Search for Truth in Edgar Lee Masters

Oftentimes, the poems that are related â€Å"speak† to one another and give the reader efferent perspectives on the same issue. By doing this, the poetic elements of the related poems act to change and contribute to the themes of each other. â€Å"Benjamin Panties† and â€Å"Mrs.. Benjamin Panties† are two poems In the anthology that, when read individually, seem to have separate themes, but when read together speak to each other in an â€Å"argument and response† manner. Through an explication of the two poems, it can be seen that Benjamin Panther and Mrs..Benjamin Panther both feel betrayed, but their differing perspectives change the reader's Initial Impression of sympathy for both characters to one of questioning for truth. The form of the two poems Is free verse In that there Is no strict rhyme or meter. This style Is very beneficial In getting the themes of the two poems across In a very effective way. Free verse works well In getting these themes ac ross because the poet Is not as â€Å"trapped† In a specific form.This develops the themes of the two poems In a much more relatable manner since both poems deal with problems that most people can relate to such as friendship, betrayal, marriage, and loneliness. Adding to this discussion of Masters' style of writing, Emilio Tolerated states that â€Å"halls lines stir up a very human otter, made up of conciseness, hardness, and classic rhythms; he Is clear-sighted, sometimes satirical, always brilliant and direct† (Talented 46).This Is a very Insightful critique, especially In his assertion that Masters' delivery Is very human and direct because this allows the average reader to get Into the mind of the characters and genuinely relate to their themes. In â€Å"Benjamin Panther† the theme Is that companionship Is necessary to live a happy life, even If It Is with a dog, especially when you have a miserable relationship with your wife and there Is no one else to t urn to. On the other hand, the theme of â€Å"Mrs..Benjamin Panther† Is that you cannot always trust people based on what they say and how people perceive them, and It Is wrong to Judge because sometimes seemingly Irrational decisions have a listened explanation. Free verse â€Å"Benjamin Panties† helps to develop the sincerity to his relationship with his dog, Nigh, and shows how he has become indifferent to the world. The free verse acts almost like a letter to the reader trying to express the struggles he faced at the end of his life. This is not to imply that there are not some intentional stresses in the poems.For example, Benjamin Panties says â€Å"our story is lost in silence. Go by, mad world! † (â€Å"B. P. † 12). There is definitely a stress on this last phrase which is important to his argument because it makes his assertion much more resonant and memorable. â€Å"Mrs.. Benjamin Panties† is also written in free verse in what appears to be an outright reply to Benjamin poem. She is very candidly expressing the problems she has with her husband, problems that she notes many people do not see from the surface.This helps to bring up a connected theme among the two poems which is that marriage is more complicated than it seems on the surface and requires insight into the situation of the husband and wife to understand the true nature of a relationship. While the order of these two poems, in the anthology, may not seem that important, it can be very helpful in discerning how the themes speak to each other, and how they are shaped in the reader's mind. It is no coincidence that â€Å"Benjamin Panties† is the first poem because it introduces this character as being someone completely without a human friend and who has given up on life.The line â€Å"our story is lost in silence. Go by, mad world! † (â€Å"B. P. † 12) is very important in showing that Benjamin did not feel that people understood his de speration and that his story is often lost. This leads directly into â€Å"Mrs.. Benjamin Panties† where she contradicts most everything her husband has asserted in the previous poem and says â€Å"all the men loved him/and most of the women pitied him! † (â€Å"M. B. P. † 3-4). Mrs.. Panties is very effectively calling Benjamin argument into question by saying that these concerns for him are false and unjustified.Initially, Benjamin poem seems very sad and the reader takes pity with him until reading the next poem. What Masters has done so well is in setting up the second poem while the previous one is still in the reader's mind. This acts to alter Benjamin theme room one of solitude that is uncontrolled to one of solitude that is brought on by himself as a result of not appreciating his wife. The occurrence of a very similar idea found in both poems, but with different implications, prove to cause conflict among their individual themes.In both poems there is a brief mention of alcohol, but the context in which both are used are completely different. Benjamin Panties says â€Å"†¦ L was alone/with Nigh for partner, bed- fellow, comrade in drink† (â€Å"B. P. † 4-5), which implies that the only friend he had to drink with was his dog, and, once again, makes the reader feel sorry for him. On the other hand, Mrs.. Benjamin Panties points out that she â€Å"loathe(s) the smell of whiskey and onions† (â€Å"M. B. P. † 6), which shows that she saw the alcohol as one of the problems that pulled her and her husband apart.While this may not seem important to the connection of the two poems, it is very significant because it shows that Benjamin fall from glory into solitude could be of his own making. On the other hand, the issue of alcohol in Benjamin poem could alter Mrs.. Pannier's theme because the argument could be made that Mrs.. Panties drove her husband to alcohol because of her failure o be a good wife and constant companion. So, in a very interesting way this mention of alcohol creates a sense of ambiguity in both poems and gets the reader to question to r an Mrs..Pannier's argument, while contributing to the reader's interpretation of both of the themes. In these two poems, Masters uses devices of sound and poetic diction very effectively to set the tone and advance the arguments of the poems. In â€Å"Benjamin Panties† there is both alliteration and a hyperbole in the line â€Å"then she, who survives me, snared my soul with a snare which bled me to death† (â€Å"B. P. † 7-8). A line very similar to this is found in â€Å"Mrs.. Benjamin Panties† as she is Justifying her reasons for being a seemingly bad wife.This constant repetition of the hard â€Å"s† sound turns the alliteration into onomatopoeia that sounds almost like a snake hissing when the poem is read aloud. This sets the very somber tone of the poem which is reflected by Benjamin solitud e and â€Å"loss of soul† which he blames on his wife. In addition to setting this tone, the fact that Benjamin uses these negative words in direct reference to his wife strengthens his argument in the eyes of the reader because they now associate this snakelike sound and deathly scene with the fife's cold attitude towards her husband.An example of how poetic diction helps set tone can be seen in the word â€Å"dingy' used in both poems to express the room Benjamin was forced to live in by his wife. The word implies a very unclean and nasty environment and is used near the end of both poems to leave the reader with a sense of the unclean nature of their relationship. It is significant that the same adjective is used to describe the room in both poems because it implies for Benjamin how bad his life has become, and for Mrs.. Panties how disgusted she was with him to force him to live in such a place.There is a very unique example of irony found in the two poems, which is brou ght out when they are directly compared. Both Mr.. And Mrs.. Panties make mention of the law in their poems, but in very different ways. Benjamin Panties mentions at the very beginning of his poem that he is an attorney at law. This shows that Mr.. Panties has a good education and a clear understanding of the law. Mrs.. Panties also directly mentions the law but in reference to their marriage by stating â€Å"the only man with whom the law and morality/permit you to have the marital relation/is the very man that fills you with disgust† (â€Å"M.B. P. † 13-15). What comes across as ironic in this cross- reference is that Mrs.. Panties names both law and morality as the reasons why she cannot escape the unhappy marriage. Since Mr.. Panties is a lawyer, he can be seen as a man who upholds the law and has to maintain a certain level of moral integrity in his profession. Mrs.. Pannier's assertion against the law and morality could, in fact, be another way of associating bla me to her husband for her being trapped in a bad marriage.Masters' background had a lot to do with the types of poems and themes he dealt with in Spoon River Anthology. Literary critic Stephen Cushman says that Masters â€Å"was cursed with the need to search all his life for the love his mother failed to give him and doomed not to recognize genuine love, since he had been deprived of it in the most fundamental stages of his existence, and we can concur in his Judgment that such a fate would ultimately play itself out in a life involving many women and many wanderings until, his physical energies exhausted, he would end old and alone. (Cushman 162). This description of Masters helps a great deal in giving a deeper meaning as to why he wrote so many poems about unhappy marriages that ended in loneliness. Since he did not experience much love early in his life, these themes to loneliness and blame taunt in the Panniers could be a way tort him to express how he felt. It is very import ant to see that there are other sets of poems in Spoon River Anthology that speak to each other about unhappy marriages through differing perspectives.In the poems â€Å"Lie McGee† and â€Å"Fletcher McGee,† this husband and wife both tell of how one made the other's life miserable. Lie claims that Fletcher took her youth and beauty in life, while Fletcher claims that Lie drained the life out of him during her life and continued to haunt him after her death. Another pair of poems that display this theme of an unhappy marriage and leave the reader to question who is telling the truth is â€Å"Rose Parallel† and â€Å"Mrs.. Parallel. † Rose wants out of his marriage and attempts to get out if by disappearing for a year, but Mrs..Parakeet refuses to get a divorce. Both sets of poems are very similar to the Panniers in the sense that nobody in these marriages can escape their unhappiness in life, and all of them ultimately die very upset with their spouses. T he unhappy marriage of the Panniers does not stand alone in the small town of Spoon River in vying the reader different perspectives on unsuccessful marriages. While Spoon River Anthology contains many pairs of poems that â€Å"speak† to each other, â€Å"Benjamin Panties† and â€Å"Mrs..Benjamin Panties† are two that significantly change the meaning of each other's themes. Standing alone, each poem invokes sympathy in the reader because Benjamin has no human friends and his wife feels trapped in a miserable marriage. Analyzing these two poems together brings out a connected theme among the poems that both Mr.. And Mrs.. Panties feel betrayed, but their differing perspectives change the reader's initial impression and force them to either choose one character's argument or find some middle ground in their quest for the truth.

