Understanding Management or Second Nature

Understanding Management

Author: Stephen Linstead

This unique volume focuses on management as it is--a complex set of social and symbolic processes--often characterized by considerable ambiguity and paradox. In particular, Understanding Management contains a body of work concerned with building an experience-based grounded description and understanding of the processes of management and managing. The contributors to this volume explore and illuminate various themes including, the dynamics, subtleties, and complexities of managerial life; its informal, as well as formalized features and practices; and the significance of the cultural and symbolic in organizations. Concentrating on the meanings and relationship between managerial talk, thought, and action, the contributors examine issues like culture, myth, ritual, totem, and taboo. Drawing from both new and established anthropological concepts, this volume provides an in-depth analysis that enables the reader to understand the nature of managing. Understanding Management represents a fascinating and invaluable resource for all those studying, teaching, and researching management, and for those in organization theory, organization behavior, the sociology and psychology of organizations, and general management studies.

Booknews

Provides access to a wide range of federal statistics for development officials and others seeking information for competitive analysis, strategic planning, market research, and other types of economic and policy evaluation. National and state data, organized by four-digit SIC codes in all wholesale and retail trade categories, includes for each SIC code a description of the category, statistics on total sales and total employment, lists of leading companies, and graphics showing industry concentration and statistics broken down by state. A second section consists of statistical tables for 590 cities and metro areas, organized alphabetically. Thoroughly indexed by SIC, subject, company, occupation, and city. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

New interesting book: Double Menopause or Discovering Nutrition

Second Nature: Economic Origins of Human Evolution

Author: Haim Ofek

This book spans two million years of human evolution and explores the impact of economics on human evolution and natural history. The theory of evolution by natural selection has always relied in part on progress in areas of science outside of biology. By applying economic principles at the borderlines of biology, Haim Ofek shows how some of the outstanding issues in human evolution, such as the increase in human brain size and the expansion of the environmental niche humans occupied, can be answered. He identifies distinct economic forces at work, beginning with the transition from the feed-as-you-go strategy of primates, through hunter-gathering and the domestication of fire to the development of agriculture. This highly readable book will inform and intrigue general readers and those in fields such as evolutionary biology and psychology, economics, and anthropology.

Table of Contents:

	Acknowledgments
1	Introduction	1
Pt. 1	Bioeconomics
2	Exchange in human and nonhuman societies	9
	Adam Smith's zoological digression	9
	Symbiotic exchange	11
	Kin and nepotistic exchange	14
	Mercantile exchange	20
	Tentative conclusions	24
3	Classical economics and classical Darwinism	26
	Darwin and the Scottish economists: The first point of junction	26
	Darwin's principle of utility: The second point of junction	31
	Diversity of human nature: The third point of junction	35
4	Evolutionary implications of division of labor	44
	The capacity for specialization and differentiation	45
	The capacity to operate in grand-scale formations	55
5	The feeding ecology	62
	The incredible shrinking gut	62
	Runaway arms races in a vertical feeding ecology	74
6	The origins of nepotistic exchange	84
	Primordial exchange at the lowest levels of organization	84
	Convergent body structures	86
	Convergent social structures	95
	The primate connection	98
7	Baboon speciation versus human specialization	105
	Parallels in the feeding ecology	105
	Antipredator behavior	110
	Adaptive radiation in the baboons	114
	The "southern ape"	115
	Founder-effect speciation	117
	Trade and adaptive specialization	118
Pt. 2	Paleoeconomics
8	Departure from the feed-as-you-go strategy	125
	The physical environment	125
	Stone tool technology according to Darwin	128
	Exchange augmented foot-sharing	131
9	The origins of market exchange	138
	Bateman's syndrome	138
	The impetus to trade	142
	The nature of commodities and the structure of markets	143
	Fire: What's in a name?	151
10	Domestication of fire in relation to market exchange	153
	Nonhuman use of fire	153
	The question of fuel	155
	Incendiary skills	157
	Provision of fire in the absence of ignition technology	159
	Fire and occupation of caves	162
11	The Upper Paleolithic and other creative explosions	168
	The Upper Paleolithic toolkit	169
	Long-distance trade	172
	Economic and geographic expansions	173
	Monetarization of exchange in relation to symbolic behavior	179
12	Transition to agriculture: the limiting factor	190
	Five unexplained remarkable facts	190
	The history of the problem	192
	Agriculture versus hunting-gathering	194
	Climates on average	196
	Climates at variance: a clue in the ice caps	202
	The Fertile Crescent: a regional case study	207
13	Transition to agriculture: the facilitating factor	212
	The specialization-diversification dichotomy	212
	The question of autarky	212
	The caprine paradox	217
	Agrarian origins of ancient cities	222
	Agriculture: summary	226
	References	228
	Index	237