Business On Trial

Annotation Are jury verdicts in business trials influenced less by a corporation's negligence than by sympathy for the plaintiffs, prejudice against business, and a belief in the corporation's "deep pockets"? Many members of the public and corporate executives believe that this is so, and they feel that the jury's decision making presents serious problems for American business competitiveness and its justice system. This book -- the first to provide a systematic account of how juries make decisions in typical business cases -- shows that these assumptions are false or exaggerated.Drawing on interviews with civil jurors, experiments with mock jurors, and public opinion polling, Valerie P. Hans explores how jurors determine whether businesses should be held responsible for an injury. She finds that many civil jurors, rather than being overly sympathetic to plaintiffs who bring civil lawsuits, are actually hostile to them, that there are only occasional instances of anti-business prejudice, and that there is no evidence of the deep-pockets hypothesis. Hans concludes that jurors do treat businesses differently than individuals, but this is because the public has higher expectations of corporations and more rigorous standards for their conduct.

In 1901, Cadbury learned that its cocoa beans purchased from Portuguese-owned plantations on the island of Sao Tome off West Africa were produced by slave labor.

Media coverage at the time of the Scopes trial was far from accurate. This book sets the record straight, revealing how inaccuracies distorted the view of the Christian faith.

How do we know which social and economic policies work, which should be continued, and which should be changed? Jim Manzi argues that throughout history, various methods have been attempted -- except for controlled experimentation. Experiments provide the feedback loop that allows us, in certain limited ways, to identify error in our beliefs as a first step to correcting them. Over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, scientists invented a methodology for executing controlled experiments to evaluate certain kinds of proposed social interventions. This technique goes by many names in different contexts (randomized control trials, randomized field experiments, clinical trials, etc.). Over the past ten to twenty years this has been increasingly deployed in a wide variety of contexts, but it remains the red-haired step child of modern social science. This is starting to change, and this change should be encouraged and accelerated, even though the staggering complexity of human society creates severe limits to what social science could be realistically expected to achieve. Randomized trials have shown, for example, that work requirements for welfare recipients have succeeded like nothing else in encouraging employment, that charter school vouchers have been successful in increasing educational attainment for underprivileged children, and that community policing has worked to reduce crime, but also that programs like Head Start and Job Corps, which might be politically attractive, fail to attain their intended objectives. Business leaders can also use experiments to test decisions in a controlled, low-risk environment before investing precious resources in large-scale changes -- the philosophy behind Manzi's own successful software company. In a powerful and masterfully-argued book, Manzi shows us how the methods of science can be applied to social and economic policy in order to ensure progress and prosperity.

A practical handbook packed with expert advice on architectural considerations for designing solutions using SAP BTP to drive digital innovation Purchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free eBook in the PDF format Key FeaturesGuide your customers with proven architectural strategies and considerations on SAP BTPTackle challenges in building process and data integration across complex and hybrid landscapesDiscover SAP BTP services, including visualizations, practical business scenarios, and moreBook Description SAP BTP is the foundation of SAP's intelligent and sustainable enterprise vision for its customers. It's efficient, agile, and an enabler of innovation. It's technically robust, yet its superpower is its business centricity. If you're involved in building IT and business strategies, it's essential to familiarize yourself with SAP BTP to see the big picture for digitalization with SAP solutions. Similarly, if you have design responsibilities for enterprise solutions, learning SAP BTP is crucial to produce effective and complete architecture designs. This book teaches you about SAP BTP in five parts. First, you'll see how SAP BTP is positioned in the intelligent enterprise. In the second part, you'll learn the foundational elements of SAP BTP and find out how it operates. The next part covers integration architecture guidelines, integration strategy considerations, and integration styles with SAP's integration technologies. Later, you'll learn how to use application development capabilities to extend enterprise solutions for innovation and agility. This part also includes digital experience and process automation capabilities. The last part covers how SAP BTP can facilitate data-to-value use cases to produce actionable business insights. By the end of this SAP book, you'll be able to architect solutions using SAP BTP to deliver high business value. What you will learnExplore value propositions and business processes enabled by SAP's Intelligent and Sustainable EnterpriseUnderstand SAP BTP's foundational elements, such as commercial and account modelsDiscover services that can be part of solution designs to fulfill non-functional requirementsGet to grips with integration and extensibility services for building robust solutionsUnderstand what SAP BTP offers for digital experience and process automationExplore data-to-value services that can help manage data and build analytics use casesWho this book is for This SAP guide is for technical architects, solutions architects, and enterprise architects working with SAP solutions to drive digital transformation and innovation with SAP BTP. Some IT background and an understanding of basic cloud concepts is assumed. Working knowledge of the SAP ecosystem will also be beneficial.

In an era of big data and data analytics, how can managers make decisions based on almost unlimited information, not to mention hiring and retaining individuals with the required data analytics skills? The new fourth edition of Essentials of Business Research Methods explains research methods and analytical techniques for individuals who aren't data scientists. The authors offer a straightforward, hands-on approach to the vital managerial process of gathering and using data to make relevant and timely business decisions. They include critical topics, such as the increasing role of online research, ethical issues, privacy matters, data analytics, customer relationship management, how to conduct information-gathering activities more effectively in a rapidly changing business environment, and more. This is also the only text that includes a chapter on qualitative data analysis, and the coverage of quantitative data analysis is more extensive as well as much easier to understand than in other texts. A realistic continuing case used throughout the book, applied research examples, and ethical dilemma mini cases enable upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate students to see how business research information is used in the real world. This comprehensive textbook is supported by a range of online resources, including instructors’ manuals, PowerPoint slides, and test banks.