The Chaos Frontier
The Chaos Frontier

Author: Ralph D. Stacey

Publisher: Butterworth-Heinemann

Published: 2016-02-09

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13: 1483164020

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The Chaos Frontier: Creative Strategic Control for Business presents the effective ways of managing and controlling innovative organizations in chaotic times. This book discusses the theories of chaos and self-organization developed by mathematicians, biologists, chemists, and physicists. Organized into four parts encompassing 13 chapters, this book begins with an overview of the scientific sense of chaos as those systems driven by certain types of perfectly orderly laws capable of behaving in a manner that is random and therefore inherently unpredictable over the long term. This text then examines the key elements that managers need to incorporate into a dynamic model of managing if they are to design effective actions in a turbulent business world. Other chapters consider organizational effectiveness and the ability to sustain competitive capability. The final chapter deals with creative interaction between a business and the other organizations and people that are its environment. This book is a valuable resource for managers.

Chaos and Fractals
Chaos and Fractals

Author: Heinz-Otto Peitgen

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2013-06-29

Total Pages: 1013

ISBN-13: 1475747403

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For almost ten years chaos and fractals have been enveloping many areas of mathematics and the natural sciences in their power, creativity and expanse. Reaching far beyond the traditional bounds of mathematics and science to the realms of popular culture, they have captured the attention and enthusiasm of a worldwide audience. The fourteen chapters of the book cover the central ideas and concepts, as well as many related topics including, the Mandelbrot Set, Julia Sets, Cellular Automata, L-Systems, Percolation and Strange Attractors, and each closes with the computer code for a central experiment. In the two appendices, Yuval Fisher discusses the details and ideas of fractal image compression, while Carl J.G. Evertsz and Benoit Mandelbrot introduce the foundations and implications of multifractals.

Cures and Chaos
Cures and Chaos

Author: Joseph Homme

Publisher:

Published: 2007-04-01

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9781594330605

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Dr. Vincent Hume was a charismatic physician, gifted with legendary talents for healing the sick. But there was a mysterious component to his personality, an element of the streets that ran counter to his pedestal position in the frontier Alaska community he served. Over the course of a decade, the origins of his street smarts, combined with a progressive illness and tragic personal events, conspired in his undoing. It was an excruciating public downfall of a respected surgeon, husband, father, friend, and neighbor; a downfall that ignited a public uproar that threatened the very fabric of the small, close knit community.

Frontiers of Complexity
Frontiers of Complexity

Author: Peter Coveney

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Published: 1996-08-27

Total Pages: 492

ISBN-13: 9780449910818

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"SCIENCE JOURNALISM AT ITS BEST. . . An impeccably researched, amazingly up-to-date, crisply written and well-illustrated survey." --Nature At the cutting edge of the sciences, a dynamic new concept is emerging: complexity. In this groundbreaking new book, Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield explore how complexity in mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, and even the social sciences is transforming not only the way we think about the universe, but also the very assumptions that underlie conventional science. Complexity is a watchword for a new way of thinking about the behavior of interacting units, whether they are atoms, ants in a colony, or neurons firing in a human brain. The rise of the electronic computer provided both the key and the catalyst to our exploration of complexity. A new generation of computers that runs on light and exploits the bizarre properties of quantum mechanics promises to deepen our understanding still further. The advances we have already witnessed are spectacular. The authors take us inside laboratories where scientists are evolving the genetic molecules that enabled life to emerge on earth and generating universes teeming with virtual creatures in cyber-space. We witness the utterly realistic behavior of a school of virtual fish--computer-generated replicas that have been trained to swim gracefully, hunt for food, and scatter at the approach of a leopard shark. Compelling in its clarity, far-reaching in its implications, vibrant with the excitement of new discovery, Frontiers of Complexity is an arresting account of how far science has come in the past fifty years and an essential guide to the rapidly approaching future. "[A] MARVELOUS AND COMPREHENSIVE WORK . . . Virtually any scientist or interested lay reader will find this book engrossing, edifying and inspiring." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Conquering the Chaos
Conquering the Chaos

Author: Ravi Venkatesan

Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press

Published: 2013-06-18

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1422184307

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Providing an insider view on how to tackle the very unique challenges of the Indian market, the former India head of two U.S. multinational corporations proves that if you can make it in India, you can make it anywhere by revealing how to break into through successfully. 10,000 first printing.

