Understanding Global Cultures: Metaphorical Journeys Through 28 Nations, Clusters of Nations, and Continents

Book Description

Click 'Additional Materials' for downloadable sample chapters

“In summary, this is a significant book . . . for a multitude of audiences, including scholars, practitioners, students, expatriates, travelers, and those who are simply interested in culture. . . . This book is also an ideal reference tool, since the metaphors are easy to remember yet rich in contextual value, and are presented in a logical structure for quick consultation. Overall, this book is enormously appealing, genuinely useful, and a worthy addition to any collection.”

—THUNDERBIRD INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS REVIEW, 2002

In Understanding Global Cultures, Third Edition, the author presents the cultural metaphor as a method for understanding the cultural mindsets of a nation, a cluster of nations, and even a continent. This title emphasizes that metaphors are guidelines that helps such outsiders to quickly understand what members of a culture consider important.

New Features of the Third Edition:

Develops a cultural metaphor for the base culture of China (the Great Wall), showing how it influenced both a unifying cultural metaphor among the large Chinese Expatriate communities living in various nations (the Chinese family altar) and the cultural metaphor for Singapore (the Hawker Centers).
Provides a description of cultural metaphors for two continents, Africa and Australia
Groups cultural metaphors by book parts into overriding themes or general types of cultures such as Authority Ranking, Equality matching, Market Pricing, Cleft, and Torn.

Instructor’s Resources on the Web:

There is now a Web site where instructors can obtain over 100 concepts, applications, and exercises to enrich the learning experiences associated with the Third Edition. Visit the authors website at www.csusm.edu/mgannon, or click here.

Customer Reviews:

A practical approach to other cultures.......2007-05-15

This book uses metaphors as tools to engage with other cultures. And very useful tools they are, indeed. I have been using this book with students for several years now, and the biggest initial obstacle is that people mistake the metaphors for stereotypes. Once this obstacle is overcome, a very creative and productive examination of the reality of another culture can occur.

Antropology is a must.......2006-01-30

Very exciting journey using the strenght of metaphores. Just be careful that metaphores are a representation of reality, not exactly that!

The Offshore Nation: Strategies for Success in Global Outsourcing and Offshoring

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Highly informative and readable
Highly recommended
Make Sure You're Looking for Info on OFFSHORING - not OUTSOURCING
A must read even if you don't outsource or are not in the business of outsourcing
A Must Read for Managing Today And Leading Into The Future

The Offshore Nation: Strategies for Success in Global Outsourcing and Offshoring
Atul Vashistha , and Avinash Vashistha
Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0071468129

Book Description

Widely practiced by many Fortune 500 companies, global outsourcing has become one of the key strategic imperatives for successful enterprises. Often referred to as offshore outsourcing, services globalization is the next step in the evolution of global trade and capitalism. Top organizations are performing, buying, selling, and transforming services at an incredibly quick pace.

Written by outsourcing and global services experts Atul and Avinash Vashistha, The Offshore Nation presents a comprehensive, balanced view of the rapid growth of outsourcing and its expanding role in corporate strategy, providing a roadmap for business leaders and upper-level managers to plan their own strategies. Drawing upon their vast experience as consultants to Fortune 1000, multinational corporations, the authors help you determine what role offshore services should play in your company, how to integrate the strategy into your overall corporate identity, and successfully manage the initiative on an enterprise-wide level.

This practical, strategy-packed guide outlines the "big picture" of outsourcing, breaking down its different components and examining its impact on world and local economies and employment shifts. Covering outsourcing in many different countries and a variety of services--from IT, telecom, and customer service to accounting--the authors reveal best practices and step-by-step, proven methods for:

Building a sound globalization strategy
Identifying the processes that are mature enough to send offshore
Choosing the right business model for globalizing IT, back office, and other services
Attracting and retaining customers
Effectively managing your suppliers

Chock-full of valuable insights and tactical advice, The Offshore Nation is the authoritative primer for global outsourcing, helping companies to minimize the risks and maximize their return on investment.

Customer Reviews:

Highly informative and readable.......2006-07-11

This book provides a great framework for analyzing and determining the why, what, how and where of offshoring. If your organization is considering a shift towards offshoring, then you should find this book very useful in helping you think through the business case. The book does not drown you in details, but still provides a comprehensive overview of the offshoring industry.

Highly recommended.......2006-05-18

"The Offshore Nation - The Rise of Services Globalization" is an excellent guide for companies putting together their offshore strategy, as well as for companies that have already done it but want better results. It beautifully captures the global trends and gives practical yet comprehensive guidelines on how to do offshoring right - things that come out straight from the authors' rich experience in the area. Highly recommended.

Make Sure You're Looking for Info on OFFSHORING - not OUTSOURCING.......2006-05-15

Offshoring and Outsourcing just got jumbled again in the American vocabulary. The Offshore Nation is written by experts on the Indian BPO marketplace. If thats what you're trying to understand, this book is very helpful. If your goal is limited to large corporation, call center projects or transaction processing, this book is very helpful.
For all other areas of Outsourcing, I highly recommend you read any one of the other books who don't confuse offshoring and outsourcing better than Lou Dobbs.

A must read even if you don't outsource or are not in the business of outsourcing.......2006-05-12

Atul's book `The Offshore Nation' offers a very insightful ring-side view of the macro-economic trend towards globalization of services and how organizations and business leaders can effectively leverage this in a global economy for competitive advantage. Atul through his organization, NeoIT, has played a lead role in shaping the sourcing strategies of global organizations and the book is both thought provoking as well as prescriptive. It is a must read even if you don't outsource or are not in the business of outsourcing, for sooner or later, you will be a part of this global economy where work moves to where it gets done best."

A Must Read for Managing Today And Leading Into The Future.......2006-05-08

Speaking as the CEO of Sourcing Interests Group, a major ongoing outsourcing forum, The Offshore Nation hits a homerun in providing practical, immediately useful insight into the many facets and considerations of offshore outsourcing. Clearly this is one of the most important books on outsourcing that has ever been written. I highly recommend it.

