The location of businesses Essay Example for Free

The location of businesses Essay Businesses can choose where to locate. Sometimes choice of location is critical. In other cases it is less important. What is the difference? And what happens when a right choice suddenly becomes a wrong choice? Factors influencing location Every business locates where it thinks it will be successful. If you remember that businesses need:   staff to work there   raw materials to produce finished products * customers   to keep their costs as low as possible then their reasons for choosing a particular location begin to make sense. Local labour supply All organizations need to be able to employ staff. So it makes sense to locate where people live. A factory in a remote part of the Scottish Highlands would have trouble finding anyone to work there. Motorway service stations have to pay to transport their staff from local towns and villages to the station itself, a cost which other businesses can avoid. The factors which influence a particular area are often local skills and cost of labour. Local skills In some parts of the country particular skills are a tradition. If you wanted to set up a business making pottery you would be sensible to locate in the Midlands, around Stoke-On-Trent. If you wanted to make cutlery, then Sheffield is the place. If you were making boots or shoes then Northamptonshire is the area for you. Probably the most famous examples today are in the United States. Silicon Valley and Seattle are renowned for their computer industries, so this is where whiz-kid programmers head for. California is the home of the film industry, so if you were keen to work on special effects and digital technology, this is where you would go. Britains Silicon Valley is located along the M4. The area is also famous for Formula One motor racing firms. Scotland has its own Silicon Glen and Cambridge is building a reputation for and is now known as Silicon Fen. Firms wanting to specialize in these particular industries know that if they locate in these areas they will be able to recruit staff with skills they need. The City Of London is renowned for its financial skills and expertise, so this is where you would find large international banks, stockbrokers and insurance firms. Other firms dont need particular skills or maybe willing to train unskilled staff. Firms doing light assembly work often locate where there is a ready supply of cheap (often female) labour. Many of these have set up where traditional industries, such as mining, have closed. Areas with high unemployment have lower wage rates the competition for jobs keeps wage rates down. At the north of Celynen Colliery in Wales, Aiwa employs 1,000 people making videos and in the Rhondda Valley the heart of the old Welsh mining industry Taxdata employs 250 people making CD packaging. In the Dearne Valley in South Yorkshire, at a former colliery, over 2,000 people work for Ventura part of the Next group companies. Ventura is a call centre and mail-handling company which handles over seven million customer accounts for various clients such as Cellnet and the Cooperative bank. Call centres employ operators equipped with a computer and telephone whose task is to answer telephone enquiries or telephone existing or potential customers to generate more sales for companies. Today approximately 150,000 people in the UK work in call centres. Most of these are located in parts of the country where wage rates are lower. However, in some places, such as Tyneside, Leeds and Glasgow, where many call centres have been set up, competition for experienced is now increasing and pay rates are rising. So the pool of skilled labour in the area is affecting the cost for firms. The cost of labour will always be more important to businesses that are more labour intensive than those which are capital intensive. A labour intensive is one which needs a higher number of staff such as call centres or schools and colleges. A capital intensive business is one where machines or technology do most of the work as in a modern electricity generating plant. Here the cost of labour is less important in the choice of location. The Cost of Premises The cost of premises is determined by the forces of demand and supply. The greater the demand for premises and the fewer there are available the higher the cost. For that purpose, premises in city centres especially in London are much more expensive than the cost of premises in the suburbs or in the regions. For example, the lease of a large store (60,000 square feet) in Oxford Street, London, was on sale for i 12,000,000 in 1997! This is because Oxford Street is a prime site in a town a large high street store would be less but not cheap. In 1997, Mark Spencer bought 19 high street stores from Littlewoods for i 192,500,000, paying over the odds for the stores it wanted. They were actually valued at around i 80,000,000. Premises on major town centre shopping routes are always more expensive than on secondary side streets simply because shoppers stay on the high street. Areas of high employment with a surplus of skilled labour Newbury, in Berkshire, is a typical example are more expensive places to locate than areas where unemployment is high and the area depressed, as in some parts of the north east. The result is that companies that have no reason to locate in London or the south east will move to other towns and cities. Those businesses which arent dependant on passing trade will locate outside town and city centres in cheaper areas or on industrial estates. Within Britain, many local authorities offer packages to encourage businesses to locate in their area. They may offer financial assistance for large firms and reduced rents for small enterprises. Specialist rental and leasing companies will offer attractive packages enabling businesses to locate easily in special workspace sites, office complexes, business or retail centres. Some centres are managed with a central reception area, business services and shared meeting rooms. Retail units may be available on short-term license agreements, payable weekly. All these attract organizations to locate where costs will be lowest and where, hopefully, they will be able to expand their business without substantially increasing their costs. Financial Help from the Government If you live in London, south-east, or the east of England (e. g. Norwich), then you live in an officially prosperous area. If you live anywhere else, the situation is different, although in Scotland, Northern-Ireland, the West-Midlands and the south-west, prosperity rose above the UK average between 1986 and 1996. However the north-east, north-west, Yorkshire and Humberside, the East-Midlands and Wales all declined below the national average. The European Union and the government are concerned about such inequalities. They would like all regions to be equally prosperous. For some time in the UK there have been assisted areas. These are areas of Britain where regional aid may be given under European Community law. Regional Selective Assistance (RSA) is the main form of such an aid in Britain. This is a discretionary grant awarded to support a project which will stimulate employment opportunities, increase regional competitiveness and improve prosperity. Between 1985 and 1988, the scheme created 100,000 jobs, reducing employment by 0. 5 per cent in the Assisted Areas, at a cost of i 130,000,000 a year. In 1998 the European guidelines on regional aid changed and all member states were asked to propose new Assisted Areas to operate from 1st January 2000. In July 1999 the Department of Trade and Industry put forward the new proposals which included the following.   Tier One (maximum) assistance for Cornwall, Merseyside, South-Yorkshire and West-Wales and the Valleys. Here grants of up to 40 per cent of the project cost will be available. The government has also proposed that Northern Ireland be treated as an exceptional case for assistance. Tier Two assistance for areas most in need of employment creation, investment and regeneration. For these areas a 20 per cent assistance grant will be available. This includes the Highlands and Islands and various areas in England, Wales and Scotland. Rather than designate towns or cities the government has used ward boundaries (which denote voting areas).   Tier Three assistance for Enterprise Grant Areas where assistance will be available to businesses employing up to 250 people. The aim is to encourage the development of small businesses as these are seen as vital for improving employment and prosperity long term. Once the new Assisted Areas have been agreed by the European Commission, they will remain in force from 1st January 2000 to 31st December 2006. Transport Links for Suppliers and Distribution.

