Marking Mix Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Marking Mix - Essay Example The main challenges are limited distribution facilities and narrow market. This, product diversification has been used to dispose of by-products and to capitalize on a company's research-and-development efforts. In fact, the diversification of a product line has been a basic way of achieving long-term market survival. If one considers the rapid technological advances that are being made and the new products being developed, then diversification does not become an incidental or peripheral activity, but a pivotal activity worthy of vigorous and sustained pursuit. The Temperature Sensors are safe for users, so any ethical or social problems are exist. If the company starts to sell this product in other regions, it should ensure that Temperature Sensors are suitable for different temperature regimes and can be used in countries with severe weather conditions. Also, it is important to product Temperature Sensors with scales and marks on different languages so target population can easily read and understand the product information. Gray leaf spot resistant is a new chemical product aimed to protect vegetation from gray leaf spot disease. This is an improvement of existing products. In this case, attempts to diversify product lines create a risk, for dealer and customer reaction is always uncertain. To some extent, the risk may be reduced through the use of marketing intelligence, as is the case when products that enjoy good differential advantages are discovered. A product- program starts with screening and then consideration of what is to be done to bring a product to the market. Firms may follow a check list that covers various aspects of product introduction, based on a study of trade practices. Product diversification may result in either trading up or trading down. In trading up, the manufacturer adds related items to his line that will sell for an increase in price, whereas trading down is the reverse process. There are two objectives involved in a decision to increase the number of variations in price a nd quality: to gain sales by catering to a new segment of the market, and to gain sales in the existing market by trading up or down (Dobson and Starkey 2004). The main ethical and social concerns are safety of chemicals and effectiveness of the product, environmental and legal compliance. If the company wants to sell this product overseas, it is important to take into account legal regulations and standards applied to chemical products and pesticides in a foreign country. The company should test the product in different environment and ensure it is safe enough for different geographical locations and weather conditions. As markets become more heterogeneous, and diverse products are developed to satisfy them, manufacturing efficiency will decline (Paley, 2006). Ramadan Iftar Box 2 is a revision of the existing product line popular in Lebanon. This product is a reaction to competitor's moves and consist of adjustments of current product lines, or they may involve the development of new products. The former are mainly defensive moves and the latter mainly offensive (Paley, 2006). Most companies use the defensive strategies to improve the profitability of existing lines and develop new products to meet competitors' lines. However, the

Corporate Frauds and Absence of Ethical Demeanor Essay

Corporate Frauds and Absence of Ethical Demeanor - Essay Example As per Trevino and Weaver (2003), ethical culture is one which rouses ethical demeanor. Ethical leadership involves proper demeanor through interpersonal relationships and personal actions and the advocating such demeanors to subordinates, mainly through two-way communication, decision-making and reinforcement As per Martin and Cullen (2006), ethical climate in an organization refers to normative systems of organizational work climate mirroring the organization’s policies, procedures, and practices with moral outcomes. As per Victor and Cullen (1988), ethical work climate refers to the organizational procedures and practices that direct the decision-making of organization and the systematic outcomes to ethical dilemmas. The ethical climate is one of the main ingredients of the culture of an organization. Ethical climate plays a dominant role when fraud is observed in an organization. As per Shin (2012), CEOs’ ethical demeanor is directly associated with employeesâ€℠¢ overall view of the ethical atmosphere of the organization (Soltani, 2014, p.254). Enron on October 16, 2001, published figures that exposed conspicuous accounting malpractices. One of the questionable accounting practices followed by the Enron was that is improper accounting of a note receivable from Enron’s equity partners in different limited partnerships. WorldCom also indulged in one of the largest corporate accounting scandals in the US which were projected at $14 billion as of March 2004. SEC alleged that WorldCom purportedly exaggerated its† revenue before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA)† in 2001 and in 2002 (SEC Annual Report 2002). HealthSouth Corporation of USA ordered the accounting personnel’ of the company to inflate the revenue to match the Wall Street analyst’ projections (Soltani, 2014, p.262).