Just War Theory

War is said to occur when one state declares hostility against another by which it places the people and resources under its authority to enmity against their adversaries as well as their resources (Gardam J, 1993). According to broadminded ed war historian and theorist Jeffrey Rodgers Hummel, there is an implication of the above definition.In placing its people as well s resources to hostilities, each state is in reality declaring war on three phases; first and foremost as to the other state; second as to the people of the other state; and thirdly as to its own dissenting citizens, should they fail to act in accordance with the State’s demand for manpower and resources (Gardam J, 1993).Going by the above definition offered by Jeffrey R. Hummel, just war would comprise that the war should have a just beginning. That is, it must be declared in reaction to violent behavior; the response has to be reasonable and according to the level of aggression, it has to be begun by an appro priate authority in opposition to appropriate enemy; it has to be conducted in proper manner that is justly†¦that is no harming of innocent people knowingly or intentionally (Gardam J, 1993). The war must have a just originThe just war theory asserts that war should originate only if there is violation of rights and only in self-defense. These rights should be individualistic rights as opposed to those that lead to war, for instance breach of a country’s sovereignty on a realistic altitude. Nevertheless, a difficulty arises at once. The fundamentals necessary to judge the justness of the war’s origin for instance, time and relevant information are not often available at the point war is declared.In deciding the idea of German Catholic participating in war during the Nazi period, it was once remarked by a publisher that â€Å"A scientific judgement concerning causes and origins of the war is absolutely impossible today because the pre-requisites for such a judgeme nt are not available to us. This must wait until a later time when the documents of both sides are available† (Allen C, 1966). The war must be a reasonable response As per the theory, it is grimacing for a provoker to be shot whether he acted on purpose or accidentally.While exercising self-defense the level of force utilized has to be proportional to the force used by the aggressor, while the aim of the responsive force should be articulated on the tenets of protection or restitution. Thus, a war with a just origin should have first exhausted all lesser force employment that could have consummated the desired objectives. It becomes crucial to elucidate one idea that the war should be left with the people with, that the state has consigned their rights of defense with.The question is whether States’ declaration of war places all its citizens to take part in hostilities even though a small proportion of them have been aggressed. Secondly, does aggression directed towards those consigned with the right of defense bind all others under declaration of war? If so, the contract appears to be calculated to enhance the level of violence of any differences as opposed to providing protection or restitution. The war has to be declared by a proper authority and against a proper enemy.Under this theory, the proper authority to exercise a right of self-defense against an aggressor is an agent or individual upon whose rights have been violated. Thus, under this heading a state is interpreted to be a proper authority. Here the assumption is that the war is declared against a state that is proper enemy. Just war should have a just ending On the ordinary observation, a just war (precisely since, it is not a campaign) should finish with the reinstatement of the status quo ante. The model case is a war of hostility, which ends justly when the provoker has been conquered, his attack repulsed, the old boundaries reinstated.Conceivably this is not quite enough for a jus t ending: the wounded state might merit compensations from the aggressor state, so that the damage the aggressor's forces meted out (Gardam J, 1993). In considering the atomic bombing of Japan, Was the bombing just? Was it moral? The use of atomic bombs was not meant to be confined to military targets, as these are obviously weapons mass destruction and could not fail to terrorize the civilians. From point of view of justice, discarding the rule that excludes civilians from deliberate attack represented a grave injustice from which the world requires to recover.If the aim was to end the war this could have been achieved without dropping those bombs on civilians (Gardam J, 1993). Appearing in the Nation, an article by Richard Falk titled â€Å"Defining a just war† in issue of Oct 29, he asserted that the war in Afghanistan qualified to be the first just war since World War II (Roberts A, 1993-1994). Although in the issue Falk went on to warn that the justice of the cause could be â€Å"negated by the injustice of improper means and excessive ends†, he did not relinquish his original affirmation.This utterance came from one of the prominent and respected advocates of international peace and justice. How true was his assertion about just war in Afghanistan (Roberts A, 1993-1994)? Interpreting Falk’s position as saying US war could be just, as long as it adhered to the ideologies he articulated, his argument nevertheless was manifestly wrong. First, on the ground that the principles were broken as of the start of the war and secondly, on the dismissal of alternative action that could have solved the impasse through the United Nations.How could this war be justified if the bombings lead to starvation of many millions of Afghanistan’s due inability of aid agencies to deliver their services to the civilians prior to the felling of the first bomb? On the other hand, prior knowledge of humanitarian crisis that could be occasioned by bombing serves to negate it from being construed as just war. First, the war did not meet the criteria of discrimination (not to harm civilians). Secondly, on the proportionality of the force (force should not be greater than the provoking cause), the force employed was greater compared to that of the aggressor (Roberts A, 1993-1994).The war in Afghanistan largely did not meet the criterion of necessity that calls upon force not to be applied if there are other non-violent means available. Before the onset of the bombing, Taliban Ambassador to Pakistan had proposed that they were ready to try Osama bin Laden if America provided evidence connecting him to the attacks in the New York and Washington. Going by the words of this ambassador, it is clear that this war could have been avoided if US offered the evidence they were demanding in order to prosecute the culprit (Mintz A, 1993).In addition, the ambassador had indicated that under Islamic law legal proceedings could begin. Thus, infact tri al could begin pertaining to the raised allegations followed by evidence being provided in court. However, what happened is that Washington refused to offer evidence, declared its demands were not subject to negotiation and started bombardment of Afghanistan (Mintz A, 1993). Whether Taliban’s offer was serious or not, Washington never bothered to follow, conversely going to war faced with such conditions eliminates the criterion of necessity.Vietnam War first assumed the aspect of political dimension with many at last being pressed towards moral arguments. Of course, the war was seen to be completely irresponsible, and one that could not be won. Its costs, even if the Americans were egoistic, were above the normal. The war was fought unjustly since it involved a lot of brutality by the Americans, a factor that was seen by many as the one that led to the defeat. In a war for â€Å"hearts and minds† as opposed to land and resources, justice stands out to be the main aspe cts to victory.Vietnam War served to educate states that there was a need for state to fight justly and to crown it all, justice has become military necessity. Vietnam was the first war that saw the need for emphasizing the jus in belle principle. It enumerated that Wars unpopular at home should not be fought in addition to wars whereby the state is unwilling to commit its resources. As mentioned earlier Vietnam War was based on doubtful justice and the war was fought unjustly, as it irritated the civilian population. By losing the hearts and minds of the civilians led to the loosing of the whole war.Modern warfare requires that there be support from different civilian populations, expanding past the population facing instantaneous risk. Nevertheless, moral regard for civilians at risk is crucial in winning great support of the war. America has in the past-confused just wars as crusades, as if a war can be just only where the forces of good outweigh those of evil. However, as for Ge orge Bush (elder) he appeared to understand that war, is properly a war of armies, a combat between combatants, through which the citizens should be protected.In good faith, there was nothing of a just war in Iraq bombing in 1991. The civilians there were not protected, since there was destruction of electricity networks as well as water purification plants (Mintz A, 1993). Demolition of infrastructure, that is, significant for civilian existence was rampant during the Gulf War. Nevertheless, American approach in Gulf War was due to compromise among what justice would have necessitated. There was no controlled bombing and collectively as opposed to Korea or Vietnam, targeting was far more unlimited and selective.Conclusion Many people acknowledge that we are faced with moral duty to avoid the evils of war. However, this realization poses many difficult questions, when as responsible individuals we witness tormenting injustices for instance, ‘ethnic cleansing’ (Gardam J, 1993). With millions of lives being risked by war, one is bound to consider if war should ever be justified and if so, for what purpose? In answering the above, it is first important to consider principles of just war theory and finally correlate these principles to historical as well as ongoing conflicts.On the just cause, figures like Ronald Reagan are seen to assert that whether in self-defense or defense for others, remain the only classified cause that justifies waging war. There is a need to justify military intervention in secessionist or revolutionary wars. The conduct of war should also be in accordance with the principles of discrimination and proportionality. Civilians should not be directly targeted ad costs of military action should be proportionate to the expected advantages of ruining military targets. ReferenceAllen C. Isbell, (1966). War and Conscience Abilene, Texas: Biblical Research Press, p. 82. Gardam, Judith Gail. (1993) Proportionality and Force in Internati onal Law. American Journal of International Law, Volume 87, Issue 3, 391-413. Mintz, Alex. (1993). The Decision to Attack Iraq: A Noncompensatory Theory of Decision Making. The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Volume 37, Issue 4, 595-618. Roberts, Adam. (Winter, 1993-1994). The Laws of War in the 1990-91 Gulf Conflict. International Security, Volume 18, Issue 3 134-181. Just War Theory The theory of just war is a military ethics doctrine tracing its origin from catholic and Roman philosophy. The Catholic Church in the United States of America was very vocal in the 1960s in asserting the theory of just war especially in their pastoral letter that were released in 1963 known as ‘The challenge of peace: God’s promise and our response. ’ Moral theologians, international makers and ethicists on just war theory maintain that for any conflict to qualify as just it should meet religious, philosophical and political justice criteria.When our eyes are cast back in the history of America, it is true that US has been involved in various wars for example the First World War, the Second World War and Afghanistan war. In the light of the just war theory, was United States ethically right to enter into these wars? This is what this research will mainly focus on. It will analyze the reasons that made US to enter into these wars from ethics point of view using th e theory of just war as the parameter. The paper starts with a short introduction then the main points and at the end there is a conclusion which is basically the summary of the key points.At the very end of this paper is a list of the resources that are used in this research, properly formatted in accordance with MLA formatting style. According to the United States Catholic Bishops, for any military action to be applied to a conflict it must meet four conditions for it to be legitimate. First of all they say that for any military action to be taken, the damage caused by the aggressor must be enormous, specific, grave and lasting. Secondly, it should be used as the last option that is, when all other means at disposal proves to be ineffective or impractical.Thirdly, the prospects of success before entering the war must be high. The fourth and the last criterion is that there should be lesser evils and disorders than the much that the aggressor(s) caused (Evans 4) Generally there are two sets of criteria for determining whether war is just or not. The first addresses the right to enter in the war while the second one is about the conduct of the military in the war. The former holds that the reason for joining the war must be just but should not for used for revenging or repossessing things captured in other words the cause must be just.In comparative justice principle, injustices suffered by one party must exceed that of the other. Again, war cannot be waged by anybody thus can only be waged by a legitimate authority. It is also argued that there must be high chances of winning the war for fighting a losing battle is wastage of resources. Also war should be used as the last resort or when all other methods have failed. Finally the gains of entering the war must be equal to the loss and harms incurred or in short, macro-proportionality must apply.After the war begins, the just war theory holds that any military action should only target specific places and indiv iduals especially the enemies and their strongholds and the condition of proportionality must apply or put in another way, the amount of force to be used must be gauged by the amount of harm caused and that only a minimum force must be put to task for the goal is not to destroy and harm civilians but to correct the mistakes that were done by the aggressor(s) (Evans, 5)According to the just war theory the entry of United States in the First World War in 1917 could be said to have been just this was because the decision to join the war was made by a legitimate body and not by a single individual. The then president Woodrow Wilson asked the congress to convene twice to determine the way forward. It was in order for US to declare war on Germany as it kept on violating all the agreements that had been made for example it violated the agreement that it would suspend all unrestricted submarine warfare.Germany had also tried to entice Mexico to join the war against US on condition that Germ any would help it to liberate itself from the United States. The other reason was that Germany attacked all neutral ships that neared what was referred to as zones irrespective of what they carried. This affected US in that its passengers were killed and the trade network was interrupted. (Coffman 25) In accordance with just war theory, if the harm is long lasting and grievous then the war is just. The same was the case in the First World War where the US was losing its people and property due to German’s malicious activities.Again as per this theory the war was just because it was used as the last option. At first the US never wanted to join the war and was following the policy of isolation. It used diplomatic talks and signing of agreements to shun war but this proved to be futile and the only option that was left was war. This war was geared towards stopping what Germany was doing and correcting the mistakes that were done and was not meant as a revenge but when the war da mage assessment is done, the damage caused by this war was more than what the aggressor had caused thus as per this theory’s principle the war could be said to have been unjust.(Coffman 26) The US entry on the world war II could also be said to be just according to the just war theory because it was declared by a legitimate body in 1941 after Japan attacked US spheres of interest in Pearl Harbor. Though the war was declared by a recognized legitimate body according to this theory it could be regarded as unjust because it was more of revenge than order restoration. The US wanted to challenge Japan which had proved to be a bother in the Pacific region.The harm that Japan had caused as per the just war theory was not grievous, lasting or that big enough to have merited the consequences that resulted. Just war theory holds that the harm caused by the war should not exceed the damage done by the aggressor but in the case of Japan, the war caused enormous damage in fact about 100,0 00 people perished when the US dropped atomic bombs in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. This is a clear indicator that US was not only targeting the combatants and their strategic positions but also targeted the civilians and thus in the light of the above the war was unjust.(Coffman 27) As per this theory the war could be said to have been just because the chances of US winning the Second World War were high although this was later proved to have been a miscalculation for it extended longer than expected and that was why the US was forced to resort to atomic bombs. This war could also be said to be unjust if it is judged the theory’s principle that argues that war should not be used as a means of achieving personal gains and in this case US used it as such.It wanted to protect its interests in the Western Europe nations because it had invested a lot in those countries in terms of loans and war materials and thus if they were to be defeated by Germany then this would have meant losing all that it had invested. (Gaido and Walters) The third war that will be analyzed using this theory is the US entry in the Afghanistan war in 2001. According to this theory, this war was justified in all ways. The war was declared by a legitimate institution that is the US government and was in response to terrorist activities of bombing the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.This was the height of terrorism and that was why the US was forced to act. The war was thus meant to control terrorism but not to avenge. When the issues of damages that were caused by these attacks are assessed, they were enormous that the amount of harm that resulted from this war and for this reason the war was just. As per the theory, the war should be used as the last resort and this is what happened in Afghanistan. The US had tried to use all other methods that were at its disposal and they proved to be ineffective. Terrorism continued to be on the increase despite the measures that were taken against it.The US had tried to hold talks with terrorists asking them to stop their terrorism activities. They kept attacking US citizens and other areas of interest and at this time it was pushed beyond limit and had to act. (Gareau 16) As per the just war theory, there is no need to engage yourself in a losing battle but here the US was confident enough that it would win this war and indeed it won thus on the light of the above, the war could be said to have been just. In conclusion, the just war theory is a theory that is used to determine whether the war is just or not.It holds that the war is just if is declared by a legitimately recognized body, if the chances of winning are clear, if it is for correcting the harms done as opposed to revenge and if it is used as the last option when all other methods have failed. Using it to determine whether US was just to enter in the First World War, Second World War and the Afghanistan war, it is right to justify US entry in the first world war an d the Afghanistan war but using the same criteria its entry on the second war could not be justified. Works Cited:Evans, M. Just War Theory: A Reappraisal. Edinburgh University Press, 2005 Coffman E. M. The War to End All Wars: The American Military Experience in First World War. University Press of Kentucky. 1998. Gaido, D. and Walters, D. Socialist Workers Party/Workers Party Split. The Second World War: What the War is About. 2005 http://marxists. catbull. com/history//etol/document/fi/1938-1949/swp- wpsplit/swpwp01. htm Gareau, F. H. State Terrorism and the United States: From Counterinsurgency to The War on Terrorism. Zed Books, 2004

