stanford university press aug 2000 (23 resultados)

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - Are there classes in America In The Classless Society Paul Kingston forcefully answers no.This book directly challenges a long-standing intellectual tradition of class analysis, recently revitalized by such prominent scholars as Erik Olin Wright and John Goldthorpe. Insisting on a realist conception of class, Kingston argues that presumed 'classes' do not significantly share distinct, life-defining experiences.Individual chapters assess the extent of class structuration in five dimensions of life: mobility (how demographically cohesive are classes ), interaction patterns (do classes exist as communal groups ), cultural orientation (are there class cultures, as Bourdieu and his followers maintain ), class sentiment (to what extent do objective position and subjective sentiments align ), and political orientations (do classes represent distinct political forces ). This broad assessment is the basis for Kingston's conclusion that classes do not exist in America in any meaningful way. The Classless Society analyzes prominent general 'maps' of the American class structure, as well as the less-studied extremes of socioeconomic position ('Lives of the Rich and Poor'), the alleged emergence of post-industrial classes (the 'New Class' and the 'McProletariat'), and class structuration in other societies ('American Unexceptionalism'). Kingston rigorously addresses the question, 'How would you recognize a class if you saw one ' thus establishing clear grounds for engaging the issue. He relates the findings and methods of the best contemporary research in substantial detail, allowing the reader to assess the book's conclusions from a thorough evidentiary base.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) was one of the twentieth century's most influential thinkers in the areas of social theory, philosophy, aesthetics, and music. This volume reveals another aspect of the work of this remarkable polymath, a pioneering analysis of the psychological underpinnings of what we now call the Radical Right and its use of the media to propagate its political and religious agenda.The now-forgotten Martin Luther Thomas was an American fascist-style demagogue of the Christian right on the radio in the 1930s. During these years, Adorno was living in the United States and working with Paul Lazarsfeld on the social significance of radio. This book, Adorno's penetrating analysis of Thomas's rhetorical appeal and manipulative techniques, was written in English and is one of Adorno's most accessible works. It is in four parts: 'The Personal Element: Self-Characterization of the Agitator,' 'Thomas' Methods,' 'The Religious Medium,'and 'Ideological Bait.' The importance of the study is manifold: it includes a theory of fascism and anti-semitism, it provides a methodology for the cultural study of popular culture, and it offers broad reflections on comparative political life in America and Europe.Implicit in the book is an innovative idea about the relation between psychological and sociological reality. Moreover, the study is germane to the contemporary reality of political and religious radio in the United States because it provides an analysis of rhetorical techniques that exploit potentials of psychological regression for authoritarian aims.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - 'This original and important book demonstrates the inseparability of philosophy and psychoanalysis for any serious attempt to answer a question so profoundly relevant to the very nature of our being that it does not 'belong' to any one discipline: the question, as Silverman puts it, of what it means for the world that each one of us is in it. The book has a remarkable clarity; Silverman makes the most complex argument seem like a perfectly natural, and absolutely necessary, movement of thought.'--Leo Bersani, University of California, Berkeley.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - ' . . . this work is less a book about the Confessions as it is an insight into a twentieth century philosopher at the end of his life. . . . With prose bordering on the poetic, Lyotard entices and captivates throughout. His final insights here disclose how Augustine's own autobiography is really an omni-biography: a story every soul tells as it comes to realize, as Lyotard's last line puts it, that only at the 'end of the night forever begins.''--The Review of Metaphysics.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - Two features of mathematics stand out: its menagerie of seemingly eternal objects (numbers, spaces, patterns, functions, categories, morphisms, graphs, and so on), and the hieroglyphics of special notations, signs, symbols, and diagrams associated with them. The author challenges the widespread belief in the extra-human origins of these objects and the understanding of mathematics as either a purely mental activity about them or a formal game of manipulating symbols. Instead, he argues that mathematics is a vast and unique man-made imagination machine controlled by writing. Mathematics as Sign addresses both aspects--mental and linguistic--of this machine. The opening essay, 'Toward a Semiotics of Mathematics' (long acknowledged as a seminal contribution to its field), sets out the author's underlying model. According to this model, 'doing' mathematics constitutes a kind of waking dream or thought experiment in which a proxy of the self is propelled around imagined