Making Sense of Iranian Society, Culture, and Business


Book Description

Iran represents a large and emerging economy with a strategic location extending from the Persian Gulf to Central Asia, a huge consumer market, tremendous natural resources, and numerous petrochemical and manufacturing industries, which require heavy investment and development. Understanding the Iranian business environment requires a holistic approach because in Iran society, culture, religion, economy, politics, and family are intimately intertwined. Therefore, this book adopts a broad scope and relies on a wide range of academic and professional resources to bring insights into the Iranian context. The author bridges theory and practice by offering a reasonable blend of academic perspective and practical expertise. He offers an analytical, readable, comprehensive, and impartial account. This book is a valuable reference for business managers, investors, analysts, policy makers, scholars, students, expatriates, travelers, and all those who are concerned with the Iranian affairs.




Making History in Iran


Book Description

Iranian history was long told through a variety of stories and legend, tribal lore and genealogies, and tales of the prophets. But in the late nineteenth century, new institutions emerged to produce and circulate a coherent history that fundamentally reshaped these fragmented narratives and dynastic storylines. Farzin Vejdani investigates this transformation to show how cultural institutions and a growing public-sphere affected history-writing, and how in turn this writing defined Iranian nationalism. Interactions between the state and a cross-section of Iranian society—scholars, schoolteachers, students, intellectuals, feminists, and poets—were crucial in shaping a new understanding of nation and history. This enlightening book draws on previously unexamined primary sources—including histories, school curricula, pedagogical materials, periodicals, and memoirs—to demonstrate how the social locations of historians writ broadly influenced their interpretations of the past. The relative autonomy of these historians had a direct bearing on whether history upheld the status quo or became an instrument for radical change, and the writing of history became central to debates on social and political reform, the role of women in society, and the criteria for citizenship and nationality. Ultimately, this book traces how contending visions of Iranian history were increasingly unified as a centralized Iranian state emerged in the early twentieth century.




Persianate Selves


Book Description

For centuries, Persian was the language of power and learning across Central, South, and West Asia, and Persians received a particular basic education through which they understood and engaged with the world. Not everyone who lived in the land of Iran was Persian, and Persians lived in many other lands as well. Thus to be Persian was to be embedded in a set of connections with people we today consider members of different groups. Persianate selfhood encompassed a broader range of possibilities than contemporary nationalist claims to place and origin allow. We cannot grasp these older connections without historicizing our conceptions of difference and affiliation. Mana Kia sketches the contours of a larger Persianate world, historicizing place, origin, and selfhood through its tradition of proper form: adab. In this shared culture, proximities and similarities constituted a logic that distinguished between people while simultaneously accommodating plurality. Adab was the basis of cohesion for self and community over the turbulent eighteenth century, as populations dispersed and centers of power shifted, disrupting the circulations that linked Persianate regions. Challenging the bases of protonationalist community, Persianate Selves seeks to make sense of an earlier transregional Persianate culture outside the anachronistic shadow of nationalisms.




Capitalism in contemporary Iran


Book Description

This book traces the patterns of capital accumulation and the changes in class and state formation emanating from it in Iran during the global neoliberal era. It demonstrates how there are inner connections between the nature of contemporary development in Iran, the form of the state, the ongoing sociopolitical transformations in society and the geopolitical tensions with the West. Simultaneously, it highlights that these issues should be explored in terms of their internal relations to the motions and tendencies of neoliberal global capitalism and resulting geopolitics. Accordingly, the book demonstrates that Iranian neoliberalisation has brought about new contested class dynamics that have fundamentally reconstructed the Iranian ruling class, aggressively shaped and reshaped the working class and the poor, and drastically impacted the state form and its foreign policy.




Doing Business in Russia, Volume I


Book Description

Russia is a major economy and important power in the global political-economic landscape. Following the dissolution of the USSR, Russia has become a premier global marketplace despite remaining enigmatic and challenging. The book serves as a concise guide in understanding Russia from an international business perspective. It explores strategic issues, drivers, constraints, costs, and risks of international expansion and includes analytical tools, practical applications, sources of information, and assistance in international business research. These are supplemented by analysis of Russia’s macro-economic profile, drivers, strategic strengths and weaknesses in the comparative context, including its international market attractiveness and opportunities for U.S. companies. The book examines Russia’s main industries, their profiles, trends and business attractiveness, trends, and marketing strategies. The discussion of Russia’s regions covers regional subdivisions and economic profiles with the focus on Moscow, the leading economic region. The book also covers the drivers and trends of the Russian small business sector and entrepreneurial business venturing. Despite the onslaught of capitalism, Russia retains its relationship-driven culture. The book provides insights by evaluating the determinants of Russian culture, its national profile in major global cross-cultural studies, and practical cultural applications in business, negotiations, and communications. The book’s pedagogy includes skill development exercises and cases on doing business in Russia.