History: Fiction or Science? Chronology 2 (Chronology)

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Had History really been tampered with? Summing it up!
Check and see
Suprise! Suprise!
Prescient St Augustine?
Something of a disappointment

History: Fiction or Science? Chronology 2 (Chronology)
Anatoly T Fomenko
Manufacturer: Delamere Resources LLC
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ASIN: 2913621066

Product Description

`History: Fiction or Science? Chronology 2` is the second volume of the most explosive and astounding tractate on history ever written - however, every theory it contains, no matter how unorthodox, is backed by rock solid scientific data. The book is easy and pleasant to read; it is well-illustrated, contains hundreds of charts, graphs and illustrations, copies of ancient manuscripts, and countless facts attesting to the falsity of the chronology used nowadays. You will be amazed to discover: - That the chronology universally accepted today and taken for granted is simply wrong; - That ALL methods of dating of ancient sources and artefacts known today are erroneous or non-exact; - That there is not a single document that could be reliably dated earlier than the XIth century; The Author refers to the Middle Ages as the Antiquity and proves mutual superimposition of the Second and the Third Roman Empire, both of which become identified as the respective kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Furthermore, he asserts that the famous reform of the Occidental Church in the XI century by Pope Gregory Hildebrand was the reflection of the XII century reforms of Byzantine emperor Andronicus who in his turn identifies with Jesus Christ. The Trojan war counted by Homer happened only as late as of the XIII century A.D. and the great poet actually lived in XIV century A.D. No stone in history of Antiquity is left unturned. Literally. This book is the beginning of a major correction to the chronology we live with.

Customer Reviews:

Had History really been tampered with? Summing it up! .......2007-10-23

Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R3A80YKC8W7UEE New Chronology is a theory validated by astronomical research and statistical analysis of ancient manuscripts that asserts: that Antiquity and Dark Ages are phantoms invented in the 16th 18th centuries. Human civilization is barely 1000 years old!

New Chronology complies with the most rigid scientific standards:

- It gives a coherent explanation of what we already know;
- It is consistent: independent lines of inquiry all lead to the same conclusion;
- The predictions it makes are confirmed empirically;

New Chronology goes by the following basic axioms:
- Chronology is the basis of history;
- Human evolution has always been linear, gradual and irreversible;
- The "cyclic" nature of human civilization is a myth, likewise all the gaps, duplicates, "dark ages" and "renaissances" that we know from consensual history are fantasy and hoax;
- The accumulation of geographical knowledge as reflected in cartography is a gradual and irreversible process;
- The closer in time is a given manuscript to the events described the less distortions it contains;
- There is no "useless" information in authentic ancient sources.

Fomenko asserts: There was no such thing as the Tartar and Mongol invasion followed by over two centuries of yoke and slavery, providing a formidable body of documental evidence to prove his assertion. The so-called "Tartars and Mongols" were the actual ancestors of the modern Russians, living in a trilingual state with Arabic and Turkic spoken as freely as Russian. The ancient Russian state was governed by a double structure of civil and military authorities. The hordes were actually professional armies with a tradition of lifelong conscription (the recruitment being the so-called "blood tax"). Their "invasions" were punitive operations against the regions that attempted tax evasion. Fomenko proves that official Russian history is a blatant forgery concocted by a host of German scholars brought to Russia by the usurper dynasty of the Romanovs. Their ascension to the throne was the result of conspiracy, so they charged these imported historians with the mission of making Romanov's reign look legitimate.

Fomenko proves Ivan the Terrible to be a collation of four rulers, no less. They represented the two rival dynasties - the legitimate Godunov rulers and the ambitious Romanov upstarts.

As Fomenko blows consensual Russian history to smithereens, he successfully removes a crucial cornerstone from underneath the otherwise impeccable edifice of World History. Fomenko adds insult to injury, wiping out one by one: the Ancient Rome: the foundation of Rome in Italy is dated to the 14th century A. D., the Ancient Greece and its numerous poleis, which he identifies as the mediaeval crusader settlements on the territory of Greece.

The Ancient Egypt: the pyramids of Giza become dated to the 11th to 14th century A. D. and identified as the royal cemetery of the Global "Mongolian" Empire, no less. The civilization of the Ancient Egypt is irrefutably dated to the 11th to 15th century A. D. with the aid of the ancient Egyptian horoscopes cut in stone, like enormous Dendera horoscope that hangs in main entrance to the Louvre museum in Paris.

He was the first one to decipher and date unambiguously all such horoscopes, coming up with mediaeval dates in every case.

English historians rage at the suggestion that the history of Ancient England was de facto a Byzantine import transplanted to the English soil by the fugitive Byzantine nobility. To reward the English historians who consider themselves the true scribes of World History, the cover of the book "History: Fiction or Science?" portrays Tintoretto's Jesus Christ crucified on the Big Ben.

Fomenko wipes out the Ancient History of China outright. No such ancient history. Period. The compilation of the so-called Ancient Chinese History is reliably datable to the 17th 18th century only. It is perfectly recognizable as the Ancient European history, reworked and transcribed in hieroglyphs as yet another historical transplantation, this time performed on the Chinese soil by the loving Jesuit hands. The Chinese are the next in line to go berserk. Chinese history is inevitably bound to get both more ancient and more eventful, proportionally to the growing involvement of China in the world affairs. Chinese historians will keep on finding valid proof of prehistoric Chinese spaceflights until the Politburo orders them otherwise.

Islam with all its key figures appears as late as 15th-16th century A. D. as a branch of proto-Christianity. This is amply illustrated by imagery of Prophet Mahomet, archangel Gabriel, Heaven and Hell of this period. In today's Islam all imagery of the things living is taboo.

Arabic historians may find consolation in the crucial historical role of the Ottoman Empire in the 16th 17th century. The trouble is that this empire was initially a proto Christian state, with Hagia Sophia identifiable as Temple of Solomon, according to Fomenko! We can only guess if the acquisition of Alexander the Great (a Macedonian and a Christian!) as the founder of the Muslim World Empire will make Fomenko's theories more acceptable to the Arabic mainstream. He certainly does not spare any holy cows at all, claiming The Stone of Qa'Aba in Mecca to contain the lost Arch of the Covenant.

The history of religions according to Fomenko looks as follows: the pre-Christian period (before the 11th century and Jesus Christ ), Bacchic Christianity (11th to 12th century, before and after Jesus Christ), Jesus Christ Christianity (12th to 14th century) and its subsequent mutations (15th to 17th) into Orthodox Christianity, the Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Buddhism, and so on..

Saint Augustine was quite prescient when he said: "be wary of mathematicians,.. particularly when they speak the truth."

Henry Ford once said: "History is more or less bunk!"

Prominent mathematician Anatoly Fomenko not only proved it for a fact, but as true scientist tried to upgrade it into a rocket science.

