables. inventory. and payables accounts. The “days of working capital”(DNC) represents the time period between purchase of inventory on acccount from vendor until the sale to the customer. the collection of the receivables. and payment receipt. Thus. it reflects the company’s ability to finance its core operations with vendor credit. A detailed investigation of WCM is possible because CFO also provides firm and industry values for days sales outstanding (A/R). inventory turnover. and days payables outstanding (A/P).Working capital management component definitions and average values for the entire 1996 –2000 period . Across the nearly 1.000 firms in the survey. cash flow from operations. defined as cash flow from operations divided by sales and referred to as “cash conversion efficiency” (CCE). averages 9.0 percent. Incorporating a 95 percent confidence interval. CCE ranges from 5.6 percent to 12.4 percent. The days working capital (DWC). defined as the sum of receivables and inventories less payables divided by daily sales. averages 51.8 days and is very similar to the days that sales are outstanding (50.6). because the inventory turnover rate (once every 32.0 days) is similar to the number of days that payables are outstanding (32.4 days). In all instances. the standard deviation is relatively small. suggesting that these working capital management variables are consistent across CFO reports.CFO magazine provides an overall working capital ranking for firms in its survey. using the following equation:Industry-based differences in overall working capital management are presented for the twenty-six industries that had at least eight companies included in the rankings each year. In the typical year. CFO magazine ranks 970 companies during this period. Industries are listed in order of the mean overall CFO ranking of working capital performance. Since the best average ranking possible for an eight-company industry is 4.5 (this assumes that the eight companies are ranked one through eight for the entire survey). it is quite obvious that all firms in the petroleum industry must have been receiving very high overall working capital management rankings. In fact. the petroleum industry is ranked first in CCE and third in DWC (as illustrated in Table 5 and discussed later in this paper). Furthermore. the petroleum industry had the lowest standard deviation of working capital rankings and range of working capital rankings. The only other industry with a mean overall ranking less than 100 was the Electric & Gas Utility industry. which ranked second in CCE and fourth in DWC. The two industries with the worst working capital rankings were Textiles and Apparel. Textiles rank twenty-second in CCE and twenty-sixth in DWC. The apparel industry ranks twenty-third and twenty-fourth in the two working capital measures.ConclusionsThe research presented here is based on the annual ratings of working capital management published in CFO magazine. Our findings indicate a consistency in how industries “stack up” against each other over time with respect to the working capital measures. However. the working capital measures themselves are not static (i.e.. averages of working capital measures across all firms change annually); our results indicate significant movements across our entire sample over time. Our findings are important because they provide insight to working capital performance across time. and on working capital management across industries. These changes may be in explained in part by macroeconomic factors. Changes in interest rates. rate of innovation. and competition are likely to impact working capital management. As interest rates rise. there would be less desire to make payments early. which would stretch accounts payable. accounts receivable. and cash accounts.The ramifications of this study include the finding of distinct levels of WCM measures for different industries. which tend to be stable over time. Many factors help to explain this discovery. The improving economy during the period of the study may have resulted in improved turnover in some industries. while slowing turnover may have been a signal of troubles ahead. Our results should be interpreted cautiously. Our study takes places over a short time frame during a generally improving market. In addition. the survey suffers from survivorship bias – only the top firms within each industry are ranked each year and the composition of those firms within the industry can change annually.Further research may take one of two lines. First. there could be a study of whether stock prices respond to CFO magazine’s publication of working capital management ratings. Second. there could be a study of which. if any. of the working capital management components relate to share price performance. Given our results. these studies need to take industry membership into consideration when estimating stock price reaction to working capital management performance托马斯M克鲁格.威斯康星大学拉克罗斯格雷格Filbeck.Schweser学习计划对整个行业中营运资金管理的研究摘要:企业能够降低融资成本或者尽量减少绑定在流动资产上的成立基金数额来用于扩大现有的资金。
