How does the politics of working life shape modern organizations? Is our desire for meaningful, secure work increasingly at odds with corporate behaviour in a globalized economy? Does the rise of performance management culture represent an intensification of work, or create opportunities for the freewheeling individual career? This timely and engaging book, by leading authorities in the field, adopts the standpoint of the 'questioning observer'. It is for those who need an informed account of work that is accessible without being superficial. The book is unique in its multi-dimensional approach, weaving together analysis of individual work experience, political processes in organizations, and the wider context of the social structuring of markets. The book identifies central questions about working experience and answers them in a direct and lively manner. It has a strong analytical foundation based on a political economy framework, giving particular weight to the contradictory character of organizations. These contradictions turn on the competing demands placed on organizations and the different political projects of groups within them. This perspective integrates the chapters, and permits numerous scholarly debates to be addressed - including those on identity projects, gender and work, power and participation, escalation in decision-making, and the meaning of corporate social responsibility. This book is suitable for undergraduate and graduate classes in Organizational Behaviour, Business Strategy and the Sociology of Work and Employment. It will also appeal to the general reader interested in grappling with the complexity of the changing environment of work.

Oh no, not another self-help book But wait, USC alumnus and celebrity life coach Paul Edward dubs his new work, Moving Forward: Turning Good Intentions Into Great Results by Discovering Yourself, Your Place, and Your Path, an "others-help" book and insists that one of the keys to moving forward in life is connecting with the right people. In the first volume of his new Life-Changing Coaching Series, Edward shares the five strategies he uses to help his influential clients solve problems, make better decisions, achieve goals, and get connected. Drawing on his rich experiences as a US Marine Corps officer, corporate executive, and professional life coach, Edward's book leads the reader on a journey that begins with self-discovery and culminates in the development and implementation of a plan for real change and personal growth. Moving Forward does not just offer theory, but it tackles some of life's thornier practical issues, like how to successfully deal with challenging friends and family members, how to increase job satisfaction, and how to make more time for the people and activities you love. Moving Forward is a guide for those who find themselves stuck in some area of their lives. Its pages brim with help and hope for anyone willing to follow the roadmap that Edward lays out for them.

This book is the first systematic and comprehensive critical evaluation of reincarnation by a professional philosopher in any language. Several chapters deal with the alleged evidence for reincarnation -- child prodigies, deja vu experiences, hypnotic regressions and spontaneous memories of earlier lives. The book shows how reincarnation is incompatible with many well-established facts such as population increases, the recency of life in the universe, and the transformation of species. It shows that reincarnation is committed to belief in the astral body, which is examined in a particularly amusing chapter. The book is written in a lucid and witty style by an author renowned for his Voltairean sense of fun.

Micro Middle Ages brings together five microhistorical case studies focusing on small or seemingly inconsequential evidence that leads to broader conclusions about  medieval history and the way we do and understand history in general. Paul Dutton provides an overview of microhistorical approaches and theorizes about its use in pre-modern history. As opposed to studying history “from above� or history “from below,� Dutton shows the advantages for historians of doing history “from the inside out,� starting from some single, overlooked, but potentially knowable thing, delving deep inside, and then reattaching it to its time and place. Such an approach has one abiding advantage: its insistence on being grounded in the particularity of the evidence. The book highlights what the microhistorical is, its conceptual and practical challenges. Dutton argues that the attention to the micro has always been with us and is a constitutive, cognitive part of who we are as human beings.

Gottfried looks at Carl Schmitt as a critic of modern liberalism and as a defender of the national state who examined carefully Western historical and political traditions. Challenging the view that Schmitt was a mere polemicist who set out to subvert "German democracy," Gottfried's work argues instead, that Schmitt criticized liberalism and democracy from a highly reflective position that combined analytical depth with staggering erudition. The book shows that almost all of Schmitt's critics try to deflect the thrust of his observations by stressing his "unpleasant" political associations and allegedly hidden motives. This new source also provides a useful bibliography on secondary literature dealing with Carl Schmitt's work. Gottfried's book is the most comprehensive study to date that addresses the major criticisms raised against Schmitt's understanding of politics. The book also underscores a point made by George Schwab and other recent biographers: that Schmitt made some of his strongest criticisms of liberal democracy while still a defender of the Weimar Republic. An excellent bibliographic resource, this book should appeal to anyone interested in German politics and to specialists in political theory and international relations.