This book will change your perception of History forever!
What if Ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt were invented during Renaissance?
What if The Old Testament was a rendition of events of the Middle Ages?
What if Jesus Christ was born in 1053 and crucified in 1086 AD?
Sounds Unbelievable?
Not after you've read "History: Fiction or Science?" by Anatoly Fomenko, the genius mathematician.
Armed with astronomy and computers Anatoly Fomenko turns History into a rocket science.

Check and see.......2007-06-21

I don't care what other people say of this book. Those affirmig it's fake, they hadn't ever read it. Or have some special reasons to do so. "Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see..." This book won't make you feel comfortable. It'll make you feel free. It'll make you feel you're "not the only one" to feel you'd been lied to for centuries.

Suprise! Suprise!.......2007-03-22

Here is a serie of books which turns "the whole world" upside down. I learned a lot of it and I hope that a new book from A.T. Fomenko will follow very quick. A absolute must for everybody who is interested in history or even a little bit from it.

Prescient St Augustine?.......2006-02-05

We can so far divide the New Chronology into the following three parts:

a) The verifiable theory that proves consensual chronology wrong with the aid of astronomy, statistics and mathematics;

b) The new chronology hypothesis based on a new understanding of known historical facts and the most likely logical explanation of the most obvious inconsistencies inherent in the official version of history;

c) The history conjectures, that is experimental historical reconstructions based on assumptions that the authors believe to make sense in the light of their research and linguistic parallels - void of ironclad factual support to date.

Fomenko's theory complies with the most rigid scientific standards as a whole:

It gives a coherent explanation of what we already know.

- It is consistent: independent lines of inquiry all lead to the same conclusion.

- The predictions it makes are confirmed empirically.

Fomenko goes by the following axioms:

- Chronology is the basis of history;

- Human evolution has always been linear, gradual and irreversible;

- The "cyclic" nature of human civilization is a myth, likewise all the gaps, duplicates, "dark ages" and "renaissances" that we know from consensual history;

- The accumulation of geographical knowledge as reflected in cartography is a gradual and irreversible process;

- The chronological distance between a given manuscript and the events described therein is proportional to the amount of distortions it contains;

- There is no "useless" information in authentic ancient sources.

Why the mainstream historians do not shower mathematician Academician Dr.Prof Fomenko with thanks and laurels?

The Russians:

Because Fomenko asserts that there was no such thing as the Tartar and Mongol invasion followed by three centuries of slavery, providing a formidable body of documental evidence to prove his assertion. The so-called "Tartars and Mongols" were the actual ancestors of the modern Russians, living in a bilingual state with Arabic spoken as freely as Russian. The ancient Russian state was governed by a double structure of civil and military authorities. The hordes were actually professional armies with a tradition of lifelong conscription (the recruitment being the so-called "blood tax"). Their "invasions" were punitive operations against the regions that attempted tax evasion. Fomenko proves that Russian history as we know it today is a blatant forgery concocted by a host of German scientists brought to Russia by the usurper dynasty of the Romanovs, whose ascension to the throne was the result of coup d'état, charged with the mission of making their reign look legitimate. Fomenko proves Ivan the Terrible to be a collation of four rulers, no less. They represented the two rival dynasties - the legitimate rulers and the ambitious upstarts. The winner took it all! Over some 30 years of controversy, Russian historians have made a most remarkable transition - they were initially accusing the young mathematician Fomenko of anticommunist dissident activity and attempts to deface the historical legacy of Soviet Russia; nowadays the middle-aged mathematician is accused of adhering to "pro-communist Russian nationalism" and defacing the proud historical legacy of Great Russia.

The Westerners:

Because Fomenko blows consensual Russian history to smithereens, successfully removing a crucial cornerstone from underneath the otherwise impeccable edifice of World History. Fomenko adds insult to injury, wiping out one by one the Ancient Rome (the foundation of Rome in Italy is dated to the XIV century A. D.), the Ancient Greece and its numerous poleis, which he identifies as the mediaeval crusader settlements on the territory of Greece, and the Ancient Egypt (the pyramids of Giza become dated to the XI-XV century A. D. and identified as the royal cemetery of the Global "Mongolian" Empire, no less). The civilization of the Ancient Egypt is irrefutably dated to the XII-XV century A. D. with the aid of the ancient Egyptian horoscopes cut in stone. He was the first one to decipher and date all such horoscopes, coming up with mediaeval dates in every case. English historians rage at the suggestion that the history of Ancient England was de facto a Byzantine import transplanted to the English soil by the fugitive Byzantine nobility. To reward the English historians who consider themselves the true scribes of World History, the cover of the present book portrays Tintoretto's Jesus Christ crucified on the Big Ben.

The Chinese:

Because Fomenko wipes out the Ancient History of China outright. No such thing. Full point. The compilation of the so-called Ancient Chinese History is reliably datable to the XVII-XVIII century only. It is perfectly recognizable as the Ancient European history, reworked and transcribed in hieroglyphs as yet another historical transplantation, this time performed on the Chinese soil by the loving Jesuit hands. The Chinese are the next in line to go berserk. Chinese history is inevitably bound to get both more ancient and more eventful, proportionally to the growing involvement of China in the world affairs. Chinese historians will keep on finding valid proof of prehistoric Chinese spaceflights until the Politburo orders them to shut up.

The Arabs:

Too bad. Islam with all its key figures is datable to XV-XVI century A. D. Arabic historians may find consolation in the crucial historical role of the Ottoman Empire in the XVI-XVII century. The trouble is that this empire was initially a Christian state, with Hagia Sophia identifiable as Temple of Solomon, according to Fomenko! We can only guess if the acquisition of Alexander the Great (a Macedonian and a Christian) as the founder of the Muslim World Empire will make Fomenko's theories more acceptable to the Arabic mainstream. He certainly does not spare any holy cows at all, claiming The Stone of Qa'Aba in Mecca to contain the lost Arch of the Covenant.

The Divinity:

Despite of reiterated statement that his theory is all about chronology and not Religion, Fomenko stirs up a whole condominium of wasp nests. His collection of anathemas, fatwa, and other condemnations from all parties concerned is already considerable. Little wonder, considering that the history of religions à la Fomenko looks as follows: the pre-Christian period (before the XI century and JC), Bacchic Christianity (XI-XII century, before and after JC), JC Christianity (XII-XVI century) and its subsequent mutations into Orthodox Christianity, the Catholicism, Islam, Buddhism, and so on.

According to Fomenko we know strictly NOTHING about the events that predate the X century A. D.

St Augustin was prescient when he spoke unto us: "be wary of mathematicians, particularly when they speak the truth."