worlds that are conjured into intersubjective being through signs. Other essays explore the status of these signs and the nature of mathematical objects, how mathematical ideograms and diagrams differ from each other and from written words, the probable fate of the real number continuum and calculus in the digital era, the manner in which Platonic and Aristotelean metaphysics are enshrined in the contemporary mathematical infinitude of endless counting, and the possibility of creating a new conception of the sequence of whole numbers based on what the author calls non-Euclidean counting. Reprising and going beyond the critique of number in Ad Infinitum, the essays in this volume offer an accessible insight into Rotman's project, one that has been called 'one of the most original and important recent contributions to the philosophy of mathematics.'.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - I am. We are.That is enough. Now we have to start.These are the opening words of Ernst Bloch's first major work, The Spirit of Utopia, written mostly in 1915-16, published in its first version just after the First World War, republished five years later, 1923, in the version here presented for the first time in English translation.The Spirit of Utopia is one of the great historic books from the beginning of the century, but it is not an obsolete one. In its style of thinking, a peculiar amalgam of biblical, Marxist, and Expressionist turns, in its analytical skills deeply informed by Simmel, taking its information from both Hegel and Schopenhauer for the groundwork of its metaphysics of music but consistently interpreting the cultural legacy in the light of a certain Marxism, Bloch's Spirit of Utopia is a unique attempt to rethink the history of Western civilizations as a process of revolutionary disruptions and to reread the artworks, religions, and philosophies of this tradition as incentives to continue disrupting.The alliance between messianism and Marxism, which was proclaimed in this book for the first time with epic breadth, has met with more critique than acclaim. The expressive and baroque diction of the book was considered as offensive as its stubborn disregard for the limits of 'disciplines.' Yet there is hardly a 'discipline' that didn't adopt, however unknowingly, some of Bloch's insights, and his provocative associations often proved more productive than the statistical account of social shifts. The first part of this philosophical meditation--which is also a narrative, an analysis, a rhapsody, and a manifesto--concerns a mode of 'self-encounter' that presents itself in the history of music from Mozart through Mahler as an encounter with the problem of a community to come. This 'we-problem' is worked out by Bloch in terms of a philosophy of the history of music. The 'self-encounter,' however, has to be conceived as 'self-invention,' as the active, affirmative fight for freedom and social justice, under the sign of Marx. The second part of the book is entitled 'Karl Marx, Death and the Apocalypse.' I am. We are. That's hardly anything.But enough to start.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - In this provocative and thoughtful book, Amy Zegart challenges the conventional belief that national security agencies work reasonably well to serve the national interest as they were designed to do. Using a new institutionalist approach, Zegart asks what forces shaped the initial design of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the National Security Council in ways that meant they were handicapped from birth.Ironically, she finds that much of the blame can be ascribed to cherished features of American democracy--frequent elections, the separation of powers, majority rule, political compromise--all of which constrain presidential power and give Congress little incentive to create an effective foreign policy system. At the same time, bureaucrats in rival departments had the expertise, the staying power, and the incentives to sabotage the creation of effective competitors, and this is exactly what they did. Historical evidence suggests that most political players did not consider broad national concerns when they forged the CIA, JCS, and NSC in the late 1940s. Although President Truman aimed to establish a functional foreign policy system, he was stymied by self-interested bureaucrats, legislators, and military leaders. The NSC was established by accident, as a byproduct of political compromise; Navy opposition crippled the JCS from the outset; and the CIA emerged without the statutory authority to fulfill its assigned role thanks to the Navy, War, State, and Justice departments, which fought to protect their own intelligence apparatus.Not surprisingly, the new security agencies performed poorly as they struggled to overcome their crippled evolution. Only the NSC overcame its initial handicaps as several presidents exploited loopholes in the National Security Act of 1947 to reinvent the NSC staff. The JCS, by contrast, remained mired in its ineffective design for nearly forty years--i.e., throughout the Cold War--and the CIA's pivotal analysis branch has never recovered from its origins. In sum, the author paints an astonishing picture: the agencies Americans count on most to protect them from enemies abroad are, by design, largely incapable of doing so.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - 'A significant contribution to the literature in organizational ethnography.'