Description: This is one of the first books to probe deeply into the art and science of branding industrial products. The book comes at a time when more industrial companies need to start using branding in a sophisticated way. It provides the concepts, the theory, and dozens of cases illustrating the successful branding of industrial goods. It offers strategies for a successful development of branding concepts for business markets and explains the benefits and the value a business, product or service provides to industrial customers. As industrial companies are turning to branding this book provides the best practices and hands-on advice for B2B brand management.
Description: This study looks at the rich literature that has been spawned through the historical imagination of Bengali-speaking writers in West Bengal and Bangladesh through issues of homelessness, migration and exile to see how the Partition of Bengal in 1947 has thrown a long shadow over memories and cultural practices. Through a rich trove of literary and other materials, the book lays bare how the Partition has been remembered or how it has been forgotten. For the first time, hitherto untranslated archival materials and texts in Bangla have been put together to assess the impact of 1947 on the cultural memory of Bangla-speaking peoples and communities. This study contends that there is not one but many smaller partitions that women and men suffered, each with its own textures of pain, guilt and affirmation.
Description: How only violence and catastrophes have consistently reduced inequality throughout world history Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines when carnage and disaster strike and increases when peace and stability return. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world. Ever since humans began to farm, herd livestock, and pass on their assets to future generations, economic inequality has been a defining feature of civilization. Over thousands of years, only violent events have significantly lessened inequality. The "Four Horsemen" of leveling--mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues--have repeatedly destroyed the fortunes of the rich. Scheidel identifies and examines these processes, from the crises of the earliest civilizations to the cataclysmic world wars and communist revolutions of the twentieth century. Today, the violence that reduced inequality in the past seems to have diminished, and that is a good thing. But it casts serious doubt on the prospects for a more equal future. An essential contribution to the debate about inequality, The Great Leveler provides important new insights about why inequality is so persistent--and why it is unlikely to decline anytime soon.
Description: "Magisterial...A vividly written, wide-ranging and often surprising account of the president-to-be." --The New York Times Book Review "Masterful." --Los Angeles Times Volume II of Sidney Blumenthal's acclaimed, landmark biography, The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, reveals the future president's genius during the most decisive period of his political life when he seizes the moment, finds his voice, and helps create a new political party. In 1849, Abraham Lincoln seems condemned to political isolation and defeat. His Whig Party is broken in the 1852 election, and disintegrates. His perennial rival, Stephen Douglas, forges an alliance with the Southern senators and Secretary of War Jefferson Davis. Violent struggle breaks out on the plains of Kansas, a prelude to the Civil War. Lincoln rises to the occasion. Only he can take on Douglas in Illinois, and he finally delivers the dramatic speech that leaves observers stunned. In 1855, he makes a race for the Senate, which he loses when he throws his support to a rival to prevent the election of a proslavery candidate. Now, in Wrestling With His Angel, Sidney Blumenthal explains how Lincoln and his friends operate behind the scenes to destroy the anti-immigrant party in Illinois to clear the way for a new Republican Party. Lincoln takes command and writes its first platform and vaults onto the national stage as the leader of a party that will launch him to the presidency. The Washington Monthly hailed Blumenthal's Volume I as, "splendid...no one can come away from reading A Self-Made Man without eagerly anticipating the ensuing volumes." Now, in one of the greatest American success stories, Wrestling With His Angel brings Lincoln from the wilderness to the peak of his career as he takes control of the nation's most profound spiritual crisis--slavery--and enters the battle for the nation's soul.
