"The inaugural Asia Pacific Research Conference on Project Management was held in February 2010 at Monash University, Australia"--Back cover.

Regarded as one of the most influential works in the field of sociology, this book provides a comprehensive framework for understanding the social world. The author dissects the complex interplay between social structures, cultural patterns, and individual behavior, and presents a nuanced view of society as a constantly evolving system. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

We live in the worlds that we help to create every day. Every activity either supports an existing system or effects some change, however small. But is it possible to consciously create the worlds in which we want to live? This volume brings together systems theorists and practitioners who have worked on that question for decades. It explores connections between design and systems ideas to explain why some efforts have been more successful than others, and what is needed if we are to move forward. It offers reflections on early and large-scale attempts at impacting societal systems, as well as proposals for taking those ideas into the future. Examples date back to the Club of Rome in the 1960s and look forward to the creation of ecologically sustainable systems in the future. They address the need for collaboration and inclusion in settings from communities to corporations. And while theories are presented as support for the examples, they are explained in practical ways meant to be accessible both to students and to general readers.

Organizations regularly assume that the culture, values, dynamic and organization of their temporary project organizations are merely a smaller version of the original parent. Given that project organizations are made up of people and teams drawn, in most cases, from outside and inside the parent, these assumptions are nonsensical. But they do explain why the HR function finds it difficult to adapt to the project environment. Martina Huemann's research in Human Resource Management in the Project-Oriented Organization, offers insight into an approach that is designed to align HR to the needs of the project organization, in terms of management structure, reward, recruitment and performance systems. The text analyses how the modern HR organization stacks up alongside the temporary organization that is the project, to identify the HR constraints and needs of the project organisation and offer a model of project-oriented HRM. Professor Huemann had a deep interest in how and why change processes come into existence and how to design and enable them. In her book she endeavors to bridge theory and practice, strategy and operations.

This is the definitive analysis of art as a social and perceptual system by Germany's leading social theorist of the late 20th century. It combines three decades of research in the social sciences, phenomenology, evolutionary biology, cybernetics, and information theory with an intimate knowledge of art history, literature, aesthetics, and contemporary literary theory.

Organizations regularly assume that the culture, values, dynamic and organization of their temporary project organizations are merely a smaller version of the original parent. Given that project organizations are made up of people and teams drawn, in most cases, from outside and inside the parent, these assumptions are nonsensical. But they do explain why the HR function finds it difficult to adapt to the project environment. Martina Huemann's research in Human Resource Management in the Project-Oriented Organization, offers insight into an approach that is designed to align HR to the needs of the project organization, in terms of management structure, reward, recruitment and performance systems. The text analyses how the modern HR organization stacks up alongside the temporary organization that is the project, to identify the HR constraints and needs of the project organisation and offer a model of project-oriented HRM. Professor Huemann had a deep interest in how and why change processes come into existence and how to design and enable them. In her book she endeavors to bridge theory and practice, strategy and operations.

Parra-Luna (politics and sociology, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain) presents 18 contributions which attempt to build models that can measure and analyze output/input quotients of global efficiency (i.e., satisfaction in goals) in the study of complex social systems--a topic which he argues has been incomprehensibly ignored by the social sciences. The papers are organized into sections on the definition of values, models for defining social performance, and operational approaches to the concept of social performance. Some articles explore the topic from the perspective of the global system, while others focus on specific areas within the social system. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR