Technology Diffusion and Adoption Global Complexity Global Innovation

Technology Diffusion and Adoption: Global Complexity, Global Innovation discusses the emerging topics of information technology and the IT based solutions in global and multi-cultural environments. This comprehensive collection addresses the aspects of innovation diffusion in the field of business computing technologies and is essential for researchers, practitioners, academicians and educators all over the world.

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From global complexity to local reality Aligning implementation pathways for the Sustainable Development Goals and landscape approaches

The Global Landscapes Forums held in Warsaw (November 2013) and Lima (December 2014), coupled with the CGIAR Development Dialogues (New York, September 2014), have helped position ‘landscape approaches’ at the center of sustainable development initiatives and global discourse. The Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and its many partners continue to devise ways to best introduce a holistic and integrated ‘landscapes’ approach to balance trade-offs between conservation and development, including agriculture, with the aim of influencing both policy and practice.

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Managing Complexity in Global Organizations

This book delivers new IMD insights on an emerging challenge - how to deal with overwhelming complexity. Global organizations face a complex decision-making environment. On one side, diversity of cultures, customers, competitors and regulations creates complexity; on the other, competitive pressures cause expanding countries to extract more synergies across products and regions. In such a climate, a new way of thinking, acting and organizing is needed beyond the familiar ‘control’ mindset. Drawing together insights from across the expert faculty, Managing Complexity in the Global Organization presents IMD’s framework on how to understand complexity and its four key drivers (diversity; interdependence; ambiguity and flux), along with solutions on specific issues in a variety of functions, industries and markets. The focus is on providing practical solutions based on real-life examples.

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Global Complexity

Global Complexity is a path-breaking book, which examines how the ideas of chaos and complexity can help us to analyse global processes. Urry argues that there are major advantages in thinking about global processes in this way. The idea of complexity emphasizes that systems are balanced between order and chaos, that a system does not necessarily move towards equilibrium and that events are both unpredictable and irreversible in their effects. Hence specific events can have unexpected effects, often distant in time and space from where they occurred. This book combines new theory with many illustrations of how global processes operate. Urry distinguishes between 'global networks' and 'global fluids', and shows how forms of global emergence develop from the complex relationships between these networks and fluids. He draws out the implications of global complexity for our understanding of social order and argues that complexity requires us to reformulate the main categories of sociology and to reject any globalization thesis that is over-unified, dominant and unambiguous in its effects. Global systems are always 'on the edge of chaos'. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of sociology, politics, geography and economics and to and to all those concerned with rethinking the nature of globalization.

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Language Complexity

Language complexity has recently attracted considerable attention from linguists of many different persuasions. This volume – a thematic selection of papers from the conference Approaches to Complexity in Language, held in Helsinki, August 2005 – is the first collection of articles devoted to the topic. The sixteen chapters of the volume approach the notion of language complexity from a variety of perspectives. The papers are divided into three thematic sections that reflect the central themes of the book: Typology and theory, Contact and change, Creoles and pidgins. The book is mainly intended for typologists, historical linguists, contact linguists and creolists, as well as all linguists interested in language complexity in general. As the first collective volume on a very topical theme, the book is expected to be of lasting interest to the linguistic community.

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Worlds Apart

Through detailed ethnographic examples, in regions such as West Africa, Hawaii, Australia, Belize and Egypt, they show precisely how global institutions, including capitalism and mass consumption, are manifested in local contexts. Their work exemplifies the role of anthropologists in this area and provides a model for future anthropological research. It also shows that an ethnographic approach will be invaluable to emerging discipline, such as cultural studies and media studies.

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Knowledge Management Organizational Intelligence And Learning And Complexity Volume II

Knowledge Management, Organizational Intelligence and Learning, and Complexity is the component of Encyclopedia of Technology, Information, and Systems Management Resources in the global Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), which is an integrated compendium of twenty one Encyclopedias. The Theme on Knowledge Management, Organizational Intelligence and Learning, and Complexity in the Encyclopedia of Technology, Information, and Systems Management Resources provides the latest scientific insights into the evolution of complexity in both the natural and social realms. Emerging perspectives from the fields of knowledge management, computer-based simulation and the organizational sciences are presented as tools for understanding and supporting this evolving complexity and the earth's life support systems. These three volumes are aimed at the following a wide spectrum of audiences from the merely curious to those seeking in-depth knowledge: University and College students Educators, Professional practitioners, Research personnel and Policy analysts, managers, and decision makers and NGOs.

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Qualitative Complexity

Offering a critique of the humanist paradigm in contemporary social theory, Qualitative Complexity is the first comprehensive sociological analysis of complexity theory. Drawing from sources in sociology, philosophy, complexity theory, 'fuzzy logic', systems theory, cognitive science and evolutionary biology, John Smith and Chris Jenks present a new series of interdisciplinary perspectives on the sociology of complex, self-organizing structures.

