Focussing on the relatively few small firms which grew rapidly, this book, originally published in 1993 uses face-to-face interviews as well as published records to identify and analyse the managerial factors most closely associated with successful small firms. The volume concentrates on the following key managerial issues: In what respects do the managerial backgrounds and aspirations of the founders of fast-growth small firms differ from those of non-fast-growth small firms? How is the process of growth managed? What incentives, remuneration packages and communication systems are instituted? How do these characteristics and experiences differ in fast-growth small firms from both the traditional small firm and large-firm sector? To what extent is it possible to explain the relative economic performance of small firms in terms of differences in their ownership, organizational and management structures.
An exploration of the increasingly popular phenomenon of solitary practice within contemporary paganism Solitary Pagans is the first book to explore the growing phenomenon of contemporary Pagans who practice alone. Although the majority of Pagans in the United States have abandoned the tradition of practicing in groups, little is known about these individuals or their way of practice. Helen A. Berger fills that gap by building on a massive survey of contemporary practitioners. By examining the data, Berger describes solitary practitioners demographically and explores their spiritual practices, level of social engagement, and political activities. Contrasting the solitary Pagans with those who practice in groups and more generally with other non-Pagan Americans, she also compares contemporary U.S. Pagans with those in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. Berger brings to light the new face of contemporary paganism by analyzing those who learn about the religion from books or the Internet and conduct rituals alone in their gardens, the woods, or their homes. Some observers believe this social isolation and political withdrawal has resulted in an increase in narcissism and a decline in morality, while others argue to the contrary that it has produced a new form of social integration and political activity. Berger posits the implications of her findings to reveal a better understanding of other metaphysical religions and those who shun traditional religious organizations.
Elusive Equity chronicles South Africa's efforts to fashion a racially equitable state education system from the ashes of apartheid. The policymakers who came to power with Nelson Mandela in 1994 inherited and education system designed to further the racist goals of apartheid. Their massive challenge was to transform that system, which lavished human and financial resources on schools serving white students while systematically starving those serving African, coloured, and Indian learners, into one that would offer quality education to all persons, regardless of their race. Edward Fiske and Helen Ladd describe and evaluate the strategies that South Africa pursued in its quest for racial equity. They draw on previously unpublished data, interviews with key officials, and visits to dozens of schools to describe the changes made in school finance, teacher assignment policies, governance, curriculum, higher education, and other areas. They conclude that the country has made remarkable progress toward equity in the sense of equal treatment of persons of all races. For several reasons, however, the country has been far less successful in promoting equal educational opportunity or educational adequacy. Thus equity has remained elusive. The book is unique in combining the perceptive observations of a skilled education journalist with the analytical skills of an academic policy expert. Richly textured descriptions of how South Africa's education reforms have affected schools at the grass-roots level are combined with careful analysis of enrollment, governance, and budget data at the school, provincial, and national levels. The result is a compelling and comprehensive study of South Africa's first decade of education reform in the post-apartheid period.
The influential are no longer only those with celebrity status – but until now there has been no authoritative resource on the theory and practice of influencer marketing. This book will educate and inspire decision makers, researchers, students, and influencers themselves. Diving deeper than the many "how-to" books on the influencer phenomenon, this book brings in frameworks from marketing, sociology, psychology, and communication studies to redefine the influencer as a persona (related to a person, group of people, or organization) that possesses greater than average sway over others. Cornwell and Katz go on to: introduce the influencers, macro and nano, authentic and inauthentic, ascending and fading; consider their relationship to brands in the marketing ecosystem, along with regulations that set limits on influencer marketing; describe how influence is measured and evaluated and look into the future; and bring together the latest research on influencer marketing and organize it for the reader. The book serves both those who want to understand the science behind influencer marketing and those who want to most effectively employ influencers in brand strategy. Instructors, students, and professionals will appreciate international examples from multiple industries applying theories to the real world.
This book takes its point of departure from the overwhelming interest in theories of the body and performativity in sociology and cultural studies in recent years. It explores a variety of ways of looking at dance as a social and artistic (bodily) practice as a means of generating insights into the politics of identity and difference as they are situated and traced through representations of the body and bodily practices. These issues are addressed through a series of case studies.
