In the popular imagination, the business media, and the schools of business and management that train new generations of entrepreneurs and executives, achieving extraordinary success in business is attributed to far-sighted individuals who have taken bold risks, provided innovative leadership, and introduced new products, services, or ideas superior to those of the competition. Amid the growing skepticism about the means by which vast amounts of wealth are accumulated and its consequences, however, this belief is long overdue for reevaluation. In From Predators to Icons, Michel Villette, a sociologist, and Catherine Vuillermot, a business historian, examine the careers of thirty-two of today's wealthiest global executives--including Warren Buffett, Ingvar Kamprad, Bernard Arnault, Jim Clark, and Richard Branson--in order to challenge the conventional explanations for their extreme success and come to a better understanding of modern business practices. In contrast to the familiar image of the entrepreneur as a visionary with a plan, Villette and Vuillermot instead discover a far less dramatic process of improvised adaptations gradually assembled into a coherent course of conduct. And rather than being risk-takers, those who are most successful in business are risk-minimizers. Huge gains, these case studies reveal, are most reliably obtained in circumstances where the entrepreneur has established careful provisions for risk reduction. As for the view that innovation makes success possible, the authors find that because innovation is an expensive process that takes a long time to produce profits, innovators first of all require capital; success makes innovation possible. The necessary resources, they show, are most often derived from what they provocatively term "predation" ruthlessly taking advantage of imperfections, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities within the market or among competitors. Finally, From Predator to Icon considers the "practical ethics" implemented during the phase in which capital is most rapidly accumulated, as well as the social consequences of these activities. Drawing on interviews with some of their subjects and, crucially, close readings of the authorized biographies and other hagiographic accounts of these figures, which eliminates the bias of malicious interpretations, Villette and Vuillermot provide revelatory insights about the creation and maintenance of business wealth that will be profitably read by both the captains and the critics of contemporary capitalism.
In the popular imagination, the business media, and the schools of business and management that train new generations of entrepreneurs and executives, achieving extraordinary success in business is attributed to far-sighted individuals who have taken bold risks, provided innovative leadership, and introduced new products, services, or ideas superior to those of the competition. Amid the growing skepticism about the means by which vast amounts of wealth are accumulated and its consequences, however, this belief is long overdue for reevaluation. In From Predators to Icons, Michel Villette, a sociologist, and Catherine Vuillermot, a business historian, examine the careers of thirty-two of today's wealthiest global executives--including Warren Buffett, Ingvar Kamprad, Bernard Arnault, Jim Clark, and Richard Branson--in order to challenge the conventional explanations for their extreme success and come to a better understanding of modern business practices. In contrast to the familiar image of the entrepreneur as a visionary with a plan, Villette and Vuillermot instead discover a far less dramatic process of improvised adaptations gradually assembled into a coherent course of conduct. And rather than being risk-takers, those who are most successful in business are risk-minimizers. Huge gains, these case studies reveal, are most reliably obtained in circumstances where the entrepreneur has established careful provisions for risk reduction. As for the view that innovation makes success possible, the authors find that because innovation is an expensive process that takes a long time to produce profits, innovators first of all require capital; success makes innovation possible. The necessary resources, they show, are most often derived from what they provocatively term "predation" ruthlessly taking advantage of imperfections, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities within the market or among competitors. Finally, From Predator to Icon considers the "practical ethics" implemented during the phase in which capital is most rapidly accumulated, as well as the social consequences of these activities. Drawing on interviews with some of their subjects and, crucially, close readings of the authorized biographies and other hagiographic accounts of these figures, which eliminates the bias of malicious interpretations, Villette and Vuillermot provide revelatory insights about the creation and maintenance of business wealth that will be profitably read by both the captains and the critics of contemporary capitalism.
