Beyond Perceptions Crafting Meaning

Researching accounting’s participation in financial regulation, banking practices, managerial incentives and environmental disclosures this volume presents scholarly work adopting interdisciplinary approaches in auditing and accountability realms.

How do public spaces generate accountability and advance social equity? Stimulating the conversation, this volume explores the creation of meaning, the increasing confrontation between regulators and the community they are purported to serve, and the prevalent conflicts in seeking a balancing of social and economic interests.

Natural languages – idioms such as English and Cantonese, Zulu and Amharic, Basque and Nicaraguan Sign Language – allow their speakers to convey meaning and transmit meaning to one another. But what is meaning exactly? What is this thing that words convey and speakers communicate? Few questions are as elusive as this. Yet, few features are as essential to who we are and what we do as human beings as the capacity to convey meaning through language. In this book, Gaetano Fiorin and Denis Delfitto disclose a notion of linguistic meaning that is structured around three distinct, yet interconnected dimensions: a linguistic dimension, relating meaning to the linguistic forms that convey it; a material dimension, relating meaning to the material and social conditions of its environment; and a psychological dimension, relating meaning to the cognitive lives of its users. By paying special attention to the puzzle surrounding first-person reference – the way speakers exploit language to refer to themselves – and by capitalizing on a number of recent findings in the cognitive sciences, Fiorin and Delfitto develop the original hypothesis that meaningful language shares the same underlying logical and metaphysical structure of sense perception, effectively acting as a system of classification and discrimination at the interface between cognitive agents and their ecologies.

For the first time, this book demonstrates that the two paradigms of architectural criticism and performance evaluation can not only co-exist but complement each other in the assessment of built works. As architecture takes more principled stances worldwide, from environmental sustainability to social, cultural, and economic activism, this book examines the roles of perceived and measured quality in architecture. By exploring in tandem both subjective traditional architectural criticism and environmental design and performance evaluation and its objective evaluation criteria, the book argues that both methodologies and outcomes can achieve a comprehensive assessment of quality in architecture. Curated by a global editorial team, the book includes: Contributions from international architects and critics based in the UK, USA, Brazil, France, Qatar, Egypt, New Zealand, China, Japan and Germany Global case studies which illustrate both perspectives addressed by the book and comparative analyses of the findings A six part organization which includes introductions and conclusions from the editors, to help guide the reader and further illuminate the contributions. By presenting a systematic approach to assessing building performance, design professionals will learn how to improve building design and performance with major stakeholders in mind, especially end users/occupants.

To find out why reasonable people are drawn to the seemingly bizarre practices of magic and witchcraft, Luhrmann immersed herself in the arcane world of Londoners who call themselves magicians. Her report is as fascinating as the esoteric world itself. Illustrated.

A big house, fancy cars, and money in the bank seldom lead to a fulfilling life, a life true to one's potential and essential nature. Ordinary life can be a prison, but it doesn't have to be that way. In this updated edition of The Craft of the Warrior, author Robert Spencer asserts that a new myth is emerging—one that guides people to a life of conscious living, where they escape the rat race and forge a new destiny based on real choice. The warrior's way leads from compulsion to freedom, from boredom to adventure, and from darkness to awareness. Synthesizing the works of Carlos Castaneda, Dan Millman, G.I. Gurdjieff, and Chogyam Trungpa, and combining personal growth processes including the Feldenkrais Method and Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Spencer opens the gate to anyone with enough spunk to enter this way of life. "The amount of free will we have is directly proportional to the degree of freedom we have from our compulsions," writes Spencer. "Getting that freedom is the task of the warrior's life."

Simultaneously a handbook and a critique of one, Beyond Craft combines an orientation to the field of creative writing with an insight into current scholarship surrounding creative writing pedagogy. A much-needed alternative to the traditional craft guide, this text pairs advice and exercises on composition with an illuminating commentary on the issues surrounding these very techniques. Teaching the craft whilst apprising students of the issues of craft pedagogy, this book allows them to gain an awareness of how current pedagogy comes at the expense of larger and increasingly relevant cultural concerns. Westbrook and Ryan bring emerging writers into the larger conversations that define the field, inviting them to: - Contextualize their own writing practices and educational experiences in relation to the history of creative writing as an academic discipline. - Determine how New Critical lore and Romantic mythology may affect-even distort-their understanding of literary production. - Critically examine their notions of authorship, collaboration, and invention in relation to contemporary literary and rhetorical theory. - Understand and evaluate the economic, social, political, and professional challenges facing creative writers today. - Analyze the contemporary literary marketplace not only to identify potential publication contexts but also to understand how issues of diversity and bias affect writing communities. - Reflect on how increasingly rapid technological developments may affect their own writing and the future of literature. Earnestly self-aware throughout, Beyond Craft both inducts new writers into the field of creative writing and infuses them with an understanding of the wider dialogue surrounding their craft.

Having been mentored by Viktor E. Frankl, the founder of logotherapy, Emeritus Professor David Guttmann authored this book so general readers may understand this approach to finding meaning in life at the point when most of us begin deeply wondering over that question, at midlife and beyond. Especially in this day and age of multiple demands on our time and seemingly non-stop obligations, we too often find that it is only when the dust settles, after a work day or work week, or even after retirement, when we begin to wonder: What is the meaning of life? The purpose? This book is a new millennium venture into those questions and their answers using logotherapy, written by a sage understudy who recalls Frankl, with his logotherapy, as the epitome of his theory even at 80 years old, wise and witty, exuding an energy, enthusiasm and youthful spirit that belied his years by decades. Aging does not diminish our power, our energy, and our quest for life, but reshapes it with new understandings, goals, and needs. But, says Guttmann, we live in a technical and machine-based world now, in which there is a danger of losing our souls. Here, readers find a new, creative perspective on aging and a fresh spiritual outlook. This book will be of interest not only to general readers, especially those at midlife and beyond, but also to their families, friends, and students or professionals in the helping professions. This unique work provides knowledge to find meaning in life derived from the fields of philosophy, psychology, religion and gerontology, with case illustrations and vignettes to give readers both intellectual pleasure and practical guidance.

Plant-centred issues are fundamental in the definitions and explanations of the Neolithic as a phenomenon.The meeting of the Neolithic Studies Group from which this volume developed aimed to provide a forum for the wide range of approaches now applied to Neolithic archaeobotany at site and landscape scales of resolution.