peter lang peter lang mär 2011 (190 results)

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -The increasing connection among higher education institutions worldwide is well documented. What is less understood is how this connectivity is enacted and manifested on specific levels of the global education network. This book details the planning process of a multi-institutional program in engineering between institutions in the US and Singapore as they develop a new model of collaboration. Contrary to what neoliberal or center-to-periphery narratives of globalization might lead us to expect, strong national and local governments, culture, and social relationships all play determining roles in the negotiations and resulting form of collaboration between these higher education institutions. Shifting Tides in Global Higher Education illuminates the value of examining particular places, incorporating diverse local experience into the narrative of global networks.Books on Demand GmbH, Überseering 33, 22297 Hamburg 160 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -The price-setting newsvendor model is used to address the single period joint pricing and inventory control problem. The objective is to set the optimal price and replenishment quantity of a single product in order to maximize the expected profit. Products with a short selling season and relatively long replenishment lead times such as fashion goods are the most relevant application areas of the model. The focus of the work is the generalization of the model with respect to the modeling of uncertainty in demand. The author presents an analytical and empirical study which compares different demand models with a more flexible model based on price and inventory optimization. She concludes that using a general model can increase the profits significantly. 118 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -Pragmatism has experienced a renaissance in social theory in recent years. This is no wonder since the so-called classical pragmatists, especially John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, outlined a highly original theory of social life. This book builds on pragmatist ideas and argues that social structures are first and foremost based on habitualized action. Thus, the insights of Dewey and Mead have profound implications for the way in which we think about many of the fundamental issues in social theory. These insights are discussed, for example, in relation to contemporary debates on the nature of intersubjectivity, institutions, the public and Pierre Bourdieüs concept of habitus. The book shows that pragmatism offers a naturalist, action-centered way of conceptualizing culture and social structures. 152 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -The devastating impacts of the recent global financial crisis underscore the need for both financial institutions and banking supervision to develop more appropriate credit risk models to ensure the stability of the financial system. This work contributes to quantitative credit portfolio risk modeling in three ways. First, it introduces a general credit portfolio modeling concept that comprises specific credit risk management models as special cases. Second, analytical techniques are presented for specifying asset correlations in a credit portfolio through systematic factors. Finally, a new approach for clustering of obligors in a credit portfolio is proposed using threshold accepting, a stochastic optimization technique. In particular, a computationally tractable technique to validate ex-post the precision of the clustering system is suggested and applied to a real world retail credit portfolio. The contributions of this book should provide benefit to practitioners, academics and graduate students in the field of financial risk management. 122 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -Research as Praxis is an exposé of the philosophical, theoretical, and methodological principles and assumptions of Research as Praxis (RAP) as an alternative paradigm of education/social research to the resurgent exclusionary hegemony of the positivist epistemology. The ultimate purpose of RAP projects is to serve the public interest, especially the well-being of students and educators. This is in contrast to projects that serve merely instrumental purposes, like trying to raise achievement test scores. Improvement of well-being can be achieved if research participants are able to participate democratically on an equal footing with researchers in deciding what to study, why, and how to do it, and how to use this knowledge to engage in collective action and dialogic understanding to solve problems and improve their situations. By acknowledging participants¿ agency and valuing their knowledge and experiences, we increase the chances that research results and experiences will be highly relevant and responsive to participants¿ needs and growth, as well as to other communities and society at large. The authors draw on the participatory research traditions, especially those experiences made available by researchers, activists, and public intellectuals from the so-called Third World ¿ Latin America, India, Bangladesh, Africa, and the Maori indigenous people from New Zealand. Inspired by those experiences, RAP inquirers blur the boundaries among research, education, and activism, and instead interplay them at all times. This book will be useful to researchers, educators, and graduate students in education, social sciences and services, and humanities.Books on Demand GmbH, Überseering 33, 22297 Hamburg 240 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -Governing the Self is about the constitution of the self. Through self-constitution, the subject is implicated in its own governance within a discourse that is increasingly shaped by neoliberal economic theory. Managerialism has become the modern mode of discipline for self production ¿ an inadequate model for education in that the subject of managerialism, homo economicus, cannot adequately