--Work and Occupations'Drori's book is a useful addition to the literature of a largely neglected, but important subject.'--Journal of Palestine Studies.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - This is the definitive analysis of art as a social and perceptual system by Germany's leading social theorist of the late twentieth century. It not only represents an important intellectual step in discussions of art--in its rigor and in its having refreshingly set itself the task of creating a set of distinctions for determining what counts as art that could be valid for those creating as well as those receiving art works--but it also represents an important advance in systems theory.Returning to the eighteenth-century notion of aesthetics as pertaining to the 'knowledge of the senses,' Luhmann begins with the idea that all art, including literature, is rooted in perception. He insists on the radical incommensurability between psychic systems (perception) and social systems (communication). Art is a special kind of communication that uses perceptions instead of language. It operates at the boundary between the social system and consciousness in ways that profoundly irritate communication while remaining strictly internal to the social.In seven densely argued chapters, Luhmann develops this basic premise in great historical and empirical detail. Framed by the general problem of art's status as a social system, each chapter elaborates, in both its synchronic and diachronic dimensions, a particular aspect of this problem. The consideration of art within the context of a theory of second-order observation leads to a reconceptualization of aesthetic form. The remaining chapters explore the question of the system's code, its function, and its evolution, concluding with an analysis of 'self-description.'Art as a Social System draws on a vast body of scholarship, combining the results of three decades of research in the social sciences, phenomenology, evolutionary biology, cybernetics, and information theory with an intimate knowledge of art history, literature, aesthetics, and contemporary literary theory. The book also engages virtually every major theorist of art and aesthetics from Baumgarten to Derrida.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - This magisterial work explores how Renaissance Germans understood and experienced madness. It focuses on the insanity of the world in general but also on specific disorders; examines the thinking on madness of theologians, jurists, and physicians; and analyzes the vernacular ideas that propelled sufferers to seek help in pilgrimage or newly founded hospitals for the helplessly disordered. In the process, the author uses the history of madness as a lens to illuminate the history of the Renaissance, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the history of poverty and social welfare, and the history of princely courts, state building, and the civilizing process.Rather than try to fit historical experience into modern psychiatric categories, this book reconstructs the images and metaphors through which Renaissance Germans themselves understood and experienced mental illness and deviance, ranging from such bizarre conditions as St. Vitus's dance and demonic possession to such medical crises as melancholy and mania. By examining the records of shrines and hospitals, where the mad went for relief, we hear the voices of the mad themselves.For many religious Germans, sin was a form of madness and the sinful world was thoroughly insane. This book compares the thought of Martin Luther and the medical-religious reformer Paracelsus, who both believed that madness was a basic category of human experience. For them and others, the sixteenth century was an age of increasing demonic presence; the demon-possessed seemed to be everywhere. For Renaissance physicians, however, the problem was finding the correct ancient Greek concepts to describe mental illness. In medical terms, the late sixteenth century was the age of melancholy. For jurists, the customary insanity defense did not clarify whether melancholy persons were responsible for their actions, and they frequently solicited the advice of physicians.Sixteenth-century Germany was also an age of folly, with fools filling a major role in German art and literature and present at every prince and princeling's court. The author analyzes what Renaissance Germans meant by folly and examines the lives and social contexts of several court fools.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - What has made Silicon Valley so productive of new technologies and new firms How did its pioneering achievements begin--in computer networking, semiconductors, personal computing, and the Internet--and what forces have propelled its unprecedented growth This collection of nine chapters by contributors from varied disciplines--business, geography, history, regional planning, and sociology--examines the history, development, and entrepreneurial dynamics of Silicon Valley.Part I, 'History,' provides context for the Valley's success by exploring its early industrial roots. It traces the development of the electronics industry in Silicon Valley back to the founding of Federal Telegraph in 1908, and discusses the role of defense spending and the relationship with Stanford University in the region's growth. Part II, 'Institutions,' emphasizes the importance of supporting institutions and practices in helping Valley startups succeed. Four chapters explore the role of law firms in facilitating the formation of new