Search results for ""author arch""

This book examines B2B decision making processes for software application development. To learn what really happens and why it happens, this study provides a multi-level hermeneutic system starting with written accounts of decision-making associated with development and delivery of new software applications these accounts are then revisited through multiple rounds of researcher and informant interpretations. The framework and supporting analysis is applied to six application software case studies that created new Internet-based software applications which were either disruptive or supporting disruptive innovations. The findings from six case studies suggest that the hermeneutic research framework proposals provide a strong systematic platform to analyse and interpret decision-making with deep prospective, introspective, retrospective, and with imaginatively unbounded current and future perspectives.The author, Arch Woodside received the 1998 Living Legend in Marketing Award. This book is International in scope. It provides DSA Models, event chronology maps, and cognitive maps for more comprehensive analysis. It includes individual case study and cross-case findings for new theory development.

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In many countries of Southeast Asia, the middle years of the 20th century marked the dawn of a new era. Independence had been won from colonial powers, and young states such as Burma (Myanmar), Indonesia, Cambodia and Singapore were faced with the task of reconstituting themselves as nations and developing an independent postcolonial identity. Architecture and urban planning played an important role in this process. Local manifestations of modernism emerged that sought to reconcile universal aspirations with specific social conditions. This volume critically examines this architectural and ideological heritage and argues for the preservation and redevelopment of these particular architectures, which are at risk of disappearing amid the rapid urbanization of today.

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This volume in the series has big objectives: describe the bad science practices now in use in most studies in business-to-business marketing strategy and describe a true paradigm shift to good science practices by replacing the variable-based linear-symmetric null hypothesis testing (NHST) approach in theory construction and testing—with case-based asymmetric models with somewhat precise outcome testing (SPOT). Whether the question refers to success or failure, wise executives ask, how did we get here? What’s in store for the next decade? Unfortunately, the majority of scholarly articles examining the causes of success and failure offers scant useful information that is accurate in forecasting success or failure strategy outcomes. The majority of studies on strategy performance outcomes focus on variable relationships and testing for the directionality (positive or negative relationships) and effect size of relationships—using multiple regression analysis and structural equation modeling (MRA/SEM) using null hypothesis statistical testing (NHST). Research on the value of NHST indicates that such studies are worse than useless: such research does not focus on case-based outcomes and achieving a statistically significant relationship greatly depends on the sample size of firms in the studies. Researchers using NHST are answering the wrong questions in examining the net effects of independent variables on dependent variable of interest (e.g., net earnings per revenue). Here are the right questions to ask. What configurations of antecedent conditions combine to generate positive outcomes for our firm and similar firms? What configurations of antecedent conditions combine to generate negative outcomes for firms in our industry? Sound reasoning and empirical evidence supports the wisdom of business executives ignoring the scholarly empirical literature on forecasting successful and unsuccessful management strategies using the NHST of the size and directionality of relationships. Good science practice relies on the complexity theory tenets covered in the chapters in this volume. Good science practice includes matching case-focused theory with case-focused data analytic tools and using somewhat precise outcome tests (SPOT) of asymmetric models. Good science practice achieves requisite variety necessary for deep explanation, description, and accurate prediction. The fear of submission rejection is another reason for rejecting case-based asymmetric modeling and SPOT. Overcome such fear by learning to apply complexity theory tenets, constructing separate case-based, mid-range, models of successful versus unsuccessful outcomes, and testing for accuracy via SPOT. This volume provides tools necessary for you to accomplish this task.

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This work's 16 contributions fill the mind with knowledge, skills, and insights useful for improving the executive's ability to do what needs to be done: scan environments better to find the weak signals on breakthrough technologies; shifts in customers' attitudes and behaviors; changes in behaviors of suppliers, governments, and other stakeholder groups; frame problems/opportunities better by deepening understanding on how we go about making sense of what is happening and can be made to happen; deciding better by gaining deep knowledge on how decisions are actually made and can be improved (e.g., via systems thinking and simulating system operations to uncover powerful levers previously unrecognized); and, doing better by applying new tools to learn what is really happening when planned strategies are converted into realized strategies.

