About This Book

Purpose of the book

This book is intended to serve as a no-cost, faculty customizable primary text for one-semester undergraduate introductory business courses. It covers the following topics in business: Teamwork; economics; ethics; entrepreneurship; business ownership, management, and leadership; organizational structures and operations management; human resources and motivating employees; managing in labor union contexts; marketing and pricing strategy; hospitality and tourism, accounting and finance, and personal finances.

What’s new

This version of the book, the Second Edition, improves upon the 2016 edition. Improvements include:

• Correction of errata identified in the 2016 compilation and many minor improvements.
• Renumbering of chapters and added front matter.
• Addition of new content: the PESTEL model in Chapter 2, Qualtrax case study in Chapter 7, and substantive revision of Chapter 16 Hospitality and Tourism.
• Addition of desktop and mobile friendly navigation features and interactive self-quizzing (Pressbooks version only).
• Addition of links to related external videos.
• Addition of accessibility features: Figures now include alternative text (AltText) which enables access by users of screen reader software.
• Broader format availability: PDF, epub, mobi, html, xhtml, Pressbooks XML, and OpenDocument (ODF) which is editable with MSWord.
• Addition of a feedback form for reporting errata: http://bit.ly/business-feedback
• Addition of a faculty listserv and a sharing portal: https://groups.google.com/a/vt.edu/forum/#!forum/fundamentalsofbusiness-g and https://www.oercommons.org/groups/fundamentals-of-business-user-group/1379

Features of the book

Each chapter lists learning objectives at the beginning of the chapter and key takeaways at the end of the chapter. The Pressbooks https://doi.org/10.21061/fundamentals-of-business version of this book also includes interactive self-quizzing.