An Intangible Weight to Carry

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Race Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

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Film Project - Essay Example The discussion below analyzes some important scenes in the two films thereby portraying the similarity and differences in the two. The two films have simplistic yet realistic plots. The last detail, just as the name portrays shows laxity in the operations of marines as an executive officer of the marine sends two petty officers Billy "Badass" Buddusky and Richard "Mule" Mulhall to escort a young convicted prisoner Larry Meadows who is facing eight years imprisonment. The two officers travel from Norfolk Virginia to Portsmouth New Hampshire as they escort the prisoner and put him in one of the most adventurous journey of his life. When they arrive in Portsmouth, the soldiers learn that the executive officer had to cover the detailed paperwork and that the two had not been sent on any mission, at least not according to the paperwork. Coming home, on the other hand, is a love triangle. In the film, Sally is a wife of a soldier, Bob Hyde. When Bob goes on a mission in Vietnam, Sally meets and falls in love with Luke Martin her former classmate and a soldier returning from Vietnam. The story shows the adverse physic al and psychological effects of war on the soldiers as the conflict between the three heighten. The summary of the plots shows some preliminary similarities in Hal Ashby’s works. Both plots show the lives of soldiers. While one can argue that the occurrence is coincidental given the independence of both scripts, Ashby employs similar features in building the legitimacy of the story line. He uses appropriate characters who possess the physique and mental alertness of soldiers. Characters enhance the success of a film. Characters should possess the appropriate traits that help bring out the best in the personality required for every character. In The Last detail, he uses Jack Nicholson as "Badass" Buddusky, Otis Young

Managing with Integrity Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Managing with Integrity - Research Paper Example Steward mangers identify with high moral developments, unlike agents. Consequently, they not only disregard their personal interest, but also forego interest of their organizations to meet people’s needs. They therefore promote welfare of employees and the entire society (Martynov, 2009). This approach to decision making mirrors the concepts of a servant leader in variety of ways that include â€Å"motives and intentions,† â€Å"means and methods,† and â€Å"ends and outcomes† (SanFacon and Spears, 2008, p. 9). The servant leader for example has a self-motivated and automatic desire to serve others and this mirrors the steward-manager’s moral obligation to meet the society’s needs. The drive in a servant leader to develop potentials for rendering services is also similar to the steward-manager’s desire to meet his moral obligations to the society. Similarly, the steward manager’s disregard of organizational interest to focus on the society’s well being is similar to the servant leadership concept that organizations should benefit people instead of exploiting them. A steward manager and the concept of servant leadership also share similar objectives (SanFacon and Spears, 2008; Martynov, 2009). A steward manager would be successful in the global business world because of two factors, the ability to interact with and manage diversity through critical thinking and the moral drive to meet social expectations. While the moral manager is different from the agent manager, morality does not negate managerial skills. The steward manager is therefore able to interact with people in different cultural and ideological frameworks to achieve his or her desired objectives. The gained morality of the manager also facilitates interaction with other members of the society who will be able to identify and respond to the manager’s good social

The meaning of death Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

The meaning of death - Essay Example The meaning of death This means that man’s search for knowledge about death started long time ago and is still, and will still remain to be a big mystery. Different societies have different myths that try to explain what death is, its origin, life after death among other contentious topics raised relating to it. The lack of answers to these burning questions has led to adoption of religion, an aspect that every single person upholds to. Religion in this case plays a major role in defining death as well as life after death even though different people have different religions. Therefore, despites man’s eager to understand death, it still remain to be a big mystery and it appears as if it is a hard nut that shall never be cracked. All man needs to know and embrace is the bitter fact that death is inevitable and all human beings are subject to it irrespective of the victim’s gender, race, economic status, social classes, age or any other difference that one may ever think of. No one can tell when death will catch up with him or her. It can strike anyone, at any time and at any place. Over a long period of time, man has been searching for the truth about death in desperately way. This can be confirmed from various publications and poetic works such as the popular poems like â€Å"I heard a fly buzz† by Emily Dickinson, â€Å"suicide note† by Janice Mirikitani as well as Mary Oliver poem entitled â€Å"when death comes† just to mention a few.

Why is consumption an environmental issue Critical evaluation of the Essay

Why is consumption an environmental issue Critical evaluation of the role of key stakeholders in the UK in the policy debate around consumption - Essay Example In one way or another we have to consume different things in order to survive for example we have to consume food and water, use electricity and fuel (Botsman and Rogers, 2011).  . It is then surprising when we begin to think of consumption as an environmental issue but in reality it has become a big issue with concerns for the environment. Consumption can now be easily referred to as overconsumption because what used to be the normal levels needed for an individual to survive have been surpassed now it has turned into a kind of selfish consumption whereby you take more than you need or larger quantities than required. The population of the earth is drastically increasing; it would not be such a major problem to the environment if the current consumption rate was not so high. With the increase of the world’s population the globe seems to shrink in size and therefore the resources decrease too because of the high consumption rate which is very hazardous towards the environmen t (Daunton, and Hilton, 2001).  ... It is estimated that an average household in the United Kingdom uses up to 1000 gallons of water in a day. Some areas in the UK consume so much water to the point that other places in the UK experience water shortages, the higher the consumption in one area the less it may be for the others because they may have limited access to water. Greenhouse gas emission is a serious concern in regards to the environment. The increase of the production of greenhouse gases leads to the rise of global warming. The ozone layer is meant to protect the earth from the ultraviolet rays of the sun which are harmful, the emission of these greenhouse gases leads to the depletion of the ozone layer therefore this exposes the earth to dangerous ultraviolet rays (Tremblay, 2005).  . The use of aerosol propellants and a certain gas that was used for refrigeration were banned and phased out in the UK due to the fact that these gases are considered as greenhouse gases. The repeated consumption of these gases led to a certain extent of pollution that harms the environment. The emission of greenhouse gases has increased drastically in the UK from around the year 1990 because of the manufacture of short term consumer items but a policy has been enforced to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases by 80% in the year 2050. UK is one of the countries with the highest carbon emission in the world and most of this is carbon emission is man-made. Since 1990 to the year 2002 there has been a drastic reduction in the carbon emission produced in the United Kingdom, this means that the goal set for the year 2050 is actually achievable. The depletion of the ozone layer has also led to the drastic climate changes. During

Adopt Intelligence Community analytic, sourcing, and evaluation Essay

Adopt Intelligence Community analytic, sourcing, and evaluation standards - Essay Example The September 9/11 attacks on America served as an impetus for the inclusion of this initiative in the 100 day action plan. This is because the American intelligence system was unable to communicate effectively in piecing up clues and leads that could prove crucial in stopping the hijacking of the planes, and hence stopping the attacks1.The reason of this failure by the intelligence community emanated from inefficient mechanism put in place for sharing intelligence information collected by different security organizations. There was also a gap in the domestic intelligence community of the state, and this ignited a debate on the need and importance of changing and improving the intelligence capabilities of the nation. There was a call from various stakeholders of the country’s security system, and members of the US senate and congress on the need to reform the way security organizations of the state shared information. On this basis, the attacks of the September 11 contributed significantly to the re-organization of the American intelligence community, and the development of Initiative 2 is part of the re-organization. The main purpose of this re-organization was to reduce the gaps in collecting domestic intelligence. The Federal government did this by creating several security organizations such as the Directorate of National Intelligence, and the Department of Homeland Security. By creating these organizations, the main aim of the reforms was to improve the manner in which intelligence information was gathered, and shared amongst American security organizations2. In initiative 2, its main objective is to develop strategies that will strengthen the collection of intelligent information, analyze it, and there after disseminate information to the relevant stakeholders for action. By doing this, the Federal government hoped that it will reduce the domestic

The influence of mercantile economics on European Colonial Expansion 1500-1800 Essay Example for Free

