In an increasingly globalised world, economic and cultural imperatives can be seen as two of the most powerful forces shaping human behaviour. This book considers the relationship between economics and culture both as areas of intellectual discourse, and as systems of societal organisation. Adopting a broad definition of culture, it explores the economic dimensions of culture, and the cultural context of economics. The book is built on a foundation of value theory, developing the twin notions of economic and cultural value as underlying principles for integrating the two fields. Ideas of cultural capital and sustainability are discussed, especially as means of analysing the particular problems of cultural heritage, drawing parallels with the treatment of natural capital in ecological economics. The book goes on to discuss the economics of creativity in the production of cultural goods and services; culture in economic development; the cultural industries; and cultural policy.

Kohlberg Kravis Roberts's approach to leveraged buyouts was an important aspect of the corporate restructuring and governance reforms in the American economy from the mid-1970s through 1990. During that period, KKR crafted a series of progressively more elaborate deals tailored to specific companies and market conditions. Through its creative debt financing and its relationships with an evolving cast of investors, companies, and managers, KKR drove the scale and scope of the buyout phenomenon to unprecedented highs. This book examines KKR's record in detail. Based upon interviews with partners of the firm and on unprecedented access to KKR's records, George Baker and George Smith have written a balanced and enlightening account of how KKR has approached LBOs. This book focuses on KKR's founding, evolution, and innovations as ways to understand issues in modern American business. In examining KKR as a unique form of enterprise - one that subscribes to a set of alternative perspectives on business and value creation - the book bridges the gap between public perception and academic knowledge of the leveraged buyout, a crucial phenomenon of modern economic life.

Michael Billig's rhetorical approach has been key to the discursive turn in the social sciences. His witty and original book examines argumentation and its psychological importance in human conduct, and traces the connections between ancient rhetorical ideas and modern social psychology. In a new introduction, he offers further reflections on rhetoric and social psychology, discusses the recent scholarship, and allows some forgotten voices in the history of rhetoric to be heard.

Review
"Historians and other scholars of the Heian period will certainly want to add it to their shelves, but I warmly recommend it as a high-level introduction to theperiod for non-Japanese specialists as well." Karl Friday Jrnl of Japanese Studies
"The over seven-hundred pades of the text provides a wealth of information...This volume remains an indispensible resource for all students of Heian Japan." American Historial Review Dec 2001
Product Description
This volume provides the most comprehensive treatment of the Heian period, the golden age of the Japanese imperial court, in any Western language. From 794 to 1185, the Japanese emperor ruled over an elaborate government modeled on China's. Native Japanese elements blended with Chinese influences in religion and the courtly arts. The world's first novel was completed about 1020. In 1185 the elegant and peaceful world of the court was shattered by the struggle of the Taira and Minamoto warrior clans, who usurped real political power.

The fundamental question of political theory, one that precedes all other questions about the nature of political life, is why there is a state at all. Is human cooperation feasible without a political authority enforcing it? Or do we need a state to live together? This problem then opens up two further questions. If a state is necessary to establish order, how does it come into place? And, when it does, what are the consequences for the political status and economic welfare of its citizens? Combining ethnographical material, historical cases, and statistical analysis, this book describes the foundations of stateless societies, why and how states emerge, and the basis of political obligation. As a result of this inquiry, it explains the economic and political roots of inequality, describes the causes of the stagnation of the preindustrial world, and explores what led to the West's prosperity of the past two centuries.

In addition to being an interesting and profound subject in its own right, commutative ring theory is important as a foundation for algebraic geometry and complex analytical geometry. Matsumura covers the basic material, including dimension theory, depth, Cohen-Macaulay rings, Gorenstein rings, Krull rings and valuation rings. More advanced topics such as Ratliff's theorems on chains of prime ideals are also explored. The work is essentially self-contained, the only prerequisite being a sound knowledge of modern algebra, yet the reader is taken to the frontiers of the subject. Exercises are provided at the end of each section and solutions or hints to some of them are given at the end of the book.

