This vivid history of the city in Western civilization tells the story of urban life through bodily experience.Flesh and Stone is the story of the... deepest parts of life—how women and men moved in public and private spaces, what they saw and heard, the smells that assailed them, where they ate, how they dressed, the mores of bathing and of making love—all in the architecture of stone and space from ancient Athens to modern New York. Early in Flesh and Stone, Richard Sennett probes the ways in which the ancient Athenians experienced nakedness, and the relation of nakedness to the shape of the ancient city, its troubled politics, and the inequalities between men and women. The story then moves to Rome in the time of the Emperor Hadrian, exploring Roman beliefs in the geometrical perfection of the body. The second part of the book examines how Christian beliefs about the body related to the Christian city—the Venetian ghetto, cloisters, and markets in Paris. The final part of Flesh and Stone deals with what happened to urban space as modern scientific understanding of the body cut free from pagan and Christian beliefs. Flesh and Stone makes sense of our constantly evolving urban living spaces, helping us to build a common home for the increased diversity of bodies that make up the modern city.

When did cosmetic surgery become a common practice, the stuff of everyday conversation? In a work that combines a provocative ethnography of plastic... surgery and a penetrating analysis of beauty and feminism, Virginia L. Blum searches out the social conditions and imperatives that have made ours a culture of cosmetic surgery. From diverse viewpoints, ranging from cosmetic surgery patient to feminist cultural critic, she looks into the realities and fantasies that have made physical malleability an essential part of our modern-day identity.For a cultural practice to develop such a tenacious grip, Blum argues, it must be fed from multiple directions: some pragmatic, including the profit motive of surgeons and the increasing need to appear young on the job; some philosophical, such as the notion that a new body is something you can buy or that appearance changes your life. Flesh Wounds is an inquiry into the ideas and practices that have forged such a culture. Tying the boom in cosmetic surgery to a culture-wide trend toward celebrity, Blum explores our growing compulsion to emulate what remain for most of us two-dimensional icons. Moving between personal experiences and observations, interviews with patients and surgeons, and readings of literature and cultural moments, her book reveals the ways in which the practice of cosmetic surgery captures the condition of identity in contemporary culture.

Flet is an Administration flunky who begins to suspect that the oft-invoked Emergency, after which all public spaces are off-limits, is a tool of... sociopolitical manipulation, if not oppression: the decentralized citizenry binge on endless, aimless file tape transmissions drained into their homes. A face-off between this tentative muckraker and her icy superior is set to go down at a mandatory, nationwide Reenactment, in advance of which Flet finds herself dreaming and driving endlessly off the map. Will she find the missing cities, or will she lose herself in the flood-tide of images that wash over the Nation? An elegant entry in the field of speculative fiction, Flet finds McSweeney slowing her distinctively hyperactive imagination and syntax down to the speed of a narrative.

To keep pace in this rapidly changing arena, the new edition of this introductory text in clinical ethics carries forward an approach tested over time... with clinicians, students in the health professions, and members of ethics committees. The new edition is admirably current with, and informed by, the extensive literature in clinical, ethical, and legal topics relevant to these problems. In many ways this text serves as an important model for creative work in bioethics. First, it is interdisciplinary and interprofessional, not merely multidisciplinary and multiprofessional. Members of different disciplines and professions talked, taught, and wrote with each other to develop clear and compelling ideas about clinical ethics. This text provides the fruits of their conversations. . . . In short, this book reflects an ideal approach to both teaching and scholarship in bioethics. From the Foreword, by James C. Childress, PhD

This book examines the most recent transformations in the automobile industry. In particular it analyzes the impact of the new forms of industrial... restructuring on production organization and the organization of labor and employee relations within Fiat in Italy, Volkswagen in Brazil and Renault and MCC/Smart in France. These case studies illustrate the most recent radical changes in the industry (outsourcing and modular organisation) and show how they have affected lean production.