companies, the evolution of the venture capital industry and its role in funding new firms, the importance of labor mobility, and the significance of close interfirm relationships in the success of Silicon Valley companies.Part III, 'General Explanations,' presents three different perspectives on the environment that has made Silicon Valley so successful. The first chapter considers Silicon Valley as an ecosystem of interacting institutions, individuals, and a culture that encourages and nurtures entrepreneurship. The second chapter argues that Silicon Valley should not be seen as a region in which relationships are based on civic virtue, but rather one in which trust is based on performance, which makes it uniquely permeable to new ideas and talented individuals. The final chapter contends that institutions specializing in new firm formation are responsible for Silicon Valley's unique ability to foster technological advances.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - Written rules in formal organizations are distinctive elements of organizational history; they shape organizational change and are in turn shaped by it. These rules are created, revised, and eliminated in ways that leave historical traces, and they have a visibility and durability that elude non-written rules. They thus provide rich data for an empirical probe into the dynamics of organizational history.This study uses qualitative and quantitative data from the history of a specific organization, Stanford University, to develop speculations about the ways in which written rules change. It contributes both to a theory of rules and to theories of organizational decision-making, change, and learning. Organizations respond to problems and react to internal or external pressures by focusing attention on existing and potential rules. The creation, modification, or elimination of a rule, then, is a response to events in the outside environment (such as new government regulations) or to events within the organization (such as alterations in internal government structures).The authors elaborate a simple set of ideas about written rules and their dynamics, emphasizing the interplay among periodic major shocks to the system from outside, experiences with individual rules as they age and are revised, and the spread of effects through an interconnected set of rules. It is a story in which changes introduced in one part of a rule system create adjustments in other parts, including the same rule later in time, as the consequences of the changes are experienced and as rule-making attention is mobilized, satiated, and redirected. These processes involve the full panoply of political negotiation, symbolic competition, discussion, and problem solving that are typical of organizational decision making.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - 'A carefully researched treatment of the highs and lows of U.S.-Japan-Korea trilateral policy coordination. . . . It merits reading by both scholars and practitioners of East Asian security.'--William J. Perry, Former Secretary of Defense and Special Advisor to the President on North Korea Policy'Cha's book is a meticulously documented yet readable account of the tensions and interactions between America's tow allies in Northeast Asia in recent decades. It adds significantly to accessible knowledge of a difficult but increasingly important relationship.'--Don Oberdorfer, author of The Two Koreas: A Contmporary History.

Taschenbuch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - This book provides a compelling and vivid account of British involvement in the Spanish Civil War, examining the experience of the British volunteers in the International Brigades, and placing them in a broad intellectual, political, social, and cultural framework. Incorporating some familiar and many new voices of a turbulent decade, it analyzes the manner in which British men and women conceptualized their engagement with the political issues of their time--whether they were Oxbridge aesthetes or militants from the factories, the mines, and the ranks of the unemployed.The event that galvanized the volunteers and the many thousands who supported them in Great Britain was the rising of General Franco and his allies against the democratically elected Second Spanish Republic on July 17, 1936. As a counterpart to German and Italian intervention on behalf of the insurgents, the Soviet Union instructed the Comintern to recruit and organize an international volunteer army to come to the aid of the Republic.The International Brigades quickly achieved mythical status as the century's most conspicuous example of dedicated idealism, serving the cause of democracy in peril. The early 'spontaneous' fighters and, later, the British Battalion in the XVth International Brigade, which included some 2,000 volunteers, fought in every major campaign of the war; about 85 percent of the Battalion's members were killed or wounded. The author is the first scholar to make systematic use of the recently opened archive of the International Brigades in Moscow, enabling him to take the measure of the nobility and tragedy of the British sacrifice in Spain. His study confirms popular mythology about the International Brigades in certain respects and sharply disputes it in others. Above all, Into the Heart of the Fire establishes the fact that the British volunteers were not social or neurotic misfits. Rather, they reflected in a distinctive way the political concerns of many of their generation.