Doing Business in Russia, Volume II


Book Description

Russia is a major economy and important power in the global political-economic landscape. Following the dissolution of the USSR, Russia has become a premier global marketplace despite remaining enigmatic and challenging. The book serves as a concise guide in understanding Russia from an international business perspective. It explores strategic issues, drivers, constraints, costs, and risks of international expansion and includes analytical tools, practical applications, sources of information, and assistance in international business research. These are supplemented by analysis of Russia’s macro-economic profile, drivers, strategic strengths and weaknesses in the comparative context, including its international market attractiveness and opportunities for U.S. companies. The book examines Russia’s main industries, their profiles, trends and business attractiveness, trends, and marketing strategies. The discussion of Russia’s regions covers regional subdivisions and economic profiles with the focus on Moscow, the leading economic region. The book also covers the drivers and trends of the Russian small business sector and entrepreneurial business venturing. Despite the onslaught of capitalism, Russia retains its relationship-driven culture. The book provides insights by evaluating the determinants of Russian culture, its national profile in major global cross-cultural studies, and practical cultural applications in business, negotiations, and communications. The book’s pedagogy includes skill development exercises and cases on doing business in Russia.




Doing Business in the United States


Book Description

This book serves as a concise guide for businesses seeking to enter the U.S. market from an international perspective. The book examines how the United States is positioned in the global marketplace, the potential for businesses entering the U.S. market, and marketing trends and applications, with an emphasis on small- to medium-sized enterprise (SME) market expansion. Chalked full of success stories, readers will develop an understanding of American markets and the American consumer, marketing mix considerations, brand building and activation tools and strategies, approaches to developing a strong and differentiated brand for U.S. market entry, and analytics tools and methods for assessing marketing entry performance.




Creative Solutions to Global Business Negotiations, Third Edition


Book Description

Practical and user friendly, the author describes all the key elements needed to negotiate deals that are doable, profitable, and sustainable. Based on decades of teaching and consultancies around the world, the author provides a useful guide for business executives operating in today’s digitalized global economy. This latest edition will help readers enhance their preparation, anticipate objections, create value for tangibles/intangibles, and avoid cultural blunders to reach mutually beneficial outcomes. By sharpening negotiation skills, business executives will be able to interact more effectively with their counterparts in the fast changing global business environment and the rising influence of third parties. Practical and user friendly, the author describes all the key elements needed to negotiate deals that are doable, profitable, and sustainable.




Tracing the Roots of Globalization and Business Principles, Second Edition


Book Description

The book begins with a historical perspective of recorded trade. It then offers a deeper insight into the first global products, the infrastructures created to support the trade initiative and the development of financial instruments to further its growth. The cross collateral influences of religion and government on the global commercial landscape follows.




Innovation in China


Book Description

The word innovation is often used today regarding China, as if the concept were new to the Eastern country. Most people know, however, that China was a juggernaut in creating new technologies and at one time was the innovation king of the world- but that was at least seven centuries ago! Today, the great oriental power is attempting once again to take the throne of innovation for its own. This desire to usurp the throne, which had been diligently taken by the West during the Scientific Revolution, has placed an almost unrealistic emphasis on innovation. In Innovation in China: The Tail of the Dragon, the author explores the issues and actors involved in making innovation the emphasis in China. He uses a simple systems model of innovation and various perceptual lenses. The lenses are aimed at the historical, economic, political, legal, educational and cultural elements of an innovation-based society. After reading the book the reader will understand more about how innovation is happening in China and by whom. More importantly, the reader will begin a journey of learning more about where the country is going as it relentlessly continues its drive to create an innovation-based society and to become once again, in terms appropriate to its history, the ‘Emperor of Innovation’.