DISCUSSION QUESTIONS Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words - 2

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS - Essay Example For instance, logistics involves activities such as customer service, storage, inventory control, packaging, and recycling. Distribution, as stipulated by Kapoor and Kansal (2003) entails physical transportation of commodities from one place to another or from the producers to the consumers. Pull and push strategies are the major marketing action plans used by many organizations. Pull denotes advertising and promoting to ultimate consumers in a bid to create demand whereas push entails tantalizing by means of endorsements (Kapoor and Kansal, 2003). Both of these strategies involve public promotions as well as designing or creating new products to meet the needs of the consumer( Kapoor and Kansal, 2003). However, push marketing strategy involves promoting already available products while in pull strategy, promotions are done and consumers have to wait for the product to be produced (Kapoor and Kansal, 2003). Ashleigh, I agree with your discussion that a distribution channel is the chain that a product goes through from production to consumers. Your example of how geographical location affects distribution channels is also spot-on. I agree that if a product is being produced in Mexico, then the distributors would best be placed at the border in order to improve accessibility of the goods from the producer to the consumer. In other words, geographical location affects communication in terms of how products reach the ultimate

Bureaucratic and Normative Control Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Bureaucratic and Normative Control - Essay Example Actually hierarchy in general (in the sense of levels of authority) is to be found in any administration which has a certain degree of magnitude and complexity. The feudal type of administration had a complicated hierarchical system. (Davis, 1994, p73) 'There is hierarchy of a social rank corresponding to the hierarchy of fiefs through the process of sub-infatuation...' 6 But the difference between the two kinds of hierarchies, according to Weber, is to be found in the type of authority relations. In the feudal case the relationship between inferior and superior is personal and the legitimating of authority is based on a belief in the sacredness of tradition. In a bureaucracy, authority is legitimised by a belief in the correctness of the rules and the loyalty of the bureaucrat is oriented to an impersonal order, to a superior position, not to the person who holds it. So what makes an administration more or less bureaucratic from the hierarchical point of view is not the number of le vels of authority, or the size of the span of control; the decisive criterion is whether or not the authority relations have a precise and impersonal character, as a result of the elaboration of rational rules. Concerning first the criterion of meaningful adequacy, it does not necessarily make sense to someone that a type of organisation having the Weberian characteristics to an extreme degree should yield maximum efficiency. One could equally well imagine such an organisation as being extremely inefficient. For example, some of these characteristics, even from a common sense point of view, seem to promote administrative inefficiency rather than efficiency (e.g. promotion by seniority). As to the criterion of objective possibility, in the light of the empirical research done since Weber, one can argue that a perfectly rational-efficient organisation having Weber's ideal characteristics is not objectively possible, in the sense that it runs against the known laws of nature -- in this case, against recent empirical findings. Such findings rather indicate that the more accentuated some characteristics of the ideal type are, the more inefficient the organisation becomes. In one sense, a great part of the literature on bureaucracy since Weber