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Sarah Pratt traces interwoven questions in the work of Nikolai Zabolotsky, a figure ranking just behind Pasternak, Mandelstram and Akhmatova in modern Russian poetry and the first major poet to come to light in the Soviet period.
Dear Reader,I have a few questions for you:How many times were you bothered by the direction your company is taking?How many times have you heard mumbo jumbo corporate strategy?How many times have consultants spewed jargon on how to steer your company, and you didn't have a clue what to do next?The Enigma is the mystery of management-in-action; a few domains that we treat as silos, separate entities: strategy, corporate finance, human behavior, managerial concepts, accounting, economics, and more.In this book, we fuse these management domains into one body of knowledge: the Paradigm.I encapsulate three interrelated fields:1.StrategyHow your company can measure its Competitive Advantage in three dimensions: technology, brand, and finance.2.FinanceHow your company can create Shareholder Value by taking into account its stakeholders.3.ManagementHow to make it happen.✽✽✽This book was written as a journey:I.Strategic dimensionThe most fundamental aspects of leading an organization. How to understand the competitive advantage of the product line within the appropriate markets. Then, what should be done to improve it, framed within two time horizons:1.Operation Strategies (OS)2.Growth Strategies (GS)II.Financial dimension:How to better understand the differences between the following bodies of knowledge:a.Accountingb.The economics of the companyc.Finance looking forward: how to deal with risk and uncertainty.What are the merits one should earn from each body of knowledge?III.Managerial dimension:Taking into account the strategic and financial dimensions, what are the concepts and practices to manage the firm forward? Here, you will find practical examples to support you.You can read this cover-to-cover, or choose chapters at your convenience to solve specific dilemmas.
Built in the fifth century b.c., the Parthenon has been venerated for more than two millennia as the West’s ultimate paragon of beauty and proportion. Since the Enlightenment, it has also come to represent our political ideals, the lavish temple to the goddess Athena serving as the model for our most hallowed civic architecture. But how much do the values of those who built the Parthenon truly correspond with our own? And apart from the significance with which we have invested it, what exactly did this marvel of human hands mean to those who made it? In this revolutionary book, Joan Breton Connelly challenges our most basic assumptions about the Parthenon and the ancient Athenians. Beginning with the natural environment and its rich mythic associations, she re-creates the development of the Acropolis—the Sacred Rock at the heart of the city-state—from its prehistoric origins to its Periklean glory days as a constellation of temples among which the Parthenon stood supreme. In particular, she probes the Parthenon’s legendary frieze: the 525-foot-long relief sculpture that originally encircled the upper reaches before it was partially destroyed by Venetian cannon fire (in the seventeenth century) and most of what remained was shipped off to Britain (in the nineteenth century) among the Elgin marbles. The frieze’s vast enigmatic procession—a dazzling pageant of cavalrymen and elders, musicians and maidens—has for more than two hundred years been thought to represent a scene of annual civic celebration in the birthplace of democracy. But thanks to a once-lost play by Euripides (the discovery of which, in the wrappings of a Hellenistic Egyptian mummy, is only one of this book’s intriguing adventures), Connelly has uncovered a long-buried meaning, a story of human sacrifice set during the city’s mythic founding. In a society startlingly preoccupied with cult ritual, this story was at the core of what it meant to be Athenian. Connelly reveals a world that beggars our popular notions of Athens as a city of staid philosophers, rationalists, and rhetoricians, a world in which our modern secular conception of democracy would have been simply incomprehensible. The Parthenon’s full significance has been obscured until now owing in no small part, Connelly argues, to the frieze’s dismemberment. And so her investigation concludes with a call to reunite the pieces, in order that what is perhaps the greatest single work of art surviving from antiquity may be viewed more nearly as its makers intended. Marshalling a breathtaking range of textual and visual evidence, full of fresh insights woven into a thrilling narrative that brings the distant past to life, The Parthenon Enigma is sure to become a landmark in our understanding of the civilization from which we claim cultural descent.
The contributors investigate policy paradigms and their ability to explain the policy process actors, ideas, discourses and strategies employed to provide readers with a better understanding of public policy and its dynamics.
