Friday, January 31, 2020

Case Analysis for North American Warehouse Clubs Essay Example for Free

Case Analysis for North American Warehouse Clubs Essay The competitive environment has changed drastically since the BSG case was originally written. The United States (US) continues to decline in the market as opposed to several years ago, but due to certain qualities it continues to remain very competitive in the market. One factor which gives the US a competitive edge is innovation. US companies are highly sophisticated and innovative. For the purposes of this analysis, the focus will be on innovation. Modern technology with information systems and applications with state of the art information and communication technologies are leading factors in the success of businesses today. Many newer businesses use e-technologies as a tool that not only improves efficiency, but gives them the competitive edge against those companies which are still running operations with outdated technology. Companies who have been around for decades are forced to implement new systems depending on their business needs. Changing technology is an initiative that is generally high cost, taking time to implement. There are numerous options available today that if the implementation of a new system is not strategically planned it could ultimately place a business in a financial deficit forcing businesses to reduce operations and sometimes shut down. It is important for businesses to invest in research and development (RD) when deciding to develop new processes to maintain a competitive edge. Looking at the case, it is apparent that Costco was the leader in modern technology compared to the other two competitors. Costco began to grow its business with two websites in 2004 in the US and in Canada. Costco’s e-commerce sales more than tripled over several years, reaching sales of over $1.2B in 2007. BJ’s began upgrading technology in 2007 which was fully implemented in 2009. Although net sales increased from $8,792M to $9,802M during the implementation years, net sales have seized to take an impressive incline with the new system. Net sales only increased $152M from 2009 to 2010. The case did not report on any innovations related to technology for Sam’s Club. Some of the problems Sam’s Club faces compared to the other competitors can be directed at the location of warehouses, their competition with Wal-Mart and their low scale target market. One way to improve would be to focus on their target market by offering upscale merchandise which will target upscale clientele. Sam’s Club could purchase BJ’s which already sells high quality brand merchandise. Merging with this competitor would tighten the market share even more. Focusing on members through this type of merchandising strategy will increase profitability. Another way to improve would be to reduce the amounts of international imports and focus on using American made products. Reducing import/export costs overall will increase revenue growth and financial performance. References World Economic Forum. 2012. The Global Competitiveness Report 2012-2013. Geneva: World Economic Forum. Available at www3.weforum.org//WEF_GlobalCompetitivenessReport_2012-13 Wall Street Journal. Sam’s Club CEO Launches Charge on Rivals, Updated October 31, 2012, 1:44 p.m. ET http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203335504578089131653808580.html By SHELLY BANJO version of this article appeared October 31, 2012, on page B7 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Sams Club CEO Launches Charge on Rivals. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_162-43940823/sams-clubs-risky-move-into-sma

Thursday, January 23, 2020

Paintings in Rome :: Essays Papers

Paintings in Rome In 211 BC the great general M. Claudius Marcellus returned to Rome after his decisive defeat of Syracuse. With him came a vast booty of Hellenistic artifacts. Remaining outside the sacred precincts of Rome, he supplicated the Senate for the purification and glory of a triumphal procession, realizing that they would both make a visual impression in his triumph and also be an ornament for the city." He opened his triumph impressively with an allegorical painting of Syracuse made prisoner. Paintings carried in triumphal processions, specifically commissioned to commemorate victorious military campaigns, not only added immensely to the celebratory nature of the rite, they also increased its sociopolitical power. Roman triumphal painting also served to acquaint Romans with novel artistic conventions, previously foreign to their experience. Although none of the paintings commissioned by victorious Roman generals to decorate their triumphal processions survives, the testimonial provide crucial alternate evidence to determine their role in shaping Roman political and artistic culture in the Republican period. During the Republic, Roman paintings with historical themes commemorated the empire's expansion: for example, the conquests of Carthage in 201 BC, Sardinia in 174 BC, and Macedonian in 168 BC Subjects included, at one end of the spectrum, pared-down iconic personifications and, at the other end, full-fledged battle scenes in landscape settings. Roman historical paintings not only secured the private memories of participants in actual events; they also served a didactic and propagandistic function in the public sphere of Roman political and religious institutions. The Roman governing class commissioned historical paintings to inform a specifically Roman audience of its achievements, to educate that audience about its policies, and thus to persuade that audience to adopt its views and follow a particular course of action. It used historical paintings to implement ideology. Ancient Rome inherited arguments, already old, for the superiority of painting over any other form of communicatio n to affect and manipulate an audience. Further, Romans embraced the idea that historical painting was at its most effective when it became the embodiment of what it represented, or, to use the terms preferred by Freedberg, when the sign becomes the living embodiment of what it signifies. (Ancient authors, for example, relish anecdotes describing portraits that profoundly affected spectators long after the death of their subjects.) Toward that end, Roman patrons became increasingly sophisticated about representational strategies and throughout the course of the Republic procured the most commanding examples possible.