account for the ¿other¿ in the educational relation. Michel Foucault¿s notion of governmentality is used to unravel the problematic connection between education and economics in the production of human capital. This book does not reject managerialism outright, calling instead for its disciplinary force to be delimited and some attention paid to the ¿other¿ in the pedagogic relationship.Books on Demand GmbH, Überseering 33, 22297 Hamburg 224 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -Trust is essential to human society and the good life. At the same time, citizens of developed countries spend more and more time in virtual environments. This collection asks how far virtual environments, especially those affiliated with «Web 2.0», challenge and foster trust The book¿s early chapters establish historical, linguistic, and philosophical foundations for key concepts of trust, embodiment, virtuality, and virtual worlds. Four philosophers then analyze how trust ¿ historically interwoven with embodied co-presence ¿ may be enhanced through online environments. Final contributions tackle the specific challenges of virtual child pornography and democratic deliberation online. This is the first collection devoted exclusively to the philosophical dimensions of trust and virtual worlds. It helps bring the reader up to date on the relevant concepts and issues, and on ways in which widely ranging insights and approaches may nonetheless cohere into a reasonably comprehensive account of trust. 224 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -The book aims to change the conversation about sexuality education for adolescents, making it consistent with a democratic cultural politics that is attuned to changes in youth and popular culture. Traditional sex education is nearly obsolete; sexuality curriculum is now primarily learned through popular culture and youth culture, which teach young people what it means to be a man and a woman, gay and straight, white, black, and Latino, rich and poor ¿ and what sexuality has to do with it. Ultimately, this book conceptualizes democratic sexuality education as a commitment to the idea that sexuality education should affirm the right of all young people to construct their own sexual selves and relations as much as possible, so long as they are non-exploitive, consensual, and informed.Books on Demand GmbH, Überseering 33, 22297 Hamburg 406 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -The last decades have witnessed major progress in both monetary policy theory and practice, with broad academic consensus on the desirability of monetary policy rules and ongoing research on their exact specification. Typically, the analysis is carried out in a New Keynesian framework with nominal rigidities and constant capital stock. The latter represents a constraint that this study seeks to overcome by introducing a model with investment and capital adjustment costs. The work assesses different interest-rate rule specifications with respect to the target variables included, based on two criteria: determinacy of rational-expectations equilibrium and convergence to steady state after a shock. The study concludes that rules with both an inflation and an output gap target ensure a unique rational-expectations equilibrium and a less distressful adjustment of the economy after the occurrence of shocks. 162 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -Perceptions of place and of landscape often clash. Based upon a decade of intermittent yet ongoing ethnographic research which explores the UK¿s Cornish peninsula, this volume investigates the social construction of landscape identity from a diversity of conceptual perspectives influenced by contemporary anthropological theories as well as recent developments within the fields of visual and material culture studies. 216 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -This thesis empirically analyses three individual research questions around initial day returns, long-run performance and valuation of initial public offerings of European Property Companies. The first question examines whether IPO signals such as underpricing reveal proprietary information about the prospects of an issuing firm¿s underlying industry such as the performance of direct real estate investments. The results in fact show a positive relation between underpricing and average property yields of the issuing companies¿ target investment area twelve months after the IPO. The second question tries to rationalise why previous real estate IPO studies document no long-run underperformance, a phenomenon commonly observed for industrial issuings. It could be shown that with a decreasing degree of the transparency of the underlying real estate markets, investor over-optimism is more likely to develop which is assumed to be one of the main factors for IPO firms to perform worse in the long run than established firms. The last research question sheds further light on the contradicting evidence found for the impact of corporate governance on valuation. Main findings show that concentrated ownership, both inside and outside, negatively affects IPO valuation while higher debt levels have a positive impact, implying that the market favorably recognises the existence of control mechanisms. 156 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -Confessions of Love: The Ambiguities of Greek ¿Eros¿ and Latin ¿Caritas¿ includes a collection of essays by internationally renowned scholars such as Phillip Cary, Roland Teske, and Leonid Rudnytzky, tackling some historic, controversial «confessions» of love. Inspired by the Augustinian tradition, this volume focuses on the ambiguous nature of love, especially with regard to some of the conflicting aspects of Greek eros and its ancient Latin rival, caritas, in great thinkers like Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Marsilio Ficino, Freud, and Max Scheler. This volume will be of interest to humanities, philosophy, theology, history, and classics departments seeking a new way to approach the Western tradition through the historic controversy in the West over eros and caritas. Finally, its focus on the retrieval and disclosure of sensuality and eroticism in these great texts will also be of special interest to postmodernism and hermeneutics. 