What drives or delivers engaged people? Employers need to focus on creating the right conditions. Employers can't impose engagement: people need to choose to engage themselves. In The Velvet Revolution at Work, the follow-up to his best-selling The CEO: Chief Engagement Officer, John Smythe explains that the essential ingredient of the right conditions is a culture of distributed leadership which enables people at work to liberate their creativity to deliver surprisingly good results for their institution and themselves. Using models, examples and anecdotes from his client research he goes on to demonstrate exactly how to design an engagement process; one that is integrated with your business strategy and that is sustainable.

What drives or delivers engaged people? Employers need to focus on creating the right conditions. Employers can't impose engagement: people need to choose to engage themselves. In The Velvet Revolution at Work, the follow-up to his best-selling The CEO: Chief Engagement Officer, John Smythe explains that the essential ingredient of the right conditions is a culture of distributed leadership which enables people at work to liberate their creativity to deliver surprisingly good results for their institution and themselves. Using models, examples and anecdotes from his client research he goes on to demonstrate exactly how to design an engagement process; one that is integrated with your business strategy and that is sustainable.

The vivid portratal of the "Velvet Revolution" describes the dramatic social and political changes that heralded the downfall of the Communist leadership in Czechoslavakia. Bernard Wheaton, one of the few Western observers in the country during the nonviolent change of government in November 1989, and Zdenek Kavan, himself a Czech, interweave firsthand description with interviews of student leaders, press accounts, and scholarly analysis of the historical antecedents of the revolution to bring the extraordinary events of 1989 to life. The authors also trace the evolution of change in Czechoslovakia, weighing the importance of the May 1990 elections and assessing political and social prospects for the future. The narrative is enriched with political cartoons and photographs.

Vaclav Havel spent most of his life as a dissident playwright in Communist-controlled Czechoslovakia. Born in 1936, Havel was a young child during World War II, as the Nazis occupied and brutalized Czechoslovakia. After the war, his country, along with the rest of Eastern Europe, fell under the control of the Soviet Union. A short period of liberalization in 1968, which came to be called the Prague Spring, was quickly ended by a brutal military crackdown. Havel's works, which were mostly protests against totalitarianism written in the form of absurdist drama, were officially banned in 1971. Frustrated by restrictions on his writing, Havel began to direct his anger toward political action. Then, in a climactic event that shocked the world, Czechoslovakia's Communist dictatorship collapsed in 1989 in what became known as the Velvet Revolution, and Havel, the country's most famous dissident, was made president. During a sometimes rocky tenure, Havel worked to bring stability to his country and presided over the peaceful division of Czechoslovakia into two democratic republics. Detailing one of the twentieth century's most unusual but dynamic political figures, this new biography of Vaclav Havel tells his intriguing and inspiring story for a new generation of readers. Book jacket.

Change in scientific practice and its implications for the status of scientific claims, examined through an analysis of three episodes at a synchrotron laboratory. After World War II, particle physics became a dominant research discipline in American academia. At many universities, alumni of the Manhattan Project and of Los Alamos were granted resources to start (or strengthen) programs of high-energy physics built around the promise of a new and more powerful particle accelerator, the synchrotron. The synchrotron was also a source of very intense X-rays, useful for research in solid states physics and in biology. As synchrotron X-ray science grew, the experimental practice of protein crystallography (used to determine the atomic structures of proteins and viruses), garnered funding, prestige, and acclaim. In Velvet Revolution at the Synchrotron, Park Doing examines the change in scientific practice at a synchrotron laboratory as biology rose to dominance over physics. He draws on his own observations and experiences at the Cornell University synchrotron, and considers the implications of that change for the status of scientific claims. Velvet Revolution at the Synchrotron is one of the few recent works in the sociology of science that engages specific scientific and technical claims through participant observation—recorded evocatively and engagingly—to address issues in the philosophy of science. Doing argues that bureaucratic change in science is neither “top-down” nor “bottom-up” but rather performed in and realized through recursively related forums of technical assertion and resistance. He considers the relationship of this change to the content of science, and the implications of this relationship for the project of laboratory studies begun in the late 1970s.

The Velvet Revolution in November 1989 brought about the collapse of the authoritarian communist regime in what was then Czechoslovakia, marking the beginning of the country's journey towards democracy. Though members of the elite have spoken about the transition to democracy, the experiences of ordinary people have largely gone untold. In Velvet Revolutions, Miroslav Vanek and Pavel Mücke examine the values of everyday citizens who lived under so-called real socialism, as well as how their values changed after the 1989 collapse. Based on 300 interviews, Vanek and Mücke give voice to everyone from farmers to managers, service workers to marketing personnel, manual laborers to members of the armed forces. Compelling and diverse, the oral histories touch upon the experience - and absence - of freedom, the value of family and friends, the experience of free time, and perceptions of foreign nations. Data from opinion polls conducted between 1970 and 2013 factor into the book's analysis, creating a well-rounded view of the ways in which popular thoughts, trends, and attitudes changed as Czech society transitioned from communism to democracy. From this rich foundation, Velvet Revolutions builds a multi-layered view of Czech history before 1989 and during the subsequent period of democratic transformation.

In April 2018, Armenia experienced a remarkable popular uprising leading to the resignation of Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan and his replacement by protest leader Nikol Pashinyan. Evoking Czechoslovakia's similarly peaceful overthrow of communism 30 years previously, the uprising came to be known as Armenia's 'Velvet Revolution': a broad-based movement calling for clean government, democracy and economic reform. This volume examines how a popular protest movement, showcasing civil disobedience as a mass strategy for the first time in the post-Soviet space, overcame these unpromising circumstances. Situating the events in Armenia in their national, regional and global contexts, different contributions evaluate the causes driving Armenia's unexpected democratic turn, the reasons for regime vulnerability and the factors mediating a non-violent outcome. Drawing on comparative perspectives with democratic transitions across the world, this book will be essential reading for those interested in the regime dynamics, social movements and contested politics of contemporary Eurasia, as well as policy-makers and practitioners in the fields of democracy assistance and human rights in an increasingly multipolar world.