Government can be defined as the institutions and processes that make and implement a society’s legally authoritative decisions. The government unit can be a city, a school board, a county, a state, a multi-state regional compact, a national government, or even an international body. In the U.S., government includes the national government institutions—Congress, the presidency, the federal courts, and the federal bureaucracies; the 50 state governments—state legislatures, governors, courts, and bureaucracies; and the thousands of local governments—cities, counties, and other special government districts such as school boards and the transportation authorities that govern airports, seaports, and mass transit. These governments make legally authoritative decisions that include legislation, administrative regulations, executive orders, case law rulings, and other public policy actions that are authoritative because individuals and organizations are obligated to obey them or face some kind of legal sanction.

This course explores the physical, ecological, technological, political, economic, and cultural implications of big plans and mega-urban landscapes in a global context. It uses local and international case studies to understand the process of making major changes to urban landscape and city fabric, and to regional landscape systems. It includes lectures by leading practitioners. The assignments consider planning and design strategies across multiple scales and time frames.

Criminal Law uses a two-step process to augment learning, called the applied approach. First, after building a strong foundation from scratch, Criminal Law introduces you to crimes and defenses that have been broken down into separate components. It is so much easier to memorize and comprehend the subject matter when it is simplified this way. However, becoming proficient in the law takes more than just memorization. You must be trained to take the laws you have studied and apply them to various fact patterns. Most students are expected to do this automatically, but application must be seen, experienced, and practiced before it comes naturally. Thus the second step of the applied approach is reviewing examples of the application of law to facts after dissecting and analyzing each legal concept. Some of the examples come from cases, and some are purely fictional. All the examples are memorable, even quirky, so they will stick in your mind and be available when you need them the most (like during an exam). After a few chapters, you will notice that you no longer obsess over an explanation that doesn’t completely make sense the first time you read it—you will just skip to the example. The examples clarify the principles for you, lightening the workload significantly.

In recent years, the redistribution of risk has created conditions for natural and technological disasters to become more widespread, more difficult to manage, and more discriminatory in their effects. Policy and planning decision-makers frequently focus on the impact that human settlement patterns, land use decisions, and risky technologies can have on vulnerable populations. However, to ensure safety and promote equity, they also must be familiar with the social and political dynamics that are present at each stage of the disaster management cycle. Therefore, this course will provide students with: An understanding of the breadth of factors that give rise to disaster vulnerability; and A foundation for assessing and managing the social and political processes associated with disaster policy and planning.

In 1931, a severe drought hit the Southern and Midwestern plains. As crops died and winds picked up, dust storms began. As the "Dust Bowl" photograph shows, crops literally blew away in "black blizzards" as years of poor farming practices and over-cultivation combined with the lack of rain. By 1934, 75% of the United States was severely affected by this terrible drought.The one-two punch of economic depression and bad weather put many farmers out of business. In the early 1930s, thousands of Dust Bowl refugees ? mainly from Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, Kansas, and New Mexico ? packed up their families and migrated west, hoping to find work. Entire families migrated together (such as the men shown in "Three generations of Texans now Drought Refugees") in search of a better life. Images such as "Midcontinent ? Family Standing on the Road with Car," "Drought Refugees," and "Untitled, ca. 1935 (Worn-Down Family in Front of Tent)" offer a glimpse into their experience on the road, and show that cars provided many families both transportation and shelter on the road. About 200,000 of the migrants headed for California. The state needed to figure out how to absorb the thousands of destitute people crossing its borders daily. One of their tactics was to document the plight of the refugees. In 1935, photographer Dorothea Lange joined the Rural Rehabilitation Division of the California State Emergency Relief Administration (SERA), a section of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. She was assigned the job of using her camera to document the growing number of homeless Dust Bowl refugees migrating to California. She worked with Paul S. Taylor, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who was researching conditions of rural poverty in order to make recommendations on how to improve the workers' conditions. The work by Taylor and Lange played an important role in helping to raise public awareness of the crisis. The reports they made for the government included both data and striking images that revealed the desperate conditions in which the migrants lived and confirmed the need for government intervention. Stark images such as "Home of Oklahoma Drought Refugees" resonated with the public, and portraits of drought refugees like "Ruby from Arkansas" and others shown in this topic humanized the migrants for more fortunate citizens. In March 1936, Lange took what became one of her most famous images, "Migrant Mother." This image of a 32-year-old woman became an icon for the suffering of ordinary people during Great Depression.