Magic City... Un antique parc d'attractions perdu au coeur des Grands Lointains, abandonné depuis plus d'un siècle. Intriguée, Ninn décide de s'y rendre, emmenant avec elle son tigre de papier et ses amis Chad et Ulrika. Mal leur en prend: pourchassés par des géants de pierre, les quatre compagnons s'y retrouvent bloqués. Mais sont-ils réellement seuls? Quels secrets ce parc abandonné recèle-t-il? Et surtout, quelle est cette mystérieuse entité qui semble le hanter, et qui va rapidement prendre nos héros pour cible? Saluée par la critique, la série Ninn a reçu le prix des collèges Angoulême 2017, le prix des lecteurs du Journal de Mickey 2016, le prix Livrentête «Bandes dessinées Juniors» 2016-2017 et le prix Conseil départemental de Loir-et-Cher 2016.
If you had been living in France in the 1990s, the language you would have heard on the radio and television or seen in the newspapers would be far removed from the French language of ten or twenty years ago. The country and its language have changed tremendously in a relatively short period of time, and, as a result, English speakers with a grounding in French can still find themselves struggling to understand terms commonly encountered in contemporary French society. Luckily, Eleanor and Michel Levieux now bring us up to date with their Insiders' French, an utterly entertaining and informative guide to the language of the "new France." This "new France" is a country poised to experience the European single currency but uncertain about being part of Europe. It is hooked on fast food but ambivalent about the country where it originated. France today has record unemployment and an increasingly controversial immigrant population. Clearly, given the rapidly changing conditions and lifestyles, conventional French dictionaries alone cannot completely inform readers and visitors. Insiders' French offers a solution to the incomprehension, a unique handbook in which you'll find the language of European union, the space program, abortion and women's rights, high-tech industries, and health care, among other topics. Entries proceed by association of ideas and related terms, with extensive cross-referencing, while still being alphabetized for easy reference like a standard dictionary. Cartoons from major French journals add to your understanding and enjoyment. Insiders' French opens up the secret territory of French politics and culture that is often not understood by visitors or students, and it does so with wit and verve—qualities that remain in the French language despite its recent changes.
What is architecture? How is it made? How is it judged? These fundamental questions have intrigued architects for centuries. While the questions are philosophical, the answers have important ramifications for architectural practice. In Search of Elegance provides answers to these complex questions and, in so doing, develops a new theory for the practice of architecture and urban design.
Featuring the latest research findings and exploring the fascinating interplay of modernist authors and intellectual luminaries, from Beckett and Kafka to Derrida and Adorno, this bold new collection of essays gives students a deeper grasp of key texts in modernist literature. Provides a wealth of fresh perspectives on canonical modernist texts, featuring the latest research data Adopts an original and creative thematic approach to the subject, with concepts such as race, law, gender, class, time, and ideology forming the structure of the collection Explores current and ongoing debates on the links between the aesthetics and praxis of authors and modernist theoreticians Reveals the profound ways in which modernist authors have influenced key thinkers, and vice versa
Volume 1 considers the uses to which social representation and modes of social behavior are put by individuals and groups, describing the tactics available to the common man for reclaiming his own autonomy from the all-pervasive forces of commerce, politics, and culture. Volume 2 is based on on microhistories that move from the private sphere (of dwelling, cooking, and homemaking) to the public (the experience of living in a neighborhood). Delves into the subtle tactics of resistance and private practices that make living a subversive art.
In the aftermath of French defeat in July 1940, twenty-year-old Jean Arnaud and his ally, the charming conman Palfy, are hiding out at a brothel in Clermont-Ferrand, having narrowly escaped a firing squad. At a military parade, Jean falls for a beautiful stranger, Claude, who will help him forget his adolescent heartbreak but bring far more serious troubles of her own. Having safely reached occupied Paris, the friends mingle with art smugglers and forgers, social climbers, showbiz starlets, bluffers, swindlers and profiteers, French and German, as Jean learns to make his way in a world of murky allegiances. But beyond the social whirl, the war cannot stay away forever... In this sequel to the acclaimed novel The Foundling Boy, Michel Déon's hero comes to manhood not through combat but by discovering truths about desire and possession, sex and love, and the nuances that lie between crudely drawn battle lines.