260 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -To speak of participation today raises a series of questions on how the presence and use of new media affect modes of social participation. From a variety of theoretical, empirical and methodological perspectives, the contributions in this volume explore participation in different social realms ¿ from everyday life, interpersonal relationships, work and leisure activities to collective and political action. This collection demonstrates that participation is a localised notion, assuming a multitude of shapes under a variety of technological, political, socio-economic, linguistic and cultural conditions. 250 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -The contemporary internet focuses on user experiences of more recent developments on the internet, specifically with the spread of broadband, the audio-visual applications it has enabled, Web2.0 uptake more generally and the growth of eGovernment. The Contemporary Internet is comparative in two senses. The first is at the cross-national level, examining factors affecting different countries¿ experiences of the internet, with a particular, but not a sole, interest in what may be termed ¿cultural influences on perceptions, adoption and use¿. Second, the book is comparative within countries, examining the, sometimes very, uneven experiences of the internet¿s possibilities. One question that pervades several chapters is how the digital divide is evolving in the light of the more contemporary developments outlined above. 212 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -In which way can language be an indicator for cultural identity in immigration contexts How are collective identity, social networks and the use of the inclusive pronoun ¿we¿ connected Does code-switching in additive bilingualism and first language attrition indicate a loss of home cultural identity Designed as a longitudinal trend study, this book answers such complex questions as it investigates data collected from interviews with thirty U.S. Americans who immigrated to Germany between 1963 and 2001. On the one hand, in-depth discourse analyses take the discursive construction of identity within the sociopolitical context of Germany into account. Narrative structures, person and place deictics and code-switching are indexical for cultural identity. On the other hand, socio-demographic factors such as age at arrival, length of residence, social networks and education are relevant for the identification of the Americans and their linguistic choices. Qualitative and quantitative methods are applied and result in a synthesis of in-depth linguistic analyses and general trends of language variation within the cohort. 232 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -About half of the world¿s population is still at risk for contracting malaria, and the main disease burden is now in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). As a result of the activities of a number of new and powerful Global Health Initiatives, malaria morbidity and mortality has recently started to decrease and the idea of eradication has re-emerged. This book provides a comprehensive update on the recent developments of the epidemiology of malaria and of existing strategies and tools for malaria control and elimination in Africa, which is discussed in the context of the long global history of malaria control. The main message is that the ambitious Global Malaria Action Plan of RBM will fail without serious efforts to systematically and massively strengthen the health systems of African countries. 198 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -Migration is a factor which has played a central role in the construction of a Canadian identity. Concepts such as multiculturalism, interculturalism and transculturalism are inextricably linked with phenomena pertaining to migration, and the effects of these phenomena have made themselves felt in Canadäs cultural System. The question therefore arises as to which processes and channels of communication have been instrumental in transmitting these migratory dynamics, and in which form they have manifested themselves in Canadian culture.Dans la construction de l¿identité canadienne, la migration occupe une position importante. Les concepts comme le multiculturalisme, l¿interculturalisme ou le transculturalisme sont étroitement liés aux phénomènes migratoires, dont les effets ne manquent pas d¿être visibles dans le système culturel canadien. II faut se demander donc, quels sont les processus et les voies de communication qui transmettent ou médiatisent les dynamiques migratoires ou bien, quelles sont les formes de leur présence au sein de la culture canadienne. 270 pp. Englisch, Französisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -This collection of essays can be situated in a development that has been underway in translation studies since the early 1990s, namely the increasing focus on translators themselves: translators as embodied agents, not as instruments or conduits. The volume deals with different kinds of emotion and different levels of the translation process. For example, one essay examines the broad socio-cultural context, and others focus on the social event enacted in translation, or on the translator¿s own performative act. Some of the essays also problematize the linguistic challenges posed by the cultural distance of the emotions embodied in the texts to be translated.The collection is broad in scope, spanning a variety of languages, cultures and periods, as well as different media and genres. The essays bring diverse questions to a topic rarely directly addressed and map out important areas of enquiry: the translator as an emotional cultural intermediary, the