Private Takeover of Data Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Private Takeover of Data - Essay Example The process of democratization is inherent in the multidimensional and multifaceted interaction of the masses with the environmental factors that have a significant impact. Indeed, history is witness to the fact that they are capable of influencing any future recourse to the formation of a new political equation. Â  The system typically represents social conditioning of the people which may express their values, interests and general behavioral pattern, in given setting. But there is increasing the tendency of collective representation of the group that may be in a position to consciously influence a susceptible audience towards a set course thus explaining the restructuring of the social fabric in a more rational manner that is deliberate and pre-determined. The last fifty years have seen the deteriorating authority of the government control through various processes like privatization, deregulation, and decentralization of power has promoted increasing commercialization of jobs that were hitherto confined to the government agencies for confidentiality and security reasons. Â  The deregulation and de-centralization have brought in private players to the national arena where they are able to bargain with the government. In fact, media has been one the most powerful private player which wields considerable influence over the people and the government. They have become strong advocates for power games. Vested interests now dominate the overall goals and objectives of the media owners. Citizens’ welfare has taken a backseat and manipulation of public opinion has become the norm. With their specific political leaning, they back their own candidates for legislative seats, thereby influencing policies and plans which may make them more powerful. Public representatives are bought by these media giants so that they may advocate the cartel’s dubious aims and objectives.

Collaboration and Innovation at Procter & Gamble Essay Example for Free

Collaboration and Innovation at Procter Gamble Essay Look in your medicine cabinet. No matter where you live in the world, odds are that you’ll find many Procter Gamble products that you use every day. PG is the largest manufacturer of consumer products in the world, and one of the top 10 largest companies in the world by market capitalization. The company is known for its successful brands, as well as its ability to develop new brands and maintain its brands’ popularity with unique business innovations. Popular PG brands include Pampers, Tide, Bounty, Folgers, Pringles, Charmin, Swiffer, Crest, and many more. The company has approximately 140,000 employees in more than 80 countries, and its leading competitor is Britain-based Unilever. Founded in 1837 and headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, PG has been a mainstay in the American business landscape for well over 150 years. In 2009, it had $79 billion in revenue and earned a $13.2 billion profit. PG’s business operations are divided into three main units: Beauty Care, Household Care, and Health and Well-Being, each of which are further subdivided into more specific units. In each of these divisions, PG has three main focuses as a business. It needs to maintain the popularity of its existing brands, via advertising and marketing; it must extend its brands to related products by developing new products under those brands; and it must innovate and create new brands entirely from scratch. Because so much of PG’s business is built around brand creation and management, it’s critical that the company facilitate collaboration between researchers, marketers, and managers. And because PG is such a big company, and makes such a wide array of products, achieving these goals is a daunting task. PG spends 3.4 percent of revenue on innovation, which is more than twice the industry average of 1.6 percent. Its research and development teams consist of 8,000 scientists spread across 30 sites globally. Though the company has an 80 percent â€Å"hit† rate on ideas that lead to products, making truly innovative and groundbreaking new products is very difficult in an extremely competitive field like consumer products. What’s more, the creativity of bigger companies like PG has been on the decline, with the top consumer goods companies accounting for only 5 percent of patents filed on home care products in the early 2000s. Finding better ways to innovate and develop new ideas is critical in a marketplace like consumer goods, and for any company as large as PG, finding methods of collaboration that are effective across the enterprise can be difficult. That’s why PG has been active in implementing information systems that foster effective collaboration and innovation. The social networking and collaborative tools popularized by Web 2.0 have been especially attractive to PG management, starting at the top with former CEO A.G. Lafley. Lafley was succeeded by Robert McDonald in 2010, but has been a major force in revitalizing the company. When Lafley became PG’s CEO in 2000, he immediately asserted that by the end of the decade, the company would generate half of its new product ideas using sources from outside the company, both as a way to develop groundbreaking innovations more quickly and to reduce research and development costs. At the time, Lafley’s proclamation was considered to be visionary, but in the past 10 years, PG has made good on his promise. The first order of business for PG was to develop alternatives to business practices that were not sufficiently collaborative. The biggest culprit, says Joe Schueller, Innovation Manager for PG’s Global Business Services division, was perhaps an unlikely one: e-mail. Though it’s ostensibly a tool for communication, e-mail is not a sufficiently collaborative way to share information; senders control the flow of information, but may fail to send mail to colleagues who most need to see it, and colleagues that don’t need to see certain e-mails will receive mailings long after they’ve lost interest. Blogs and other collaborative tools, on the other hand, are open to anyone interested in their content, and attract comments from interested users. However, getting PG employees to actually use these newer products in place of e-mail has been a struggle for Schueller. Employees have resisted the changes, insisting that newer collaborative tools represent more work on top of e-mail, as opposed to a better alternative. People are accustomed to e-mail, and there’s significant organizational inertia against switching to a new way of doing things. Some PG processes for sharing knowledge were notoriously inefficient. For instance, some researchers used to write up their experiments using Microsoft Office applications, then print them out and glue them page by page into notebooks. PG was determined to implement more efficient and collaborative methods of communication to supplant some of these outdated processes. To that end, PG launched a total overhaul of its collaboration systems, led by a suite of Microsoft products. The services provided include unified communications (which integrates services for voice transmission, data transmission, instant messaging, e-mail, and electronic conferencing), Microsoft Live Communications Server functionality, Web conferencing with Live Meeting, and content management with SharePoint. According to PG, over 80,000 employees use instant messaging, and 20,000 use Microsoft Outlook, which provides tools for e-mail, calendaring, task management, contact management, note taking, and Web browsing. Outlook works with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server to support multiple users with shared mailboxes and calendars, SharePoint lists, and meeting schedules. The presence of these tools suggests more collaborative approaches are taking hold. Researchers use the tools to share the data they’ve collected on various brands; marketers can more effectively access the data they need to create more highly targeted ad campaigns; and managers are more easily able to find the people and data they need to make critical business decisions. Companies like PG are finding that one vendor simply isn’t enough to satisfy their diverse needs. That introduces a new challenges: managing information and applications across multiple platforms. For example, PG found that Google search was inadequate because it doesn’t always link information from within the company, and its reliance on keywords for its searches isn’t ideal for all of the topics for which employees might search. PG decided to implement a new search product from start-up Connectbeam, which allows employees to share bookmarks and tag content with descriptive words that appear in future searches, and facilitates social networks of coworkers to help them find and share information more effectively. The results of the initiative have been immediate. For example, when PG executives traveled to meet with regional managers, there was no way to integrate all the reports and discussions into a single document. One executive glued the results of experiments into Word documents and passed them out at a conference. Another executive manually entered his data and speech into PowerPoint slides, and then e-mailed the file to his colleagues. One result was that the same file ended up in countless individual mailboxes. Now, PG’s IT department can create a Microsoft SharePoint page where that executive can post all of his presentations. Using SharePoint, the presentations are stored in a single location, but are still accessible to employees and colleagues in other parts of the company. Another collaborative tool, InnovationNet, contains over 5 million researchrelated documents in digital format accessible via a browser-based portal. That’s a far cry from experiments glued in no tebooks. One concern PG had when implementing these collaborative tools was that if enough employees didn’t use them, the tools would be much less useful for those that did use them. Collaboration tools are like business and social networks–the more people connect to the network, the greater the value to all participants. Collaborative tools grow in usefulness as more and more workers contribute their information and insights. They also allow employees quicker access to the experts within the company that have needed information and knowledge. But these benefits are contingent on the lion’s share of company employees using the tools. Another major innovation for PG was its largescale adoption of Cisco TelePresence conference rooms at many locations across the globe. For a company as large as PG, telepresence is an excellent way to foster collaboration between employees across not just countries, but continents. In the past, telepresence technologies were prohibitively expensive and overly prone to malfunction. Today, the technology makes it possible to hold high-definition meetings over long distances. PG boasts the world’s largest rollout of Cisco TelePresence technology. PG’s biggest challenge in adopting the technology was to ensure that the studios were built to particular specifications in each of the geographically diverse locations where they were installed. Cisco accomplished this, and now PG’s estimates that 35 percent of its employees use telepresence regularly. In some locations, usage is as high as 70 percent. Benefits of telepresence include significant travel savings, more efficient flow of ideas, and quicker decision making. Decisions that once took days now take minutes. Laurie Heltsley, PG’s director of global business services, noted that the company has saved $4 for every $1 invested in the 70 high-end telepresence systems it has installed over the past few years These high-definition systems are used four times as often as the company’s earlier versions of videoconferencing systems. Sources: Joe Sharkey, â€Å"Setbacks in the Air Add to Lure of Virtual Meetings,† The New York Times, April 26, 2010; Matt Hamblen, â€Å"Firms Use Collaboration Tools to Tap the Ultimate IP-Worker Ideas,† Computerworld, September 2, 2009; â€Å"Computerworld Honors Program: PG†, 2008; www.pg.com, accessed May 18, 2010; â€Å"Procter Gamble Revolutionizes Collaboration with Cisco TelePresence,† www.cisco.com, accessed May 18, 2010; â€Å"IT’s Role in Collaboration at Procter Gamble,† Information Week, February 1, 2007.

Essay --

Before the Civil War ended, President Lincoln signed for the Emancipation Proclamation to be passed. When the Emancipation Proclamation was passed on January 1, 1863, it was a step toward freedom for African Americans. Although the proclamation freed few, and did not apply to â€Å"slaves in border states fighting on the side of the union,† it sent a message. Lincoln was sending a strong message, not only to the United States of America, but to the world, that the Civil War was no longer being fought to preserve the Union, but was being fought to end slavery (Ask Jones which citation from extra paper). African Americans described the proclamation as the â€Å"document for freedom,† it was hope. The Emancipation Proclamation, while it did not free the slaves, it was a road way toward the thirteenth amendment. In 1865 when President Lincoln was still in office, the Civil War ended, and left the South in shambles. The war left no option except the need to rebuild the Sout h. This was the beginning of reconstruction. Reconstruction originally began under President Lincoln, until April 15, 1865, when he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, then President Andrew Johnson took over, and reconstruction took a turn for the worst. Under the short reign of Lincoln, blacks were able to reunite their families, receive land and work for themselves, as well as get an education, and establish black churches. When Johnson took office, after Lincoln’s assassination, reconstruction began to shift for the blacks; it no longer held the same meaning. Their land was taken, and their freedom to work for themselves began to diminish, slowly reconstruction began to return to the idea of slavery. Economics At the war’s end Congress established the Freedmen’s Burea... ...ural music, provide charity and support to those in need and developed the black political leaders. The black church was the beginning of the establishment of the black community, and the most important part of the black church: it was free of white supervision. Blacks struggled to save to build their churches, and often founded Baptist and Methodists churches. One of their most prominent churches was the African Methodist Episcopal (AME). Churches in the black community were a form of ranking. The Presbyterian, Congregational, and Episcopal churches were attended mostly by the â€Å"upper-class† blacks, such as the blacks that had been free prior to the civil war. Poorer blacks, found the â€Å"upper-class† black churches unappealing. Besides churches, blacks understood that they must learn to read, or they were not free. To blacks freedom and education were inseparable.