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Where do brilliant executive wisdom and actions come from? Making Tough Decisions Well and Badly (MTDWB) assesses the literature that examines executives’ conscious and non-conscious actions in decision making, implementation and assessment of outcomes. MTDWB includes anecdotal histories of good and bad decisions and the executives who made them. This volume uncovers the common threads in framing, forecasting, decision making and actions, looking at Steve Jobs, Martin Luther King, Jr, Senator Wayne Morris, Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Sam Walton, Mahatma Gandhi, and Bill Gates. Authors discuss how common threads could be useful for achieving superior competences MTDWB assesses ten valuable decision making tools such as checklists and coaches; and tools to avoid such as use of product portfolio paradigms and use of fit-only regression analysis, that appear often in the popular business and academic literature on making tough decisions. MTDWB closes with ten recommendations for those responsible for making tough decisions.

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For decades, scholars have bemoaned the low relevancy and impact of most research in the leading journals in business, management, and marketing. The majority of the research that gets published, perhaps 70% of it, hardly has any measurable scholarly impact in terms of citations. Rather than low relevancy, ‘Bad to Good’ posits that the deeper issue is the pervasive use of bad research practices appearing in most articles in almost all ranked journals in the sub-disciplines of business. With the objective of reducing the high volume of bad practices in research in finance, management and marketing, the book offers tools for improving theory construction and empirical testing of theory especially by early-to-mid scholars. ‘Bad to Good’ covers 24 common bad practices, explaining why they are bad and how to replace them with good practices. Arch Woodside is a leading voice on how to improve business research. He served as the Editor-in-Chief of the ‘Journal of Business Research’ (JBR) for forty years. In 2016 the JBR ranked first among the top-twenty journals in marketing in the Google.com/scholar h-5 index (an impact metric) and seventh among the strategic management sub-discipline.

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Accurate and useful assessment of tourism market opportunities, network behavior, and tourism destination management performance requires solid foundations in performance evaluation theory as well as applying metrics covering both sensemaking contexts and outcomes. "Advances in Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research" seeks to advance knowledge and sense-making skills in interpreting cultural, organizational, and personal influences relating to tourism and hospitality behaviors. The ten papers in this volume make explicit current tourism assessment practices and look at how such assessments are being conducted and how to go about accomplishing prescribing and applying advanced assessment metrics. With a multi-regional focus that includes Asia, Europe, and North American this volume examines a variety of topics including: using importance-performance analysis to discern cultural differences in image perceptions with application to international visitors to Mauritius; network analysis methods for modelling tourism inter-organizational systems; and, tools for overcoming continuing bad performance in tourism destination management.

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This volume provides useful answers to the following questions: how do tourists go about seeking high novelty and yet return to the same destination year-after-year? How do some firms in the same industry end up embracing industrial tourism while other firms reject such business models? What simple and complex heuristics do freely-independent-travelers apply pre-trip and during the trip in deciding where to go and what to do? What metrics are useful for measuring the impact of activity-focused tourism on the well-being of regional areas? How do executive leadership styles affect employee satisfaction in international tourist hotels? What action and outcome metrics are useful for measuring performance management auditing and destination marketing organization planning and implementing?In terms of the first question, research on tourists' risk-handling behavior provides a useful framework for explaining their novelty seeking proneness. The first paper of the volume provides a complete research report on how tourists' risk-handling behavior explains contingencies in novelty seeking regarding repeat visits to a given destination. How executives process industrial tourism models depends on whether or not they view such enterprise development as a core or peripheral business. The second paper provides thick descriptions of alternative process approaches whilst the third reports a mixed-methods (interpretative and positivistic) research design to provide a thorough report on FITs' (fully independent travellers') pre-trip and trip thinking and doing behavior. This research approach shows how FITs take advantage of serendipitous opportunities to experience a number of locations, attractions, and activities that they had neither actively researched nor planned.The fourth paper applies the fields of travel research and community economic development (CED) within an ethnographic and survey research study on mural tourism which shows how tourism business models can be successful for nurturing CED. The following paper provides both evidence on how leadership styles affect the success of international hotel operations as well as templates on how to measure both leadership styles and subsequent impacts on hotel operations. The final paper includes a longitudinal case study of management performance audits of a government destination marketing organization (DMO) to illustrate the use of templates for measuring both auditor and DMO executives behavior and performance outcomes. As such, this paper concludes what is a diverse and engaging volume of "Advances in Culture Tourism and Hospitality Research".