importance of emotion to cognitive meaning, the place of emotion in linguistic reception, and translation itself as a trope whereby emotion can be expressed.Books on Demand GmbH, Überseering 33, 22297 Hamburg 174 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -This study focuses on fictional representations of albinism in the work of the French writers Didier Destremau and Patrick Grainville, and the Francophone Guinean writer Williams Sassine. The focus on selected novels allows for an in-depth study of each narrative and sheds new critical light on these under-studied writers, permitting a comparative discussion of the novels in relation to other writing about albinism. A series of common themes can be found in these novels, which, although present in different combinations and intensities, echo the preoccupations of all fictional writing about albinism. They include a recognition of the problematic relationship between inner and outer reality (in both bodily terms and in relation to notions of inclusion and exclusion), the challenging of accepted categories and designations, and the consequent problematisation of the relationship between Self and Other. Bound up with these issues, of course, are questions of identity and power.Books on Demand GmbH, Überseering 33, 22297 Hamburg 234 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -Travelling in Women¿s History with Michèle Roberts¿s Novels: Literature, Language and Culture is a journey to discover Roberts¿s work as a feminist writer, novelist and memoirist. An overall analysis and detailed overview of Michèle Roberts¿s novels first provide the reader with a study of Roberts¿s rewriting of stories that have been inspired by historical, mythological and religious women who gain a voice in her fiction. Not only will the content of Roberts¿s novels be explored but also its connection to form, as this feminist writer has always linked body to language. Second, the book analyses personal and public discoveries in Roberts¿s memoir, Paper Houses: A Memoir of the ¿70s and Beyond (2007). The personal, professional and political journeys the writer-protagonist strolls in London will be part of a feminist culture and language that the memoirist preserves in her autobiography. Finally, two conversations with Michèle Roberts from 2003 and 2010 are presented in a last chapter in order to illustrate Roberts¿s arguments when writing as a woman. 176 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -Western civilization is the Utopia of a better and higher life on Earth. The globalization of neo-liberalism proves that this project has failed. The paradigm of «Critical Theory of Patriarchy» explains this failure and discusses alternatives. By confronting the central civilizations in history, the egalitarian, life-oriented matriarchal one, and the hierarchical, nature and life dominating, hostile patriarchal one, we see that 5000 years of patriarchy have «replaced» matriarchies and nature itself by a «progressive» counter-world of «capital». This transformation characterizes «capitalist patriarchy» including «socialism». Its demise is due to the «alchemical» destruction of the world¿s resources, thought of, theologically legitimized and fetishized as «creation». This violence is not recognized. Elites have, instead, begun with a new «military alchemy», treating the whole Planet as weapon of mass destruction. Hence, the «Planetary Movement for Mother Earth». 304 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -This book treats various areas of the phonetics, orthography, morphology, syntax, and lexica of artificial languages in an effort to determine what features such languages have in common, and how they differ. Among the topics dealt with are affricates, digraphs, stress, plural formation, demonstratives, prepositional case assignment, color terms, terms for beverages, and terms for meteorological phenomena. Data from many artificial languages, gathered from both primary and secondary sources, are presented in an attempt to give a picture of tendencies among them. The comparative examination of the languages considered in this book demonstrates that artificial languages are relatively uniform in some phonological aspects (e.g. nasals and affricates) while they show a considerable degree of variation in relation to some morphological categories (e.g. demonstratives and plurals). With regard to vocabulary from various lexical fields, in addition to the expected differences among a priori languages, different degrees of uniformity were found among a posteriori and mixed languages with respect to lexemes with particular meanings. 190 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -The challenges of an ageing population and workforce are increasingly recognised by policy makers, managers and workers in many countries. In this book, prominent researchers address these challenges. It deals with health and workability, and gives data and viewpoints on competitive advantages and disadvantages of older workers. The study includes data on attitudes, specific measures and policies from many parts of the world: Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil and Singapore. The authors present a variety of interesting examples of measures used in workplaces, to motivate and enable workers to stay longer in working life. This book is an encounter between research and policy: it contributes to the discussion of policies related to older workers. 296 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -Changing roles of management accountants have been intensively discussed in business practice and academic research. The objective of this empirical study is to gain a deeper understanding of management accountants¿ business orientation and extended tasks. Based on data collected from the top 1,500 companies in Germany, results reveal that especially subjective norms have a strong impact on the practice of management accountants acting business-oriented. Furthermore, the results reinforce the frequently postulated positive effect of management accountants¿ business orientation. The analyses also show positive associations between the involvement of management accountants in incentive compensation, the effort effects of incentive schemes, and firm performance. 