Books published by ibidem-Verlag, Jessica Haunschild u Christian Schon

This book includes contributions by African, East and West European, Asian and North American scholars which deal with and compare ideological and non-ideological approaches to the analysis of literary, artistic as well as popular works (popular music) mostly by American authors. Most of the essays deal with a way various aspects of American identity are depicted, represented, treated, ideologized and aestheticized in different literary genres, forms of art and media. The contributions offer multidisciplinary, cross-cultural and comparative perspectives and represent a diversity of scholarly voices ranging from the general discussion on the relationship between ideology and art (Anton Pokrivcák), ideology and multiculturalism (Cristina Garrigós). They also give the analysis of poetry (Pokrivcák, Obododima Oha), postmodern fiction (Pi-Hua Ni, Cristina Garrigós), drama (Zoe Detsi-Diamanti, Csaba Csapó) as well as the comparative analysis of the depiction of the identity of North American Indians in such different media as literature and film (Michal Peprník). In addition to this, the book includes the analysis of Black rap music (Wojciech Kallas).

This book offers far-reaching insights into perceptions of conflict in South Africa. Claude-Hélène Mayer's approach is remarkable, because she imparts the recollections of numerous people from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds. The author captures the essence of about one-hundred interviews reflecting disparate attitudes towards social changes in the post-apartheid Republic of South Africa. Unexpected statements - for example, with respect to the continued existence of internalized apartheid - are carefully analyzed and hermeneutically understood. At the beginning of the research, presumptions might have raised expectations for the similarity between the narrative interviews. However, it becomes clear during the reading of this work that each interview was itself unique and each created a unique situation between the interviewer and the interviewee, inviting the reader to listen again and again to the spoken and analyzed words. The thorough, months-long field stays, from 1999 until 2004, emphasize the researcher's exhaustive effort better to understand the perspective of the interviewees. In addition to the book's research-related merits, its data can increase the cultural competence of those readers who are interested in information on specific predominant-cultural standards in present day South Africa. Readers can more fully appreciate how the people in South Africa live a special, dynamic form of their unmatched "unity in diversity."

The reduction principle is a common idea which states that while researching the stability of solutions of the dynamic system (the system of differential, difference, differential-difference equations) the order of the researched system can be decreased. As the main obstacle in researching a dynamic system is a big dimension of the system, decreasing the order significantly simplifies the stability of the research process.This work contains some ways of decreasing the system order. The author aimed to keep the details to a minimum, to facilitate a better understanding of the main ideas, and the rigor of explanations is replaced by examples and references to the original works.The project Modern Mathematics for Engineers is addressed to upper-course University students in Mathematics specialties, to graduate students and to researchers who apply Mathematics in different spheres.

The European Union is increasingly facing a dilemma between democracy and technocracy. On the one hand, the EU is today accused for lacking sufficient democratic legitimacy, and on the other, public policy-making is getting more and more complex and technical, making politicians reliant to a certain extent on the technical knowledge of specialised experts. The European Parliament, being the only directly legitimated body within the institutional set-up of the EU and thus the symbol of democracy, plays a key role in this respect. In this book Brigitte Reck analyses the role of expertise for the European Parliament. It is assumed that, in order to fulfil the new challenges posed by its enhanced role in EU decision-making, the European Parliament depends to a high degree on internal and external help in the form of expert knowledge, policy advice and parliamentary assistance. It discovers, mainly on the basis of interviews with politicians and officials in Brussels, which sources of expertise the European Parliament can rely on and to what extent Parliament has adapted its internal capacities to the new challenges arising mainly from co-decision, but also from enhanced complexity. Finally it suggests how to improve the internal expertise capacities of the European Parliament which are necessary if the institution is to bridge the gap between democratic control and good quality outcomes.