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This volume provides specific answers to hard questions about how to create valid metrics to measure the effectiveness of tourism advertising and the usefulness of destination marketing websites. An extensive literature review describes 40+ years of research on the effectiveness of tourism advertising and the slow advancement to using valid impact metrics - field experiments with alternative ad treatment and placements. Several authors undertake information-usefulness audits on DMO (destination management office) websites and provide practical check lists. Tourism website comparisons include: Maine, Massachusetts and New York; Genoa, Marseilles and Valencia; France, Spain and Portugal; and China, Poland, Russia and Thailand, against each other as well as the Lonely Planet websites. Content analysis of consumer-generated advertisements that promote visits to third places, in this case Starbucks coffee shops and Chipotle restaurants, makes an intriguing study. The final paper gives a thick description of the dynamics of the government's role in shaping China's domestic, inbound, and outbound tourism industry and contributes to building a behavioral theory of government-firm relationships.

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To clarify their own thinking, gain confirmation, and plan, customers tell stories about their interactions with sales and service associates. These stories are told often via blog sites, social-media platforms (e.g. TripAdvisor) as well as informally to friends and family members. Read original first-person stories of problems, opportunities and outcomes with a multiple-choice exercise following each story, as well as a critical review by an independent researcher. This volume describes customers’ reports of their experience of interactions with sales/service associates. Chapters also offer a descriptive theory of storytelling narratives of these encounters. Gain an international view with stories by Asian, European, New Zealand/Pacific Rim, and North American customers. The volume highlights small details that have significant impact on customer satisfaction enhancing the reader’s abilities to detect nuances in multiple international contexts, understand how customers evaluate sales/service reps’ behavior well as providing opportunities to solve real problems. This is a valuable book in the field of customer relationship management that is also interactive.

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This volume provides in-depth understanding about business-to-business (B2B) and organizational relationships. Studies included identify real-life relationship paradoxes and explain how firms manage - not solve - these paradoxes. Two research reports are the result of three years of intensive face-to-face data collection of how interfirm relations form, operate, and change. They include unedited direct quotes from suppliers, focal firms, and customers on their interfirm relationships and provide a profound understanding of quality relationships. Additional articles include: Discourses in Organizational Culture; Organizational Innovation and Outcomes in SMEs; Anatomy of Relationship Significance; a review of Markets-as-Networks Theory; and Meta-theories in Research. The volume highlights that making mistakes is inherent in organizational innovations and understanding how organizations work through such mistakes is an important key to understanding success versus failure in innovation outcomes. It provides rich descriptions on how B2B networks form, function and develop and is for readers who want to delve into how B2B relationships actually work and, frequently, do not work.

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Case Study Research: Core Skills in Using 15 Genres examines the processes involved in conducting case research in a number of genres including participant observation, fuzzy set social science, system dynamics, decision systems analysis, forced metaphor elicitation technique, ethnographic decision tree modeling, mapping strategic thinking, the historical method, storytelling research and conversational analysis. The book reviews and applies the best literature on case study methods from a number of disciplines providing a strong rationale for adopting case study research methods alone or in mixed-methods. This fully revised and updated second edition employs a broad and deep coverage of multiple case study research genres to comprehensively explore the topic.

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What's really happening? For an organization this question contains at least four sub issues: What actions are being done now help to increase the organization's performance? What actions are wasted motions - what are we doing that does not contribute and wastes our time? What actions harm the organization's performance - what actions are counterproductive in helping the organization achieve what really needs to be accomplished? What actions are we not doing now but really should be doing to increase the organization's performance? A fifth, related, sub issue is how to go about finding out what is really happening-what research methods should executives use, as well as avoid using, to go about finding this out. Executive thinking differs fundamentally from scientific thinking in fundamental ways. Scientists and academic researchers are able to choose the problem, whereas in organizations, the problems (and symptoms of problems) are often thrust upon the executive. Scientists focus on a limited number of problems at a time, whereas executives are confronted with a vast number of potential problems and a myriad of possible presentation problem frames. Scientists have the relative luxury of time to explore the problem at hand, whereas executives, particularly CEOs, do not. The intention is for this volume to be read by executives wanting to learn how to reduce overconfidence, and to become more mindful, in making decisions and in learning how to scientifically evaluate the quality of outcomes that follow from implementing decisions.

