In 1972 Stephen Jay Gould took the scientific world by storm with his paper on punctuated equilibrium. Challenging a core assumption of Darwin's theory of evolution, it launched the controversial idea that the majority of species originates in geological moments (punctuations) and persists in stasis. Now, thirty-five years later, Punctuated Equilibrium offers his only book-length testament on a theory he fiercely promoted, repeatedly refined, and tirelessly defended.
What Do We Know about War? reviews the causes of war and the conditions of peace. Drawing analyses from the thirty-five year history of this discipline, leading researchers explore the roles played by alliances, territory, arms races, interstate rivalries, capability, and crisis bargaining in increasing the probability of war. They emphasize international norms and the recent finding that democratic states do not fight each other as factors that promote peace. This book offers an accessible and up-to-date overview of current knowledge and an agenda for future research.
Over time, thought processes and decision making styles evolved and were shaped by theological, philosophical, political, social, and environmental factors and trends. Recently, advances in technology have borne an unprecedented influence on our social environment. Contemporary thinking inevitably reflects this influence and moves us from a linear,
Communication and Group Decision-Making takes stock of recent group communication research - with an explicit focus on communication processes. This book is recommended for academics, professionals and researchers in communication and organization
Beinhocker has written this work in order to introduce a broad audience to what he believes is a revolutionary new paradigm in economics and its implications for our understanding of the creation of wealth. He describes how the growing field of complexity theory allows for evolutionary understanding of wealth creation, in which business designs co-evolve with the evolution of technologies and organizational innovations. In addition to giving his audience a tour of this field of complexity economics, he discusses its implications for real-world issues of business.
Managing Change is written for students on modules covering management, strategy and organisational change as part of undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. --Book Jacket.
Modern approaches to public relations cluster into three camps along a continuum: conflict-oriented egoism, e.g. forms of contingency theory that focus almost exclusively on the wellbeing of an entity; redressed egoism, e.g. subsidies to redress PR’s egoistic nature; and forms of self-interested cooperation, e.g. fully functioning society theory. Public Relations, Cooperation, and Justice draws upon interdisciplinary research from evolutionary biology, philosophy, and rhetoric to establish that relationships built on cooperation and justice are more productive than those built on conflict and egoistic competition. Just as important, this innovative book shuns normative, utopian appeals, offering instead only empirical, materialistic evidence for its conclusions. This is a powerful, multidisciplinary, and well-documented analysis, including specific strategies for the enactment of PR as a quest for cooperation and justice, which aligns the discipline of public relations with basic human nature. It will be of interest to scholars and advanced students of public relations and communication ethics.
Classifies, presents, and discusses the contributions and the limits of the theories of organizational change using an historical perspective as its organizing scheme. This book focuses on process theories of organizational change. It discusses different theoretical perspectives and resulting implications.
Urban change is often difficult because we are dealing with people’s elusive notions of place and perception, time and change. Urban design and planning in a changing urban context so that it remains relevant for people is elusive because the idea of place is embedded in memory and identity – but whose memory and whose identity? This book seeks to understand the urban change dynamic so that the planning of urban places aligns with the dynamic of people’s perception of place. Planning Urban Places examines the premise that building cities is a concrete business surrounded by a shifting context. It discusses the notion of urban design and placemaking from the perspective of place perception and cognitive psychology, place philosophy and human geography. It also considers network theory to help illustrate the self-organising paradigm of small word network theory for planning urban places.
The book investigates omissions in the textual transmission of the Hebrew scriptures. Literary criticism (Literarkritik) commonly assumes that later editors only expanded the older text; omissions would not have taken place. This axiom is implied in analyses and introductions to the methodology. The book investigates the validity of the axiom. After a review of literature, books of methodology, and past research, texts from different parts of the Hebrew Bible are discussed with this aim in view. The investigated texts consist of examples which preserve documented evidence about editorial changes. Passages with variant editions are compared in order to understand omissions as an editorial technique. The comparison of variant witnesses includes, for example, passages where the Greek and Hebrew versions differ and cases where parallel passages differ (e.g., Chronicles in relation to Kings, the Temple Scroll in relation the Pentateuch). Example texts have been taken from the Pentateuch, Samuel, Kings, Ezra-Nehemiah, Esther, Jubilees, etc.The investigation shows that omissions took place in part of the transmission of the Hebrew scriptures. Although omissions were clearly less common than additions, the conclusion challenges the axiom of literary criticism. Rejecting the conventional implementation of the methodology, the book provides a new model for understanding the transmission of the Hebrew scriptures that integrates omissions as a possible editorial technique.
