Shaping Commitment

Corporations, business groups and other business organizations are increasingly concerned about social challenges that directly impact the future of capitalism. Colombia s Fundación Social (FS) a century-old Latin American business group has from its start operated under two different but closely intertwined rationales: as a market, profit-seeking player; and as a civil society organization practicing solidarity. Social aims are at the core of FS mission, and business firms are instrumental. Remarkably, despite decades of growth as a ranking business group, FS underlying objective remained grounded in concern for the poor: To fight the structural causes of poverty.

Even when they don't want peace, combatants seek out UN peacemaking for its unique tactical, material, and symbolic benefits.

The reissue of a classic work, now with a foreword by Daniel Goleman! Here is a monumental work that continues in the tradition pioneered by co-author Richard Lazarus in his classic book Psychological Stress and the Coping Process. Dr. Lazarus and his collaborator, Dr. Susan Folkman, present here a detailed theory of psychological stress, building on the concepts of cognitive appraisal and coping which have become major themes of theory and investigation. As an integrative theoretical analysis, this volume pulls together two decades of research and thought on issues in behavioral medicine, emotion, stress management, treatment, and life span development. A selective review of the most pertinent literature is included in each chapter. The total reference listing for the book extends to 60 pages. This work is necessarily multidisciplinary, reflecting the many dimensions of stress-related problems and their situation within a complex social context. While the emphasis is on psychological aspects of stress, the book is oriented towards professionals in various disciplines, as well as advanced students and educated laypersons. The intended audience ranges from psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, nurses, and social workers to sociologists, anthropologists, medical researchers, and physiologists.

Employee-Organization Linkages: The Psychology of Commitment, Absenteeism, and Turnover summarizes the theory and research on employee-organization linkages, including the processes through which employees become linked to work organizations, the quality of such linkages, and how linkages are weakened or severed. The text identifies the determinants of employee commitment, absenteeism, and turnover, as well as their consequences for the individual, work groups, and the larger organization. The book also presents conceptual models on how employees become committed to, decide to be absent from, and decide to leave their organizations. Human resource practitioners, managers, employers, and industrial psychologists will find the book very informative and insightful.

Every financial decision we make impacts our lives. Introduction to Personal Finance: Beginning Your Financial Journey, 3rd Edition is designed to help students avoid early financial mistakes and provide the tools needed to secure a strong foundation for the future. Using engaging visuals and a modular approach, instructors can easily customize their course with topics that matter most to their students. This course empowers students to define their personal values and make smart financial decisions that help them achieve their goals.

Challenging the notion that modernization is a homogenizing process, Susan Rogers contends that in the course of large-scale transformations communities often reproduce and strengthen distinctive cultural and social features. To make this argument, she focuses on the French farming community of "Ste Foy" during a period of rapid change (1945-75). Using ethnographic field data and archival material that she collected as a "participant-observer," she finds an intriguing puzzle: an allegedly archaic social form, the ostal, has become increasingly common in the community. The ostal, a type of family farm organized around an extended "stem family" household, is a variant of the stem family systems associated with preindustrial southern Europe. How have Ste Foyans continued to remake this "archaic" mode as their community grew more prosperous and more involved in national and international markets? In showing how the specific identity of a community is reproduced rather than obliterated by modernization, the author reveals dialectical relationships between structure and change, history and culture, and the centralized nation-state and regional diversity. This analysis addresses anthropologists, historians, and scholars interested in local politics and economic development.

This book undertakes an in-depth examination of the dynamics of commitment in U.S.-Southeast Asia strategy. Drawing on cases including the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam and Washington’s pivot to Asia amid China’s growing regional role, it constructs an original balance of commitment model to explain continuity and change in U.S.-Southeast Asia policy. Balance of commitment goes beyond balance of power approaches to explains how translating Southeast Asia’s importance in U.S. thinking into actual commitments has proven challenging for policymakers as it requires simultaneously calibrating adjustments to power shifts, threat perceptions and resource extraction. The book applies the balance of commitment approach to several practical case studies, based on hundreds of conversations with policymakers and experts in the United States and Southeast Asia, personal experiences across nearly two decades and primary and secondary source material across a half-century. The findings suggest that the challenges of U.S. commitment to the region are rooted not simply in differences between administrations or divergences in outlook between Washington and regional capitals, but tough balancing acts for U.S. policymakers in domestic politics and wider foreign policy. As such, shaping U.S. strategy in Southeast Asia and calibrating and sustaining commitment requires not just appreciating Southeast Asia’s significance, but committing to the region in ways that manage structural aspects of U.S. thinking, capabilities and resourcing.

"Through first-person testimonies, this anthology demonstrates the transformative power of higher education and its impact on the working class"--Provided by publisher.