The car - once everybody's dream and a key status symbol in most countries and cultures - has been extensively questioned in the last decades and in the last few years particularly. Urbanisation, traffic congestion, pollution problems, heavy reliance on scarce oil supplies, safety issues and ever-growing competition, have all provided significant business challenges for the automotive industry. Many car manufacturers have had to fundamentally rethink their design, brand and marketing strat...

Generation Y in Consumer and Labour Markets explores the role of people born in the late 1970s and 1980s as consumers and coworkers in an emerging post-modernist society. Having grown up in a branded society overcrowded with commercial messages and a never-ending supply of choices and opportunities, Generation Y not only influences consumption patterns, they also bring their values to work life, thus changing the attitudes towards the employee-employer relationship and how work is...

This New York Times –bestselling history is "an immense, and immensely readable, saga of the American and Japanese auto industries" ( Boston Globe ).After generations of creating high-quality automotive products, American industrialists began losing ground to the Japanese auto industry in the decades after World War II. Pulitzer Prize-winner David Halberstam, with his signature p...

In Shift, Carlos Ghosn, the brilliant, audacious, and widely admired CEO of Nissan, recounts how he took the reins of the nearly bankrupt Japanese automotive company and achieved one of the most remarkable turnarounds in automotive—and corporate—history.When Carlos Ghosn (pronounced like “phone”) was named COO of Nissan in 1999, the company was running out of gas and careening toward bankruptcy. Eighteen short months later,...

The New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller!The new secret to driving LOYALTY THAT PAYSOnce revolutionary, loyalty programs designed to differentiate products quickly became commoditized. And yet, billions of dollars are still spent every year on programs that are doomed to fail. These programs, it turns out, don't inspire long-term loyalty. Once a better deal comes along, customers will gladly defect. Can you blame them?

The true story behind NASCAR’s hardscrabble, moonshine-fueled origins, “fascinating and fast-moving . . . even if you don’t know a master cylinder from a head gasket” (Atlanta Journal-Constitution).“[Neal] Thompson exhumes the sport’s Prohibition-era roots in this colorful, meticulously detailed history.”—TimeToday’s NASCAR—equal parts Disney, Vegas, and Barnum & Bailey—is a multibillion-dollar conglomeration with 80 milli...

How a Michigan farm boy became the richest man in America is a classic, almost mythic tale, but never before has Henry Ford’s outsized genius been brought to life so vividly as it is in this engaging and superbly researched biography. The real Henry Ford was a tangle of contradictions. He set off the consumer revolution by producing a car affordable to the masses, all the while lamenting the moral toll exacted by consumerism. He believed in giving his workers a living wage, though...

Holden is one of the few brands that has an emotional grip on Australia (Qantas being another). The closure of the Holden factory in Adelaide is not just the end of a business - it's the end of an era, of a story, and of a great Australian dream.When Holden signalled that it would close its Adelaide factory, it struck at the very heart of Australian identity. Holden is our car made on our shores. It's the choice of patriotic rev heads and suburban drivers alike. Ho...

With the exception of sleep, humans spend more of their lifetimes on work than any other activity. It is central to our economy, society, and the family. It underpins our finances and our sense of meaning in life. Given the overriding importance of work, we need to recognize a profound transformation in the nature of work that is significantly altering lives: the incoming tidal wave of shadow work.Shadow work includes all the unpaid tasks we do on behalf of businesses and organizat...

Australia is one of just thirteen countries in the world equipped to take a car from design concept all the way to a showroom – a remarkable achievement in a market so small. Yet the industry has few friends, and many vociferous critics who argue that the country should not make cars at all. In this engaging and insightful analysis for the lay reader, Gideon Haigh explains why the industry has become an ideological battleground, and reveals the more complex and surprising truth behind the ...

Everyone knows that Toyota has had an amazing twenty-five- year run, rising from a humble Japanese start-up to a thriving global giant. But how did it pass Ford and GM to become the world?s largest auto manufacturer? And how does it continue to thrive while so many competitors are struggling and failing?Journalist David Magee dug deeply into Toyota?s past and present, interviewing senior executives who rarely talk to the press, along with many other sources. The powerful l...

Workplace injuries are common avoidable and unacceptable. The Political Economy of Workplace Injury in Canada reveals how employers and governments engage in ineffective injury prevention efforts intervening only when necessary to maintain the system's legitimacy. Dr. Bob Barnetson sheds light on this faulty system highlighting the way in which employers create dangerous work environments yet invest billions of dollars into compensation and treatment. Examining this dynamic clarifies the w...