Showing 1–12 of 302 results
Inception Point: The Use of Learning and Development to Reform the Singapore Public Service
Inception Point: The Use of Learning and Development to Reform the Singapore Public Service fills a gap in current literature on Singapore’s modernisation. While the political leadership of the late Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and his People’s Action Party (PAP) government were key to Singapore’s modernisation, the role of policy implementation was one shouldered by the Singapore Public Service, a story thus far neglected in literature.
Inception Point argues that the Singapore Public Service used executive development and training to introduce reforms across the bureaucracy. In so doing, the bureaucracy constantly adjusted itself to help modernise Singapore. In the 40 years between decolonisation in 1959 and 2001, when the training arm of the bureaucracy became a statutory board, training had been used firstly, to socialise the bureaucracy away from its colonial-era organisational culture to prepare it for the tasks of nation-building. Subsequently, civil servants were mobilised into an ‘economic general staff’ through training and development, to lead the Singapore developmental state in the 1970s and the 1980s. The Public Service for the 21st Century (PS21) reforms in the 1990s was the epitome in harnessing development and training for reforms across the bureaucracy.
Readership: Students and professionals interested in the history of the civil service in Singapore, interested in reforms for civil service in general.
Critical Issues in Asset Building in Singapore’s Development
Singapore’s progress as an independent nation and the uplifting of its people’s livelihood have been made possible by stable social and political conditions. A more important factor in driving these positive changes lies with people-centric leadership. One can contrast the case of Singapore with societies led by self-serving leaders whose lack of honesty and integrity brings about immense social and economic hardships to various communities. When people suffer under undesirable circumstances, they often migrate to seek better future for themselves and their families. This book reveals how Singapore’s governance grounded on the principle of asset building facilitates the country’s growth and development. Policies being discussed in this volume include multi-culturalism, accessible housing, social mobility for low-income families, water resource management, and national conscription. Highly relevant for students, policy makers and the general public interested in socio-political and economic development issues, this unique piece of work not only gives readers a documentary account of what has been undertaken to empower and assist citizens in the last 50 years or so, but also prompts them to reflect on Singapore’s future trajectory.
Seapower: A Guide for the Twenty-First Century 3rd Edition
$104.60This is the third, revised and fully updated, edition of Geoffrey Till’s Seapower: A Guide for the 21st Century. The rise of the Chinese and other Asian navies, worsening quarrels over maritime jurisdiction and the United States’ maritime pivot towards the Asia-Pacific region reminds us that the sea has always been central to human development as a source of resources, and as a means of transportation, information-exchange and strategic dominion. It has provided the basis for mankind’s prosperity and security, and this is even more true in the early 21st century, with the emergence of an increasingly globalized world trading system. Navies have always provided a way of policing, and sometimes exploiting, the system. In contemporary conditions, navies, and other forms of maritime power, are having to adapt, in order to exert the maximum power ashore in the company of others and to expand the range of their interests, activities and responsibilities. While these new tasks are developing fast, traditional ones still predominate. Deterrence remains the first duty of today’s navies, backed up by the need to ‘fight and win’ if necessary. How navies and their states balance these two imperatives will tell us a great deal about our future in this increasingly maritime century. This book investigates the consequences of all this for the developing nature, composition and functions of all the world’s significant navies, and provides a guide for anyone interested in the changing and crucial role of seapower in the 21st century. Seapower is essential reading for all students of naval power, maritime security and naval history, and highly recommended for students of strategic studies, international security and International Relations.
Balancing Green: When to Embrace Sustainability in a Business
An expert on business strategy offers a pragmatic take on how businesses of all sizes balance the competing demands of profitability and employment with sustainability. The demands and stresses on companies only grow as executives face a multitude of competing business goals. Their stakeholders are interested in corporate profits, jobs, business growth, and environmental sustainability. In this book, business strategy expert Yossi Sheffi offers a pragmatic take on how businesses of all sizes — from Coca Cola and Siemens to Dr. Bronner’s Magical Soaps and Patagonia — navigate these competing goals. Drawing on extensive interviews with more than 250 executives, Sheffi examines the challenges, solutions, and implications of balancing traditional business goals with sustainability. Sheffi, author of the widely read The Resilient Enterprise, argues that business executives’ personal opinions on environmental sustainability are irrelevant. The business merits of environmental sustainability are based on the fact that even the most ardent climate change skeptics in the C-suite face natural resource costs, public relations problems, regulatory burdens, and a green consumer segment. Sheffi presents three basic business rationales for corporate sustainability efforts: cutting costs, reducing risk, and achieving growth. For companies, sustainability is not a simple case of “profits versus planet” but is instead a more subtle issue of (some) people versus (other) people — those looking for jobs and inexpensive goods versus others who seek a pristine environment. This book aims to help companies satisfy these conflicting motivations for both economic growth and environmental sustainability.