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The Contractor's Role in Building Cost Reduction AfterDesignAuthor：Waddle,Todd W.Nationality：UKDerivation：Cost Engineering; Feb2008, Vol. 50 Issue 2, p14-21It has become evident from recent news articles that inflationary pressures and increased construction activity are causing many building projects to come in well over owner's budgets. This trend has increased dramatically over the past few years, as much of the construction industry has been impacted by an unprecedented increase in the cost of construction. The historical rate of increase in construction cost has been under five percent per year, as reported by the Engineering News Record. Over the last few years, the industry has seen a significant increase from historical escalation rates, up to 10-15 percent per year in many regions of the US. These increases have been caused by a variety of factors, including the following.• Shortage of steel resulting from rapid growth in China.• Demand for materials in the US resulting from increased hur ricane damage. • Rising oil prices leading to higher manufacturing and transportation cost. • Rising labor cost because of increased construction activity .To be successful in having over budget projects awarded, the building contractor has had to take a proactive role in working with owners and design teams to reduce project cost to amounts that owners are able to award. This cost reduction is normally accomplished through the following methods.• value engineering;• scope reduction;Value EngineeringValue engineering (VE) has been defined as a systematic method to improve the value of goods and services by using an examination of function. Value, as defined, is the ratio of function to cost. Value can therefore be increased by either improving the function or reducing the cost.It is a primary tenet of value engineering that quality not be reduced as a consequence of pursuing value improvements . VE is a process originating at General Electric Company (GE) during World War II. Because of shortages of skilled labor, raw materials, and component parts, engineers at GElooked for acceptable alternates and often found substitutions that resulted in reduced costs and/or product improvement.GE developed a systematic process that they called value analysis. Over the years the name gradually changed to VE. The basic steps of VE include the following：• Information gathering: project requirements defined, function analysis.• Alternates: various ways of meeting the requirements and functions.• Evaluation: asses sment of alternates on how well they meet requirements and costs savings.• Presentation: selection of best alternatives to be presented to client for decisions.True VE evaluates life cycle costs such as initial cost, maintenance cost, operational cost, life span, time value of money, replacement cost, and frequency of replacement. VE can be undertaken at any stage of the building design process; however, it is most effective in the early stages, since it is less costly to make changes to preliminary documents .Scope ReductionScope reduction involves identifying areas of the project scope of work that can be reduced in quality, quantity, or both in a manner that is acceptable to the owner.Scope reduction items of work often consist of material or equipment substitutions that lower the cost of the project, but may not be an equal substitute. An example of quantity scope reduction would be to reduce the guttering system on a pitched roof from the entire roof perimeter to entrances only. A quality scope reduction example would be to provide vinyl composition floor tiles (VCT) in lieu of ceramic floor tiles.After a project has been determined to be out of budget because of high bids, the project is normally either cancelled, redesigned and re-bid, or negotiations are held with the low bidder to reach an acceptable contract amount. For the building contractor that is selected for negotiations, this is anopportunity to move toward project award and to also build a relationship of trust and openness with the owner and design team that could lead to future projects.First, the building contractor should meet with the owner and design team to fully understand the owners project requirements, priorities, life cycle considerations, and budget.Next, the building contractor's role is to use his estimating and construction expertise to analyze various components and systems within the project for alternate solutions. The contractor should also bring in key subcontractors and suppliers who are often able to identify alternate materials and/or systems within their specialties. Each division of work should be examined and evaluated for VE solutions. In past years, this process and service was considered part of the building contractors overhead. However, in today's market, some contractors will negotiate rates and be reimbursed for the time and effort that they spend in this process in the event that theproject is not awarded to them.The work breakdown structure (WBS) can be a helpful tool to the building contractor in analyzing the various components and systems within a building project. The WBS is a tree-type structure of functional systems used to classify the project on a level-by-level basis . This breakdown structure facilitates the evaluation of each system of the project from the building foundations to the completed sitework.Questions to Ask or Areas and/to Consider by WBSThis section provides a list of areas for the building contractor to examine and/or questions to ask in the WBS system level format for cost saving alternatives. Some of these changes can be accomplishedwithout major re-design cost and incorporated into the construction documents in the form of an addendum. Other changes listed would require extensive re-design and time delays.SUBSTRUCTURE—Have alternate types of foundation system been considered?• wood piles in lieu of precast;• drilled caissons vs. piles;• mat foundations in place of piles or caissons.—Evaluate sand base in place of gravel or stone under slab on grade. SUPERSTRUCTURE—Have alternate types of building structures been evaluated?• structural steel, precast concrete, cast in place concrete, light gauge steel framing or wood framing systems.