This title was first published in 2000. Founded in 1914 by Wyndham Lewis and christened by Ezra Pound, the Vorticism movement was a sustained act of aggression against the moribund Victorianism seen as stifling to artistic energies. Inspired by the example of F.T.Marinetti and the Futurists, the Vorticists were nevertheless harshly critical of the Futurists' naive enthusiasm for modernity. They created their own style of geometric abstraction to celebrate the new consciousness of humanity in a mechanized urban environment. But their splintered and discordant style also measured the cost of the psychic disruption that modernity caused. This illustrated guide to the movement covers topics including sculpture, painting, literary Vorticism, women in Vorticism and Vorticist aesthetics.

This is the first comprehensive and systematic evaluation of reincarnation and Karma in any language. Renowned philosopher Paul Edwards exposes the many flaws in the arguments supporting the belief in reincarnation and the so-called Law of Karma. He also covers the alleged evidence in support of reincarnation, including child prodigies, deja vu experiences, hypnotic regressions, and 'reincarnation memories'. Finally, he discusses in some detail the claims of the leading figures in the recent immortality movement. Edwards' wit and clarity make this a fascinating, accessible, and enjoyable work.

The implications of globalization for labour are more often asserted than analyzed. This collection, and its companion volume "Globalization and Patterns of Labour Resistance" edited by Jeremy Waddington, seek to remedy this deficiency by presenting contemporary research on the relationship between the globalization of production and the regulation of labour. It considers the ways in which national and supra-national regimes of labour regulation are being actively reconstructed in the context of the internationalization of production. The contributors analyze the implications of changes in different national labour regimes for relations between state, capital and labour, and for class and gender segmentation, and discuss the scope and limits of recent initiatives in the implementation of international labour standards.

This volume in Religion and Public Life, a series on religion and public affairs, provides a wide-ranging forum for differing views on religious and ethical considerations. The contributions address the decline of social capital-those patterns of behavior which are conducive to self-governance and the spirit of self-reliance-and its relation to the demise of the civic-humanist tradition in American education. The unifying theme, is that classical studies do not merely result in individual mastery over a particular technique or body of knowledge, but also link the individual to the polity and even to the whole of the cosmic order. At the same time, American republicanism, in its exaltation of the common man from the Jeffersonian agrarian soldier to the apotheosis of Lincoln tempers the classical ideal into something less exalted, if more democratic. The effects on the contemporary state of the liberal arts curriculum are demonstrated in articles critical of the market-model university. Two essays explore the historical and philosophical significance of the discipline of rhetoric, that has suffered under the hegemony of rationalistic philosophy. A concluding contribution, invokes Giambattista Vico as an eloquent defender of the humanities. Humanities and Civic Life includes: "Rome, Florence, and Philadelphia: Using the History of the Humanities to Renew Our Civic Life" by Robert E. Proctor; "The Dark Fields of the Republic: The Persistence of Republican Thought in American History" by David Brown; "Unleashing the Humanities" by Robert Weisbuch; "Liberal Arts: Listening to Faculty" by Dennis O'Brien; "Historical Consciousness in Antiquity" by Paul Gottfried; "Taking the Measure of Relativism and the Civic Virtue of Rhetoric" by Gabriel R. Ricci; "The River: A Vichian Dialogue on Humanistic Education" by Randall E. Auxier.

This title was first published in 2000. Founded in 1914 by Wyndham Lewis and christened by Ezra Pound, the Vorticism movement was a sustained act of aggression against the moribund Victorianism seen as stifling to artistic energies. Inspired by the example of F.T.Marinetti and the Futurists, the Vorticists were nevertheless harshly critical of the Futurists' naive enthusiasm for modernity. They created their own style of geometric abstraction to celebrate the new consciousness of humanity in a mechanized urban environment. But their splintered and discordant style also measured the cost of the psychic disruption that modernity caused. This illustrated guide to the movement covers topics including sculpture, painting, literary Vorticism, women in Vorticism and Vorticist aesthetics.