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This volume aims to help increase knowledge, skills and insights into making effective decisions in the 'bigger hall' of marketing management. It contains 17 case studies which are aimed at improving the reader's skills in making and carrying out effective decisions in industrial and business marketing. Each of the case studies provides an understanding of the culture of a particular firm in a particular industry. All are based on field research studies of actual firms. The topics included cover: setting strategic direction; product and customer portfolio analysis; product development; advertising; pricing; channel management; environmental scanning; measuring strengths and weaknesses; understanding competitors' behaviour; auditing marketing activities; and international marketing strategies. These case studies also provide a diversity of industry settings ranging from a small Japanese printing firm located to MacTec Control AB, a Swedish manufacturer of high-tech equipment and from Thomson Consumer Electronics to Cavity Oil Pumps.

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In our modern, urbanized societies, our engagement with the natural world often seems distant and superficial. Human life is now far removed from its prehistoric origins, when humans dwelt deep within the forests and depended on them for their survival. In this important book, Vladimir Bibikhin, one of Russia’s most influential twentieth-century philosophers, argues that, although most humans now live far from woods and forests, our existence remains profoundly linked to them. It was Aristotle who first appreciated their primal role, even deriving his notion of ‘matter’w from the Greek words for wood and forest. As timber, the woods may be seen as inanimate material, but at the same time they also constitute a living ecosystem and the source of energy and life. By opening up this duality, the woods are transformed from simple matter to a living environment, serving as a reminder that we belong to the world of biological life to a far greater extent than we usually think. The Woods will be of interest to students and scholars in philosophy and the humanities generally and to anyone concerned with the environment and our relationship to the natural world.

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In our modern, urbanized societies, our engagement with the natural world often seems distant and superficial. Human life is now far removed from its prehistoric origins, when humans dwelt deep within the forests and depended on them for their survival. In this important book, Vladimir Bibikhin, one of Russia’s most influential twentieth-century philosophers, argues that, although most humans now live far from woods and forests, our existence remains profoundly linked to them. It was Aristotle who first appreciated their primal role, even deriving his notion of ‘matter’w from the Greek words for wood and forest. As timber, the woods may be seen as inanimate material, but at the same time they also constitute a living ecosystem and the source of energy and life. By opening up this duality, the woods are transformed from simple matter to a living environment, serving as a reminder that we belong to the world of biological life to a far greater extent than we usually think. The Woods will be of interest to students and scholars in philosophy and the humanities generally and to anyone concerned with the environment and our relationship to the natural world.

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In the archives of the Memorial International Human Rights Centre in Moscow is an extraordinary diary, a rare first-person testimony of a commander of guards in a Soviet labour camp. Ivan Chistyakov was sent to the Gulag in 1937, where he worked at the Baikal-Amur Corrective Labour Camp for over a year. Life at the Gulag was anathema to Chistyakov, a cultured Muscovite with a nostalgia for pre-revolutionary Russia, and an amateur painter and poet. He recorded its horrors with an unmatchable immediacy, documenting a world where petty rivalries put lives at risk, prisoners hacked off their fingers to bet in card games, railway sleepers were burned for firewood and Siberian winds froze the lather on the soap. From his stumbling poetic musings on the bitter landscape to his matter-of-fact grumbles about his stove, from accounts of the conditions of the camp to reflections on the cruelty of loneliness, this diary is unique - a visceral and immediate description of a place and time whose repercussions still affect the shape of modern Russia.