Buch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - This book studies the transition from local to national timekeeping, a process that led to Standard Time--the world-wide system of timekeeping by which we all live. Prior to the railroads' adoption of Standard Railway Time in 1883, timekeeping was entirely a local matter, and America lacked any uniform system to coordinate times and public activities. For example, in the middle of the nineteenth century, Boston had three authoritative times, which differed by seconds and minutes.The story begins in the 1830s with the building of the first railroads. Since railway safety depended upon maintaining the temporal separation of trains through precise timing, railroads were the first to establish time standards to govern their operations. The railroads' switch to five time standards indexed to the Greenwich meridian inaugurated the modern era of public timekeeping and led directly to cities adopting Greenwich-indexed civil time zones.Central to the story are those college and university astronomers who, starting in the 1850s, sold time signals to nearby cities and railroads. From the start, they competed with other entrepreneurs trying to make money by selling time. Decades of negotiations, government lobbying, and battles over customers followed, all in the name of 'public service.' Improvements by a host of clockmakers, civil and electrical engineers, telegraph and railway technicians, and instrument makers finally changed the market for accurate time. Public timekeeping became the realm of business investors.Despite the efforts of astronomers and various of their Congressional supporters, who argued for the necessity of a national system of time authorized by the federal government, the railroads' success with their own system blocked legislation for a national system of time until the First World War. By then, a single source for correct time dominated the public's timekeeping: the U.S. Naval Observatory's noon signal.In this first comprehensive, scholarly history of timekeeping in America, the author has drawn upon a rich, untapped archival record, municipal and legislative documents, newspapers, and science and engineering journals to challenge several myths that have grown up around the subject.

Buch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - This volume explores the appropriation of the past in modern British culture. Today, at the beginning of a new millennium, the mass media would have us believe that Britain is suffering an identity crisis. If the pundits are correct, we are witnessing a manipulation of British history at the hands of those keen to project a new national image--or in the language of commodification, to 'rebrand' Britain.The twelve essays in Singular Continuities take a different tack. They argue that to distinguish between 'the new' and 'the traditional' in modern English culture often draws a false dichotomy, that British-ness, in fact, has been the product of continuous creation throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors strongly suggest that 'tradition' derives from constant reimagining, if not from calculated invention.Such reimagining has often assumed surprising forms. Thus, for example, at the end of Victoria's reign, an 'enemy' culture--that of the Boer farmer--was recruited to the British ideal of pastoral self-sufficiency. Similarly, the iconoclastic surrealism of the interwar artist Humphrey Jennings was actually suffused with a celebratory sense of the British past. And during the 1970s and 1980s, working-class autobiography eulogized not the triumph of character over circumstance but rather an industrial nostalgia that recalled a cityscape where slum neighbors once knew their turf and the people who occupied it. Related themes are pursued in essays that range from the demonizing of Irish immigrants in early-Victorian London to the impact of reading on suffrage activism, from the professionalization of social work to the selling of the past in Thatcher's Britain.What has been termed 'heritage-bashing' finds few echoes in this collection. 'Heritage' is a remarkably protean notion, as useful to the political left as to the right, to feminists as well as to would-be patriarchs. It is the malleable nature of British cultural continuity that makes its heritage 'singular.'.

Buch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - 'A masterful job of contemporary scholarly editing, this book begins an edition intended to clarify a 'Jeffers canon, ' establishing for times to come the verse legacy of a poet who looked on all things with the eyes of eternity.'--San Francisco Chronicle'This edition will be standard . . . a tribute and justice to a poet whose independent strength has survived to challenge personal and public canons.'--Virginia Quarterly Review.