Abortion Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words - 6

Abortion - Essay Example In western societies, legalization on abortion has not been found to be a foolproof solution, causing circumstantial segregations based on vested interests or dynamics of power. Violent protests and insurgencies by activitist groups have not been able to restore social harmony and peace. The proponents of abortion have always equated abortion to a social evil, but the roots of the issue is deeply ramified across all disciplines of sociological, political, moral, religious and most importantly, humanistic and psychological value and belief systems (Dillon, 2009). In this discourse, the topic of abortion will be critically analyzed in the light of sociological theories mainly, such as, the Social Conflict Theory, Symbolic Interactional Theory and Structural Functionalism. The best-fit approach and the emergent thoughts in the light of modernization will be deliberated using a secondary case-study analysis to enlighten on the way forward for such an eruptive social issue. The debate on the issue of abortion has mostly to deal with the problems of inequality and behavioral choices on the part of the women who undergo the peril. Traditionally, there are two major observations to be noted in this case; firstly, no one likes it and many people seem to have clouted thoughts about it and secondly, despite its historic incidence in the society from time immemorial, abortion is like poverty and serious illness. Society abhors the fact but is not open about it too. There is always a continuing debate on coming to terms with the law on the other hand. With regard to the two emergent points of view, fetus and the female, the theoretical constructs need to be analyzed further in details (Nagan, 1972). Marxist theories are predominantly economic and deal with the external environment. Marxism community-manifesto supports a pro-abortion heritage. Conferring the social responsibility onto the mother, her opinion about keeping the baby or not has more to do

The Food (Grocery) Industry Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words - 11

The Food (Grocery) Industry - Essay Example From this paper it is clear that there is a wide spread economic recession that necessitates study of external factors affecting businesses as many of them are closing down due to this. As a management consultant, I will help the United Kingdom’s grocery industry to asses its current competitiveness and its macro environmental position so as to be able to assist in making decision about the possible strategies to be applied in future A lot of businesses are venturing in UK grocery industry, in the year 2001, the number of groceries was very high and their operative average value was estimated to be Around 103.4 billion pounds. The food industry has become the core business venture of many supermarkets and expenditure on food stuff in the UK; this growth has been constant since 1990. Analysts have ascertained that the food industry could be the only business that is recessive proof. None the less, the non food articles are responsible for the increasing share.According to the s tudy the supermarket especially the grocery industry is led by large supermarkets and groceries namely ASDA, Safeway, Tesco and Sainsbury. Waitrose is one of the leading groceries in the United Kingdom. It has shown considerable growth despite the economic recession that been affecting the industry since the year 2001. The industry has been doing very fine with Waitrose operating 137 stores, Tesco operates 146 stores, ASDA operates over 100 stores over UK and the trend is the same for other companies including Safeway and others. The PPG has made it very difficult to access out of town permission for planning. This has actually jeopardised the strategies by some of the businesses which wanted to open new food and home super-centres.

Activity Based Costing (ABC) Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Activity Based Costing (ABC) - Assignment Example Historically, ABC started to become popular as an alternative approach to traditional cost accounting about three decades ago, where the latter has become increasingly proving its irrelevance (Emblemsvag, 2010). The increasing automation of production as compared to being labor-intensive, the multiple product lines compared to small number of products being produced, and the increasing overhead cost of companies are factors which are said to have contributed to the popularity of ABC (Emblemsvag, 2010). ABC is said to have addressed some important issues which traditional cost accounting may have left hanging when it comes to question of reason or logic in cost allocation. Comparing the two methods of allocating cost, Emblemsvag (2010) highlighted three salient points of ABC: 1. ABC assumes cost objects consume activities whereas traditional cost accounting assumes cost objects consume resources, 2. ABC uses drivers at various levels (hence consumption, and therefore cost varies at all levels), while traditional cost accounting usually employs volume related allocation as bases for costs, and 3. ABC is process oriented, while traditional cost accounting is process oriented. Higher productivity as a desired goal or objective, therefore, is better achieved using activity based costing than traditional cost accounting. ... Such opportunities may not be readily available in a traditional cost accounting system, making ABC the wiser choice for productivity managers. Therefore, ABC is a tool that has proven to be a valuable tool for efficiency and productivity performance, and probably an indispensable method of cost allocation and cost accounting for modern organisations. Many more typical benefits of ABC have been cited (Value Based Management, 2011), and among them are: Ability to identify the most and least profitable customers, products, and channels, Ability to easily identify the root causes of poor financial performance, Ability to track costs of activities and work processes, Equip managers with cost intelligence to better drive improvements, Meet important marketing objectives, such as determination of a better marketing mix, enhancement of bargaining power with customers, and achieve better positioning of products in the market From the above premises it can be gleaned that ABC offers the bette r solution for any problem arising from overhead cost allocation. Definitely, ABC is an improvement of what traditional cost accounting aims to address, i.e., allocation of cost to where it matters most, keep costs down, and contribute to rising profit levels for the company through increased efficiency and productivity. But is ABC really perfect? Has it become the eureka of overhead allocation, where a lasting solution has been found to last a lifetime? Is there a downside, a lowlight, anything that ABC would not be able to achieve? Is it the perfect cure? There are some weaknesses when ABC is implemented by organisations. But such weaknesses or limitations are far