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After years of rapprochement, the relationship between Russia and the West is more strained now than it has been in the past 25 years. Putin’s motives, his reasons for seeking confrontation with the West, remain for many a mystery. Not for Mikhail Gorbachev. In this new work, Russia’s elder statesman draws on his wealth of knowledge and experience to reveal the development of Putin’s regime and the intentions behind it. He argues that Putin has significantly diminished the achievements of perestroika and is part of an over-centralized system that presents a precarious future for Russia. Faced with this, Gorbachev advocates a radical reform of politics and a new fostering of pluralism and social democracy.Gorbachev’s insightful analysis moves beyond internal politics to address wider problems in the region, including the Ukraine conflict, as well as the global challenges of poverty and climate change. Above all else, he insists that solutions are to be found by returning to the atmosphere of dialogue and cooperation which was so instrumental in ending the Cold War. This book represents the summation of Gorbachev’s thinking on the course that Russia has taken since 1991 and stands as a testament to one of the greatest and most influential statesmen of the twentieth century.

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Winner of a PEN Translates Award Named a Most Anticipated Book by Literary Hub When Anya is arrested at a Moscow anti-corruption rally under false pretences, she is given a 10-day sentence at a detention centre. Her cellmates are five other ordinary women arrested on petty charges. Ten listless days stretch before Anya and, as she appeals her sentence and recalls her progress from apolitical youth to informed citizen, she is troubled by strange, dreamlike visions, and wonders if her cellmates might somehow not be as ordinary as they seem. A brilliant exploration of what it means to be marginalized both as an independent woman and in an increasingly intolerant Russia in particular, The Incredible Events in Women's Cell Number Three introduces one of the most urgent and gripping new voices in international literature.

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Volume 23B includes two chapters covering problems and implementations of solutions in e-services adoption processes in developing nations. The first documents the unequal access and ICT usage, which is known as digital divide, to be one of the major obstacles to the implementation of e-government systems. This research investigates the digital divide and its direct impact on e-government system success of local governments in Indonesia as well as indirect impact through the mediation role of trust. To achieve a comprehensive understanding of digital divide, this study introduced a new type of digital divide, the innovativeness divide. It provides details for successful policy formulation to improve e-government readiness. The second explores what needs to be done to enable consumers to adopt e-services by airlines in developing nations. It includes new theory and empirical evidence from both qualitative and quantitative studies in response to this issue. Exciting and useful chapters for executives and researchers seeking knowledge and theory of how to influence e-service adoptions in developing nations!

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This volume serves to recognize the uniqueness of the moment; the number of new users of e-services worldwide will double during 2015-2018 (moving from 2 billion users mostly living in the developed nations to an additional 2 billion users mostly living in developing nations). This radical embrace of new e-service technologies will substantially improve the quality of lives for most residents globally. A profound happening occurring now! The new technologies combine rapidly delivering of a multitude of services at extremely low cost to adopters now having extremely low incomes relative to residents living in developed nations. Adoption of e-service among residents in developing nations ends the debate as to whether or not marketing to the "bottom of the pyramid" is possible. The more relevant issues focus on describing and explaining e-service adoption processes in developing nations. How are these processes being implemented? What obstacles had to be overcome in achieving these adoptions? How were these obstacles overcome? Read this volume for research providing useful answers to these questions.

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"Luxury Fashion and Culture" focuses on the study of how humans use high quality, highly pleasurable, and frequently rare products, services, and experiences to distinguish to themselves and others who they are as well as whom they are not - both within and across cultures. Luxury fashion enables the individual to transform herself - to play a part in scenes exuding refinement, acceptance, high status, and good taste and risk ridicule by playing the part badly. The chapters provide new theory, recipes of methods, and findings on how culture helps humans manage and respond to luxury fashion enactments. Rather than focusing on traditional cultural transformations, it focuses on personal expressions of self and archetypal role-playing and fulfilment through the power of luxury fashion. This volume: applies the perspectives of Veblen, Goffman, McCracken, Thompson, and Belk to provide a theoretical foundation to explain why and how humans buy and enact luxury fashion products, services, and experiences; includes confirmatory personal introspections of explanations of luxury fashion enactments with self-photographs and self-interpretations of the enactments to explain how individuals enact luxury fashion and respond to alternative fashion-marketing designs; and is unique in conjoining sociology, psychology, marketing, and economics to advance fashion marketing theory and research.

