New Releases by Peter Boxall

This Element revisits the relation between Giacomo Leopardi and Samuel Beckett to argue that the dialogue between them might offer new ways of thinking about the nature of both writers'' pessimism. The authors suggest that Leopardi becomes increasingly important for Beckett, not only because he frames a literary philosophy of scepticism, but because he gives a rich account of the means by which thoroughgoing pessimism might open on to an unenchanted mode of persistence. In doing so, the Element looks past the impasse - between going on and not going on - that threatens to forestall imaginative possibilities for both writers.

The Possibility of Literature is an essential collection from one of the most powerful and distinctive voices in contemporary literary studies. Bringing together key compositions from the last twenty-five years, as well as several new pieces, the book demonstrates the changing fate of literary thinking over the first decades of the twenty-first century. Peter Boxall traces here the profound shifts in the global conditions that make literature possible as these have occurred in the historical passage from 9/11 to Covid 19. Exploring questions such as ''The Idea of Beauty'', the nature of ''Mere Being'', or the possibilities of Rereading, the author anatomises the myriad forces that shape the literary imagination. At the same time, he gives vivid critical expression to the imaginative possibilities of literature itself - those unique forms of communal life that literature makes possible in a dramatically changing world, and that lead us towards a new shared future.

Strategy and Human Resource Management is concerned with examining how HR strategy impacts on an organisation''s chances of survival and its relative success, and with understanding how it varies across important organisational, industry and societal contexts. It takes an analytical approach, which examines and explains what managers do and why they do it before offering any sort of prescription for what the authors think they should do. This approach is grounded in research but is brought to life with examples, cases and vignettes to offer a practice-orientated analysis of the subject. As well as explaining important general principles in strategic HRM, critical features of the different contexts in which they are applied are examined. For this fifth edition, there is increased coverage of contemporary topics, including capital markets and increasing financialisation, Industry 4.0, the shaping of employee voice under different varieties of capitalism and the effects of austerity. Strategy and Human Resource Management retains, however, the classic sources that are fundamental to the subject while also including important theoretical advances and the best new studies of strategies in the world of work and people.

This study tests the argument that human resource management in hotels enhances service-recovery performance and job satisfaction through empowering front-line employees to respond to service failures. After an initial phase of qualitative interviewing, dyadic data were gathered through a large-scale survey in thirty hotels in Sri Lanka. The results of structural equation modelling show that the HR practices and management styles adopted in this context help to develop job competence, which is then related to service-recovery performance and job satisfaction. However, they show that service recovery is carefully stage-managed and ''staircased'' in this hotel context with empowerment strongly related to hierarchical level. Empowerment to address service failures is important in these hotels but it is deliberately graduated according to rank. While employee training shows benefits for both parties, greater job autonomy would enhance the well-being of these service workers. Full paper available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhm.2019.03.006.

Using a two-wave survey of 315 workers in a lean manufacturing plant, this study examines how work intensification affects employee wellbeing and how its effects may be ameliorated. It demonstrates that work intensification is transmitted into poorer wellbeing through greater emotional exhaustion. It shows that this mediation process is moderated by line-manager support, which buffers the relationship between emotional exhaustion and wellbeing. The study suggests that the health-impairing risks of high work intensity in lean settings can be reduced through better supervisory support. Ensuring that line managers have the opportunity, skills and motivation to offer good support to workers is a vital aspect of the interventions needed to counteract the health risks posed by lean production. Full paper available at https://doi.org/10.1177/0143831X19890678.

Situated within a societal perspective on human resource management (HRM), this paper asks how HRM academics can make a better contribution to understanding the impacts of HRM on societal well-being. It argues that we should target the ''so what?'' questions that matter to society, including important issues of employer-employee misalignment and of perverse alignment (''perverse-performance work systems''). It calls for an approach to societal issues in HRM that is problem-focused and theory-informed. While recognising some validity to the criticisms of academic HRM raised in the ''psychologisation'' debate, the article argues that the critique is over-generalised and contests the idea that the concern of HRM academics with enhancing workplace mutuality is an expression of a unitarist ideology. Mutuality and unitarism should not be conflated. In advancing a pluralist agenda, it argues that we must become better at theoretical integration, at synergising our research methods and at engaging constructively with practitioners and policy makers.