—Compare Alternate Stair Systems.• steel pan stairs vs. precast concrete or cast in place concrete.EXTERIOR CLOSURE—Evaluate exterior wall systems.• Light gauge metal framing in lieu of reinforced concrete masonry units.• Can wall widths or gauges be reduced?—Compare sheathing systems.• Fiber sheathings in place of cement boards.—Review alternate wall insulation systems.• Batt insulations, rigid insulation materials, loose fill block insulation.—Consider alternate exterior wall veneers.• Conventional stucco versus exterior insulation finish system.• Brick or precast in lieu of stone.—Evaluate alternate glazing systems.• Can exterior glazed areas be reduced?• Storefronts in lieu of curtainwalls if code allows.• Painted aluminum in lieu of stainless steel or brass framing.—Review exterior entrances.• Manual entrance doors in place of automatic entrances.• Automatic entrances in lieu of revolving doors.• Cedar entrance doors rather than mahogany.—Examine exterior railing systems.• aluminum or cable systems in lieu of glass;• standard designs in place of custom elements;ROOFING—Evaluate the specified roofing with alternative materials.• Combined metal decking/insulation systems in lieu of separate systems.• Interior batt insulation in place of rigid roof insulation.• Built-up roofing vs. single ply membranes.• Fib erglass or concrete tiles in lieu of clay tiles.• Painted metals in place of copper.• Can the specified gauge of metal roofing be lowered?• Eliminate or reduce the guttering system?• Can skylights be reduced or styles changed?• Are standard warranties specified?INTERIOR CONSTRUCTION—Examine interior wall systems.• Can light gauge metal-framed walls be used in lieu of concrete masonry units?• Can wall thicknesses or gauges be reduced?• Are drywall systems being used in lieu of plaster? Examine inte rior doors and hardware.• Are the specified doors standard sizes or custom?• Have alternate wood door species been considered?• Have alternate hardware styles or manufacturers been compared?• Can manual doors be used in lieu of automatic?• Are the doo rs pre-machined for hardware installation?• Compare pre-finishing doors with finishing on-site.—Review interior specialties.• Have alternate types of toilet partitions been considered?• Prefinished metals vs. plastic laminates.• Can vinyl corner guard s be used rather than metal?• Metal lockers vs. wood.• Have special partitions been evaluated?• Plastic veneers in lieu of wood.• Can the sound rating be reduced?• Defer installation?• Has the access flooring system been evaluated?• Standard floor f inishes rather than custom?INTERIOR FINISHES—Evaluate interior wall finishes.• Painted wall finishes in lieu of wallcovering.• Epoxy coatings in place of tile finishes.• FRP instead of stainless steel.• Are textured drywall systems being used rather than plaster?—Examine interior floor finishes.• Resilient flooring vs. ceramic or wood.• Ceramic flooring in lieu of stone.• Tile or stone in place of terrazzo.• Alternate carpet manufacturers.—Review alternate ceiling finishes.• Standard ceiling vs. custom.• Fiber ceiling vs. metal.CONVEYING SYSTEMS—Review specified elevators and escalators.• Have alternate manufacturers been considered?• Are standard interior elevator cab finishes specified or custom?• Can glass walls be eliminated?• Are sta ndard warranties specified?SITE PREPARATION• Has a site work analysis been performed to balance cuts and fills.SITE IMPROVEMENTS• Can paved areas be reduced or more economical paving materials used?• Has resurfacing existing parking areas been conside red rather than new parking construction?• Have alternate types of enclosure walls been considered?• Have landscaping alternatives or substitutions been considered?• Seeding in place of sodding.• Reduce or change tree and plant materials.• Use existin g trees and other existing landscaping.SITE CIVIL/MECHANICAL UTILITIES• Have alternate utility piping materials been evaluated?• Can existing site utilities be abandoned rather than removed?SITE ELECTRICAL UTILITIES• Have alternate exterior lighting p ackages been compared?• Have alternate utility piping materials been evaluated?CONTRACTOR OVERHEAD AND PROFIT• Can phasing be reduced to shorten the project duration?• Can the start of the project be timed to avoid cost impact of winter conditions?• F or high-rise projects; have crane and hoisting options been compared? • Can the Owner include the Builders Risk policy?.Breaking down and analyzing the components of a building project through the work breakdown structure can aid in reduction summaries also reveal that the mechanical, electrical and plumbing(MEP) systems typically offer the greatest opportunity for cost savings due to their total significance to a project. The MEP systems normally make up between 30 to 50 percent of a building project's cost.The owners of the illustrated projects accepted cost reducing changes ranging from 6 to 14 percent of the original low bids. These reductions allowed them to meet their particular budgets and have their projects constructed by incorporating the changes into addendums. Some projects may be so far over budget that substantial structural and/or building redesigns are unavoidable. However, building contractors can play a major role in bringing projects into budget—using their past experience along with their subcontractor and supplier networks to develop cost reduction alternatives that may not have been previously considered by owners and/or design teams.设计阶段后承包商在降低施工成本方面所扮演的角色作者：Waddle,Todd W.国籍：英国出处：营销的智慧与计划2008.11.05，第14-21页从最近的新闻报道中可以明显的看出，通货膨胀的压力和建筑产业的不断发展使很多工程项目超出了业主的预算。