Tools and Techniques of Leadership and Management
Tools and Techniques of Leadership and Management

Author: Ralph Stacey

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-06-25

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 1136296794

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Many of today’s books on the tools and techniques of leadership and management provide descriptions of long lists for use in decision-making, leading, coaching and project management. This book takes a completely different approach. It contests the claims that the tools and techniques are based on evidence and explains why human activities of leading and managing are simply not amenable to scientific proof and consequently, why long-term futures of organizations are unpredictable. The book undertakes a critical exploration of just what these tools and techniques are about; showing that while they may lead to competent performance they cannot go further to expert performance because expertise involves going beyond rules and procedures. Ralph Stacey investigates the many questions that are thrown up as a result of this new approach. Questions such as: How do we apply this new way of thinking? What are the practical tools and techniques it gives us? What is the role of leaders in an unpredictable world? How does complexity affect the way organizations are structured and function? This book will be relevant to students on courses and modules that deal with leadership, decision-making and organizational development and behaviour as well as professional leaders and managers who want to develop their own understanding and techniques.

The Real South
The Real South

Author: Scott Romine

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2008-06

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0807134295

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In this stimulating study, Scott Romine explores the impact of globalization on contemporary southern culture and the South's persistence in an age of media and what he terms "cultural reproduction." Rather than being compromised, Romine asserts, southern cultures are both complicated and reconfigured as they increasingly detach from tradition in its conventional sense. In considering Souths that might appear fake -- the Souths of the theme restaurant, commercial television, and popular regional magazines, for example -- Romine contends that authenticity and reality emerge as central concepts that allow groups and individuals to imagine and navigate social worlds. Romine addresses a major critical problem -- "authenticity" -- in a fundamentally new manner. Less concerned with what actually constitutes an "authentic" or "real" South than in how these concepts are used today, The Real South explores a wide range of southern narratives that describe and travel through virtual, simulated, and commodified Souths. Where earlier critics have tended to assume a real or authentic South, Romine questions such assumptions and whether the "authentic South" ever truly existed. From Gone with the Wind, Civil War reenactments, and a tennis community outside Atlanta called Tara, to the work of Josephine Humphreys, the travel narrative of V. S. Naipaul, and the historical fiction of Lewis Nordan, Romine examines how narratives (and spaces) are used to fashion social solidarity and cultural continuity in a time of fragmentation and change. Far from deteriorating or disappearing in a global economy, Romine shows, the South continues to be reproduced and used by diverse groups engaged in diverse cultural projects.

Modes of Thought in Western and Non-Western Societies
Modes of Thought in Western and Non-Western Societies

Author: Ruth Finnegan

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2017-10-04

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 1725238462

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Is there a basic difference in thinking between Western and non-Western societies? This long-debated yet highly topical problem forms the central question to which distinguished contributors in the fields of psychology, linguistics, history, and sociology and, more particularly, of social anthropology and philosophy, address themselves in this interdisciplinary collec­tion. They are: Barry Barnes, Benjamin N. Colby and Michael Cole, Ruth Finnegan, Ernest Gellner, Robin Horton, J. M. Ita, Hilary Jenkins, Steven Lukes, Nobuhiro Nagashima, S. J. Tambiah, W. H. Whiteley, and Sybil Wolfram. The central ideas of this classic work are reformulated and refined in the various contributions with different possible dichotomies discussed such as: 'traditional/modern', 'industrial/non­ industrial', or 'scientific/non-scientific', and 'thinking,' analyzed in terms of its thought processes, content, logic or social background. The material in the book, which is dedicated to Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard, falls within the general area of the comparative sociology of knowledge, and will thus particularly interest philosophers, social anthropologists, and sociologists. The volume is however conceived in an interdisciplinary spirit and will be of interest to anyone seriously concerned to examine the nature of thinking in our own and other societies.

Frontier Road
Frontier Road

Author: Simón Uribe

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2017-07-24

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 1119100178

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Frontier Road uses the history of one road in southern Colombia—known locally as “the trampoline of death”—to demonstrate how state-building processes and practices have depended on the production and maintenance of frontiers as inclusive-exclusive zones, often through violent means. Considers the topic from multiple perspectives, including ethnography of the state, the dynamics of frontiers, and the nature of postcolonial power, space, and violence Draws attention to the political, environmental, and racial dynamics involved in the history and development of transport infrastructure in the Amazon region Examines the violence that has sustained the state through time and space, as well as the ways in which ordinary people have made sense of and contested that violence in everyday life Incorporates a broad range of engaging sources, such as missionary and government archives, travel writing, and oral histories