Project teams can improve results by recognizing that the future is inevitably uncertain and that by creating flexible designs they can adapt to... eventualities. This approach enables them to take advantage of new opportunities and avoid harmful losses. Designers of complex, long-lasting projects--such as communication networks, power plants, or hospitals--must learn to abandon fixed specifications and narrow forecasts. They need to avoid the "flaw of averages," the conceptual pitfall that traps so many designs in underperformance. Failure to allow for changing circumstances risks leaving significant value untapped. This book is a guide for creating and implementing value-enhancing flexibility in design. It will be an essential resource for all participants in the development and operation of technological systems: designers, managers, financial analysts, investors, regulators, and academics. The book provides a high-level overview of why flexibility in design is needed to deliver significantly increased value. It describes in detail methods to identify, select, and implement useful flexibility. The book is unique in that it explicitly recognizes that future outcomes are uncertain. It thus presents forecasting, analysis, and evaluation tools especially suited to this reality. Appendixes provide expanded explanations of concepts and analytic tools.

Few recent phenomena have proved as emblematic of our era, and as little understood, as globalization. Are nation-states being transformed by... globalization into a single globalized economy? Do global cultural forces herald a postnational millennium? Tying ethnography to structural analysis, Flexible Citizenship explores such questions with a focus on the links between the cultural logics of human action and on economic and political processes within the Asia-Pacific, including the impact of these forces on women and family life.Explaining how intensified travel, communications, and mass media have created a transnational Chinese public, Aihwa Ong argues that previous studies have mistakenly viewed transnationality as necessarily detrimental to the nation-state and have ignored individual agency in the large-scale flow of people, images, and cultural forces across borders. She describes how political upheavals and global markets have induced Asian investors, in particular, to blend strategies of migration and of capital accumulation and how these transnational subjects have come to symbolize both the fluidity of capital and the tension between national and personal identities. Refuting claims about the end of the nation-state and about “the clash of civilizations,” Ong presents a clear account of the cultural logics of globalization and an incisive contribution to the anthropology of Asia-Pacific modernity and its links to global social change.This pioneering investigation of transnational cultural forms will appeal to those in anthropology, globalization studies, postcolonial studies, history, Asian studies, Marxist theory, and cultural studies.

The development of power semiconductors with greater ratings and improved characteristics has meant that the power industry has become more willing to... develop new converter configurations. These new configurations take advantage of the higher controllability and switching frequencies of the new devices. The next few years will decide which of the proposed technologies will dominate future power transmission systems.Flexible Power Transmission is a comprehensive guide to the high voltage direct current (HVDC) options available, helping the reader to make informed decisions for designing future power transmission systems. The book includes:a full description of the principles and components in existing converter technology, as well as alternative proposals for self-commutating conversion; A review of the state of power semiconductors suited to HVDC transmission and present proposals for multi-level HVDC transmission.a detailed overview of the flexible HVDC methods for improving controllability and increasing power transfer capability in electrical power systems.up-to-date information on thyrisistor-based HVDC technology.coverage of new pulse width modulation (PWM) transmission technology and multi-level voltage source conversion (VSC) and current source conversion (CSC).An excellent reference for professional power engineers, Flexible Power Transmission is also a useful guide for power system researchers as well as lecturers and students in power systems and power electronics disciplines.

In this landmark book, Preston Smith attributes the recent decline in innovation to pressure from financial markets that drives management toward rigid... development approaches such as phased development processes, Six Sigma, and project office. These processes have unintentionally (but effectively) made changes during development more difficult, disruptive, and expensive, while the need for change continues at an accelerating pace. Flexible Product Development is a hands-on resource that provides the tools and strategies needed to restore flexibility to any organization and remove the obstacles that stand in the way of responsive new product development. Preston Smith introduces approaches that can enhance development process flexibility by creating and maintaining development options, delaying decisions, and, in general, reducing the cost of change. Step-by-step, he explains the basics of flexible product development, provides a broad array of flexibility-enhancing tools, and guides the reader in modifying the organization?s values to embrace this new way of operating.