New Releases by Peter Boxall

Completely revised and updated to include the most up-to-date selections, this is a bold and bright reference book to the novels and the writers that have excited the world''s imagination. This authoritative selection of novels, reviewed by an international team of writers, critics, academics, and journalists, provides a new take on world classics and a reliable guide to what''s hot in contemporary fiction. Featuring more than 700 illustrations and photographs, presenting quotes from individual novels and authors, and completely revised for 2012, this is the ideal book for everybody who loves reading.

Samuel Beckett is widely regarded as ''the last modernist'', the writer in whose work the aesthetic principles which drove the modernist project dwindled and were finally exhausted. And yet despite this, it is striking that many of the most important contemporary writers, across the world, see their work as emerging from a Beckettian legacy. So whilst Beckett belongs, in one sense, to the end of the modernist period, in another sense he is the well spring from which the contemporary, in a wide array of guises, can be seen to emerge. Since Beckett looks at a number of writers, in different national and political contexts, tracing the way in which Beckett''s writing inhabits the contemporary, while at the same time reading back through Beckett to the modernist and proto-modernist forms he inherited. In reading Beckett against the contemporary in this way, Peter Boxall offers both a compelling re-reading of Beckett, and a powerful new analysis of contemporary culture.

Consumer demand for forage- or grass-finished beef is rapidly emerging in the US. This research uses data elicited from consumer surveys and experimental auctions to provide insight on product attributes (taste/flavour, credence and nutritional characteristics) and socio-demographic factors that are most important in determining US consumers'' preferences and willingness to pay premiums for grass-finished versus grain-finished beef. Information related to beef production processes increased the probability consumers would be willing to pay a premium for grass-fed beef. However, it appears that health-related messages are more important drivers of willingness-to-pay, on average, than the absence of antibiotics and supplemental hormones and traceability. Labelling information regarding grass-fed beef''s nutritional content and related production processes is vital for maintaining and growing premium niche markets for grass-fed beef in the US. The relative size of the willingness to pay estimates compared to previous cost estimates suggest that the Australian beef industry may have a comparative advantage for finishing beef on forage and marketing premium grass-fed differentiated beef products in the US market.

We examine the propensity of respondents to choose the status quo (SQ) or current situation alternative as a function of complexity in two separate state-of-the-world choice experiments. Complexity in each choice set was characterized as the number of single and multiple changes in levels of attributes from the current situation and the order of the choice task in the sequence of multiple tasks provided to respondents. We show that increasing complexity leads to increased choice of the SQ and that a respondent''s age and level of education also influenced this choice. We outline the effects of the alternate approaches for incorporating the SQ into welfare measurement. These findings have implications for the design of stated preference experiments, examining passive use values and for empirical analysis leading to welfare measurement.

The management of managers is an important contemporary concern, but the literature on the issue is not well integrated. This paper reviews key sources on the topic across organizational economics, human resource development and strategic human resource management. It presents a novel interdisciplinary framework for analyzing how firms manage senior managers and for guiding future research, arguing that firms adopt different styles to attract-defend, develop-renew and motivate-harvest their senior managerial resource, depending on their contexts and choices that are made in the firm over time. The notion that some styles draw on early identification of élites while others treat management identification as more of an emergent problem is central to the typology. Within each of the styles identified, effectiveness in the management of managers hinges on recognizing and handling certain strategic tensions and problems.

One of the few available books of criticism on the topic, this monograph presents the fullest account to date of Don DeLillo''s writing, situating his oeuvre within a wider analysis of the condition of contemporary fiction, and dealing with his entire work in relation to contemporary political and economic concerns for the fist time. Providing a lucid and nuanced reading of DeLillo''s ambivalent engagement with American and European culture, as well as with modernism and postmodernism, and globalization and terrorism, this fascinating volume interrogates the critical and aesthetic capacities of fiction in what is an age of global capitalism and US cultural imperialism.

Managers make choices regarding the types of employment structures that meet the needs of the firm, and workers make choices regarding the types of arrangement that meet their needs. Various streams of literature offer perspectives on why employment or contracting might be preferred but it is often the perspective of the firm that dominates the analysis. This kind of one-sidedness weakens our understanding of employment as a relationship. It lacks recognition of the importance of mutuality: of matching the needs of the worker with the needs of the business. This paper reports research investigating management decisions to use self-employed contractors or employees for particular jobs, and workers'' decisions to seek or accept organizational employment or self-employment. Some 80 in-depth interviews were conducted with managers and workers across two industries (energy supply and engineering consultancy) with the intent of studying two groups of workers differing dramatically in skill levels. While largely confirming existing theory on the management conditions relevant to the contracting-out of work, the study identifies factors that make a contracting relationship more beneficial, thus suggesting propositions for further research on worker preferences.

This paper uses two recent large-scale surveys in New Zealand to test the various reasons given for lower rates of union membership among younger workers. Younger workers'' disproportionate location in smaller workplaces and those industries where union reach is lowest accounts for a substantial part of their lower union density. Along with the tendency of younger workers to explore their options through labour turnover, this factor offers a much better explanation for the younger-older worker union density gap than do assertions about a growth in individualism in Generations X and Y.