194 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -Cinema has played a key role in articulating the impact and legacies of the so-called anni di piombo in Italy, the years of intra-national political terrorism that lasted from 1969 until well into the 1980s. Tragedia all¿italiana offers an analytical exploration of Italian cinemäs representation and refraction of those years, showing how a substantial and still growing corpus of films has shaped the ways in which Italians have assimilated and remembered the events of this period.This is the first monograph in English on terrorism and film in Italy, a topic that is attracting the interest of a wide range of scholars of film, cultural studies and critical terrorism studies. It provides novel analytical categories for an intriguing corpus of films and offers careful accounts of works and genres as diverse as La meglio gioventú, Buongiorno, notte, the poliziottesco (cop film) and the commedia all¿italiana. The author argues that fiction film can provide an effective frame for the elaboration of historical experience but that the cinema is symptomatic both of its time and of the codes of the medium itself ¿ in terms of its elisions, omissions and evasions as well as its emphases. The book is a study of a body of films that has elaborated the experience of terrorism as a fascinating and even essential part of the heritage of modern Italy. 302 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -In this book two novel utilisations of volatile compounds in the field of Pharmaceutical Chemistry are presented. First, volatile degradation products of lipids are applied to the characterisation of vegetable fats and oils and the detection of their adulteration. Unfortunately, routine methods for quality control of fatty plant oils and fats often do not provide satisfying results. Analysis of the volatile compounds of these fats and oils can be a remedy, as is shown for many samples in this book. Furthermore, the study deals with the application of eco-friendly and harmless volatile compounds (terpenes and essential oils) for the reduction of airborne microbes in rooms, which is an innovative alternative to established, partly harmful room-disinfectants. 274 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -The book is about Italian perceptions of the Ottomans from Renaissance until the nineteenth century within the framework of political history. It is based on ample documentation of pontifical sources on the Ottomans from the Vatican Library and other archives, as well as Venetian and Italian literature on the Ottomans. Most of the pontifical sources belong to lesser known authors and come from unpublished sources with transcription in Italian and translation in English with commentary, among them Monsignor Marcello Marchesi, pontifical diplomat and councilor to Emperor Rudolf II during the Long War in Hungary, and Angelo Petricca da Sonnino, vicar apostolic in Istanbul and head of Propaganda Fide. In addition the book presents the contrasting views of the Ottomans vis-à-vis the Europeans from Turkish second-hand sources. 288 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -Translators, law students or legal professionals who begin to deal with legal language face a bewildering variety of legal writings. Even though legal language has been examined from a multitude of perspectives, there are virtually no studies explicitly addressing variation in legal English in terms of recurrent linguistic patterns. This book is a first step towards filling this gap. It provides a corpus-based linguistic description of variation among several selected legal genres, including vocabulary distribution and use (keywords), extended lexical expressions (lexical bundles), and lexico-syntactic co-occurrence patterns (multidimensional analysis). The findings are interpreted in functional terms in an attempt to provide an overall characterization of the most commonly encountered types of legal language. 280 pp. Englisch.

Buch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -The papers in this collection discuss broadly understood cognitive turns in the philosophy of language, inspired by the Chomskyan revolution in linguistics, Langacker¿s and Lakoff¿s Cognitive Linguistics, but also phenomenology, Relevance Theory and Classical Indian Philosophy. The individual texts investigate, from different angles, the relations between philosophy of language and linguistics, and contribute to the development of theoretical frameworks for studying language. Most of the contributions were presented at the first International Conference on Philosophy of Language and Linguistics, PhiLang2009 (University of ¿ód¿, May 2009). 244 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Condition: Neu. Neuware -Where is our economy heading Have we lost something valuable in the human quest for efficiency and perpetual growth What human qualities are being eroded as we rely on the modern market mechanism to coordinate our daily lives This book poses a theological challenge to contemporary economic life through a re-discovery of the historical roots of the theological covenant in society. The author places the covenant in contrast with the contract, exploring the distinction between the two concepts, their significance and their interaction in the economic market. The result is a new proposal ¿ the ¿Two Pillars¿ paradigm ¿ that challenges the fundamentals of modern economics and promotes the idea of a balanced market which allows for genuine human relationships, freedom and economic justice. The author illustrates the practical use of the paradigm through the example of long-term employment arrangements, and applies it as a basis for dialogue with scholars ranging from Adam Smith to modern-day economists. 304 pp. Englisch.