Celia de Anca

Culture and Business Management

One of the oldest definitions of culture is the one formulated by the British anthropologist Edward Tylor in 1871, which has been widely used as a reference point, for example by the Encyclopaedia Britannica (2000), which defined culture as “a complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society”.2

Gender and Management

Until relatively recently, gender diversity was not taken into consideration, and companies have not known how to take advantage of it. Women did not receive the same education as men and there was one simple reason for this: it was unquestioningly assumed that women were inferior to men and as a result did not need a man’s education to prepare them to be able to transform and change the world.

Dominant and Rising Values

Things are changing; there are few things that we can be more certain about. A well-known president of a Spanish bank recently stated to his board of directors, “Ladies and gentlemen, the only certain thing is change.” Our society, and in particular the organizations that serve it, is subject to a continuous process of transformation and change. Anybody who works in a company can be absolutely certain of this. You only have to open a newspaper or read any of the thousands of reports that analysts produce every day to see that the majority are trying to explain these changes to us, but they seldom help us to grasp the real implications that they have.

Diversity in Ford Almussafes — An Example of Adaptation

The motor vehicle sector has been most affected by globalization. It is a mature industry, with fierce competition and narrow margins that have led companies to search for economies of scale, which has in turn led to a process of concentration such that the industry is now dominated by only a handful of large groups.

Personality and Diversity Management

Personality is one of the major areas of study in psychology today. We do not have scope in this book to explore the complexities relating to this topic, nor to discuss neurological and biological questions. We will restrict ourselves to looking at the concept of personality, understood as character, the apparent, conditioned identity of each individual.1 Our intention is to investigate some of the results of the numerous studies that have researched character typologies and how they affect behavior. Individual and collective behavior within organizations has been an important area of study in recent years and has produced interesting results relating to the development and acquisition of competences and new skills by managers.

Marianne C. Toldalagi

Marianne C. Toldalagi was a senior executive at some of the top international travel companies. At American Express from 1994 through 1998, she was senior vice-president and general manager of the consumer travel division. At Thomas Cook Travel from 1989 to 1994, she was senior vice-president and executive vice-president. In her previous tenure in the travel industry, she was an executive at Crimson Travel, a founding member of the Travel Business Round-table, where she chaired its policy committee in 1998, and served on the board of Thomas Cook Travel, USA.

Luiza Helena Trajano Inàcio

Luiza Helena Trajano was born in Franca, Sao Paulo; she is married and a mother of three. She began working for Magazine Luiza at the age of 12, when she decided to give up her holidays to work. As she enjoyed the experience, she repeated it in subsequent years, and within a few years began to work full time for the company, progressing through all the departments of the group, including accountancy, management, sales and sales management; in 1991, when a holding company was created, she was appointed director general. She is trained in law and business administration and has been responsible for the rapid growth of the company; under her management, the company has grown from a network of 37 outlets in 1991 to 175 outlets, with revenue of 920 million Brazilian reales in 2003.

Corporate Social Responsibility at Grupo Santander

Jaume Pages, deputy director of Universia, writes this in the introduction to its Annual Report for 2004: Universia has received more than 68 million visits to its webpage every month, and has 3.5 million registered users. These figures mean that we are the biggest channel of information for university students in Spanish and Portuguese, in addition to being the best way for our university students to answer their questions about training portals, grants, getting their first job, studying in other countries and so on. We are very pleased with the results for 2004 as they show the important role of collaboration with universities and the support of the Grupo Santander in the project. It is important to highlight the addition of another country to our network; the universities of Uruguay have now joined the significantly increased number of partner universities in the other ten countries.1

JPMorgan Chase & Co in Latin America: The Management of Diversity as a Tool for Developing Human Capital

JPMorgan Chase (JPMC) is among the world’s leading financial services companies; it is a Fortune 50 company that focusses on commercial and investment banking. Following the merger of JPMorgan Chase with Bank One in July 2004, the company now has assets of

Diversity in the Historic Perspective of Business Management

1.1 billion and operations in more than 50 countries in all the continents and employs over 100,000 people. The company has over 32 million clients in the US. JPMC’s headquarters are in New York, whilst its retail and commercial banking head offices are located in Chicago.