Pibrex Russia Essay

Then plant lacks a strong organisational culture; communications within and between departments are poor; there is inequity between in wages, working conditions and training and problems with motivation and employees is prevalent. Pibrex International is losing interest in the Russian operation and two sub-cultures exist within the Pibrex Russian organisation. The new General Manager, Elena Michasilova must develop an action plan that can turn the operations around to breakeven point by the year 2000 at minimal cost to the company. This reportoutlines to Elena Michailova considers both the external environmental (Political, economicsocialand organisation factors affecting Pibrex Russia and analyses why the plants are underperforming in a difficult economic environment and outlines four different unique strategies retrenchment, price leadership, quality leadership and export orientation) makes recommendations that Elena Michailova can implement to overcome the numerous organizational and financial challenges that the company faces. It establishes a viable export orientate strategy and industry leading restructuring programme, called Challenge 2000 that Elena can quickly implement to overcome these challenges she faces managing Pibrex Russia at minimal cost to the company. Implementation of both will lead Pibrex back to profitability by the year 2000 This report illustrates what the management team has done to begin a turnaround of the firm and the problems that remain. In particular, the company must reassess its management strategies and take steps to masintain its competitive position Introduction: This report considers both the external environmental and organisation factors affecting Pibrex Russia and analyses why the plants are underperforming in a difficult economic environment and makes recommendations that Elena Michailova can implement to overcome the numerous organizational and financial challenges that the company faces. It establishes a viable strategy and industry leading restructuring programme, called Challenge 2000 that Elena can quickly implement to overcome these challenges at minimal cost to the company. Background. Pibrex is one of the world’s largest producers of petrochemical based polymers for the plastics market. The company has purchased a plant in Russia and after three years of serious operating losses and has appointed a new general manager of the plant. The plant lacks a strong organisational culture; communications within and between departments are poor; inequity in wages, working conditions, and training exist but motivation and retention problems are prevalent. Pibrex headquarters is losing interest in the Russian operation and two sub-cultures exist with Pibrex Russian organisation. Two subcultures exist within the company because there is two separate manufacturing plants. The first plant is Pibrex KAZ, which is one the site of the original plant in Kalingrad. The other plant is the recently purchased (1993) Pibrex KZ plant which is just outside Moscow. In addition Pibrex opened a sales and marketing office in St Petersburg (called Pibrex AO) and a head office in the capital city of Moscow (called PibrexRussia). In contrast to the two manufacturing facilities Pibrex AO and Pibrex Russia were staffed with people from Pibrex’s other overseas operations and enthusiastic young graduates such as Elena. In 1994 Pibrex KAZ, Pibrex KZ, Pibrex A) and Pibrex Russia were grouped together into Pixbrex Region Europe North. However, within Pibrex’s decentralized governance structure, the regional subsidiaries were able to decisions autonomously In 1997 the management of PREN Europe North took steps to stem the losses at Pibrex KZ. Pibrex Russia was shut down and the sales and marketing department merged with Pibrex KZ. At Pibrex KZ over half the production workers were laid off and prices were raised to increased margins, but this only had the effect of eroding sales even further. A macroeconomic shock came in the form of the Russian Financial Crisis (RFC). This preceded the Global Financial Crisis. As a result of the RFC, Pibrex’s sales slipped even further and management was now fully involved in crisis management with the ultimate goal being survival. Whereas in the past Pibrex had relied on a decentralized governance structure, on this occasion, Pibrex formed a â€Å"steering committee† to direct strategy in its Russian operations. The steering committee reassigned Elena as the new Financial Controller and asked her to perform a financial audit on all of Pibrex’s Russian operations. They also decided to concentrate on reducing costs and increasing profits wherever possible. Sales activity was limited to only the largest and most profitable of customers. Also, the steering committee took various steps to control all finances as well as reduce all expenditures. The steering committee as Elena to serve as Managing Director and Financial Controller of all Pibrex’s Russian operations pending a submission of a full set of key issues facing Pibrex and a clear set of recommendation on Pibrex with the view to reaching breakeven point by 2000. This is that set of recommendations. Identification of Key Issues and Challenges. Pibrex Russia is faced with a multitude of problems and challenges that it needs to deal with as it progresses through 1988 and 1999, if it is to break even by the year 2000. ?The following is a synopsis of the most critical issues a)The Financial Situation in Russia Pibrex Russia faces very challenging external factorsthat make for a very difficult external environment as a result of the Russian financial crisis The unstable financial situation bought about by the RFC means that Pibrex Russia is strugging to increase its revenues and reduce its costsdue to rampant inflation; a dramatically devalued Russian currency, the ruble; the evodus of foreign investment funds; the financial collapse of many Russian small to medium enterprises, multiple bank faces and an increasing unskilled, unmotivated and cynical workforce. This unstable financial situation means that Pibrex’s costs (particularly of raw materials) is going up and increasing company failures will mean it will be more difficult to make sales. It will have difficulty finding plant finance and to attract and retain employees with the right skills. (b)Difficulties in the Internal Operating / Accounting Environment. The internal operating environment of the company also seemed very chaotic, like the external environment. There was a lack of internal accounting controls, which I assume would eventually impede the dire to drive down costs and increase revenues c)Difficulties in the Legal / Regulatory Environment. Since reentering Russian in 1992, the Russian government has imposed a number of operating conditions on PR that undoubtedly prevent PR from operating at optimal efficiency. Russian law required each of Pibrex’s subsidiaries to maintain separate bank account and pay local taxes (p125). There were also many other bureaucra tic hassles (d)Difficulties with Organisational Issues. Organisational obstacles included PR never being legally registered as the Russian mother company. The Russian subsidiaries were opened at different times and were therefore registered as different entities. Also the distance between the subsidiaries were substantial leading to taxation constraints. (e)Difficulties with Old and Poorly Maintained Plant and Buildings. The old plant and poorly maintained and buildings reduces the effectiveness of production, potentially creates health and safety concerns for the workers but more than that, it severely affects the morale of the workers who see it as ineptitude on the part of management and indicative of how they value the production workers. f)Poor Management and Employee Relations There are old and deeply held resentments between factory workers and middle management whom the factory workers believe â€Å"stole† the workers share of the company when privatization. This resentment has never gone away. The workers were also deeply resentful of the dual wage structure whereby sales and management staff who were transferred Pibrex AO (the Moscow sales and marketing office were given shiny new facilities while the production workers had to work in cold and outdated factories. (g)Cultural Conflict within Pibrex Russia In my opinion the main problem facing Pibrex is the cultural conflict between the factory workers and the company’s management. There are many subcultures at play within Pibrex Russia. This arises because Pibrex Russia itself is a merger between the old Pibrex Russia, Pibrex AO, Pibrex KZ and Pibrex KAZ. As a result of being part of the old Soviet Russia there is a rigid, bureaucratic and authoritarian culture which affects the production workers, and management. Characteristics of this culture included strong power distance, adherence to authority, belief in hierarchy, clear lines of communication, and strong uncertainty avoidance. Under this environment top managers did not delegate, middle managers did not make the decisions that they need to, whereas production workers looked for clear direction. This authoritarian culture was a complete contrast to, and did not fit well with Pibrex’s usual practice of decentralization and delegation. The highly complex and decentralized structure of PREN (Pibrex Region North Europe) which involved two business areas and four functions did not fit with this traditional, authoritarian culture at Pibrex KZ which favoured a more straightforward bureaucratic structure. After the Merger between Pibrex AO and Pibrex KZ there was a definite cultural conflict betweenthe younger, more urban, more entrepreneurial sales and marketing staff from Moscow and the older established production staff and established management staff from Pibrex KZ. (h)International Management losing Interest in Pibrex Russia As a result of all of the above problems listed above, it seems that Pibrex in Gothenburg seems to have lost patience with Pibrex Russia. Accordingly, Pibrex Gothenburg has a firm directive that it wants its Russian operations to return to profitability by 2000. General External Environmental Analysis Pibrex Russa is in the Russian plasticsand chemicals industry. Polymers and resins produced by Pibrex Russia are found in a large number of different Russian industries including packaging, construction equipment, furniture and consumer goods. It was expected that demand for Pibrex’s resins and polymers would remain strong as a result of the need to rebuild Russia’s infrastructure (after the fall of Communism) and to supply the Russian military. Although there were numerous overseas competitors, none of them had established themselves in Russia. Also, there was a strong research and development base In Russia for the development of resins and polymers In late 1990s the external environment in Russia is influenced by the downfall of communism and the RFC. The environment, particularly financial, was characterized by instability and unpredictability. This instability can be traced back to the soviet reforms ofâ€Å"Glasnost† and â€Å"Perestroika. † Russia embraced a programme of rapid economic reform and liberalization which involved removal of financial regulations and freeing up the Russian financial system. Largely, this prgramme of financial and economic reform was not successful and this, in my opinion was one of the main factors leading to the RFC. There was also contagion from the Asian Financial Crisis. The RFC resulted in a currency devaluation , bank and company failures the collapse of the Russian stockmarket, the exit of foreign investment and this lead to a â€Å"black market† economy. Chaos in Russia was not limited to the economy. There was extensive political and social instability as well. The post soviet government was still establishing itself. On a social level this economic and political upheaval led to many social ills and discontent e. g. increased alcoholism. S. W. O. T Analysis AS. W. O. T analysis Strengths A key strength that Pribex has is it’s relationship with its parent company. This relationship is important because Pribex can leverage of the parent company’s international reputation, tacit knowledge, its existing supplier relationships, their research and development facilities and manufacturing processes as well as its customer service and safety standards. Additionally I believe the parent company may be able to provide Pibrex Russia with financial backing, which is particularly important given the financial and economic environment described above. Pribex AO is a strength to Pribex Russia. Their culture is not as divided and its staff and highly trained and motivated. Additionally it is where Elena has come from so it has a history of effective management. Elena herself is a critical strength to the company. She is one of the key managers and is materially contributing to the fdinacial well being of the company. Weaknesses As mentioned before the company, the company has a number of operational weaknesses. The major one is the conflicts that arise in the various subcultures of the company but there are other weaknsses as well such as ineffective financial controls over revenues and costs, poor relations between management and employees generally, a divisive dual wage system and a absence of top management support. The two factories Pibrex KZ and Pibrex KAZ old, use outdated technologies and are not very pleasant to work in. The factories have also been poorly maintained so for these reasons production output is poor. In addition to production weaknesses there are also some financial weaknesses. The company is having difficulty increasing revenues in the current economic environment and reducing costs. The company has been losing money for many years and there is little prospect of returning to profitability Opportunities: Pribex Russia has an opportunity to establish itself as a market leader in the building polymer and resins industry and as the rebuild of Russia infrastructure gets into full swing, it should be able increase revenues and decrease certainly its fixed costs and this may lead to profitability. Additionally Pribex Russia, with its existing research and development facilities has an opportunity to pioneer new polymer applications and establish itself as an innovator in the market. As the Russian economy is reformed Pibrex Russia has the opportunity to improve its financial situation and develop a reputation as an innovator in the industry. Threats: The macroeconomic analysis above indicated that the RFC and the instability and uncertainty that it brings to the financial sector as the major threat to Pibrex. It is a threat because it makes it more difficult for Pibrex to increase revenues and reduce costs. The RFC also threatens the company’s ability to raise capital and to reward its works appropriately leading to resentment amongst workers. The other major macroeconomic threat is the political instability that exists within Russia and makes it difficult for Pibrex management to forward plan and affects confidence. If Pibrex pursues a â€Å"price leadership strategy† then it faces threats from competitors, both domestic and foreign, who can produce products cheaper and therefore charge lower prices than pribex thus undermining their price leadship strategy If Pibrex pursues a â€Å"product leadership† strategy based on quality it faces competitive threats from both domestic and foreign competitors who can beat Pribex’s current quality standards (which are affected by their aging, inefficient plants). Four Strategies that Can Be Implemented at Pibrex Elena should recommend the following four quite different strategies to the management of Pibrex. 1. Retrenchment Strategy. Under this strategy Pibrex Russia should retrench its operations and closing the aging loss making Pibrex KZ plant and focus on modernizing its Pibrex KAZ plant. This would eliminate all of the problems associated with the older Pibrex KZ plant mentioned above and this would help restore confidence in Pribex Russia with the parent company. The downside is that it would minimize opportunities for further growth and expansion 2. Price Leadership Strategy. To minimize the macroeconomic risks mentioned above and return the company to profitability the company could pursue a competitive strategy based on price leadership. Under this strategy Elena would aggressive pursue domestic production from both manufacturing plants through a low price strategy, which would provide more work for the current production workers. To implement a successful price leadership strategy Pibrex may need to draw up on the financial resources of the parent company. Pibrex would aggressive pursue and develop new customers though aggressive advertising (with support from the parent company). In order to adapt a successful price leadership strategy PR would need to aggressively control costs, establish strict financial controls and eliminate the vtwo tier wage structure 3. Quality Leadership Strategy. To minimize the macroeconomic risks to the company it could pursue a strategy based on quality. Under this strategy it would draw on the parent company’s tacit knowledge and research and development facilities to become a quality leader in the area of building polymers and resins. Elena would lead an aggressive sales strategy based on world leading research and innovation and become a centre of excellence based on quality. This sales strategy would be to mainly domestic customers and the strategies relies on a considerable upswing in sales, as a result of infrastructure building to correct the company’s financial situation and return to profitability by the year 2000. To assist in selling to the rejuvenated domestic market, Elena would draw upon the sales `skills and sales teams already existing in the parent company. Pibrex Russia would become a domestic leader based on this Quality Leadership strategy. 4. Export Focused Strategy. Under this strategy Pibrex would split its manufacturing plants so that the older plant, Pibrex KZ would supply solely the domestic market, and the more modern plant Pibrex KAZ would supply the export market. The more modern plant would be chosen to serve the export market because more quality and innovation is required. Success in export markets would require additional attention to the company’s quality management processes. This dual strategy should ensure there is enough work for all the factory workers. Additionally an export led strategy would benefit from any currency devaluation. This dual strategy and the increased attention to quality control may, in the short term require additional capitl funding that the parent company would need to provide. Overall Implentation Plan for Elena. It is recommended that Elena implements an export focused strategy. This strategy would take advantage of the company’s strengths (being the parent company’s knowledge, reputation, resources and sales strategies) as well as minimizing its weaknesses (under-capacity, bitterness between workers and culture conflicts). It would reduce the tensions between workers, increase production and reduce the overcapacity problem. This export focused strategy does not initially minimize all of Pibrex’s weaknesses (such as poor financial controls and lack of head office commitment) but these weaknesses maybe corrected over time. To successfully implement this export focused strategy I recommend implementing a change programme called â€Å"Challenge 2000† which will draw on Pibrex’s strengths and minimize the company’s weaknesses. Challenge 2000 will be led by Elena as well as supported by the Steering Committee and PREN management. Challenge 2000 will have eight distinctive steps that will ensure success: 1. Demand sufficient capital investment from the parent company to allow for the repair and upgrade of the Pibrex KZ plant, implementation of a new sales incentive sub-programme and a quality sub-programme based on research and innovation. . Complement the increased efficiency at the Pibrex KAZ and the upgraded Pibrex plant by removing excess layers of management 3. To this reduction in management layers by creating an efficiency sub-programme bthat implements inventory, cost and revenue controls throughout Pibrex russia 4. Alleviate employee resentment and bitterness by eliminating the dual wage programme, and implementing an aggressive bonus incentive programme that rewards both local export sales. 5. Implement the export focusedmarketing strategy but aggressive pursue all domestic leads as well 6. Develop a marketing plan as part of this marketing strategy for both the domestic and export markets. 7. Have Pibrex aggressively pursue all sales leads in domestic and export markets. 8. Co-ordinate production schedules to the marketing plan using just in time inventories Conclusion. This paper outlines four different implementation strategies that Elena Michailova can chose and recommends an export focused strategy for Pribesx Russia. The successful implementation of this export focused strategy complemented with the eight step Challenge 2000 program will ensure that Pibrex will be restored to profitability by the year 2000. Challenge 2000 is a viable low cost change program that will certainly impress PREN management. The successful implantation of both will be replicated in Priex’s plants throughout the world which will see Elena Michailova, the once young bright inexperienced manager, rise over time to be the world wide Chief Operating Officer for Pirbex

