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This contribution focuses on the relationship between the urban milieu and high creativity firms, focusing on the videogames sector in Montreal. It reveals an organizational frame of a lack of large R&D departments and a lack of global networks of subsidiaries or partners through which firms access creative knowledge. None of these classical ways to enhance creativity is present. Instead, creativity relies on distributed and independent communities of knowing which generate, exploit, and develop a ‘creative slack’ as a source of growth for the firm. These communities find their source of inspiration and innovation in the fertile soil of a creative city.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of Paul Slack's Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England. The account of poverty in this book is then compared to Slack's contribution. An overview of the succeeding chapters is presented.

Examines ‘resilience’ as both a form of coping with vulnerability and reducing ‘unsustainability’. This involves the integration of key permaculture concepts such as ‘in-built redundancy’, ‘slack’, and principles such as ‘sufficiency’ to guide our thinking. Through an examination of the Transition movement, this chapter outlines a ‘creative adaptive management’ approach to building less unsustainable, more resilient communities. A resilient community is argued to be one that has high levels of solidarity, low levels of socio-economic inequality and empowered citizens. These are features of the civic republic tradition. Also anticipating later chapters, it discusses the centrality of creativity and leadership. This chapter also explores the political and cultural importance of ‘rituals’; collective practices organized around gratitude, non-consumption and remembrance. It suggests that the Transition movement can be read as an attempt to ‘de-sequester’ and render explicit those forms of relations of dependence on nature and fellow humans which have been occluded, forgotten, or otherwise hidden away in modernity.

This chapter presents a couple of “Keynesian” theories of the impact of redistribution, which claim that marginal tax rates have no effect on work hours during a recession, and that work hours are stimulated by any policy that puts resources in the hands of the poor and unemployed. The chapter explains how the fundamental differences between Keynesian approaches and mine are a matter of testable assumptions, and concludes with a simple econometric framework that embeds all of them. The relevant parts of that econometric model are estimated in the next chapter.

World War II had been over for five years. The incredible saga of RDX and the phenomenal accomplishments of the Tennessee Eastman Company and Holston Ordnance Works were fading into the recent past. Public attention turned to the Cold War with the Soviet Union; however, a case involving espionage at Holston Ordnance Works in 1943 would make newspaper headlines in 1950. In June 1950, a former employee of Holston Ordnance, Alfred Dean Slack, was arrested by the FBI, charged with a 1943 act of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union, and sentenced to ten years in prison.

This introductory chapter provides a background for a study of Richard Linklater's cinema. Born in 1960 and a self-taught filmmaker, Linklater's cine-literacy and philosophical knowledge has often seen him classified as the most European-minded of the American filmmakers who came to prominence with low-budget features in the 1990s and, partly for this reason, he remains one of those most critical voices of contemporary America. The most dominant theme in his cinema is the employment of the slacker-protagonist, which offers imagination and reflection as alternative priorities to competition and profit. In his emblematic debut film Slacker (1991), he used slacking not as laziness, but as a refusal to engage with the fast-track consumerism and aggressive foreign policy of President Ronald Reagan and George Bush Senior. Another noteworthy characteristic of Linklater's cinema is his deployment of rotoscoping, which involves the tracing and animating of live action footage in order to explicitly represent metaphysical enquiry. This is particularly seen in Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006).

This chapter examines the form and content of Richard Linklater's films on slacking. A theoretical approach to the Modernist cinema of Linklater begins by looking at the frequent motif of the street. In Slacker (1991), SubUrbia (1996), Before Sunrise (1995), Waking Life (2001), Before Sunset (2004), and Fast Food Nation (2006), the street is a place and time of visual, auditory, sensual, romantic, spiritual, and philosophical encounters. The locating of these encounters in the urban areas of Austin, Vienna, Paris, New York, and SubUrbia's metaphorical Burnfield suggests modernity and its flow of life, as well as the fluid nature of the films themselves, for the movement of these films is the movement of the characters therein. This movement is always temporalized; it is defined by time. This temporalized movement negotiates the potential of cinematic subjectivity, and the sharing of empathy and emotional effect. Thus, the cinema of Linklater is one of time-frames, and the movement therein: life, fluidity, and open-endedness of thought and action.