Membership and retention Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Membership and retention - Essay Example The study revealed that there is a disparity between knowledge about basic rights under these union-based laws and that most employees do not understand their legal rights or their rights on termination and dismissal (Omar, Chan & Joned, 2009). At industries in which union membership is already present, this could have much to do with why unions are voted out and why union membership continues to decline. In order to strengthen union membership, in-house literature should be produced by union leadership that defines these rights, in a language that is easily understood by a wide variety of educated and non-educated demographics. By providing this information, those currently in unions would understand how the union actually represents their interests and be less apt to demand union exit from the industrial environment. â€Å"Once unionization occurs, the union’s ability to foster commitment from members and to remain as their bargaining agent depends on how well the union succeeds in providing services that its members want† (Mathis & Jackson, 2005, p.544). It is also possible to improve union membership by auditing the current collective bargaining representatives that handle negotiations for employees. The complex dynamics of collective bargaining requires individuals with psychological knowledge, management training, legal understanding, and conflict resolution skills. If the union is not being represented by competent and qualified individuals, the employees’ needs will likely not be addressed competently and therefore union membership will decline due to bargaining inadequacy. These audits can be conducted by the unions themselves, the corporate management teams, employee assessment teams, or even paid independent auditing contactors specializing in union knowledge and bargaining norms. By illustrating that there is a measurement system in place to gauge competency, and promoting these efforts effectively, more union membership