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Nearly all business-to-business firms interact and have contractual relationships with upstream, downstream and parallel operating enterprises. How firms design and implement these relationships effectively, overcome poorly performing network linkages, and manage change in interfirm networks are the major topics that Volume 17 covers. The three papers in Volume 17 report new theory and in-depth descriptions of interfirm network behavior. Each paper includes extensive reviews of the relevant literature on interfirm network behavior as well as data analysis using empirical positivistic and/or case study research methods. More than 150 figures and tables support the discussion of findings.

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This volume presents a collection of papers written by senior marketing scholars based on their presentations upon receiving the "Society for Marketing Advances Distinguished Marketing Scholar Award". Each paper reviews a stream of research in marketing and reflects the wisdom of authors highly cited in the literature - with citations of their work usually spanning several decades.

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Consumers' planned behaviour is often very different to what is actually carried out. Consumer plans can relate to four behaviours: planned and done (deliberate strategies), planned and not done (unrealized strategies), unplanned and done (emergent strategies) and unplanned and not done (unused strategies). This book examines alternative theories and the empirical testing of how planning relates to doing. It considers tourist spending, length of stay, attractions, destinations, accommodation and activities and looks at how marketing strategies affect consumer plans.

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When Vladimir Putin became President of Russia in 2000, his first priority was to reestablish the intelligence agencies' grip on the country by portraying himself as a strongman protecting Russian citizens from security threats. Despite condemnation by the United Nations, the European Parliament, and European Union, the policy of brutal "ethnic cleansing" in Chechnya continued. For Putin, Islamist attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, were a welcome opportunity to rebrand the war against Chechen independence, not as the crushing of a democracy, but as a contribution to President George W. Bush's "War on Terror." In the years that followed, Putin's regime covertly supported and manipulated extremist factions in Chechnya and stage-managed terrorist attacks on its own citizens to justify continuing aggression. US and European condemnation of Russian atrocities in Chechnya dwindled as Russia continued to portray Chechen independence as an international terrorist threat. Chechnya's Prime Minister-in-Exile Akhmed Zakaev, who had to escape Chechnya, faced Russian calls for his extradition from the United Kingdom, which instead granted him political asylum as Russia's increased its oppressive operations.

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After years of rapprochement, the relationship between Russia and the West is more strained now than it has been in the past 25 years. Putin’s motives, his reasons for seeking confrontation with the West, remain for many a mystery. Not for Mikhail Gorbachev. In this new work, Russia’s elder statesman draws on his wealth of knowledge and experience to reveal the development of Putin’s regime and the intentions behind it. He argues that Putin has significantly diminished the achievements of perestroika and is part of an over-centralized system that presents a precarious future for Russia. Faced with this, Gorbachev advocates a radical reform of politics and a new fostering of pluralism and social democracy.Gorbachev’s insightful analysis moves beyond internal politics to address wider problems in the region, including the Ukraine conflict, as well as the global challenges of poverty and climate change. Above all else, he insists that solutions are to be found by returning to the atmosphere of dialogue and cooperation which was so instrumental in ending the Cold War. This book represents the summation of Gorbachev’s thinking on the course that Russia has taken since 1991 and stands as a testament to one of the greatest and most influential statesmen of the twentieth century.

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The first English-language account of Ivan Morozov and his ambition to build one of the world’s greatest collections of modern art“A century of Russian culture distilled in the story of the life, family and collection of the lavish, lazy, kindly, eccentric grandson of a serf who brought Monet and Matisse to Moscow, waited three years for the right 'Blue Gauguin'—and survived the first years of Bolshevik rule.”—Jackie Wullschläger, Financial Times "Best Books of 2020: Visual Arts" A wealthy Moscow textile merchant, Morozov started buying art in a modest way in 1900 until, on a trip to Paris, he developed a taste for the avant-garde. Meticulous and highly discerning, he acquired works by the likes of Monet, Pissarro, and Cezanne. Unlike his friendly rival Sergei Shchukin, he collected Russian as well as European art. Altogether he spent 1.5 million francs on 486 paintings and 30 sculptures—more than any other collector of the age. Natalya Semenova traces Morozov’s life, family, and achievements and sheds light on the interconnected worlds of European and Russian art at the turn of the twentieth century. Morozov always intended to leave his art to the state—but with the Revolution in 1917 he found himself appointed “assistant curator” to his own collection. He fled Russia and his collection was later divided between Moscow and St. Petersburg, only to languish in storage for decades.Morozov: The Story of a Family and a Lost Collection was published to coincide with "The Morozov Collection" exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, May 2021.Exhibition Schedule:Paris Fondation Louis Vuitton May 12 - October 10, 2021