Wednesday, January 15, 2020

Ecriture Feminine

Ecriture feminine, literally â€Å"women's writing,†[1]  more closely, the writing of the female body and female disparity in language and text,[2]  is a strain of  feminist literary theory that originated in France  in the early 1970s and included foundational theorists such as  Helene Cixous,  Monique Wittig,  Luce Irigaray,[3]  Chantal Chawaf,[4][5]  and  Julia Kristeva,[6][7]  and also other writers like psychoanalytical theorist  Bracha Ettinger,[8][9]  who joined this field in the early 1990s. [10]  Generally, French feminists tended to focus their attention on language, analyzing the ways in which meaning is produced. They concluded that language as we commonly think of it is a decidedly male realm, which therefore only represents a world from the male point of view. [11] Nonetheless, the French women's movement developed in much the same way as the feminist movements elsewhere in Europe or in the United States: French women participated in consciousness-raising groups; demonstrated in the streets on the  8th of March; fought hard for women's right to choose whether to have children; raised the issue of violence against women; and struggled to change public opinion on issues concerning women and women's rights. The fact that the very first meeting of a handful of would-be feminist activists in 1970 only managed to launch an acrimonious theoretical debate, would seem to mark the situation as typically ‘French' in its apparent insistence on the primacy of theory over politics. [12] Helene Cixous  first coined  ecriture feminine  in her essay, â€Å"The Laugh of the Medusa† (1975), where she asserts â€Å"Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies† because their sexual pleasure has been repressed and denied expression. Inspired by Cixous' essay, a recent book titledLaughing with Medusa  (2006) analyzes the collective work of Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Bracha Ettinger and Helene Cixous. [13]  These writers are as a whole referred to by Anglophones as â€Å"the French feminists,† though Mary Klages, Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has pointed out that â€Å"poststructuralist theoretical feminists† would be a more accurate term. [14]  Madeleine Gagnon is a more recent proponent. And since the aforementioned 1975 when Cixous also founded women's studies at Vincennes, she has been as a spokeswoman for the group Psychanalyse et politique and a prolific writer of texts for their publishing house, des femmes. And when asked of her own writing she says, â€Å"Je suis la ou ca parle† (â€Å"I am there where it/id/the female unconscious speaks. â€Å")  [15] American feminist critic and writer  Elaine Showalter  defines this movement as â€Å"the inscription of the feminine body and female difference in language and text. [16]  Ecriture feminine places experience before language, and privileges non-linear, cyclical writing that evades â€Å"the discourse that regulates the  phallocentric  system. â€Å"[17]  Because language is not a neutral medium, the argument can be made that it functions as an instrument of patriarchal expression. Peter Barry writes that â€Å"the female writer is seen as suffering the handicap of having to use a mediu m (prose writing) which is essentially a male instrument fashioned for male purposes†. 18]  Ecriture feminine thus exists as an antithesis of masculine writing, or as a means of escape for women,although the phallogocentric argument itself has been criticised by W. A. Borody as misrepresenting the history of philosophies of ‘’indeterminateness’’ in Western culture. Borody claims that the‘black and white’’view that the masculine=determinateness and the feminine=indeterminateness contains a degree of cultural and historical validity, but not when it is deployed to self-replicate a similar form of gender-othering it originally sought to overcome. 19]  In the words of Rosemarie Tong, â€Å"Cixous challenged women to write themselves out of the world men constructed for women. She urged women to put themselves-the unthinkable/unthought-into words. †[20] Almost everything is yet to be written by women about femininity: about their sexuality, that is, its infinite and mobile complexity; about their eroticization, sudden turn-ons of a certain minuscule-immense area of their bodies; not about destiny, but about the adventure of such and such a drive, about trips, crossings, trudges, abrupt and gradual awakenings, discoveries of a zone at once timorous and soon to be forthright. 14] With regard to phallocentric writing, Tong explains that â€Å"male sexuality, which centers on what Cixous called the â€Å"big dick†, is ultimately boring in its pointedness and singularity. Like male sexuality, masculine writing, which Cixous usually termed phallogocentric writing, is also ultimately boring† and furthermore, that â€Å"stamped with the official seal of social approval, masculine writing is too weighted down to move or change†. 20] Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: not man; not the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which the publishing houses are the crafty, obsequiou s relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our backs; not  yourself. Smug-faced readers, managing editors, and big bosses don't like the true texts of women- female-sexed texts. That kind scares them. [21] For Cixous, ecriture feminine is not only a possibility for female writers; rather, she believes it can be (and has been) employed by male authors such as  James Joyce. Some have found this idea difficult to reconcile with Cixous’ definition of ecriture feminine (often termed ‘white ink’) because of the many references she makes to the female body (â€Å"There is always in her at least a little of that good mother’s milk. She writes in white ink†[22]) when characterizing the essence of ecriture feminine and explaining its origin. This notion raises problems for some theorists: â€Å"Ecriture feminine, then, is by its nature transgressive, rule-transcending, intoxicated, but it is clear that the notion as put forward by Cixous raises many problems. The realm of the body, for instance, is seen as somehow immune to social and gender condition and able to issue forth a pure essence of the feminine. Such essentialism is difficult to square with feminism which emphasizes femininity as a social construction†¦Ã¢â‚¬ [23] For Luce Irigaray, women's sexual pleasure  jouissance  cannot be expressed by the dominant, ordered, â€Å"logical,† masculine language because according to Kristeva, feminine language is derived from the pre-oedipal period of fusion between mother and child. Associated with the maternal, feminine language is not only a threat to culture, which is patriarchal, but also a medium through which women may be creative in new ways. Irigaray expressed this connection between women's sexuality and women's language through the following analogy: women's  jouissance  is more multiple than men's unitary, phallic pleasure because  [24] â€Å"woman has sex organs just about everywhere†¦ feminine language is more diffusive than its ‘masculine counterpart'. That is undoubtedly the reason†¦ her language†¦ goes off in all directions and†¦ e is unable to discern the coherence. †Ã‚  [25] Irigaray and Cixous also go on to emphasize that women, historically limited to being sexual objects for men (virgins or prostitutes, wives or mothers), have been prevented from expressing their sexuality in itself or for themselves. If they can do this, and if they can speak about it in the new languages it calls for, they will establ ish a point of view (a site of difference) from which phallogocentric concepts and controls can be seen through and taken apart, not only in theory, but also in practice. 26] ————————————————- [edit]Notes 1. ^  Baldick, Chris. Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms. OUP, 1990. 65. 2. ^  Showalter, Elaine. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8, No. 2, Writing and Sexual Difference, (Winter, 1981), pp. 179-205. Published by: The University of Chicago Press. http://www. jstor. org/stable/1343159 3. ^  Irigaray, Luce,  Speculum of the Other Woman, Cornell University Press, 1985 4. ^  Cesbron, Georges, † Ecritures au feminin. Propositions de lecture pour quatre livres de femmes† in Degre Second, juillet 1980: 95-119 5.   Mistacco, Vicki, â€Å"Chantal Chawaf,† in Les femmes et la tradition litteraire – Anthologie du Moyen Age a nos jours; Seconde p artie: XIXe-XXIe siecles, Yale Press, 2006, 327-343 6. ^  Kristeva, Julia  Revolution in Poetic Language, Columbia University Press, 1984 7. ^  Griselda Pollock, â€Å"To Inscribe in the Feminine: A Kristevan Impossibility? Or Femininity, Melancholy and Sublimation. †Ã‚  Parallax, n. 8, [Vol. 4(3)], 1998. 81-117. 8. ^  Ettinger, Bracha,  Matrix . Halal(a) – Lapsus. Notes on Painting, 1985-1992. MOMA, Oxford, 1993. (ISBN 0-905836-81-2). Reprinted in:  Artworking 1985-1999. Edited by Piet Coessens. Ghent-Amsterdam: Ludion / Brussels: Palais des Beaux-Arts, 2000. (ISBN 90-5544-283-6) 9. ^  Ettinger, Bracha,  The Matrixial Borderspace  (essays 1994-1999), Minnesota University Press, 2006 10. ^  Pollock, Griselda, â€Å"Does Art Think? â€Å", in:  Art and Thought  Blackwell, 2003 11. ^  Ã¢â‚¬Å"Murfin, Ross C. †Ã‚  http://www. ux1. eiu. edu/~rlbeebe/what_is_feminist_criticism. pdf 12. ^  Moi, Toril, ed. French Feminist Thought. Basil Blac kwell Ltd, 1987. (ISBN 0-631-14972-4) 13.   Zajko, Vanda and Leonard, Miriam,  Laughing with Medusa. Oxford University Press, 2006 14. ^  a  b  Klages, Mary. â€Å"Helene Cixous: The Laugh of the Medusa. † 15. ^  Jones, Ann Rosalind. Feminist Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Summer, 1981), pp. 247-263. Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc. http://www. jstor. org/stable/3177523 16. ^  Showalter, Elaine. â€Å"Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness. †Ã‚  The New Feminist Criticism: essays on women, literature, and theory. Elaine Showalter, ed. London: Virago, 1986. 249. 17. ^  Cixous, Helene. â€Å"The Laugh of the Medusa. †Ã‚  New French Feminisms. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds. New York: Schocken, 1981. 253. 18. ^  Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory  : An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. New York: Manchester UP, 2002. 126 19. ^  Wayne A. Borody (1998) pp. 3, 5 Figuring the Phallogocentric Argument with Respect to the Classical Greek Philosophical Tradition Nebula: A Netzine of the Arts and Science, Vol. 13 (pp. 1-27) (http://kenstange. com/nebula/feat013/feat013. html) . 20. ^  a  b  Tong, Rosemarie Putnam. Feminist Thought  : A More Comprehensive Introduction. New York: Westview P, 2008. 276. 1. ^  Helene Cixous, Summer 1976. 22. ^  Klages, Mary. â€Å"Helene Cixous: ‘The Laugh of the Medusa. 23. ^  Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory  : An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. New York: Manchester UP, 2002. 128. 24. ^  Murfin, Ross C. http://www. ux1. eiu. edu/~rlbeebe/what_is_feminist_criticism. pdf 25. ^  Irigaray, Luce. This Sex. 26. ^  Jones, Ann Rosalind. Fem inist Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Summer, 1981), pp. 247-263. Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc. http://www. jstor. org/stable/3177523. ————————————————- [edit]External links