The influence of mercantile economics on European Colonial Expansion 1500-1800 Essay 1.0  Ã‚  Ã‚   Introduction   The Rise of Europe between 1500 and 1850 was largely accounted for by the growth of European nations which shared their borders with the Atlantic and, in particular, by those that engaged in colonialism and transoceanic trade. Europe was the gateway to the Americas for the Asian traders, and vica-versa. The fact that the economic performance among Atlantic trading nations blossomed due to their access to the Atlantic, is explained by the fact that countries with relatively non-absolutist initial institutions experienced faster growth[1].   Because of this, urbanisation in Western Europe grew significantly faster than in Eastern Europe after 1500 and due in large part to the growth of Atlantic traders (read countries). The process of European growth between 1500 and 1850 was attributed to those countries which had access to the Atlantic, and trade through these Atlantic ports accounted for most of the differential growth of   Europe; Western Europe in relation to Eastern Europe. With trade playing an important part in the economic and social development of most of Europe between 1500 and 1800, Europe witnessed a major revolution- The Price Revolution, starting about the 1520s to the 1630s. This long period, about 120 years in all, saw Europe undergo sustained economic growth and expansion that was marked by: A sustained demographic upsurge, in which European population about doubled By much urbanisation, expanded in scale, by a conspicuous growth of industries By dramatic overseas commercial expansion and colonial exploitation in first Africa, then Asia, the Americas: north and south, with the Caribbean Sea as the focal point A marked monetary expansion, from vast new supplies of both gold and silver from Africa and the Americas (Mexico and Peru), which fuelled an already on-going inflation (begun with earlier monetary expansion) These metals were vitally necessary for Europeans to expand their trade with Asia in particular (Asia being vastly greater in size, population, and economic wealth than the still underdeveloped west European economy), but also the Baltic regions of northern Europe and Russia, as well, where population was markedly too sparse and/or too poor to demand that much in the way of European goods (beyond salt, herrings, beer, woollens)[2]. 2.0  Ã‚  Ã‚   Overview Prior to the 19th century, agriculture played an important role in the lives of the Europeans. There was discrimination between the rich and poor. The poor had to work in the land held by the rich to make a living. There was a long period during which the wage-land rent ratio declined, that implied that there was a rise in inequality. Farmland owners were far closer to the top of the income distribution than were landless workers. At some point in the 19th century this pattern reversed, and wages started to rise relative to land rents, implying a decline in inequality. This pattern soon changed and the traditional link between factor prices and factor endowments was broken some time in the 19th century[3]. It was evident that with trade beginning to grow due to their proximity to the Atlantic, the European nations could not hold back on development. There was also the question of what caused the structural break in wage-rent ratio behaviour? The all important finger pointed to industrial growth; industrial revolutionary forces led to the break in living standards behaviour. Though the exact date or period is elusive, many scholars date the first industrial revolution in Europe from 1760, while some cited this to be from 1780. There were others who disagreed with these views altogether, but everyone were unanimous in their conclusion that, these changes came about due to the technological advance accelerated in English industry about this time (Mokyr 1990; Crafts 1994; Temin 1997)[4]. With trade growing and industrialisation taking place, the two commodities that could be produced simultaneously were: Agricultural products using land and employing labour Manufactured goods using capital and labour Though there were two options to choose from for the poor strata of society of the 1600 and 1700 Europeans, the most appealing aspect for the workers to turn away from agriculture was the sense of freedom and better life. Industries attracted the workers more, and drew them out of agriculture and into the cities, raising wages, lowering rents, and inflating the ratio of wages to rents[5]. Europe is well placed and accessible to the Americas, Asia, and within the whole of Europe itself. This was a distinct advantage that Europe had to encourage the Europeans to bolster exports. This gave rise to industrialisation and pushed trade beyond their borders. Intercontinental trade rose and this influenced prices too. It could be reasoned that trade could have influenced price factors for several centuries before the structural break occurred. However, it turned out that the growth in European overseas trade was not due to global commodity market integration, as measured by a decline in intercontinental price gaps, but rather to shift in demand and supply in Europe, Asia and the Americas (O’Rourke and Williamson 2002a)[6]. It was only in the 19th century that large-scale intercontinental trade became possible in such basic commodities as grain, animal products, coal and manufactured intermediates[7]. 3.0  Ã‚  Ã‚   The Influence Although Europe witnessed some improvements in economic institutions in the late medieval and early modern period, as mentioned earlier, rapid economic development did not begin until the emergence of political institutions providing secure property rights to a broader segment of society and allowing free entry into profitable businesses (North and Thomas, 1973, and North and Weingast, 1989)[8]. Most European countries were under the power of the monarchy. With the rise of political institutions, the power of the monarchy was constrained along with their supporters. The political institutions began to show their strength to control the power of the monarchy, and prerogatives emerged when groups that favoured change, that is commercial interests outside the royal circle, became sufficiently powerful politically. Starting 1500, and more so from 1600 onwards, countries with non-absolutist institutions and easy access to the Atlantic, trade across the Atlantic rose, that enriched and strengthened commercial interests outside the royal circle, enabling them to demand and obtain the institutional changes necessary for economic growth. This was the beginning of the shift from monarchy rule to political rule in these parts. Although profits from Atlantic trade were relatively small in terms of GDP, they were still substantial, and much greater than what was witnessed earlier. By the end of the 17th century, the volume of trade across Atlantic was much larger than that of long-distance Mediterranean trade seen ever before. Those who stood to gain by these initiatives became very rich by 17th- and 18th-century standards in Europe, and were without doubt politically and socially very powerful. What was surprising was that these changes did not take place in countries with highly absolutist institutions, such as, Spain, Portugal, and to a large extent France. The monarchy was able to suppress any political arising and control the expansion of trade. They along with their allies were the main beneficiaries of the early profits from Atlantic trade and plunder; with groups favouring change in the political arena not becoming powerful enough to induce change[9]. The path to development and growth has not always remained the same. The dynamics of accumulation, the agents of expansion, and opposition have not always been the same. There has been a great difference in the various phases of the development of capitalism through this period. We note that different rules and regulations were employed by the European nations in their quest for expansion (Aglietta 1979; Lipietz 1987, 1988). The period 1500-1800 popularly called as the mercantilist phase, trade played a pivotal role in defining the way the European nations concentrated on global mercantile economics. Merchant capital began to ex ­pand on a global scale through state-chartered companies. As Colonial expansionism was the goal of most these European countries, commerce had a big hand in pushing this initiative. The countries in Western Europe accu ­mulated capital through com ­merce, colonial plunder, slave trade, and de-farming. The European traders reached far corners of the globe in their quest and they began to specialize in the production of consumer items such as sugar, coffee, spices, fabrics, salted fish, fur, and later wheat and timber. While the production of consumer items expanded in the colonies, giving way to their colonial expansion, the effects of these measures led to the downfall of other subsistence economies in Europe and the rest of the world. In the industrial phase (1800-1890), the engine of global expansion was the industrial capital of Western Europe. A particularly important feature of this phase of capitalist development was a change in the dominant eco ­nomic discourse from protectionism to free trade and competition. The vic ­tory of the manufacturing class over the landowners and mercantile bour ­geoisie in repealing restrictive trade practices, such as the corn laws in Britain (which meant lower costs of production), marked the victory of the free traders[10]. Note: â€Å"There is a tendency among mercantilist (Krasner 1985) and regulationist (Ag ­lietta 1979) scholars to overemphasize the national dimension by regarding the world economy as a system of interacting national social formations (Aglietta 1982: 6). Although the role of the nation-state in modern societies has been very important, treating nation states as actors having connections with each other and with other organizations in the international arena makes it difficult to deal with social relations that are not between or outside states, but simply crosscut state divisions (Giddens 1990: 67). As some of the twentieth-century nation-states are torn apart by ethnic and religious conflicts, and as new social identities organized around religion or re ­gionalism are emerging, insistence on the nation-state as the unit of analysis will sig ­nificantly limit in our understanding of the political and ideological dimensions of globalization†-Mustafa Koc. The title ‘Atlantic traders’ referred to Britain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain, which were the nations most directly involved in trade and colonialism with the New World and Asia. These nations maintained a rigorous attitude towards trade and expansionism. These countries, because of their proximity to the Atlantic Ocean, traded far and wide, to Asia and Americas. They were very aggressive and wanted to expand their presence around the world and were involved in colonialism-and slavery-related activities as well as trade[11]. The Rise of Europe between 1500 and 1850 is largely due to the Rise of Atlantic Europe[12]. In order to study the influence of mercantile economics on European colonial expansion, Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson used three data series to measure economic development. The three data series were: Constructed estimates of urbanisation based on the urban population of Bairoch, Batou and Ch`evre (1988)[13], which was a comprehensive dataset with information on all 2,200 European cities which had, at some time between 800 and 1800, 5,000 or more inhabitants. This data was then divided by the population estimates of McEvedy and Jones (1978)[14] to calculate urban population growth. The second in this series was to use estimates of GDP per capita from Maddison (2001)[15]. To continue with the research, the estimates chosen were from 1500, 1600, 1700, 1820, and then more frequently. Finally, the third data used was the use of European city-level data from Bairoch, Batou and Ch`evre (1988), to investigate which urban centers were driving demographic and economic growth, and also to contrast the growth of Atlantic ports to other ports and to inland cities[16]. The research was conclusive in determining whether there was a significant growth pattern based on the period 1500 1800. There were significant positive estimates to imply that Atlantic traders started to grow in 1500-1600. The estimates confirmed the positive growth pattern in large effects from the interaction between the Atlantic traders from 1600. These effects become statistically significant after 1750; the effects are statistically significant starting 1700. An important revelation from this exercise was the explicit sign that showed that perhaps the only countries with high growth potential, or those that were going to grow, engaged in substantial Atlantic trade and colonial activity. Belgium, Ireland, Denmark, Germany and Norway, despite having access to the Atlantic, either directly or via the North Sea, are stark representation of countries that did not take a major part in long distance oceanic trade or expansionism[17]. This evidence established a significant relationship between the potential for Atlantic trade and post-1500 economic development, and suggests that the opportunities to trade through the Atlantic, and the associated profits from colonialism and slavery, played an important role in the Rise of Europe[18]. 4.0  Ã‚  Ã‚   Observation We see that the influence of Atlantic trade; the opening of the sea routes to the New World, namely, Africa and Asia, and the building of colonial empires contributed to the process of West European growth between 1500 and 1800 not only through its direct economic effects, but also indirectly by inducing fundamental institutional changes, with Britain and the Netherlands (Duchy of Burgundy) leading from the front. Through their rigorous initiatives in Atlantic trade, both Britain and the Netherlands altered the balance of political power by enriching and strengthening commercial interests outside their royal circles. Through this channel, they contributed to the emergence of political institutions protecting merchants against royal power. The tendency for institutional change to emerge became more evident in societies which already had checks on royal power than in countries with absolutist regimes and monarchy-controlled trade monopolies. Those countries with easy access to the Atlantic and without a strong absolutist monarchy, Atlantic trade provided substantial profits and political power for merchants outside the royal circle. This group could demand and obtain significant institutional reforms protecting their property rights. With their newly gained power and property rights, these merchants took advantage of the growth opportunities offered by Atlantic trade, invested more, traded more, and fueled the First Great Divergence.[19]. Another point of contention in the theory of European colonial expansion was the search for precious metals and gun powder trade. Folasade Ifamose of the University of Abuja contents that, the whole region between the Volta and Niger area was acutely convulsed and destabilised by the direct involvement in the gun and gun powder trade across the Atlantic between 1500 and 1800 by the British, Dutch and Portuguese traders. The desire to capture cities with precious metals as well as those with direct access to the Atlantic coasts directly affected and influenced many of the Atlantic access nation kings to participate actively in the trans-Atlantic trade. The ultimate desire of the traditional rulers was to acquire, among other things, firearms from the triangular trade through the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British[20]. 1590-1621 saw the Dutch swarm out all over the European, Atlantic and Asian seas and established new overseas markets. The Dutch state supported their traders in overseas trading operations and in a decisive movement accelerated the production of more ships to enhance trade and changing market opportunities. Moreover, the build-up of a reorganised army and navy in the Dutch Republic stimulated the growth of a new infrastructure of arms trade and arms production, which provided an important condition for the expansion of Dutch interests overseas[21]. The Sea is the only Empire which naturally belongs to us, conquest is not in our interest, wrote the Englishman Andrew Fletcher in 1698[22]. Few of the great ancient empires relied so much on sea power; Europe used the one resource that gave it an advantage, namely its skill in shipbuilding and navigation, to create something quite unprecedented, seaborne empires[23]. When trading possibilities proved disappointing or local populations proved hostile, Europeans turned to conquest (expansionism), along with forced extraction of resources. Next was the importation of European herds and crops, altering forever the ecological balance of these places. The production of sugar using slave labour, already perfected on Mediterranean isles, was first transferred to the near Atlantic islands and then to the Caribbean. And islands were to remain the preferred destinations for plantation economies for centuries. When one thinks about the expansion of Europe we often conflate an oceanic presence or a bounded presence on an island or a littoral, with continental territorial control, wrote Elizabeth Mancke[24]. 5.0  Ã‚  Ã‚   Conclusion During the period 1500-1800, the world saw the expansion of trade beyond the borders of most Western European nations. Countries like Britain, Spain, Netherlands, Portugal, and France began to explore the other side of the world through the sea. The Atlantic was a convenient way for these European traders to reach beyond boundaries. Their expertise in ship-building helped them establish trading ports in Africa and Asia. However, when the local population of the African and Asian countries began to revolt, the European traders with the help of their respective rulers began to exploit and embark on a conquest policy. This way, some of the Western European nations, including Britain, Portugal and the Netherlands began to show their ascendancy in forging expansionism roles. It was from its mastery of the seas, not land, that Europe experienced its first great economic boom. The wealth accumulated through its archipelagic empires of access found its way back to Europe, partly to be invested in land, partly to capitalise new industrial enterprises that would ultimately overturn the old order of things. By the late eighteenth century the boundary between land and sea became more definite and during the nineteenth century new nation states concentrated their energies on their own interiors. The European plunderers forced many Asian and African peasants to bonded labour and took back with them all possible resources available (John R. Gillis, 2003). 6.0  Ã‚  Ã‚   Bibliography â€Å"Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson†, The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change, and Economic Growth, [electronic bulletin board] May 4, 2004, [cited 27 February 2007] available at econ-www.mit.edu/faculty/download_pdf.php?id=1181 â€Å"O’Rourke Kevin H and Williamson Jeffrey G†, From Malthus to Ohlin: Trade, Growth and Distribution since 1500, [electronic bulletin board] April 2003, [cited 27 February 2007] available at www.tcd.ie/Economics/TEP/2002_papers/TEPNo5KO22.pdf â€Å"O’Rourke Kevin H and Williamson Jeffrey G†, After Columbus: Explaining the Global Trade Boom 1500-1800, [electronic bulletin board] February 2001, [cited 27 February 2007] available at www.tcd.ie/Economics/TEP/2001_papers/TEPNo6KO21.pdf â€Å"Prof. Munro John†, ECONOMICS 303Y1, The Economic History of Modern Europe to1914, [electronic bulletin board] September 2001, [cited 27 February 2007] available at eh.net/coursesyllabi/syllabi/munro/01dutcom.pdf â€Å"Engerman Stanley L†, The big picture: how (and when and why) the West grew rich, Policy Research, Vol. 23, 1994, 547-559, [electronic bulletin board] 1994, [cited 28 February 2007] available at www.compilerpress.atfreeweb.com/Anno%20Engerman%20The%20big%20picture%20Research%20Policy%201994.htm â€Å"Koc Mustafa†, Globalization as a Discourse, [electronic bulletin board] [cited 2 March 2007] available at www.mrs.umn.edu//chollett/anth%203204/Course%20Readings/Globalization%20as%20a%20Discourse.rtf Acemoglu Daron, Johnson Simon and Robinson James, The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change and Economic Growth, [electronic bulletin board] p.6, September 10, 2003,[cited 3 March 2007] available at http://web.mit.edu/sjohnson/OldFiles/www/attach/Rise20%20of%20Europe%20final%20revision.pdf Harvard University, 1999 WP Abstracts, [electronic bulletin board] December 9, 1999 [cited 3 March 2007] available at www.fas.harvard.edu/~atlantic/abst99.html Gillis R. John, Islands in the Making of an Atlantic Oceania, 1400-1800, [electronic bulletin board] 2003 [cited 4 March 2007] available at www.historycooperative.org/proceedings/seascapes/gillis.html [1] Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson, Abstract, p.2, The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change, and Economic Growth [2] John Munro, The Dutch and the Macro-Economic Trends of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, p.2, The Economic History of Modern Europe to1914 [3] Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, 2003, Introduction, From Malthus to Ohlin: Trade, Growth and Distribution since 1500, p.2-3 [4] N.F.R. Crafts, The Industrial Revolution in R Floud and D. McCloskey, The Economic History of Britain Since 1700, Vol.1, Cambridge University Press J Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress, Oxford University Press Temin, Two Views of the British Industrial Revolution, Journal of Economic History, 57 (March) 63-82 [5] Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, 2003, Introduction, From Malthus to Ohlin: Trade, Growth and Distribution since 1500, p.3 [6] K. H.O’ Rourke and J. G. Williamson, After Columbus: Explaining the Global Trade Boom 1500-1800, Journal of Economic History 62 (March), 1-31 [7] Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, 2003, Introduction, From Malthus to Ohlin: Trade, Growth and Distribution since 1500, p.2-3 [8] Douglass C. North and Robert P. Thomas, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History, Cambridge University Press Douglass C. North and Barry R. Weingast, Constitutions and Commitments: Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth Century England, Journal of Economic History, 49, 803-832 [9] Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, 2003, Introduction, From Malthus to Ohlin: Trade, Growth and Distribution since 1500 [10] Mustafa Koc, Phases of Global Expansion, p.266, 13 Globalization as a Discourse [11] Atlantic trade opportunities became available only during the late 15th century, thanks to the discovery of the New World and the passage to Asia around the Cape of Good Hope. This resulted due to a series of innovations in ship technology, pioneered by the Portuguese that changed rigging and hull design of ships and developed the knowledge of oceanic navigation. [12] Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson, The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change and Economic Growth, p.6, 2003 [13] La Population des villes europ ´eenees de 800 `a 1850: Banque de donn ´ees et analyse sommaire des r ´esultats, Centre d’histoire  ´economique Internationale de l’Uni. de Gen`eve, Libraire Droz, Geneva [14] McEvedy, Colin and Richard Jones (1978) Atlas of World Population History, Facts on File, New York [15] Maddison, Angus (2001) The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, Development Centre of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD, Paris [16] Atlantic Trade and the Rise of Europe, Data, p.7 [17] Ch.1.2, Economic Growth in Europe, p.10, Atlantic Trade and the Rise of Europe [18] Ch.1.5 Interpretation, p.15, Atlantic Trade and the Rise of Europe [19] The establishment of political institutions limiting the power of the monarchy must have created positive spillovers on the rest of the economy of the rest of the non-Atlantic British cities, especially on the industrial capitalists, Ch.2.1, The Argument, p.17, [20] Folasade Ifamose, The Indigenous Aristocracy, the Atlantic trade, and the Gunpowder Economy, University of Abuja, Nigeria, www.fas.harvard.edu-1999 WP Abstract [21] Michiel de Jong, The Role of the State in the Expansion of the Dutch Overseas Trade Networks, 1590-1630, Universite it Leiden, The Netherlands, www.fas.harvard.edu-1999 WP Abstract [22] Quoted in Anthony Pagden, Peoples and Empires: Europeans and the Rest of the World from Antiquity to the Present (London: Weidenfeld and Nicoloson, 2001), p. 94. [23] C.R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600-1800 (London: Penguin, 1973) [24] Elizabeth Mancke, Early Modern Expansion and the Politicization of Oceanic Space,†Ã‚   The Geographical Review, 89, nr. 2 (April 1999), p. 227

