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This article examines the implications of an aging workforce for human resource management (HRM). It first looks at research and theories relevant to understanding age-related changes at work, including lifespan development theories, changes in work outcomes such as motivation and performance, and the social context for age (e.g., age stereotyping). It then considers the ways that organizations can keep their employees-including those who are aging-satisfied, engaged, productive, and healthy in their jobs in terms of traditional HR practices like recruitment and selection, training, career development, and occupational safety and health. Finally, it offers suggestions on how HRM can take age differences into account and identifies a number of areas for future research.

This chapter highlights the most significant ways in which research from across Internet Studies combines thematically to offer a picture of the challenges facing freedom of expression in the twenty-first century, as well as the need for broader theoretical frameworks. It suggests that a broader theoretical framework is required to catch the full range of law and policies shaping expression online, and to develop responses for policy and practice. The Internet presents just as many opportunities for digital surveillance or censorship as it does for free expression. The most helpful contribution of Internet Studies has been to expose and illuminate the many different forces that restrict or expand the opportunities to speak and communicate. The Internet has become central to communication and it plays a role in helping multiple actors to obtain their various goals.

Regulation has been a recurring theme in business history at industry level as well as in case studies of firms and firm dynamics. For banking and finance, the complications of information asymmetry and the systemic importance of banking systems for monetary and economic stability have led to a general consensus that there can be a positive role for regulation and supervision in the banking industry. But there are also important challenges that arise from regulatory competition, moral hazard and regulatory capture. These challenges can be magnified when raised to the regional, international, or global platform. This chapter argues that despite the apparent need for greater coordination of prudential supervision and regulation to ensure a stable global financial system, there has been only limited progress toward practical implementation of these principals at a global level.

Financial crises have been a common feature of the economic landscape for more than two centuries. The chapter defines banking crises, considers the type of costs that they impose, and outlines the most common causes of banking crises during the past 200 years. The remainder of the chapter considers five distinct historical periods: the nineteenth century, when the pattern of crises following ‘boom–bust’ economic cycles became established; the inter-war period, which was punctuated by two major sets of crises (post-First World War crisis and the Great Depression); the post-Second World War financial ‘lock-down’, which was characterized by stringent banking regulation and a complete absence of banking crises; deregulation and the return of crises in the 1970s; and the subprime crisis that emerged in 2008 and the subsequent Eurozone crisis.

Most governments around the world face unrelenting demands for reforms and regulatory improvements — mainly from commentators, regulated organisations, elected representatives, and oversight bodies. As a result, such administrations often seek to deliver ‘better regulation’ through initiatives that are designed to improve the delivery of high quality regulation. Such efforts, however, tend to come up against three central challenges which are discusses in this article. This article looks at responses to these three challenges — which can be referred to as those of: benchmarks, strategies, and measurement. It considers the approaches that have been taken in the literature and in governmental policies and draws attention to a number of ongoing difficulties that are presented by the search for better regulation. The argument presented here is that current approaches involve a number of worrying tensions and contradictions which are of both a philosophical and a practical nature.

This article concentrates on creating sustainability that is already becoming central to business strategy formation and implementation. It is believed that business will be shaped by a different sense of the term “sustainability”. The most important sustainability beliefs are that the world operates as a complex, not mechanistic, system, and human beings operate out of a bundle of care, not needs. The institution called “business” has a very special role in modern societies with respect to sustainability and to the culture change needed to create it. Sustainability exists in a new paradigm, where the fundamental beliefs that underlie the place, role, and practices of business are no longer capable of producing what is wanted without unintended consequences that more than negate the positive outcomes. As business has become more powerful, changing its ways becomes equivalently more problematic.