Buch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - The three shots fired into the back of Israel's prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, on the night of November 4, 1995, were a blow to Israel's social body. The shock, horror, and pain caused by the murder found direct and overwhelming expression at the funeral and memorial ceremonies held in Jerusalem, attended by most of the world's leaders.This book deals with the social and political developments in Israel in the painful process of decolonization from the occupied territories, following the late 1980s Palestinian Intifada and its aftermath. Fifteen distinguished contributors from a range of disciplinary viewpoints--historical, psychological, anthropological, political, and cultural--survey the various reactions to the assassination and analyze its ramifications and repercussions, creating a powerful mosaic of Israel with the assassination at its center.The fear that the murder would lead to civil war did not materialize. In fact, with hindsight it seems that the prime minister was a scapegoat, a victim of a deeply divided society split not only over the issue of peace with its neighbors but, more profoundly, over the construction of Israel's collective identity and consciousness. The assassination showed how easy it is for religious fundamentalists to ignore democratic rules and how militant nationalists will resort to violence to prevent the surrender of parts of the Holy Land.The strength of these elements of society was manifested in the general elections of 1996, when Rabin's adherents lost to the nationalist-clerical group. Paradoxically, the reaction to the assassination also revealed Israel's growing desire to pursue the peace process, and when Prime Minister Netanyahu failed to do so, he was replaced before his term ended. Less than four years after the assassination, the Israelis put the reigns of government back into the hands of Rabin's successors, who promised to continue in his path.With the road to peace lengthy, painful, and hazardous, have the fanatics learned a lesson from the aftermath of Rabin's murder Will he be the last victim Will Israeli democracy survive the agony of shrinking to the tiny size of the pre-1967 boundaries Will Israeli society develop into a Western democratic and enlightened model, or will it become a reactionary, ethnocentric, xenophobic backwater This volume does not propose definitive answers to these questions, but it reflects on them in very thoughtful and knowledgeable ways.

Buch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - Two features of mathematics stand out: its menagerie of seemingly eternal objects (numbers, spaces, patterns, functions, categories, morphisms, graphs, and so on), and the hieroglyphics of special notations, signs, symbols, and diagrams associated with them. The author challenges the widespread belief in the extra-human origins of these objects and the understanding of mathematics as either a purely mental activity about them or a formal game of manipulating symbols. Instead, he argues that mathematics is a vast and unique man-made imagination machine controlled by writing. Mathematics as Sign addresses both aspects--mental and linguistic--of this machine. The opening essay, 'Toward a Semiotics of Mathematics' (long acknowledged as a seminal contribution to its field), sets out the author's underlying model. According to this model, 'doing' mathematics constitutes a kind of waking dream or thought experiment in which a proxy of the self is propelled around imagined worlds that are conjured into intersubjective being through signs. Other essays explore the status of these signs and the nature of mathematical objects, how mathematical ideograms and diagrams differ from each other and from written words, the probable fate of the real number continuum and calculus in the digital era, the manner in which Platonic and Aristotelean metaphysics are enshrined in the contemporary mathematical infinitude of endless counting, and the possibility of creating a new conception of the sequence of whole numbers based on what the author calls non-Euclidean counting. Reprising and going beyond the critique of number in Ad Infinitum, the essays in this volume offer an accessible insight into Rotman's project, one that has been called 'one of the most original and important recent contributions to the philosophy of mathematics.'.

Buch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - This remarkable posthumous work by one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century engages Augustine's Confessions, one of the major canonical works of world literature and the very paradigm of autobiography as a definable genre of writing.Lyotard approaches his subject by returning to his earliest phenomenological training, rearticulating Augustine's sensory universe from a vantage point imaginarily inside the confessant's world, a vantage point that reveals the intense point of conjuncture between the sensual and the spiritual, the erotic world and the mystical, being and appearance, sin and salvation. Lyotard reveals the very origins of phenomenology in Augustine's narrative, and in so doing also shows the origins of semiotics to lie there (in the explication of the Augustinian heavens as skin, as veil, as vellum).Lyotard's explication of Augustine is also a final survey of the entirety of the philosophical enterprise, a philosopher's profound reflections on the very basis of philosophy. He sees the Confessions as a major source of the Western--and decidedly modern--determination of the self and of its normativity, the point of departure for all reflection and the condition of possibility of all experience. Lyotard suggests that Augustine's 'I,' Descartes's 'cogito,' and Husserl's 'transcendental ego' in essence or structurally say the same thing.Lyotard aims at no simple ascription of Augustine's position. Instead, his text centers on what he takes to be Augustine's central confession: the repeated avowal of an essential uncertainty concerning the status of the faith confessed, of being in a sense already too late, of a difficulty in being no longer of this world while being in it all the same. Far from offering the foundation of all subsequent journeys to selfhood, Lyotard sees the Confessions as many evocations of a certain loss of self, of a temporality that is not given or recuperated all at once--or once and for all--but that time and again is lost or forgotten.