Physical Science

2. The first thing I had to change was the first shelf where the red ball rolls down. Then I had to hang up the 5lbs. then switch the sides of the brown lever at the bottom. After I had to put the elastic of the slingshot with the little ball. The last thing was hang the bucket up. Part 2 The first to do is push the first domino. It causes the rest of the dominoes to fall and push the first pink ball. The pink ball will roll down the ramp. As the ball is rolling, it will hit and push another pink ball. The second pink ball will roll down into a small skinny tube. When it falls, it will push up the other side of the lever. When it goes up, it will make the string loose and make the scissor cut the string. When it cuts the string, the weight will fall and break. When it breaks the water inside of it will go through the tube, pouring inside the bucket. The bucket will get heavy and pull down the string, which the end is tied to the lid of a cookie jar opening the cookie jar. Analysis questions:In the device, it shows a closed system because all of the items stay in the area. The items were the 2 balls, the bucket with water and the dominoes. 2. To change a thermos into an open energy system is by opening the lid. 3. Energy is never created or destroyed; it is just passed on to other different types of energies, like potential to kinetic or potential to mechanical energy. 4. One place is where the dominoes fall and push the first ball. The second is when the bucket full of water pulls down the string to open the lid of the cookie jar.

Free Essays on Honesty

Essay on Honesty You pull up to the second window at the McDonalds’s drive-through to pick up the shake you just ordered and paid for, and the person working there hands you a huge bag of food while asking you if this is what you ordered. Do you A: Answer â€Å"Yes† and take the food or B: Answer â€Å"No† and tell him/her that you only paid for a shake? Yes this really did happen to me. What did I do? Believe it or not, I did the honest thing and gave the food back. But the real question is what would a majority of American’s youth do in a similar situation. There are two potentially dishonest acts in this situation, lying and stealing. In my opinion most high school kids are not above lying and/or stealing. The reason this is true is simply that many of today’s parents are not above lying and/or stealing. So after observing people that hold a high place of respect do things unmoral like this, their conscience says to itself, â€Å"Okay, lying and/or st ealing is not really that bad, and is acceptable to my parents.† A majority of Americans youth today are morally confused, due to the un-honorable actions of their parents. 1984, by George Orwell, shows an example of un-honorable actions of parents, rubbing off on their children. About 99% of the population in this book, were uncaring robots. They would turn their best friend into the â€Å"thought police† at the drop of a hat. They don’t think for themselves, and therefore are robots. The children of 1984, were even worse because they would turn their own parents into the â€Å"thought police†, with no sense of shame, and they actually felt proud about their actions. This is a perfect example of the unmoral actions of the parents rubbing off on their children. This could be the fate of our country if we don’t take parenting more seriously. If this pattern continues on it’s current course, we will have a society with no boundaries to govern life. W... Free Essays on Honesty Free Essays on Honesty Essay on Honesty You pull up to the second window at the McDonalds’s drive-through to pick up the shake you just ordered and paid for, and the person working there hands you a huge bag of food while asking you if this is what you ordered. Do you A: Answer â€Å"Yes† and take the food or B: Answer â€Å"No† and tell him/her that you only paid for a shake? Yes this really did happen to me. What did I do? Believe it or not, I did the honest thing and gave the food back. But the real question is what would a majority of American’s youth do in a similar situation. There are two potentially dishonest acts in this situation, lying and stealing. In my opinion most high school kids are not above lying and/or stealing. The reason this is true is simply that many of today’s parents are not above lying and/or stealing. So after observing people that hold a high place of respect do things unmoral like this, their conscience says to itself, â€Å"Okay, lying and/or st ealing is not really that bad, and is acceptable to my parents.† A majority of Americans youth today are morally confused, due to the un-honorable actions of their parents. 1984, by George Orwell, shows an example of un-honorable actions of parents, rubbing off on their children. About 99% of the population in this book, were uncaring robots. They would turn their best friend into the â€Å"thought police† at the drop of a hat. They don’t think for themselves, and therefore are robots. The children of 1984, were even worse because they would turn their own parents into the â€Å"thought police†, with no sense of shame, and they actually felt proud about their actions. This is a perfect example of the unmoral actions of the parents rubbing off on their children. This could be the fate of our country if we don’t take parenting more seriously. If this pattern continues on it’s current course, we will have a society with no boundaries to govern life. W...

Global Warning essays

Global Warning essays GLOBAL WARMING IS A GRAB FOR POWER Although Sowells article was interesting reading and had some good points in it, for me, it did not support its conclusion. That is that Washington wants to scare the population about Global Warming, so it can expand its power in answer to societys demand to fix the problem. First, let us examine his reasons. He uses the analogy of Paulovs dog to suggest we have been conditioned to respond in a fearful way to the phrase Global Warming. It is true that we have heard this phrase from time to time but, 1) It does not seem to generate any more emotion than did the Global Cooling in the 1970s, that Sowell make mention of in his essay, and 2) Sowell doesnt support with evidence the government as the source for the repeated exposure of the Global Warming phrase to the public. In fact, Sowell's essay generally attributes the proponents of this phrase to scientists. Although scientist may be utilized by government to address various bio-phycho-social problems they are not necessarily the government per se. They can be independent researchers employed by special interest or private, for profit or non-profit, businesses. Sowell also refers to computer models as being the tool orchestrating the hysteria about Global Warming. Again, I ask what hysteria? Also the word orchestrating is very ambiguous. In this case, it most probably means conducting or leading, but computers are not objects you play like instruments, they are tools for compiling and communicating information. He even makes reference to garbage in, garbage out. However, the fallacy is assuming the information that is going in is put there by the government and that it is garbage. A just as reasonable assertion can be that the information used to create the computer models was done by objective researchers and that the information is v ...

