Business is the backbone of American society and is one of the keys to making our system work as well as it has for over two hundred years. Yet as a body of knowledge, business is much younger, and in its brief history, there have been few attempts to present the discipline of business in a single place. The major purpose of the Encyclopedia of Business and Finance, Second Edition is to summarize the body of knowledge that we know as business in one place and in language appropriate to the layperson.

This two-volume collection of over 315 articles presents a wealth of information about the major functional areas of business: accounting, economics, finance, information systems, law, management, and marketing. Articles vary in length and depth, in bibliographic support, and in writing style. Thus, the reader will encounter a variety of approaches to and perspectives about business. Some articles are quantitative, since some aspects of business are numerically based. Other articles tend more toward the qualitative to accommodate the more descriptive aspects of business. Some of the articles present an historical perspective, incorporating long-validated knowledge, while other articles focus on current concepts and more recent data. Other articles provide “how-to” advice. Regardless of the approach, available data are accurate to the best of each writer’s knowledge as of 2006. All articles have the same goal: to provide useful knowledge about the business and financial world.