Organizations are caught in clichés. This means that they do not think for themselves anymore, but rather simply copy pre-existing ideas. This is giving rise to a world which pretends to be knowable, predictable and mouldable, one in which clichés like efficiency, transparency, means-ends rationality, and the strong leader are used without further thought or critique. This is the reason why organizations come into conflict with themselves, and which causes a seemingly unresolvable crisis. Film, however, can show us a totally different world. It has a subversive potency that can wake up the viewer, making them think again, allowing them to see a world which cannot be perceived anymore. It can show the world as it really is again, and can enable us to break through clichés. This book adopts a unique viewpoint on organizations, through its use of film. With the help of philosophers like Deleuze, Heidegger and Sloterdijk, filmmakers like the Coen Brothers, Cronenberg, Antonioni and Tarkovsky and films like The Big Lebowski, eXistenZ, Stalker and Playtime, a world is revealed and explored. It shows the decisive role played by architecture, and why managers are manipulative and impotent at the same time.

For decades, social perspectives, and even academic studies of language, have considered clichés as a hackneyed, tired, lazy, unthinking and uninspiring form of communication. Authored by two established scholars in the fields of Systemic-Functional Linguistics and Discourse Studies and Pragmatics, this cutting-edge book comprehensively explores the perception and use of clichés in language from these complementary perspectives. It draws data from a variety of both written and spoken sources, to re-interrogate and re-imagine the nature, role and usage of clichés, identifying the innovative and creative ways in which the concepts are utilised in communication, interaction, and in self-presentation. Observing a rich, complex layering of usage, the authors deconstruct the many and varied ways in which clichés operate and are interdependently constructed; from the role they play in discourse in general, to their functions as argumentative strategies, as constructs of social cognition, as politeness strategies, and finally as markers of identity.

This collection examines the work of the Italian economist and social theorist Vilfredo Pareto, highlighting the extraordinary scope of his thought, which covers a vast range of academic disciplines. The volume underlines the enduring and contemporary relevance of Pareto's ideas on a bewildering variety of topics; while illuminating his attempt to unite different disciplines, such as history and sociology, in his quest for a 'holistic' understanding of society. Bringing together the world's leading experts on Pareto, this collection will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of sociology and social psychology, monetary theory and risk analysis, philosophy and intellectual history, and political science and rhetoric.

Drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives developed in and around the work of Barthes, Kristeva, Genette and Derrida, Dr Prendergast explores approaches to the concept of mimesis and relates these to a number of narrative texts produced in the period which literary history familiarly designates as the age of realism.

This collection of essays exposes points of queerness, marginality, and alterity present in the German canon and introduces further deviation from traditional German literature and culture in the form of openly lesbian and gay works. It provides new queer analyses of texts by canonical authors such as Goethe, Schiller. Thomas and Klaus Mann, Ingeborg Bachmann, Christa Reinig, and Elfriede Jelinek, yet discusses works that have seldom received scholarly attention. It also breaks the traditional limitation of Germanistik to the study of literature by including essays on aspects of German culture such as music, film, fine art and art history, and politics and law.