John Dobson – författare

This volume presents research, practical experiences, and ideas in data and database security. A variety of issues are considered including the methodology behind defining the needs of a secure database system, how these criteria can be achieved and the compromises which have to be made in reality in order to produce an efficient but secure database system. This book should be of interest to database researchers and applicators interested in database technology.

The first book ever to integrate business ethics with financial economics, Finance Ethics shows how ethical behavior fits within the rational, profit-maximizing, finance paradigm. Dobson argues that even in economic terms the finance paradigm has a serious flaw: it views the firm and financial markets in general as contractual nexuses yet it fails to supply any adequate mechanisms for enforcing those contractual relations. Finance Ethics is therefore not just a moral critique of the finance paradigm, arguing that self-interested profit making must be constrained by ethics. Rather, it is a critique from within that paradigm, in which truth becomes a rational mechanism to enforce contracts, and virtuous behavior is shown to make the most business sense.

Businesses that tend to flourish during any given time period usually reflect the aspirations and attitudes of the prevailing culture. More specifically, the managers within these businesses reflect these characteristics. The challenge to management therefore is to read and interpret subtle cultural shifts and to understand how these shifts impact the role of business in society. These facts beg the questions What is the prevailing culture of the twenty-first century going to be? and How is this culture going to be reflected in the attitudes and aspirations of business management? The author of this remarkable book argues that the dominant culture will best be described as aesthetic in nature. The manager views his or her role as essentially artistic, seeking excellence in the craft rather than the pursuit of profit as the highest good.Parts one and two describe the existing models of management, the technical manager and the moral manager, and explain why they are no longer suitable. Then, incorporating business ethics, postmodern theory, virtue-ethics theory, and examples drawn from industry, Dobson convincingly argues the emergence of a new management paradigm. Part three describes the new model of management as artistic and aesthetic enterprise and the manager as artisan. Business scholars and theorists, practicing managers, and students will all find this book fascinating and useful in preparing for business in the coming century.

London dispersion interactions are responsible for numerous phenomena in physics, chemistry and biology. Recent years have seen the development of new, physically well-founded models, and dispersion-corrected density functional theory (DFT) is now a hot topic of research. This book is an overview of current understanding of the physical origin and modelling of London dispersion forces manifested at an atomic level. It covers a wide range of system, from small intermolecular complexes, to organic molecules and crystalline solids, through to biological macromolecules and nanostructures. In presenting a broad overview of the of the physical foundations of dispersion forces, the book provides theoretical, physical and synthetic chemists, as well as solid-state physicists, with a systematic understanding of the origins and consequences of these ubiquitous interactions. The presentation is designed to be accessible to anyone with intermediate undergraduate mathematics, physics and chemistry.

This book brings together for the first time two important features of a computer system to be embedded in an organisational context: responsibility, meaning whether the computer system properly supports the organisational responsibilities that people are allocated; and dependability, which means whether it does so in a way that people can justifiably trust it to perform its operation correctly.Organisational responsibility is examined from philosophical, social and practical viewpoints, which then leads to a workflow design which supports those responsibilities. The approach pays particular attention to looking at what happens when things go wrong and the adjustments and workarounds that people make to fulfil their responsibilities when their primary operational tasks are unachievable or frustrated, and how these alternative strategies can be incorporated into the workflow design. The application of the method to multi-organisational contexts is dealt with in some detail.

This book brings together for the first time two important features of a computer system to be embedded in an organisational context: responsibility, meaning whether the computer system properly supports the organisational responsibilities that people are allocated; and dependability, which means whether it does so in a way that people can justifiably trust it to perform its operation correctly.Organisational responsibility is examined from philosophical, social and practical viewpoints, which then leads to a workflow design which supports those responsibilities. The approach pays particular attention to looking at what happens when things go wrong and the adjustments and workarounds that people make to fulfil their responsibilities when their primary operational tasks are unachievable or frustrated, and how these alternative strategies can be incorporated into the workflow design. The application of the method to multi-organisational contexts is dealt with in some detail.