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"The Core Competence of the Corporation" challenged and redefined traditional concepts of management strategy in a market that was growing increasingly global and competitive.
Business scholars C. K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel base their 1990 argument for a strategy change on a comparison of case studies. They note that some corporations are adept at inventing new markets, quickly entering emerging markets, and shifting patterns of customer choice in...
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Published in 1938, Cyril Lionel Robert (C. L. R.) James's The Black Jacobins is the little-known story of the only successful slave revolution known in history. It was this 12-year struggle of the African slaves in the French colony of San Domingo that led to the establishment of the Republic of Haiti in 1804. The uprising was inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution that had begun in 1789, just two years before, and in this work James goes...
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C. S. Lewis may be most famous for his fiction, including children's books like the Chronicles of Narnia series. But in his 1952 book Mere Christianity-originally printed as three separate pamphlets in 1942, 1943, and 1944-this eclectic and learned man documents his complex journey from atheism to faith.
Lewis's fresh, lively, and often humorous presentation of Christian doctrine saw some label him the greatest defender of Christianity of the twentieth...
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Northern Irish academic, novelist, and broadcaster C. S. Lewis's 1943 philosophical work The Abolition of Man is subtitled Reflections on Education With Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools. It is about the power of education to shape the minds of individuals and improve society (or harm it, if badly done), and encompasses everything from the scientific worldview at the time to philosophical arguments about right...
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When American sociologist C. Wright Mills' The Sociological Imagination was first published in 1959, it provoked much hostile reaction. This was understandable: the book was a hard-hitting attack on how sociology was practiced-and on a number of leading sociologists. Mills was a fierce critic of both modern capitalism and Soviet-style authoritarianism, and argued that the sociology profession failed to look at how people's problems are connected to...
26) A Macat Analysis of Carlo Ginzburg's The Night Battles: Witchcraft & Agrarian Cults in the 16th &
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In his 1966 book The Night Battles, Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg detailed the lives of peasant people who were marginalized in their own society and have been all but forgotten in ours. He created a new school of study, "microhistory," which has influenced thinkers from a range of different disciplines.
The Night Battles looks at the witch trials of a small group of peasants in sixteenth-century Italy who believed they turned into animals at...
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The story of the Crusades (1095—1291) is of two centuries of repeated invasion and occupation of Muslim kingdoms by Western European Catholics. This was in response to Muslim conquests of Christian lands from the seventh century on. The story has been told and retold in Western histories-but only from the Western perspective. Hillenbrand's collection of authentic Islamic sources, many previously untranslated or inaccessible, tells the Crusades from...
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English naturalist and geologist Charles Darwin first published On the Origin of Species in 1859. The idea of evolution and that all earth's species have descended from a common ancestor had already been around for some time. What was new about Darwin's work was that it found a way to explain evolution using a theory called natural selection. This claimed that species change in small ways, gradually, over long periods of time; the individuals who...
29) A Macat Analysis of Charles P. Kindleberger's Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial
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A History of Financial Crises was first published in 1978, the world was entering a new period of global economic turbulence. Established economists based their analyses on the assumption that investors act rationally, and these economists often communicated their ideas with dry, technical language. Kindleberger rebelled against convention. Using a more literary and descriptive style, he came up with a new view. He argued that markets are unstable...
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Nigerian novelist and professor Chinua Achebe was acutely conscious that Western views of Africa were inevitably the views of a culture that assumed itself superior. When confronted by what it took to be an inferior culture, the West identified itself as better-materially, intellectually, even spiritually. Achebe believed that even as original and subtle a work as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness-a novel seen by many as a criticism of colonialism...
31) A Macat Analysis of Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Fin
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Ordinary Men is one of the most influential works on the Holocaust. Before US historian Browning's 1992 book, most Holocaust scholarship focused either on the experience of the victims or on the Nazi political ideology driving the slaughter. Browning investigates the stories of some who carried out acts of extreme violence, those who literally had blood on their hands. Who were they? What were their backgrounds? And how could they end up committing...
32) A Macat Analysis of Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the Eng
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English historian Christopher Hill turned thinking about the English Civil Wars (1642—51) on its head when he published The World Turned Upside Down in 1972. Instead of focusing on power struggles in the upper echelons of English society-on the battle between the monarchy and would-be republicans-Hill looked to develop "history from below," investigating the lives of ordinary people, the way they saw society, and their political hopes for the future....
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Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss first published Structural Anthropology in his native French in 1958. Not only did the book transform the discipline of anthropology, it also energized a movement (called structuralism) that came to dominate the humanities and social sciences for a generation.
Linguistic structuralism studies the meaning of language based not just on definitions, but also on the relationships of words and sounds to each other....
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American anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1926—2006) earned his PhD from the prestigious Harvard University, where he followed the interdisciplinary approach pioneered by the institution's Department of Social Relations.
Previous generations of anthropologists had imported their own value systems and culture, regardless of which part of the world they were studying. Native cultures were almost always judged to fall short in comparison to colonialists'...
35) A Macat Analysis of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and
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American author Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's 1996 work Hitler's Willing Executioners is one of the most controversial history books of modern times. While most historians have sought to explain the horror of the Holocaust by focusing on Nazi leaders and their ideologies, Goldhagen set out to investigate whether ordinary Germans enthusiastically embraced their goals. His conclusion: "eliminationist anti-Semitism"-a genocidal hatred of Jews unique to Germany-caused...
36) A Macat Analysis of David Brion Davis's The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823
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Davis's 1975 work looks to answer a question that had been all but ignored up to that point. Slavery had been accepted in Western culture for centuries. So why did a movement suddenly rise up in the industrial era calling for the slave trade to be abolished? Could it be that people had suddenly become more enlightened and humanitarian? Or were there other, more compelling and perhaps self-interested reasons for this sudden about-turn?
The Problem...
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The emergence of China as a major player on the international stage is one of the most significant developments in contemporary geopolitics-the study of the effects of geography (both human and physical) on international relations. Kang's call for understanding of and engagement with China, rather than containment and confrontation, makes China Rising a "must-read" for anyone interested in international politics.
Kang's analysis investigates and...
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David Graeber's 2011 book Debt: The First 5,000 Years seeks to overturn hundreds of years of economic theory, specifically the idea that people have a natural inclination to trade with each other, and that the concept of money developed spontaneously to overcome the inefficiencies of a bartering system. The US-born social activist uses his training as an anthropologist to trace the history of money and of debt, and reaches the conclusion that money...
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Excited by the possibilities hinted at by the major scientific breakthroughs of the day, Scottish philosopher David Hume set out to construct a science of the mind. 1748's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is the result.
A work that had a huge influence on great thinkers including celebrated German philosopher Immanuel Kant, An Enquiry is Hume's examination of how we obtain information and form beliefs. He argues that we mainly gain knowledge...
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David Hume's book tackling the subject of belief in God is among the most influential in Western philosophy. Published in 1779, three years after Hume's death, without featuring the author's name, the book was deeply controversial in its day. It is now considered a masterpiece and Hume is regarded as one of the greatest philosophers writing in English.
A cleverly crafted fictional conversation, Dialogues deals with justifying belief in God. On the...
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