Customer Relationship Management in Banking

Customer Relationship Management in Banking ABSTRACT Today the world is globalized and customers are well educated and well informed. This has increased the competition among the firms and organisations. The competition elevates the customer bargaining power and switching power to choose the best product and service. Therefore customer relationship has become a focus of importance to all the companies in order to retain the customer as well as maximize revenues. Today marketing is no more developing, delivering and selling of goods and services, it is moving towards developing and maintaining long term relationship with customers. Therefore relationship marketing has making its important in all the business sectors so as in financial services. Customers Relationship Management creates the opportunity through which the banks can benefit by developing good relationships with their customers. The aim of the project is to gain a better understanding how the CRM has benefited both the bank as well as its customers. This research also aims to identify how critically CRM has been practiced in Lloyds Banking Group, analysis the data mining process of Lloyds Banking Group, to find out the customer segmentation procedure of the bank to analysis the customer retaining strategy of the bank, to find out how does the bank measure customer life time value and to verify the relationship between the customers and the Lloyds Banking Group. To validate the purpose of the project has addressed to set of questionnaires, one is for Lloyds Banking Groups employees and other is for customers of the bank. The literature review has also help to understand the answer for the research questions. Both the quantitative as well as qualitative data collection techniques have been adopted namely, survey questionnaire and semi-structure interviews. Some data has also collected through interview of Lloy ds employee and a group of their customers. Lloyds use CRM as an effective business strategy to classify the most profitable customers for bank. And accordingly bank gives priorities those customers through individualized marketing, reprising, flexible conclusion building and modify service-all delivered through a variety of sales channels that the bank use. Researcher has found that Lloyds is conducting a campaign management by using data mining task. This campaign helps to make crucial business decisions by exacting suitable, beforehand strange and ultimately logical and actionable awareness from huge databases. Researcher also has suggested suitable recommendations to the bank to improve the CRM practice in Lloyds Banking Group. 1.0 INTRODUCTION This chapter provides the brief introduction of research. Furthermore, it also discusses the aims, objectives of the research questions and scope of the study. 1.1 TOPIC OF THE RESEARCH Customer Relationship Management of Lloyds Banking Group PLC; A Critical Evaluation 1.2 INTRODUCTION TO RESEARCH Peter Drucker said, â€Å"The purpose of a business is to create customers†. Customer Relationship Management can be the single strongest weapon we have as manage to ensure that customers become and remain loyal. Customer Relationship Management (CRM), is an vital division of modern business organization. CRM concern the relation between the organisations along with its consumers. Consumers are the means of support of any business in a universal business with thousands of workforce and a multi-billion earnings, or a single broker with a handful of standard consumers. CRM is the same in principle for both examples. Globalization and technology improvements have pushed companies into hard competition. In this new era organisations are targeting on managing customer relationships, mainly customer satisfaction, in order to maximize revenues (Constantinos 2003). Today, marketing is not just developing, delivering and selling; it is shifting towards developing and maintaining equally long term relationships with customers (Buttle, 1996). This new business values is called relationship marketing (RM), which has involved significant interest both from marketing academics and practitioners (Gronroos, 1994). The Greek philosopher, Epictetus said that â€Å"what concern me is not the way things are, but rather the way people think things are† (Szwarch, 2005, p.3). The concepts of consumer satisfaction were depending on the thinking of consumer. Research suggests that customer satisfaction, basic concept of relationship marketing, is important in achieving and retaining competitive advantage. Research studies have discovered that retaining current customers is much less expensive than attracting new customers (Desatnick, 1988; Stone et al., 1996; Bitran and Mondschein, 1997; Chattopadhyay, 2001; Massey et al., 2001). The best way to retain customers is to keep them satisfied, a number of studies have shown that customer satisfaction can guide to brand loyalty, repurchases intention and repeat sales (Day, 1984; Swan and Oliver, 1989; Oliver, 1999). Customer retention, in turn, seems to be related to profitability (Oliver, 1999). Relationship marketing is becoming significant in financial services (Zineldin, 1995). If a bank develops and sustains a solid relationship with its customers, its competitors cannot easily replace them and so this relationship provides for a continued competitive advantage (Gilbert, 2003). Moriarty et al. (1983) has suggested relationship concept in the banking sector which states that banks can increase their profits by maximising the profitability of the total customer relationship over time, instead of looking for to get more profit from any single transaction. Perrien et al. (1992) observed severe competitive pressures that forces financial institution to restructure their marketing strategies by developing into long-term relationship with customers. And banking industry purely related to financial services, which needs to create the trust among the people. This research is exploratory in nature and design. The data which is collected is going to be mostly primary data collected from the relevant persons within the bank. The data has gathered from the face to face interviews with the help of structured and semi-structured questionnaire with those persons. The above describe interviews has last 40 (fourty) to 45 (fourty five) minutes (approx). On the other hand the researcher has decided to collect primary data from random interviews of Lloyds Banking Groups customers. Sample size is around 200 customers and of structured questionnaire. But of course this research paper has relied on reviewing the various secondary data available from various researches such as books, magazines, website, previous research and publication etc. The collected data has been analysed by graphs, table and pi chart drawn from Microsoft excel. 1.3 AIM OF THE RESEARCH The aim of the research is to study why CRM is important in bank, how the CRM works in banks and also the effectiveness of Lloyds Banking Group in obtaining long term customer relationship, customer loyalty, and customer satisfaction by the use of CRM. And also suggest feasible recommendations to Lloyds Banking Group to increase the customer satisfaction and market share by the effective use of CRM. 1.4 OBJECTIVES OF THE RESEARCH The followings are the objectives of this research; To study how critically practised in Lloyds Banking Group Analysis the data mining process of Lloyds Banking Group To find out how the bank segments their customers To analysis how the bank retaining their customers To find out how does the bank measure customer Life Time Value To verify the relationship between the customers and the Lloyds Banking Group 1.5 SCOPE OF THE STUDY The scope of the study and research work has limited to Lloyds Banking Group only. This chosen level of aspects has stayed at large in the study so that it can be studied well and analyzed thoroughly to get a deeper understanding. Trying to cover too much ground may lead to a very superficial and confused analysis and may involve long time duration to complete the project work or report. Therefore a specified and narrow down approach with Lloyds Banking Group and an evaluation of its success has comprised with the researchers scope of the study to avoid confused analysis and a weaker report. 1.6 OUTLINE OF THE SUBSEQUENT CHAPTERS Chapter 1; INTODUCTION This chapter provides the brief introduction of the research. Furthermore, it also discusses the aims, objectives of the research questions and scope of the learning. CHAPTER 2; LITERATURE REVIEW This chapter determines the theoretical issues relating to CRM which is relevant to the research. CHAPTER 3; METHODOLOGY This episode discusses about primary and secondary methods of research used by the researcher. CHAPTER 4; CONTEXT Chapter 4 deals with the information about Lloyds Banking Group. CHAPTER 5; FINDINGS This chapter deals with the result of primary data. CHAPTER 6; ANALYSIS Analysis part deals with findings in the context of literature review in chapter 2. CHAPTER 7; CONCLUSION This chapter includes the overall conclusion of the research. This chapter produce the conclusion compared and contrasted with the finding of the research and the literature review. It summarises the aims and key findings and acknowledges the limitation of the works. CHAPTER 8; RECOMMENDATIONS This chapter is the last chapter of the research. This chapter provide the recommendation for the managerial implication in the Lloyds Banking Group. At the end, chapter provide recommendation for the future research. CHAPTER 9; REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY This chapter includes a systematic list of books, web site and other works such as journal, magazine etc which have been used as secondary data or as reference in this research. CHAPTER 10; APPENDICES This chapter contain all questionnaires and some graphs, chart and tables which have been made on the basis of customer survey. 2.0 LITERATURE REVIEW This chapter contains a review of literature relevant to the research. This literature review deals with, about CRM, the history and goals of an integrated banking CRM, the technological factor of CRM, the process cycle in banks, data warehouse technology, data mining process, how to analysis the data, customer segmentation process, communication strategies of bank to the customers etc. 2.1 CUSTOMER RELATIONSIP MANAGEMENT Existing research states that ‘relationships are the base to the successful development and edition of new business viewpoint, though business have taken care of relationships with their customers for many centuries (Gronroos, 1994). Sheth and Parvathiyar, (1995) said that relationships demand much more than mere transactions. Rather, they symbolize strategic and tactical issues based on a new philosophical move that geared in the direction of long-term organisation survival. According to Storbacka, (1994) relationship marketing got popular in 1990s but it has a long history under different names. In its starting, one-to-one marketing appeared in the mid 1990s, which transformed into Customer Relationship Management. Parvatiyar and Sheth gave a static definition of CRM. â€Å"Customer Relationship Management is widespread tactic and process of acquire, retaining and partnering with careful consumers to create better-quality value for the business and the consumer† (Parvatiyar and Sheth 2000, p.6) 2.2 THE HISTORY AND GOALS OF AN INTEGRATED BANKING CRM According to Puccinelli (1999) the financial services industry as entering a new era where personal attention is decreasing because the institutions are using technology to replace human contact in many application areas. Sherif, 2002 advocated that, now global changes brought new trends, directions and new ways of doing business, which also brought new challenges and opportunities to financial institutions. In order to complete with newly increasing competitive pressures, financial institutions must recognize the need of balancing their performance by achieving their strategic goals and meeting continues volatile customer needs requirements. Different ways must be analyzed to meet customer needs. Foss said that banks are highly focusing on CRM for the last five years that is expected to continue. According to Peter (1998) and Chablo (1999) the main goals of an effective integrated CRM solution in the banking sector are to enable financial institutes to; Widen customer relationship through acquiring new customers, identifying and targeting new segments and expanding in new markets. Lengthen the existing relationship developing longer term relationships, increasing perceived value of products and introducing new products and Deepen the relationship with customers initiating the cross selling and up selling opportunities, understanding the propensity of different customer segments to purchase and increase sales. The implementation if CRM system in a bank helps the business organisation to obtain a complete picture of their existing customers, design both customer-oriented and market-driven financial products and services, as well as implement extensive and reliable financial marketing research and efficient campaigns, to achieve and enhance customer loyalty and profitability. The above goals can be achieved through the seamless integration of information technology solutions and business objectives at every process of the bank business that affects the customer. 2.3 THE PHASES OF CRM The main phases of CRM are as follows; Customer selection or Segmentation According to Dave Chaffey (2009), customer selection is defining the types of customers that a company will market to. It means identifying different groups of customers for which to develop offerings and to target during acquisition, retention and extension. Different ways of segmenting customers by value and by their detailed lifecycle with the customer are reviewed. Many companies are now only proactively marketing to favoured customers. Seth Godin (1999), says â€Å"Focus on share of customer, not market share fire 70 per cent customers and watch your profits go up!