Cioran – A Dionysiac with the voluptuousness of doubt

Ion Dur, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania; Baia Mare Northern University Centre, Romania

December 2018 / ISBN: 978-1-62273-460-3
Availability: In stock
182pp. ¦ $58 £45 €50

Since its inception philosophical thought has been fixated by death. Death, as much as life, has been the unrelenting driving force behind some of history’s greatest thinkers. Yet, for Emil Cioran, a Romanian-French philosopher, even philosophy cannot attempt to understand nor contain the inevitable unknown. Considered to be an anti-philosopher, Cioran approached and reflected on the human experience with a despairing pessimism. His works are characterised by a brooding, fatalistic temperament that reveals and defines itself in his irony, black humour and inimitable style. Although Cioran’s later works have received much scholarly recognition, little attention has been paid to the texts he wrote in his adolescent. Grounded in the historical context of interwar Romania, this book presents for the first time an analysis of the little-known works of this pioneering Romanian thinker. Deeply affected by his upbringing, this book offers a glimpse into Cioran’s first attempts to delve into philosophical enterprise, before turning its attention to his later works, On the Heights of Despair (1934), The Transfiguration of Romania (1936) and Twilight of thoughts (1940; written in France). Using both the French and Romanian editions of these works, but also their original manuscripts, this volume seeks to provide a re-reading that takes language rather than a social or political critique as its focal point. As an important and provocative contribution to the existing literature on Cioran, this book will be an essential point of reference for students and researchers, alike.

Law and Economics: Market, Non-market and Network Transactions

Edited by Panta Murali Prasad, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India and Ranita Nagar, Gujarat National Law University, Gandhinagar , India

November 2018 / ISBN: 978-1-62273-452-8
Availability: In stock
232pp. ¦ $57 £47 €50

It is well known that sustainable development practices, technological innovation and good governance play a major role in the accumulation of wealth in a knowledge economy. Hence, the state promotes competition, provides incentives to conserve resources and creates opportunities for citizens to push for innovation and invention. As a result, the formulation of efficient legal rules is essential for protecting intellectual property rights, fully specified contracts and effective ex-ante and ex-post systems. However, can efficient legal rules improve societal well-being by changing the behaviour of individuals and basic social structures and trends? And if so, how can these legal rules be formulated? In their Second International Conference on Law and Economics, the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur aimed to address the formulation and implementation of efficient legal rules while at the same time working towards a greater dissemination of law and economics-based research. This book is the final outcome of this conference that saw over thirty presentations take place. The twelve carefully selected contributions to this volume cover a broad range of topics within law and economics from engaging with decisions makers to create a process for the routine collection of empirical evidence to perceived gender discrimination and stress among working professionals. This book is not only an important contribution to law and economics scholarship but will also be of great interest to both universities and research institutions working within the field.

Spoilt for Choice: How senior managers select professional advisors

Wienke Seeger

January 2019 / ISBN: 978-1-62273-547-1
Availability: Discontinued
300pp. [Color] ¦ $95 £71 €81

How do senior executives, such as CEOs and CFOs, interact, select and appoint professional advisors? Based on a successful PhD project, the research in this book explores the interactions between advisors of large professional service firms and senior executive clients on an evidence-based academic level. The research journey and the author’s reflections are charted step-by-step, providing an example of how to analyse unstructured qualitative data, reach theoretical saturation and capture emerging substantive theories. Moreover, by taking a unique holistic and inductive approach, this study offers a series of practical insights on how to combine and apply Kathy Charmaz’ constructivist grounded theory with an auto-ethnographic stance. Divided into eight chapters, the author uses empirical data and rigorous analysis to uncover two distinct decision-making processes, namely (a) the client’s decision to develop and maintain a relationship with the advisor and (b) to select and appoint the advisor for a particular project or services. Mapping these to one common conceptual framework a second complementary model emerges - a type of decision-making matrix with the foci ’competitiveness, skills and merit’, ‘continuity and embeddedness’, ‘control and manage’ and ‘trust and empathy’ - which offers the reader an alternative perspective of client decision-making. This book will be useful for practitioners and researchers alike who have an interest in understanding either naturalistic decision-making processes, the complexities of relationship development and procurement dynamics, as well as applied qualitative research methods.

Spoilt for Choice: How senior managers select professional advisors

Wienke Seeger

January 2019 / ISBN: 978-1-62273-526-6
Availability: Discontinued
300pp. ¦ $63 £48 €54

How do senior executives, such as CEOs and CFOs, interact, select and appoint professional advisors? Based on a successful PhD project, the research in this book explores the interactions between advisors of large professional service firms and senior executive clients on an evidence-based academic level. The research journey and the author’s reflections are charted step-by-step, providing an example of how to analyse unstructured qualitative data, reach theoretical saturation and capture emerging substantive theories. Moreover, by taking a unique holistic and inductive approach, this study offers a series of practical insights on how to combine and apply Kathy Charmaz’ constructivist grounded theory with an auto-ethnographic stance. Divided into eight chapters, the author uses empirical data and rigorous analysis to uncover two distinct decision-making processes, namely (a) the client’s decision to develop and maintain a relationship with the advisor and (b) to select and appoint the advisor for a particular project or services. Mapping these to one common conceptual framework a second complementary model emerges - a type of decision-making matrix with the foci ’competitiveness, skills and merit’, ‘continuity and embeddedness’, ‘control and manage’ and ‘trust and empathy’ - which offers the reader an alternative perspective of client decision-making. This book will be useful for practitioners and researchers alike who have an interest in understanding either naturalistic decision-making processes, the complexities of relationship development and procurement dynamics, as well as applied qualitative research methods.

Perplexing Patriarchies: Fatherhood Among Black Opponents and White Defenders of Slavery

Pierre Islam, Yale University

September 2018 / ISBN: 978-1-62273-462-7
Availability: In stock
190pp. ¦ $60 £45 €51

Perplexing Patriarchies examines the rhetorical usage (and lived experience) of fatherhood among three African American abolitionists and three of their white proslavery opponents in the United States during the nineteenth century. Both the prominent abolitionists (Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, and Henry Garnet), as well as the prominent proslavery advocates (Henry Hammond, George Fitzhugh, and Richard Dabney), appealed to the popular image of the father, husband, and head of household in order to attack or justify slavery. How and why could these opposing individuals rely on appeals to the same ideal of fatherhood to come to completely different and opposing conclusions? This book strives to find the answer by first acknowledging that both the abolitionists and the proslavery men shared similar concerns about the contested status of fatherhood in the nineteenth century. However, due to subtle differences in their starting assumptions, and different choices of what parts of a father’s responsibilities to emphasize, the black abolitionists conceived of an ideal father who protected the autonomy of his dependents, while the proslavery men conceived of one whose authority necessitated the subordination of those he protected. Finding that these differences arose from choices in starting assumptions and emphases rather than total disagreement on what the role of the father should be, this work reveals that black abolitionists were not radically critiquing the gender conventions of their day, but innovatively working within those conventions to turn them towards social reform. This discovery opens up a new way for historians to consider how oppressed peoples negotiated the intellectual boundaries of the societies which oppressed them: Not necessarily breaking entirely from those boundaries, nor passively accepting them, but ingeniously synthesizing a worldview from within their confines that still allowed for freedom and personal autonomy.