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Volume 22 includes two main chapters in both Part A and B. It appears in two parts because all chapters offer great depth in coverage of core issues senior executives must address for long-term survival of the firm: business intelligence, knowledge management, and understanding of the systems dynamics of interfirm behavior. In the first main chapter of Part A Azizah Ahmad demonstrates that high-performing firms must achieve useful on-going business intelligence (BI). Ahmad shows how plans are designed and implemented for viable BI operations. The main contribution of the study is the identification of the firm's internal resources of BI governance that influences successful BI deployment. In the second chapter Md Nuruzzaman shows how country risk, different political actions from the government, and bureaucratic behavior influence the activities in industry supply-chains in emerging markets. The outcomes of the study are useful for various stakeholders of the Bangladeshi RMG industry sector ranging from the government to various private organizations. The applications of this study are extendable through further adaptation in other industries and various geographic contexts.

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"Visionary Pricing" is dedicated to Dan Nimer, pioneer of pricing and price management. The volume features leading edge thinking from today's preeminent pricing thought leaders from North America, Europe, and Asia who originally came together 30 years ago to encourage the development of pricing. They now assess the present and future destiny of pricing, pricing innovation, and pricing paradigms that are influencing the evolution of pricing throughout the world. The volume contains four sections: section 1 interviews Nimer and presents his views on the emergence of value-based pricing as an influential pricing paradigm of the 21st century; section 2 focuses on pricing strategy and competitive advantage; section 3 focuses on the difining role of value in pricing; and section 4 focuses on pricing capability and innovation.

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The authors propose that complexity theory holds great promise in improving understanding of guests' evaluations of their service experiences. Volume 9 provides answers to the following and additional behavior and evaluation issues. How do general and behavior specific attitudes work together in explaining air travelers' carbon offsetting behavior? What can the zone of tolerance and importanceperformance analysis (IPA) techniques tell us about the evaluations of convention delegates' perceptions of products and services? How can a "slow city" motivate domestic tourists to visit the destination? Do effective marketing strategies for performing arts require unique designs to attract incidental spectators as well as behaviourally loyal visitors? When do consumers attach themselves strongly to tourist souvenirs as well as to other cherished possessions such as a trophy won during a contest, a gift received from significant others, or a wedding ring? What are the nitty gritty details in how exhibition areas can provide visitors with opportunities to understand corporate brands? Since values influence activities do they also influence holiday preferences?

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This portrait of contemporary tourists proposes that these travelers create consumption audio-portraits and self-explanations (identity constructions) through their purchases and use of travel-related services. Their configurations of destinations, accommodations, travel modes, in-route and destination activities, meal choices, sites/attractions visited, and their travel companions inform others and themselves about who they are. These understandings of self through travel are statements of being—where I’ve been and what I’ve done tells me and others who I am. Also, one’s definition of self (being) affects tourists’ future configurations of travel-related buying and consumption. Thus, tourism-related behavior and being represent virtuous and sometimes vicious consumption systems. Consequently, most tourists are identifiable by who they are and what they know about where they have been and what they have done via their summaries of their trips. The chapters in this volume provide tools and evidence useful for deep understanding of tourists’ buying, consumption, and being through examinations of consumers’ self-descriptions of personal markers of their trip configurations. This volume’s core tenet is that thick descriptions and case-based models are essential steps for highly useful research and deep understanding of tourism behavior.