Something of a disappointment.......2005-09-09

After having read the first volume of this expected series of 7 volumes I was triggered by the thesis of these authors that ancient Greek and Roman history did in fact take place in the Middle Ages. So I started studying medieval history of the Middle East - also known as Islamic history - to find out if the opponents of the ancient Greeks and Romans - the Acheamenid Persians, Sassanids, Scythians, Egyptians, etc. - also have their duplicates in medieval history. My search was disappointing: none of the many medieval Islamic dynasties seemed to correspond to the ancient middle eastern rulers.

However, I did find a close correspondence between Herodotus' Persian kings and medieval events:

- the defeat and capture of an Anatolian king - the Lydian Croesus - by the Persian conqueror Cyrus is identical to the defeat and capture of another Anatolian king - sultan Bayezid - by the Asian/Mongol conqueror Tamerlane;
- the Persian conquest of Egypt by the cruel tyrant Cambyses reds almost exactly as the Ottoman conquest of Egypt by Selim the Grim (note the nickname!);
- Darius the Lawgiver of the Persian Empire looks very much alike to Sulayman the Magnificent, the Lawgiver in Islamic history;
- Xerxes, whose main claim to fame is to be defeated by the Greeks at the naval battle of Salamis, looks like Selim II (the Sot) whose main claim to fame is to be defeated by a Spanish-Italian alliance at the naval battle of Lepanto.

I should have expected Fomenko et al. to arrive at similar conclusions, however, they claim that the Persian kings are the alter egos of the Angevin kings of Sicily whose biographies do not contain the exploits of the Persian kings.

The similiarities I indicate lead to the conclusion that Herodotus must have written his Histories at the close of the 16th century. But this is extremely late, given that Herodotus is "the Father of History", so therefore all other "ancient" histories must have been fabricated even later. Yet, the founders of modern chronology - Scaliger and Petavius - laid their foundations also at the close of the 16th century and had the full corpus of ancient histories already at their disposal.

It seems to me that Fomenko has to address these inconsistencies, maybe in the forthcoming 5 volumes?

Another critique of their book is that the correspondencies between different rulers are often based on a superficial comparison of the biographies; upon a more thorough comparison many details appear that do not correspond at all.

Finally, the authors rely heavily on the works of Gregorovius (1821-1891!!) - his medieval histories of Rome and Athens - as the source of medieval history; these works are - at least in the West - hoplessly outdated and have been superceded by more up-to-date works (for instance, Julius Norwich's trilogy on Byzantine history is not even cited).

Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period (Asia: Local Studies / Global Themes)

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Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period (Asia: Local Studies / Global Themes)
Mary Elizabeth Berry
Manufacturer: University of California Press
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Binding: Hardcover

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A quiet revolution in knowledge separated the early modern period in Japan from all previous time. After 1600, self-appointed investigators used the model of the land and cartographic surveys of the newly unified state to observe and order subjects such as agronomy, medicine, gastronomy, commerce, travel, and entertainment. They subsequently circulated their findings through a variety of commercially printed texts: maps, gazetteers, family encyclopedias, urban directories, travel guides, official personnel rosters, and instruction manuals for everything from farming to lovemaking. In this original and gracefully written book, Mary Elizabeth Berry considers the social processes that drove the information explosion of the 1600s. Inviting readers to examine the contours and meanings of this transformation, Berry provides a fascinating account of the conversion of the public from an object of state surveillance into a subject of self-knowledge.
Japan in Print shows how, as investigators collected and disseminated richly diverse data, they came to presume in their audience a standard of cultural literacy that changed anonymous consumers into an "us" bound by common frames of reference. This shared space of knowledge made society visible to itself and in the process subverted notions of status hierarchy. Berry demonstrates that the new public texts projected a national collectivity characterized by universal access to markets, mobility, sociability, and self-fashioning.

Legal Aspects of Implementing the Kyoto Protocol Mechanisms: Making Kyoto Work

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Legal Aspects of Implementing the Kyoto Protocol Mechanisms: Making Kyoto Work

Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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The first protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was adopted in Kyoto in 1997 and entered into force in February 2005. It is a unique international law instrument which sets legally binding targets for the reduction of emissions of greenhouse gases which contribute to climate change. The targets are unprecedented in an environmental agreement and will involve substantial financial commitment in virtually all industrialized country parties to the protocol. The Kyoto Protocol is also the first international agreement to include economic instruments which are designed to involve private sector entities and assist parties to meet their targets. These economic instruments, known as the Kyoto or flexible mechanisms, are Joint Implementation (JI), the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), and International Emissions Trading. The Kyoto Protocol defined these mechanisms but did not set out the details necessary for their operation. After protracted negotiations, detailed rules were finalized at the Seventh Session of the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties held in Marrakech in 2001. The Marrakech Accords run to almost 250 pages but still leave many important practical issues unaddressed. As the 2008-2012 commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol draws close more and more projects under CDM and JI are being developed to take advantage of the Kyoto mechanisms and the key issues and problems are now becoming more apparent. Drawing on the emerging body of expertise in this complex area, this book conveys a knowledge of what is becoming known as 'Carbon Finance'. It thereby aims to contribute to the development of the market for carbon emission reductions - one of the objectives of the Kyoto mechanisms.

Human Development Report 2006: Beyond Scarcity: Power, poverty and the global water crisis (Human Development Report)

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Human Development Report 2006: Beyond Scarcity: Power, poverty and the global water crisis (Human Development Report)

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ASIN: 0230500587
Release Date: 2006-11-09

Book Description

Throughout history water has confronted humanity with some of its greatest challenges. Water is a source of life and a natural resource that sustains our environments and supports livelihoods - but it is also a source of risk and vulnerability. In the early 21st Century, prospects for human development are threatened by a deepening global water crisis. Debunking the myth that the crisis is the result of scarcity, this report argues poverty, power and inequality are at the heart of the problem.

*Investigates the underlying causes and consequences of a crisis that leaves 1.2 billion people without access to safe water and 2.6 billion without access to sanitation

*Examines the social and economic forces that are driving water shortages and marginalizing the poor in agriculture and examines the scope for international cooperation to resolve cross-border tensions in water management

*Includes special contributions from Gordon Brown and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, President Lula, President Carter, and the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan.