This course examines the choices and constraints regarding sources and uses of energy by households, firms, and governments through a number of frameworks to describe and explain behavior at various levels of aggregation. Examples include a wide range of countries, scope, settings, and analytical approaches. This course is one of many OCW Energy Courses, and it is a core subject in MIT’s underGraduate / Professional Energy Studies Minor. This Institute-wide program complements the deep expertise obtained in any major with a broad understanding of the interlinked realms of science, technology, and social sciences as they relate to energy and associated environmental challenges.

The Enoch Pratt Free Public Library is based in Baltimore, Maryland. This site explain resources and links to assist patrons with accessing Movies and Film in the Public Domain.

Short history of the town of Fruita in Grand Valley. See www.fruita.org for more information.

This class is designed to expose you to the cycles of disasters, the roots of emergency planning in the U.S., how to understand and map vulnerabilities, and expose you to the disaster planning in different contexts, including in developing countries.

In this activity, students will examine documents from the FBI case file about Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama. They will answer questions to show understanding of the events that took place, and how the spread of information about Selma impacted the Civil Rights Movement. They will also be asked to think about whether the Federal Government would have acted differently if the FBI knew that the public may be able to see their files — the Government was not required to release records like this until the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) gave the public the right to request Federal agency records in 1966.

This seminar examines efforts in developing and advanced nations and regions to create, finance, and regulate infrastructure and energy technologies from a variety of methodological and disciplinary perspectives. It is conducted with intensive in-class discussions and debates.

The outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939 posed a serious challenge to U.S. neutrality. On the one hand, Americans' sympathies lay overwhelmingly with Great Britain and its allies; on the other hand, public sentiment overwhelmingly favored staying out of the war. Through a study of contemporary documents, students learn about the difficult choices faced by the Roosevelt administration during the first fifteen months of World War II, culminating in the decision to provide direct military aid to Great Britain.

A guide to free and open source education.

Nearly every week, if not every day, there are more and more open source and open educational resources available and accessible to us. It's impossible to ignore. It also seems impossible to keep pace with the sheer volume.

Despite this, I will attempt here to give a comprehensive listing of many helpful, accessible, amazing open education resources. (There will inevitably be some left out, but here goes!)

To begin, it's good to understand that there are open resources for almost every age, grade, and subject:

elementary, middle, and high school students
higher, tertiary, and vocational education
special needs and gifted students
public or private school students
homeschoolers or unschoolers
parents, teachers, and administrators
Where open education is being used
Prime Minister David Cameron announced in February 2013 that more UK universities are joining Futurelearn, the UK's first provider of free, open online courses (with the British Library). In both the UK and US, there are hundreds or thousands of free, open online courses being used; increasingly we are seeing other countries, like Brazil and India, start to become heavy users and hotbeds for open source and open educational resources too.

Unesco has advocated for the use of open source and open educational resources worldwide. And, in December 2012 a UN trade group said that governments should seize open source opportunities and become less reliant on large-scale software manufacturers.

Why open source?
All educators and administrators, and hey, students too, should read and pass along this short note on Why should open source software be used in schools? Information like this helps begin the process of understanding, gets people on board, and can make the difference between action and talking.

Open education resources
OSS Watch provides tips for selecting open source, or for procuring free or open software.

SchoolForge and SourceForge are good places to find, create, and publish open software. SourceForge, for one, has millions of downloads each day.

Open Source Education Foundation and Open Source Initiative, and other organization like these, help disseminate knowledge.

Creative Commons has a number of open projects from Khan Academy to Curriki where teachers and parents can find educational materials for children or learn about Creative Commons licenses. Also, they recently launched the School of Open that offers courses on the meaning, application, and impact of "openness."