As stated by the Brundtland Report, the authoritative document on sustainable development, the pressure of poverty creates environmental stress by factors like overcrowded cities, deforestation, and overuse of marginal land. Alejandro Turbay, Funmilayo Akinosi, and Daniel Nordlund sought to find out how microfinance institutions (MFIs), who inherently cater to a largely poor clientele, could maximise their socioeconomic missions within ecologically beneficial limits. Turbay, Akinosi, and Nordlund defined sustainability through the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development, a systematic, five-level approach for planning and making decisions. Subsequently, they created a principle-based model of their vision of a 'sustainable MFI', and then tested this model with executive-level practitioners of various microfinance institutions around the world. In this book, they present their findings:- The acceptance of ecological considerations into socio-economic missions is growing.- More and more 'green' funds are helping to turn environmental challenges into investment opportunities.- MFIs operating within ecologically beneficial manners can derive advantages including credit risk reduction, enhanced reputation, increased competitiveness, and improved earnings.- Surprisingly, incorporating ecological considerations turned out to be not necessarily expensive. Some activities like re-using materials could even be done without any additional costs.The book describes how MFIs can maximise the benefits by considering the inherent connections between their missions and ecological considerations.

In this wide-ranging book, Michael Seibold critically examines and assesses how Talent Identification and Development (TID) programmes for tennis are organised and implemented. He compares the views of key actors involved in TID practice: players, coaches, administrators, and parents in four selected European countries. Seibold's study is based upon a multi-disciplinary and comparative research design, using both quantitative and qualitative research strategies. The results show large gaps between theory and practice of TID, indicating that tennis is likely to remain a socially exclusive sport and to become even more so within the next few years and will remain limited to children from families with above-average financial backgrounds. Michael Seibold suggests that environmental factors should form a part of every TID programme. Any TID must be looked upon as an ongoing longitudinal dynamical process. A centrally operating talent development commission, following clear published guidelines, is of crucial importance. Seibold's book gives a real inside view into the TID programmes in tennis from the point of view of an expert who has been working many years as a national and international tennis coach and as sports expert as part of the International Olympic Committee's Olympic Solidarity Programme. It will help the reader to understand more about TID in tennis in general and support coaches, parents, players, and administrators in developing and optimising a programme to support and evolve their future talents.

In the traditional financial system, profit and social solidarity have often represented a dichotomy hard to beat. In this scenario, the Microfinance Investment Vehicles (MIVs) are emerging as tools to build a bridge between private and social interests, increasingly in recent years, despite the fact that the world economy has been shaken by a strong global recession.After clarifying the often confused meaning of MIVs, Maria Cristina De Lorenzo utilises financial indicators like returns, Jensen's alpha, Sharpe Index, Treynor Index, Beta, R-Squared to analyse the performance and the risk of a sample of ten MIVs over the last three years. She compares the results obtained to three benchmarks representing the overall equity market (Morgan Stanley Capital International World Index), the socially responsible investment market (Dow Jones Sustainability World Index), and the emerging bond market (J.P. Morgan Emerging Market Bond Index Global). Her study demonstrates that, in general, MIVs outperformed the benchmarks. They can successfully improve portfolio diversification because there is no positive correlation with broader markets (Beta parameters are next to zero).Ultimately, De Lorenzo aims to provide ways of research defining standard indicators of social performance associated with such investments in order to reinforce the idea that ethically and socially responsible funds are both a great financial and social opportunity for all involved.

