In 1973, Betsy Ann Plank became the first woman to chair the Public Relations Society of America in its twenty-five-year history. It was a tumultuous time to assume the national association’s leadership. Civil society seemed to be fraying at the edges, and trust in political institutions and corporations had plummeted in the aftermath of Watergate. Nevertheless, Plank, in her fearless style, took up the challenge head-on. From the start and throughout the span of her sixty-three-year career in public relations, she managed to overcome the very real barriers she faced due to gender-based discrimination in what was a male-dominated industry. As a PR practitioner, Plank served as executive vice president of Daniel J. Edelman, Inc., director of PR planning at AT&T, and assistant vice president of external affairs at Illinois Bell. Beyond her service in the professional realm, Plank grew her legacy by taking the time to mentor countless PR professionals, educators, and students. She saw this dissemination of knowledge as her greatest gift to the field of public relations. In this highly readable biography, Karla Gower explores Plank’s personal life and career, tracing her evolution from a low-level job in advertising through her contributions to the rise of the rapidly changing PR industry in the 1960s and the evolution of her personal devotion to the enhancement of public relations education.
 

Beyond Market Value chronicles Annette Campbell-White’s remarkable life, from a childhood spent in remote mining camps throughout the British Commonwealth, where books created an imaginary home; to her early adulthood in London, where she first discovered a vocation as a book collector; to Silicon Valley, where she built a pioneering career as a formidable venture capitalist. She recalls the impulsive purchase of the first book in her collection, T. S. Eliot’s A Song for Simeon, and her pursuit of rare editions of all one hundred titles listed in Cyril Connolly’s The Modern Movement. Campbell-White’s collecting and career peaked in 2005, when she acquired the last of the Connolly titles and was first named to Forbes’ Midas List, the annual ranking of the most successful dealmakers in venture capital.

In 2007, out of concern for their preservation, Campbell-White rashly sold the Connolly titles she had spent more than twenty years assembling, leading to a new appreciation of what remained of her collection and, going forward, a broader focus on collecting modernist letters, manuscripts, and ephemera. Beyond Market Value is both a loving tribute to literary collecting and a telling account of the challenges of being a woman in the male-dominated world of finance.

Plunging into the verbal quagmire of official language used by bureaucrats in both government and business, distinguished linguist Roger W. Shuy develops new techniques based on linguistic principles to improve their communication with the public.

Shuy presents nine case studies that reveal representative problems with bureaucratic language. He characterizes the traits of bureaucratic language candidly, though somewhat sympathetically, and he describes how linguists can provide bureaucrats with both the tools for communicating more clearly and also the authority to implement these changes.

Drawing on documents cited in class action lawsuits brought against the Social Security Administration and Medicare, Shuy offers a detailed linguistic analysis of these agencies’ problems with written and oral communication, and he outlines a training program he developed for government writers to solve them. Moving on to the private sector, Shuy analyzes examples of the ways that businesses such as car dealerships, real estate and insurance companies, and commercial manufacturers sometimes fail to communicate effectively. Although typically bureaucracies change their use of language only when a lawsuit threatens, Shuy argues that clarity in communication is a cost effective strategy for preventing or at least reducing litigation.

Bureaucratic Language in Government and Business explains why bureaucratic language can be so hard to understand and what can be done about it.

These essays provide the first published research on Latin America’s business sectors after recent political transformations in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico and Peru. They reveal the widely varied political and economic roles of business interests, particularly in regard to military regimes and the retreat of authoritarianism.

How corporations used mass media to teach Americans that capitalism was natural and patriotic, exposing the porous line between propaganda and public service.
 
Business As Usual reveals how American capitalism has been promoted in the most ephemeral of materials: public service announcements, pamphlets, educational films, and games—what Caroline Jack calls “sponsored economic education media.” These items, which were funded by corporations and trade groups who aimed to “sell America to Americans,” found their way into communities, classrooms, workplaces, and onto the airwaves, where they promoted ideals of “free enterprise” under the cloaks of public service and civic education. They offered an idealized vision of US industrial development as a source of patriotic optimism, framed business management imperatives as economic principles, and conflated the privileges granted to corporations by the law with foundational political rights held by individuals. This rhetoric remains dominant—a harbinger of the power of disinformation that so besets us today. Jack reveals the funding, production, and distribution that together entrenched a particular vision of corporate responsibility—and, in the process, shut out other hierarchies of value and common care.

The recent global economic downturn has affected nearly everyone in every corner of the globe. Its vast reach and lingering effects have made it difficult to pinpoint its exact cause, and while some economists point to the risks inherent in the modern financial system, others blame long-term imbalances in the world economy. Into this debate steps Paul Mattick, who, in Business as Usual, explains the global economic downturn in relation to the development of the world economy since World War II, but also as a fundamental example of the cycle of crisis and recovery that has characterized capitalism since the early nineteenth century.