This study is concerned with the debate around employee well-being in the environment of lean production. It applies the job demands-resources model to examine the effects of problem-solving demands and job resources (training, participation in decision-making, and line manager support) on employee engagement and exhaustion in a Chinese manufacturer. It examines previously untested interactions and shows that these job resources created a “buffering effect” in the relationship between problem-solving demands and exhaustion. It also shows a “coping effect” because the relationship between resources and engagement was strengthened as problem-solving demands increased. Rather than being uniformly positive or negative, the results suggest that the overall impact of lean production on worker well-being is likely to depend on the ways in which managers create scope for worker involvement in decision-making, target resources to the specific job demands, and adjust resource levels to the degree of these demands. Full paper available at https://doi.org/10.1111/1748-8583.12204.

The high-involvement model of human resource management (HRM) is seen as offering major benefits to organisations, employees and societies through enhancing employee motivation, enabling people to reach more of their potential, and producing better quality and innovation. However, it would be a mistake to imagine that we can stimulate more of it by simply ''turning up the volume'' on its virtues. In this article, we highlight what we have learnt about the model, including the contextual factors that enable and constrain its uptake. We also discuss the tensions that affect the quality and sustainability of particular implementations. These include the need to retain employee commitment when it is threatened by all-too-common periods of restructuring, the need to manage the relationship between greater involvement and work intensification, and the need to ensure a good match between the kinds of autonomy that employees value and the working arrangements that organisations need in complex, interdependent teamwork.

This article uses national-level data to examine the benefits for workers of better skill utilisation and the question of how opportunities to use skills in the workplace can be enhanced. Analysis of the New Zealand data in the 2005 and 2015 rounds of the International Social Survey Programme confirms that better skill utilisation is generally associated with a broad range of beneficial outcomes, including higher employee income, better opportunities for career advancement, higher job satisfaction, greater organisational commitment and lower turnover intentions. In addition, skill utilisation serves as a significant mediator between work autonomy and employee outcomes, particularly in the 2015 survey. As a general rule, better utilisation of employee skills will occur in organisational climates in which employee autonomy is encouraged. Full paper available at https://doi.org/10.1177/0022185618819169.

PurposeThis study aims to explore the implementation of data analytics in the Big-Four accounting firms, including the extent to which a digital transformation is changing the work of financial auditors, why it is doing so and how these firms are managing the transformation process.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted 23 interviews with 20 participants across four hierarchical levels from three of the Big-Four accounting firms in New Zealand.FindingsThe firms have entered the era of “smart audit systems”, in which auditors provide deep business insights that are communicated more effectively through data visualisation. The full potential, however, of data analytics depends not only on the transformation process within accounting firms but also on improvement in the quality of IT systems in client companies. The appointment of transformation managers, the recruitment of technology-savvy graduates and the provision of extensive training are helping to embed data analytics in the Big-Four firms. Accounting graduates in financial audit now need to show that they have the aptitude to become “citizen data scientists”.Practical implicationsThe findings explain how data analytics is being embraced in the Big-Four auditing firms and underline the implications for those who work in them.Originality/valueThe findings challenge the “technological reluctance” thesis. In contrast, the authors observe a climate of positive attitudes towards new technology and accompanying actions in the Big-Four firms. The authors show how branches of the Big-Four firms operating distantly from their global headquarters, and with smaller economies of scale, are implementing the new technologies that characterise their global firms.Full paper available at https://doi.org/10.1108/PAR-06-2021-0105.

