Consumers Index to Product Evaluations and Information Sources 2002, Volume 30

Book Description

The particular strength of this book is Geoff Whitty's grasp on and insights into the politics of education... he is able to bring to bear an authoritative perspective which is unrivaled in the United Kingdom. there is no other current book which compares in terms of the breadth and depth of this' - Professor Stephen Ball, Institute of Education, University of London

This book aims to make sense of the changes in education policy over the past decade, using the resources of the sociology and politics of education. The author shows that wider sociological perspectives can help us to appreciate both the limits and the possibilities of educational change.

Geoff Whitty illustrates this through studies of curriculum innovation, school choice, teacher professionalism and school improvement. He considers how far education policy can be used to foster social inclusion and social justice and the book concludes with an assessment of New Labour education policy in these terms. The book deals with education policy in England and Wales, as well as making comparisons with contemporary education policy in other countries.

This book is relevant to students of education at masters and doctoral levels, students of social policy, and policy-makers.

Customer Reviews:

A Practical Guide for developing SPC in Manufacturing Area.......1999-06-19

I bought this book for 2 years. I think this is one of my useful cookbooks helping on my daily job. If you work regarding to product processing; you need to buy it.

Transparency Masters to Accompany Spc Essentials and Productivity Improvement: A Manufacturing Approach

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Transparency Masters to Accompany Spc Essentials and Productivity Improvement: A Manufacturing Approach
William A. Levinson , and Frank Tumbelty
Manufacturer: ASQ Quality Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Study Guides | Reference | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0873893735

Book Description

There is no shortage of strategic reasons for taking partnering seriously in today's converging and colliding marketplace. However, there certainly is a lack of credible explanations as to why so many fail.

This book provides the ingredients for successful business partnerships. It identifies the value that effective partnerships can generate, the reasons why so many run into difficulties, and the imperatives for leaders who want to make partnering work in a globalized, digital world.

A powerful series of insights into one of the major issues of our time: how to create a partnership that generates innovation and other key advantages. Original, perceptive, wise and easy to read. -Dr Charles Hampden-Turner, Cambridge University, Judge Institute of Management Studies

Deering and Murphy have written with great clarity and insight on a difficult subject. Partnering will continue to grow in importance as firms shrink in size and look outside their boundaries for some of their critical resources. This book offers clear and practical guidelines for the manager who has to grapple with the multilevel and multicultural complexities of the partnering process. I highly recommend it. -Max Boisot, Snider Center for Entrepreneurial Research, Wharton Business School

Customer Reviews:

The Partnering Imperative makes sense of Business Developmen.......2003-09-20

As a line manager responsible for a small software company's business development activities, what I like the most about The Partnering Imperative is that it helps me decide with what potential partners I should be persistent, and where it is best to be responsive to offers but guarded with resources. Like any small company, we need to focus to be successful. The Partnering Imperative is helping me decide what large companies our small company should partner with and also helping us predict the success that our partnering efforts will have. For our small software company, our partnerships will make the difference between our being a success that people will read about or another software company that had a great product but just could not break the $50 million in sales mark.

For the large equipment vendors who have to partner to "avoid the negative" of not working with small nibble companies who can fill in gaps in functionality, there is tremendous value in this book as a guide for avoiding the pitfalls of partnership between large and small entities. These are the situations where the larger partner often tries to manage away the risks presented by the differences between it, the larger partner, and its chaotic but essential smaller partner. In these partnerships, the larger organization is busy managing formal communications processes and preparing to walk away at the slightest hint of failure. If big and small companies can be aware of these tendencies from the start, they are more likely to stick it out and reach partnering pay-off.

For smaller companies who need to partner to gain access to distribution channels and installed bases of customers, The Partnering Imperative provides a pragmatic guide to dancing with the "elephants" that small companies must work with. Smaller companies who expect their larger partners to revisit agendas to address emerging needs, will be be more successful if they are address "big partner" concerns like avoiding surprises and differences through formal communications process with lots of checks and balances.

Book Description

This six-volume "portrait of a Mediterranean personality" is a composite portrait of the individuals who wrote the personal letters, contracts, and all other manuscript fragments that found their way into the Cairo Geniza. Most of the fragments from the Geniza, a storeroom for discarded writings that could not be thrown away because they might contain the name of God, had been removed to Cambridge University Library and other libraries around the world. Professor Goitein devoted the last thirty years of his long and productive life to their study, deciphering the language of the documents and organizing what he called a "marvelous treasure trove of manuscripts" into a coherent, fascinating picture of the society that created them.
It is a rich, panoramic view of how people lived, traveled, worshiped, and conducted their economic and social affairs. The first and second volumes describe the economic foundations of the society and the institutions and social and political structures that characterized the community. The remaining material, intended for a single volume describing the particulars of the way people lived, blossomed into three volumes, devoted respectively to the family, daily life, and the individual. The divisions are arbitrary but helpful because of the wealth of information. The author refers throughout to other passages in his monumental work that amplify what is discussed in any particular section. The result is an incomparably clear and immediate impression of how it was in the Mediterranean world of the tenth through the thirteenth century.
Volume I, subtitled Economic Foundations, gives an overview of the Mediterranean (history, peoples, culture) during the high middle ages; discusses the working class; the business world, and government's role in commerce; and provides a complete description of travel and seafaring.

