The main purpose of this book is to provide a new framework to understand the question of how economic agents and their organizations acquire and coordinate innovative capabilities and new knowledge. Its particular focus is on the dynamics of knowledge production and organization at the firm level.

This book offers a detailed description of the geology, geochemistry and deposit model of key deposits in the Mianning-Dechang REE belt in West Sichuan, one of the most important REE belts in the world and genetically related to the Himalayan carbonatite-alkaline complex, helping readers to understand the ore-forming process of carbonatite-related REE deposits. The carbonatite-related REE deposits provide more than 90% of worldwide LREE resources. Thanks to the deposit model presented here, it can serve as an important guidebook for REE exploration and will be of interest to various members of industry and academia, including those who work in exploration, research and teaching. The methods for inclusion studies and petrochemistry discussed represent the cutting edge of analytical techniques in geology.

Portia Simpson's story exquisitely captures the rugged beauty of the Scottish highlands as well as the physical and mental hardships of working in a remote estate across the seasons of the hunting year.

From the 1840s until the 1870s German water resorts, and Baden-Baden in particular, were among the most fashionable - and notorious - of Continental destinations, famed for fostering transient and transgressive modes of therapy, sociability and play. This book explores the "classic" watering place's curious fictional afterlives.

This book presents a comprehensive assessment of the law and enforcement relating to Chinese citizens' right of access to information (ATI). It reviews the labyrinth of Chinese laws that bear on government information disclosure, and examines the judicial treatment of the ATI right based on a survey of over 400 representative lawsuits.

This book combines social theory and 'black theology' to examine the importance of 'African American civil religion' and its role in public discourse, African American religious life and civic engagement. Beginning with the failure in Weber's work to take Black Protestants into account, the author examines the engagement - or lack of engagement - with African American civil religion in social scientific research. With attention to the various eschatological trajectories in African American civil religion, the author sheds light on the enduring belief in a 'Promised Land', in spite of the disappointment occasioned by unfulfilled hopes.

Based on the author's experience successfully managing floor operations at a Toyota plant for many years, this book documents a process, or "roadmap," to facilitate success for anyone tasked with this job. It presents an actionable methodology and gives readers insights into proven techniques that can be used to establish and maintain operational excellence. The author outlines the role of the shop floor manager as the member of the management team most closely involved with the process for creating value for the customer.

The 15th Lord Francis Powerscourt murder mystery.

This book is the first musical, cultural, and technological history of loudness, highlighting how loudness calls attention to musical, discursive, affective, and technological continuities across seemingly disparate traditions. It explores the role of dynamics in music theory, the problematic status of the decibel in the acoustic sciences, debates about orchestration technique, and criticism in jazz, rock, and disco. Examining how loudness inflects issues in music studies including taste, race, gender, and youth, it charts an interdisciplinary path forward, highlighting the insights gained when popular music is studied alongside various forms of art music and acoustic mediation.

This is the first book to critically compare the two social theorists and public intellectuals, Anthony Giddens and Manuel Castells. Providing detailed examinations of their theories, as well as blindspots in their work, it examines the impact of new communication technologies and globalization on contemporary society, including their contributions to contemporary social issues including climate change, political trust, and the recent and continuing global financial crisis.

This handbook covers East Asia as a region, and as individual countries. The military histories of each nation are distinct yet these peoples and states have a long history of interactions. An international team of contributors cover topics such as the People¿s liberation army, Japanese martial arts, the history of guns, and the Korean War. Divided into sections on Korea, China, Japan and East Asia, this handbook is an essential resource for anyone researching on East Asiäs military history.

Directors' and Officers' Liability Insurance

Utilizing critical realism, a broad philosophical and epistemological approach to knowledge, information, and culture that avoids the extremes of both modern positivism and postmodern skepticism, this book constructs a new narrative framework for debates over access to information. Author David Opderbeck critiques both predominant schools of IP scholarship, and shows how this new ethical paradigm can contribute to the ongoing discussion of issues including network neutrality, internet governance, cybersecurity, and the relationship between trade secret and patent law.