Rules For The World: International Organizations In Global Politics

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Why International Organizations Fail

Rules For The World: International Organizations In Global Politics
Michael Barnett , and Martha Finnemore
Manufacturer: Cornell University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0801488230

Book Description

Rules for the World provides an innovative perspective on the behavior of international organizations and their effects on global politics. Arguing against the conventional wisdom that these bodies are little more than instruments of states, Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore begin with the fundamental insight that international organizations are bureaucracies that have authority to make rules and so exercise power. At the same time, Barnett and Finnemore maintain, such bureaucracies can become obsessed with their own rules, producing unresponsive, inefficient, and self-defeating outcomes. Authority thus gives international organizations autonomy and allows them to evolve and expand in ways unintended by their creators.

Barnett and Finnemore reinterpret three areas of activity that have prompted extensive policy debate: the use of expertise by the IMF to expand its intrusion into national economies; the redefinition of the category "refugees" and decision to repatriate by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees; and the UN Secretariat's failure to recommend an intervention during the first weeks of the Rwandan genocide. By providing theoretical foundations for treating these organizations as autonomous actors in their own right, Rules for the World contributes greatly to our understanding of global politics and global governance.

Customer Reviews:

Why International Organizations Fail.......2005-12-18

International relations theory has long ago identified a subfield that deals specifically with the existence of international organizations - IOs in the jargon. This field has yielded relatively few insights, and is of little use to the practitioner. Scholars have proposed complex theoretical constructs - "international regimes" - to explain cooperation among states, but they have tended to treat international organizations as mere servants of states' interests, not as actors in their own right. They have very seldom opened the black box to describe what IOs are really like.

Now Barnett and Finnemore want to revive the subject by going back to basic questions - what do international organizations do, how do they work - and by using the tools of another discipline, sociology, which has much to say about the behavior of organizations. They begin with an obvious starting point: international organizations are bureaucracies and, as such, they exhibit many of the pathologies that we associate with these large impersonal organizations - their lack of responsiveness, their taste for red tape, their tunnel vision, their mission creep. But bureaucracies also have qualities for which they do not always get credit but that make them an indispensable component of our modern world: their capacity to manage complex tasks in a rational way, their predictability and fairness in the application of general rules, their expertise in the use and production of knowledge, their legitimacy in the pursuit of the common interest.

The two authors then lead the reader through a crash course in organizational behavior, starting with scholarly debates about IOs' autonomy, power, dysfunction and change, then moving to the characteristics of modern bureaucracies (hierarchy, continuity, impersonality, expertise) and to the effects of bureaucratic rules (rules as operating procedures, rules as lenses through which problems are defined and classified, rules as creating a world amenable to the intervention of experts, rules as the basis of an organizational culture). Rules of experts "construct" the social world, they help create the world as it is: this is the basic tenet of the "constructivist" school of thought from which this book derives.

The authors distinguish between four types of authority that international bureaucracies can wield in their relations with states and other actors: delegated authority, when international organizations act on behalf of states; moral authority, when they represent the interests and values of the international community; expert authority, when knowledge yields power; and rational-legal authority, which is the hallmark of bureaucratic power. These four types of authority - delegated, moral, expert, and rational-legal - have the twin effects of putting IOs "in authority" and of making them "an authority": IOs are often the actors empowered to decide if there is a problem on a particular issue, what kind a problem it is, and whose responsibility it is to solve it.

After having developed this theoretical framework, Barnett and Finnemore then move on to present three case studies of international organizations, focusing on their autonomy from states, the way they exercise power, their change processes, and how they sometimes produce inefficient and self-defeating outcomes. They first examine the IMF and the way its economic expertise made ever-increasing intervention in domestic economies seem logical and even necessary to states that had explicitly barred such action in the organization's Articles of Agreements. They then describe how the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) used its authority to expand the concept of refugee and later developed a repatriation culture that led to violations of refugee rights. Finally, they look at the UN Secretariat, the bureaucratization of peacekeeping, and the development of a peacekeeping culture that led the institution to turn a blind eye when crimes against humanity were committed in Rwanda.

The book is not exempt from verbose jargon that sometimes makes it a hard read, and from approximations that lead the authors to couch some controversial statements without substantiating them (on the "failure" of IMF programs, for instance). They mostly keep a bird eye's view on the bureaucracies that they study, and fail to describe their inner workings in a meaningful way. They spend too much time discussing chicken-and-egg problems, such as the autonomy of international organizations vis-à-vis the states, and too little on important issues such as leadership or accountability. Their last proposition, that the promotion of democracies and liberalism is more and more dependent on organizations that are neither liberal nor democratic, would in itself have deserved a single volume. Despite its shortcomings, this book is a valuable addition to the field, and one hopes that it may spur further empirical studies on the bureaucracies that increasingly provide rules for the world.

Tower of Babble: How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos

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United Dictators Against Freedom
Talkshop for dictators
The prevailing ideology of Isolationism
What about Bush Multinationals?
A Jewish Perspective on The UN's Role in the New WOrld Order

Tower of Babble: How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos
Dore Gold
Manufacturer: Crown Forum
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

International | Current Events | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

General | Politics | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism
Inside the Asylum: Why the UN and Old Europe are Worse Than You Think
The U.N. Exposed: How the United Nations Sabotages America's Security and Fails the World
The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West, and the Future of the Holy City
The Future of the United Nations: Understanding the Past to Chart a Way Forward

ASIN: 1400054753
Release Date: 2004-11-09

Book Description

A United Nations insider exposes how anti-American and antidemocratic forces have hijacked the UN and put America and its allies at risk

Politicians and pundits are imploring the United States to give the UN a major role in American foreign policy. But as bestselling author Dore Gold reveals in Tower of Babble, it is absurd to look to the UN to fight aggression, combat terrorism, and preserve global order. The UN is an abject failure—a fatally flawed organization that has actually accelerated and spread global chaos. And it is dominated by anti-Western forces, dictatorships, state sponsors of terrorism, and America’s worst enemies.

In his New York Times bestseller Hatred’s Kingdom, Gold blew the lid off Saudi support for terrorism, and now he uncovers an even more important story. As a former UN ambassador, he has a unique insider’s perspective on why the UN fails to address—or in many cases exacerbates—the very problems it was created to solve. He shows how President Franklin Roosevelt’s great vision has been corrupted beyond recognition.

