Review of Kobo Abe’s The Face of Another

It was T.S. Eliot who wrote “Between the thought and action, between motion and the act falls the shadow.” The shadow, when the thought and the action are interactions with another, may be considered to be the face–not just the physical face, although a person without a face appears monstrous indeed but, also, the face as a measure of personal status and the creation of identity. Japan is one of the East Asian countries in which “face” is a measure of the individual and the ability of the individual to be treated with respect and dignity as a person who has accumulated physical and personal resources which may be mediated between the essence of the individual and the world.

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Review of Sihanouk Reminisces: World Leaders I Have Known

Norodom Sihanouk was King of Cambodia from WWII until the Lon Nol coup in 1970 (apart from a brief period when he abdicated in favour of his father) and enjoyed 45 years of statesmanship–that lengthy and extraordinary career, in which he tried and failed to keep Cambodia an independent and peaceful country, is recounted in part in this memoir. Taking as a basic theme the use of charisma in leadership, Sihanouk recounts some of those leaders he has met and the charisma that they exhibited. The two great heroes he has are General De Gaulle and Chou En Lai.

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Management of Employee Development : A Case Study of the Telecommunications Sector in Thailand

Announcing: 

Southiseng, Nittana and John Walsh, “Management of Employee Development : A Case Study of the Telecommunications Sector in Thailand,” pp.92-112, Humanities and Social Sciences (2009), Vol.26, No.2, available at: http://www.huso.kku.ac.th/thai/hsJournal/journal/26-2.pdf.

Abstract:

After the introduction of the Build-Transfer-Operate (BTO) concessions in the late 1980s and Thailand’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, competition among the telecoms operators in the Thai domestic market intensified. The telecoms operators (for example, TOT, CAT, AIS, DTAC, True Move, Hutch, Shin Satellite and SAMART) have been competing in product/service innovation and development, and are committed to investing in the development of their employees. This paper applies a qualitative research method with indepth interviews to explore the strategies that the telecoms operators have used for enhancing their employee development (ED). Fifteen in-depth interviews were conducted with human resource management (HRM) and human resource development (HRD) managers as well as employees in the telecoms market of Thailand. It was found that both HRM and HRD have been widely used in helping telecoms companies strengthen and use their existing employees’ knowledge and talents. Both were involved in strengthening personnel, retaining their talent and integrating employee skills as part of organizational performance improvement. At the same time, the convergence of employee engagement, teamwork, flexibility, effective communications, continuous learning and opportunistic schemes were found to add positive value to sustainable

 

ED.

Things I Learned by Googling Myself for a Year

Other writers will be aware that, from time to time, stories and articles one has written appear elsewhere on the internet – sometimes with permission and sometimes without. To keep track of what was published, I set up a Google Alert which, every day, tells me some of the times my name newly appears. Of course, there is also an element of egoism in doing this.

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Review of Kermode’s The Age of Shakespeare

Although the opposite is often assumed, it is surprising quite how much we know of the life of Shakespeare, not least how much we do not know. The limits of knowledge have been more or less fixed and such sophisticated measures as computer analysis of texts and manuscripts is employed to try to expand that knowledge (or reduce the gaps) in a systematic and reliable way.

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Review of Faure’s China and Capitalism

Why did China, for the centuries the world’s richest, most developed, and most sophisticated society, fall behind the west in the age of the industrial revolution? Many authors have considered this conundrum (none perhaps as interestingly and influentially as Kenneth Pomeranz) and provided a variety of partial explanations, often referring to specific technical or historical issues or, less convincingly, some kind of culture-based argument.

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Review of Zizek’s First as Tragedy, then as Farce

The bad boy of philosophy, Slavoj Zizek arouses strong emotions wherever he goes, relentlessly talkative and so full of provocative opinions they appear to burst out of him as if by some sort of mechanistic device beyond his control. When, as is often the case, he talks or writes about the psychoanalysis of Lacan or the philosophy of Hegel and Marx, his impact is somewhat limited to the now limited circle of people able and willing enough to understand what he is saying to be outraged or inspired.

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Review of The Gates of Anubis

Mysterious and rather unpleasant Egyptian sorcerors have exploited holes in space and time to try to bring about their goals–ending the hated colonization of Egypt by the British notable amongst them. To do this, agents (in fact magically created doppelgangers known as ka) travel around Britain pursuing long-term plans that will bring the schemes and plots of the British crown to naught. Bringing other people into these plots is, of course, deeply necessary and so Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron and other less salubrious and famous characters litter the plot, in one way or another.

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The 4400: Tom Baldwin Does Not Exist

One of the more curious aspects of the science fiction television series The 4400 is the way that, increasingly as the story progressed, the main characters stopped responding to the bizarre and frightening events around them but instead responded to other people responding. The two principal NTAC protagonists (a form of Department of National Security), Skouros and Baldwin, the latter especially, always look at each other or someone else rather than the person talking to them.

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Humiliating Rejection Letter Comments I Have Received

As writers, we have to face the regular litany of rejection letters (even the best of us faces this problem occasionally). A few minutes ago I opened a reviewed manuscript which included the phrase ‘many passages are copied and pasted’ and this struck me as particularly (and needlessly) irritating. I have never copied and pasted in my life and I spend hours and hours telling my students to avoid doing it as well

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