Sound Business

China and Japan are in the sound business--they just don't realize it. Not the kind of sound business usually associated with prosperous Asian economies, but the Chinese characters they use by the billions every day. For centuries Chinese characters have served as a powerful symbol of the cultural divide between east and west, but all that is about to change. Sound Business: The Reality of Chinese Characters, written by MA in Japanese Studies and Chinese Philip Philipsen, presents a whole new picture of Chinese characters seen in world perspective. And this is a world that sound makes go around. Get a rare insight into the real function, usage, etymology and true origin of Chinese characters, and be prepared to lose your breath as you discover our astonishing shared heritage. Mixing past and present avant-garde Japanese, Chinese and western research, Sound Business: The Reality of Chinese Characters takes you on a journey that will forever change the way you look at Chinese characters. Join the revolution!

American newspapers have faced competition from new media for over ninety years. Today digital media challenge the printed word. In the 1920s, broadcast radio was the threatening upstart. At the time, newspaper publishers of all sizes turned threat into opportunity by establishing their own stations. Many, such as the Chicago Tribune's WGN, are still in operation. By 1940 newspapers owned 30 percent of America's radio stations. This new type of enterprise, the multimedia corporation, troubled those who feared its power to control the flow of news and information. In Sound Business, historian Michael Stamm traces how these corporations and their critics reshaped the ways Americans received the news. Stamm is attuned to a neglected aspect of U.S. media history: the role newspaper owners played in communications from the dawn of radio to the rise of television. Drawing on a wide array of primary sources, he recounts the controversies surrounding joint newspaper and radio operations. These companies capitalized on synergies between print and broadcast production. As their advertising revenue grew, so did concern over their concentrated influence. Federal policymakers, especially during the New Deal, responded to widespread concerns about the consequences of media consolidation by seeking to limit and even ban cross ownership. The debates between corporations, policymakers, and critics over how to regulate these new kinds of media businesses ultimately structured the channels of information distribution in the United States and determined who would control the institutions undergirding American society and politics. Sound Business is a timely examination of the connections between media ownership, content, and distribution, one that both expands our understanding of mid-twentieth-century America and offers lessons for the digital age.

Companies really need to think about their principles. They need to do this for themselves, as opposed to simply reproducing existing codes, simply taking principles off the proverbial shelf and applying these to their structures. There are a number of ways to do this. One is through open dialogue. You can also collaborate with all relevant stakeholders, ensuring that you come up with the best possible principles that can move your business forward. Whatever way you choose to approach this, know that the development of sound business principles is as important, if not more so, that even your business plan! These principles can also take on a number of forms. They can be high-level statements of principle, laying out for your company the roadmap to its advancement. Business principles can also be statements of policy, indicating how you intend to do business, more than what you intend to do with your business. Still, some of these are a combination of separate documents, ones that indicate policy, systems of management, implementation as well as monitoring procedures for your business!

The world is full of sound - most of it unwanted and unplanned - which can change our moods, our behaviour and our performance. This book explains clearly how to use this fact to great advantage, in terms of productivity and customer performance. In a few years, a company's sound will become as important as its logo and public image. Here is a practical guide to planning and managing sound for increased profit in all aspects of business.

This book presents a selection of articles with focus on the theoretical foundations of business ethics, and in particular on the philosophy of management and on human rights and business. This implies identifying and discussing conflicts as well as agreement with regard to the philosophical and other foundations of business and management. Despite the general interest in corporate social responsibility and business ethics, the contemporary discussion rarely touches upon the normative core and philosophical foundations of business. There is a need to discuss the theoretical basis of business ethics and of business and human rights. Even though the actions and activities of business may be discussed from a moral perspective, not least in the media, the judgments and opinions relating to business and management often lack deeper moral reflection and consistency. Partly for this reason, business ethicists are constantly challenged to provide such moral and philosophical foundations for business ethics and for business and human rights, and to communicate them in an understandable manner. Such a challenge is also of scientific kind. Positions and opinions in the academic field need to be substantiated by thorough moral and theoretical reflection to underpin normative approaches. Far too often, business ethicists may agree on matters, which they approach from different and sometimes irreconcilable philosophical standpoints, resulting in superficial agreement but deeper-lying disagreement. In other cases, it may be of high relevance to identify philosophical standpoints that despite conflicting fundamentals may arrive at conclusions acceptable to everyone.

This work on the history of tax law presents the papers delivered at the third Tax Law History Conference in 2006 organised by the Centre for Tax Law in the Law Faculty at Cambridge University. The papers deal with a range of topics, and though the breadth of topics is broad, it is not devoid of pattern. The majority of the papers deal with themes connected with continental Europe, law and empire, international law, and the problems of progression and the tax system. As a whole the papers, by leading tax scholars from all over the world, once again illustrate a wide variety and depth of learning on tax history, and highlight the important issues waiting to be investigated in this rapidly growing field of scholarship.