Metadecisions: Rehabilitating Epistemology constitutes an epistemological inquiry about the foundations of knowledge of a scientific discipline. This text warns contemporary scientific disciplines that neglecting epistemological issues threatens the viability of their pronouncements and designs. It shows that the processes by which complex artefacts are created require a pluralistic approach to artefact design. It argues that viable solutions to fundamental problems in each discipline require cooperation, creativity and respect for contributions from all walks of life, all levels of logic and all standards of rigor - be they in the natural sciences, the social sciences, engineering sciences, management, the law or political sciences. Several true cases, obtained from different walks of life are used to illustrate logic levels in problems and how the application of the process of modeling/metamodeling helps to conceptualize problem dysfunctions and to convert decisions into metadecisions. Ten cases spanning subjects like Doctor Assisted Suicides (DASs), Advising Women on The Risks of Mammograms, a Deregulation Crusade, The Crash of TWA Flight 800, The Control of The World Wide Web, The Creation of the US Department of Homeland Security, among others, are used to illustrate the application of the metasystem framework to increase knowledge and meaning of fundamental problems. The design of any human activity requires the intervention of several inquiring systems where the manager, the engineer, the scientist, the lawyer, the epistemologist, the ethicist and even the artist contribute to shape how problems in the real-world are formulated, how decisions/metadecisions to solve problems are taken, and finally, how actions are implemented.
The impetus for this work emerged from Savall’s belief that there is a doubleloop interaction between social and economic factors in organizations, between behaviors and structures, and between the quality of life in organizations and their economic performance. When managers underestimate this dynamic interaction, the resulting tension ultimately manifests in lowered performance and increased costs, what he refers to as the “hidden costs” of organizational life. Only by delving into the depths of these organizational dynamics can we hope to fully understand – and create the basis for improving – organizational performance. The Qualimetrics Approach presents a different and challenging way of thinking about analyzing organizations, one that draws together quantitative information, financial analysis and qualitative insights into organizational dynamics. As Savall and Zardet argue, to gain a true understanding of what is happening in organizations, intervener-researchers must focus on all three perspectives, as ignoring any one of them will lead to incomplete understandings. Their approach underscores the importance of using qualitative data to validate quantitative depictions (“the numbers”) of organizational performance in understanding the construction of financial statements. The strength of Savall and Zardet’s approach is that it pushes us to go deeper, to fully understand the narratives underlying the numbers and the social construction of our financial assessments.
Diversity these days is a hallowed American value, widely shared and honored. That’s a remarkable change from the Civil Rights era—but does this public commitment to diversity constitute a civil rights victory? What does diversity mean in contemporary America, and what are the effects of efforts to support it? Ellen Berrey digs deep into those questions in The Enigma of Diversity. Drawing on six years of fieldwork and historical sources dating back to the 1950s and making extensive use of three case studies from widely varying arenas—housing redevelopment in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood, affirmative action in the University of Michigan’s admissions program, and the workings of the human resources department at a Fortune 500 company—Berrey explores the complicated, contradictory, and even troubling meanings and uses of diversity as it is invoked by different groups for different, often symbolic ends. In each case, diversity affirms inclusiveness, especially in the most coveted jobs and colleges, yet it resists fundamental change in the practices and cultures that are the foundation of social inequality. Berrey shows how this has led racial progress itself to be reimagined, transformed from a legal fight for fundamental rights to a celebration of the competitive advantages afforded by cultural differences. Powerfully argued and surprising in its conclusions, The Enigma of Diversity reveals the true cost of the public embrace of diversity: the taming of demands for racial justice.
One of the great challenges we face today is coming to grips with "forces of power/' in both theoretical and methodological terms, in a way that prepares us for action—action that is not totally subject to existing forces. The literature has some excellent theoretical accounts of power, but these say little about what we should do. Most often they are abstract and out of reach of all but a select few. In this book, however, we have a clear-cut account of power, ideology, and control that paves the way for practic- minded people to make a genuine attempt at tackling issues of power on both organizational and societal levels. John C. Oliga suggests a division between what he calls "objectivist," "subjectivist," and "relational" perspectives. With objectivism, he refers to theories that focus on power as capacities located in social structures. These tend to be either synergistic (e.g., Parsonian collective) or conflictual (e.g., Marxian conflictual view) theoretical orientations. With subjectivism he discusses theories that focus on power possessed by agents. With rela tional approaches he places theories that conceive power as a property of interaction among social forces.
