David Sims – författare

There is a great deal of interest in churches across the UK, US and Europe about applying ideas from the world of leadership and management to Christian ministry. There are those who wish to apply (sometimes quite uncritically) mechanistic approaches which they hope will enable churches to be run in a more ‘business-like’ manner. There are also those who argue that insights from organizational studies have no place whatsoever in churches.This innovative and original book builds on qualitative thinking about organizational narrative and argues that it can provide significant insights into how churches function, which is much more in keeping with their ethos and history. As well as analysing how stories and storytelling work in churches it also provides practical ideas for how they can be used to improve church leadership. Taking the work of organizational thinkers and researchers and bringing it into conversation with biblical scholars, theologians, and church historians, the authors establish a conversation across these disciplines and explore how story and narrative work through and within churches.Table of Contents:1. What Is Leadership? 2. Leading the Stories and Storying the Leading 3. Stories and Identities: Story, Character and Becoming 4. Living in Multiple Stories 5. Who Owns the Story? 6. Church Narratives: Interpretive Stories 7. Church Narratives: Identity Stories 8. Church Narratives: Improvised Stories9. Curating Congregational Stories in a Tick Box Church?Conclusion: Ten Ideas for Leading By Story in Churches

Exploring Identity brings together leading thinkers from around the world in an exploration of identity as a key concept in understanding the dynamics of organizations and the people who inhabit them. It develops key themes in current research and demonstrates the significance of identity studies to the real world.

This book examines the landscape archaeology of the Second World War on the section of the east coast of England known as the Suffolk Sandlings (the coastal strip from Lowestoft to Felixstowe), an area unusually rich in military archaeology. It was in the front line of Britain's defences against invasion throughout the war and as a training ground it was the setting for nationally important exercises in the lead-up to the D-Day landings. In 1944 it also played a major role in Operation 'Diver', the defence against the flying bomb. The Sandlings is therefore an ideal testbed for much wider questions about the militarisation of the landscape during the Second World War. This important new study considers how this area was transformed in the course of the conflict by synthesising an extensive range of sources, including the physical remains of defences and training, aerial photographs, the war diaries of military units on the coast, oral history and artistic representations. What emerges is the most detailed account to date of a coastal landscape during the Second World War.A highly innovative interdisciplinary study, this holistic approach reveals in astonishing detail the struggle to build defences in 1940, the dramatic reorganisation of those defences in 1941? 2 and the slow transformation of the military landscape from one of defence to one where troops prepared for the offensive. The reader is shown not just a new view of the wartime landscape, but a new methodology for the study of conflict landscapes more broadly; in this the book makes a major contribution to scholarship.Richly illustrated with plans, maps and wartime photographs - many published for the first time - the book presents a vivid picture of a landscape in a crucial period in its history and will be of great interest to military historians, landscape archaeologists and all those with an interest in the area.

With a particular focus on Egypt, radical questions are posed on how global aid and development can be improved, including how it can respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. This book aims to present an alternative aid framework to help overcome the dysfunctionality of the current international development system.

With a particular focus on Egypt, radical questions are posed on how global aid and development can be improved, including how it can respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. This book aims to present an alternative aid framework to help overcome the dysfunctionality of the current international development system.

This book moves beyond superficial generalizations about Cairo as a chaotic metropolis in the developing world into an analysis of the ways the city’s eighteen million inhabitants have, in the face of a largely neglectful government, built and shaped their own city. Using a wealth of recent studies on Greater Cairo and a deep reading of informal urban processes, the city and its recent history are portrayed and mapped: the huge, spontaneous neighborhoods; housing; traffic and transport; city government; and its people and their enterprises. The book argues that understanding a city such as Cairo is not a daunting task as long as pre-conceived notions are discarded and care is taken to apprehend available information and to assess it with a critical eye. In the case of Cairo, this approach leads to a conclusion that the city can be considered a kind of success story, in spite of everything.

Egypt has placed its hopes on developing its vast and empty deserts as the ultimate solution to the country's problems. New cities, new farms, new industrial zones, new tourism resorts, and new development corridors, all have been promoted for over half a century to create a modern Egypt and to pull tens of millions of people away from the increasingly crowded Nile Valley into the desert hinterland. The results, in spite of colossal expenditures and ever-grander government pronouncements, have been meager at best, and today Egypt's desert is littered with stalled schemes, abandoned projects, and forlorn dreams. It also remains stubbornly uninhabited. Egypt's Desert Dreams is the first attempt of its kindto look at Egypt's desert development in its entirety. It recounts the failuresof governmental schemes, analyzes why they have failed, and exposes the main winners of Egypt's desert projects, as well as the underlying narratives and political necessities behind it, even in the post-revolutionary era. It also shows that all is not lost, and that there are alternative paths that Egypt could take.