The Modern Firm or City Builders

The Modern Firm: Organizational Design for Performance and Growth

Author: John Roberts

Business firms around the world are experimenting with new organizational designs, changing their formal architectures, their routines and processes, and their corporate cultures as they seek to improve their current performance and their growth prospects. In the process, they are changing the scope of their business operations, redrawing their organization charts, redefining the allocation of decision-making authority and responsibility, revamping the mechanisms for motivating and rewarding people, reconsidering which activities to conduct in-house and which to out-source, redesigning their information systems, and seeking to alter the shared beliefs, values and norms that their people hold. In this book, John Roberts argues that there are predictable, necessary relationships among these changes that will improve performance and growth. The organizations that are successful will establish patterns of fit among the elements of their organizational designs, their competitive strategies and the external environment in which they operate and will go about this in a holistic manner. The Modern Firm develops powerful conceptual frameworks for analyzing the interrelations between organizational design features, competitive strategy and the business environment. Written in a non-technical language, the book is nevertheless based on rigorous modeling and draws on numerous examples from the eighteenth century fur trading companies to such modern firms such as BP and Nokia. Finally, the book explores why these developments are happening now, pointing to the increase in global competition and changes in technology. Written by one of the world's leading economists and experts on businessstrategy and organization, The Modern Firm provides new insights into the changes going on in business today and will be of interest to academics, students and managers alike.

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City Builders: Property Development in New York and London, 1980-2000

Author: Susan S Fainstein

"An utterly unique book that offers new, powerful arguments about the interaction between governmental authority and property investment in the urban environment, the impact of globalization on urban economies, and the role of property markets in changing the built environment of cities."—Dennis R. Judd, coauthor of City Politics

"A fascinating and important story that challenges conventional, radical and post-modern theories of property development."—Michael Harloe, coauthor of City Class and Capital

"This is, more than ever, essential reading for any serious student of the contemporary city."—Peter Hall, author of Cities in Civilization

Author Biography: Susan S. Fainstein is professor of urban planning and policy development at Rutgers University. She is coauthor of Restructuring the City: The Political Economy of Urban Redevelopment and coeditor of The Tourist City and Readings in Planning Theory.

Table of Contents:

List of Illustrations and Tables

List of Abbreviations

Preface

1. Economic Restructuring and Redevelopment

2. The Development Industry and Urban Redevelopment

3. Markets, Decision-Makers, and the Real-Estate Cycle

4. Policy and Politics

5. Economic Development Planning Strategies

6. Public-Private Partnerships in Action: King's Cross and Times Square

7. Creatin New Centers: Spitalfields and Downtown Brooklyn

8. Creating a New Address I: Battery Park City

9. Creating a New Address II: Docklands

10. Real-Estate Development: Why Is It Special and What Is Its Impact?

11. Development Policy for the Inner City

Appendix: Population and Economy of London and New York

Notes

Bibliography

Index