Description:
How can a company that has never turned a profit have a multibillion dollar valuation? Why do some start-ups attract large investments while others do not? Aswath Damodaran, finance professor and experienced investor, argues that the power of story drives corporate value, adding substance to numbers and persuading even cautious investors to take risks. In business, there are the storytellers who spin compelling narratives and the number-crunchers who construct meaningful models and accounts. Both are essential to success, but only by combining the two, Damodaran argues, can a business deliver and sustain value. Through a range of case studies, Narrative and Numbers describes how storytellers can better incorporate and narrate numbers and how number-crunchers can calculate more imaginative models that withstand scrutiny. Damodaran considers Uber's debut and how narrative is key to understanding different valuations. He investigates why Twitter and Facebook were valued in the billions of dollars at their public offerings, and why one (Twitter) has stagnated while the other (Facebook) has grown. Damodaran also looks at more established business models such as Apple and Amazon to demonstrate how a company's history can both enrich and constrain its narrative. And through Vale, a global Brazil-based mining company, he shows the influence of external narrative, and how country, commodity, and currency can shape a company's story. Narrative and Numbers reveals the benefits, challenges, and pitfalls of weaving narratives around numbers and how one can best test a story's plausibility.
Description: This book explores the political economy of women's work in India and its relationship to the Indian state. The author argues that the withdrawal of state support under globalization, coinciding with the demand for expansion of state welfare schemes, is progressively weakening thesocial-service sector in the country. More and more women, particularly from the lower social strata, are employed in new social-welfare schemes where the form of work is defined as voluntary social service. Through a case study of honorary women workers in anganwadis of the Integrated ChildDevelopment Services (ICDS) scheme, this book sheds light on the contemporary understanding of the status of women within these welfare policies.State Without Honour discusses the history and politics of women's work and the use of women's less-paid labour in state-sponsored social welfare schemes in India. It contributes a deeper understanding around the process of the expansion of scheme-based social welfare projects in contemporary Indiaas a symbol of further marginalization and exploitation of its women workers. It explains how the entry of more women workers into state social welfare projects also coincides with and contributes to further intrusion of private capital into the local economy with the direct support ofstate-sponsored social welfare schemes. It helps to see the Indian state shape itself into the role of a non-state actor through its own performance or lack of it.
Description: The Great Recession and the turn towards all forms of protectionism stress the relevance of international trade policy. With the global economy undergoing deep structural changes, the negotiations between Canada and the EU on a Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) present a real-time experiment that sheds light on the direction that the relationships between two economic units of the G8 will take. For Canada, an agreement with the EU would end its current dependency on the US; for the EU, an agreement with Canada would be a first with a G8-economy and indicate how its new trade strategy 'Global Europe' will look like. This book is the first to simultaneously analyze the undercurrents of this project and introduce the main topics at hand. CETA is much more than a simple free trade agreement, its breadth covers regulatory aspects in goods, services, and finance; the opening of public procurement markets; attitudes and policies of Canadian provinces towards liberalization; climate policies and international leadership claims of the EU in comparison to Canadian policy attempts; the challenges of the Euro project and the reform efforts; and the challenges of the Euro as a international reserve currency. CETA is a challenging project that will kick-start enormous changes in trade policy-making as well as in market openness in Canada. It will mark the EU's efforts to re-make the Atlantic Economy. This book provides deep insights into the ambiguity of the project and addresses the implications of a rapidly changing global economy for trade policy. Offering analysis of the financial industry, banking, trade policy, climate change strategy, and the Euro exchange rate, this book should be of interest to students and policy-makers alike.
Description: Design-oriented firms such as Apple and IDEO have demonstrated how design thinking can affect business results. However, most managers lack a sense of how to use this new approach for issues other than product development and sales growth. Solving Problems with Design Thinking details ten real-world examples of managers who successfully applied design methods at 3M, Toyota, IBM, Intuit, and SAP; entrepreneurial start-ups such as MeYou Health; and government and social sector organizations, including the City of Dublin and Denmark's The Good Kitchen. Using design skills such as ethnography, visualization, storytelling, and experimentation, these managers produced innovative solutions to such problems as implementing strategy, supporting a sales force, redesigning internal processes, feeding the elderly, and engaging citizens. They elaborate on the challenges they faced and the processes and tools they used, providing a clear path to implementation based on the principles and practices laid out in Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie's Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers.