Cocoa
Chocolate has long been a favorite indulgence. But behind every chocolate bar we unwrap, there is a world of power struggles and political maneuvering over its most important ingredient: cocoa. In this incisive book, Kristy Leissle reveals how cocoa, which brings pleasure and wealth to relatively few, depends upon an extensive global trade system that exploits the labor of five million growers, as well as countless other workers and vulnerable groups. The reality of this dramatic inequity, she explains, is often masked by the social, cultural, emotional, and economic values humans have placed upon cocoa from its earliest cultivation in Mesoamerica to the present day. Tracing the cocoa value chain from farms in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, through to chocolate factories in Europe and North America, Leissle shows how cocoa has been used as a political tool to wield power over others. Cocoa’s politicization is not, however, limitless: it happens within botanical parameters set by the crop itself, and the material reality of its transport, storage, and manufacture into chocolate. As calls for justice in the industry have grown louder, Leissle reveals the possibilities for and constraints upon realizing a truly sustainable and fulfilling livelihood for cocoa growers, and for keeping the world full of chocolate.
The Returned: They Left to Wage Jihad, Now They’re Back
Since 2012, hundreds have left Western countries to join jihadist groups fighting in Syria. Many are still there, many have been killed, but some have chosen to return to their countries of origin. In this remarkable book, journalist David Thomson has gathered their testimonies and analyses with nuance the factors that led to their radicalisation.
China’s Change: The Greatest Show on Earth
About the Author:
After graduating in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford in 1973, Hugh Peyman co-authored with Richard Hall The Great Uhuru Railway: China’s Showpiece in Africa (Gollancz 1976), then moved with Reuters in 1977 to Hong Kong before joining Asia’s leading business, politics and economics magazine the Far Eastern Economic Review where he worked in Hong Kong and Malaysia.
Peyman began over 35 years of investment research in 1981, heading Asian Research ex-Japan for Merrill Lynch and Dresdner Kleinwort Benson, based in Singapore, before founding Research-Works in 1999 to do independent long-term Asian research for global asset managers. He speaks to investors, companies and students about China. He has lived in Shanghai since 2002.
Bridges and Ruptures
“Breaches and Bridges : German Foreign Policy in Turbulent Times is an agenda-setting lecture of German Foreign Minister Dr. Frank-Walter Steinmeier. It is accompanied by two essays. The first is an insightful introduction by the first mayor of Hamburg, Olaf Scholz, who reflects on the role of the Hanseatic city in world affairs. The second is a brief contextualisation by Professor Amrita Narlikar, president of the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA). Narlikar identifies the necessity for a more profound understanding of historical trajectories and political traditions among international negotiating partners, and invokes new forms of leadership and cooperation in global governance. In Dr. Steinmeier’s speech, he announces the German candidacy for a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council and outlines German foreign policy with its cornerstones of peace, justice, innovation and partnership. In a period of global transition and turmoil, the world needs creative and feasible solutions. With its timely analysis, the book provides its readers with just such solutions. It does so by bridging the scholars-practitioners divide. The volume is a valuable reference for the international relations and foreign policy community worldwide. Written in both English and German, the book approaches a broad audience”–Provided by publisher.
