Stranger Cities: Australian Creation and the Ambidextrous Mind, a Profile of Portal Modernity


Book Description

Stranger Cities explores the metaphysics of Australian society and the clash between its competing strands of romantic culture and classic civilization. The social expression, artistic resonance, economic significance, civic character, historic phases, mythic representations, creative antinomies, and imaginative contribution of these metaphysical fundamentals form the background of Australia’s distinctive urban civilization with its bustling stranger populations, ocean-facing portal cities, revealing art and architecture, and cyclical worlds of markets and industries, war and peace. Murphy portrays a classic eudemonic society whose dominant ethos of phlegmatic happiness vies with a subsidiary current of melancholic and choleric romanticism.




Stranger Cities


Book Description

Stranger Cities explores the nature of Australia's distinctive urban civilization with its portal ontology, axial metaphysics, ambidextrous style of thinking, architectonic spirit, and happy phlegmatic outlook. This classic ethos is offset by various choleric and melancholic strands of Australian romanticism.




Knowledge, Art, and Power


Book Description

In Knowledge, Art, and Power: An Outline of a Theory of Experience John Ryder presents an original theory of experience rooted in the American pragmatic naturalist philosophical tradition. The operative assumption of the book is that a clearer understanding of experience provides a richer conception of human being. Beginning with the Deweyan idea of experience as the mutually constitutive engagement of an individual with her environing conditions, the theory posits that there are three general dimensions that condition all of our experience - cognitive (knowledge), aesthetic (art), and political (power). All other constituents and forms of experience, such as language, emotions, ethics, religion, and others, are conditioned by these three general threads that define the fabric of experience and of human life.




Assembling the Tropics


Book Description

This book charts the convergence of science, culture, and politics across Portugal's empire, showing how a global geographical concept was born. In accessible, narrative prose, this book explores the unexpected forms that science took in the early modern world. It highlights little-known linkages between Asia and the Atlantic world.




The New Handbook of Political Sociology


Book Description

Political sociology is a large and expanding field with many new developments, and The New Handbook of Political Sociology supplies the knowledge necessary to keep up with this exciting field. Written by a distinguished group of leading scholars in sociology, this volume provides a survey of this vibrant and growing field in the new millennium. The Handbook presents the field in six parts: theories of political sociology, the information and knowledge explosion, the state and political parties, civil society and citizenship, the varieties of state policies, and globalization and how it affects politics. Covering all subareas of the field with both theoretical orientations and empirical studies, it directly connects scholars with current research in the field. A total reconceptualization of the first edition, the new handbook features nine additional chapters and highlights the impact of the media and big data.




The Collective Imagination


Book Description

The Collective Imagination explores the social foundations of the human imagination. In a lucid and wide-ranging discussion, Peter Murphy looks at the collective expression of the imagination in our economies, universities, cities, and political systems, providing a tour-de-force account of the power of the imagination to unite opposites and find similarities among things that we ordinarily think of as different. It is not only individuals who possess the power to imagine; societies do as well. A compelling journey through various peak moments of creation, this book examines the cities and nations, institutions and individuals who ply the paraphernalia of paradoxes and dialogues, wry dramaturgy and witty expression that set the act of creation in motion. Whilst exploring the manner in which, through the media of pattern, figure, and shape, and the miracles of metaphor, things come into being, Murphy recognises that creative periods never last: creative forms invariably tire; inventive centres inevitably fade. The Collective Imagination explores the contemporary dilemmas and historic pathos caused by this-as cities and societies, periods and generations slip behind in the race for economic and social discovery. Left bewildered and bothered, and struggling to catch up, they substitute empty bombast, faded glory, chronic dullness or stolid glumness for initiative, irony, and inventiveness. A comprehensive audit of the creativity claims of the post-modern age - that finds them badly wanting and looks to the future - The Collective Imagination will appeal to sociologists and philosophers concerned with cultural theory, cultural and media studies and aesthetics.




The Purple Cloud


Book Description

"If now a swell from the Deep has swept over this planetary ship of earth, and I, who alone chanced to find myself in the furthest stern, as the sole survivor of her crew . . . What then, my God, shall I do?" The Purple Cloud is widely hailed as a masterpiece of science fiction and one of the best "last man" novels ever written. A deadly purple vapor passes over the world and annihilates all living creatures except one man, Adam Jeffson. He embarks on an epic journey across a silent and devastated planet, an apocalyptic Robinson Crusoe putting together the semblance of a normal life from the flotsam and jetsam of his former existence. As he descends into madness over the years, he becomes increasingly aware that his survival was no accident and that his destiny?and the fate of the human race?are part of a profound, cosmological plan.




Employee Engagement in Corporate Social Responsibility


Book Description

This book offers a remarkable collection of chapters, written by the leading scholars in CSR and employee engagement. Using the existing literature, new empirical studies, case studies and thought-provoking insights, this collection of authors discuss why and how to engage employees in CSR and through CSR. Employee engagement in Corporate Social Responsibility focuses on engaging employees in socially responsible initiatives with three major parts of the book: the antecedents that lead to employee engagement in CSR; the processes and opportunities to involve employees; and the impact of the above on employees, the company, non-profit organisations and society. This book contributes to both research and managerial practice by presenting cutting edge knowledge from leading CSR scholars and practitioners.




Creativity and the Global Knowledge Economy


Book Description

This is a major work by three international scholars at the cutting edge of new research that investigates the emerging set of complex relationships between creativity, design, research, higher education and knowledge capitalism. It highlights the role of the creative and expressive arts, of performance, of aesthetics in general, and the significant role of design as an underlying infrastructure for the creative economy. This book tracks the most recent mutation of these serial shifts - from postindustrial economy to the information economy to the digital economy to the knowledge economy to the 'creative economy' - to summarize the underlying and essential trends in knowledge capitalism and to investigate post-market notions of open source public space. The book hypothesizes that creative economy might constitute an enlargement of its predecessors that not only democratizes creativity and relativizes intellectual property law, but also emphasizes the social conditions of creative work. It documents how these profound shifts have brought to the forefront forms of knowledge production based on the commons and driven by ideas, not profitability per se; and have given rise to the notion of not just 'knowledge management' but the design of 'creative institutions' embodying new patterns of work.




New Philosophies of Labour


Book Description

This volume addresses the long-standing neglect of the category of labour in critical social theory and it presents a powerful case for a new paradigm based on the anthropological significance of work and its role in shaping social bonds.