Description: This successful textbook on predictive text mining offers a unified perspective on a rapidly evolving field, integrating topics spanning the varied disciplines of data science, machine learning, databases, and computational linguistics. Serving also as a practical guide, this unique book provides helpful advice illustrated by examples and case studies. This highly anticipated second edition has been thoroughly revised and expanded with new material on deep learning, graph models, mining social media, errors and pitfalls in big data evaluation, Twitter sentiment analysis, and dependency parsing discussion. The fully updated content also features in-depth discussions on issues of document classification, information retrieval, clustering and organizing documents, information extraction, web-based data-sourcing, and prediction and evaluation. Features: includes chapter summaries and exercises; explores the application of each method; provides several case studies; contains links to free text-mining software.
Description: Is primitivism a consequence of the natural evolution of some human societies? Or is it a conscious choice by such societies to evade state power? In The Roots of the Periphery, Bhangya Bhukya sets out to answer these questions by taking as his focal point the case of the Gond dynasty of theerstwhile Chanda region of Deccan India. Arguing that the "periphery" - the adivasis (or the indigenous peoples) - have their roots in the "centre", he demonstrates how the British colonial government in India created an administrative divide between the plains and the hills, thus stereotyping hilland forest communities as isolated, primitive, barbaric, and uncivilized.This book examines the evolution of Gond society over a prolonged period - from Mughal rule to the colonial era - with an interdisciplinary approach that uses both oral narratives and folklore along with archival sources. In so doing, it challenges the isolationist and assimilationist perceptionsabout adivasi society and asserts that the "difference" imagined and articulated by the Gonds was deeply rooted in self-rule and self-determinism.
Description: Indira Gandhi, prime minister of India for sixteen years, was as charismatic as she was controversial--at once admired and criticized for her political judgements and actions. Yet beyond such debate, what has not been fully understood is her life-long communion with nature and how that defined her very being. Weaving personal, political and environmental history, politician-scholar Jairam Ramesh narrates the compelling story of Indira Gandhi, the naturalist. He tells us why and how she came to make a private passion a public calling; how her views on the environment remained steadfast even as her political and economic stances changed; how her friendships with conservationists led to far-reaching decisions to preserve India's biodiversity; how she urged, cajoled and persuaded her colleagues as she took significant decisions particularly regarding forests and wildlife; and how her own finely-developed instincts and beliefs resulted in landmark policies, programmes, initiatives, laws and institutions, that have endured. Drawing extensively from unpublished letters, notes, messages and memos, Indira Gandhi: A Life in Nature offers a lively, conversational narrative of a relatively little known but fascinating aspect of Indira Gandhi's tumultuous life. Equally, the book acts as a compass to India at a time when the country faces the formidable challenge of ensuring ecological security and sustainability in its pursuit of high economic growth.
Description: A riveting and timely intellectual history of one of our most important capitalist institutions, Harvard Business School, from the bestselling author of The Firm. With The Firm, financial journalist Duff McDonald pulled back the curtain on consulting giant McKinsey & Company. In The Golden Passport, he reveals the inner workings of a singular nexus of power, ambition, and influence: Harvard Business School. Harvard University occupies a unique place in the public's imagination, but HBS has arguably eclipsed its parent in terms of its influence on modern society. A Harvard degree guarantees respect. An HBS degree is, as the New York Times proclaimed in 1978, "the golden passport to life in the upper class." Those holding Harvard MBAs are near-guaranteed entrance into Western capitalism's most powerful realm--the corner office. Most people have a vague knowledge of the power of the HBS network, but few understand the dynamics that have made HBS an indestructible and powerful force for almost a century. As McDonald explores these dynamics, he also reveals how, despite HBS's enormous success, it has failed with respect to the stated goal of its founders: "the multiplication of men who will handle their current business problems in socially constructive ways." While HBS graduates tend to be very good at whatever they do, that is rarely the doing of good. In addition to teasing out the essence of this exclusive, if not necessarily "secret" club, McDonald explores two important questions: Has the school failed at reaching the goals it set for itself? And is HBS therefore complicit in the moral failings of Western capitalism? At a time of pronounced economic disparity and political unrest, this hard-hitting yet fair portrait offers a much-needed look at an institution that has a profound influence on the shape of our society and all our lives.