The Native Family Versus the Dominant Culture Essay Example for Free

The Native Family Versus the Dominant Culture Essay The current interest in what has come to be called multicultural literature has focused critical attention on defining its most salient characteristic: authoring a text which appeals to at least two different cultural codes. (Wiget 258) Louise Erdrich says shes an emissary of the between-world. (Bacon) I have one foot on tribal lands and one foot in middle-class life. Her stories unfold where native family and dominant culture clash yet rarely blend, a kaleidoscope of uneasy pieces. The reader becomes the mediator, an observer on the edges as two cultural codes (Wiget 258) collide. She creates dyads: shards of interaction as identities reflect patterns from both cultures. Born in 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota, Louise Erdrich grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota. Her heritage includes a French-Ojibwe mother and a German father. With encouragement from her father, she learned to write stories and read William Shakespeares plays (Giles 44). Her parents taught at the Bureau of Indian Affairs School while her grandparents lived on Turtle Mountain Reservation nearby. She did not study the Ojibwe language or culture until she moved to New Hampshire with her husband, Michael Dorris. She had taking an anthropology class taught by Dorris at Dartmouth, which stimulated her interest in Native American storytelling. Feeling estranged from her family and heritage after moving away, she decided to learn more about the High Plains setting of her stories. (Habich) During her lifetime, Erdrich probably experienced racism or prejudice because of segregation laws in the fifties. A member of the first coeducational class at Dartmouth in l972, she earned an MA in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University. (Habich) She worked at a variety of jobs: life guarding, waitressing, teaching poetry in prisons, weighing trucks on the interstate and hoeing sugar beets. Erdrich found urban life different from reservation life when she became an editor for the Circle, a Boston Indian Council  newspaper. She raised several children, some adopted, which provided insight and an understanding of human experience from yet another point of view. Louise Erdrich reveals the Native American lifestyle and collects truths common to all races in her books of poetry, Jacklight and Baptism of Desire, and novels, The Beet Queen, Tracks, Love Medicine, and The Bingo Palace. She commented in a 1991 Writers Digest interview: The people in our families made everything into a story. They love to tell a good story. People sit and the stories start coming, one after another. You just sort of grab the tail of the last persons story: it reminds you of something and you keep going on. I suppose that when you grow up constantly hearing the stories rise, break and fall, it gets into you somehow. (Giles 43) Family for Native Americans means living as a tribe where all adults share some responsibility for socializing the children. The extended kinship system connects an individual to all members of the society, either by descent or marriage, or through formal religious or social affiliations. (Encyc of No Amer Indians) In American Horse, Erdrich combines pieces seeking configuration. Erdrichs characters are met the way people in real life are met: you meet them and then you start knowing who their family is and what their background is. (Huey) Set on the North Dakota Indian reservation, Erdrich creates dyads of conflict where characters interface. A mirroring polarity also occurs between two feminine worlds in American Horse. Albertine exists as the mother living in hiding and fear that the authorities will take her son, Buddy. The social worker, Vicki Koob, approaches with clouded notions of what is best for him. In all likelihood, she never has experienced motherhood. Each relates from her culture of inner core values and contradictions. Through Buddy, Erdrich reveals a mother-son dyad. He is the product of the man she had loved and let go. (American Horse l96) Erdrich uses visual imagery throughout the story to reflect what is perceived and what is real. Buddy had been knocked awake out of hiding in a washing machine while herds of policemen with dogs searched through a large building with many tiny rooms. . . .Tss, his mother mumbled, half awake, Wasnt nothing. But Buddy sat up after her breathing went deep again, and he watched. There was something coming and he knew it. (American Horse 196) The reader has sound and visual cues to determine Albertines condition. Is she sleeping or in a stupor? Later the social worker alludes to Albertine as an alcoholic. [But notice that the child only speaks of the sweet scent of powder on his mother, not of alcohol] Buddy is sitting on the edge along with the reader. When Erdrich changed the Buddy character to Redford for a chapter in The Bingo Palace, she included the words that hes been knocked out of a dream where he was hiding in a washing machine. (Bingo Palace 171) providing more insight into how he gained his surrealistic visions. Buddy has a picture in his mind: It was a large thing made of metal with many barbed hooks, points, and drag chains on it, something like a giant potato peeler that rolled out of the sky, scraping clouds down with it and jabbing or crushing everything that lay in its path on the ground. (American Horse 197) In Bingo Palace, it becomes, something like Grandma Zeldas potato peeler providing a concrete connection to Buddys apprehension. Buddys vision reveals that hell be peeled away from his home. Buddys sexual identity also is awakening. He learns about women through Albertine with visual and tactile clues. The confliction further increases since he has created their situation, even though he realizes his importance  in her life. he felt like hugging her so hard and in such a special way that she would say to him, Lets get married. there were also times he closed his eyes and wished that she would die, only a few times, but still it haunted him that his wish might come true. (American Horse 197) The narrative sets up for the dominant white cultures power play, represented by the white social worker, Miss Vicki Koob, two police officers, a tribal officer named Harmony and a state officer, Brackett who have legal papers to