Using internal UN documents and classified cables, Gold presents stark evidence of how the UN ignores mass murder, emboldens terrorists, props up dictators, and otherwise betrays its mission to protect the world’s security. Tower of Babble reveals:

• Why America can—and indeed must—go outside the UN to address the most serious threats to national security

• How the UN jeopardizes the success of the war on terror—and how terrorist groups have actually penetrated UN organizations

• How, in the space of a year, the UN turned a blind eye to two horrifying episodes of mass murder—and why the slaughters could have been prevented

• How the oil-for-food scandal only hints at the UN’s repeated failures to deal with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq

• How the UN’s new international criminal court threatens America’s sovereignty

• How the UN’s startling record of failure has led Presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Clinton, and George W. Bush to bypass the UN Security Council

As this hard-hitting book reveals, it is, quite simply, a myth that the United Nations is a positive force for world order or the “sole source of international legitimacy.” And unless the United States and its allies recognize this now, they will continue to put themselves at risk.

"Dore Gold's book is informed and informative. It can be read with pleasure and profit by anyone with a genuine interest in the United Nations. I warmly recommend it."--Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, former Ambassador to the United Nations

"For anyone wondering what's wrong with the United Nations, this is the book to read. Providing both a concise history and an urgent warning for our own time, Dore Gold in clear and lively detail explains how and why the UN too often promotes not peace, but problems--and what we can do about it."--Claudia Rosett, columnist, the Wall Street Journal's Opinionjournal.com

"Dore Gold's Tower of Babble is bound to be one of the most controversial critiques in the public debate on the UN."--Henry Kissinger, Former Secretary of State

Customer Reviews:

United Dictators Against Freedom.......2007-07-17

The author, after making an earth-shaking exposure of the corruption and greedy deeds of these evil organization, ends up with a tepid note of hope. It just doesn't make any sense. "Money-for-Food" they called it, when they had been fooling the whole free world (the West) by pocketing millions themselves and their club of world dictators. Is this hope inspiring? Refusing to prevent, or do anything to stop, the killing of hundred of thousands of black Africans in Rwanda, and getting away with it? So many, mind you: so many, many issues that have gone practically unnoticed since the end of WWII that are calling for the close-down of this modern day Babylon.

This book picks the most important scandals around the world and exposes them in an easy to understand language. The facts are naked, you put the adjectives. Do we need any more evidence to call this gang a state-sponsored mafia? Will Amazon let me publish this review in my second try? How can Iran be one of the countries to tell us what human rights should be?

A must read to know what we are contributing to with our money.

Talkshop for dictators.......2006-05-14

In the introduction, the author shows that at least once in its existence the United Nations served the purpose it was created for. That was in 1990 when the Security Council took a stand against Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Unfortunately, in every other instance it has failed, mostly spectacularly and often with tragic consequences. There were for example the peacekeeping disasters of Somalia 1993, Rwanda 1994, Srebrenica (Bosnia) 1995, Kosovo and Congo/Zaire. The last two crises flowed from the Bosnia and Rwanda disasters respectively. The refusal to confront evil is the major flaw of the UN. This refusal eventually morphed into collusion with evil, as the Oil For Food scandal demonstrates.

In chapter 2: Failure Foreshadowed, Gold discusses the birth of Israel in 1948 when there were no UN forces to withstand the Arab aggression. Likewise during The Kashmir War of the same year between India and Pakistan. Already the organization was betraying the vision of its founders by not acting against the aggressor. And from there it went downhill: Tibet followed in 1950, India annexed Goa in 1962 and many similar acts followed. Chapter 3: Cold War Freeze, looks at the North Korean invasion of the South in 1950, the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The next chapter deals with the Six Day War of 1967 and Resolution 242. The UN remained passive and actually enabled the outbreak of war.

During the Iran-Iraq War that started in 1980, the UN again refused to condemn the aggressor and it did nothing about Saddam's 1987 chemical attacks on the Kurds. After the Gulf War, it again ignored genocide, this time against the Shia Muslims of Iraq. In chapter 6: Impartial To Genocide, the disturbing and heartbreaking events of the Rwandan genocide are recalled. General Romeo Dallaire warned the Dept of Peacekeeping Operations - then under Kofi Annan - of the impending horror, but the warning was ignored. In some instances, UN forces colluded with the mass murderers. The UN's inaction ultimately led to a regional war in Central Africa.

The next chapter deals with the tragedy of Srebrenica and the other supposed "safe havens" in Bosnia and shows the duplicity of the UN and certain European governments. Chapter 8 discusses the international criminal court, a highly politicised concept from the beginning, and one that cannot be expected to be objective. Chapter 9 provides proof of how the UN backs terrorists, with particular reference to the terrorist organization Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon and the many instances of collusion between it and the UN's UNIFIL force.

The author concludes that the major cause of these failures is the international body's moral equivalence. It does not distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil or victim and aggressor. Although he was responsible for the failure in Rwanda, Kofi Annan nevertheless became Secretary-General. The Oil For Food scandal and the underreported child sex abuse scandals have completely undermined the organization's legitimacy. It adopts numerous Anti-Israel resolutions every year but has for years ignored the genocide in Darfur. In fact the perpetrator Sudan was elected to its Human Rights Commission in 2004.

The 2001 UN Conference Against Racism in Durban was an openly Antisemitic hate fest. Unlike the EU or Africa, Israel is isolated in that it does not form part of a larger bloc, and it is always up against the Arabic and Islamic states. Although it has failed utterly to halt aggression and bring about a peaceful world order, the UN is still protected by the ideology of political correctness. Some of its agencies still perform good work, but overall the spiral is further downhill as documented in the Afterword with further revelations on Darfur, sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers, oil for food monies that went to terrorists and UN agencies infiltrated by terror groups. An example of the latter is UNRWA and its ties to Hamas.

The Appendix: The Paper Trail, provides evidence on various failures like Rwanda, Bosnia, Iraq, Oil For Food and UNRWA's ties to Hamas, mostly from the United Nations' own documents. There are extensive notes, acknowledgements and an index. The book includes maps of the Kashmir Dispute, Korean War, Cuban Missile Crisis, the Six-Day war, Rwanda, and its Neighbours, the Bosnian Conflict and Lebanon and Israel. There are also 17 black and white photographs of personalities and tragic evidence of the UN's failures. In addition to this valuable and informative book, I recommend The UN Gang by Pedro Sanjuan, Global Deception by Joseph Klein, The UN Exposed by Eric Shawn and Inside The Asylum by Jed Babbin.