This exciting new and original collection locates dance within the spectrum of urban life in late modernity, through a range of theoretical perspectives. It highlights a diversity of dance forms and styles that can be witnessed in and around contemporary urban spaces: from dance halls to raves and the club striptease; from set dancing to ballroom dancing, to hip hop and swing, and to ice dance shows; from the ballet class, to fitness aerobics; and 'art' dance which situates itself in a dynamic relation to the city.
Acquisitions and Collection Development in the Humanities is a one-of-a-kind guide on the procedures, approaches, and principles needed to make sound decisions in acquiring materials in various areas of the humanities. It gives you an inside look at managerial concerns in documentary delivery, changing budgetary needs, and fluctuations in journal prices and helps you address many of the important questions in acquisitions and collection development within both traditional and technological environments. As contributing author Dennis Dillon puts it, the ultimate goal of humanities librarians “is not to acquire information bytes and bits, but to promote integrity: integrity of texts, integrity of selection, the integrity of the collection, and the integrity of the library and its ultimate purpose.” This objective underlies this multifaceted and comprehensive collection of articles, as the authors address many interesting issues, developments, and challenges in the field, including: selecting candidates for digitization and producing e-texts collecting in areas that don’t have immediate utility or that may be unpopular what librarians need to know about the humanities as a discipline in order to effectively meet the informational and technological needs of their constituencies online discussion groups as useful sources of webliographic information cooperative collection building the importance of maintaining a high degree of local ownership for materials the principles, criteria, and tools needed to develop a Native American studies collection document-driven and use-driven approaches to collecting acquiring and preserving records that chronicle the role played by African Americans in the United States’development Acquisitions and Collection Development in the Humanities can help professional librarians, graduate school faculty, and students in information and library science acquire the knowledge and skills necessary for building a broadly based and academically responsive collection. It will certainly help you keep up with changes in the information environment and show you how the tools you’ve developed for selecting traditional library materials will be useful as you grapple with electronic texts, “spider” search mechanisms on the Web, becoming a webliographer, and budget shortfalls.
Unsung Women in Somerset is a book of real-life and legendary women who lived, loved, worked and struggled in Somerset. From pre-Roman to modern times, we meet women with courage, kindness, innovation and even some who smashed the rules! Through 23 chapters, we meet most women through a short story, followed by historical notes about the woman and a chapter bibliography that shows the meticulous research that has gone into the book. Most chapters also include a Quick Tribute section that briefly mentions other interesting women from the same century. Meet the woman who had two funerals. Meet the African princess who survived and thrived despite the odds. Meet the woman who voted... before it was legal. Meet the openly gay artists whose generosity touched their neighbours' hearts. Meet the queens and saints and "witches" and workers and much more! These are the unsung women of our county. This is the history of Somerset like never before.
This book was first published in 2006. Despite many well-intentioned policies and changes to management practices, the world's natural resources continue to decline. The roles and interplay between science and policy in the regional broadacre agriculture landscape are examined here, offering readers a thorough understanding of the complex interactions that occur across spatial scales to produce the regional-scale impacts. The fundamental causes of resource degradation, social decline and environmental pollution are addressed, examining the cross-scale drivers from the individual farm level to the global level of commodity systems. Broadacre agriculture is a common land use throughout all continents of the world and is driven by the same type of dynamics, and this case study of the Western Australia agricultural region can be used to clearly demonstrate the principles for other agricultural systems. Aimed at academics, ranging from researchers through to policy analysts, this book will inspire innovation and action in sustainable natural resource management.
Historians of the long eighteenth century have recently recognised that this period is central both to the history of cultural production and consumption and to the history of national and regional identity. Yet no book has, as yet, directly engaged with these two areas of interest at the same time. By uniting interest in the history of culture with the history of regional identity, Creating and Consuming Culture in North-East England, 1660-1830 is of crucial importance to a wide range of historians and intervenes in a number of highly important historical and conceptual debates in a timely and provocative way. The book makes a substantial contribution to eighteenth-century studies. Not only do these essays demonstrate that in thinking about cultural production and consumption in the eighteenth century there are important continuities as well as changes that need to be considered, but also they complicate the commonplace assumption of metropolitan-led cultural change and cultural innovation. Rather than the usual model of centre-periphery diffusion, a number of contributions show that cultural change in the provinces was happening at the same time as in, or in some cases even before, London. The essays also indicate the complex relationship between cultural consumption and social status, with some cultural forms being more inclusive than others.
