Wetherly and Otter: The Business Environment 
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Additional casesWetherly and Otter: The Business Environment
Chapter 03
Levinson, M. (2006) The Box - How the Shipping Container
Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
(Oxford: Princeton University Press). This is an in depth
study of how in the opinion of the author a low-tech
development changed the world. He charts the combination
of entrepreneurial drive and the external factors that enabled
this drive to fundamentally change the internal organization
of the logistics industry. This also reveals how the changes
moved from a local environment to a national and global one.
Porter, M. E. (1985) Competitive Advantage - Creating
and Sustaining Superior Performance (London: Collier
Macmillan). Chapter 5 focuses on the role of technology in
affecting the value chain of a company and the development
of a technological strategy for a business.
Porter, M. E. (1998) Competitive Advantage of Nations (New
York: Free Press). Chapter 1 gives a very succinct overview of
Porter's belief that competitive advantage is created through
the increases in productivity made possible by technological change, and he outlines both the weaknesses in other
theories used to explain competitiveness as well as broadly
outlining his own diamond model. (This chapter is available
online at: www.simonsays.com)
Young, W. (2004) Sold Out - the True Cost of Supermarket
Shopping (London: Vision). This book looks at the rise of
the supermarkets' dominance over the grocery trade and the
technological changes within the industry. In so doing it
highlights many of the concerns that are expressed about our
modern technological world.
United Nations Development Programme (2001) Human
Development Report - Making New Technologies Work for
Human Development (available at: http://hdr.undp.org).
This report looks at the way in which new technologies have
and are shaping living standards across the world. In so
doing it focuses on the global disparities in technological
development and the degree to which the poorer countries
can gain technological advantages.
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