The prevailing ideology of Isolationism.......2006-04-01

In 1990-1995, Liberia forced more than 800,000 people into exile. The UN did not exercise its influence and power stopping the injustice. The UN did not bring justice to the Khmer Rouge leaders. In the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge murdered millions of Cambodians and the UN did not authorize a forceful stop to the murder. The UN was late in response to the 1994 Rwanda War. In 1998, five African countries invaded Congo and by 2001, 2.5 million people were killed and it was not until 2003 that the UN dispatched French forces to establish law and order, a year latter. The UN is letting special interests dictate policy and these economic and social incentives prevent action. The UN policies and actions are seemingly covert; the UN does not want an informed public. The UN is dysfunctional and this ineptiness increases the chance of crimes against humanity. The UN has no deterent capacity.

The UN is not a legal body operating to some objective legal criteria. The UN can maintain diplomatic neutralism in the face of genocidal murders and this is immoral. The UN is taking the side of evil not to fight against evil. The maximum too resist not evil seems to apply to the powerless because the powerless should not provoke greater anger and bring destruction upon them by acting. "The ability to confront evil means the willingness to act boldly and ruthlessly and without consensus". The UN cannot act without consensus and if it's members can reframe from voting then they in essence have prevented healthy action. The ability or refusal, to recognize evil and boldly confront evil is the UN's salient flaw.

The UN has had an unusual amount of authority within the Middle East. The UN affirms the legitimate right of the Palestinian people to resist Israeli occupation. The UN has not deterred the terrorist threat in the Middle East nor has the UN, the supposed protector of international peace and security and improved peace in the world. Instead the UN has gerrymandered itself to many totalitarian regimes giving them voice in shaping world affairs. The UN ideology is weak; the UN remains silent on the peoples right too a representative government; the UN ideology has caved from a position of morality too one of relative morality.

The UN did not create Israel. The UN did not owe its existence to a UN parition plan or UN resolution. The Arab leaque refused to accept the Jewish state.

The Arabs did not disguise their aggression towards Israel and made the following statement "this will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and crusades." The Arabs represented a group of states against Israel. The UN declared for the first time they would react too the threat with armed intervention. The UN did not react and the failure to act would result in serious injury to the prestige of the UN. The UN called for an Arab cease fire even as the old city of David was falling; 57 synaguoges and academies were destroyed. The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) under the leadership of Yitzhak Rabin took Kastel allowing 131 trucks carrying 500 tons of food passage into Jerusalem saving a population of 160,000 where 100,000 were at risk.

In 1967, Syrian pressed their claims to the Sea of Galilee, Israel's only source of fresh water, which the armistice had established was entirely within the territory of Israel. In Syria had a new defense treaty with Egypt and April of 1967, Syria escalated shelling of villages in northern Israel. The Israeli's responded to the unusually heavy Syrian artillery barrages by launching fighter aircraft and shot down six Syrian Sovet Mig fighters. Syrian infiltrations increased. IDF, General Yitzhak Rabin warned Syrians that continue provocations would lead to a firm Israeli response that would endanger the Syrian regime. Israel was deterring Syria from exploiting their topographical advantage on the Golan Heights to shell Israeli civilians. The Soviet Union exploited the situation to spread rumors about Israel's plans of expansion inflaming the Arab world. The Soviets warned Egypt that Israel was planning a major offensive against its Syrian military partner. Israel vociferously denied the charge. The UN did nothing to stop the escalation and confrontation crisis. The Egyptians prepared for war. May 18, 1967 President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt massed 80,000 soldiers and 550 tanks on Israel's southern border. Egypt was conveying aggressive intent and commanding the UN Emergency Force to withdraw its peacekeepers from along the border between Israel's Negev Desert and Egyptian Sinai. Egypt artillery gun overlooked the Straits of Tiran, a vital lane Israel depended on for access to the Red Sea and ultimately the Indian ocean. U Thant ordered the UNEF withdrawal and war emanating in the region. U Thant reported to the security council, "Relations between peoples on opposite sides of the line are such that if the United Nations buffer should be removed serious fighting would, quite likely, soon be resumed" Nasser announced he was closing the Straits of Tiran, thereby enacting a blockade against Israel shipping. It was an act of war. Nasser was a pan-Arab advocate intervening in the politics of Algeria, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Yemen, where he dispatched a huge expeditionary army in 1962. In 1964, Nasser was known as the "Hero of the Soviet Union" and Soviet admirals were constantly visiting Egypt seeking naval and air bases to counter the US sixth fleet. The UN did not convene to discuss the Egypt-Syria crisis. The Soviet representative said, "The Soviet delegation deems it necessary to stress that it does not see sufficient grounds for hasty convening of the Security Council and for the artificially dramatic climate fostered by the representatives of some Western powers". It is obvious the Soviets wanted Egypt to act out and continue in his confrontational course. Superpowers can not go to war because of mutual assured destruction through the escalating possibility of nuclear weapons; however, superpowers manipulated local governments to engage in confrontations in localized theatres and establish dominance indirectly. Jordon's King Hussein placed his armed forces under Egypt. Two Egyptian commando battalions joined nine Jordanian brigades that were poised to strike Israel from the Jordanian-controlled west bank and 1/3 of the Iraqi army traversed Jordanian territory and was positioned to cross the Jordan River. The battle was intended to destroy Israel and they knew Israel could not absorb the first blow. June 5, two hundred Israeli aircraft destroy Egyptian air force on the ground. More than a 1,000 Israeli's were injuried during the Jordian assault, Israel held its fire until Jordanian troops crossed into Jerusalem. Syria, sent bomber to attack Israel's oil refineries in Haifa Bay and in response Israel destroyed 2/3 of the Syrian air force. Finally, Iraqi bombers attack Israel and prompted an Israel counterstrike. June 10, 1967, Israel had captured the Gaza strip and the Sinai Pennisula, destroying the Egyptian military that had threatened a mass invasion and Israeli forces had captured the West bank and dismantled Jordanian military. They had recovered the old city of Jerusalem. And finally Israel had taken the Golan Heights from Syria. The UN involvement in the conflict had been a dismal failure. The Israeli army had defeated Soviet arms on the battlefield. It was not up to America diplomacy to decisively beat back Soviet initiative at the UN.

The tower of Babel was a futile attempt to unify all people subject by one government. The massive pyramid of money, technology, lust, and greed compelled the people to build upward. Time was their enemy because resources were not unlimited. It was only a matter of time before the tower had too be abandoned as a futile effort. The UN does not have the capability too maintain or create World peace.

God punished the people for their vanity. The people of the tower of Babel fell into confusion and their languages were changed. Individual tribes and small communities emerged with each tribe establishing customary laws and cultures. The idea of one single unifying power was destroyed. The UN will also fall upside and great will be its fall. Hopefully the "deep rooted" ideology of isolationism will compel the US too abandon the United Nations and remove its entanglement in the affairs of other nations. Peace will prevail as nations stop entangling themselves into the economic, social, and moral administration and politics of other countries.