Customer Reviews:

classic of the field........2007-02-27

this is a 6-volume set. Goitein's text is entertaining, well-written and full of anecdotes. This is a classic in the field and a good read for non-specialists.

A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, Vol. I: Economic Foundations (Mediterranean Society)

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A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, Vol. I: Economic Foundations (Mediterranean Society)
S. D. Goitein
Manufacturer: University of California Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | World | History | Subjects | Books

General | Middle East | History | Subjects | Books

General | Judaism | Religion & Spirituality | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0520004841

Book Description

A Mediterranean Society : The Jewish Communities of the Arab Worlds as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza : Economic Foundations (Vol. 1) (Mediterranean Society Ser.)

Average customer rating:

A Mediterranean Society : The Jewish Communities of the Arab Worlds as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza : Economic Foundations (Vol. 1) (Mediterranean Society Ser.)
S.D. Goitein
Manufacturer: University of California Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000PRXZFU

A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, Vol. I: Economic Foundations

Average customer rating:

A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, Vol. I: Economic Foundations
S. D. Goitein
Manufacturer: University of California Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000L9DRVO

Average customer rating:
A history of gold and money, 1450-1920 (Foundations of history library)
Pierre Vilar
Manufacturer: Humanities Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

Public Finance | Economics | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0902308181

Book Description

Companies today have the capability to develop higher quality products and services faster than ever before. Advances in production quality, cycle time, supply chain arrangements, and customer information -- all radical improvements in "upstream" efforts to serve the customer -- have altered business competition. Concurrent Marketing is the first book to show why this competitive environment demands a new, more coordinated marketing effort "downstream" in which field sales and service take on increased strategic significance.

In such an environment, product management, sales, and service groups must interact more often, more quickly, and in greater depth across an increased number of products, markets, and accounts. Concurrent Marketing explains how companies can integrate the activities of these three groups and leverage functional expertise for competitive advantage. Grounded in the author's four-year study of firms in the computer, consumer goods, telecommunications, and medical products industries, this book shows how companies can realign their organizational structures, information systems, compensation policies, training programs, career paths, and account management practices to develop concurrent marketing capabilities.

Concurrent Marketing questions much current management thinking in identifying ways that competitive firms need to be organized to build these capabilities. Cespedes addresses the importance of specialist expertise in cross-functional activities; the role and limits of incentives in achieving flexible coordination; the relationship between individual and organizational learning in managing change; the sales force as the fulcrum of marketing efforts; and the consequences of reengineering and team work initiatives that ignore these critical issues.

Concurrent marketing presents a competitive opportunity and challenge, says Cespedes, because few firms are yet organized to respond to the new realities of the marketplace. The structures, systems, and processes required to integrate product, sales, and service groups are the building blocks of organizational excellence. They also represent a key to competitive advantage for those companies willing to take the lead.

Customer Reviews:

Practical and insightful guide to the marketing process.......1998-07-19

As a consultant in the area of strategic marketing, I regularly recommend this book to my clients. It is readable and unlike many business books, free of excessive jargon and simplified formulas for success (which rarely work).

Dr. Cespedes presents an analytic approach to considering the entirety of the customer experience with an organization's marketing efforts.

Book Description

This book offers a contemporary psychodynamic view of organizational life. Michael Diamond stresses the unconscious dimensions of hierarchic and other work relationships in organizations. From these relationships, he argues, come not only organizational cultures but also organizational identities. The book transcends the common technical rational approach to organizational behavior by isolating and then analyzing the nonrational side of organizational experience. Diamond illustrates how different characteristics of organizational life emerge from the dynamics of shared and projected emotions between leaders and followers, managers and subordinates, and among workers. The author suggests that these complementary unconscious feelings anchor the definition of organizational membership in interpersonal relationships at work. The result is, what he calls, the emotionally grounded structure of organizations--the organizational identity. What distinguishes this book from other psychodynamic approaches to organizations are the following: (1) an up-to-date synthesis of object relations, self psychology, and interpersonal psychoanalysis based primarily but not exclusively on the work of Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, Heinz Kohut and Harry Stack Sullivan; (2) a discussion of psychoanalytic organization theory and the application of psychodynamic concepts in organizational behavior; (3) a psychodynamic critique of organizational culture, the structure of values and rituals at work, and the introduction of the structure of organizational emotions, what the author calls organizational identity; (4) a psychoanalytic explanation and typology of regressive behavior in work groups; (5) a discussion and illustration of the role of language and communication in organizational consulting; and (6) a variety of case studies drawn from over ten years of organizational research and consulting. Finally, this book offers the organizational theorist and consultant a variety of psychodynamic tools to apply in understanding and positively changing organizations. This book will be of interest to organizational development consultants, human resource professionals, organizational theorists and researchers, organizational psychologists and psychodynamically oriented social and behavioral scientists, and psychologically informed managers and executives.