Description: This book provides an interpretive and comprehensive account of the history of India between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, a crucial epoch characterized by colonialism, nationalism and the emergence of the independent Indian Union. It explores significant historiographical debates concerning the period while highlighting important new issues, especially those of gender, ecology, caste, and labour. The work combines an analysis of colonial and independent India in order to underscore ideologies, policies, and processes that shaped the colonial state and continue mould the Indian nation.
Description: This work analyzes the challenges of governance faced by contemporary India. It argues that while the expansion and growth of India's private sector and a vibrant civil society can fill in for some of the shortcomings of the public sector in the foreseeable future, there is a wide range ofcore functions from regulation to security, from social inclusion to public goods provision, where the State is-and will be-indispensable. The integrity and responsiveness of the Indian state to the multiple challenges facing the country, both internal and external, will fundamentally determineIndia's future.The contributions to this volume critically assess different institutions and frameworks-civil services, presidency, judiciary, Parliament, Election Commission, financial and federal institutions, audits and accountability framework, and institutions of local governance. The editors of the volumedemonstrate that fundamental state reform will be a necessary condition for India to realize its potential and fulfill its people's aspirations in the twenty-first century.
Description: The first in a sweeping, multi-volume history of Abraham Lincoln--from his obscure beginnings to his presidency, death, and the overthrow of his post-Civil War plan of reconciliation--"engaging and informative and...thought-provoking" (The Christian Science Monitor). From his youth as a voracious newspaper reader, Abraham Lincoln became a free thinker, reading Tom Paine, as well as Shakespeare and the Bible. In the "fascinating" (Booklist, starred review) A Self-Made Man, Sidney Blumenthal reveals how Lincoln's antislavery thinking began in his childhood in backwoods Kentucky and Indiana. Intensely ambitious, he held political aspirations from his earliest years. Yet he was a socially awkward suitor who had a nervous breakdown over his inability to deal with the opposite sex. His marriage to the upper class Mary Todd was crucial to his social aspirations and his political career. "The Lincoln of Blumenthal's pen is...a brave progressive facing racist assaults on his religion, ethnicity, and very legitimacy that echo the anti-Obama birther movement....Blumenthal takes the wily pol of Steven Spielberg's Lincoln and Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals and goes deeper, finding a Vulcan logic and House of Cards ruthlessness" (The Washingtonian). Based on prodigious research of Lincoln's record, and of the period and its main players, Blumenthal's robust biography reflects both Lincoln's time and the struggle that consumes our own political debate. This first volume traces Lincoln from his birth in 1809 through his education in the political arts, rise to the Congress, and fall into the wilderness from which he emerged as the man we recognize as Abraham Lincoln. "Splendid...no one can come away from reading A Self-Made Man...without eagerly anticipating the ensuing volumes." (Washington Monthly).
Description: In the late 1990s, a group representing Dalits in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu called the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchior Liberation Panthers Partyshook the established social and political structures. For over a decade they boycotted elections, questioning the legitimacy of institutions that failed to implement constitutional provisions and allowed casteism to persist. The Panthers conducted mass awareness campaigns for Dalit liberation, instilling a sense of empowerment in a hitherto marginalized population. Eventually, labelled as extremists and alienated by the State, the Panthers were pushed into electoral politics. How the Panthers mobilized themselves and managed to effect changes in Tamil Nadus politics is the main premise of this ethnographic account. Looking into the processes of transition therein, the author discusses how caste considerations inform and underpin politics in the state and whether the Panthers will erode or adapt to hegemonic caste power. With its micro-empirical focus on identity politics in Tamil Nadu, the book also explores diverse dimensions of mobilization and ways in which contentious politics alters political regimes.