What about Bush Multinationals?.......2006-02-07

This is an outing of the weakness of the UN, but what about the one world government being created by the Multinationals who are taking American's sovereignty away? This mad rush towards Globalism pushed on by the Bush Neocons, and his corportate crony insiders, should be of even more concern. Compared to them, the UN is impotent.

A Jewish Perspective on The UN's Role in the New WOrld Order.......2005-08-09

This book is written exclusively from a pro-Israeli stand-point. The author is a former Israeli ambassador to the UN and, as such, spends chapter after chapter trying to exonerate Israeli foreign policy which has often been condemned by several UN Security Council resolutions.

However, this book is a useful guide to showing you how politicians create a 'camouflage of confusion' and how the many UN splinter organisations have consistently aided genocide in Africa by handing out free guns.

Not really essential reading - and has no information at all about the founding of the UN, the Meditation Temple in the basement and the UN's links to the Alice Bailey Lucis (Lucifer Publishing) organisation.

Understanding Global Cultures: Metaphorical Journeys through 23 Nations

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MBA level reading or superficial nonsense???
Invaluable Academic Resource
Best Bet

Understanding Global Cultures: Metaphorical Journeys through 23 Nations
Martin J. Gannon
Manufacturer: Sage Publications, Inc
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | International | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

General | Social Sciences | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

Among Cultures: The Challenge of Communication (with InfoTrac®)
Dynamics of Intercultural Communication
Understanding Cultural Differences: Germans, French, and Americans
Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind
Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Issues of Our Time)

ASIN: 0761913297

Book Description

This book describes a method, the cultural metaphor, for readily understanding the cultural mindset of a nation and comparing it to those of other nations. This method involves identifying some phenomenon, activity or institution of a nation’s culture that all or most of its members consider important with which they identify closely. Metaphors are not stereotypes; rather, they rely upon the features of one critical phenomenon in a society to describe the entire society. The characteristics of the metaphor then become the basis for describing and understanding the essential features of the society. For example, the Italians invented the opera and love it passionately. Five key characteristics of the opera are the overture, spectacle and pageantry, voice, exteriority, and the interaction between the lead singers and the chorus. These features are used to describe Italy and its cultural mindset. Thus the metaphor is a guide or map that helps the student of the foreigner understand quickly what members of a society consider important

What’s new:

A new organizational framework: In the first edition, there was no overriding framework into which parts of the book could be divided. In the new edition, the generic types of cultural frameworks developed by Triandis and Fiske and the torn and cleft culture framework developed by Huntington, organize the book. These frameworks allow the reader to gain new insight into various cultural metaphors and to address the challenging issue of integrating cultural and economic perspectives.

New nations covered in this edition include:

- The Thai Kingdom

- Saudi Arabia

- Brazil

- Poland

- Korea

- Malaysian

- Mexico

- Portugal

Customer Reviews:

MBA level reading or superficial nonsense???.......2003-12-04

Questions:

1. Why does anyone want to know, at the MBA level, cultural information about 23 countries?

2. What MBA, is going to be managing 23 or more countries at the same time?

3. What good is a 10-15 page overview of a country with millions of people? Do you think you can adequately describe the United States in such a short space? (for a foreign MBA for example - reversing the situation)

4. Why are MBA's reading this instead of peer reviewed journals?

5. As with the Hofstede debacle, where does the author demonstrate language skills to get down to the true motivations and causes of cultural behaviors, particularly those that play a role in the global game of economics?

If you are an MBA student or a Ph.D. candidate, you need to avoid all materials like this and get down to the real grit of cross cultural studies by learning to a competent level, another language and at least living in the target country for a year or two, asking deep, penetrating questions while you are there. Anything less, and the reader/student is being untrue not to academic pursuits but to himself/herself!

Invaluable Academic Resource.......2001-10-03

I have now used Gannon's book at both the MBA and senior undergraduate level in courses on Cross-Cultural Management. It is the best approach I have found for synthesizing material from the sociological, anthropological and business disciplines in the education of the manager/student with regard to organizational design and its adaptation to the local characteristics of the market, the legislation, the fiscal regime, the socio-political system and the cultural system encountered in the international environment. Coupled with Gannon's other book of readings, research translations and commentary on cultural metaphors and his book of applications and exercises for working across cultures, the instructor has the most thorough framework and set of tools for dealing with the difficult issues encountered in understanding other cultures that I have seen to date. International students in my graduate courses have unanimously acknowledged that Gannon's metaphors for their cultures are perceptively and creatively right on the mark.

Best Bet.......2001-08-23

Gannon and his associates have written a delightful, must-read book for people who work across cultures. The cultural descriptions are easy to remember and provide much greater depth than most treatments of culture. The book provides many new insights, even for people who know these cultures well, and is very good at explaining why other cultures behave as they do. Gannon's book is so well-written and interesting that my MBA students complain that they have difficulty wrestling the book away from other family members who pick it up and get hooked. If someone asked me to recommend just one book to read on culture, Understanding Global Cultures would get my vote.

Healing the Nations: A Call to Global Intercession

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Very Interesting & Controversial Book

Healing the Nations: A Call to Global Intercession
John Loren Sandford
Manufacturer: Chosen
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Religion & Spirituality | Subjects | Books

General | Spirituality | Religion & Spirituality | Subjects | Books

Look Inside Religion & Spirituality Books | Trip | Specialty Stores | Books
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Elijah Among Us: Understanding and Responding to Gods Prophets Today
Prophets, Healers and the Emerging Church
The Renewal of the Mind
Restoring the Christian Family
Deliverance and Inner Healing

ASIN: 0800792769
Release Date: 2000-03-01

Book Description

Following the Christian's mandate to "heal the nations," John Sandford teaches the Body of Christ how to overcome patterns of destruction in lands and peoples.

Customer Reviews:

Very Interesting & Controversial Book.......2000-07-20

This book is a very good book about how to gather a burden for the nations as a whole. It is very controversial, though. John Sandford states that polygamy is acceptable in some countries and churches, and that God(Jesus) can be found in all world religions. Although there are many things I find disagreeable, the book as a whole is a must for anyone with a burden for the nations. It has it's redeeming qualities, in which it speaks of mistakes missionaries have been making for years when trying to reach the lost of the world and how to correct them. It really deepend my understanding of how God views the nations of the world. Overall it's a MUST-READ!

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