Animal products were used extensively in nineteenth-century Britain. A middle-class Victorian woman might wear a dress made of alpaca wool, drape herself in a sealskin jacket, brush her hair with a tortoiseshell comb, and sport feathers in her hat. She might entertain her friends by playing a piano with ivory keys or own a parrot or monkey as a living fashion accessory. In this innovative study, Helen Cowie examines the role of these animal-based commodities in Britain in the long nineteenth century and traces their rise and fall in popularity in response to changing tastes, availability, and ethical concerns. Focusing on six popular animal products – feathers, sealskin, ivory, alpaca wool, perfumes, and exotic pets – she considers how animal commodities were sourced and processed, how they were marketed and how they were consumed. She also assesses the ecological impact of nineteenth-century fashion.
In Wild Unrest, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz offers a vivid portrait of Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the 1880s, drawing new connections between the author's life and work and illuminating the predicament of women then and now. Horowitz draws on a treasure trove of primary sources to explore the nature of 19th-century nervous illness and to illuminate the making of Gilman's famous short story, "The Yellow Wall-Paper": Gilman's journals and letters, which closely track her daily life and the reading that most influenced her; the voluminous diaries of her husband, Walter Stetson; and the writings, published and unpublished of S. Weir Mitchell, whose rest cure dominated the treatment of female "hysteria" in late 19th-century America. Horowitz argues that these sources ultimately reveal that Gilman's great story emerged more from emotions rooted in the confinement and tensions of her unhappy marriage than from distress following Mitchell's rest cure. Hailed by The Boston Globe as "an engaging portrait of the woman and her times," Wild Unrest adds immeasurably to our understanding of Charlotte Perkins Gilman as well as the literary and personal sources behind "The Yellow Wall-Paper.
This book examines how the interplay between nineteenth-century literary and visual media paralleled the emergence of a modern psychological understanding of the ways in which reading, viewing and dreaming generate moving images in the mind.
A Community of Witches explores the beliefs and practices of Neo-Paganism and Witchcraft—generally known to scholars and practitioners as Wicca. While the words "magic," "witchcraft," and "paganism" evoke images of the distant past and remote cultures, this book shows that Wicca has emerged as part of a new religious movement that reflects the era in which it developed. Imported to the United States in the later 1960s from the United Kingdom, the religion absorbed into its basic fabric the social concerns of the time: feminism, environmentalism, self-development, alternative spirituality, and mistrust of authority. Helen A. Berger's ten-year participant observation study of Neo-Pagans and Witches on the eastern seaboard of the United States and her collaboration on a national survey of Neo-Pagans form the basis for exploring the practices, structures, and transformation of this nascent religion. Responding to scholars who suggest that Neo-Paganism is merely a pseudo religion or a cultural movement because it lacks central authority and clear boundaries, Berger contends that Neo-Paganism has many of the characteristics that one would expect of a religion born in late modernity: the appropriation of rituals from other cultures, a view of the universe as a cosmic whole, an emphasis on creating and re-creating the self, an intertwining of the personal and the political, and a certain playfulness. Aided by the Internet, self-published journals, and festivals and other gatherings, today's Neo-Pagans communicate with one another about social issues as well as ritual practices and magical rites. This community of interest—along with the aging of the original participants and the growing number of children born to Neo-Pagan families—is resulting in Neo-Paganism developing some of the marks of a mature and established religion.