Marginalized by the scientific age the lessons of the senses have been overtaken by the dominance of language and the information revolution. With The Five Senses Serres traces a topology of human perception, writing against the Cartesian tradition and in praise of empiricism, he demonstrates repeatedly, and lyrically, the sterility of systems of knowledge divorced from bodily experience. The fragile empirical world, long resistant to our attempts to contain and catalog it, is disappearing beneath the relentless accumulations of late capitalist society and information technology. Data has replaced sensory pleasure, we are less interested in the taste of a fine wine than in the description on the bottle's label. What are we, and what do we really know, when we have forgotten that our senses can describe a taste more accurately than language ever could? The book won the inaugural Prix Médicis Essai in 1985. The Revelations edition includes an introduction by Steven Connor.
It is August 18, 1634. Father Urbain Grandier, convicted of sorcery that led to the demonic possession of the Ursuline nuns of provincial Loudun in France, confesses his sins on the porch of the church of Saint-Pierre, then perishes in flames lit by his own exorcists. A dramatic tale that has inspired many artistic retellings, including a novel by Aldous Huxley and an incendiary film by Ken Russell, the story of the possession at Loudun here receives a compelling analysis from the renowned Jesuit historian Michel de Certeau. Interweaving substantial excerpts from primary historical documents with fascinating commentary, de Certeau shows how the plague of sorceries and possessions in France that climaxed in the events at Loudun both revealed the deepest fears of a society in traumatic flux and accelerated its transformation. In this tour de force of psychological history, de Certeau brings to vivid life a people torn between the decline of centralized religious authority and the rise of science and reason, wracked by violent anxiety over what or whom to believe. At the time of his death in 1986, Michel de Certeau was a director of studies at the école des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris. He was author of eighteen books in French, three of which have appeared in English translation as The Practice of Everyday Life,The Writing of History, and The Mystic Fable, Volume 1, the last of which is published by The University of Chicago Press. "Brilliant and innovative. . . . The Possession at Loudun is [de Certeau's] most accessible book and one of his most wonderful."—Stephen Greenblatt (from the Foreword)
Michel Baridon traces the history of the most famous gardens in the world from their inception through the three centuries of eventful history that they have witnessed.
Energy and the environment are inextricably linked to the economy. Thermodynamics therefore seems to be a privileged tool in overcoming the constraints associated with optimization.This first volume reports on an original, contemporary approach leading to optimal solutions in the form of trend models, proving the existence of solutions which can then be refined in a more complete and sophisticated manner.The validation of the proposed methodology is realized through real-life examples (engines, heat pumps, refrigeration systems, etc.). However, the more fundamental aspects linked to the dynamics of the transfer and conversion of energy and matter are also explored, as well as the evolution which characterizes the second law of thermodynamics.This book presents recent advances, often still undergoing research, as well as structured exercises, and is therefore aimed at both students and researchers in the field of energetics. It proposes a view of the evolution of knowledge regarding the thermodynamics modeling of systems and processes It shows results and also the existence of optimum all and along the development It focuses on multidisciplinary approach that characterizes thermodynamics
Louise Michel was born illegitimate in 1830 and became a schoolmistress in Paris. She was involved in radical activities during the twilight of France’s Second Empire, and during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the siege of Paris. She was a leading member of the revolutionary groups controlling Montmarte. Michel emerged as one of the leaders of the insurrection during the Paris Commune of March-May 1871; and French anarchists saw her as martyr and saint – The Red Virgin. When the Versailles government crushed the Commune in May 1871, Michel was sentenced to exile in New Caledonia, until the general amnesty of 1880, when she returned to France and great popular acclaim and support from the working people of the country. Michel was arrested again during a demonstration in Paris in 1883 and sentenced to six years in prison. Pardoned after three years, she continued her speeches and writing, although she spent the greater part of her time from 1890 until her death in 1905 in England in self-imposed exile. It was during her prison term from 1883 to 1886 that she compiled her Memoires, now available in English. These memoirs offer readers a view of the non-Marxist left and give an in-depth look into the development of the revolutionary spirit. The early chapters treat her childhood, the development of her revolutionary feelings, and her training as a schoolteacher. The next section describes her activities as a schoolteacher in the Haute-Marne and Paris and therefore contains much of interest on education in 19th-century Europe. Her chapters on the siege of Paris, the Commune, and her first trial show those events from the point of view of a major participant. Of particular interest is a chapter on women’s rights, which Michel saw as part of the search for the rights of all people, male and female, and not as a separate struggle. The Red Virgin: Memoirs of Louise Michel will be useful to both scholars and students of 19th-century French history and women’s studies.
