In this book, the focus is on post-merger intercultural integration, effective communication between the relevant cultures and the different politeness strategies adopted by them. It is argued that cultural differences are a key issue in misunderstandings and miscommunication, which can affect a smooth post-merger integration, thereby focusing on differences between the Australians, US-Americans, Germans and the Swiss. The research contributes to bridge the gap between pragmatics, sociolinguistics and intercultural management studies. The empirical findings identify a company s social...

Dieser Sammelband spannt einen Bogen von den ordnungstheoretischen und sozialphilosophischen Grundlagen wissenschaftlicher Politikberatung bis zur Anwendung ausgewahlter Methoden. Die Autoren setzen sich mit unterschiedlichen Theorieangeboten fur Politikberatung, Anforderungen an Politikberatung und Formen von Politikberatung auseinander. Thematisch bildet die Leitidee der Sozialen Marktwirtschaft, raumlich deren Nutzung bei der Politikberatung in den Transformationslandern Sudosteuropas eine Klammer. Als Beispiele solcher Lander dienen Ungarn bereits ein EU-Mitglied und Albanien.
This...

This book deals with the liability conventions brought into existence by the International Maritime Organization and concentrates on the newly adopted instrument dealing with bunker oil pollution as an area of great concern for every stakeholder involved in shipping business. The work covers a wide spectrum ranging from the Convention itself to its scope of application, liable and aggrieved parties, jurisdiction, requirements of liability and admissibility of claims, defences and exoneration from liability. It addresses many areas of interest and of importance to international and national...

Cognitive capitalism is considered to be a new stage in the historical evolution of capitalism which is undergoing a metamorphosis affecting most of the laws and tendencies characteristic of industrial capitalism. This raises a series of issues tackled in the theoretical part, especially regarding the increased importance of cognitive work and the new composition of the labour market that influence the determinants of the value of goods, the structure of welfare, and the forms of income distribution. A historical analysis is applied to describe the evolution of cognitive capitalism and its...

The work of Niklas Luhmann is the most innovative and comprehensive attempt to describe modern society. His views, in turn, have triggered the most intensive criticism ever in social sciences. This book presents his extraordinarily complex theory in a step-by-step fashion and in a way understandable for those who are not familiar with his thought. It examines his views on politics, which, the author argues, is the best way to demonstrate the provocative character of his theory. The book not only facilitates the understanding of Luhmann s theory but is also useful for getting an insight into...

Directors Dealings and Insider Trading are well-known patrons to both, the academic literature and the financial press. While directors dealings have been regulated in the US and many other countries, the German legislator tightened only a few years ago trading rules for insiders and imposed in July 2002 a notification requirement for directors dealings. The author addresses directors dealings and insider trading in Germany from different perspectives. He starts out with a short-term analysis tying in with previous research on the German market and follows with an in-depth long-term analysis....

This book contributes to the debate of the complex relations between development and adult learning in Europe, both at a local and global level. This integrated analysis provides models for interpreting the reality of macro and micro-development, and also for clues on how to make populations life s better. The book will be useful to researchers in the field of adult education, as well as other social actors (NGOs, social economists, sociologists, and practitioners) concerned with the recent trends in human development and how adult education can help people to deal with it."

Chinese Medicine is an outstanding scientific proposition system with its own structural, methodological and theoretical prerequisites flowing into the specific practices that make Chinese Medicine popular in the Western world. However, we should be aware of the fact that Chinese Medicine is challenged in its existence because it is widely not understood. Fostering the understanding of Chinese Medicine in various aspects is, hence, the main aim of this book that delivers interesting insights into the discussions on current developments in Chinese Medicine research.

The two creation stories in Genesis 1-3 have been subject of intense study since the beginning of critical research on the Pentateuch in the eighteenth century. Even today, they continue to vex the biblical commentators. This work attempts to study one of these creation stories, namely the Eden Story narrated in Gen 2:4-3:24. This story graphically describes the first couple s installation in the Garden of Eden and their expulsion from it. These two themes have prompted some scholars to consider this story as a summary of Israel s history until the tragedy of exile and a prologue to the...

The manual construction of formal domain conceptualizations (ontologies) is labor-intensive. Ontology learning, by contrast, provides (semi-)automatic ontology generation from input data such as domain text. This thesis proposes a novel approach for learning labels of non-taxonomic ontology relations. It combines corpus-based techniques with reasoning on Semantic Web data. Corpus-based methods apply vector space similarity of verbs co-occurring with labeled and unlabeled relations to calculate relation label suggestions from a set of candidates. A meta ontology in combination with Semantic...