† According to Efraim Turban (2008), the most sophisticated segmentation and targeting schemes for extension of customers are often used by banks, which have full customer information and acquire history data as they search for to boost Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) through encouraging increased use of products overtime. The segmentation approach used by banks is based on five main basics which in result are covered on top of each other. The amount of options used, and therefore the complexity of approach, will depend on resources obtainable, opportunities, capabilities and technology afforded by catalog. i. Identify customer lifecycle groups When guests use online services then they basically pass those seven or more stages. The organisations have clear these segments and establish the CRM infrastructure to categories customers in this manner; then they deliver focused messages, whichever by modified web messaging or by e-mails that are triggered routinely because of various rules. First-time guests recognized by a cookie placed on their PC. When guests registered, they are tracked through the residual stages. The customers who have purchased one or more products are one particular important group. The key challenge is for a company to encourage a customer to shift from the first product to the second and then go on. Explicit offers can be try to push customer for further products. In the same way, when customers turn into an inactive then the customer required follow-up. ii. Identify customer profit characteristics This is a conventional segmentation which is based on the nature of customer. For Business 2 Business Companies it includes sex, age and geography. It includes volume of the organisation and the type of sector or application, the organisation operates in. iii. Identify behaviour in response and purchase As shown in figure 2.2 through analysis of data base when customer progress through the lifecycle, company is capable to build up a detail reaction and buy history which judges the details of frequency, recency, group of product buy and monetary value. This approach is known as ‘RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary value) analysis. iv. Identify multi-channel behaviour In spite of of the eagerness of the company for online channels, various customers are chosen for using online channels and others customers are chosen conventional channels. This is an degree, be indicated by RFM and rejoinder examination since customers with a preference for an online channel is more reactive and make more use online. Customer who likes online channels is focused mostly by online communications such as e-mail, but when customer like conventional channels is focused by conventional communications such as direct mail or phone. This is known as ‘right-channelling. v. Tone and style preference In a same way to channel liking, customers are respond in their own way to various types of message. Some customers like rational application, in that time a detailed e-mail may work best. On the other hand some customers are preferred an emotional appeal. Companies are test for this in customers or conclude it using profit description and response performance and then expand various inventive treatments consequently. 2. Customer acquisition Processes used to add new customer. According to Turban (2008), customer acquisition refers to marketing activities intended to form relationship with new customers while reducing acquisition cost and targeting high-value customers. Service value and selecting the right path for various customers are essential at this stage and during the lifecycle. The conventional manner to customer acquisition include a marketing manager developing a blend of mass marketing (billboards, magazine advertisements etc.) and direct marketing (mail, telephone, etc.) campaigns based on their knowledge of the particular customer base that was being focussed. Marketing campaign trying to pressure new customers to buy a particular type of diapers, the mass marketing ads might be determined in parenting magazines. The advertisements could also be positioned in more conventional publications whose readership demographics were alike to those of new parents. Customer acquisition is comparatively similar to mass marketing. A marketing manager selects the demographics that they are involved in and after that works with a data vendor to obtain lists of buyers who meet those features. The data vendors have large database holding millions of eventual customers that can be segment based on explicit demographic criteria. The idea of â€Å"similar demographics† has conventionally been an art rather than a science. Usually there are not hard-and-fast systems about whether two groups of buyers share the similar features. Most of the segmentation that took place in conventional direct marketing involves hunches on the division of the marketing professional. 3. Customer retention Dafe Chaffey 2009 said that customer retention refers to the marketing actions taken by a company to keep its current customers. Identifying applicable offerings based on their personal needs and complete position in the customer lifecycle (e.g. purchase value or number) is key. Customer retention strategy aims to keep a high percentage of valuable customers and a customer development strategy aims to boost the value of those retained customer to the organisation. Customer retention is based on customer loyalty. And customer loyalty is the point to which a customer will continue with a specific brand or vendor. Customer acquisition to retain and extend create long-term customer relationship. We need to calculate customer satisfaction, as satisfaction drives loyalty and loyalty drives profitability. This relationship is exposed below; The marketers aim is to push customers up the curve towards the affection zone. But the majority are not in that zone. Marketers must understand to achieve retention,why customers defers or are indifferent. 4. Customer extension This technique is encouraging customers to increase their involvement with a company. According to Turban 2008, customer extension is increasing the range of products that a customer buys from an organisation. Sometime it is referred ‘customer development. Increasing the lifetime value (CLV) of a customer is the main objective of customer extension by encouraging cross-sell. For example a customer of Egg credit card may be offered the loan or a deposit account. There are many of customer extension technique for CRM as follows; Re-sell: same type of products to existing customers-particular vital in some Business 2 Business background as re-buys or modified re-buys. Cross-sell: sell extra products which may be closely related to the original buy. Up-sell: this is mean, selling more expensive products. Reactivation: Customers who have purchased for some time or have lapsed can be encouraged to buy again. Referrals: generating sells from recommendation from existing customers. 2.4 CUSTOMER LIFETIME VALUE MODELLING Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is also an important theory and practise of CRM. But the calculation of CLV is not straightforward. There are so many company, they do not calculate it. According to Dave Chaffey (2009) â€Å"Lifetime value is the total net benefits that a customer or group of customers will provide a company over their total relationship with the company†. CLV is based on estimating the income and costs related with each customer over a phase of time and then calculating the net present value in present monetary terms using a discount rate value applied over the stage. Efraim Turban (2006) said there is various scale of complexity in calculating LTC. Those are exposed in figure 2.6. Option 1 is a realistic way or estimated proxy for future LTV, but the true LTV is the future value of the customer at individual level. CLV modelling at a segment level 4 is crucial within marketing since it answers the question; How much can I afford to invest in acquiring a new customer? Lifetime value analysis helps marketers to: Create the true value of a companys customer base Recognize and compare crucial target segment Calculate the effectiveness of another customer retention strategy Plan and calculate investment in customer acquisition programmes Make decisions about product and offers Figure 2.7 gives an example of how LTV can be used to develop a CRM strategy for different customer groups. There are 4 (four) main types of customers are indicated by their present and future value as bronze, silver, gold and platinum. Separate customers groupings (circles) are recognized according to their current value (as indicated by current profitability) and future value as indicated by CLV calculation. Every group will have a customer segmentation based on their demographics. Therefore this is used for customer selection. Within the four main value groupings, there are various strategies are developed for various customer groups. Few bronze customers such as group A and B practically do not have development potential and are usually unprofitable, therefore the objective is to reduce costs in communications and if they do not stay as customers this is acceptable. Some bronze customers like group C may have potential for growth; therefore for group C the strategy is to extend their purchases. Silver customers are focused with customer extension offer and gold customers are extended. Platinum customers are the best customers; therefore the communication is very important with these customers. 2.5 THE TECHNOLOGICAL FACTORS OF CRM According to Davenport and Short, (1990); Porter, (1987) ‘information technology is an enabler to thoroughly redesign business process to achieve improvements in organisational performance. ‘Information Technology help helps a business process by facilitating changes to job practices and establishing new techniques to link a customer with organisations, suppliers and stakeholders (Hammer and Champy, 1993). Eckerson and Watson (2000) advocated that ‘CRM take full advantage of technology to collect and analyze data on customer patters, expand predictive models, interpret customer behaviour, proper respond with communications, and deliver product and service to individual customers. By using technology a business can generate a 360 degree view of consumers to find out from past interactions to optimize future ones. Peppard (2000) said that ‘the leading factors in CRM development are improvement in set of connections communications, client/server compute, and business cleverness application. CRM collect, store, maintain and distribute customer knowledge all over the organisation. The effectual management of information has a vital role to play in CRM. In the case of scheming customer duration importance, consolidated view, product tailoring and facility improvement, the information is essential. Along with data warehouses, enterprise resource planning (ERP) organization and the internet are the vital infrastructures to CRM application. Fickel (1999) said ‘CRM application links front office (e.g. marketing, sales and customer service) and back office (e.g. financial, logistics, operations and human resources) functions with the businesses customer contact point. A companys touch point is â€Å"all of the communication, human and physical interactions your customers experience during their relationship lifecycle with your organisation. Whether an commercial, Web-site, sales individual, store or office, finger points are vital because customers from perceptions of your organisation and brand based on their cumulative experiences† (Source; http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/4508.imc at 16/10/2009 on 15:25) According to Eckerson and Watson (2000), ‘CRM integrated touch points is something like a common view of the customer. A separate information systems controlled these touch points. Figure 2.8 demonstrates the correlation between customer touch point with back and front office operations Peppers and Rogres, (1999) said ‘In many companies, CRM is just a technology solution that extends divide databases and sales force automation tools to link sales and marketing functions in order to develop targeting efforts. On the other hand some organisations consider CRM as a tool that is exclusively designed for one-to-one relationship. According to Goldenberg (2000) ‘CRM is not just a tools application for sales, marketing and service, but when CRM completely and successfully implemented, customer-driven, a cross-functional, technology-integrated commerce process management scheme that improves relationships and encompasses the whole organisation. 2.6 DATA WAREHOUSE TECHNOLOGY According to Watson (2000) ‘data warehouse is a tools of information technology management that helps business decision makers to instant access of information of customer data throughout the organisation by combining all database and operational systems like sales and transaction, human resource, inventory, purchasing, financial and marketing system. Data warehouse pull out, clean, convert and manage large volumes of data from various systems and creating a historical record of all customer. Data warehousing technology is the most crucial part of CRM because it makes CRM possible. Shepard et al. (1998) said ‘a better understanding of customer behaviour is possible because data warehousing technology consolidates correlates and convert customer data into customer intelligence. Thoughts of customers and their buying pattern can improve information relating to customer service interactions, bill and account status, back orders, product returns, product delivery, and internal operating cost. The capacity of a data storehouse to store hundreds and thousands of gigabytes of data compose an analysis feasible as well as immediate. Organisational benefits with a data warehouse are as follows; exact and faster access of information bad and duplicate data eliminate by quality data and filtering customer profiling and retention modelling it compute total present importance and approximate future value of every customer it gives detail report 2.7 DATA MINING TECHNOLOGY Peppers and Rogres, (1999) said that ‘the first analytical step of data mining is to describe the data. Data mining summarize its statistical attributes like standard deviations and means, visually review it by use of charts and graphs and distributes the value of the field in our data. But alone data description can not provide an action plan. We have to build a analytical model based on pattern determined from known output and after that we have to test the model on result outside the original sample. An ideal model must never be puzzled with reality, but it is useful guide to understanding our businesses. According to Eckerson and Watson (2000) ‘we can use data mining for both classification and regression problems. In first problem we can predict what type something will fall into. In second problems we are predicting a number like prospect that a person will react to an recommend. In CRM process, data mining is often used to allocate a score to a particular customer. Data mining is also often using to recognize a set of characteristics, which is called profile. Data mining segments customers in to groups with similar behaviour like purchasing a particular product. 2.8 THE CRM PROCESS CYCLE IN BANKS Pound (2000) said that exploration and alteration process should be done by the banks on basis of customer information captured; this shows the full value of CRM initiatives. Banks set up a closed CRM cycle with the help of an integrated CRM solution, which composed of a set of continuous iterative process. It manages the whole customer related process for bank, analysing customer profile, customer data and life time value, which is helping to making marketing decision and optimizing the execution of marketing campaigns, customer service strategies and sales strategies across various channels during the bank. According to Professor Constantin Zopounidis (2002) CRM process cycle is based on a generic business view. It presents a continuous improvement of value between customers and banks across touch points. Pound 2000 said that ‘recent banking data sources are extremely heterogeneous. Geographic information is dispersed due to continual acquisitions, mergers and reorganizations. For example a bank might use web site, ATMs, e-mail, sales, call centres and marketing automation applications that must be integrated in a unified environment of CRM banking. An effective multi-channels customer interface will not be possible without a centrally integrated warehouse driving the entire CRM process cycle. This should be update real time. The historical data should be recorded by it, which is used to create propensity models and customer life time value models to recognize past behaviour and action in order to take future marketing strategy. 