In this beautiful and richly illustrated book, the acclaimed author of Blue and Black presents a fascinating and revealing history of the color green in European societies from prehistoric times to today. Examining the evolving place of green in art, clothes, literature, religion, science, and everyday life, Michel Pastoureau traces how culture has profoundly changed the perception and meaning of the color over millennia—and how we misread cultural, social, and art history when we assume that colors have always signified what they do today. Filled with entertaining and enlightening anecdotes, Green shows that the color has been ambivalent: a symbol of life, luck, and hope, but also disorder, greed, poison, and the devil. Chemically unstable, green pigments were long difficult to produce and even harder to fix. Not surprisingly, the color has been associated with all that is changeable and fleeting: childhood, love, and money. Only in the Romantic period did green definitively become the color of nature. Pastoureau also explains why the color was connected with the Roman emperor Nero, how it became the color of Islam, why Goethe believed it was the color of the middle class, why some nineteenth-century scholars speculated that the ancient Greeks couldn't see green, and how the color was denigrated by Kandinsky and the Bauhaus. More broadly, Green demonstrates that the history of the color is, to a large degree, one of dramatic reversal: long absent, ignored, or rejected, green today has become a ubiquitous and soothing presence as the symbol of environmental causes and the mission to save the planet. With its striking design and compelling text, Green will delight anyone who is interested in history, culture, art, fashion, or media.
Finite Physical Dimensions Optimal Thermodynamics: Complex Systems is the result of 30 years of teaching and research in the field of thermodynamics of systems and processes. It starts from FTT during the seventies (and P Chambadal approach in France), but also includes the equilibrium thermodynamics from Carnot and TPIL from Onsager. The book shows that thermodynamics proposes more realistic results than those obtained from equilibrium thermodynamics. Focusing on a multidisciplinary approach that characterizes thermodynamics, particularly the connection between transfer phenomena and conversion of energy, the book is ideal for those in industry. Presents a synthesis of years of teaching and research on the topic Proposes a view of the evolution of knowledge regarding the thermodynamics modeling of systems and processes Starts from FTT during the seventies (and P Chambadal approach in France), but also includes the equilibrium thermodynamics from Carnot and TPIL from Onsager
The second volume of Michel Leiris’s hugely influential four-volume autobiographical essay, available to English-language readers in a brilliant and sensitive translation by Lydia Davis One of the most versatile and beloved French intellectuals of the twentieth century, Michel Leiris reconceives the autobiography as a literary experiment that sheds light on the mechanisms of memory and on the way the unconnected events of a life become connected through invented narrative. In this volume, the second in his four-volume epic autobiographical enterprise, Leiris merges quotidian events with profound philosophical self-exploration. He also wrangles with the disillusionment that accompanies his own self-reflection. In the midst of struggling with his own motives for writing an autobiographical essay, he comes to the revelation that life, after all, has aspects worth remembering even if moments of beauty are bookended by misery. Yet what can be said of human life, of his own life, when his memory is unreliable, his eyesight is failing, and his mood is despairing?