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The first chapter in this book examines the relationships between absorptive capacity and effective knowledge management through the analysis of quantitative data drawn from managers and employees in residential aged care organizations in Western Australia. The author, Michael Preece, defines absorptive capacity as the ability of an organization to use prior knowledge to recognize the value of new knowledge from external sources, assimilate this new knowledge, and apply it to the benefit of the organization. He provides valuable training in how service organizations go about transforming new knowledge into effective actionable business plans. The second chapter by Mohammad Shamsuddoha provides an application of system dynamics modelling in firms in the poultry industry in Bangladesh. This chapter offers deep knowledge of the "fifth discipline" and beyond. Shamsuddoha uses Vensim, a simulation-based software package, to build a simulation model with appropriate equations, formulae, and connectivity to replicate the real-life operation and outcome in a simulation environment. He also provides the in-depth knowledge necessary to learn to truly understand the fifth discipline.

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The volume advances theory on hospitality meanings from both conscious and unconscious processing of stimuli (sights, actions, consequences). It explains how seemingly trivial experiences can have big repercussions in hospitality. Expanding on John Urry's grandmaster thesis, The Tourist Gaze, the volume proposes that assessments occur automatically with perceptions even when perceptions occur unconsciously. As well as a global review of the literature by Woodside and Metin, it includes highly-focused reports on the following topics: user-generated reviews in the hospitality industry; evaluation of the service performances; luxury tourists: celebrities' perspectives; nontrivial behavioral implications of trivial design choices in travel websites; the role of social psychology in the tourism experience model (TEM); destination brand performance measurement over time; perceptions of hotel disintermediation: the French generation Y case; constructing and shaping tourist experiences via travel blog engagement and more. The volume provides "reading assignments" for learning the nuances of perception and assessment processes by tourists.

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As one of the heroes of the 1917 February Revolution and then Prime Minister at the head of the Provisional Government, Alexander Kerensky was passionately, even fanatically, lauded as a leader during his brief political reign. Symbolic artefacts – sculptures, badges and medals - featuring his likeness abounded. Streets were renamed after him, his speeches were quoted on gravestones and literary odes dedicated to him proliferated in the major press. But, by October, Kerensky had been unceremoniously dethroned in the Bolshevik takeover and had fled to Paris and then to the US, where he would remain exiled and removed from his former glory until his death. The breakneck trajectory of his rise and fall and the intensity of his popularity were not merely a symptom of the chaos of those times but offer a window onto a much broader historical phenomenon which did not just begin with Lenin and Stalin – the cult of the leader. In this major new study of the Russian leadership cult, Boris Kolonitskii uses the figure of Kerensky to show how popular engagement with the idea of the leader became a key component of a cultural re-imagining of the political landscape after the fall of the monarchy. A parallel revolution was taking place on the level of creating a resonant political vocabulary where one had not existed before, and it was in the shared exercise of bestowing and dissolving authority that a politicised way of seeing began to emerge. Kolonitskii plots the unfurling of this symbolic revolution by examining the tapestry of images woven by Kerensky and those around him, and, in so doing, exposes his vital role in the development of nascent Soviet political culture. This highly original portrait of a revolutionary sheds new light on the cult of Kerensky that developed around this charismatic leader during the months following the overthrow of the tsar. It will be of value to students and scholars of Russian history and to those interested in political culture.

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Relationships of individual and groups among three-plus firms represent the cornerstone concept in business-to-business (B2B) contexts. The three-plus firms include manufacturer-supplier to manufacturer-customer to distributor-customer, and facilitators (e.g., transportation and management consulting firms). The common thread of the five papers in this volume is that making sense and achieving deep knowledge of three-plus B2B relationships are necessary antecedents for achieving high operating effectiveness, high (on-time) efficiency, and sustaining profits for each firm in these relationships. As the titles of the five papers imply, reading the volume provides deep insights into the specifics of how high performing three-plus B2B relationships influences these three major objectives of the firm: National Cultures? Impacts on Western Industrial Buyer-Seller Relational Process Models; Developing Guanxi Relations; Industrial Buyer-Seller Relations in a Chinese Context; Adaptation in Business Contexts; Working Triadic Relationships; How Do Managers See It? Capturing Practitioner Theories via Network Pictures.

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