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The expanded sovereign bond portfolios from the sizeable public interventions in the financial sector during the current crisis need close monitoring and analysis of emerging vulnerabilities. This chapter presents some conventional and new measures of market, credit, and liquidity risks for government bond portfolios, considered from the perspective of a sovereign debt manager. In particular, it examines duration, convexity, and VaR statistics as measures of market exposure; the contingent-claims approach as the most promising measure of credit risk exposure; and a VaR statistic as a measure of liquidity risk.

This chapter investigates the evolution of cross-strait economic relations and Asian regional integration and its implications for future development in the region. Trade and investment in Asia is fundamentally market-driven, and cross-border FDI is the major driving force. This investment-induced trade explained the cross-strait economic relations and intensive trade in intra-industry and intra-regional trade in Asia. The rise of China in 1990s with the assistance of Taiwanese firms further accelerated the trend of integration by forming regional production networks. However, after 2000 institutional arrangement like bilateral or plural-lateral FTA emerged to normalize and institutionalize the de facto economic integration. RCEP and TPP have evolved as the two major platforms for Asian regional cooperation with two key players, China and the United States, on each side. We argue that in the long run the win-win solution that the two platforms will further merge into FTAAP, which benefits all participants including China and the United States. However, in the short run, based on its 50 years of developmental experience, Taiwan can play an important role to promote and consolidate Asian regional integration as a technology provider and resource coordinator for the region and a risk buffer for entering Chinese market. We thus propose a roadmap for Taiwan and China to jointly participate in regional integration process. In the intermediate run, Asian economies need to change the structure toward more regional-centered trade in final goods through domestic consumption market in order to reduce the dependence on Western markets and mitigate any loss may arise from external shocks.

This chapter explores the multiple levels of authenticity involved in son et lumière and projection mapping. Light shows are increasingly staged at historic sites, using monumental buildings as canvases. The use of light allows the buildings to communicate, giving them a performative, additional dimension, generating multiplicity, where the same architectural structure or place is encountered simultaneously in both its light and physical forms. The effect is hyperreal, transforming buildings into simulacra, versions of distorted reality, where no original exists. As the building appears to move, the mind simultaneously informs the viewer that it is static, evoking a co-created tourist experience. Light shows, arguably staged by “imagineers”, reflect the increasing move toward the spectacle essential for creative and experience economies.

This chapter introduces the concept of an intelligent organization in the context of the twenty-first-century knowledge economy. An intelligent organization is one in which individuals behave intelligently, work is grounded in intelligent methods and choices, and rich stocks of intelligence in the form of knowledge capital to support intelligence work and choices. Intelligence is defined as both a thing and attribute and behavior and way of working. The chapter also highlights examples of intelligent behaviors and or organizational pathologies. The chapter also highlights the importance of becoming aware of intelligent and unintelligent choices.

János Kornai was born as János Kornhauser, on January 21, 1928. The son of a prominent Hungarian business attorney, Kornai grew up with three siblings, though he says that he was clearly his mother's “favorite among” the four children (p. 5). His impressive intellect was evident from an early age and seemed to benefit from the tremendous independence his busy parents gave him from the beginning.

Japan has long occupied a unique place in East Asia and continues to do so in an era of increased global interconnectivity. Beginning with the Meiji Restoration (1868), it became the first in the region to make a decisive, sustained, and highly successful attempt to “modernize” its political, economic, and social structures, thereby largely avoiding Western domination. This particular historical trajectory built directly on social foundations laid during the prolonged closure of the Tokugawa period and largely allowed Japan free reign to craft its own version of modernity, educational and otherwise. One result of this conscious, directed process of “catch-up” was an impressive “compression” of the transition to modernity – a phenomenon that had stretched out over hundreds of years in most Western countries – to little more than a half century (Kariya, 2010); a feat unmatched by any country in the first half of the twentieth century. Following the devastation of the Second World War, Japan redoubled its efforts to “catch-up” and through a combination of high birth rates following the war, export-driven economic growth leading to an explosion of manufacturing jobs, a commitment to egalitarian growth and full employment, and the creation of an educational meritocracy that meticulously selected the country's best and brightest, the country quickly moved up the value-added chain until, by the early 1980s, the Japanese economy was globally dominant (Katz, 1998; Okita, 1992). As such, by the 1980s, Japan became unique, first, in being the only country in the region whose social conditions facilitated genuine comparison with the “advanced” countries of the West and, second, a model for “modernization” that other countries in the region could emulate, first the four Asian Tigers and then (although rarely explicitly) China in the post-Mao “Reform and Opening” period (Rappleye, 2007; Kojima, 2000).

This chapter advances an articulation of the contemporary knowledge worker as an infrastructural bricoleur. The practical and pragmatic intelligence of the contemporary knowledge worker, particularly those involved in project-based work, reflects an ability to build adaptable practices and routines, and to develop a set of working arrangements that is creative and event-laden. Like Ciborra’s octopi, workers augment infrastructures by drawing on certain forms of oblique, twisted, flexible, circular, polymorphic and ambiguous thinking until an accommodation can be found. These workers understand the non-linearity of work and working, and are artful in their pursuits around, through and beyond infrastructural givens. Modern knowledge work, then, when looked at through the lens of infrastructure and bricolage, is less a story of failure to understand, a limitation in training or the shortcomings of a system, but instead is more a mirror of the contemporary realities of today’s knowledge work drift as reflected in individuals’ sociotechnical practices.

Understanding how dyadic negotiations and group decision processes evolve over time requires specifying the basic elements of process, modeling the configuration of those elements over time, and providing a theoretical explanation for that configuration. We propose a bead metaphor for conceptualizing the basic elements of the group negotiation process and then “string” the beads of behavior in a helix framework to model the process by which group negotiations evolve. Our theorizing draws on the group decision development literature (e.g. Bales, 1953; Poole, 1981, 1983a, b; Poole & Roth, 1989a, b) as well as on the negotiation process literature (e.g. Gulliver, 1979; Morley & Stephenson, 1977). Our examples are from our Towers Market studies of negotiating groups.

Recent interest in the multimodal accomplishment of organization has focused on the material and symbolic aspects of materiality. We argue that current literature invokes diverse “multimodal imaginaries,” that is, ways of conceiving the relation between the material and the conceptual, and that the different imaginaries support a plurality of perspectives on materiality. Using the empirical case of a large urban renewal project in São Paulo, Brazil, we illustrate three different multimodal imaginaries – the concrete, the semiotic, and the mimetic – and indicate how each imaginary determines the way in which the site in question is discursively constructed. After outlining the different approaches, we discuss their theoretical implications, advantages, and constraints, setting an agenda for future studies of materiality in organizational and institutional contexts.