Tuesday, January 7, 2020

The Power of Judicial Review - 1125 Words

The late 1700s and early 1800s were a time full of expansion and innovation in the United States of America. The country was getting bigger, both in population and in geographic size, and the government was getting more powerful as well. This was because of the new Constitution that was put into place in 1787 that replaced the Articles of Confederation and took most of the power away from the individual states and gave it to the federal government. When the Constitution was ratified, both Brutus (believed to be Robert Yates), and Alexander Hamilton were in a debate over the potential power of the federal government, and more specifically, the power of the Supreme Court in Federalist 78 and Brutus’ eleventh and twelfth letters. Alexander†¦show more content†¦This type of longevity in office ensures that the judges do not face any type of political pressure by either the government of the people themselves. It also prevents the other two branches of government from havi ng any type of influence on them. This works both ways, however. The Judiciary relies on the other two branches to enforce its decision. It has no power to do so by itself. Hamilton states it has no influence over either the sword or the purse...It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment. This reinforces the idea that the judiciary is very weak in comparison to the other branches. The legislative branch controls the money, or â€Å"the purse†, and the executive contains the military, or â€Å"the sword†. The judicial branch also poses no threats to any political rights. Federalist 78 outright protects the idea of judicial review, one of the most controversial topics. Hamilton claims that the court not only has the right, but the duty to decide when acts of Congress are constitutional or unconstitutional and to base their decision firmly off the Constitution whenever there are any type of conflicts. He regarded this as a protection against manipulation by Congress, which was a far more serious concern. Fifteen years after the publishing of Brutus’ letters and Federalist 78, the landmark case Marbury v. Madison was broughtShow MoreRelatedThe Power Of Judicial Review Essay1805 Words   |  8 PagesThe power of judicial review was established by the Supreme Court in the 1803 case Marbury v. Madison and gives the judicial branch the ability to decide the constitutionality of a law or Executive action. Judicial review has no constitutional grounds, meaning that the Supreme Court essentially created its own power: the power to interpret the constitution. 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