Internet Pornography :: Cyberporn Research Papers

Internet Pornography Material that is reserved for adult use has been widely available to everyone via the Internet. Without any regulation the Internet has remained untouched until a few days ago when the president passed the Communications Decency Act. This law was put into effect to put an end to the problems that have derived from the Internet. The CDA makes it a crime to knowingly send "indecent" material that could be viewed by a minor over a computer online service or on the Internet computer network. To those people who are found guilty of this crime could face up to two years in prison and fines of as much as $250,000. Pornography is still available on then net but when this law is implemented its going to drastically change the Internet as a whole. The law makes it illegal to knowingly transmit obscene or indecent material to a minor. There are some protection to online service providers such as America Online, and Prodigy, whose systems are used for such transmissions. Controlling cyberporn has raised many first amendment questions when the government tries to regulate who controls the flow of that information. Many people seem to think that this is the best way to police the internet without restricting free speech. In my opinion the only reason why pornography on the Internet is such a big topic is because children are now learning to use computers at such a young age that they can find their way to these small group of sexually explicit sites. But in reality these pornographic related sites are only a very small fraction of the millions of sites out there on the world wide web. Their has been a large discussion of proposing a rating system. Their has been a rating system for violence, nudity, sex and language successful with video games and movies. Threw the Recreational Software Advisory Council, hundreds if not thousands of web sites and home pages could be rated and regulated. Their would be no problems with violating constitutional rights if this only leads to making sure that minors cannot get access to this type of information. But, as soon as the federal government decided to tell us what we can and cannot say over the Internet would be considered a violation of my first amendment rights to freedom of speech. One point brought up by author of the article I found in Editor & Publisher "If hard-core pornographic materials are illegal in the mainstream distribution channels, it should be also illegal on the Internet.

