THE RISE AND FALL OF GREAT COMPANIES by Geoffrey Owen ( 9780199592890 )

Item Details

Title:

THE RISE AND FALL OF GREAT COMPANIES
COURTAULDS AND THE RESHAPING OF THE MAN-MADE FIBRES INDUSTRY

By:

Geoffrey Owen

Format:

Hardback

List price:

£45.00

Our price:

£39.38

Discount:

12.5% off

You save:

£5.62

ISBN 10:

0199592896

ISBN 13:

9780199592890

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Publisher:

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Pub. date:

28 October, 2010

Series:

Pasold Studies in Textile History 17

Pages:

320

Description:

This is the dramatic story of the rise and fall of a great British company, Courtaulds. It describes the upheavals that a company goes through when one of its core businesses is threatened with extinction in the face of globalization, and assesses why some companies found a way through the crisis and continue to exist, while Courtaulds did not.

Synopsis:

This book is about a company which pioneered a major new industry, failed to build on that success, and ended up being taken over and broken up. By comparing this firm with its competitors in the same industry, the book sheds light on one of the hardest of all managerial challenges: what companies can do when their industry goes through a period of turbulence, forcing them to change direction, learn new skills, and perhaps abandon businesses on which they have relied for many years. Courtaulds was a British company which was once the world's leading producer of man-made fibres. It failed to adapt to the crisis in that industry that began in the mid-1970s, and lost ground to the point where, 25 years later, it could no longer sustain itself as an independent company. The crisis stemmed from the shift of textiles, clothing, and man-fibre production to low-wage countries, and above all to China. The book looks in some detail at the other companies - European, American, and Japanese - which had a big commitment to man-made fibres in the earlier post-war decades and, like Courtaulds, faced difficult adjustment problems in the closing years of the 20th century.Why did some of them handle the crisis better than Courtaulds? In answering this question the book looks both at decisions taken by individual managers and at the national context in which they were operating. Institutional differences between countries, notably in the role of shareholders and the financial markets, played an important role in determining which companies survived and which did not.

Illustrations:

Black and white plates; colour plates

Publication:

Imprint:

Oxford University Press

Prizes:

Winner of Winner of the BAC Wadsworth Prize 2011.

Returns:

Returnable

Some other items by this author:

CONFLAGRATION OF THE SOULS (PB)

CORPORATE GOVERNANCE IN THE US AND EUROPE