A peculiar war is raging in Quebec's largest city: one talks about 'linguistic battles' being fought daily in the streets of Montreal, where Anglophones are concentrated in the otherwise predominantly French-speaking province. The language dichotomy lies at the heart of Montreal's cultural history and reflects a relationship fraught with tensions between Canada's so-called Founding Nations. Following a history of francophone conquest, defeat, and reconquest, the two linguistic communities have at last reached a more harmonious modus vivendi at the turn of the twenty-first century.Writers have always engaged in and contributed to the debate. But how does contemporary literature broach English-French relations years after such pivotal events in Québécois history as the Quiet Revolution, the FLQ crisis, the implementation of Bill 101 and the two referenda on independence? Neil Bissoondath and Monique Proulx, two authors presently living and writing in Quebec, have scrutinised interactions between Anglophones and Francophones in present-day Montreal and translated cultural memory in their works of narrative fiction. Reading Montreal literature as a contact zone where Self and Other meet and grapple with each other, Stefanie Rudig's study shows how the clashes with l'Autre leave each side modified, usually for the better.In Bissoondath's novel Doing the Heart Good, the protagonist and first-person narrator Alistair Mackenzie takes a retrospective look at his life, during which the monolingual Anglophone has frequently been forced to deal with Francophones. Proulx also places her characters in situations in which they encounter alterity and alienation in her short story collection Les Aurores montréales. In addition to the anglophone or francophone Other, Proulx depicts migrants in her short narratives and how they participate in Montreal's linguistic duality. Though neither of the two texts is overtly didactic, both Proulx and Bissoondath suggest ways to overcome all remnants of the historically conditioned English-French antagonism and promote an effectively multilingual and pluriethnic Quebec society that thrives on difference.This edition also includes a ten-page summary in French.

Low income households are faced with various types of risks, increasing their vulnerability to poverty. In Cambodia, conditions of the rural poor - with the majority engaged in agriculture - are characterized by low productivity, limited capacities in terms of land and assets, volatile income sources, fluctuating farm input and output prices, debt and lack of credit worthiness. A microfinance institution operating in rural Cambodia and aiming to offer financial products to a large number of poor households is Angkor Mikroheranhvatho Kampuchea (AMK) Co. Ltd. Through its internal Market and Social Research Department, AMK staff annually collects socio-economic information about selected loan clients (household profiles, cash-flow analysis), as well as non-clients as a control group. Their survey tool includes questions about household's food consumption, main risk sources and coping strategies. The present research study draws information from this AMK survey database. The measures taken are applied to socio-economic cross-sectional data as of 2006/07 and validated with panel data from 2008.A theoretical framework is developed to examine the mechanisms through which the effects of the AMK services on its clients influence the household's ability to manage risk. It includes measurement aspects of a forward-looking concept of vulnerability to identify and capture its linkages to risks, shocks, and risk strategies of rural households. Secondly it incorporates the dynamic aspects of poverty by looking at temporal changes in absolute poverty levels. Moreover, it seeks to identify gaps and opportunities of microfinance services as a risk management strategy to reduce vulnerability.The results show that the fraction of vulnerable households (85%) facing a risk of poverty is considerably greater than what the static poverty assessment suggests. Results further show that the majority of the sample households are poor (72%) as of 2006 and 2007. Among the non-clients the figure is substantially lower with 58% poor households, whereas 75% of the AMK microfinance clients fall below the poverty line. This particular confirms the intended outreach targets of AMK.Furthermore, it could be ascertained that those clients who remained clients could significantly accumulate assets and became less dependent on agricultural activities. This is a good indication that AMK clients have safety nets and more strategic possibilities in case of future shocks.

The recent global macroeconomic crisis creates an exceptionally interesting possibility to investigate the linkages of the microfinance sector to mainstream markets and its connections with domestic markets as well as international markets - a subject whose significance has increased in recent years due to the growing importance of microfinance as part of local financial systems of developing countries and with more and more involvement of commercial investors. Sascha Huijsman's book is one of the very few studies on this relationship. She provides a rigorous analysis of the impact of the financial crisis on microfinance institutions (MFIs) by using data from a worldwide survey with MFI managers and utilising monthly financial data of almost 60 MFIs. Although microfinance-specific characteristics, such as socially oriented, highly committed investors and the nature of microfinance enterprises, which typically operate in the informal sector, so far nourished the assumption that MFIs were isolated from the impact of fluctuations on mainstream markets, Huijsman's study convincingly shows that through different linkages microfinance is to a certain extent connected to formal market movements Interestingly, however, it turns out there are considerable differences between the impact on MFIs in different regions; especially MFIs in Eastern Europe have been affected. Moreover, MFIs offering savings services to their clients turned out to be more resilient to the crisis. Huijsman's study provides plenty of unexpected results and certainly is a must-read for practitioners and researchers in the field of microfinance.