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The 150th anniversary of Thomas Hardy′s birth is briefly noted and a number of recent publications on the author and his work are noted in the context of his corpus of critical material on him.

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), careful plotter of the fictional region of “Wessex,” is a novelist both acutely aware of the role of space in his works and remarkably fascinated by violence. Bringing these two significant elements of his fictional method together, this chapter examines the numerous violent spaces created by Hardy throughout his fiction. It focuses in particular on the ways in which different spaces, at first presumed to be safe, become invaded by extreme acts of violence. In the course of the chapter, I ask: How does this perversion of space by violence contribute to Hardy's literary aims? How do spatial relationships and boundaries intersect with his characterization? And does Hardy leave his readers with any hope for future spaces?

I suggest that Hardy's situation of acts of violence in a range of spaces, natural and domestic alike, is purposefully disorientating. It allows him to interrogate defined social ideas of “moral” indoor spaces and “wild” outdoor landscapes during the late Victorian period. There is, in fact, no such thing as a safe space in Hardy – spaces are ambiguous, changing and shaped by their inhabitants. The effect of violent spaces in Hardy, therefore, provides a challenge both to the conventional settings of nineteenth-century realist writing and any presumed knowledge of these environments. It might be tempting to see such spatial aesthetics as rather pessimistic, yet I argue that by dispelling the illusory link between space and safety, Hardy promotes a more sensitive awareness of everyday environments and our interactions with/within them.

Charles Oscar Hardy (1884–1948) was a well-known though perhaps not leading monetary and financial economist of his time. He was and is important enough, however, to be remembered and studied a half century later (see Frank G. Steindl, Monetary Interpretations of the Great Depression, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995; J. Ronnie Davis, The New Economics and the Old Economists, Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1971; and Allan H. Meltzer, A History of the Federal Reserve, 1913–1951, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Educated at Ottawa University, Kansas (AB, 1904) (a private university affiliated with the Baptist Denomination) and the University of Chicago (Ph.D., 1916), he taught at both schools as well as at the University of Iowa. He was Vice President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, had a long-term association with the Brookings Institution, and was a frequent advisor to government agencies. Working when the gold standard was in effect, he discerned instability as the likely consequence of excessive gold stocks and resultant credit expansion. An advocate of central-bank monetary management, he worried over limits to its power to create monetary stability because of shifts in the balance of trade and in long-term investment, and called for major reform of the gold standard. Subsequently, he advocated activist monetary and fiscal policy. Hardy also contributed to the development of the theory of risk and uncertainty, a field dominated by his colleague, Frank Knight.

The association between resources and work engagement has been well-established among different occupational groups. The purpose of this paper is to go one step further through the investigation of the relationship between personal (i.e. hardy personality) and job-related (i.e. opportunity for learning and development) resources and work engagement in the long run.

A two-wave longitudinal study was conducted on a sample of healthcare professionals working in a spinal cord and brain injury rehabilitation hospital located in northern Italy.

The results of cross-lagged structural equation modeling indicated the occurrence of reciprocal causal relationships between the study variables. In particular, personal and job-related resources were related to an increase in work engagement over the course of the study. The level of engagement displayed by participants, in turn, was positively related to their personal and job-related resources over time, thus revealing the occurrence of positive cycles in the workplace.

On the whole, these findings provide a deeper understanding of the role played by hardy personality as a personal resource able to promote employees’ motivation and, at the same time, they advance the scientific knowledge concerning the construct of positive cycle.

IN 1909 THOMAS HARDY published in Time's Laughingstocks a poem called ‘Panthera’. It is not a poem which has attracted much attention, though unusual and interesting in many re‐spects. It is a dramatic monologue, the opening of which seems a deliberate attempt to imitate the idiomatic abruptness of some of Browning's better‐known monologues:

Paley's and Hardy's inequality are proved on a Hardy-type space for the Fourier–Dunkl expansions based on a complete orthonormal system of Dunkl kernels generalizing the classical exponential system defining the classical Fourier series.

Although the difficulties related to the Dunkl settings, the techniques used by K. Sato were still efficient in this case to establish the inequalities which have expected similarities with the classical case, and Hardy and Paley theorems for the Fourier–Bessel expansions due to the fact that the Bessel transform is the even part of the Dunkl transform.

Paley's inequality and Hardy's inequality are proved on a Hardy-type space for the Fourier–Dunkl expansions.

This work is a participation in extending the harmonic analysis associated with the Dunkl operators and it shows the utility of BMO spaces to establish some analytical results.

Dunkl theory is a generalization of Fourier analysis and special function theory related to root systems. Establishing Paley and Hardy's inequalities in these settings is a participation in extending the Dunkl harmonic analysis as it has many applications in mathematical physics and in the framework of vector valued extensions of multipliers.

In the paper we extend some Hardy and Littlewood type inequalities on time scales for the function of n variables. Special cases of obtained results include generalized Wirtinger, Hardy and Littlewood type inequalities.

Since 1990, the number of empirical and applied research dealing with employee empowerment has proliferated. This article will examine four dimensions of power: various resources to influence the outcome of decision‐making; controlling access to those processes; through hegemonic process to legitimize power through culture and norms; and determining the limits of power. A critical perspective from other behavioral sciences will present various designs. Foucauldian Theory will challenge the devolution of power via prior research attempts. Contemporary research on organization culture and structure will be examined via the validation of six hypotheses. Organizational characteristics facilitating empowerment such as vision, openness and teamwork, discipline and control, support and security will be discussed, along with the impact of leadership on an empowered workforce. Psychological dimensions of empowerment: choice, competence, meaningfulness and progress are examined in addition to trust issues. Some conclusions and recommendations will integrate the diverse theories.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the enabling role of accounting and reporting practices as discourses about sustainability unfold inside organizations. In particular, the authors investigate how managers attempt to connect the concept of “sustainability” to their specific experience, as they seek to make sustainability meaningful (i.e. filling it with unfolding meaning) through accounting and within particular discursive spaces.

The authors rely upon the case of LOGIC, a large international oil and gas company operating in more than 70 countries worldwide. The authors analyze the evolution of discourses concerning sustainability inside the company, as well as the changing accounting and reporting practices, with a particular focus on integrated reporting.

The authors show that accounting and reporting practices (such as integrated reporting within LOGIC) provide the conditions for “sustainability”—as a discursive concept—to become meaningful, while evolving themselves as they are attached to this concept. They do so by enabling individuals (the management team within LOGIC) to connect their diverse experiences and aspirations to the concept of sustainability. Rather than filling sustainability with stable meaning, the authors observed that individuals are attracted by the gaps left by accounting representations, leading to the development of new practices and unfolding meanings within specific discursive spaces.

Most of the literature on sustainability accounting and reporting practices concentrate on the need for these practices to mirror what companies do about sustainability. Differently, the authors add to the very few studies on “aspirational” reporting that have emphasized the enabling effects of the gap between what companies say and do about sustainability. The authors do so by demonstrating that accounting is “aspirational” not only because it stimulates corporate efforts toward an imaginary better future, but also because it attracts managers’ particular aspirations through its representational gap. The authors show that this gap enables meaningful connections between individuals (their particular experience and aspirations) and “sustainability,” bringing this concept into their specific discursive space and, thereby, leading to the emergence of new practices.