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Universal Concept of Complexity by the Dynamic Redundance Paradigm

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The Global Governance of Food

Food provides a particularly exciting and grounded research site for understanding the mechanisms governing global transactions in the 21st century. While food is intimately and fundamentally related to ecological and human well-being, food products now travel far flung trade routes to reach us. International trade in food has tripled in value and quadrupled in volume since 1960 and tracing the production, movement, transformation, and consumption of food necessitates research that situates localities within global networks and facilitates our capacity to "see the trees and the forest" by zooming from the global to the local and back to the global. Our need for food is a constant; how we acquire food is a variable; and the production, commercialization, and consumption of food therefore offer an invaluable window onto the globalization of the world we inhabit. Food provides an ideal site for answering the fundamental questions of governance of central concern to globalization debates. This book presents recent and interdisciplinary scholarship about the variety of mechanisms governing global food systems and their impacts on human and environmental well-being This book was previously published as a special issue of Globalizations

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Global Change and Terrestrial Ecosystems

Describes current state-of-the-science for predicting the effects of global change on ecosystems.

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Managing Institutional Complexity

Experts investigate how states and other actors can improve inter-institutional synergy and examine the complexity of overlapping environmental governance structures. Institutional interaction and complexity are crucial to environmental governance and are quickly becoming dominant themes in the international relations and environmental politics literatures. This book examines international institutional interplay and its consequences, focusing on two important issues: how states and other actors can manage institutional interaction to improve synergy and avoid disruption; and what forces drive the emergence and evolution of institutional complexes, sets of institutions that cogovern particular issue areas. The book, a product of the Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change research project (IDGEC), offers both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Chapters range from analytical overviews to case studies of institutional interaction, interplay management, and regime complexes in areas including climate change, fisheries management, and conservation of biodiversity. Contributors discuss such issues as the complicated management of fragmented multilateral institutions addressing climate change; the possible “chilling effect” on environmental standards from existing commitments; governance niches in Arctic resource protection; the relationships among treaties on conservation and use of plant genetic resources; causal factors in cross-case variation of regime prevalence; and the difficult relationship between the World Trade Organization and multilateral environmental agreements. The book offers a broad overview of research on interplay management and institutional complexes that provides important insights across the field of global environmental governance.

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Developments in Global Optimization

In recent years global optimization has found applications in many interesting areas of science and technology including molecular biology, chemical equilibrium problems, medical imaging and networks. The collection of papers in this book indicates the diverse applicability of global optimization. Furthermore, various algorithmic, theoretical developments and computational studies are presented. Audience: All researchers and students working in mathematical programming.

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Sociology and Complexity Science

By now, most academics have heard something about the new science of complexity. In a manner reminiscent of Einstein and the last hundred years of physics, complexity science has captured the public imagination. ® One can go to Amazon. com and purchase books on complexification (Casti 1994), emergence (Holland 1998), small worlds (Barabási 2003), the web of life (Capra 1996), fuzzy thinking (Kosko 1993), global c- plexity (Urry 2003) and the business of long-tails (Anderson 2006). Even television has incorporated the topics of complexity science. Crime shows ® ® such as 24 or CSI typically feature investigators using the latest advances in computational modeling to “simulate scenarios” or “data mine” all p- sible suspects—all of which is done before the crime takes place. The ® World Wide Web is another example. A simple search on Google. Com using the phrase “complexity science” gets close to a million hits! C- plexity science is ubiquitous. What most scholars do not realize, however, is the remarkable role sociologists are playing in this new science. C- sider the following examples. 0. 1 Sociologists in Complexity Science The first example comes from the new science of networks (Barabási 2003). By now, most readers are familiar with the phenomena known as six-degrees of separation—the idea that, because most large networks are comprised of a significant number of non-random weak-ties, the nodes (e. g. , people, companies, etc.

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Thinking in Complexity

This new edition also treats smart materials and artificial life. A new chapter on information and computational dynamics takes up many recent discussions in the community.

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Managerial Effectiveness in a Global Context

The rapid expansion of globalization and multinational corporations means more and more managers work across the borders of multiple countries. Some of them are expatriates; most are not. And although many of these managers are not wrestling with the issues of relocating and adjusting to living in a different culture, they all find themselves dealing with cultural issues - defined in the broadest context - every time they pick up the phone, log onto their e-mail, or disembark from an airplane. What do these managers do? Is it different from the work they did when they managed in their own countries, and if it is different, how so? What does it take for them to be effective when they manage across so many countries simultaneously? What do these managers need to know in order to be effective? What do organizations need to know and do in order to select and develop people who will manage and lead effectively in the global economy? This report addresses those questions as it documents the findings of a Center for Creative Leadership research study into what factors might predict managerial effectiveness in a global context.

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Global Complexity Information Chaos and Control

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Natural Resource Use and Global Change

Building on recent developments in social ecology, this book advances a new critical theory of society and nature, exploring social metabolism and global resource flows in contemporary society. Barriers to global sustainability are identified and conditions for transforming industrial economies towards new sustainable resource use are described.

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Seeking Sustainability in an Age of Complexity

Harris weaves together a unique story of the complexity of global and regional sustainability.

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Logistics The Backbone for Managing Complex Organizations

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