Johnny Carson Ancestry and Family Tree

Johnny Carson Ancestry and Family Tree John William Johnny Carson (October 23, 1925 Ââ€" January 23, 2005 was an American actor, comedian and writer best known for his tenure as host of The Tonight Show from 1962 until 1992. Born in Corning, Iowa to Homer Lee Kit Carson (no relation to the famous western hero) and Ruth Hook Carson, Johnny grew up with his parents, older sister, Catherine, and younger brother, Richard (Dick), in Nebraska. Johnny Carson married his college sweetheart Joan Wolcott on October 1, 1949. They had 3 sons. In 1963, Carson divorced Joan and married Joanne Copeland on August 17, 1963. After another divorce, he and former model Joanna Holland were married on September 30, 1972. This time, it was Holland who filed for a divorce in 1983. Johnny then married Alexis Maas on June 20, 1987, a marriage that survived happily until Carsons death in January 2005. Tips for Reading This Family Tree First Generation: 1. John William (Johnny) CARSON was born on 23 Oct 1925 in Corning, Iowa.1 He died of emphysema on 23 Jan 2005 in Malibu, California. Second Generation: 2. Homer Lee (Kit) CARSON2,3 was born on 4 Oct 1899 in Logan, Harrison Co., Iowa.4 He died on 9 Apr 1983 in Paradise Valley, Scottsdale, Arizona.5 Homer Lee (Kit) CARSON and Ruth HOOK were married in 1922.6 3. Ruth HOOK7 was born in Jul 1901 in Jackson Township, Taylor Co., Iowa.8 She died in 1985. Homer Lee (Kit) CARSON and Ruth HOOK had the following children: i. Catherine Jean CARSON was born in Dec 1923 in Hand Hospital, Shenandoah, Iowa.81  Ã‚  ii. John William (Johnny) CARSON.iii. Richard Charles (Dick) CARSON was born on 4 Jun 1929 in Clarinda, Page Co., Iowa.9 Third Generation: 4. Christopher N. (Kit) CARSON2,3,10,11 was born in Jan 1874 in Monona Co., Iowa. Christopher N. (Kit) CARSON and Ella B. HARDY were married on 28 Dec 1898 in Harrison Co., Iowa.12 5. Ella B. HARDY2,3,10,13 was born on 18 Nov 1876 in Magnolia, Jefferson Co., Iowa. She died on 20 Aug 1967. Christopher N. (Kit) CARSON and Ella B. HARDY had the following children: 2 i. Homer Lee (Kit) CARSON.ii. Charles E. CARSON3 was born about 1907 in Logan, Harrison Co., Iowa.iii. Raymond E. CARSON10 was born about 1913 in Logan, Harrison Co., Iowa.iv. Doris A. CARSON10 was born about 1918 in Logan, Harrison Co., Iowa. 6. George William HOOK14 was born on 27 Dec 1870 or 1871 in Lowry, St. Clair Co., Missouri.15 He died of a heart attack on 21 Dec 1947 in Bedford, Taylor Co., Iowa. He is buried in Fairview Bedford Cemetery, Taylor Co., Iowa. George William HOOK and Jessie BOYD were married on 19 Sep 1900.15-17 7. Jessie BOYD6 was born on 6 Jul 1876 in Taylor County, Iowa.16 She died of grief on 20 Jun 1911 in Bedford, Taylor Co., Iowa.16 She is buried in Fairview Bedford Cemetery, Taylor Co., Iowa. George William HOOK and Jessie BOYD had the following children: 3  Ã‚  i. Ruth HOOKii. John W. HOOK6 was born in 1904 in Bedford, Taylor County, Iowa.18 He died of peritonitis in May 1911 in Bedford, Taylor County, Iowa.19iii. Mary HOOK6 was born in Feb 1906 in Taylor County, Iowa.20,21iv. Florence HOOK6 was born in Feb 1910. She died in Feb 1910.22,23v. Jessie Boyd HOOK was born in Jun 1911.24 Fourth Generation: 8. Marshall CARSON11,25-28 was born on 14 Mar 1835 in Maine. He died on 21 May 1922 in Logan, Harrison County, Iowa. He is buried in Logan Cemetery, Harrison County, Iowa. Marshall CARSON and Emeline (Emma) KELLOGG were married on 17 Jul 1870 in Washington County, Nebraska. 9. Emeline (Emma) KELLOGG11,26-28 was born on 18 May 1847 in Fayette, Indiana. She died on 12 Feb 1922 in Harrison County, Iowa. She is buried in Logan Cemetery, Harrison County, Iowa. Marshall CARSON and Emeline (Emma) KELLOGG had the following children: 4  Ã‚  i. Christopher N. (Kit) CARSON.ii. Angie CARSON11 was born about 1875 in Nebraska.iii. Phebe CARSON11 was born about 1877 in Iowa.iv. Amilda CARSON11 was born about 1879 in Iowa.v. Ora CARSON26 was born in Jun 1881 in Harrison Co., Iowa.vi. Edgar M. CARSON26 was born in Feb 1882 in Harrison Co., Iowa.vii. Fred G. CARSON26-28 was born in Jul 1885 in Harrison County, Iowa. He died in 1923 in Harrison Co., Iowa.viii. Herbert E. CARSON26,27,29 was born in Dec 1890 in Harrison Co., Iowa. 10. Samuel Tomlinson HARDY10,13,30,31 was born on 1 May 1848 in Angola, Steuben Co., Indiana. He died on 21 Jul 1933 in at the home of his daughter, Mrs. C. N. Carson in Logan, Harrison Co., Iowa. Samuel Tomlinson HARDY and Viola Millicent VINCENT were married on 30 Jun 1872 in Iowa. 11. Viola Millicent VINCENT13,30,32 was born on 2 Apr 1855. She died on 3 May 1935 in Harrison Co., Iowa. Samuel Tomlinson HARDY and Viola Millicent VINCENT had the following children: i. Loyd HARDY13 was born about 1866 in Iowa.ii. Louis HARDY13 was born about 1870 in Iowa.5 iii. Ella B. HARDY.iv. Delaven H. HARDY13,30 was born in Aug 1879 in Iowa.30v. Bruce L. HARDY30 was born in Sep 1881 in Iowa.30vi. Gladys HARDY30 was born in Oct 1896 in Iowa.30

139 DB wk4 KJ Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

139 DB wk4 KJ - Essay Example These people are governed by a common set of workforce principles (Waxer). Cirque du Soleil encourages its employees to contribute to the organization. As a result, Cirque du Soleil shows represent a blend of global influences and are well appreciated by people all over the world. Cirque du Soleil is a good corporate citizen as it dutifully discharges its corporate social responsibility. Cirque du Soleil has reached dizzy heights and has an international presence. The company’s founder Guy Lalibertà © has not forgotten his humble past and therefore helps underprivileged sections of the society. The company sets aside one percent of its revenue for outreach programs to help at-risk kids. Cirque du Soleil recognizes the importance of paying back to the communities in which it operates. These social initiatives enable Cirque du Soleil gain international goodwill. Ethnocentrism, the belief that one’s own ethnic and cultural group is important, plays a significant role in fulfilling this social role. Cirque du Soleil’s own team represents varied cultures from all over the world. People from diverse regions, beliefs and attitudes are treated with respect and dignity. The organization extends the same feeling of equality while contributing meaningfully to 80 communities in more than 20 countries (Cirque du

Management a la Google by Gary Hamel Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Management a la Google by Gary Hamel - Essay Example Secondly, the company maintains a networked organizational structure rather than a hierarchical one, thereby ensuring that ideas which are generated compete on the basis of merit rather than hierarchical authority. Thirdly, Google management allows its executive to develop 20% of their working time for any project they choose as opposed to being restricted to working with ongoing projects only. This ensures that new ideas and projects are concurrently being developed, which is equivalent to Google’s seed corn for the future. (Hamel, 2006). Fourthly, Google is committed to ensuring that only the best brains become part of the Google team. The reasoning is that the entry of mediocre employees will produce a corresponding decline in the quality of the work that is produced for the Company. Hamel offers the opinion that Google management appears to be pursuing a well-honed strategy that is likely to yield benefits in the future and help the company to avoid many of the traditional pitfalls that afflict other Companies. Google’s strategic focus on innovation and the development of new software and technology is likely to help the Company to sustain a competitive edge rather than becoming stagnant and resting on its laurels as other companies tend to do. By ensuring that ongoing projects are not given so much value that not enough provision is made for the future, Google is ensuring that new seeds are being continuously planted, which could yield future benefits for the Company. The Company’s loose, networked structure is also likely to be an advantage in ensuring that decisions are made fast and with the minimum of bureaucracy so that the Company continues to function in an efficient manner, giving precedence to the merit of new ideas over hierarchical power structures and authority. Its elitist stand in hiring only A-level executives and keeping out mediocre.

Safety management Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words - 7

Safety management - Assignment Example Different players have various responsibilities to act in the creation of awareness of radiation hazards, preparedness of response and prevention of occurrence of incidents from mishandling of radiation materials. The roles of various agencies should be set out clearly in terms of efforts, capacities and response if timely, coordinated and effective assistance will be given in case of a radiation crisis. Health and environmental risk assessment are crucial aspects of a strategic action plan. Risk assessment indicates an approximation of the impending impact of the incident to the general public so as to anticipate and prevent future occurrences. The preliminary estimate of doses of reaction exposed are used as a base for assessment. Radiation poses a great threat to the public health since the initial symptoms are hardly recognizable for immediate action to be taken. As such, the general public is highly vulnerable to radioactive injuries. Local Emergency Response Plan is vital in the strategic action plan as it crucial in the assessment of both regional and local response capabilities, resources, occupancies and conditions. This helps in preventing under resources areas from suffering adversely from radioactive materials as a result of incapacitation. Awareness in terms of causes, health and environmental effects and storage of radioactive materials is crucial in the strategic action plan as it boost the preparedness of the public and the health practitioners should there be a radioactive threat. This enables the general public to acquire the initial skills through training. Continued planning, exercise of the preventive and combative measures are effective in enhancing preparedness. Furthermore, during emergencies, the public can refer to a publication by IAEA and WHO â€Å"How to Recognize and Initially Respond to an Accidental Radiation

Murderous Monsters Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Murderous Monsters - Research Paper Example The media’s extensive coverage of the atrocious crimes exacerbates the public’s preoccupation with the perpetrators, as the former struggles to understand the character deficiencies or motives that drove the latter to perpetrate such crimes. Consequentially, this alters people’s perception of perpetrators’ guilt before and after the court issues a verdict. Charles Sobhraj, infamously known as â€Å"the serpent† was a half-Vietnamese and half-Indian serial killer credited for allegedly killing Western tourists who he befriended while hiking along the Hippie trail in Asia. Finally arrested after his plan to murder sixty French tourists backfired, Sobhraj was arrested and convicted to serve an eleven-year sentence in India. The short prison term was because authorities lacked sufficient evidence to tie him to the homicides. Sobhraj completed his prison term in 1997 and went on to sell the rights to his life story to a movie producing company in 2003. Excited to live out the rest of his life in luxury with his newly acquired fortune, Sobhraj’s murderous instincts got the better of him whereby, he was arrested in 2004 and convicted for the murder of two North-American tourists. He continues to serve his life-long prison sentence in Nepal where he continually plans his escape. In all the cases, it is apparent that the media showed heightened interest in chasing the story despite the atrocious crimes perpetrated by the serial killers. The ultimate goal of the entertainment companies was to satiate the public’s exaggerated thirst for drama-filled television content. They do so at the expense of the victims who lost their lives to these inhumane criminals, and the family and friends of those victims. The fancy pseudo-names given to these criminals by the media have also functioned to glamorize and sensationalize their actions while peaking the public’s interest. The cases featured in the essay are from different