2.9 CUSTOMER DATA COLLECTION Kristin Anderson Carol Kerr (2002), said that in banki Customer Relationship Management in Banking Customer Relationship Management in Banking ABSTRACT Today the world is globalized and customers are well educated and well informed. This has increased the competition among the firms and organisations. The competition elevates the customer bargaining power and switching power to choose the best product and service. Therefore customer relationship has become a focus of importance to all the companies in order to retain the customer as well as maximize revenues. Today marketing is no more developing, delivering and selling of goods and services, it is moving towards developing and maintaining long term relationship with customers. Therefore relationship marketing has making its important in all the business sectors so as in financial services. Customers Relationship Management creates the opportunity through which the banks can benefit by developing good relationships with their customers. The aim of the project is to gain a better understanding how the CRM has benefited both the bank as well as its customers. This research also aims to identify how critically CRM has been practiced in Lloyds Banking Group, analysis the data mining process of Lloyds Banking Group, to find out the customer segmentation procedure of the bank to analysis the customer retaining strategy of the bank, to find out how does the bank measure customer life time value and to verify the relationship between the customers and the Lloyds Banking Group. To validate the purpose of the project has addressed to set of questionnaires, one is for Lloyds Banking Groups employees and other is for customers of the bank. The literature review has also help to understand the answer for the research questions. Both the quantitative as well as qualitative data collection techniques have been adopted namely, survey questionnaire and semi-structure interviews. Some data has also collected through interview of Lloy ds employee and a group of their customers. Lloyds use CRM as an effective business strategy to classify the most profitable customers for bank. And accordingly bank gives priorities those customers through individualized marketing, reprising, flexible conclusion building and modify service-all delivered through a variety of sales channels that the bank use. Researcher has found that Lloyds is conducting a campaign management by using data mining task. This campaign helps to make crucial business decisions by exacting suitable, beforehand strange and ultimately logical and actionable awareness from huge databases. Researcher also has suggested suitable recommendations to the bank to improve the CRM practice in Lloyds Banking Group. 1.0 INTRODUCTION This chapter provides the brief introduction of research. Furthermore, it also discusses the aims, objectives of the research questions and scope of the study. 1.1 TOPIC OF THE RESEARCH Customer Relationship Management of Lloyds Banking Group PLC; A Critical Evaluation 1.2 INTRODUCTION TO RESEARCH Peter Drucker said, â€Å"The purpose of a business is to create customers†. Customer Relationship Management can be the single strongest weapon we have as manage to ensure that customers become and remain loyal. Customer Relationship Management (CRM), is an vital division of modern business organization. CRM concern the relation between the organisations along with its consumers. Consumers are the means of support of any business in a universal business with thousands of workforce and a multi-billion earnings, or a single broker with a handful of standard consumers. CRM is the same in principle for both examples. Globalization and technology improvements have pushed companies into hard competition. In this new era organisations are targeting on managing customer relationships, mainly customer satisfaction, in order to maximize revenues (Constantinos 2003). Today, marketing is not just developing, delivering and selling; it is shifting towards developing and maintaining equally long term relationships with customers (Buttle, 1996). This new business values is called relationship marketing (RM), which has involved significant interest both from marketing academics and practitioners (Gronroos, 1994). The Greek philosopher, Epictetus said that â€Å"what concern me is not the way things are, but rather the way people think things are† (Szwarch, 2005, p.3). The concepts of consumer satisfaction were depending on the thinking of consumer. Research suggests that customer satisfaction, basic concept of relationship marketing, is important in achieving and retaining competitive advantage. Research studies have discovered that retaining current customers is much less expensive than attracting new customers (Desatnick, 1988; Stone et al., 1996; Bitran and Mondschein, 1997; Chattopadhyay, 2001; Massey et al., 2001). The best way to retain customers is to keep them satisfied, a number of studies have shown that customer satisfaction can guide to brand loyalty, repurchases intention and repeat sales (Day, 1984; Swan and Oliver, 1989; Oliver, 1999). Customer retention, in turn, seems to be related to profitability (Oliver, 1999). Relationship marketing is becoming significant in financial services (Zineldin, 1995). If a bank develops and sustains a solid relationship with its customers, its competitors cannot easily replace them and so this relationship provides for a continued competitive advantage (Gilbert, 2003). Moriarty et al. (1983) has suggested relationship concept in the banking sector which states that banks can increase their profits by maximising the profitability of the total customer relationship over time, instead of looking for to get more profit from any single transaction. Perrien et al. (1992) observed severe competitive pressures that forces financial institution to restructure their marketing strategies by developing into long-term relationship with customers. And banking industry purely related to financial services, which needs to create the trust among the people. This research is exploratory in nature and design. The data which is collected is going to be mostly primary data collected from the relevant persons within the bank. The data has gathered from the face to face interviews with the help of structured and semi-structured questionnaire with those persons. The above describe interviews has last 40 (fourty) to 45 (fourty five) minutes (approx). On the other hand the researcher has decided to collect primary data from random interviews of Lloyds Banking Groups customers. Sample size is around 200 customers and of structured questionnaire. But of course this research paper has relied on reviewing the various secondary data available from various researches such as books, magazines, website, previous research and publication etc. The collected data has been analysed by graphs, table and pi chart drawn from Microsoft excel. 1.3 AIM OF THE RESEARCH The aim of the research is to study why CRM is important in bank, how the CRM works in banks and also the effectiveness of Lloyds Banking Group in obtaining long term customer relationship, customer loyalty, and customer satisfaction by the use of CRM. And also suggest feasible recommendations to Lloyds Banking Group to increase the customer satisfaction and market share by the effective use of CRM. 1.4 OBJECTIVES OF THE RESEARCH The followings are the objectives of this research; To study how critically practised in Lloyds Banking Group Analysis the data mining process of Lloyds Banking Group To find out how the bank segments their customers To analysis how the bank retaining their customers To find out how does the bank measure customer Life Time Value To verify the relationship between the customers and the Lloyds Banking Group 1.5 SCOPE OF THE STUDY The scope of the study and research work has limited to Lloyds Banking Group only. This chosen level of aspects has stayed at large in the study so that it can be studied well and analyzed thoroughly to get a deeper understanding. Trying to cover too much ground may lead to a very superficial and confused analysis and may involve long time duration to complete the project work or report. Therefore a specified and narrow down approach with Lloyds Banking Group and an evaluation of its success has comprised with the researchers scope of the study to avoid confused analysis and a weaker report. 1.6 OUTLINE OF THE SUBSEQUENT CHAPTERS Chapter 1; INTODUCTION This chapter provides the brief introduction of the research. Furthermore, it also discusses the aims, objectives of the research questions and scope of the learning. CHAPTER 2; LITERATURE REVIEW This chapter determines the theoretical issues relating to CRM which is relevant to the research. CHAPTER 3; METHODOLOGY This episode discusses about primary and secondary methods of research used by the researcher. CHAPTER 4; CONTEXT Chapter 4 deals with the information about Lloyds Banking Group. CHAPTER 5; FINDINGS This chapter deals with the result of primary data. CHAPTER 6; ANALYSIS Analysis part deals with findings in the context of literature review in chapter 2. CHAPTER 7; CONCLUSION This chapter includes the overall conclusion of the research. This chapter produce the conclusion compared and contrasted with the finding of the research and the literature review. It summarises the aims and key findings and acknowledges the limitation of the works. CHAPTER 8; RECOMMENDATIONS This chapter is the last chapter of the research. This chapter provide the recommendation for the managerial implication in the Lloyds Banking Group. At the end, chapter provide recommendation for the future research. CHAPTER 9; REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY This chapter includes a systematic list of books, web site and other works such as journal, magazine etc which have been used as secondary data or as reference in this research. CHAPTER 10; APPENDICES This chapter contain all questionnaires and some graphs, chart and tables which have been made on the basis of customer survey. 2.0 LITERATURE REVIEW This chapter contains a review of literature relevant to the research. This literature review deals with, about CRM, the history and goals of an integrated banking CRM, the technological factor of CRM, the process cycle in banks, data warehouse technology, data mining process, how to analysis the data, customer segmentation process, communication strategies of bank to the customers etc. 2.1 CUSTOMER RELATIONSIP MANAGEMENT Existing research states that ‘relationships are the base to the successful development and edition of new business viewpoint, though business have taken care of relationships with their customers for many centuries (Gronroos, 1994). Sheth and Parvathiyar, (1995) said that relationships demand much more than mere transactions. Rather, they symbolize strategic and tactical issues based on a new philosophical move that geared in the direction of long-term organisation survival. According to Storbacka, (1994) relationship marketing got popular in 1990s but it has a long history under different names. In its starting, one-to-one marketing appeared in the mid 1990s, which transformed into Customer Relationship Management. Parvatiyar and Sheth gave a static definition of CRM. â€Å"Customer Relationship Management is widespread tactic and process of acquire, retaining and partnering with careful consumers to create better-quality value for the business and the consumer† (Parvatiyar and Sheth 2000, p.6) 2.2 THE HISTORY AND GOALS OF AN INTEGRATED BANKING CRM According to Puccinelli (1999) the financial services industry as entering a new era where personal attention is decreasing because the institutions are using technology to replace human contact in many application areas. Sherif, 2002 advocated that, now global changes brought new trends, directions and new ways of doing business, which also brought new challenges and opportunities to financial institutions. In order to complete with newly increasing competitive pressures, financial institutions must recognize the need of balancing their performance by achieving their strategic goals and meeting continues volatile customer needs requirements. Different ways must be analyzed to meet customer needs. Foss said that banks are highly focusing on CRM for the last five years that is expected to continue. According to Peter (1998) and Chablo (1999) the main goals of an effective integrated CRM solution in the banking sector are to enable financial institutes to; Widen customer relationship through acquiring new customers, identifying and targeting new segments and expanding in new markets. Lengthen the existing relationship developing longer term relationships, increasing perceived value of products and introducing new products and Deepen the relationship with customers initiating the cross selling and up selling opportunities, understanding the propensity of different customer segments to purchase and increase sales. The implementation if CRM system in a bank helps the business organisation to obtain a complete picture of their existing customers, design both customer-oriented and market-driven financial products and services, as well as implement extensive and reliable financial marketing research and efficient campaigns, to achieve and enhance customer loyalty and profitability. The above goals can be achieved through the seamless integration of information technology solutions and business objectives at every process of the bank business that affects the customer. 2.3 THE PHASES OF CRM The main phases of CRM are as follows; Customer selection or Segmentation According to Dave Chaffey (2009), customer selection is defining the types of customers that a company will market to. It means identifying different groups of customers for which to develop offerings and to target during acquisition, retention and extension. Different ways of segmenting customers by value and by their detailed lifecycle with the customer are reviewed. Many companies are now only proactively marketing to favoured customers. Seth Godin (1999), says â€Å"Focus on share of customer, not market share fire 70 per cent customers and watch your profits go up!