This study interrogates the Work Orientation module of the International Social Survey Pro-gramme (ISSP) across three waves (1997, 2005 and 2015) to understand the job values of New Zealanders. It finds that men and women are more similar than different in their job values, that full-timers are more concerned with income and career prospects than part-timers, and that higher education tends to raise expectations of having an interesting job and a high level of pay. New Zealanders have become somewhat more altruistic at work, confirming the image of the ''helpful Kiwi'', but their job values have not shifted much across these surveys and are similar to those of employees in other developed countries. The broad pattern is that a vital extrinsic factor, job security, and the intrinsic quality of work out-rank the value of the extrinsic factors of high income and career prospects for New Zealanders.

In The Prosthetic Imagination, leading critic Peter Boxall argues that we are now entering an artificial age, in which our given bodies enter into new conjunctions with our prosthetic extensions. This new age requires us to reimagine our relation to our bodies, and to our environments, and Boxall suggests that the novel as a form can guide us in this imaginative task. Across a dazzling range of prose fictions, from Thomas More''s Utopia to Margaret Atwood''s Oryx and Crake, Boxall shows how the novel has played a central role in forging the bodies in which we extend ourselves into the world. But if the novel has helped to give our world a human shape, it also contains forms of life that elude our existing human architectures: new amalgams of the living and the non-living that are the hidden province of the novel imagination. These latent conjunctions, Boxall argues, are preserved in the novel form, and offer us images of embodied being that can help us orient ourselves to our new prosthetic condition.

Water management can generate valuable ecosystem services but can be costly to implement. We examine this issue using irrigation water storage infrastructure which has the potential to provide desirable services to residential properties affected by the condition of the storage structure. We examine a particular prairie setting where concerns regarding fluctuations in water levels of an irrigation storage lake led to an agreement between the irrigation agency and the owners of properties around the lake to stabilize water levels. Using quasi-experimental hedonic property approaches with two different control groups we estimate the subsequent impact of this agreement on shoreline property values using a time series of sales data. The methods utilized in this article represent an effective approach to produce plausible estimates of some of the economic values captured by the infrastructure generating ecosystem services. We find that property values increased as a result of the agreement and that the additional property tax revenues arising from these values can be used to some extent to offset the annual service fees paid to the irrigation agency to provide the stabilized lake levels. This article illustrates the potential for irrigation infrastructure management to provide increases in ecosystem service values beyond irrigation, and also that these values can be captured to pay for the costs of providing these increased values.

We extend count data travel cost modeling by developing a utility theoretic system of semilogarithmic recreation demand equations. The restrictions required to make the system utility theoretic are applied during estimation. The model is applied to individual wilderness recreation trips in a system of four Canadian wilderness parks. The resulting demand system is used to examine the impacts of changing U.S.-Canadian currency exchange rates on participation and welfare of U.S. recreationists.

An adult mystery yarn...Stephanie Howe is out of prison after a ten stretch for GBH and more, enjoying a celebratory drink at the local hostelry for dodgy guys and gals, The Bootmakers Arms, a.k.a. The Cobblers. The notorious lady gangster has business to clear up from before her holiday at her Majesty''s request.Much has changed in her leafy suburb, north east of London, during the interruption in her life. The pub has new owners; guys who have made their millions in The City of London. Managed by the mercurial Veronica, a mystery herself. A landlady who has calmed the pub from being a scene from the Wild West to simply a den of thieves. They are desperate to redevelop the pub and shed it of its sleazy image. Next door to the pub the once defunct and discredited Prep School, now the magnificent Blue Skies House Retirement Home. Owned by Benny ''BJ'' Johnson, a larger than life character of Nigerian origin with an overdraft to match his ego.There is a relatively new Detective Inspector on the block, Mike Griffin. He has a long-term case to solve. The disappearance of sixteen gold bars after a raid on a Spanish Bank in The City of London a decade earlier. Word is that it is in his patch and he has been deployed to solve this, together with an unhealthy spike in crime figures in the area.An area where many know plenty but divulge little. Dodgy pasts are more than the norm. Who really knows what though? Fake news and misinformation are D.I. Griffin''s bug bear. An intriguing pool of characters for him and his tenacious team of two to unravel. One of the pub''s most frequent visitors is a peddler of goods illegally acquired in London''s West End, who certainly, doesn''t stand out as being anything other than a punter; but has he a secret to be told? Cobblers is an entertaining, page turning, adult mystery yarn that looks at everyday life of everyday folk in a not necessarily normal society. Much illicit shagging seems to be excepted, or even expected. With the local Constabulary more than contributing to the shenanigans, as well as appearing to carry a stash of nine-bob notes. Or is this more reality than the lives many of us lead?The gold though? The tale attempts to untangle the mystery whereabouts of the bullion.Character and dialogue driven, explosive at times, with many a twist, Cobblers will absorb you into a world that we all live very close to.Prepare to be entertained and if you can second guess the outcome you are one ahead of the author.