Originally published in 1976, this book was written specifically to guide students of political theory who want to understand Hegel's political ideas as they appear in The Phenomenology of Mind. Professor Shklar's commentary uses plain language and English translations of references wherever possible. The core of Hegel's argument is that freedom is the identity of the personal goals of individual citizens and the public ends of the polity as a whole. This is a dynamic process, in which all laws are created by each and all, and in turn expressed and realised in the minds and actions of every member of society. The text emphasises Hegel's criticism of every type of subjectivity. The failure to recognise the cultural character of all experience is the core of Hegel's critical review of all past philosophy, and led him to develop his own theory of history and of knowledge as retrospective thinking.

In the later decades of the twentieth century, Africa plunged into political chaos. States failed, governments became predators, and citizens took up arms. In When Things Fell Apart, Robert H. Bates advances an exploration of state failure in Africa. In so doing, he not only plumbs the depths of the continent's late-century tragedy, but also the logic of political order and the foundations of the state. This book covers a wide range of territory by drawing on materials from Rwanda, Sudan, Liberia, and Congo. A must-read for scholars and policy makers concerned with political conflict and state failure.

In addition to being an interesting and profound subject in its own right, commutative ring theory is important as a foundation for algebraic geometry and complex analytical geometry. Matsumura covers the basic material, including dimension theory, depth, Cohen-Macaulay rings, Gorenstein rings, Krull rings and valuation rings. More advanced topics such as Ratliff's theorems on chains of prime ideals are also explored. The work is essentially self-contained, the only prerequisite being a sound knowledge of modern algebra, yet the reader is taken to the frontiers of the subject. Exercises are provided at the end of each section and solutions or hints to some of them are given at the end of the book.

Scientists and 'anti-scientists' alike need a more realistic image of science. The traditional mode of research, academic science, is not just a 'method': it is a distinctive culture, whose members win esteem and employment by making public their findings. Fierce competition for credibility is strictly regulated by established practices such as peer review. Highly specialized international communities of independent experts form spontaneously and generate the type of knowledge we call 'scientific' - systematic, theoretical, empirically-tested, quantitative, and so on. Ziman shows that these familiar 'philosophical' features of scientific knowledge are inseparable from the ordinary cognitive capabilities and peculiar social relationships of its producers. This wide-angled close-up of the natural and human sciences recognizes their unique value, whilst revealing the limits of their rationality, reliability, and universal applicability. It also shows how, for better or worse, the new 'post-academic' research culture of teamwork, accountability, etc. is changing these supposedly eternal philosophical characteristics.

This is the second edition of a popular book on combinatorics, a subject dealing with ways of arranging and distributing objects, and which involves ideas from geometry, algebra and analysis. The breadth of the theory is matched by that of its applications, which include topics as diverse as codes, circuit design and algorithm complexity. It has thus become essential for workers in many scientific fields to have some familiarity with the subject. The authors have tried to be as comprehensive as possible, dealing in a unified manner with, for example, graph theory, extremal problems, designs, colorings and codes. The depth and breadth of the coverage make the book a unique guide to the whole of the subject. The book is ideal for courses on combinatorical mathematics at the advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate level. Working mathematicians and scientists will also find it a valuable introduction and reference.

This book is a major contribution to the history of philosophy in the later medieval period (1250-1350). It focuses on cognitive theory, a subject of intense investigation during these years. In fact many of the issues that dominate philosophy of mind and epistemology today - intentionality, mental representation, scepticism, realism - were hotly debated in the later medieval period. The book offers a careful analysis of these debates, primarily through the work of Thomas Aquinas, John Olivi, and William Ockham. Each of these figures attempts to reconceptualise cognition along direct realist lines, criticising in the process the standard Aristotelian account. Though of primary interest to medieval philosophers, the book presupposes no background knowledge of the medieval period, and will therefore interest a broader community of philosophers concerned with the origins of contemporary cognitive theory.

Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript is a classic of existential literature. It concludes the first and richest phase of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship and is the text that philosophers look to first when attempting to define Kierkegaard’s own philosophy. Familiar Kierkegaardian themes are introduced in the work, including truth as subjectivity, indirect communication, the leap, and the impossibility of forming a philosophical system for human existence. The Postscript sums up the aims of the preceding pseudonymous works and opens the way to the next part of Kierkegaard’s increasingly tempestuous life: it can thus be seen as a cornerstone of his philosophical thought. This volume offers the work in a new and accessible translation by Alastair Hannay, together with an introduction that sets the work in its philosophical and historical contexts.
Contents
Introduction; Chronology; Further reading; Note on the translation; Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Crumbs; Index.

