Business : Corporate & Business History

The principles and practices of corporate social responsibility date back more than a century , but the current wave of global interest is unprecedented. With The Market for Virtue, David Vogel has provided the most comprehensive analysis to date of the contemporary CSR movement in both the United States and Europe. Growing awareness of CSR is evident in the growth of social and ethical investment funds, voluntary codes of corporate conduct, and companies' self-reporting on social and environmental practices. more...

Price: $28.95

This groundbreaking biography by Kevin Maney, acclaimed technology columnist for USA Today , offers fresh insight and new information on one of the twentieth century's greatest business figures. Over the course of forty-two years, Thomas J. Watson took a failing business called The Computer-Tabulating-Recording Company and transformed it into IBM, the world's first and most famous high-tech company. more...

Price: $29.95

A dramatic narrative by a top journalist about the transformation of one of the world's greatest media empires. The Murdoch Mission gets inside Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and documents the media mogul's strategic forays in digital media and broadcasting and new Internet-based businesses. Among other giant highlights is the creation of his new $40 billion company, the mammoth Sky Global Networks. Wendy Rohm provides an up-close look at how Murdoch's youngest son, James Murdoch, is changing his father's fortune in the megamarket of China and other world markets. She shows the impact these forays will have on international trade and the media world at large. more...

Price: $27.95

When Lucent Technologies was spun off from AT&T in 1996, the new company was full of promise. An old-line manufacturer, it quickly became a sizzling hot stock thanks to the emergence of the Internet and the build-up of telecommunications. The stock market was soaring, and Lucent flew with it. Within a few short years it became the sixth-largest corporation in America and the most widely held stock in the country. Yet only months later, Lucent was gasping for life, victim of the greatest stock-market bubble in history. more...

Price: $17.99

Count them: Franklin Raines, Michael Eisner, Carly Fiorina, Harry Stonecipher, Hank Greenberg , Morgan Stanley's Phillip Purcell. These chief executives, each running one of the sixty largest companies in America, were each removed against his or her will in the span of the same year. The facts in each case vary. Stonecipher, a short–timer as CEO of Boeing, was fired after a wild workplace fling that began at the company's annual executive retreat. Greenberg, chief executive of the insurance company AIG for almost four decades, was ousted under the pressure from New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer because of an investigation of the company's accounting irregularities. Fiorina and Eisner came under attack from shareholders; Raines was the target of a newly empowered government regulator. But taken together, they signal a tectonic shift in the underpinnings of power in corporate America. The imperial CEO is gone. In its place is a new, and often messy, system of board rule, in which a group of people, many of whom have relatively little experience in business, are holding sway over corporate titans, and in which an array of new interest groups – shareholders, regulators, hedge funds, employees, and labor unions – are learning to successfully flex their muscle. This book would tell the tumultuous inside story of that revolution, examine what caused it, and explore what it means for the future of American business. more...

Price: $19.95