Numerous open or open educational resource databases and search engines exist. Some examples include:

OEDb: over 10,000 free courses from universities as well as reviews of colleges and rankings of college degree programs
Open Tapestry: over 100,000 open licensed online learning resources for an academic and general audience
OER Commons: over 40,000 open educational resources from elementary school through to higher education; many of the elementary, middle, and high school resources are aligned to the Common Core State Standards
Open Content: a blog, definition, and game of open source as well as a friendly search engine for open educational resources from MIT, Stanford, and other universities with subject and description listings
Academic Earth: over 1,500 video lectures from MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale
JISC: Joint Information Systems Committee works on behalf of UK higher education and is involved in many open resources and open projects including digitizing British newspapers from 1620-1900!
Other sources for open education resources
Universities

The University of Cambridge's guide on Open Educational Resources for Teacher Education (ORBIT)
OpenLearn from Open University in the UK
Global

Unesco's searchable open database is a portal to worldwide courses and research initiatives
African Virtual University (http://oer.avu.org/) has numerous modules on subjects in English, French, and Portuguese
https://code.google.com/p/course-builder/ is Google's open source software that is designed to let anyone create online education courses
Global Voices (http://globalvoicesonline.org/) is an international community of bloggers who report on blogs and citizen media from around the world, including on open source and open educational resources
Individuals (which include OERs)

Librarian Chick: everything from books to quizzes and videos here, includes directories on open source and open educational resources
K-12 Tech Tools: OERs, from art to special education
Web 2.0: Cool Tools for Schools: audio and video tools
Web 2.0 Guru: animation and various collections of free open source software
Livebinders: search, create, or organize digital information binders by age, grade, or subject (why re-invent the wheel?)
Legal help

New Media Rights is trying to help digital creators use public domain or open materials legally. They have guides on how to use free and open software materials in various fields.
Free, non-profit resources
WatchKnowLearn and Good Sites for Kids are examples of non-profit organizations that operate in an open way, but are technically not open source. Keep an eye out for them as well to help you along the open education way.

The original caption for this photograph reads: "Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt and others at the opening of Midway Hall, one of two residence halls built by the Public Buildings Administration of FWA for Negro government girls."As a presidential advisor of African American Affairs during the Roosevelt administration, Mary McLeod Bethune formed the Federal Council of Negro Affairs, which would become known as the Black Cabinet. The Black Cabinet was instrumental in creating jobs for African Americans in Federal executive departments and New Deal agencies.Bethune’s influence within the Roosevelt administration also allowed her to direct funds created by the New Deal program to Black people. Programs such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and National Youth Administration (NYA) were successful in employing over 300,000 African Americans during the Great Depression.The original caption for this photograph uses the term "negro" to refer to Black people, which was commonly accepted in that era, but is outdated and inappropriate today.

For the last century, precepts of scientific management and administrative rationality have concentrated power in the hands of technical specialists, which in recent decades has contributed to widespread disenfranchisement and discontent among stakeholders in natural resources cases. In this seminar we examine the limitations of scientific management as a model both for governance and for gathering and using information, and describe alternative methods for informing and organizing decision-making processes. We feature cases involving large carnivores in the West (mountain lions and grizzly bears), Northeast coastal fisheries, and adaptive management of the Colorado River. There will be nightly readings and a short written assignment.

This course is an introduction to real-world dynamics of public policy controversies. Topics to be considered include national, state, and local policy disputes, such as smoking, hazardous waste, abortion, gun control, and education. Using a case study approach, students study whether and how those disputes get resolved. Students conduct debates and simulations in addition to writing a series of short essays.

Strategic Management (2020) is a 343-page open educational resource designed as an introduction to the key topics and themes of strategic management. The open textbook is intended for a senior capstone course in an undergraduate business program and suitable for a wide range of undergraduate business students including those majoring in marketing, management, business administration, accounting, finance, real estate, business information technology, and hospitality and tourism. The text presents examples of familiar companies and personalities to illustrate the different strategies used by today’s firms and how they go about implementing those strategies. It includes case studies, end of section key takeaways, exercises, and links to external videos, and an end-of-book glossary. The text is ideal for courses which focus on how organizations operate at the strategic level to be successful. Students will learn how to conduct case analyses, measure organizational performance, and conduct external and internal analyses.