Since its foundation more than eight decades ago, quantum mechanics has been plagued by enigmas, mysteries and paradoxes and held hostage by quantum positivism. This fact strongly suggests that something is fundamentally wrong with the quantum mechanics paradigm. The best scientific minds, such as Albert Einstein, Louis de Broglie, David Bohm, Richard Feynman and others have spent years of their professional lives attempting to find resolution to the quantum mechanics predicament, with not much success. A shift of the quantum mechanics paradigm toward a deeper physics theory is long overdue. The Prologue is an introduction by Victor Vaguine of a fundamentally new quantum mechanics paradigm which he calls Super Quantum Mechanics (SQM). The theory and concept will be further expanded in a companion book Conceptual and Philosophical Foundations of Super Quantum Mechanics (February 2013). In contrast with quantum mechanics, which remains an enigmatic and mysterious science full of paradoxes, SQM is an ontological science. The SQM is a giant step in the progression of quantum mechanics toward a deeper physics theory. Fulfilling Einstein’s dream, the centerpiece of SQM is an elementary quantum entity/event which can be visualized by humans. Each quantum entity is tangible with all its physical attributes at all times and not hanging in limbo. The philosophy of SQM is non-local realism. SQM brings non-locality dimension into focus and into system. Einstein stubbornly rejected non-locality, in effect imposing a subjective constraint on objective reality. He thus missed a supreme opportunity of a lifetime to free quantum mechanics from the detrimental influence of quantum positivism and to bring it to a deeper level. In contrast with the Standard Model of particle physics, which assumes elementary particles as point-like with no structure, SQM states that elementary particles (and forces) have dimension and structure. Based on three fundamental reasons, Victor Vaguine declares that the string theory is not valid scientific theory. The author ventures into cosmology by declaring intrinsic connections of SQM with the origin of the Universe through his original concept of absolute quantum entanglement at the pre-Big Bang state. Victor Vaguine states that the inflationary multiverse theory is scientifically invalid and replaces it with a concept of Uni-Universe, a new term coined by the author. The Uni-Universe is an assembly of habitable universes in 4-dimensional space. Each individual universe, such as our Universe, is sharply and uniquely defined. Based on the law of fine tuning, the author estimates: • expected time of arrival of humans on the cosmic scene versus actual timing • size of our Universe (unknown to science until now) • the extent of the habitability in the Milky Way galaxy, the observed Universe and our Universe • a time window for emerging intelligence in our Universe. Never ending scientific progress is presented as a series of curtains, each hiding a fundamentally new scientific paradigm. None of the curtains can be opened by logic or mathematical formalism alone—requiring instead great intuition and counter-intuition. Victor Vaguine declares that the lethal combination of materialism and quantum positivism is an impediment to scientific progress in theoretical physics and cosmology. The book, written at a high scientific level, contains minimal mathematical formalism and is accessible for laypersons with intellectual curiosity.
For uninitiated researchers, engineers, and scientists interested in a quick entry into the subject of chaos, this book offers a timely collection of 55 carefully selected papers covering almost every aspect of this subject. Because Chua's circuit is endowed with virtually every bifurcation phenomena reported in the extensive literature on chaos, and because it is the only chaotic system which can be easily built by a novice, simulated in a personal computer, and tractable mathematically, it has become a paradigm for chaos, and a vehicle for illustrating this ubiquitous phenomenon. Its supreme simplicity and robustness has made it the circuit of choice for generating chaotic signals for practical applications.In addition to the 48 illuminating papers drawn from a recent two-part Special Issue (March and June, 1993) of the Journal of Circuits, Systems, and Computers devoted exclusively to Chua's circuit, several highly illustrative tutorials and incisive state-of-the-art reviews on the latest experimental, computational, and analytical investigations on chaos are also included. To enhance its pedagogical value, a diskette containing a user-friendly software and data base on many basic chaotic phenomena is attached to the book, as well as a gallery of stunningly colorful strange attractors.Beginning with an elementary (freshman-level physics) introduction on experimental chaos, the book presents a step-by-step guided tour, with papers of increasing complexity, which covers almost every conceivable aspects of bifurcation and chaos. The second half of the book contains many original materials contributed by world-renowned authorities on chaos, including L P Shil'nikov, A N Sharkovsky, M Misiurewicz, A I Mees, R Lozi, L O Chua and V S Afraimovich.The scope of topics covered is quite comprehensive, including at least one paper on each of the following topics: routes to chaos, 1-D maps, universality, self-similarity, 2-parameter renormalization group analysis, piecewise-linear dynamics, slow-fast dynamics, confinor analysis, symmetry breaking, strange attractors, basins of attraction, geometric invariants, time-series reconstruction, Lyapunov exponents, bispectral analysis, homoclinic bifurcation, stochastic resonance, synchronization, and control of chaos, as well as several novel applications of chaos, including secure communications, visual sensing, neural networks, dry turbulence, nonlinear waves and music.