Buch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - Written rules in formal organizations are distinctive elements of organizational history; they shape organizational change and are in turn shaped by it. These rules are created, revised, and eliminated in ways that leave historical traces, and they have a visibility and durability that elude non-written rules. They thus provide rich data for an empirical probe into the dynamics of organizational history.This study uses qualitative and quantitative data from the history of a specific organization, Stanford University, to develop speculations about the ways in which written rules change. It contributes both to a theory of rules and to theories of organizational decision-making, change, and learning. Organizations respond to problems and react to internal or external pressures by focusing attention on existing and potential rules. The creation, modification, or elimination of a rule, then, is a response to events in the outside environment (such as new government regulations) or to events within the organization (such as alterations in internal government structures).The authors elaborate a simple set of ideas about written rules and their dynamics, emphasizing the interplay among periodic major shocks to the system from outside, experiences with individual rules as they age and are revised, and the spread of effects through an interconnected set of rules. It is a story in which changes introduced in one part of a rule system create adjustments in other parts, including the same rule later in time, as the consequences of the changes are experienced and as rule-making attention is mobilized, satiated, and redirected. These processes involve the full panoply of political negotiation, symbolic competition, discussion, and problem solving that are typical of organizational decision making.

Buch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - Are there classes in America In The Classless Society Paul Kingston forcefully answers no.This book directly challenges a long-standing intellectual tradition of class analysis, recently revitalized by such prominent scholars as Erik Olin Wright and John Goldthorpe. Insisting on a realist conception of class, Kingston argues that presumed 'classes' do not significantly share distinct, life-defining experiences.Individual chapters assess the extent of class structuration in five dimensions of life: mobility (how demographically cohesive are classes ), interaction patterns (do classes exist as communal groups ), cultural orientation (are there class cultures, as Bourdieu and his followers maintain ), class sentiment (to what extent do objective position and subjective sentiments align ), and political orientations (do classes represent distinct political forces ). This broad assessment is the basis for Kingston's conclusion that classes do not exist in America in any meaningful way. The Classless Society analyzes prominent general 'maps' of the American class structure, as well as the less-studied extremes of socioeconomic position ('Lives of the Rich and Poor'), the alleged emergence of post-industrial classes (the 'New Class' and the 'McProletariat'), and class structuration in other societies ('American Unexceptionalism'). Kingston rigorously addresses the question, 'How would you recognize a class if you saw one ' thus establishing clear grounds for engaging the issue. He relates the findings and methods of the best contemporary research in substantial detail, allowing the reader to assess the book's conclusions from a thorough evidentiary base.

Buch. Condición: Neu. Neuware - Many Arab communities in Israel's Galilee region are home to export-oriented textile factories, owned by multinational corporations, whose Jewish managers employ local Arab and Druse women as seamstresses and low-level work supervisors. Based on five years of ethnographic research, this book explores how these managers and workers negotiate the terms and meanings of factory work, integrating work culture with the norms and values of the host towns in order for employment arrangements to succeed.The entrance of industrial corporations into developing areas of the world, particularly in those industries employing primarily women, has generated tension between traditional familial and social roles and the demands of industrial working life. In Israel these tensions are further complicated by the social and political dynamics of Arab-Jewish conflict, as well as the strictly demarcated roles of women and men in traditional Arab society. The resolution of these tensions on the shop floor shapes the social relations of production, the factories' management systems, family life in the industrial towns, and individual status and autonomy. The negotiation involves unequal power relations, manifested in a dual patriarchal structure: the Arab cultural practice of male domination of women as well as the formal management system of the textile concern, which dictates the nature of relationships between Jewish managers and Arab women workers.To meet their business goals, the managers must cooperate with the community that provides their workforce, adapting its norms and appropriating its worldview. The managers are constrained by the strict social rules of Arab and Druse society, and respond by attempting to harness and manipulate local family values to foster personal commitment, furthering production goals through paternal control. The consequence of this paternalism is a workforce that relates to the organization as family, identifies with its goals, and internalizes feelings of loyalty. However, the workforce also uses the plant as the arena for developing self-awareness and enhancing personal independence and status within the family. The seamstresses emerge as active shapers of the organizational culture, forcing the managers to adapt to and comply with their personal needs and perceptions of work.