Whether termed the 'network society', the 'knowledge society' or the 'information society', it is widely accepted that a new age has dawned, unveiled by powerful computer and communication technologies. Yet for millennia humans have been recording knowledge and culture, engaging in the dissemination and preservation of information. In `The Early Information Society', the authors argue for an earlier incarnation of the information age, focusing upon the period 1900-1960. In support of this they examine the history and traditions in Britain of two separate but related information-rich occupations - information management and information science - repositioning their origins before the age of the computer and identifying the forces driving their early development. `The Early Information Society' offers an historical account which questions the novelty of the current information society. It will be essential reading for students, researchers and practitioners in the library and information science field, and for sociologists and historians interested in the information society.
This book constitutes the first thorough academic analysis of legislative drafting. By placing the study of legislation and its principles within the paradigm of Flyvberg's phronetic social sciences, it offers a novel approach which breaks the tradition of unimaginative past descriptive reiterations of drafting conventions. Instead of prescribing rules for legislation, it sets out to identify efficacy as the main aim of the actors in the policy, legislative and drafting processes, and effectiveness as the main goal in the drafting of legislation. Through the prism of effectiveness as synonymous with legislative quality, the book explores the stages of the drafting process; guides the reader through structure and sections in their logical sequence, and introduces rules for drafting preliminary, substantive and final provisions. Special provisions, comparative legislative drafting and training for drafters complete this thorough analysis of the drafting of legislation as a tool for regulation. Instead of teaching the reader which drafting rules prevail, the book explores the reasons why drafting rules have come about, thus encouraging readers to understand what goal is served by each rule and how each rule applies. The book is aimed at academics and practitioners who draft or use statutory law in the common or civil law traditions.
Offering an introduction to the main themes and issues that have emerged in the study of the body over recent years, Helen Thomas illustrates the complex relationships that exist between the body, society and everyday life.
Known worldwide among scholars of medieval Europe for her books on the Knights Hospitaller and the Knights Templar, the trial of the Templars in Britain and Ireland, and women and the crusades, Professor Helen J. Nicholson has drawn together in this volume a selection of her shorter publications, previously published in academic journals, scholarly collections, or online. Reflecting almost thirty years of published research, this collection includes articles focusing on women’s depiction in contemporary writing on the crusades and their involvement with the military religious orders, the Templars’ and Hospitallers’ relations with the rulers of Latin Christendom and with their noble patrons and their operations in Britain and Ireland. Women, the Crusades, the Templars and Hospitallers in Medieval European Society and Culture will interest scholars, students, and other researchers studying the military religious orders, the crusades and women’s lives in medieval Europe and the crusader states.
Photography symbolized the possibility of creating an ideal archive to many Victorians, an archive in which no moment or experience need be forgotten. This seductive idea had particular appeal for a generation of writers preoccupied with their own mortality and the erosion of tradition in an age distracted by the ever-changing spectacle of the present. many early photographers and publishers shared this temporal anxiety and the nostalgic archival proclivities it induced, and these mutual preoccupations resulted in the production of the early photographically illustrated books, verse anthologies, lantern shows, guide books, magazines and cartes de visite collections which are the subject of this book. Groth argues that these various early forms of photlographic illustration reflected and contributed to a growing alignment of reading with taking a moment out of time, and of literary experience with the nostalgic reinventions of an emerging heritage culture. Nostalgia operates both creatively and regressively in this context, providing the catalyst for new cultural forms and memory practices, whilst nurturing an intrinsically conservative desire to find a refuge from the exigencies of the present in an increasingly idealized world of tradition, family, nature, and community; a world where time appeared, for a moment at least, to stand still"--Dust jacket.
The war memoirs of these two officers with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers have never been out of print since their first publication. Both men won instant and enduring fame with these very different narratives, which made them two of the most influential participants in shaping later attitudes to the war. Graves gave offence in many quarters with his factual inaccuracies and/or slurs on various units of the British Army. Sassoon's nostalgic evocation of his cricketing and fox-hunting background contrast with the detailed narrative of personalities and life in the Battle of the Somme and the Battle of Arras. The thinly disguised names of real fellow officers are unravelled to help illustrate Sassoon's poetry and actions.
