Luke Strongman – författare

This book is a critical and practical guide to the aspects of public relations in the everyday business world. It explores key thematical trends and developments within the public relations and reputation management fields. Public relations is essential to any business or organisational entity; it is a part of what they do in performing their function and it is a part of what helps them to perform their function. Pubic relation is what links organisations' values and products to their stakeholders as well as to the market and social drivers that sustain them. Public relations practitioners are change-merchants. That is, they like to shift public opinion and bring about new attitudes and behaviours. Including chapters that discuss issues such as crisis management, negotiation, networking, and branding, this book delves beneath the surface activity to reveal the theory behind the practice. This will be an accessible, interesting book that will appeal to broaden general readership, including a wide variety of everyday business viewpoints.

Reconstructions is a book about international development and several of its conceptual, theoretical, and some of its practical and behavioural facets. It is an exploratory introduction to the subject for tertiary students and an advanced general readership. It is a book of ‘field theory.’ This term is derived from two meanings. The first is ‘fieldwork’ and its associations with the attempt to provide a structure where one did not previously exist; and secondly, to draw on experience that is gained from information derived from practical settings and established knowledge. Hence, the theory developed in the book has bearings from real-world referents, secondary though those sometimes might be. Through different lenses – macro, conceptual, abstract, political, scientific and behavioural – Reconstructions: An Introduction to International Development Studies explores concepts that inform both the foreground (by identifying issues and concerns) and background (by explaining theory and concepts) of international development work. Reconstructions is also partially a book about alternative development, in as much as it critiques certain aspects of conventional development theory and advocates a people-centred, sustainable development. Models of International Development might change, and need to do so to respond to different political, social, generational, androgogical and environmental differences. A constant human factor is the relationship of people to their environment and the desire to improve it in social, economic and resource-conscious ways. Hence, the basis of Reconstructions: An Introduction to International Development Studies concerns the relation of people to the environment from a developmental perspective.

BCD. Business Communication Digitally is a book for today's and tomorrow's business practitioner and student that is structured into eleven chapters, each dealing with topics salient for aspects of business practice in the digital age. The constant need to innovate, to communicate ahead of time, to perform a service or supply a product on the promise of the future transaction, informs much about business practice. After all, what is business acumen based on but the difference between realities and contingencies, the tangible and the intangible? Most business communication in the digital world of today and tomorrow will either take place face to face or technologically mediated (by phone, email, video conference, text, etc.). More mediated business communication is taking place because of the ubiquitous availability of new distal technologies that are compatible with the office PC - social media, Skype, Yammer, etc. It is now possible to video-call a colleague almost anywhere in the world via internet connection. With the ubiquitous use of social media technology as one form of mass communication, social presence and media effects become relevant to mass communication that are encountered in the business world. The chapters of BCD are developed on a progression of themes. opportunity; creativity; equality and sustainability; negotiation; patience; listening; recognition; trust; intangibles; social presence; and digital media. These themes combine to engender a sense of situatedness in a world of doing.

The Steel Registry. Characters of Crime Fiction is a celebration of the genre of detective fiction and detective fiction characters. Beginning with the earliest eighteenth and nineteenth century crime fiction and concluding with leading contemporary exponents of the genre, the history and development of detective fiction is traced through vignettes of seventy-five crime and detective fiction characters derived from the famous novels of the genre. Famous detective fiction characters and the authors who created them are celebrated through brief descriptive and exploratory synopses - including luminaries such as Conan-Doyle, Christie, Sayers, Chandler, Hammett, Marsh, Fleming, Stark, Le Carre, Dexter, Follett, Ludlum, Paretsky, Rankin, Burke, Ellroy, Dibdin, Grisham, Temple, Childe, Reichs, Hayder, James, Larsson, Galbraith, Hurwitz, and many more. This book explores the many reasons for reading crime fiction, not the least of them being the vast variety of literature that the genre embraces. The book also celebrates the "e;heroes and heroines"e; of detective fiction, describing in brief the nuances of their characters. Through the pleasures of reading about the challenges these heroes and heroines face, their attempts to stay human in a world which often lacks humanity, the genre of crime fiction also contributes to "e;good"e; literature, the stuff of "e;lit crit"e; or literary criticism, and so it can also be read with considerations of the development of style and genre. The Steel Registry explores this purer motive as well as the perhaps more usual escapism or sheer enjoyment, being beguiled, being captivated, being grabbed by the throat with a page-turning intensity, that is characteristic of the stimulating novels of the detective fiction genre and the characters of crime fiction created by their inspired authors.

The chapters of this book discuss in differing ways the transition in the second millennium of the Common Era from the Renaissance, through Enlightenment and subsequently, Romanticism, with a focus in Europe and the Pacific from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The book highlights salient features of each movement, using examples from the lives and works of critical exponents of each - artists, poets, playwrights, philosophers, engineers, navigators, and explorers. The aim has been to impart knowledge of each period, describe characteristics of the way in which the three movements transitioned from one to another through a particular thematic or topical focus, and outline central terms and concepts pertaining to them. In doing so, it is clear that the period of European and Pacific history that spanned the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries brought tremendous change on the human psyche and saw unprecedented development of industry, culture, arts, science and a flowering of the human imagination as well as a strengthening of the human capacity for reason. The Renaissance, and the transition between Enlightenment and Romanticism was indeed, a 'firstlight' after the long dark ages in Europe, America and the Pacific West; it provided the impetus for the forces of change that impel progress in the present day. To make 'observations' of key figures and texts at various stages and events of the half-millennia in focus is also to reveal the perplexing change, society and human understanding of it was undergoing and to explore critical ideas and inventions of art and science that shaped the modern world.

The Silver Conclave presents a critical analysis and reflection on fifty heroes, heroines and villains of English and American literature, folklore, history, film and graphic art. The characters are discussed as individual figures critiqued from the novels and narratives of their authors' invention. The chronology of characters spans from the eleventh century and the English legend of the robber-prince 'Robin of Sherwood,' to Ian Fleming's suave double-agent James Bond, who has battled forces of corruption for MI6 in fiction and in film since the mid-twentieth century, to J. K. Rowling's intelligent modern witch, Hermione Granger, from the ever-popular 'Potterverse' in the early twenty-first century. Individually, or as a collection of character and plot summaries or vignettes, a range of characters are presented who have enlightened (or darkened) the popular imagination in novels, television and film. The narrative of The Silver Conclave is chronological, providing discussion about heroic and villainous figures primarily from English and American literary sources, arranged according to the year of publication.

Mind over Matter explores issues in popular psychology and science that are firstly concerned with the evolution of the human species and, more particularly, of the human mind and its functioning; secondly, it discusses how people orientate to their environments and react through communication and discourse. It will also explore some interesting bisecting roads of neural functioning, such as the purpose of deja vu and dreaming, discuss what happens when the mind seeks "e;shortcuts"e; in the creation of understanding, and what happens at the periphery of conscious control. Mind over Matter is about the human mind and making sense of the semiosphere of information that surrounds us. As such, it is both about something - mind and behaviour - and also a reflection on thinking about the mind. The book is concerned with thinking through the ideas behind orientating oneself in an environment which is teeming with information, consciousness, and the possibilities of language and communication. The book concludes by making brief commentary on possible human evolution in the future.