Singapore Chronicles: Finance
$24.50Mr Ignatius Low spent 17 years at The Straits Times, Singapore’s national broadsheet. Starting as finance correspondent at the paper’s Money desk, he eventually rose to become Money Editor, News Editor and Deputy Editor. Prior to joining the paper in 1999, he spent four years in Singapore’s Administrative Service, where he was posted to the Ministry of Finance and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). During that time, he was involved in various aspects of the broad-ranging review of the financial sector conducted by the Financial Sector Review Group chaired
by then-Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. In 2011, he co-authored Sustaining Stability, Serving Singapore – a comprehensive account of MAS, commissioned for its 40th anniversary. Having left journalism in 2016, he is currently head of the Singapore Press Holdings’ integrated media solutions team.
Balancing Green: When to Embrace Sustainability in a Business
An expert on business strategy offers a pragmatic take on how businesses of all sizes balance the competing demands of profitability and employment with sustainability. The demands and stresses on companies only grow as executives face a multitude of competing business goals. Their stakeholders are interested in corporate profits, jobs, business growth, and environmental sustainability. In this book, business strategy expert Yossi Sheffi offers a pragmatic take on how businesses of all sizes — from Coca Cola and Siemens to Dr. Bronner’s Magical Soaps and Patagonia — navigate these competing goals. Drawing on extensive interviews with more than 250 executives, Sheffi examines the challenges, solutions, and implications of balancing traditional business goals with sustainability. Sheffi, author of the widely read The Resilient Enterprise, argues that business executives’ personal opinions on environmental sustainability are irrelevant. The business merits of environmental sustainability are based on the fact that even the most ardent climate change skeptics in the C-suite face natural resource costs, public relations problems, regulatory burdens, and a green consumer segment. Sheffi presents three basic business rationales for corporate sustainability efforts: cutting costs, reducing risk, and achieving growth. For companies, sustainability is not a simple case of “profits versus planet” but is instead a more subtle issue of (some) people versus (other) people — those looking for jobs and inexpensive goods versus others who seek a pristine environment. This book aims to help companies satisfy these conflicting motivations for both economic growth and environmental sustainability.
Thinking Ecologically about the Global Political Economy
This book aims to advance an ecologically grounded approach to International Political Economy (IPE). While there are many volumes that deal with various environmental aspects of IPE, there are none that really try to get to grips with the question of how thinking ecologically transforms our understanding of what IPE is and should be. Katz-Rosene and Paterson seek to address this lacuna. The volume shows the ways in which socio-ecological processes are integral to the themes treated by students and scholars of IPE – trade, finance, production, interstate competition, globalisation, inequalities, and the governance of all these, notably – and further that taking the ecological dimensions of these processes seriously transforms our understanding of them. Global capitalism has always been premised on the extraction, transformation and movement of what have become known as ‘natural resources’. Seeking to aid students and scholars, the authors provide a synthesis of ecological arguments regarding IPE and weaves them into an overall approach to be usable by others in the field. This synthesis will draw on basic ecological political ideas such as limits to growth and environmental justice, ideas in ecological economics, practices of ecological movements in the global economy, as well as key ideas from other political economic traditions relevant for developing an ecological approach. Providing a broad and critical introduction to international political economy from a distinctly ecological perspective, this work will be a valuable resource for students and scholars alike.
E W Barker: The People’s Minister
$45.40“Barker was not a natural politician – he lacked raw political ambition and the consuming passion of the ideologically driven. He was a natural leader – in sports, in school. He also had a first rate mind; he was a Queen’s Scholar. He was a renaissance gentleman and a human being comfortable in his own skin – no chip on the shoulder, nothing to prove and not one to seek out the political limelight. As such, one tends to forget how much he was a crucial element in our birth as a sovereign nation – this reluctant politician was the legal mid-wife of Singapore’s Separation and birth as an independent nation; the man who as Speaker shaped the conventions and order of a new Parliament; the man who as Minister was behind some of our most important nation-ilding endeavor like public housing, reclamation etc. Many remark how we remember the man that Eddie Barker was and forget he was a Minister because the human being in him was always so much larger and deeper and real than any institutional role he played at any one time. This book attempts to piece together the story of Eddie Barker – his deeds, his accomplishments and the extraordinary life he led being the man that he was – and just how much Singaporeans and Singapore have been the beneficiaries of it.” – Mr Benny Lim, former Permanent Secretary for National Development and former Permanent Secretary in the Prime Minister’s Office, who retired in April 2016