International business and Globalisation

Globalisation is the process by which the world is becoming increasingly interconnected as a result of massively increased trade and cultural exchange. Globalisation has increased the production of goods and services. Big companies have now turned into multinationals with productions facilities and subsidiaries all around the world. Globalisation has resulted in increased international trade giving birth to multinationals which operate in more than one country, with some even setting up production facilities in different parts of the world, mainly where they can find relaxed laws and cheap labour.

There are though, some problems with globalisation. The major problem is that because of increased globalisation, world economies have become interconnected. This is dangerous because if one major economy faces and economic meltdown, it will affect countries around the world. Trade agreements have been signed to mainly benefit Western countries and this is causing the rich to get richer and poor to get poorer.

Organisational strategy

Strategy is defined as "the long term direction of an organisation" Johnson and Scholes (2011). There are three different levels of strategy; corporate, business and operational level. The corporate level defines the overall scope of the organisation. The business level looks at how individuals business units compete in their particular market and the operational level looks at how organisations actually deliver in terms of resources, people, and processes. SWOT analysis is way of analysing an organisations position in the market and this helps the organisations to come up with a strategy for the future. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Strengths and weaknesses will look at the organisation itself whereas the opportunities and threats are of the external environment. Ansoff matrix is a tool used by a business to determine its product and market growth strategy. It suggests that growth of a business relies on whether the business markets new or existing products in new or exiting markets.

Oragnisational context

The term organisational context refers to the organisations environment. There are 3 layers of environment, internal, competitive and external. Some of the aspects of the internal environment are the organisations structure, objectives and culture. To measure the competitive or micro environment there are some tools. Porters 5 forces helps us analyse the micro environment.

This tools helps us analyse the competition and the industry as a whole. All the 5 forces determine the profitability of an industry. To measure the external environment a tool called PESTLE is used. It stands for political, economical, sociocultural, technological, legal and environmental factors. This tool is used because organisations are influenced by external factors and to survive and grown the organisations must respond to any changes in the external environment. PESTLE allows organisations to look at the most influential external environmental factors and this allows businesses to predict what the future of their industry will be so they can plan accordingly. Here is an example of a PESTLE analysis

Management theories

Management is the process of co-ordinating people and other resources to achieve the goals of an organisation. There are many management theories but the most popular ones are from Frederick Winslow Taylor, Henri Fayol, Henry Ford and Elton Mayo with his Hawthorne effect. Taylor's theory is know an scientific management. According to Taylor there would be an increased in productivity if workers worked like machines. His theory is based on efficiency and productivity. His theory suggests that the best way of doing a job should be defined and only the right person should undertake this task, thus eliminating time wastage. He also suggested that motivation is purely on financial incentives and the more the reward if for doing a job, more effort will be put into the job by the worker. Fayol on the other hand suggested that division of labour should be achieved as this will give more authority and responsibility to the workers hence improving their motivation and productivity. Also according to his theory management should be centralised, which means that all decision making should rest with the higher management as this will increase efficiency. Henry Ford is famous for creating the moving assembly line which is nowadays use by almost all manufacturing companies around the world. He is also the founder of the Ford Motor Company. The ver first car produced by this company was the Ford Model - T which was also the very first mass produced car. Here's a short video on Ford, and the Model T car. Fordism, named after Henry Ford, is a notion of a modern economic and social system based on an industrialized and standardized form of mass production for maximum efficiency

Organisational structure

Organisational structure is the arrangement of authority, communication, rights and duties in an organsation. It determines how the roles and responsibilities are assigned, coordinated and controlled. 

Naturally work is divided in an organisation. This is called the division of labour. It is the separation of work processes into a number of tasks and each task is assigned to a group or an individual. This gives birth to specialization, through which individuals or groups can excel at doing one thing at a time. This happens because they usually do one task over and over again. This may also result in boredom and lack of creativity from the workers side as the task might be repetitive. 

Businesses also have to decide where the decision making power resides in the heiracrchy of the organizational structure. Some organisations have a centralised structure which keeps the decision making power at the top of the hierarchy. Then there's decentralised structure where decision making is spread out to include more junior level employees.  

Increase in university demand

It has been noted that the demand for universities is on the rise. The article talks about how universities are dealing with the increasing demand and how the improving educational standards in England is driving up demand for universities. A report from the universities minister has been released at an attempt to update another report which had been released over 50 years ago, and according to it only 5% of young people went to universities. The report also considers what the demand will be after 20 years time and it suggests that a need to increase in places by 92,000 will be needed by England based universities. When the original Robbins reports was published in 1963, 216.000 students were in enrolled in higher education.

The full article can be read here : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-24579816

Legal contracts

A contract is an agreement between two parties which is enforceable by law. The offeror, also known as the seller, is the person who is making the offer and the offeree is the person to whom the offer is being made to. In order to form a contract, both parties should accept the offer and once the offer is accepted, offeror and offeree are in a legal binding. Also after purchasing a good or service, we enter into a legal agreement with the offeror. For example, a dry cleaning service. The dry cleaning service provider will have laid out terms and conditions for the servicing that it is providing. There some sort of contract involved in everything we do or buy and it is an essential part of businesses as well.