Opis produktu

A contemporary business enterprise (interchangeably enterprise, firm) is a subject of research and studies carried out by economists, historians, sociologists, psychologists, lawyers, to mention only the few specializations representing a large number of scientific disciplines that explore the complex nature of a business enterprise. Simultaneously, the knowledge of enterprise has been constantly growing due to the valuable contribution of managers and other business practitioners, who are willing to share their experience with all those that are interested in phenomenon of a business enterprise. On one hand, it undoubtedly increases the common knowledge on an enterprise; on the other hand, the variety of research assumptions, goals of the studies, empirical tools, and interpretations make this knowledge somehow inconsistent, lacking a coherent framework that would leverage its cognitive and practical usefulness. Such a framework is extremely difficult to set out, in fact, it does not exist at present, and it seems hardly to be ever introduced. Nevertheless, the attempts to integrate a scattering knowledge of a business enterprise, especially in the absence of one, widely recognized theory of the firm, are frequently met in literature and business practice, Those attempts confirm the real need to develop an integrated approach to the firm, in both design and implementation.

The need for approaches that integrate the growing knowledge of a business enterprise underlies the origin of this book and determines its twofold goal: to analyze essentials of a business enterprise (the firm) developing an interdisciplinary-based approach, and to examine integrating usefulness of that approach, while applied to basic managerial issues, like establishing, functioning, growth and development of a contemporary enterprise.