Renewing Unilever: Transformation and Tradition [Paperback]

Geoffrey Jones (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0199269440 | ISBN-13: 978-0199269440 | Publication Date: October 20, 2005

Unilever's brands can now be found in one out of every two households in the world. This arresting and impressive fact shows the scope and scale of this unique global corporation. Geoffrey Jones, a leading business historian from the Harvard Business School takes us inside this corporation, which from it's origins in Britain and the Netherlands, has become a worldwide manufacturer of fast moving consumer products. Unilever's operations cover food and home and personal care, and it's brands include Lipton Tea, Hellmann's Bird's Eye, Wall's, Ben and Jerry's, Surf, Domestos, Comfort, Dove, Sunsilk, Pond's, Signal, Axe and Calvin Klein. In particular the book focuses on the evolution of the company over the last half century. Managing such a firm in the era of globalization posed enormous challenges. The book covers the company's strategies and provides compelling evidence of its decision-making, marketing, brand management, innovation, acquisition strategies, corporate culture and human resource management. The author has had full access to corporate archives and executives and provides us with a unique insight into the workings and strategies of one of the world's oldest and largest multinationals.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Unilever is a sprawling business, difficult to describe in 350 pages let alone interpret, and Professor Jones makes a good fist of dealing with the complexity, force-fitting reality into neat chapters without much distortion The Business Economist Overall, this is a very good book and the author lived up to his promise of carrying out independent and critical research about the period between 1965 and 1990 in the history of the company. Technovation ...admirably candid official history Financial Times

About the Author

Geoffrey Jones is Joseph C. Wilson Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School. He previously taught at the universities of Cambridge and Reading, and at the London School of Economics, in the U.K. He is the author and editor of many books and articles on the history of international business, including British Multinational Banking 1830-1990 (OUP, 1993), Merchants to Multinationals (OUP, 2000), and Multinationals and Global Capitalism (OUP, 2005). He is a former President of both the European Business History Association and the Business History Conference of the United States, is co-editor of the journal Business History Review, and editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Business History.

Product Details

• Paperback: 472 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (October 20, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0199269440
• ISBN-13: 978-0199269440
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,601,207 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Geoffrey Jones teaches the history of global business at the Harvard Business School, where he holds the Isidor Straus Professorship, established in 1927 as the first Chair in business history in the world. His most recent book, which is on the history of the globalization of the beauty industry, is Beauty Imagined. He is now researching the history of green entrepreneurship. He lives in Belmont, Massachusetts.