Representation of Women in Media Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Representation of Women in Media - Essay Example This follows a keen observation of how women and men are portrayed in most movies and music videos. The part that women have been known to play in such movies often portrays them as sexual objects. There has been a widespread debate concerning the kinds of costumes that both men and women play, in most videos and erotic films, their male counterparts, who have been cited as merely taking advantage of those women, usually use them as baits for sexual activities. In most of the music videos and erotic films, women play a very passive role; their male counterparts often dictate them. Women are usually presented as weak characters and have to play their part in order to please men (Akinfeleye & Amobi 2011, p. 5-6). When people watch these movies, it has been discovered that they are largely influenced by the experiences they saw, something that has led to increased cases of sexual violence and other forms of aggression to women by male people. For this films and music videos to make sense to people who make them, women have to be dressed in a manner that is scanty and very revealing. On the other hand, the male has always been seen as being formal and well dressed, something that has raised an issue about the aspect of such passivity and submission. Most of the feminist discussions have criticized this kind of portrayal of women as a sex object rather than important and valuable members of the society just like men. Over time, the role of the mass media as a reliable and essential agent of socialization has attracted several criticisms from different segments of our contemporary society (Baran, & Davis 2012, p. 100). The images that are usually aired in mass media about music videos, erotic films and other kinds of programs have been said to change people’s perceptions about social realities, this is according to the observations from social psychologists. According to these propositions, these images are believed to play an essential role towards stimulating certain kinds of behaviors that are highly undesirable (Marnie et al. 2005, p. 67).

Murderous Monsters Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Murderous Monsters - Research Paper Example The media’s extensive coverage of the atrocious crimes exacerbates the public’s preoccupation with the perpetrators, as the former struggles to understand the character deficiencies or motives that drove the latter to perpetrate such crimes. Consequentially, this alters people’s perception of perpetrators’ guilt before and after the court issues a verdict. Charles Sobhraj, infamously known as â€Å"the serpent† was a half-Vietnamese and half-Indian serial killer credited for allegedly killing Western tourists who he befriended while hiking along the Hippie trail in Asia. Finally arrested after his plan to murder sixty French tourists backfired, Sobhraj was arrested and convicted to serve an eleven-year sentence in India. The short prison term was because authorities lacked sufficient evidence to tie him to the homicides. Sobhraj completed his prison term in 1997 and went on to sell the rights to his life story to a movie producing company in 2003. Excited to live out the rest of his life in luxury with his newly acquired fortune, Sobhraj’s murderous instincts got the better of him whereby, he was arrested in 2004 and convicted for the murder of two North-American tourists. He continues to serve his life-long prison sentence in Nepal where he continually plans his escape. In all the cases, it is apparent that the media showed heightened interest in chasing the story despite the atrocious crimes perpetrated by the serial killers. The ultimate goal of the entertainment companies was to satiate the public’s exaggerated thirst for drama-filled television content. They do so at the expense of the victims who lost their lives to these inhumane criminals, and the family and friends of those victims. The fancy pseudo-names given to these criminals by the media have also functioned to glamorize and sensationalize their actions while peaking the public’s interest. The cases featured in the essay are from different

Stress Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words - 2

Stress - Essay Example Victims of terrorism are the most affected. They experience trauma for periods of time depending on the levels of shock. There are different types of victims, there are those who lose loved ones, those who witness the terror attack, those who survive the terror attack and those who hear about it first hand from close people. For example, in the September 2001 attack on the USA. Al Qaeda and Bin Laden attacks in the past have rendered so many afraid. The security system of the United States celebrates the death of Osama Bin Laden but however cannot forget the almost ten different attacks on their citizens and the many deaths caused by terrorists mostly of the Jihad culture. According to the USA security system, over seventy terror related reports were identified in a year in 2001. Many studies in the colleges and universities on terrorism and communication have in the recent past began. Post-traumatic stress has been common for the ones who lost loved ones. They experience a dis-attachment to the real world. According to Fields, the victims of terror experience a great feeling of loss. Some may feel guilty as to why they survived the 2001 terror attack. The incidents that happened recur in their minds and they are afraid that such an ordeal could happen again. The most common effect is isolation. It is easier for victims to isolate themselves from others; remain in the house or in familiar surroundings only. On the other hand, traumatic stress is characterized with the reluctance to express oneself. More so for the ones who witnessed a terror ordeal, they are withdrawn and they require guidance and therapy to overcome stress and trauma. The cost of living has in the past drastically changed. Each year, the cost of living keeps fluctuating. However, one thing is certain, life has become more expensive now than in the pats. There are more bills to pay and more that takes away

Nature-Nurture Debate Essay Example for Free

Nature-Nurture Debate Essay Introduction In this report I will examine and explain effective communication by looking at the role of effective communication and interpersonal interaction in health and social care context, theories of communication, methods of communication (verbal, non-verbal and written communication), communication cycle, what is effective communication, formal and informal communication, differences between language and culture. Communication between people enables us to exchange ideas and information, but it involves much more than simply passing on information to others. Communication helps people to feel safe, to form relationships and develop self-esteem. Poor communication can make an individual feel vulnerable, inferior and emotionally threatened. Effective communication helps us understand a person or situation, enables us to resolve differences, build trust and respect and create an warm environment. The effective communication helps us improving communication skills in everyday live, business, relationships, but also in health and social care context. Learning and understanding the effective communication skills the people can better connect with the family members, friends, co-workers (by improving teamwork), people looked after in care homes. What is effective communication Effective communication combines a set of skills including verbal and non-verbal communication, attentive listening, the ability to manage stress, the capacity to recognize and understand your own emotions and those of the person you are communicating with . Effective communication is about more than exchanging information. It requires also understanding the emotion behind the information. It enables us to communicate even negative or difficult messages without creating conflict or destroying trust. Effective communication-Methods of communication Verbal communication The basis of communication is the interaction between people. Verbal communication is the main way for people to communicate face to face. The components of the verbal communication are: sounds, words, speaking and language. Only people can put meaning into words; words alone have no meaning. As meaning is an assigned to words, language develops, which leads to the development of speaking. Over 3000 languages and major dialects are spoken in the world. The huge variety of languages creates difficulties between different languages, but even in one language there can be many problems in understanding. Speaking can be looked in two major areas: interpersonal and public speaking. To communicate effectively we must not simply clean up our language, but learn to relate to people. To be an effective communicator, one must speak in a manner that is not offending to the receiver. Listening Successful listening means not just understanding the words or the information being communicated, but also understanding how the speaker feels about what they are communicating. Effective listening can: -create an environment where everyone feels safe; -save time; -relieve negative emotions; -focus fully on the speaker, make the speaker feel heard and understood; -avoid interrupting; -show you interest. The communication cycle According to Michael Argyle(1972) skilled interpersonal interaction (social skills) involves a cycle in which you have to translate or â€Å"decode† what other people are communicating and constantly adapt you own behaviour in order to communicate effectively. Good communication involves the process of checking understanding, using reflective or active listening. The communication cycle supposes: -an idea occurs: you have an idea that you want to communicate; -message coded: you think through how you are going to say what you are thinking and you put your thoughts in to language or sign language; -message sent: you speak, or sign, or write, or send your message in some other way; -message received: the other person has to sense your message; -message decoded: the other person has to interpret or â€Å"decode† your message; -message understood: your ideas will be understood if all goes well. Non-verbal communication Non-verbal means â€Å"without words†, so non-verbal communication refers to the messages that we send without using words. We send these messages using our eyes, the tone of our voice, our facial expression, our hands and arms, the way we sit or stand. We can enhance effective communication by using open body language (arms uncrossed, standing with an open stance, maintaining eye contact with the person you are talking to). When we speak about non-verbal communication we actually mean: -posture; -the way we move; -facing other people; -gestures; -facial expression; -touch; -silence; -voice tone; -proximity; -reflective listening. As well as remembering what a person says, good listeners will make sure that their non-verbal behaviour shows interest. Skilled listening involves: -looking interested and communicating that you are ready to listen; -hearing what it is said to you; -remembering what was said to you, together with non-verbal messages; -checking your understanding with the person who was speaking to you. Written communication When people remember conversations they have had, they will probably miss out or change some details. Written statements are much more permanent and if they are accurate when they are written, they may be useful later on. Written records are essential for communicating formal information that needs to be reviewed at a future date. For the people who cannot see written scripts or who have limited vision there is a communication system known as Braille which uses raised marks that can be felt with the fingers and it’s based on the sense of touch. This system is now widely used for reading and writing by the people who cannot see written script. Theories of communication The verbal and non-verbal communication is not always straightforward. Effective communication involves a two-way process in which each person tries to understand the view point of the other person. According to Michael Argyle (1972) interpersonal communication is a skill that could be learned and developed. Skilled interpersonal communication, interaction(social skills) involve a cycle in which you have to translate or â€Å"decode† what people are communicating and constantly adapt your own behaviour in order to communicate effectively. The communication cycle involves a kind of code that has to be translated. The stages of communication cycle might be: 1. An idea occurs. 2. Message coded. 3. Message sent. 4. Message received. 5. Message decoded. 6. Message understood. Tuckman ‘s stages of group interaction Bruce Wayne Tuckman(1965) argued that communication in groups can be influenced by the degree to which people feel they belong together. Tuckman suggested that most groups go through a process involving four stages: 1. Forming refers to people meeting for the first time and sharing information. 2. Storming involves tension, struggle and arguments about the way the group may function. 3. Norming sees the group coming together and agreeing on their group values. 4. Performing means that the group will be an effectively performing group, once they have established common expectations and values. Formal and informal communication in health and social care Health and social care work often involves formal communication, which is understood by a wide range of people and shows respect for others. Usually care workers will adjust the way they speak, in order to communicate respect for different communities they address to, as the service users, visitors, colleagues. Formal communication is used in local authority social services and supposes proper English. It also shows respect for others (e.g.: if one went to a local authority social services reception desk, that person will expect to be greeted in a formal way like â€Å"Hello! How can I help you?†, and not informally, like â€Å"Hi! How’s it going?† In many situations such informal language could make people feel not being respected; so it is often risky to use informal language unless you are sure that people expect you to do so. The formal communication is also used in social care services with the manager and even between colleagues if they don’t know very well each other. Otherwise, when they know each other better, they will use informal language. Communication with people at work (between colleagues) is different, because care workers must communicate respect for each other. Colleagues, who do not show respect for each other, may fail to show respect for people who use care services. Colleagues have to develop trust in each other. It is important to demonstrate respect for confidentiality of conversation with colleagues. Care settings may have their own social expectations about the correct way to communicate thoughts and feelings. Communication between professional people and people using services involves the professionals being well aware of the need to translate technical language in to everyday language, when they work with people from other professions or people who use services. Professional people such as doctors or nurses often use their own specialised language, called jargon. It is important that people check that they are being understood correctly. Differences between language and culture Language There are many minority languages in the world. Some people grow up in multilingual communities, where they learn several languages from birth. Many people have grown up using only one language to think and communicate. People who learn a second language later in life find more difficult to express their thoughts and feelings in that language, and prefer to use their first language. Working with later languages can be difficult, as mental translation may be required. Different localities, ethnic groups, professions and work cultures have their own special words or phrases known as speech communities. Some people might feel threatened or excluded by that kind of language they encounter in these speech communities. The technical terminology used by care workers (called jargon) can also create barriers for people who are not a part of that speech community. When people who use services communicate with professionals there is always a risk of misunderstanding between people from different language communities, therefore the health and social care staff needs to check their understanding with the people communicating with them. Culture means the history, customs and ways of behaving that people learn as they grow up. People from different regions use different expressions. Also non-verbal signs may vary from culture to culture. In Europe and North America people often expect other people to look them in the eyes when talking. If a person looks down or away they think it is a sign of dishonesty, sadness or depression. On the other hand, in some other cultures (some black communities or Muslim communities) looking down or away when talking is a sign of respect. (E.g.: in social care settings a Hindu or Muslim person will not accept to be looked after by a person of the opposite sex). People from different geographical areas who use different words and pronounce words differently, they are often using a different dialect. Some social groups use slang (non standard words that are understood by other members of a social group or community, but which cannot be usually found in a dictionary). BTEC Level 3-Health and Social Care-Book 1-Beryl Stretch/Mary Whitehouse www.helpguide.org/effectivecommunication http://louisville.edu