Multinational corporations (MNCs) have the potential to influence job and business formation in the Africa through Corporate Social Responsibility Entrepreneurship (CSRE) programs and support. Surprisingly, the best approaches and/or means to support, track, and report these efforts remain unclear. Through a review of twelve prominent companies, this chapter expands the current literature on CSR by providing a broader view of MNCs role in promoting entrepreneurship priorities in Africa. Five major types of CSRE that current initiatives fall under are identified, along with the intended contributions, beneficiaries (e.g. micro-entrepreneurs, SMEs, women), and ways in which MNCs track and report impact. While MNCs efforts are laudable for their depth and breadth, major challenges remain to ascertain the real impact of these priorities and actions on the entrepreneurial landscape. The authors discuss these and suggest important considerations for MNC continued and improved support of African entrepreneurship and African entrepreneurs.

This article discusses the influence of environmental law on the environment and the economy. Businesses seek to influence the stringency and design of environmental law by lobbying legislators and officials at environmental agencies. Sometimes business groups play a formal, collaborative role in the development of environmental regulations. The basic types of regulatory design for environment are presented. Environmental law can affect underlying environmental conditions and other policy criteria. The global reach of business in today's economy, combined with the global scope of some of the most salient environmental problems, increasingly creates new challenges for business and environmental law. One set of challenges centers on the complexity of the legal environment within which multinational corporations and other businesses engaged in global transactions must operate. The global nature of some of the most pressing environmental problems has created a related set of challenges linked with achieving international cooperation and coordination.

The advent of neo-corporatism has been a rare occurrence among advanced capitalist liberal democracies—and virtually unheard of elsewhere. Of the twenty or so original members of that club of rich countries, the OECD, only about one-third have managed to practice it for any length of time, despite the demonstrable benefits that this mode of interest intermediation has had for many aspects of macroeconomic performance from the end of the Second World War until the end of the 1970s. The most pervasive reason for this has been the opposition of organized business interests. Only under exceptional conditions of a “balance of class forces” between capital and labor has it emerged and persisted at the national level.

Although it is conventional in political science to distinguish between political parties and interest groups, in practice the distinction is less clear. The conventional definitions suggest that political parties seek to capture power; interest groups aspire to influence public policy. Even the names of political parties make it obvious, however, that in practice this distinction is not absolute. The linkage in the UK between Labour parties and unions is usually clear. In the United States, the Minnesota branch of the Democratic Party is still called the Democratic Farm Labor Party. Farmers' parties used to be fairly common although as in the Swedish case they have generally adopted labels that are more encompassing such as, to continue the Swedish example, the Center Party. Parties do not call themselves “The Business Party” but are often described as such. What does this mean? On what basis is it reasonable to identify a party as the business party? There are a number of different indicators that can be used.

Scholarship has been moving toward the reintegration of business and cultural history, in ways that offer payoffs for both. The best of this work avoids much of the determinism and teleology of older approaches, finding that business can be practiced, quite successfully, in many different ways in different cultural settings. The new scholarship challenges business historians to recognize the more expressive aspects of business culture, beyond what culture may contribute instrumentally to firm growth. Modern cultural theory offers a way to rethink the relationship between business and culture. Treating culture as constitutive turns familiar business issues of strategy, structure, and technology into objects of meaning and interpretation, “artifacts” of values and practice rather than hard, settled facts. Such an approach argues for giving business ideas, practices, and expressions equal footing with material matters of production and profit.

In recent years, there has been a steady expansion in the literature on the history of business education. This article presents the main contributions to the existing knowledge of the development of business education internationally. It discusses the developmental path of business education around the world and the emergence of higher business as a phenomenon that occurred in different forms in parallel within major economies. The article characterizes the first decades after the Second World War as a period of Americanization. It has been generally agreed that European business schools were strongly influenced by American role models after the Second World War. The article supports this view; however, it also emphasizes that the concept of “Americanization” most suitably characterizes the relationship between American and Western European business education during the first two decades after the war. It characterizes international business education over the last two decades by globalization and regionalization.