As a 56 years old male living in the suburbs of London, sport has played a major part in my life. Life in the Medium Paced Lane tracks 40 years of performing at the highest level (achieveable). Like limbo, the bar gets lower as time moves on. This is a memoir that will excite most of the population (okay slightly ambitious). It takes in the sixties (just) through to the noughties. It encompasses a sporting life that has rubbed shoulders with the good, great and the ugly. From the playing fields of Essex to international encounters on the other side of the world. Catching a cricket ball from a superstar to plucking an egg out of the midnight sky. The grandeur of Lord''s to a burning sofa on a wicket in South Essex. Hopefully as humorous as it is true. A page turning read that leaves you just wondering...well just wondering - Enjoy!

The Value of the Novel offers a reappraisal of the political and literary value of the novel as a genre.

J Curve is a humorous contemporary tale of how a high flyer in business allows greed to become his main motivation and potentially his downfall. The story opens in October 2014 in the City of London. Brett Hunter, the supposedly suave and sophisticated, Managing Director of Sobbolds Leisure; brewery owners, with an extensive portfolio of hotels, pubs, restaurants and much more, is about to embark on his biggest deal to date. The takeover of Gulbey- Barrett''s, the sleeping drinks conglomerate giant. Hunter believes that he is nearing the pinnacle of his career, with the social trappings associated with this. His parallel life though is driven by greed. In the weeks that follow Hunter''s world begins to disintegrate, but he hasn''t got to where he is without the ability to fight his corner. Max Shadpole though, the Executive Editor of The Sunday Post, a national tabloid newspaper has been on his case for a long time and whilst Hunter is distracted by the impending business deal, Max edges towards exposing the real Hunter. Throughout J Curve looks at the characters and their lives; magnifying warts and all of those involved in the impending City takeover. The glamorous, high flying bankers, Jayne Russell and Jane Morgan play prominent roles and their contrasting characters are illuminated as the story progresses. The Directors at Gulbey''s, in particular the upstanding Edward Goodyear and the eccentric Guy Gulbey, prove that tragedy and day to day humour are both fundamental to everyday life. Threaded throughout the story is how life at the top can be very lonely. J Curve avoids the technicalities of business, concentrating on how life spins in many directions for all those involved, moving at a fast pace, culminating in many revelations and an unexpected twist of fate.

If Trollope, Cooper and Christie could ever have collaborated on a novel they would probably come up with something very similar to ''Stumped Identity''. Rory Embers, a teenager in long term foster care along with his four younger siblings in urban North London, wants to find his real father and seeks retribution for the life he has given them. To find his father he gains the help of Sophie Anderson, a young Social worker who, unbeknown to Rory, has an agenda of her own. Their investigations lead them to the seemingly idyllic West Country village, Craig Dell, where the cricket club is the hub of the village. Here in the heart of middle England, villagers go about their business and pleasure. Behind the net curtains all is not quite so straight forward and an unconventional lifestyle and seedy underbelly is slowly uncovered. But which of the residents is Rory''s father? Two fit the bill precisely; Phil ''Popeye'' Embers, the village butcher and Miles Harrington, the recently arrived, secretive peddler of pornography. Not until the final pages is the ''who done it'' revealed. ''Stumped Identity'' is a fast paced yarn that has humour threaded throughout whilst addressing a serious social issue.

This critical introduction examines the formal and thematic features common among twenty-first-century writers from around the world.

Bibliographies.

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.

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.

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.

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.