Customer Reviews:

Used it to publish an article........1997-11-30

With the help of Dr. Diamond's material a colleague and I published an article in Administration and Policy in Mental Health V.24, no.2, 1996 regarding the psychodynamics of organizations. We developed a social policy model explained by attribution theory that develops the differences among correctional, traditional medical, rehabilitation, and restitution models - also addresses organizational cultural clashes within mixed models. See how Dr. Diamond's work is valuable to understanding org. culture and its implications for real world managers and educators. It is practical, and investing in it yields results!

Book Description

A complete guide to piloting a software project to success-on time and within budget
This book provides novice software project managers, software developers, and anyone delivering reusable software with strategies for mastering the basics of directing a software project. Well-known management consultant Marsha Lewin uses a "been there, done that" approach designed to solve on-the-job problems quickly and efficiently.
Learn how to get a project in motion immediately in the first chapter's "quick start" tutorial. This comprehensive overview outlines the ins and outs of software project management, including the expectations for a project manager, defining the project, satisfying critical needs, and leading and monitoring your team. These aspects of managing small- to medium-sized project types are detailed in the same lively, colloquial style that demystifies the complexities of the discipline. The author equips you with the tools to concurrently satisfy the triple constraints of schedule, budget, and quality within the context of risk management, and highlights potential pitfalls and their solutions to assure repeated success.
To help you get under way and stay ahead, supplemental, ready-to-use forms, formats, and checklists are included, along with information on:
? Use of resources, including people and budget, the quality of software developed, and the costs and risks
? Political and technical issues affecting project success
? Risk management methodology
? Shaping yourself as a leader
? Software development methodologies, from traditional life cycle to prototyping, and how they relate to software project management
? Testing and its role in project management
Dozens of real-world examples and diagrams, together with a comprehensive bibliography and glossary, render Better Software Project Management a crucial resource for anyone responsible for keeping software projects within budget and on schedule.

Customer Reviews:

Keep This Book Handy.......2002-09-12

Whether you are an experienced project manager or just starting out, this book should be on your shelf. For the beginner, it covers all of the basics...and much more. For the experienced project manager, much of it will be familiar, but you will find many opportunities to improve your techniques.

Better Software Project Management goes beyond the oversimplified approaches that confuse project management tools with project management. Real project management means dealing with people as well as tasks, schedules and budgets. This book offers insights into them all.

Review of "Better Project Management".......2002-08-27

As an IT Project/Program Manager, senior IT executive and fellow-author for more years now than I care to remember, I found Marsha Lewin's new book, "Better Software Project Management", a pleasant and informative surprise. Ms. Lewin has distilled her obviously vast experience into a highly practical "how-to" book which will prove invaluable to Project Managers and all other managers with IT connections. Her advice and suggestions throughout this well-written book vibrate with hard-won experience and a strong aura of "been there, done that". Newly minted project managers will find a wealth of tips and templates to get them started and to provide project deliverables with the aplomb of seasoned veterans. Veterans will themselves find plenty to learn and re-learn from Ms. Lewin's hard-nosed, yet humorous approach. The author dispenses with the usual theoretical approaches to the subject but illustrates the best of the available theory with practical and thoughtful "cases".

If you have one project management book to read this year, read this one!

Review of "Better Project Management".......2002-08-27

If you have one project management book to read this year, read this one!

A professional's hearty endorsement.......2002-02-07

I have been engaged in the management of software projects for more than 30 years. This "primer" is, by far, the best and most concise book that I have ever read on the subject.

Of particular note, it is written by an experienced project manager to meet the needs of real life project managers. The author offers practical answers and presents usable examples that clearly show how her methods may be applied.

One of the hardest things for a new project manager to do is to sort out all of the acronyms, buzzwords, means and methods spoken of when describing the management of a project. The author cuts through the professional fog that obscures the subject and makes clear what is entailed in this art/science. Even after 30 years I found myself learning from her.

I strongly recommend this book.

A must for large project managers.......2001-12-05

This is a short and easy to read book that is packed with practical advise. Marsha gives detailed examples that can be adapted for other projects. She discusses the role of tools for project managers but also discusses the unquantified problems that cause projects to fail such as personnel turnover, changes in scope, and defining the end of a project. She has obviously managed some large projects and is speaking from experience. I must contrast this with "Extreme Programming Explained" which might work for very small projects but which does not work for a large project.

Better Software Project Management A Primer for Success

Average customer rating:

Better Software Project Management A Primer for Success
Marsha D. Lewin
Manufacturer: NY
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000N7ENNK

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