† According to Efraim Turban (2008), the most sophisticated segmentation and targeting schemes for extension of customers are often used by banks, which have full customer information and acquire history data as they search for to boost Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) through encouraging increased use of products overtime. The segmentation approach used by banks is based on five main basics which in result are covered on top of each other. The amount of options used, and therefore the complexity of approach, will depend on resources obtainable, opportunities, capabilities and technology afforded by catalog. i. Identify customer lifecycle groups When guests use online services then they basically pass those seven or more stages. The organisations have clear these segments and establish the CRM infrastructure to categories customers in this manner; then they deliver focused messages, whichever by modified web messaging or by e-mails that are triggered routinely because of various rules. First-time guests recognized by a cookie placed on their PC. When guests registered, they are tracked through the residual stages. The customers who have purchased one or more products are one particular important group. The key challenge is for a company to encourage a customer to shift from the first product to the second and then go on. Explicit offers can be try to push customer for further products. In the same way, when customers turn into an inactive then the customer required follow-up. ii. Identify customer profit characteristics This is a conventional segmentation which is based on the nature of customer. For Business 2 Business Companies it includes sex, age and geography. It includes volume of the organisation and the type of sector or application, the organisation operates in. iii. Identify behaviour in response and purchase As shown in figure 2.2 through analysis of data base when customer progress through the lifecycle, company is capable to build up a detail reaction and buy history which judges the details of frequency, recency, group of product buy and monetary value. This approach is known as ‘RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary value) analysis. iv. Identify multi-channel behaviour In spite of of the eagerness of the company for online channels, various customers are chosen for using online channels and others customers are chosen conventional channels. This is an degree, be indicated by RFM and rejoinder examination since customers with a preference for an online channel is more reactive and make more use online. Customer who likes online channels is focused mostly by online communications such as e-mail, but when customer like conventional channels is focused by conventional communications such as direct mail or phone. This is known as ‘right-channelling. v. Tone and style preference In a same way to channel liking, customers are respond in their own way to various types of message. Some customers like rational application, in that time a detailed e-mail may work best. On the other hand some customers are preferred an emotional appeal. Companies are test for this in customers or conclude it using profit description and response performance and then expand various inventive treatments consequently. 2. Customer acquisition Processes used to add new customer. According to Turban (2008), customer acquisition refers to marketing activities intended to form relationship with new customers while reducing acquisition cost and targeting high-value customers. Service value and selecting the right path for various customers are essential at this stage and during the lifecycle. The conventional manner to customer acquisition include a marketing manager developing a blend of mass marketing (billboards, magazine advertisements etc.) and direct marketing (mail, telephone, etc.) campaigns based on their knowledge of the particular customer base that was being focussed. Marketing campaign trying to pressure new customers to buy a particular type of diapers, the mass marketing ads might be determined in parenting magazines. The advertisements could also be positioned in more conventional publications whose readership demographics were alike to those of new parents. Customer acquisition is comparatively similar to mass marketing. A marketing manager selects the demographics that they are involved in and after that works with a data vendor to obtain lists of buyers who meet those features. The data vendors have large database holding millions of eventual customers that can be segment based on explicit demographic criteria. The idea of â€Å"similar demographics† has conventionally been an art rather than a science. Usually there are not hard-and-fast systems about whether two groups of buyers share the similar features. Most of the segmentation that took place in conventional direct marketing involves hunches on the division of the marketing professional. 3. Customer retention Dafe Chaffey 2009 said that customer retention refers to the marketing actions taken by a company to keep its current customers. Identifying applicable offerings based on their personal needs and complete position in the customer lifecycle (e.g. purchase value or number) is key. Customer retention strategy aims to keep a high percentage of valuable customers and a customer development strategy aims to boost the value of those retained customer to the organisation. Customer retention is based on customer loyalty. And customer loyalty is the point to which a customer will continue with a specific brand or vendor. Customer acquisition to retain and extend create long-term customer relationship. We need to calculate customer satisfaction, as satisfaction drives loyalty and loyalty drives profitability. This relationship is exposed below; The marketers aim is to push customers up the curve towards the affection zone. But the majority are not in that zone. Marketers must understand to achieve retention,why customers defers or are indifferent. 4. Customer extension This technique is encouraging customers to increase their involvement with a company. According to Turban 2008, customer extension is increasing the range of products that a customer buys from an organisation. Sometime it is referred ‘customer development. Increasing the lifetime value (CLV) of a customer is the main objective of customer extension by encouraging cross-sell. For example a customer of Egg credit card may be offered the loan or a deposit account. There are many of customer extension technique for CRM as follows; Re-sell: same type of products to existing customers-particular vital in some Business 2 Business background as re-buys or modified re-buys. Cross-sell: sell extra products which may be closely related to the original buy. Up-sell: this is mean, selling more expensive products. Reactivation: Customers who have purchased for some time or have lapsed can be encouraged to buy again. Referrals: generating sells from recommendation from existing customers. 2.4 CUSTOMER LIFETIME VALUE MODELLING Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is also an important theory and practise of CRM. But the calculation of CLV is not straightforward. There are so many company, they do not calculate it. According to Dave Chaffey (2009) â€Å"Lifetime value is the total net benefits that a customer or group of customers will provide a company over their total relationship with the company†. CLV is based on estimating the income and costs related with each customer over a phase of time and then calculating the net present value in present monetary terms using a discount rate value applied over the stage. Efraim Turban (2006) said there is various scale of complexity in calculating LTC. Those are exposed in figure 2.6. Option 1 is a realistic way or estimated proxy for future LTV, but the true LTV is the future value of the customer at individual level. CLV modelling at a segment level 4 is crucial within marketing since it answers the question; How much can I afford to invest in acquiring a new customer? Lifetime value analysis helps marketers to: Create the true value of a companys customer base Recognize and compare crucial target segment Calculate the effectiveness of another customer retention strategy Plan and calculate investment in customer acquisition programmes Make decisions about product and offers Figure 2.7 gives an example of how LTV can be used to develop a CRM strategy for different customer groups. There are 4 (four) main types of customers are indicated by their present and future value as bronze, silver, gold and platinum. Separate customers groupings (circles) are recognized according to their current value (as indicated by current profitability) and future value as indicated by CLV calculation. Every group will have a customer segmentation based on their demographics. Therefore this is used for customer selection. Within the four main value groupings, there are various strategies are developed for various customer groups. Few bronze customers such as group A and B practically do not have development potential and are usually unprofitable, therefore the objective is to reduce costs in communications and if they do not stay as customers this is acceptable. Some bronze customers like group C may have potential for growth; therefore for group C the strategy is to extend their purchases. Silver customers are focused with customer extension offer and gold customers are extended. Platinum customers are the best customers; therefore the communication is very important with these customers. 2.5 THE TECHNOLOGICAL FACTORS OF CRM According to Davenport and Short, (1990); Porter, (1987) ‘information technology is an enabler to thoroughly redesign business process to achieve improvements in organisational performance. ‘Information Technology help helps a business process by facilitating changes to job practices and establishing new techniques to link a customer with organisations, suppliers and stakeholders (Hammer and Champy, 1993). Eckerson and Watson (2000) advocated that ‘CRM take full advantage of technology to collect and analyze data on customer patters, expand predictive models, interpret customer behaviour, proper respond with communications, and deliver product and service to individual customers. By using technology a business can generate a 360 degree view of consumers to find out from past interactions to optimize future ones. Peppard (2000) said that ‘the leading factors in CRM development are improvement in set of connections communications, client/server compute, and business cleverness application. CRM collect, store, maintain and distribute customer knowledge all over the organisation. The effectual management of information has a vital role to play in CRM. In the case of scheming customer duration importance, consolidated view, product tailoring and facility improvement, the information is essential. Along with data warehouses, enterprise resource planning (ERP) organization and the internet are the vital infrastructures to CRM application. Fickel (1999) said ‘CRM application links front office (e.g. marketing, sales and customer service) and back office (e.g. financial, logistics, operations and human resources) functions with the businesses customer contact point. A companys touch point is â€Å"all of the communication, human and physical interactions your customers experience during their relationship lifecycle with your organisation. Whether an commercial, Web-site, sales individual, store or office, finger points are vital because customers from perceptions of your organisation and brand based on their cumulative experiences† (Source; http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/4508.imc at 16/10/2009 on 15:25) According to Eckerson and Watson (2000), ‘CRM integrated touch points is something like a common view of the customer. A separate information systems controlled these touch points. Figure 2.8 demonstrates the correlation between customer touch point with back and front office operations Peppers and Rogres, (1999) said ‘In many companies, CRM is just a technology solution that extends divide databases and sales force automation tools to link sales and marketing functions in order to develop targeting efforts. On the other hand some organisations consider CRM as a tool that is exclusively designed for one-to-one relationship. According to Goldenberg (2000) ‘CRM is not just a tools application for sales, marketing and service, but when CRM completely and successfully implemented, customer-driven, a cross-functional, technology-integrated commerce process management scheme that improves relationships and encompasses the whole organisation. 2.6 DATA WAREHOUSE TECHNOLOGY According to Watson (2000) ‘data warehouse is a tools of information technology management that helps business decision makers to instant access of information of customer data throughout the organisation by combining all database and operational systems like sales and transaction, human resource, inventory, purchasing, financial and marketing system. Data warehouse pull out, clean, convert and manage large volumes of data from various systems and creating a historical record of all customer. Data warehousing technology is the most crucial part of CRM because it makes CRM possible. Shepard et al. (1998) said ‘a better understanding of customer behaviour is possible because data warehousing technology consolidates correlates and convert customer data into customer intelligence. Thoughts of customers and their buying pattern can improve information relating to customer service interactions, bill and account status, back orders, product returns, product delivery, and internal operating cost. The capacity of a data storehouse to store hundreds and thousands of gigabytes of data compose an analysis feasible as well as immediate. Organisational benefits with a data warehouse are as follows; exact and faster access of information bad and duplicate data eliminate by quality data and filtering customer profiling and retention modelling it compute total present importance and approximate future value of every customer it gives detail report 2.7 DATA MINING TECHNOLOGY Peppers and Rogres, (1999) said that ‘the first analytical step of data mining is to describe the data. Data mining summarize its statistical attributes like standard deviations and means, visually review it by use of charts and graphs and distributes the value of the field in our data. But alone data description can not provide an action plan. We have to build a analytical model based on pattern determined from known output and after that we have to test the model on result outside the original sample. An ideal model must never be puzzled with reality, but it is useful guide to understanding our businesses. According to Eckerson and Watson (2000) ‘we can use data mining for both classification and regression problems. In first problem we can predict what type something will fall into. In second problems we are predicting a number like prospect that a person will react to an recommend. In CRM process, data mining is often used to allocate a score to a particular customer. Data mining is also often using to recognize a set of characteristics, which is called profile. Data mining segments customers in to groups with similar behaviour like purchasing a particular product. 2.8 THE CRM PROCESS CYCLE IN BANKS Pound (2000) said that exploration and alteration process should be done by the banks on basis of customer information captured; this shows the full value of CRM initiatives. Banks set up a closed CRM cycle with the help of an integrated CRM solution, which composed of a set of continuous iterative process. It manages the whole customer related process for bank, analysing customer profile, customer data and life time value, which is helping to making marketing decision and optimizing the execution of marketing campaigns, customer service strategies and sales strategies across various channels during the bank. According to Professor Constantin Zopounidis (2002) CRM process cycle is based on a generic business view. It presents a continuous improvement of value between customers and banks across touch points. Pound 2000 said that ‘recent banking data sources are extremely heterogeneous. Geographic information is dispersed due to continual acquisitions, mergers and reorganizations. For example a bank might use web site, ATMs, e-mail, sales, call centres and marketing automation applications that must be integrated in a unified environment of CRM banking. An effective multi-channels customer interface will not be possible without a centrally integrated warehouse driving the entire CRM process cycle. This should be update real time. The historical data should be recorded by it, which is used to create propensity models and customer life time value models to recognize past behaviour and action in order to take future marketing strategy. 2.9 CUSTOMER DATA COLLECTION Kristin Anderson Carol Kerr (2002), said that in banki