Analysis of Cusp Catastrophe Model

Analysis of Cusp Catastrophe Model Social Psychology of Sport Critical discussion on cusp catastrophe model and using its principles of anxiety on an athlete’s performance. Introduction The ability to cope with pressure and anxiety under strenuous conditions such as a large sporting event is an essential skill to have, especially for an elite level athlete. Anxiety can be associated with an unpleasant state of mind, which can have different effects on performance. There have been many reported situations among athletes relating the feeling of being anxious or stressed in different sporting events. Dias et, al (2009) have participated in a research reporting 550 results among different level athletes linking to stress and anxiety to an important event. Some research have been shown that there were decrease in performance in correlation to anxiety such as memory, complex motor tasks such as shooting into the hoop in basketball () or indoor rock climbing (). However, there have also been positive anxiety correlations on performance regarding rebound shot in basketball and () have shown to have improvement in motor tasks skills such as anagram-solving. However, the relationships between anxiety and performance have been difficult to explain. Things such as methodological flaws, lack of operational definitions and unclear theoretical construction all conjunct within different theories (). Hardy’s (1990) cups catastrophe model (CCM) has been attempting to explain the contradicting effects of anxiety on performance, using multidimensional construct model. Cusp catastrophe model The catastrophe theory was originally proposed by a mathematician Rene Thom (1975). Rene developed the model geometrically explaining all naturally discontinuities in the world. Hardy (1990) has then developed a model of anxiety and performance (), attempting to explain the contradicting findings that have been previously reported regarding anxiety on performance. The model is based on the view on anxiety performance as a multidimensional construct; it combines the cognitive components â€Å"interactive effects of anxiety-performance relationship, the facilitative effects of cognitive anxiety and hysteresis†(), and physiological arousals ‘the organism’s natural physiological response to anxiety-including satiations’(). Cups catastrophe model shows an interactive, three-dimensional model predicting the effects for cognitive anxiety in a form of worry and physiological arousal on performance. Cups catastrophe model proposes that there are a series of four relationships which exists between cognitive anxiety, physiological arousal and performance. Cognitive arousal (CA) components are explained as expectations and cognitive concerns about one self, their situation and potential consequences (). Physiological arousal (PA) component is regarded as physiological response to anxiety, such as pain, feeling sick or feeling uncomfortable (). The first predictor suggests that cognitive anxiety has a positive connection with performance, when physiological arousal is at the lower end of the spectrum. The second predictor shows to have a negative relationship with performance, when physiological arousal is high. Third, is when the CA is low, the PA is shown to have an inverted U-shaped relationship on performance. The final predictor suggests that, when CA is high and physiological arousal is increasing a break in the wave of performance surface occurs. The split factor suggests that there will be a catastrophic drop in performance from the upper performance surface to lower performance surface. Moreover, when the catastrophic drop has occurred, with the large reduction in physiological arousal it is possible to bring performance back to the upper performance surface ().The change that occur when cognitive anxiety is high and physiological arousal increases is called hysteresis, which occurs under the condition of high cogn itive anxiety but not low cognitive anxiety. Hysteresis can be explained as the condition within the model where performance can catastrophically decrease from the upper performance surface to the lower performance surface. However, with the decrease in PA levels below the level at which the catastrophic drop occurred performance of the athlete may increase. Analysing one of the quotes made by Jessica Ennis, (2011) who is a professional 100 meter hurdler, have said: Im really, really nervous before every event, she admits. There are different levels of nerves. Before the hurdles Im particularly nervous as its the first event and, once thats out of the way, I relax a little bit†. Using cups catastrophe model it can be seen that Jessica experience signs of anxiety, having different levels of nervousness throughout the event. It can be expected that her cognitive and physiological arousals are pretty high, as the pressure from an Olympic event such as crowd, competition, winning the gold medal or podium position could have an effect on her performance. So before the event Jessica’s anxiety levels are high, with cognitive anxiety being high and physiological arousal decreasing the hysteresis effect may occur with Jessica feeling the pressure. However, her personal coping strategies could help reverse that effect, bringing her ba ck to the upper performance surface when the competition begins. Balancing the high cognitive state and physiological arousal may help increase performance during the event. Straight after the event it can be seen that she may relax, so her cognitive anxiety and physiological arousal decrease straight after the event leaving her of being more stress-free. Moreover, if she had to perform the hurdles after a certain amount of time, cognitive anxiety could be in at the middle and physiological arousal being low, to maintain the concentration for her to progress on to the next tier. Critical discussion The cups catastrophe model can handle complex linear and nonlinear relationship simultaneously in a three-dimensional manner, with the use of high-order probability density within the model, the functions have the advantage of being able to integrate sudden changes within behavioural jumps in the hysteresis(). Researches by Hardy et al, 2010 have applied the theory behind the cusp model over two experiments, supporting the process and the theory behind performance catastrophes and anxiety by using it with high levels of trait anxiety with competitive environment. The second study was social pressure and ego within the competitive environment which suggest that the cups catastrophe model is plausible. Hardy at al, 2007 have also found that hysteresis did occur in high CA condition, with the significant drops in performance with the increase in PA and CA. Another study by Marshall et al. 2005 looked into how interaction effects of cognitive anxiety and physiological arousal on have an effect on golf performance. The research did confirm that using the model, it had a positive relationship in regards of different situations and how anxiety is coped. However, the research also indicated that even though the methodology is plausible other factors needed to be assessed, as the theory is multidimensional it is very complex. Edwards et al, 2002 on the other hand, implemented that the theory of cusp catastrophe model may be plausible; however other factors such as confidence could appear to play a significant part in the catastrophic performance. Also () has implemented that other models such as endogenous learning-by-doing (ELBD), supports similar fundamentals of anxiety literature. All of the studies and theories suggest that anxiety does have different effects on physiological arousal and on anticipation timing performance during competition and practice. Also most of the models do tend to support the hysteresis theory and the catastrophe phenomenon. Most of the literature supports the different implementation of anxiety which occurs within the human mind, however it is very complex and needs to be further investigated to find a greater explanation on how anxiety affects sporting performance. Conclusion Determining the effects on anxiety on performance is still ripe at this stage; there are plenty of implementations which could be added to all of the models and theories. However, with the use of combined theories it may help further explanation and elimination of how there are relationships within understanding of anxiety, and how potentially it could increase and decrease performance of the athletes. With the cups catastrophe model being one of the most used in the research, it cannot be overlooked that other factors may affect the relationship between anxiety and performance. With the implementation of cups catastrophe model researchers could use other models or theories to round up the conclusion. Reads Anxiety-induced performance catastrophes: Investigating effort required as an asymmetry factor Lew Hardy*, Stuart Beattie and Tim Woodman

Using the Google Search Engine :: Computer Science

Using the Google Search Engine find two internet sites that provide internet resources for the study of Australian Literature. -http://www.middlemiss.org/lit/lit.html -http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ozlit/ ii. Write a detailed summary in no more than 600 words of what kind of information and services the sites provide. Give examples as necessary. The first of the two websites that I looked at was www.middlemiss.org/lit/lit.html, it is constructed by Perry Middlemiss who is a lover of books, and who wishes to pay credit to those 'forgotten' Australian writers on the Web. Middlemiss begins by naming 70 Australian authors, and also provides links to those authors, and those who do not have links to other sites a promise is made that they will be provided in the future. By simply clicking on one of the authors, for example Miles Franklin, you are led to a web page that gives a brief biography of the author, and also a list of her works, some of which also have links that give a brief insight. The site also provides listings of the winners of literary prizes, and in particular The Miles Franklin Award, and The Australian/Vogel Award. Again by clicking on these we are lead to a page that provides the winners of these awards, and also those that were shortlisted. A page that provides a short description on the authors and the books that are listed are available by clicking on the links. Another form of Australian Literature that is provided is poems. Middlemiss offers his favourite poet, Victor Daley on the site, and lists some of his poems, which are all accessible. He also lists other Australian poets, all of which have further links. By clicking on the poet's name we are lead to a site that offers a short biography of the poet, for example Adam Lindsay Gordon, the site also offers a list of his poetry collections and biographies, some of which have further links that discuss that particular item. Links are also available to full texts of the poems that are listed. For example by clicking on The Trenches by Frederic Manning we are lead to the full version of the poem. Also available are links to different Australian novels, which have been segregated under different topic headings, these include fiction, drama, art, food, histories, and others. Ozlit (http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ozlit/) offers more than 500 pages of Australian Literary information, and more than 1100 entries in their Books and Writers database, which is also fully searchable. A search engine is available that allows you to search the whole Ozlit site for information. There is also a links database available that allows you to search for references on writers.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” and Brett Easton Ellis’ “Less Than Zero” Essay