take Buddy. They show no respect to Albertine, her maternal or civil rights. The dyad of two women has different visions for Buddy and of human life. One woman will fight for his life; the other becomes more concerned about her hair and sexual excitement with a co-worker. She treats Buddy like a used car: I want to find that boy and salvage him, Vicki Koob explained to Officer Bracket as they walked into the house. Look at his family life the old man crazy as a bedbug, the mother intoxicated somewhere. (American Horse 201) [Notice how she assumes that she can salvage him or that he needs salvaging. She just assumes that she can embrace and hold him and it will be better than the embrace of his mother.] Not one thing escaped Vicki Koobs trained and cataloguing gaze. (Indian Horse 202) Vicki, in her focus on details, misses the family productivity seen in quilts made from salvaged wool coats. She sees only the television sets in various states of repair, and the minimal food in the refrigerator. Never reacting with the compassion of a woman nor a mother, her perception has limited vision. Harmony vacillates in his identity as Indian and member of the white mans world as peace officer. Harmony cannot achieve his own name. Nor is it to be expected that the identity eventually achieved will be associated with  any recognizable single culture. (Caws 372) As a tribal officer who could be counted on to help out the State Patrol, Harmony thought he always had to explain about Indians or get twice as tough to show he did not favor them. (Indian Horse 199) With the battle lines set, Uncle Lawrence comes eye to eye with Miss Koob. The eye bulged impossibly wider in outrage when he saw the police car. But the eyes of the two officers and Miss Vicki Koob were wide open too. (Indian Horse 199) Lawrences vision extends beyond all of them. He must appear crazy to survive even though he knows they will take him away. Erdrich inserts a bit of comic relief and develops Lawrence as a trickster. Its impossible to write about Native life without humor thats how people maintain sanity. (Bacon) Uncle Lawrence wore a thick white corset laced up the front with a striped sneakers lace. His glass eye and his set of dentures were still out for the night so his face puckered here and there, around its absences and scars, like a damaged but fierce little cake. (Indian Horse 199) In the final conflict between Albertine and Harmony, he shows a dreamy little smile of welcome. Albertine appeals to ancestral wisdom, her fathers power and grace: [her father] American horse took the butterfly, a black and yellow one, and rubbed it on Albertines collar bone and chest and arms until the color and powder of it were blinded into her skin. For grace, he said. (204) She removes her belt to defend herself, swinging the turquoise butterfly that  protects from negative energy. A Native American symbol of power, it represents life itself. A personal fetish was usually a crude representation of an object seen in a dream, either by the wearer or by someone who transferred it to him, together with the powers or benefits accruing from the dream (Callahan). She flings her final vestiges of power: Her fathers hand was on her chest and shoulders lightening her wonderfully. Then on wings of her fathers hands, on dead butterfly wings, Albertine lifted into the air and flew toward the others. (American Horse 205) Albertine expects to be shot but Harmony only hits her on the head and leaves her behind. To him she is trouble and not worth taking. The last paragraph sets the scene for the helpless Native American, forced to assimilate into the dominant white culture. Albertine is knocked out on the ground. Miss Koob gives Buddy a candy bar while he rides in the back seat of the police car. Then Buddy reflects: There was no blood on Albertine, but Buddy tasted blood now at the sight of her, for he bit down hard and cut his own lip. He ate the chocolate, every bit of it, tasting his mothers blood. And when he had the chocolate down inside him and all licked off his hands, he opened his mouth to say thank you to the women, as his mother had taught him. But instead of a thank you coming out he was astonished to hear a great rattling scream, and them another, rip out of him like pieces of his own body and whirl onto the sharp things all around him. (American Horse 206) Does Buddy taste the blood of his fallen ancestors from years of domination? Will Albertine rise again to find him? Erdrich leaves the final judgments to the reader in the hopes the story does not play out as it always has before. [Use hanging indents for the Works Cited page see example below] Works Cited Bacon, Katie, An Emissary of the Between World. A Conversation with Louise Erdrich, Atlantic Unbound, January 17, 2001www.theatlantic.com/cgibin/send.cgi?page+http%3A/ . Callahan, Kevin, An Introduction to Ojibway Culture and History http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/5579/ojibwa.html. Caws, Peter. Identity: Cultural, Transcultural and Multicultural. Multiculturalism. A Critical Reader. David Theo Goldberg,Ed. Malden, Massachusetts:Blackwell Publishers. 1994 371-386. Childrearing. Encyclopedia of North American Indians http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/naind/html/na_007000_childrearing.htm. Erdrich, Louise. American Horse. Stories from the Promised Land A multicultural anthology of American fiction, Eds. Wesley Brown and Amy Ling. New York: Persea Books, 1991. 196-296. Erdrich, Louise. The Bingo Palace. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. Giles, James R. and Wanda (ed). The Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Research, Incorporated, 1995. Habich, John. Louise Erdrich: 2001 Artist of the Year Star Tribune December 30, 2001. About Louise Erdrich. http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/erdrich/about.htm. Huey, Michael, Two Native American Voices: Interview with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris. Christian Science Monitor, March 02, 1989. http://www.csmonitor.com/cgi-bin/getasciiarchive?tape/89/ulouise. Owens, Louis. Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Spillman, Robert. The Creative Instinct. The Salon Interview. (9 July 1997). Wiget, Andrew. Identity, Voice, and Authority: Artist-Audience Relations in Native American Literature. World Literature Today. Volume: 66. Issue: 2.1992, 258.