The exciting diasporic sounds of the London Asian urban music scene are a cross-section of the various genres of urban music that include bhangra "remix," R&B and hip hop styles, as well as dubstep and other "urban" sample-oriented electronic music. This book brings together a unique analysis of urban underground music cultures in exploring just how members of this "scene" take up space in "super-diverse" London. It provides a fresh perspective on the creativity of British South Asian youth culture, and makes a significant sociological intervention into this area by bringing the focus back onto urgent issues of "race" ethnicity alongside class and gender within youth cultural studies.
If you love discovering weird and wacky things about the world around you, then this amazing book is for you! Impress your friends with awesome facts so incredible they won't know whether to believe you or not. You'll find out that subjects like the human body, food, animals, science and history are far more surprising and exciting than you ever imagined. A team of cartoon characters will guide you through hundreds of incredible facts and records... so dive in and prepare to be amazed, amused and astounded!
Conventional thinking teaches that the absence of liability - in particular contractual invalidity - is itself the reason for the restitution of transfers in the South African law of unjustified enrichment. However, this book argues that while the absence of a relationship of indebtedness is a necessary condition for restitution in such cases, it is not a sufficient condition. The book takes as its focus those instances in which the invalidity thesis is strongest, namely, those traditionally classified as instances of the condictio indebiti, the claim to recover undue transfers. It seeks to demonstrate that in all such instances it is necessary for the plaintiff to show not only the absence of his liability to transfer but also a specific reason for restitution, such as mistake, compulsion or incapacity. Furthermore, this book explores the reasons for the rise of unjust factors in South African law, attributing this development in part to the influence of the Roman-Dutch restitutio in integrum, an extraordinary, equitable remedy that has historically operated independently of the established enrichment remedies of the civilian tradition, and which even now remains imperfectly integrated into the substantive law of enrichment. Finally, the book seeks to defend in principled terms the mixed approach to enrichment by transfer (an approach based both on unjust factors and on the absence of a legal ground) which appears to characterise modern South African law. It advocates the rationalisation of the causes of action comprised within the condictio indebiti, many of which are subject to additional historically-determined requirements, in light of this mixed analysis.
The clock plays a significant part in our understanding of temporality, but while it simplifies, regulates and coordinates, it fails to reflect and communicate the more experiential dimensions of time. As Helen Powell demonstrates in this book, cinema has been addressing this issue since its inception. Stop the Clocks! examines filmmakers' relationship to time and its visual manipulation and representation from the birth of the medium to the digital present. It engages both with experimentation in narrative construction and with films that take time as their subject matter, such as Donnie Darko, Interview with a Vampire, Lost Highway and Pulp Fiction. Helen Powell asks what underpins the enduring appeal of the science fiction genre with filmmakers and audience and how cinematography might inform our conceptualisation of other imagined temporal worlds, including the afterlife. She examines the role of angels and vampires in contemporary cinema, as well as the distinctive time schemes of new media and their implications for rethinking time and the moving image through digitalisation. Broad based and accessible, Stop the Clocks! will appeal to a wide interdisciplinary audience and provides a useful sourcebook on undergraduate and postgraduate courses in film and other arts and media-based disciplines.
How do people on low incomes make decisions about employment and benefit claims? Interview material and economic analysis combine with new theories of the relationship between moral and economic reasoning.
This book explores the rights held by young people in the citizenship education classroom in the divided societies of Northern Ireland and Israel. Against the backdrop of a long history of protracted conflict and division, the author analyses how international rights obligations are reflected in the contested citizenship education curriculum in secondary schools. Drawing upon extensive qualitative data as well as policy and curriculum documents, the author reveals that understandings of education rights can be oriented around three themes – minority group representation in the curriculum, dealing with difference through pedagogy, and preparing young people for life in a (divided) society. This can be mapped onto the 42-A rights framework where education should be ‘acceptable’ and ‘adaptable’. However, the variety of interpretations held by participants raises questions regarding the ‘universality’ of international frameworks for education rights, and the workability of such frameworks in the national and divided contexts. While the contexts of Northern Ireland and Israel have much in common, they are rarely compared: this book will show that their comparison is as relevant as ever, as issues of identity continue to affect everyday school life. This book will be of interest to citizenship and history education scholars, as well as those who are concerned with the application of international human rights law.
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