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Essays

Most historians today would agree that Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964) has not "faded away," but remains a source of ongoing research and scholarly investigation concerning his career and the decisions that ultimately…

This paper is about "global context." Most of the paper discusses the concepts of "the world is flat" and spiking and clustering. These ideas are discussed with respect to trends in globalization driven by the world's leading urban areas, advances in technology and the increasing linkages between different parts of the world.

¶ … Remediation technologies for Arsenic Contamination at Deloro Mine, Eastern Ontario

¶ … transnational-nature of the 18th Street gang. Strictly speaking, for a gang to be classified as transnational, the gang has to have its presence in more than one country. This essay will explore the reasons due to…

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).

Who was Alfred Schutz, and why was his work on social theory and phenomenology so important? This is an important question that must be answered here, and will be answered, but there are other issues that must be…

Global Marketing - How Western and Asian Cultural and Marketing Values Differ

North Korean Ambassador Jong Thae Hwa enumerated the crimes Japan committed against the Korean people during the colonization of the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1942 (Kyodo 2000).

The population of the current ski market is estimated at 65-70 million worldwide, totaling 7 billion in U.S. dollars (Skiing in China today, 2006, Beijing Ski Club). These figures encompass everyone from occasional and…

Dr. June Soomer, Adviser, Strategic Policy and Planning Department, Eastern Caribbean Central Bank, defines regional integration as "the unification of nation states into a larger whole.