Explore the function of the narrator in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s â€Å"The Great Gatsby† and Brett Easton Ellis’ â€Å"Less Than Zero† Published in 1925 by author F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, is considered a literary classic by many critics. The eponymous novel is set in the â€Å"Roaring 1920’s† post World War 1 and tells the tale of Jay Gatsby through the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway. The exposition begins when we are told of the socio-cultural divide between the upper class of America, by a character who has just moved to Long Island from Minnesota. The clear separation between West Egg and East Egg is an idea explored by Nick, who is a resident of the â€Å"lower-upper† class West Egg. Throughout the novel, it can be observed that events that occur are a direct parallel to the life of Scott Fitzgerald, as he projects characteristics of both Gatsby and Nick that were similar to his own. It is widely believed that the book is written in a manner that is cynical of the American Dream and of the elitist society, in a biased fashion that favours Gatsby. Conversely, Less Than Zero is a novel set in the 1980s and tells the story of affluent college students, who lead hedonistic lifestyles with the security of their parents’ wealth. Brett Easton Ellis’ first novel in his oeuvre is written during the years following the Vietnam War of economic prosperity in Reagan’s America and highlights the fragmented society caused by passionless relationships between friends and family and the lack of morality present in upper class America. The two novels contrast in the cities that they are set in; The Great Gatsby is set in New York’s Long Island, whilst Less Than Zero is set in California on the opposite coast of America. However the behaviour of the two generations is quite similar, and is reflective of the influence of money on higher-class society during the respective periods. In The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway is not only the narrator, but also a character that actively participates in the novel and it his opinion that dictates how the reader perceives other characters. One obvious example of this is in the novel’s title, as the epithet â€Å"Great† is used to describe a character that the reader has not yet met. This suggests that Nick Carraway idolizes Gatsby in some aspects and to some degree, aspires to what Gatsby represents. â€Å"†¦ Produced like the supper, no doubt, out of a caterers basket.† This short extract is taken from a section where Nick is describing a lavish party that is frequently held by Gatsby. The metaphor implies that Gatsby is almost God-like in the way he is able to throw extravagant parties yet remains anonymous to those that attend. During the 1920’s, there was a period of what was known as prohibition, where all alcohol was banned, and yet people are often described drinking throughout The Great Gatsby. This could be a condemnation of upper class society, as it suggests they are just as immoral, if not more so, than the lower classes. Fitzgerald himself went from a family of mediocrity to a sudden rise in splendor through his writings, and can therefore relate to the awe that one might feel when acclimatizing to such a society. Less Than Zero’s narrator, Clay, does not represent its author in the same way as Nick does, however Easton-Ellis uses Clay to magnify the issues that surrounded affluent college students during the 80s. Clay often negatively portrays the actions of other characters, which can be seen as an act of hypocrisy. For example, â€Å"Because you both stole a quarter gram of cocaine from me the last time I left my door open. That’s why.† At this point, Clay accuses his sisters of stealing his cocaine, which they put down to him â€Å"leaving his door unlocked†. This may be a reference to the lack of privacy or a lack of trust within society to such a degree that one cannot trust even their closest family. Nick Carraway is arguably a biased narrator, through his romanticized and idealized description of the novel’s protagonist and adversely, his foil, Tom Buchanan. On their first encounter Nick describes Gatsby’s gestures with authority for example, â€Å"He had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced, or seemed to face, the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself† This quotation epitomizes Nick’s admiration for Gatsby before he has properly met him and implies that he has already formulated an opinion based upon rumours he has heard but also based on the party Gatsby invited him to. Once again, this is may be seen as a condemnation of American society by Fitzgerald who shows that capitalist and superficiality was a major factor in defining an individual. Gatsby’s flawless persona does deteriorate as the novel progresses and as Gatsby comes close to achieving his dream, however Nick appears to glaze over this and as a result, preserves Gatsby’s â€Å"greatness† to the reader. The use of the affectation â€Å"old sport† throughout Gatsby’s communication with Nick highlights a friendship that is neither formal nor informal but rather one of an illusionary nature. This is to say that Gatsby uses the affectation in order to evoke a more appealing, intellectual persona. Despite Nick seeing through his faà §ade, he chooses to ignore the matter, instead only becomes more infatuated with what Gatsby represents. â€Å"What part of the Middle West?’ I inquired casually.’ ‘San Francisco’ ‘I see† It is apparent that Nick knows San Francisco is not in the Middle West but rather on the west coast yet he chooses not to argue as if Gatsby’s word is unequivocally truth. Claire Stocks puts this infatuation down to a likeness that both men share which is that â€Å"[both men] seem to be the victims of insufficient or thwarted inheritances†¦ They are both forced to work for their living†. It can be suggested that towards the end of Less Than Zero, Clay wants to leave this society as he narrates, â€Å"My eyes keep wandering off the screen and to the two green exit signs that hang over the two doors in the back of the theater† This occurs whilst Clay, Blair and Kim are in the cinema watching a â€Å"gory† film and highlights that Clay does in fact have some form of morality despite the actions that he part-takes in. Easton-Ellis reveals a character that is torn between being moral or following the hedonistic life he is so easily acclimatized to. Fitzgerald also uses Nick Carraway as a way of criticizing the society that he strives to be a part of. This is evident in Chapter 2, where Nick spends time with Tom, Myrtle and Mr. Wilson, â€Å"I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.† At this point, Nick may be referring to the â€Å"variety† of classes that are present, as Myrtle and Mr. Wilson are of a lower class, himself of middle class and Tom from the upper echelons of society. It may be seen that Fitzgerald could not stand the behavior of the people he became associated with, however realized that their behavior was a result of what he sought after, in terms of the â€Å"American dream† and therefore feels â€Å"enchanted† by the hedonistic nature of the upper class. Nevertheless, Fitzgerald also highlights the vast socio-cultural divide between classes and as such presents the reader with an ambiguous view of fractured relationships. Clay also presents his own society with undertones of disdain, being cynical of the netherworld through his direct and succinct account of various events that take place. He rarely places emotion or opinion in his description of events and as a result, it seems that he is more of a trustworthy narrator. This is most evident when he recounts the viewing of a â€Å"snuff† movie, â€Å"It looks like a toolbox and I’m confused for a minute and Blair walks out of the room. And he takes out an ice pick and what looks like a wire hanger and a package of nails and then a thin, large knife and he comes toward the girl and Daniel smiles and nudges me in the ribs.† The repeated use of polysyndeton gives the reader the impression that Clay is not properly viewing the movie; instead, he is almost analyzing it as if it were a novel. The lack of sensory description also implies that Clay is trying to distance himself from this and that he sees the crude and disgusting nature of what he is being shown. At this time, snuff films had just been exposed and were not an unknown phenomenon. Therefore, Easton-Ellis may be suggesting that society has lost its moral compass/guidance, being reduced to ignoring such shocking acts. However, in spite of this, Clay does offer himself as a more intellectual individual compared to other characters, by the way he looks at the billboard that is titled â€Å"Disappear Here†. Evidently he does not choose to â€Å"disappear† and instead stays amongst the morally obsolete society that he is attached to and this ultimately leads to the dà ©nouement in which he is forced to leave his society. Both novels differ in the tone in which they are written though the contexts are very similar despite being in diverse decades. On the one hand, there is Nick who is biased towards one specific character and seems to show disdain for the society that he once strived for, and on the other, Clay, who has a more direct approach to narration and more expressively communicates the plot to the reader. Overall, the two narrators are used to convey to very different ideas that are relevant to their contexts. The Great Gatsby is narrated such that the reader is almost forced into liking Gatsby despite his clear superficiality, which is upheld by trivial objects such as â€Å"real books† and medals with â€Å"authentic looks†. Less Than Zero poses are more critical view of society, with the narrator becoming confused by the moral ambiguity and generally growing to hate the society that he belongs to as it has been reduced to individualism and by an large a fractured society whereby â€Å"people are afraid to merge†.

Part One (Olden Days)