As one of the most comprehensive machine learning texts around, this book does justice to the field's incredible richness, but without losing sight of the unifying principles. Peter Flach's clear, example-based approach begins by discussing how a spam filter works, which gives an immediate introduction to machine learning in action, with a minimum of technical fuss. Flach provides case studies of increasing complexity and variety with well-chosen examples and illustrations throughout. He covers a wide range of logical, geometric and statistical models and state-of-the-art topics such as matrix factorisation and ROC analysis. Particular attention is paid to the central role played by features. The use of established terminology is balanced with the introduction of new and useful concepts, and summaries of relevant background material are provided with pointers for revision if necessary. These features ensure Machine Learning will set a new standard as an introductory textbook.

Adam Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society (first published in 1767) is a classic of the Scottish - and European - Enlightenment. Drawing on such diverse sources as classical authors and contemporary travel literature, Ferguson offers a complex model of historical advance which challenges both Hume's and Smith's embrace of modernity and the primitivism of Rousseau. Ferguson combines a subtle analysis of the emergence of modern commercial society with a critique of its abandonment of civic and communal virtues. Central to Ferguson's theory of citizenship are the themes of conflict, play, political participation and military valour. The Essay is a bold and novel attempt to reclaim the tradition of active, virtuous citizenship and apply it to the modern state.

Over the past few decades serious reservations have been expressed about the explanatory power of sociological theory and research. In this important book, leading social theorist Peter Hedstrom outlines the foundations of an analytically oriented sociology that seeks to address this criticism. Building on his earlier influential contributions to contemporary debates, Professor Hedstrom argues for a systematic development of sociological theory so that it has the explanatory power and precision to inform sociological research and understanding. He discusses various mechanisms of action and interaction and shows how strong links can be forged between the micro and the macro, and between theory and empirical research. Combining approaches to theory and methodology and using extensive examples to illustrate how they might be applied, this clear, concise and original book will appeal to a broad range of social scientists.

In this absorbing commentary on the discovery of the atom's constituents, Steven Weinberg accomplishes a brilliant fusion of history and science. This is in effect two books, cleverly interwoven. One is an account of a sequence of key events in the physics of the twentieth century, events that led to the discoveries of the electron, proton and neutron. The other is an introduction to those fundamentals of classical physics that played crucial roles in these discoveries. Physical concepts are introduced where needed to understand the historical story, and each new concept builds on physics already explained. Throughout the book, connections are shown between the historic discoveries of subatomic particles and work today at the frontiers of physics. A final chapter describes the discoveries of new elementary particles up to the present day.

In this major new study, Prasenjit Duara expands his influential theoretical framework to present circulatory, transnational histories as an alternative to nationalist history. Duara argues that the present day is defined by the intersection of three global changes: the rise of non-western powers, the crisis of environmental sustainability and the loss of authoritative sources of what he terms transcendence - the ideals, principles and ethics once found in religions or political ideologies. The physical salvation of the world is becoming - and must become - the transcendent goal of our times, but this goal must transcend national sovereignty if it is to succeed. Duara suggests that a viable foundation for sustainability might be found in the traditions of Asia, which offer different ways of understanding the relationship between the personal, ecological and universal. These traditions must be understood through the ways they have circulated and converged with contemporary developments.

This is a 1979 book by political scientist and sociologist Theda Skocpol, published by Cambridge University Press and explaining the causes of revolutions through the structural functionalism sociological paradigm comparative historical analysis of the French Revolution of 1787 through the early 19th century French Revolution, the Russian Revolution of 1917 through the 1930s Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution of 1911 through the 1960s Cultural Revolution. Skocpol argues that these three cases, despite being spread over a century and a half, are similar in the sense that all three were Social Revolutions
Skocpol asserts that Social Revolutions are rapid and basic transformations of a society's state and class structures. This is different from, for example, a mere 'rebellion' which merely involves a revolt of subordinate classes but may not create structural change and from a Political Revolution that may change state structures but not social structures. Industrialization can transform social structure but not change the political structure. What is unique about Social Revolutions, she says, is that basic changes in social structure and political structure occur in a mutually reinforcing fashion and these changes occur through intense sociopolitical conflict.