Intelligence
Essays

Suffrage is the right to vote through the democratic process. Contemporary readers typically believe that everyone who is an adult citizen in the United States has always had the right to vote.

The purpose of this report is to analyze the issue of sexual discrimination in the work place and we shall also mention an important case to highlight how sexual discrimination comes into practice in real life situations. This is an important issue which further stresses the need for fair hiring and promotion practices in the workplace.

Unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAV) have been in use for some 30 years and used for a variety of purposes. Most commonly, these aircraft are used for military or scientific reconnaissance missions, where data is gathered…

Rupert Smith, the Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (New York: Vintage Books, 2007)

Both articles and their extensive empirical and theoretical research have a wealth of insights and intelligence that brings e-commerce into a more realistic and pragmatic perspective. Starting with Exploring E-commerce benefits for businesses in a developing country (Molla, Heeks, 2007) that authors explain how they have interviewed 92 businesses in South Africa who have moved beyond the basic stage of ecommerce as defined by the 6-point e-commerce capability indicator cited in their article (Molla, Heeks, 2007). In citing this scale the authors contend that the much-hyped benefits of e-commerce surrounding operating efficiency gains including lower transaction costs and greater fluidity and flexibility of e-commerce are in fact not occurring in the emerging economy of South Africa. Instead, the authors state that the greatest gains are being made in the area of intra- and interorganizational communication and collaboration, clustered primarily in services industry as evidenced by their cited research (Molla, Heeks, 2007). This is certainly the case in Brazil where the continued growth of e-commerce has succeed while other nations have failed mainly due to the exceptional stability of the nations' banking system, strong laws and regulations to protect e-commerce and online commerce, and an infrastructure that makes automating supply chains more achievable than many other regions and nations of the world (Paulo, Dedrick, 2004). Brazil is also unique in that is government subsidizes new ventures and seeks out global technology partners, including Intel, for its e-commerce and infrastructure-dependent industries (Callaway, 2008). Juxtaposing the growth of Brazil is the stagnation of South Africa as is shown in the analysis, which implies e-commerce is better at breaking down the walls of organizations and getting them to work together more effectively than it is in driving top-line revenue from transactions., This consistent with the more pragmatic and practical studies of e-commerce adoption in emerging nations that show e-commerce system development and implementation will teach a business more about itself than it had never considered prior to the implementation (Alemayehu, Heeks, 2007). The process of creating an e-commerce strategy including the process and system integration, coordination of product and services catalogues, redefining and clarification of pricing, and the ability to define expediting processes for service and service recovery of negative customer events all force a business to grow faster than it had anticipated (Standing, Benson, 2000). Small businesses enter e-commerce thinking the big pay-off will be increased top-line revenue growth and greater transaction efficiencies (Molla, Heeks, 2007). Small businesses in commodity driven industries will also do this to specifically drive down the cost per transaction and pool purchasing power to gain an advantage in negotiating with suppliers (Salcedo, Henry, Rubio, 2003). All of these actual benefits are completely different than the much-hyped and promoted benefits of e-commerce being frictionless commerce throughout a supply chain, greater revenue growth at lower transaction costs, and ease and speed of generating customer loyalty, all contributing to skyrocketing profitability of an enterprise (Romano, 2009). All of these benefits accrue, in actuality, to oligopolistic firms who have the infrastructure, from a corporate IT staff to a well-known brand and the ability to selectively disintermediate their own supply chain to gain the much-hyped transaction cost efficiencies (Molla, Heeks, 2007). The greater the global market power of a company and its commanding position in an oligopoly, the more it can enforce its market-maker statue and drive change (Alemayehu, Heeks, 2007). Molla and Heeks (2007) deflate the hype of Transaction Cost Theory and its corollary of disintermediation by showing through their research that perfect competition doesn't exist in e-commerce globally and is especially problematic in emerging countries due to the lack of value chain integration and transparency. The authors also make an excellent point that the main catalysts or fuel of e-commerce growth in many nations is market research and mass customization (Molla, Heeks, 2007). There are myriad of examples of how e-commerce combined with mass customization has led to explosive, profitable growth on the part of companies with Dell not only reaching over $1B in revenues from online sales but also achieving double-digit inventory turns and extensive operational efficiencies at the same time (Luo, John, Du, 2005). The authors contend that for many emerging nations this however is not possible given the lack of trust and adoption of e-commerce, and the lack of alacrity and accuracy in complex supply chain relationships including a lack of clarity in communications and procurement performance (Molla, Heeks, 2007). Contrasting this however are the effects of a stabilized and trusted banking system in Brazil for example (Brazilian e-Commerce, 2005). The greater the trust levels in a given nation's financial system the higher the level of e-commerce adoption, even in highly collectivist cultures (Joia, Sanz, 2005). The authors continue with a triangulation of market performance, communications and transaction cost reduction, showing how e-commerce is more of a catalyst of organizational synchronization than a platform for selling more online (Molla, Heeks, 2007).

¶ … Career Development, Personnel Evaluation, and Training Programs

Since the construction of the first civil society, behavioral rules distinguishing what is acceptable and what is criminal have existed. Even though individuals typically have a concept of conventional moral behavior,…

Rousseau's Doctrine of Natural Rights vs. Liberal Political, Social, and Economic Theory

It is often said that a manager is what one does and a leader is who a person is (Underdown, 2010). There is a lot of truth to that statement as a manager often is given responsibility for ensuring the status quo while…

As predominately Arab nations throughout the Middle East continue to explore and exploit their region's vast reserves of petroleum, an enormous amount of wealth is being generated by those unaccustomed to handling the intricacies of capital gains, interest rates, and other financial devices utilized by capitalist-based economies. The religion of Islam has always been conflicted between the tenets of moderation espoused by the prophet Allah, and the concept of Sharia law espoused by the most conservatively devout Muslims, and today that divide is demonstrated by the rising popularity of so-called Islamic banking. The notion of Islamic banking is predicated on the fundamental constraints of sharia law, and "The Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA), the chief regulator for all authorized firms conducting business in or from the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), has drafted and issued a rulebook specific to Islamic business called the Islamic Financial Business module" which defines Islamic Financial Business as "any part of the financial business of an authorized person which is carried out in accordance with Shari'a.