Control Theory is at the heart of information and communication technologies of complex systems. It can contribute to meeting the energy and environmental challenges we are facing. The textbook is organized in the way an engineer classically proceeds to solve a control problem, that is, elaboration of a mathematical model capturing the process behavior, analysis of this model and design of a control to achieve the desired objectives. It is divided into three Parts. The first part of the text addresses modeling aspects through state space and input-output representations. The notion of the internal state of a system (for example mechanical, thermal or electrical), as well as its description using a finite number of variables, is also emphasized. The second part is devoted to the stability analysis of an equilibrium point. The authors present classical tools for stability analysis, such as linearization techniques and Lyapunov functions. Central to Control Theory are the notions of feedback and of closed-loop, and the third part of the textbook describes the linear control synthesis in a continuous and discrete-time framework and also in a probabilistic context. Quadratic optimization and Kalman filtering are presented, as well as the polynomial representation, a convenient approach to reject perturbations on the system without making the control law more complex. Throughout the text, different examples are developed, both in the chapters and in the exercises.
Acts of Faith and Imagination wagers that fiction written by Catholic authors assists readers to reflect critically on the question: "what is faith?" To speak of a person's "faith-life" is to speak of change and development. As a narrative form, literature can illustrate the dynamics of faith, which remains in flux over the course of one's life. Because human beings must possess faith in something (whether religious or not), it inevitably has a narrative structure?faith ebbs and flows, flourishes and decays, develops and stagnates. Through an exploration of more than a dozen Catholic authors' novels and short stories, Brent Little argues that Catholic fiction encourages the reader to reflect upon their faith holistically, that is, the way faith informs one's affections, and how a person conceives and interacts with the world as embodied beings. Amidst the diverse stories of modern and contemporary fiction, a consistent pattern emerges: Catholic fiction portrays faith?at its most fundamental, often unconscious, level?as an act of the imagination. Faith is the way one imagines themselves, others, and creation. A person's primary faith conditions how they live in the world, regardless of the level of conscious reflection, and regardless of whether this is a "religious" faith. Acts of Faith and Imagination investigates the creative depth and vitality of the Catholic literary imagination by bringing late modern Catholic authors into dialogue with more contemporary ones. Readers will then consider well-known works, such as those by Graham Greene, Flannery O'Connor, and Muriel Spark in the fresh light of contemporary stories by Toni Morrison, Alice McDermott, Uwem Akpan, and several others.
Examining present-day forms of terrorism, violence, racism and hatred, Wieviorka analyses each aspect from a sociological point of view, showing how these various forms of evil are constituted in day-to-day life.
In 1933 thousands of intellectuals, artists, writers, militants and other opponents of the Nazi regime fled Germany. They were, in the words of Heinrich Mann, "the best of Germany," refusing to remain citizens in this new state that legalized terror and brutality. Exiled across the world, they continued the fight against Nazism in prose, poetry, painting, architecture, film and theater. Weimar in Exile follows these lives, from the rise of national socialism to their return to a ruined homeland, retracing their stories, struggles, setbacks and rare victories. The dignity in exile of Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Dblin, Hanns Eisler, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Anna Seghers, Ernst Toller, Stefan Zweig and many others provides a counterpoint to the story of Germany under the Nazis.
La thermodynamique doit aujourd’hui s’adapter à une problématique plus large, le développement durable. Par le biais d’une approche originale utilisant des outils renouvelés, cet ouvrage apporte des réponses à ce challenge sous deux aspects : - un aspect applicatif, par la méthodologie d'optimisation sous contrainte, qui conduit à des solutions optimales faciles à comparer à l'existant, et dessine les voies et potentiels d'amélioration encore disponibles ; - un aspect fondamental, qui correspond à une vision nouvelle de la thermodynamique des machines et des systèmes. Le livre s'écarte de l'approche classique de thermodynamique de l'équilibre, développée par Carnot, pour adopter une méthode qui allie les descriptions des phénomènes dynamiques de transfert et de conversion. À ces aspects pratiques de la vie courante, s'ajoute une vision plus profonde et fondamentale du monde, en particulier la notion d'évolution, intimement liée au second principe de thermodynamique. L’auteur Ingénieur et physicien, Michel Feidt est enseignant-chercheur en thermodynamique et énergétique à l'université de Lorraine. Il anime aussi une équipe de recherche dédiée aux études des systèmes et procédés énergétiques.
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