Define The Concept Of Culture Essay

‘Culture’ is the ways in which a society lives. A culture may share the same religions, beliefs, values, class or status, a culture can dress in a certain way and act in a way that follows the norms of how their society carries out life and what they deem as acceptable, culture can shared by a large group of people or a smaller group within society. For example there are ‘subcultures’, a subculture is a small group which have different way of life opposed to the majority of society; they may dress, talk and act in a different way. An example of subculture is a religious group, being a part of a religion may mean that people that are part of it dress differently, and have different values and ideas on life and live in a different way to the majority in society. Another example of a culture is ‘popular culture’ this is a culture that involves a large majority, and is highly influenced by the media, for example football is a sport that is frequentl y covered by the media by television, radio, news etc. And is a popular sport with a large following; other examples of pop culture are: pop music, bingo and mainstream fashion. Pop culture has a variety of people from different backgrounds being part of the same thing called a common culture which is shared by the masses. ‘High culture’ is another example of a culture that is shared with people and their families from a ‘higher class’. People that are part of the high culture are wealthy and have an ascribed status or come from a family with an ascribed status, meaning that they or the head of the family worked towards their success/wealth. They take part in activities associated with upper class such as: polo, lacrosse, hunting, and watching arts such as operas, ballets, orchestras. High culture attempts not allow people who are not from the same class or have the same status as them to join in with their clubs and activities this is called ‘social closure’ but this is difficult as more people can achieve super rich lifestyles, buying their way into high culture that may of came from a low class background. Pop culture is known as ‘low culture’ as people from ‘high culture’ are meant to be higher compared to them in class and status, th erefore people from low culture would not be wanted in high culture activities.

‘Everyday Creativity Is Always Dialogical in Bakhtin’s...

‘Everyday creativity is always dialogical in Bakhtin’s sense’. To what extent do you agree or disagree wit this perspective? Traditional definitions of language have often categorised creative activity in the ‘canonical’ literary uses we see in artistic works. However, contemporary definitions no longer confine creativity with language to the work of the novelist or poet. It is a well argued point that the seeds of such literary language reside in what may be described, as the mundane, practical uses of ‘everyday’ talk and writing. This shift in opinion and approach to language study may be largely attributed to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, who developed a social theory of language. Bakhtin’s main argument was that there should†¦show more content†¦For example one student switches to a different language style in order get his own back on a teacher. (2006) Bakhtin would argue that it is exactly this responsive and addressive, dialogic nature of interaction and communication that stimulates creativity in language use, affecting the form and meaning on all levels. (2006) With this in mind, it may seem surprising that this can also be exemplified in what is ordinarily considered to be the very private activity of keeping a diary or journal. Many diaries draw considerably on literary uses of language, such as parallelism, metaphor, rhythm and imagery. Janet Maybin (2006) explains that this use of language may help to express strong emotions in a way that more prosaic language could not communicate as effectively. Maybin relates diary writing to identity work, the literacy process â€Å"..providing a kind of backstage for the self, or a launching pad for an improved self..†.(Maybin, 2006, p.264) She highlights that whilst at one level diaries provide scope for very personal and intimate thoughts, in the writings of a diary †Å".. there is always [..] a sense of addressing someone else†; an absent