To have an ''experience'' in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the famous Civil War battlefield, has taken on a range of new meanings in recent years. Almost instantly after the smoke had cleared following the battle in 1863, the field was transformed into an iconic site of memory and an emblem of American patriotism. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in and around the alleged ΓÇÖhallowed groundΓÇÖ of Gettysburg, this book explores the experiential landscapes and ''sensescapes'', examining the powerful appeal of the idea of a personal and historical ''experience'' and its relations with paradigms of memory, heritage, and patriotism. Using empirical research to ground these often abstract and vague concepts and the ways in which they are translated into human and social practice, TITLE uses the notion of the ''Gettysburg experience'' to scrutinize the processes through which the term ''experience'' itself takes on, a range of different and contrasting meanings, as exemplified by experiences of the federal National Park Service and its ΓÇÖbattlefield rehabilitationΓÇÖ programme, battle re-enactors seeking a bodily, first-person perspective on the fog of war, and practitioners of the paranormal: ghost hunters who aim to connect with the war dead through techniques and media wholly foreign to ''normal'' regimes of commemoration. A rigorous and richly illustrated study of memory and meaning in the search for experience, this book will appeal to scholars of sociology, geography and anthropology with interests in heritage, memory and collective remembrance.

Why do international state-building efforts so often fail? From Somalia and Lebanon to Afghanistan and Iraq, recent state-building practices have led to consequences so perverse that it is impossible not to question whether the entire process ought not to be rethought. In this book Daniel Biro argues that state-building projects are virtually doomed to failure by the fundamental misconceptions inherent in the institutions that support and execute them. He shows that the problem lies chiefly in the inability of the UN and major western states to fully account for the diversity and variability seen in the processes of polity creation and proposes an alternative framework for the analysis of polities that do not conform to the conventional model of the modern state. With illustrations from Asia, Africa and Central America Biro posits that it is more useful to consider local, alternative forms of 'governance without government' as genuine social orders rather than merely deviations from a preconceived ideal of state order that traditionally ignores contemporary actors such as warlords or militias and the co-constitutive relations they share with the states and societies in which they flourish.

Alica Kizekova investigates the use of regional organizations and soft balancing by great and middle powers in the Indo-Asia-Pacific. To test the validity of soft-balancing behaviour, the case of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is compared to the soft-balancing cooperation within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) when dealing with a re-emerging China of the early 1990s. ChinaΓÇÖs regional policies with respect to disputed claims in the South China Sea alarmed the ASEAN member states prompting fears about potential Chinese aggression and arguing that soft balancing in the form of ASEAN-led government-to-government and non-official multilateral structures ΓÇÖsocializeΓÇÖ China towards regionally responsible behaviour and a commitment to shared norms. This book finds that soft balancing has thus been a strategy of critical significance for both ASEAN and SCO, deserving an enhanced level of recognition for its role in coordinating regional relations.

This book is a timely exploration in light of the heightened requirement of business for novel solutions to meet the varied economic, ethical and social challenges organisations face, related to fast paced technological developments, increasing global market competition and associated environmental impacts and cultural inequality concerns.

The remains of churches and monasteries throughout the mountainous landscape of the Greek Peloponnesos - the Morea, as it then was known - attest to the interaction of western Europeans and Byzantine Greeks following the Fourth Crusade of 1204 C.E. Architecture and Interaction in the Thirteenth-Century Mediterranean: Building Identity in the Medieval Morea presents fourteen, under-studied monuments in order to assess the role of buildings and their ornamentation in the creation of identity in this Mediterranean region. Architecture and Interaction investigates and reframes scholarly conceptualizations of cultural interaction and revives the ancient Greek term methexis, meaning communion or participation, to elucidate the material culture of complex societies characterized by ever-changing cultural encounters. The book explores the mechanisms of exchange of architectural knowledge and memory among patrons, architects, masons, and viewers. A fully illustrated Appendix catalogs each church - some for the first time in English - and the study creates a model for contextually specific readings of architecture and identity. Architecture and Interaction is geared to scholars and students of both eastern and western medieval architecture and history (as well as historians of architecture in other contact zones) and also to those interested in cross-cultural theory and identity studies.

Combines coverage of each intellectual property right granted for creations of the mind. Deconstructing the fundamental topics into short, clear sections separated by subheadings throughout, this text is suitable as a student companion to this intriguing area of the law.