Mattick explains that today’s recession is not the result of a singular financial event but instead is a manifestation of long-term processes within the world economy. Mattick argues that the economic downturn can best be understood within the context of business cycles, which are unavoidable in a free-market economy. He uses this explanation as a springboard for exploring the nature of our capitalist society and its prospects for the future.

Although Business as Usual engages with many economic theories, both mainstream and left-wing, Mattick’s accessible writing opens the subject up in order for non-specialists to understand the current economic climate not as the effect of a financial crisis, but as a manifestation of a truth about the social and economic system in which we live. As a result the book is ideal for anyone who wants to gain a succinct and jargon-free understanding of recent economic events, and, just as important, the overall dynamics of the capitalist system itself.

During the 1920s, the "black decade" of British steel, nearly everyone agreed that the industry's revival depended on replacing obsolete equipment and instituting modern technologies that would increase production and decrease costs. Despite consensus, these goals were not reached and, even after wartime and postwar reconstruction needs were met, the industry continued its steady decline. Steven Tolliday advances three hypotheses for this stagnation.

First, the problems of British steel, Tolliday suggests, were embedded in the structures of individual firms and of the industry as a whole—both unchanged since the prosperous years of the nineteenth century—and after World War I fractured by conflicting interests (share holders, managers, family members, bankers, creditors). Second, the two external institutions that might have enforced reorganization and modernization—the banking system and the government—were overcautious, had complex and contradictory goals, and lacked the management skills to exploit their potential financial leverage. Third, the many attempts at reform by banks and government collapsed because these establishments, like the industry itself, were constrained by traditions and antiquated structural rigidities.

This excellent example of a new direction in business history—analysis of a given industry by conveying the interaction of technology, markets, companies, financial institutions, and government—brings many important theoretical questions into focus and also contributes substantially to the scrutiny of specific problems, such as why the British economy appears to be in irrevocable decline.

    Central banks and stock exchanges are bombed. Suicide bombers ravage cinemas, nightclubs, and theaters. Planes crash into skyscrapers and government buildings. Multiple bombs explode on commuter trains. Thousands of people are killed and injured while millions are terrorized by these attacks.
    These scenarios could be part of a future Hollywood movie. Sadly, they are representative of previous terror attacks against industry and government interests worldwide. Moreover, they are harbingers of global terror threats.
    Industry constitutes a prime target of contemporary terrorism. This timely book analyzes the threats companies face due to terrorism, industry responses to these dangers, and terrorism’s effects on conducting business in the post-9/11 environment. Dean C. Alexander details the conventional and unconventional terror capabilities facing industry. He describes the activities of terrorists in the economic system and the ways they finance their operations.
    Alexander discusses how companies can reduce terrorist threats and that corporate security can minimize political violence. He outlines the dynamics of the public-private partnership against terrorism: government aiding industry, business supporting government, and tensions between the two. He also delineates terrorism’s effects—financial, physical, and emotional—on workers and employers. He highlights the negative financial and economic consequences of terrorism. He discusses the impact of terrorism on traditional business practices and concludes with an assessment of future trends.

In the nineteenth century, Woman's Exchanges formed a vast national network that created economic alternatives for financially vulnerable women in a world that permitted few respectable employment options. Many remain in business. 

Kathleen Waters Sander delves into the history of Woman's Exchanges and looks at the women who led the organizations—and those who used them to stave off poverty. One of the nation's oldest continuously operating voluntary movements, Exchanges like the Philadelphia Ladies' Depository and the Dorcas Society were fashionable, popular shops where women who had fallen on hard times could sustain themselves. By selling their handiwork on consignment, they not only earned money but avoided the stigma of seeking public employment. As Sander shows, Exchanges evolved into an important forum for entrepreneurial growth. They also provide an example of how women used the voluntary sector, which had so successfully served as a conduit for their political and social reforms, to advance opportunities for economic independence.

A great book about an even greater book is a rare event in publishing. Robert Darnton’s history of the Encyclopédie is such an occasion. The author explores some fascinating territory in the French genre of histoire du livre, and at the same time he tracks the diffusion of Enlightenment ideas. He is concerned with the form of the thought of the great philosophes as it materialized into books and with the way books were made and distributed in the business of publishing. This is cultural history on a broad scale, a history of the process of civilization.

In tracing the publishing story of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, Darnton uses new sources—the papers of eighteenth-century publishers—that allow him to respond firmly to a set of problems long vexing historians. He shows how the material basis of literature and the technology of its production affected the substance and diffusion of ideas. He fully explores the workings of the literary market place, including the roles of publishers, book dealers, traveling salesmen, and other intermediaries in cultural communication. How publishing functioned as a business, and how it fit into the political as well as the economic systems of prerevolutionary Europe are set forth. The making of books touched on this vast range of activities because books were products of artisanal labor, objects of economic exchange, vehicles of ideas, and elements in political and religious conflict.

