Rural - Publications - Faculty & Research

28 Feb 2023
Research & Ideas

Can Apprenticeships Work in the US? Employers Seeking New Talent Pipelines Take Note

rates, says Fuller, who suggests more targeted guidance and outreach to shrink the gap. In recent years, CareerWise has begun to expand, with new programs in cities including New York and Washington, DC, as well as rural locations in... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

18 Dec 2017
Op-Ed

Why Employers Must Stop Requiring College Degrees For Middle-Skill Jobs

Credit: Pixsooz American companies have a problem. Over the past decade, they have begun to demand a bachelor’s degree in hiring workers for jobs that traditionally haven’t required one. This uptick in credentialing, or “degree inflation,” rested on the belief that... View Details

Keywords: by Joseph Fuller

23 Aug 2006
Op-Ed

The Real Wal-Mart Effect

benefits from the company's low prices. Wal-Mart operates 2-1/2 times as much selling space per inhabitant in the poorest one-third of states as in the richest one-third. And within these states, it focuses on poorer districts and consumers. Without Wal-Mart,... View Details

Keywords: by Pankaj Ghemawat & Ken A. Mark; Retail

29 Jun 2016
Research & Ideas

The $1 Trillion Link Between Mental Health and Economic Productivity

Leight “50 Million Years of Work Could be Lost to Anxiety and Depression” by Sam Jones, The Guardian, April 12, 2016 “Cognitive behaviour therapy-based intervention by community health workers for mothers with depression and their infants in View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

24 Jan 2018
Research & Ideas

How to Get People Addicted to a Good Habit

initial survey of several thousand rural households in West Bengal, India, they discovered that people don’t wash their hands with soap for the same reason most of us don’t run three miles every morning or drink eight glasses of water... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

13 Jun 2011
HBS Case

Mobile Banking for the Unbanked

of the population lives in rural areas, but the majority of bank branches and jobs are in the cities. To send money home, a city worker had to seal his wages in an envelope and pay a courier to travel for hours to the village.... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Banking; Communications; Telecommunications

19 Oct 2021
Research & Ideas

Fed Up Workers and Supply Woes: What's Next for Dollar Stores?

and took them private, they moved it much more to being a general store, daily necessities, stuff like that, and they expanded dramatically across rural America. Family Dollar has followed that model. A lot of their private-label... View Details

Keywords: by Christine Pazzanese, Harvard Gazette; Retail

30 Jun 2021
In Practice

The Harvard Business School Faculty Summer Reader 2021

characters grow over many books—and grow on you. I enjoy rereading them even if I know who did the foul deed. I will also read literary fiction such as Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. This novel is about a young girl that includes a murder mystery and is set in... View Details

Keywords: by Kathryn Haviland

18 Oct 2017
Research & Ideas

How Economic Clusters Drive Globalization

and not always at the forefront of sustainability practices. “It can take a while to improve these processes, and I think the industry is moving in that direction. But, during the 1960s and 70s, the palm oil cluster was a huge engine of growth and infrastructure for... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Agriculture & Agribusiness

12 Sep 2011
Research & Ideas

The Untold Story of ‘Green’ Entrepreneurs

In the 1920s, on pitch black nights in rural eastern Montana, the farmhouse owned by the parents of brothers Marcellus and Joe Jacobs stood out for one reason: it had light, although located far from power lines and gasoline supplies. It... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

2002
Chapter

Factories in the Countryside: The Industrial Workforce and Social Division in Nantong County, 1895-1937

By: Elisabeth Koll

Keywords: History; Human Capital; Rural Scope; Society; China

Citation

June 2008 (Revised July 2009)
Case

COFCO Xinjiang Tunhe Co., Ltd.

By: David E. Bell and Aldo Sesia

In 2005, COFCO Ltd., one of China's largest and most successful companies, acquired Xinjiang Tunhe, a tomato processing firm, which had been, in recent years, poorly managed. COFCO changed Tunhe's management team and set out to create a culture of professionalism and... View Details

Keywords: Agribusiness; Customer Relationship Management; Rural Scope; Supply Chain Management; Performance Consistency; Safety; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; China

Citation

Educators

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February 2010
Teaching Note

Fabindia Overseas Pvt. Ltd. (TN)

By: Mukti Khaire

Teaching Note for [807113]. View Details

Keywords: For-Profit Firms; Expansion; Mission and Purpose; Problems and Challenges; Employment; Rural Scope; Supply Chain; Profit; Retail Industry; Apparel and Accessories Industry; India

Citation

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09 Apr 2020
Research & Ideas

How Social Entrepreneurs Can Increase Their Investment Impact

examined in an HBS case study, that provides prepaid power plans to poor urban and rural communities using energy derived from rice husks and solar power. Its model benefits both poor populations and the environment. Husk thrives because... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne

21 Jan 2013
Research & Ideas

Altruistic Capital: Harnessing Your Employees’ Intrinsic Goodwill

she worked on Moroccan agricultural policy with a team of consultants. "I was just an intern," Ashraf says, "but as I looked around the boardroom I realized that not one of these people had ever actually talked to a farmer in Morocco. And yet they were designing a... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

19 Jun 2012
First Look

First Look: June 19

provide potable water services to rural and urban India where the public infrastructure does not exist. Past efforts have been stymied by rural operations problems including expensive technologies,... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

10 Jul 2000
Research & Ideas

Cable TV: From Community Antennas to Wired Cities

a business opportunity. Walson charged two dollars a month for this service, and by the middle of 1948 had 727 customers. He and other entrepreneurs soon began setting up similar "Community Antenna Television" systems in rural... View Details

Keywords: by Thomas R. Eisenmann; Media & Broadcasting; Consumer Products; Entertainment & Recreation

15 Jun 2020
Research & Ideas

A Mass Crisis Can Overwhelm Health Care. Liberia Found a Solution.

required to accomplish such a planned massive expansion, from yet-to-be hit rural areas to overwhelmed urban health systems. As leaders consider how to tackle the task, they might look at the Harvard Business School case study of... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Layne; Health

2004
Chapter

The City and the Countryside: Economy, State and Socialist Legacies in the Vietnamese Labor Market

Keywords: History; Economic Systems; Human Capital; Urban Scope; Rural Scope

Citation

March 2021 (Revised May 2021)
Case

ALDDN: Advancing Local Dairy Development in Nigeria

By: Meg Rithmire and Debora L. Spar

In 2020, Ndidi Nwuneli, founder and CEO of Sahel Consulting in Nigeria, faced a thorny set of problems. Her firm partnered with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in a large project to develop the local dairy industry as a way to facilitate equitable growth and... View Details