Trespassers 12.43 As against trespassers (who, in principle, must take other people's premises and their occupiers as they find them) †¦ Charles Arnold-Baker Local Council Administration, Seventh Edition I Pagford Parish Council was, for its size, an impressive force. It met once a month in a pretty Victorian church hall, and attempts to cut its budget, annex any of its powers or absorb it into some newfangled unitary authority had been strenuously and successfully resisted for decades. Of all the local councils under the higher authority of Yarvil District Council, Pagford prided itself on being the most obstreperous, the most vocal and the most independent. Until Sunday evening, it had comprised sixteen local men and women. As the town's electorate tended to assume that a wish to serve on the Parish Council implied competence to do so, all sixteen councillors had gained their seats unopposed. Yet this amicably appointed body was currently in a state of civil war. An issue that had been causing fury and resentment in Pagford for sixty-odd years had reached a definitive phase, and factions had rallied behind two charismatic leaders. To grasp fully the cause of the dispute it was necessary to comprehend the precise depth of Pagford's dislike and mistrust of the city of Yarvil, which lay to its north. Yarvil's shops, businesses, factories, and the South West General Hospital, provided the bulk of the employment in Pagford. The small town's youths generally spent their Saturday nights in Yarvil's cinemas and nightclubs. The city had a cathedral, several parks and two enormous shopping centres, and these things were pleasant enough to visit if you had sated yourself on Pagford's superior charms. Even so, to true Pagfordians, Yarvil was little more than a necessary evil. Their attitude was symbolized by the high hill, topped by Pargetter Abbey, which blocked Yarvil from Pagford's sight, and allowed the townspeople the happy illusion that the city was many miles further away than it truly was. II It so happened that Pargetter Hill also obscured from the town's view another place, but one that Pagford had always considered particularly its own. This was Sweetlove House, an exquisite, honey-coloured Queen Anne manor, set in many acres of park and farmland. It lay within Pagford Parish, halfway between the town and Yarvil. For nearly two hundred years the house had passed smoothly from generation to generation of aristocratic Sweetloves, until finally, in the early 1900s, the family had died out. All that remained these days of the Sweetloves' long association with Pagford, was the grandest tomb in the churchyard of St Michael and All Saints, and a smattering of crests and initials over local records and buildings, like the footprints and coprolites of extinct creatures. After the death of the last of the Sweetloves, the manor house had changed hands with alarming rapidity. There were constant fears in Pagford that some developer would buy and mutilate the beloved landmark. Then, in the 1950s, a man called Aubrey Fawley purchased the place. Fawley was soon known to be possessed of substantial private wealth, which he supplemented in mysterious ways in the City. He had four children, and a desire to settle permanently. Pagford's approval was raised to still giddier heights by the swiftly circulated intelligence that Fawley was descended, through a collateral line, from the Sweetloves. He was clearly half a local already, a man whose natural allegiance would be to Pagford and not to Yarvil. Old Pagford believed that the advent of Aubrey Fawley meant the return of a charmed era. He would be a fairy godfather to the town, like his ancestors before him, showering grace and glamour over their cobbled streets. Howard Mollison could still remember his mother bursting into their tiny kitchen in Hope Street with the news that Aubrey had been invited to judge the local flower show. Her runner beans had taken the vegetable prize three years in a row, and she yearned to accept the silver-plated rose bowl from a man who was already, to her, a figure of old-world romance. III But then, so local legend told, came the sudden darkness that attends the appearance of the wicked fairy. Even as Pagford was rejoicing that Sweetlove House had fallen into such safe hands, Yarvil was busily constructing a swath of council houses to its south. The new streets, Pagford learned with unease, were consuming some of the land that lay between the city and the town. Everybody knew that there had been an increasing demand for cheap housing since the war, but the little town, momentarily distracted by Aubrey Fawley's arrival, began to buzz with mistrust of Yarvil's intentions. The natural barriers of river and hill that had once been guarantors of Pagford's sovereignty seemed diminished by the speed with which the red-brick houses multiplied. Yarvil filled every inch of the land at its disposal, and stopped at the northern border of Pagford Parish. The town sighed with a relief that was soon revealed to be premature. The Cantermill Estate was immediately judged insufficient to meet the population's needs, and the city cast about for more land to colonize. It was then that Aubrey Fawley (still more myth than man to the people of Pagford) made the decision that triggered a festering sixty-year grudge. Having no use for the few scrubby fields that lay beyond the new development, he sold the land to Yarvil Council for a good price, and used the cash to restore the warped panelling in the hall of Sweetlove House. Pagford's fury was unconfined. The Sweetlove fields had been an important part of its buttress against the encroaching city; now the ancient border of the parish was to be compromised by an overspill of needy Yarvilians. Rowdy town hall meetings, seething letters to the newspaper and Yarvil Council, personal remonstrance with those in charge – nothing succeeded in reversing the tide. The council houses began to advance again, but with one difference. In the brief hiatus following completion of the first estate, the council had realized that it could build more cheaply. The fresh eruption was not of red brick but of concrete in steel frames. This second estate was known locally as the Fields, after the land on which it had been built, and was marked as distinct from the Cantermill Estate by its inferior materials and design. It was in one of the Fields' concrete and steel houses, already cracking and warping by the late 1960s, that Barry Fairbrother was born. IV In spite of Yarvil Council's bland assurances that maintenance of the new estate would be its own responsibility, Pagford – as the furious townsfolk had predicted from the first – was soon landed with new bills. While the provision of most services to the Fields, and the upkeep of its houses, fell to Yarvil Council, there remained matters that the city, in its lofty way, delegated to the parish: the maintenance of public footpaths, of lighting and public seating, of bus shelters and common land. Graffiti blossomed on the bridges spanning the Pagford to Yarvil road; Fields bus shelters were vandalized; Fields teenagers strewed the play park with beer bottles and threw rocks at the street lamps. A local footpath, much favoured by tourists and ramblers, became a popular spot for Fields youths to congregate, ‘and worse', as Howard Mollison's mother put it darkly. It fell to Pagford Parish Council to clean, to repair and to replace, and the funds dispersed by Yarvil were felt from the first to be inadequate for the time and expense required. No part of Pagford's unwanted burden caused more fury or bitterness than the fact that Fields children now fell inside the catchment area of St Thomas's Church of England Primary School. Young Fielders had the right to don the coveted blue and white uniform, to play in the yard beside the foundation stone laid by Lady Charlotte Sweetlove and to deafen the tiny classrooms with their strident Yarvil accents. It swiftly became common lore in Pagford that houses in the Fields had become the prize and goal of every benefit-supported Yarvil family with school-age children; that there was a great ongoing scramble across the boundary line from the Cantermill Estate, much as Mexicans streamed into Texas. Their beautiful St Thomas's – a magnet for professional commuters to Yarvil, who were attracted by the tiny classes, the rolltop desks, the aged stone building and the lush green playing field – would be overrun and swamped by the offspring of scroungers, addicts and mothers whose children had all been fathered by different men. This nightmarish scenario had never been fully realized, because while there were undoubtedly advantages to St Thomas's there were also drawbacks: the need to buy the uniform, or else to fill in all the forms required to qualify for assistance for the same; the necessity of attaining bus passes, and of getting up earlier to ensure that the children arrived at school on time. Some households in the Fields found these onerous obstacles, and their children were absorbed instead by the large plain-clothes primary school that had been built to serve the Cantermill Estate. Most of the Fields pupils who came to St Thomas's blended in well with their peers in Pagford; some, indeed, were admitted to be perfectly nice children. Thus Barry Fairbrother had moved up through the school, a popular and clever class clown, only occasionally noticing that the smile of a Pagford parent stiffened when he mentioned the place where he lived. Nevertheless, St Thomas's was sometimes forced to take in a Fields pupil of undeniably disruptive nature. Krystal Weedon had been living with her great-grandmother in Hope Street when the time came for her to start school, so that there was really no way of stopping her coming, even though, when she moved back to the Fields with her mother at the age of eight, there were high hopes locally that she would leave St Thomas's for good. Krystal's slow passage up the school had resembled the passage of a goat through the body of a boa constrictor, being highly visible and uncomfortable for both parties concerned. Not that Krystal was always in class: for much of her career at St Thomas's she had been taught one-on-one by a special teacher. By a malign stroke of fate, Krystal had been in the same class as Howard and Shirley's eldest granddaughter, Lexie. Krystal had once hit Lexie Mollison so hard in the face that she had knocked out two of her teeth. That they had already been wobbly was not felt, by Lexie's parents and grandparents, to be much of an extenuation. It was the conviction that whole classes of Krystals would be waiting for their daughters at Winterdown Comprehensive that finally decided Miles and Samantha Mollison on removing both their daughters to St Anne's, the private girls' school in Yarvil, where they had become weekly boarders. The fact that his granddaughters had been driven out of their rightful places by Krystal Weedon, swiftly became one of Howard's favourite conversational examples of the estate's nefarious influence on Pagford life. V The first effusion of Pagford's outrage had annealed into a quieter, but no less powerful, sense of grievance. The Fields polluted and corrupted a place of peace and beauty, and the smouldering townsfolk remained determined to cut the estate adrift. Yet boundary reviews had come and gone, and reforms in local government had swept the area without effecting any change: the Fields remained part of Pagford. Newcomers to the town learned quickly that abhorrence of the estate was a necessary passport to the goodwill of that hard core of Pagfordians who ran everything. But now, at long last – over sixty years after Old Aubrey Fawley had handed Yarvil that fatal parcel of land – after decades of patient work, of strategizing and petitioning, of collating information and haranguing sub-committees – the anti-Fielders of Pagford found themselves, at last, on the trembling threshold of victory. The recession was forcing local authorities to streamline, cut and reorganize. There were those on the higher body of Yarvil District Council who foresaw an advantage to their electoral fortunes if the crumbling little estate, likely to fare poorly under the austerity measures imposed by the national government, were to be scooped up, and its disgruntled inhabitants joined to their own voters. Pagford had its own representative in Yarvil: District Councillor Aubrey Fawley. This was not the man who had enabled the construction of the Fields, but his son, ‘Young Aubrey', who had inherited Sweetlove House and who worked through the week as a merchant banker in London. There was a whiff of penance in Aubrey's involvement in local affairs, a sense that he ought to make right the wrong that his father had so carelessly done to the little town. He and his wife Julia donated and gave out prizes at the agricultural show, sat on any number of local committees, and threw an annual Christmas party to which invitations were much coveted. It was Howard's pride and delight to think that he and Aubrey were such close allies in the continuing quest to reassign the Fields to Yarvil, because Aubrey moved in a higher sphere of commerce that commanded Howard's fascinated respect. Every evening, after the delicatessen closed, Howard removed the tray of his old-fashioned till, and counted up coins and dirty notes before placing them in a safe. Aubrey, on the other hand, never touched money during his office hours, and yet he caused it to move in unimaginable quantities across continents. He managed it and multiplied it and, when the portents were less propitious, he watched magisterially as it vanished. To Howard, Aubrey had a mystique that not even a worldwide financial crash could dent; the delicatessen-owner was impatient of anyone who blamed the likes of Aubrey for the mess in which the country found itself. Nobody had complained when things were going well, was Howard's oft-repeated view, and he accorded Aubrey the respec t due to a general injured in an unpopular war. Meanwhile, as a district councillor, Aubrey was privy to all kinds of interesting statistics, and in a position to share a good deal of information with Howard about Pagford's troublesome satellite. The two men knew exactly how much of the district's resources were poured, without return or apparent improvement, into the Fields' dilapidated streets; that nobody owned their own house in the Fields (whereas the red-brick houses of the Cantermill Estate were almost all in private hands these days; they had been prettified almost beyond recognition, with window-boxes and porches and neat front lawns); that nearly two-thirds of Fields-dwellers lived entirely off the state; and that a sizeable proportion passed through the doors of the Bellchapel Addiction Clinic. VI Howard carried the mental image of the Fields with him always, like a memory of a nightmare: boarded windows daubed with obscenities; smoking teenagers loitering in the perennially defaced bus shelters; satellite dishes everywhere, turned to the skies like the denuded ovules of grim metal flowers. He often asked rhetorically why they could not have organized and made the place over – what was stopping the residents from pooling their meagre resources and buying a lawnmower between the lot of them? But it never happened: the Fields waited for the councils, District and Parish, to clean, to repair, to maintain; to give and give and give again. Howard would then recall the Hope Street of his boyhood, with its tiny back gardens, each hardly more than tablecloth-sized squares of earth, but most, including his mother's, bristling with runner beans and potatoes. There was nothing, as far as Howard could see, to stop the Fielders growing fresh vegetables; nothing to stop them disciplining their sinister, hooded, spray-painting offspring; nothing to stop them pulling themselves together as a community and tackling the dirt and the shabbiness; nothing to stop them cleaning themselves up and taking jobs; nothing at all. So Howard was forced to draw the conclusion that they were choosing, of their own free will, to live the way they lived, and that the estate's air of slightly threatening degradation was nothing more than a physical manifestation of ignorance and indolence. Pagford, by contrast, shone with a kind of moral radiance in Howard's mind, as though the collective soul of the community was made manifest in its cobbled streets, its hills, its picturesque houses. To Howard, his birthplace was much more than a collection of old buildings, and a fast-flowing, tree-fringed river, the majestic silhouette of the abbey above or the hanging baskets in the Square. For him, the town was an ideal, a way of being; a micro-civilization that stood firmly against a national decline. ‘I'm a Pagford man,' he would tell summertime tourists, ‘born and bred.' In so saying, he was giving himself a profound compliment disguised as a commonplace. He had been born in Pagford and he would die there, and he had never dreamed of leaving, nor itched for more change of scene than could be had from watching the seasons transform the surrounding woods and river; from watching the Square blossom in spring or sparkle at Christmas. Barry Fairbrother had known all this; indeed, he had said it. He had laughed right across the table in the church hall, laughed right in Howard's face. ‘You know, Howard, you are Pagford to me.' And Howard, not discomposed in the slightest (for he had always met Barry joke for joke), had said, ‘I'll take that as a great compliment, Barry, however it was intended.' He could afford to laugh. The one remaining ambition of Howard's life was within touching distance: the return of the Fields to Yarvil seemed imminent and certain. Then, two days before Barry Fairbrother had dropped dead in a car park, Howard had learned from an unimpeachable source that his opponent had broken all known rules of engagement, and had gone to the local paper with a story about the blessing it had been for Krystal Weedon to be educated at St Thomas's. The idea of Krystal Weedon being paraded in front of the reading public as an example of the successful integration of the Fields and Pagford might (so Howard said) have been funny, had it not been so serious. Doubtless Fairbrother would have coached the girl, and the truth about her foul mouth, the endlessly interrupted classes, the other children in tears, the constant removals and reintegrations, would be lost in lies. Howard trusted the good sense of his fellow townsfolk, but he feared journalistic spin and the interference of ignorant do-gooders. His objection was both principled and personal: he had not yet forgotten how his granddaughter had sobbed in his arms, with bloody sockets where her teeth had been, while he tried to soothe her with a promise of triple prizes from the tooth fairy.