The ways ideas traveled in early modern Europe, the level of penetration of Enlightenment ideas in the society of the Old Regime, and the connections between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution are brilliantly treated by Darnton. In doing so he unearths a double paradox. It was the upper orders in society rather than the industrial bourgeoisie or the lower classes that first shook off archaic beliefs and took up Enlightenment ideas. And the state, which initially had suppressed those ideas, ultimately came to favor them. Yet at this high point in the diffusion and legitimation of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution erupted, destroying the social and political order in which the Enlightenment had flourished.

Never again will the contours of the Enlightenment be drawn without reference to this work. Darnton has written an indispensable book for historians of modern Europe.

In this timely work, Scott Kennedy documents the rising influence of business, both Chinese and foreign, on national public policy in China.

China's shift to a market economy has made businesses more sensitive to their bottom line and has seen the passage of thousands of laws and regulations that directly affect firms' success. Companies have become involved in a tug of war with the government and with each other to gain national policy advantages, often setting the agenda, providing alternative options, and pressing for a favored outcome.

Kennedy's comparison of lobbying in the steel, consumer electronics, and software industries shows that although companies operate in a common political system, economic circumstances shape the nature and outcome of lobbying. Factors such as private or state ownership, size, industry concentration, and technological sophistication all affect industry activism.

Based on over 300 in-depth interviews with company executives, business association representatives, and government officials, this study identifies a wide range of national economic policies influenced by lobbying, including taxes, technical standards, and intellectual property rights. These findings have significant implications for how we think about Chinese politics and economics, as well as government-business relations in general.

Beyond the highly publicized heroics and foibles of players and teams, when the grandstands are empty and the scoreboards dark, there is a world of sport about which little is known by even the most ardent fan. It is the business world of sport; it is characterized by a thirst for power and money, and its players are just as active as those on the professional teams they oversee. In this collection, some of the best scholars in the field use examples from baseball, football, basketball, and hockey to illuminate the significant economic, legal, social, and historic aspects of the business of professional sports. 

Contributors: Dennis A. Ahlburg, Rob B. Beamish, Joan M. Chandler, James B. Dworkin, Lawrence M. Kahn, Charles P. Korr, John J. MacAloon, David Mills, Roger G. Noll, Steven A. Reiss, Gary R. Roberts, Stephen F. Ross, Peter D. Sherer, Leigh Steinberg, and David G. Voigt,

At the height of its power around 1800, the English East India Company controlled half of the world’s trade and deployed a vast network of political influencers at home and abroad. Yet the story of the Company’s beginnings in the early seventeenth century has remained largely untold. Rupali Mishra’s account of the East India Company’s formative years sheds new light on one of the most powerful corporations in the history of the world.

From its birth in 1600, the East India Company lay at the heart of English political and economic life. The Company’s fortunes were determined by the leading figures of the Stuart era, from the monarch and his privy counselors to an extended cast of eminent courtiers and powerful merchants. Drawing on a host of overlooked and underutilized sources, Mishra reconstructs the inner life of the Company, laying bare the era’s fierce struggles to define the difference between public and private interests and the use and abuse of power. Unlike traditional accounts, which portray the Company as a private entity that came to assume the powers of a state, Mishra’s history makes clear that, from its inception, the East India Company was embedded within—and inseparable from—the state.

A Business of State illuminates how the East India Company quickly came to inhabit such a unique role in England’s commercial and political ambitions. It also offers critical insights into the rise of the early modern English state and the expansion and development of its nascent empire.

A range of powerful forces -- increasing demand for wood, uncertain and decreasing supply, increasing environmental pressures, and growing markets for environmentally certified wood -- are changing the way the forest products industry conducts business. Forward-thinking firms have recognized the significance of these forces and are developing a new business model, one that will not only sustain revenues, but can ensure the long-term health of the forests upon which the industry depends.The Business of Sustainable Forestry integrates and analyzes a series of 21 case studies of industry leaders carried out by the Sustainable Forestry Working Group. The motivations of the pioneering firms studied are as varied as their characteristics, yet each has made significant progress. The authors of this book argue that the operations that have been most succeessful are those that have integrated sustainable forestry principles and practices into their overall corporate strategy. The book: describes the forces that are pushing the industry toward sustainability presents an overview of the new techniques and technologies that are making sustainable forestry more feasible than ever presents in clear, engaging prose company profiles that demonstrate both the promise of and the obstacles to sustainable forest management gives a clear-eyed look at practices such as certification and their capacity to transform the forest products market provides conclusions drawn from the cases by Stuart Hart of the University of North Carolina and Matt Arnold of the Management Institute for Environment and Business offers a succinct set of lessons learned The Business of Sustainable Forestry is the first book to present a composite snapshot of the business of sustainable forestry and the lessons learned by early adopters in form and language accessible to the general business reader. Forest and natural resource managers, forest products industry managers, and students and academics in schools of business and forestry will find the book a unique and valuable guide to an industry in transition.