If you are an instructor reviewing, adopting, or adapting this textbook, please help us understand your use by filling out this form http://bit.ly/strategy-interest

How to Access this Book This text is available in multiple formats including PDF, a low-resolution PDF which is faster to download, Open Document Format (ODT), and ePub. It is also available online in Pressbooks at https://pressbooks.lib.vt.edu/strategicmanagement. Softcover print on demand options are available in color interior (https://www.amazon.com/dp/1949373940) or black & white interior (https://www.amazon.com/dp/1949373894). The main landing page for this book is: https://doi.org/10.21061/strategicmanagement.

Attribution This textbook was adapted for use in Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business capstone course, MGT 4394 Strategic Management, and is shared under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial ShareAlike 3.0 license. It is adapted without attribution to the original 2010 author or publisher at their request. It is adapted from Mastering Strategic Management which was published by the University of Minnesota Publishing in 2015 as an adaptation of the 2010 version. University of Minnesota Publishing reformatted the original text, and replaced some images and figures to make the resulting whole more shareable but did not otherwise significantly alter or update the original 2010 text.

Powerpoint slides are available at http://hdl.handle.net/10919/102735
A testbank only for instructors is also available at http://hdl.handle.net/10919/104179

Instructor Resource Portal in OER Commons
https://www.oercommons.org/groups/strategic-management-instructor-group/5209

Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Mastering Strategy: Art and Science
Chapter 2: Assessing Organizational Performance
Chapter 3: Evaluating the External Environment
Chapter 4: Evaluating the Internal Environment
Chapter 5: Synthesis of Strategic Issues and Analysis
Chapter 6: Selecting Business-Level Strategies
Chapter 7: Innovation Strategies
Chapter 8: Selecting Corporate-Level Strategies
Chapter 9: Competing in International Markets
Chapter 10: Executing Strategy through Organizational Design
Chapter 11: Leading an Ethical Organization: Corporate Governance, Corporate Ethics, and Social Responsibility
About the Author / Editorial and Production Teams
Version Notes
Glossary

This work is published by Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business in association with Virginia Tech Publishing.

Suggested Citation Kennedy, Reed. (2020) Strategic Management. Blacksburg, VA: Virginia Tech Publishing. https://doi.org/10.21061/strategicmanagement CC BY NC-SA 3.0

Contributors
About the Previous Author
The publisher of the 2010 version of this book requested that they and the original author not receive attribution.

This Version
Primary Contributor: Reed B. Kennedy
Reviewer / Contributors: Eli Jamison, Joseph Simpson, Pankaj Kumar, Ayenda Kemp, Kiran Awate, and Kathleen Manning
Cover Design, Illustration, and Alternative Text; Student Reviewer: Kindred Grey
Research and Editorial Assistant; Student Reviewer: Kathleen Manning
Managing Editor: Anita Walz
Production Editor: Robert Browder
Copyeditors: Grace Baggett, Lauren Holt

ISBN 978-1-949373-94-3 (print-color)
ISBN 978-1-949373-89-9 (print-black & white)
ISBN 978-1-949373-96-7 (ebook-PDF)
ISBN 978-1-949373-95-0 (ebook-Pressbooks)
https://pressbooks.lib.vt.edu/strategicmanagement
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21061/strategicmanagement

Accessibility Virginia Tech Publishing is committed to making its publications accessible in accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. The HTML and screen reader–friendly PDF versions of this book utilize header structures and include alternative text which allow for machine-readability.

This course addresses the relationship between technology-related problems and the law applicable to work environment. The National Labor Relations Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, state worker’s compensation, and suits by workers in the courts are discussed in the course. Problems related to occupational health and safety, collective bargaining as a mechanism for altering technology in the workplace, job alienation, productivity, and the organization of work are also addressed. Prior courses or experience in environmental, public health, or law-related areas will be useful.

This course examines the policy, politics, planning, and engineering of transportation systems in urban areas, with a special focus on the Boston area. It covers the role of the federal, state, and local government and the MPO, public transit in the era of the automobile, analysis of current trends and pattern breaks; analytical tools for transportation planning, traffic engineering, and policy analysis; the contribution of transportation to air pollution, social costs, and climate change; land use and transportation interactions, and more. Transportation sustainability is a central theme throughout the course, as well as consideration of if and how it is possible to resolve the tension between the three E’s (environment, economy, and equity). The goal of this course is to elicit discussion, stimulate independent thinking, and encourage students to understand and challenge the "conventional wisdomâ€ of transportation planning.