Business history as a specific field was not born inside the historical profession. It first appeared in the United States at Harvard Business School, in 1927. N. S. B. Gras held the first chair in business history. Today business history has indeed become universal. For quite a while, however, and in spite of the initial support from the Annales, the value and methods of business history were questioned by many historians. At the same time, the fact that business history could be taught in departments other than history, mostly business administration and economics, meant that its practitioners could come from these very disciplines and that research and teaching in business history brought them in contact with the trends at work in the historical profession. This article assesses the results of this double process for a field that is steeped in two worlds: inside history and outside history.

Through much of the twentieth century, business-interest associations (BIAs) were neglected as the object of academic study and systematic research. Although this topic attracted considerable interest among institutional economists and social reformers on both sides of the Atlantic during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is only from the late 1970s that modern scholars have once again begun to delve seriously into BIAs' organization and strategies. The introductory section of this article presents the main theoretical issues at stake, synthesizes the outcomes of historical research, and analyzes the interrelations between them. It sketches a comparative-historical framework to explain the development of BIAs. Furthermore, the article outlines the long-term historical development of BIAs since the Middle Ages. Finally, it proposes an agenda for future research.

Several broad generalizations about the nature of business representation in Washington would command general agreement. First, business representation is organizationally fragmented and competitive. Second, there is no hierarchical relationship between business organizations. Third, peak and trade organizations are not the only source of business representation in Washington. Large corporations increasingly have their own “in-house” lobbyists in a governmental affairs unit; although, this trend varies by industry and firm size, there was a marked increase between 1991 and 2001 across industries in the emphasis firms placed upon hiring in-house lobbyists. Fourth, business groups are often part of short-lived coalitions that can link businesses with other types of organizations or pit one group of businesses against another.

This article addresses how the relationship between business, society and the environment has evolved, with each system affecting the others. It reviews the effort to shift from a traditional “dominion of nature” paradigm toward a radically different “sustainability” paradigm. Effecting this change requires a new definition and understanding of the role of the corporation in society. The features of this new model are proposed. The interplay of science, markets, public policy, and ethical reasoning helps in the understanding on the way business and society interpenetrate and influence one another in relation to the environment. The Millennium Development Goals Project placed vital environmental goals in a framework of other human goals. The number of signatories to the Global Compact or other codes remains small relative to the total number of economic enterprises. Environmental issues are prominent in the economic marketplace, public policy arena, and the marketplace of ideas.

This article addresses whether market-based capitalism might chiefly be responsible for the global environment crisis and the dominant “dark” forces resisting solutions to this crisis. The emphasis is particularly on the Anglo-Saxon form of capitalism. It also addresses six contentions as to why capitalism might represent the ultimate cause of ecological destruction and resistance to change on behalf of a sustainable future. Corporations, and the people within them, are following a system of logic that leads inexorably toward dominant behaviors. The business and the natural environment (B&NE) field needs to become proficient at analyzing the impacts of business. The field must also present judgments of what is right versus wrong and good versus evil. It must also assign duties and moral obligations, demand sacrifices, and normatively focus on what should be.

This article distinguishes between the major competitive approaches adopted by leading firms in the OECD economies in the post-war period and outlines a framework for analysing how some of the key changes in the business environment since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system have affected the conditions encouraging companies to pursue these in different contexts. It presents a taxonomy of seven ideal types of competition models that resemble many of the dominant business strategies identified in comparative studies of twentieth-century capitalisms. The article also suggests how different kinds of conditions seem likely to encourage firms to follow particular types. Next, it summarizes the major changes that have taken place in many market economies since the 1960s which have often been cited as important factors influencing institutional and business system restructuring, and indicates how they can be expected to alter these conditions, and so affect dominant competition models in different economies.

Public pension systems are usually distinguished according to whether they are universal or contribution based. In the first instance access is determined by residency or nationality, implying that the subjects of insurance are either all legal residents or all citizens. In the second instance employment status is the determinant, implying that only workers have full access. This article focuses on the changes in the sectoral composition of economies, firm strategies, and labour markets respectively to argue that occupational pensions will gradually be transformed into individual saving accounts. It concludes with a brief discussion of the policy challenges and open research questions involved.