This comprehensive volume examines the future effectiveness of regional institutions as well as key questions concerning the attempts to overcome ongoing serious problems of security, governance and poor economic performance in the Pacific. What is obvious from this collection is that a new and stronger commitment to overcoming national problems is required through regional cooperation. The volume is highly suited to courses on international political economy, security and regional cooperation.

Bringing together a broad range of contributors including art, architecture, and design academic theorists and historians, in addition to practicing artists, architects, and designers, this volume explores the place of the sketchbook in contemporary art and architecture. Drawing upon a diverse range of theories, practices, and reflections common to the contemporary conceptualisation of the sketchbook and its associated environments, it offers a dialogue in which the sketchbook can be understood as a pivotal working tool that contributes to the creative process and the formulation and production of visual ideas. Along with exploring the theoretical, philosophical, psychological, and curatorial implications of the sketchbook, the book addresses emergent digital practices by way of examining contemporary developments in sketchbook productions and pedagogical applications. Consequently, these more recent developments question the validity of the sketchbook as both an instrument of practice and creativity, and as an educational device. International in scope, it not only explores European intellectual and artistic traditions, but also intercultural and cross-cultural perspectives, including reviews of practices in Chinese artworks or Islamic calligraphy, and situational contexts that deal with historical examples, such as Roman art, or modern practices in geographical-cultural regions like Pakistan.

The Emerging Church Movement, an eclectic conversation about how Christianity needs to evolve for our postmodern world, has been breaking traditional bounds and stirring up controversy for more than two decades. This volume is the first academic work to adopt an interdisciplinary approach to understanding this complex and boundary-crossing phenomenon. Containing contributions by researchers from a diverse set of disciplines, this book brings together historical, sociological, ethnographic, anthropological, and theological approaches to offer the most thorough and multifaceted description of the Emerging Church Movement to date. Contributors: Juan Jose Barreda Toscano Dee Yaccino Gerardo Marti Lloyd Chia Jason Wollschleger James S. Bielo Jon Bialecki Heather Josselyn-Cranson Xochitl Alviso Chris James Tim Snyder

Current scholarship on Latin American historical fiction has failed to take feminism and postcolonialism into account. This study uses these important contemporary discourses as a starting point for a new definition of the Latin American historical novel that includes national identity, magical realism, historical intertextuality, and symbolism.

Usage of the political keyword 'propaganda' by the Chinese Communist Party has changed and expanded over time. These changes have been masked by strong continuities spanning periods in the history of the People's Republic of China from the Mao Zedong era (1949–76) to the new era of Xi Jinping (2012–present). Redefining Propaganda in Modern China builds on the work of earlier scholars to revisit the central issue of how propaganda has been understood within the Communist Party system. What did propaganda mean across successive eras? What were its institutions and functions? What were its main techniques and themes? What can we learn about popular consciousness as a result? In answering these questions, the contributors to this volume draw on a range of historical, cultural studies, propa­ganda studies and comparative politics approaches. Their work captures the sweep of propaganda – its appearance in everyday life, as well as during extraordinary moments of mobilization (and demobilization), and its systematic continuities and discontinuities from the perspective of policy-makers, bureaucratic function­aries and artists. More localized and granular case studies are balanced against deep readings and cross-cutting interpretive essays, which place the history of the People's Republic of China within broader temporal and comparative frames. Addressing a vital aspect of Chinese Communist Party authority, this book is meant to provide a timely and comprehensive update on what propaganda has meant ideologically, operationally, aesthetically and in terms of social experience.

First published in 1995. This book is about the issues in the education of pupils with learning difficulties. It redefines the relationship between the established curriculum for pupils with learning difficulties, the whole curriculum and the National Curriculum within the context of personal and social development. Particular themes running through the book include the ways in which the individual needs of pupils can be met through group work and planning for meaningful pupil involvement.

Business knowledge has been evolving ever since the emergence of the first economic book, The Wealth of Nations, written by Adam Smith. A profound load of business management theories, concepts, notions, techniques and tools have been developed. However, pragmatic applications of those “good stuffs” to business in practice seem not quite satisfactory. Many evidences show that the majority of senior managers are still reactive (instead of proactive) to the environmental changes, myopia in strategic planning, inconsistent in managing and bias in analyzing. Those are obviously the handicaps in the treacherously changing business environment. On the other hand, the under-performance of MBA graduates somehow reveals that there might be a need to renovate and supplement the current education system in management. Those problems will be well defined and addressed in this book through introducing a new approach in thinking and effective methods that can readily help resolve these problems. Unlike the pure academic writings, our principles, systems, methods and tools are developed based upon not only academic theories, but also the practical experiences through being practiced and testified in numerous business cases in reality. Furthermore, our principles and systems are designed to be readily applicable to business in practice.Business in its nature is a holistic and indivisible piece of matter, and it is also a complex, volatile and conceptual matter as well. The former characteristics hinder the business practitioners from managing and making decisions effectively while the latter ones hinder the students from acquiring the mastery of its overall rationale. Image that, without a holistic and integrative framework and engineering mindset, the tasks of business planning and implementation might end up like constructing a cross-sea bridge without an overall blueprint and engineering concepts and practices. Unfortunately, there is by far no such a single framework that provides a holistic view systematically and visually that allows people to concisely capture the essence of business.Conceptualization is deemed to be one of the crucial abilities in strategic planning and decision making for senior executive level and usually becomes a bottleneck for many middle managers to move up along their career ladder. One of the challenges of conceptualizing business lies in the complexity and vagueness of the relationship among numerous business elements. For removing this difficulty to a considerable extent, we take the systematic approach to provide the framework that holistically captures the panorama of business environment and logically integrates the essential business elements in seamless manner, from financial status and performance to management functions to strategy to market environment to macro environment. Essentially, our system serves as a frame of mind in the field of business, called Business “MindFrame”, in which people can be aided in better modeling business contexts, reasoning the business decisions out, and charting the effective courses of actions rationally.Published by SCPG Publishing Corporation and distributed by World Scientific for all markets except China

Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, is known for its bustling street life. Public spaces, such as streets and sidewalks, are appropriated by citizens mostly for small-scale economic activities. Green parks are privatized in order to cater to the growing demand for leisure space. At the same time, official spaces like Ba Dinh Square or Ly Thai To Square are occupied by Hanoi's residents for sports and gatherings. This dissertation takes a close look at the practices and the meaning of public spaces and the development of public spheres in Hanoi. Dissertation. (Series: Southeast Asian Modernities - Vol. 13)