Is there life after death or do we simply cease to exist? Renowned scholar Paul Edwards has compiled Immortality, a superb group of philosophical selections featuring the work of both classical and contemporary authors who address the topics of immortality, soul and body, transmigration, materialism, epiphenomenalism, physical research and parapsychology, reincarnation, disembodied existence, and much more.
In addition to a 70-page editorial introduction offering an in-depth discussion of the forms which belief in immortality has taken, this volume includes selections from Thomas Aquinas, A.J. Ayer, Paul and Linda Badham, John Beloff, C.D. Broad, Joseph Butler, Ren? Descartes, C.J. Ducasse, Paul Edwards, Hugh Elliot, Antony Flew, John Foster, Peter Geach, John Hick, John Hospers, David Hume, William James, Raynor Johnson, Immanuel Kant, John Locke, Lucretius, Donald MacKay, John Stuart Mill, Derek Parfit, Plato, H.H. Price, Joseph Priestley, Thomas Reid, Tertullian, Peter van Inwagen, and Voltaire. Also included is a detailed annotated bibliography.

A fresh and vital fusion of myth and legend, lively anecdote and poetry

Written around AD 1200 by an unnamed Icelandic author, the Orkneyinga Saga is the only medieval chronicle to have Orkney as the central place of action, and from it we derive much of our knowledge of the Northern Isles and Caithness. The Saga describes the conquest of the islands by the kings of Norway during the Viking expansion of the ninth century and goes on to narrate the subsequent history of the Earldom of Orkney. Dominated by the great figures of the times – Sigurd the Powerful, St Magnus the Martyr and Hrolf, the conqueror of Normandy – the Saga is a powerful account of warfare and the struggle for supremacy.

This modern translation captures the force of the Orkneyinga Saga, which retains a special significance for the people of Orkney, sharpening their awareness of their dual cultural heritage, both Norse and Scottish.

Paul Edwards is a beautiful writer. He can express the moods and emotions of a day as well as anyone. And his love for the game - and those involved in it - pours off every page of this book. But because he has interests far beyond the boundary - in politics and people, in music and history - he is as likely to quote Mott the Hoople as Herman Melville; as likely to cite the repeal of the corn laws as regulations regarding Kolpak registrations. His work is all the richer and more satisfying for it. He knows that not everything that counts can be counted. He knows you can't define love or loyalty or a million things in between. So he tells us how a day's play feels. He tells us about the people and places. He tells us why it matters but knows it doesn't matter too much.

Eyrbyggja Saga is prominent in the great group of medieval Icelandic sagas that Magnus Magnusson has called 'historical novels – the first novels to be written in Europe'.

Mixing realism with wild Gothic imagination, history with eerie tales of hauntings, it dramatizes a thirteenth-century view of the past, from the pagan anarchy of the Viking Age to the settlement of Iceland, the coming of Christianity and the beginnings of organized society. Its central figure is Snorri, a man so perplexingly ambiguous that the narrator himself is drawn to speculate on his motives and a character who brilliantly epitomizes the violent stresses of his times.

How does the politics of working life shape modern organizations? Is our desire for meaningful, secure work increasingly at odds with corporate behaviour in a globalized economy? Does the rise of performance management culture represent an intensification of work, or create opportunities for the freewheeling individual career? This timely and engaging book, by leading authorities in the field, adopts the standpoint of the 'questioning observer'. It is for those who need an informed account of work that is accessible without being superficial. The book is unique in its multi-dimensional approach, weaving together analysis of individual work experience, political processes in organizations, and the wider context of the social structuring of markets. The book identifies central questions about working experience and answers them in a direct and lively manner. It has a strong analytical foundation based on a political economy framework, giving particular weight to the contradictory character of organizations. These contradictions turn on the competing demands placed on organizations and the different political projects of groups within them. This perspective integrates the chapters, and permits numerous scholarly debates to be addressed - including those on identity projects, gender and work, power and participation, escalation in decision-making, and the meaning of corporate social responsibility. This book is suitable for undergraduate and graduate classes in Organizational Behaviour, Business Strategy and the Sociology of Work and Employment. It will also appeal to the general reader interested in grappling with the complexity of the changing environment of work.