A bank's asset and liability management committee or risk management committee is responsible for the overall financial planning and management of the bank's profitability and risk profile. This book emphasizes how managers can develop strategies to maximize stockholders wealth by balancing the trade-off between banking risks and returns.

Using the economic perspective, this exciting text offers an alternative view to sociological or art historic approaches to art. The issues discussed include: institutions from festivals to "superstar" museums, different means of supporting the arts, an investigation into art as an investment, and the various approaches applied when valuing our cultural properties. This text challenges widely held popular views and, once started, is difficult to put down.

Air Transport: A Tourism Perspective provides rigorous insights into the current complexities, synergies and conflicts within air transportation and tourism, presenting a balanced, comprehensive, contemporary, and global analysis that thoroughly examines the links between theory and practice. The book offers readers a multi-sector, global perspective on the practical implications of the link between air transport and tourism. By using a novel approach, it systematically explores the successive stages of a tourist's trip-investigating reasons for flying, the airport experience, airline industry structures, competition and regulation, and air transportation and destination interrelationships. In addition, the book explores current and salient debates on such issues as the influence of traveling to visit friends and family, the role of charters versus low cost carriers, public subsidies to support airport development, and much more.

The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Research Methods provides a rich resource for organizational researchers, locating the technical aspects of organizational research in the wider context of the relevant personal, epistemological, theoretical, historical, ethical, and political issues. David Buchanan and Alan Bryman have gathered together many of the world's leading writers on theory, method, and analysis in organizational research and have made this the most comprehensive and cutting-edge volume in this ever-growing field.

Dynamic Behavior of Materials, Volume 1 represents the first of nine volumes of technical papers presented at the Society for Experimental Mechanics SEM 15th International Congress & Exposition on Experimental and Applied Mechanics, held at Costa Mesa, California, June 8-11, 2015. The full set of proceedings also includes volumes on: Challenges in Mechanics of Time Dependent Materials, Advancement of Optical Methods in Experimental Mechanics, Experimental and Applied Mechanics 16th International Symposium on MEMS and Nanotechnology, 5th International Symposium on the Mechanics of Biological Systems and Materials, International Symposium on the Mechanics of Composite and Multi-functional Materials, Fracture, Fatigue, Failure and Damage Evolution; and Residual Stress, Thermomechanics & Infrared Imaging, Hybrid Techniques and Inverse Problems.

A growing number of organizations are meta-organizations; rather than individuals they have other organizations as their members. This comprehensive book explains, in-depth, the unique way in which meta-organizations function, how they differ from organizations with individual membership, and how they are crucial agents in the process of globalization. Göran Ahrne and Nils Brunsson combine the fields of organization theory and international relations in a new way. They portray a theory based on insights from organization studies that is also used to explain and understand international organizations. This theory creates new possibilities to analyze meta-organizations such as the EU and the UN and compare them to other meta-organizations such as national trade associations, sport federations and international non-governmental organizations. The authors point out striking similarities between all these organizations that have never been discovered before, including the conditions for membership, identity formation and decision-making. The book opens a whole new area for organizational research. It will be essential reading for researchers and postgraduate students interested in organization theory, globalization, politics and organizations, or international organizations.

Evaluation researchers are tasked with providing the evidence to guide programme building and to assess its outcomes. As such, they labour under the highest expectations - bringing independence and objectivity to policy making. They face huge challenges, given the complexity of modern interventions and the politicised backdrop to all of their investigations. They have responded with a huge portfolio of research techniques and, through their professional associations, have set up schemes to establish standards for evaluative inquiry and to accredit evaluation practitioners. A big question remains. Has this monumental effort produced a progressive, cumulative and authoritative body of knowledge that we might think of as evaluation science? This is the question addressed by Ray Pawson in this sequel to Realistic Evaluation and Evidence-based Policy. In answer, he provides a detailed blueprint for an evaluation science based on realist principles.