Plant communities of the dune complex are a result of interaction between tolerance of plant species and sandy substrate, high wind velocities, salt spray, sand accretion and environmental heterogeneity. Propagules of many plant species are dispersed by water currents and deposited on the driftline. Most of these species find ideal conditions for germination but seedling establishment, growth and reproduction is denied to all but a few species with ecological amplitude sufficient to withstand the physical stresses associated with sand accretion, erosion and sandblasting in the highly disturbed environment. The distinct differences between habitats from the water´s edge to the inland grass-forest ecotone leads eventually to the establishment of ecologically distinct communities consisting of both plants and animals. The distinction is caused by sharp differences in the physical environment that may create sharp zones with abrupt or gradual blending of the two community types. In some locations these zones are relatively stable for long periods before any visible change occurs in the community depending on the recession of the shoreline, availability of new bare areas and the advance of communities towards the sea coast. The occurrence of plant communities in zones has been documented along sea coasts worldwide. This chapter examines the plant communities of the sand dune complex along seashores of the world. The following information has been assembled from Doing (1985), Dry coastal ecosystems Vol. 2 A, B, C, edited by Eddy van der Maarel (1993), Doody (1991) and Thannheiser (1984). It presents data on plant communities and ecology of each zone from various parts of the world. The species complement in the ´foredune complex´ in tropical, temperate and other regions around the world may be different, but their response to the prevailing environmental stresses of foredunes is convergent. In different world regions the boundaries between vegetation zones of the sand dune complex may not be defined sharply because of climatic variability, geographic location, physiography of the dune system and other factors peculiar to each location. Usually three to six different plant assemblages have been identified on the dune complex along sea coasts and lakeshores. A brief description of vegetation and ecological traits of species in each zone are presented below.

The most interesting aspect of systems is their birth and formation because it brings novelty into the world. How does such creativity, or constructivity work its way? We start by discussing the concepts of novelty, innovation and emergence generally in the framework of dynamical systems. We then turn to birth processes at the same system level before looking at the emergence of new entities at higher levels of a system. We conclude with a discussion of group formation as one intermediate step to the emergence of a new system level.

It seemed, in Hawai‘i, that Hawaiian music was in a crisis state by the late 1960s. Neither Hawaiian nor non-Hawaiian residents and tourists seemed to express much interest in the formerly celebrated Hawaiian troupes. Many younger Hawaiians came to negatively associate the steel guitar with Waikiki tourists, Webley Edwards’ “Hawai‘i Calls” radio program, or country music. Some observers such as George Kanahele and Kahauanu Lake became concerned that such a lack of interest in Hawaiian music and language would contribute to a loss of cultural integrity, just as Hawaiians continued to see their lands under siege by military and touristic expansion. Such apprehension, however, soon met a powerful response, a “Hawaiian renaissance,” a movement that would rejuvenate traditional Hawaiian music. While chronicling these developments, this chapter also contemplates the meaning of “traditional” Hawaiian music in the mid- to late-twentieth century, as well as the role of the steel guitar and hapa haole music in the Hawaiian Renaissance and the rise of the kī hō‘alu, or slack key guitar. Featured musicians include Gabby Pahinui, Isreal Kamakawiwo‘ole, Eddie Kamae, Don Ho, Alan Akaka, Genoa Keawe, Jerry Byrd, and David Keli‘i.

A quarter of all casualties at Peterloo were women, even though they comprised only 12% of those present. This apparent victimisation of women by the Manchester Yeomanry Cavalry resulted in the widespread use of the motif of mother and child across a range of poems, other print media and cultural artefacts produced in response to Peterloo, leading to an intensification of impact rather than a dilution through repetition. The introduction traces the involvement of female reformers, particularly in the North West and their representation in graphic satire. Even though this section comprises only eight poems, the trope of woman and child as victims is present in many of the other poems in this collection as well as newspaper articles, graphic satire and other artefacts, resulting in a powerful discourse due to the sense of collectivity engendered by its repeated use. The introduction provides examples of how the representations of Peterloo depicted women and children, illustrating that the poems should be read alongside the caricatures of George Cruikshank and images printed on handkerchiefs, illustrated here by the work of John Slack, and pottery in order to fully understand the power and resonance of this single trope.

This chapter examines the role of the city of Austin in Richard Linklater's cinema. Locating Linklater in Austin is vital, for his films not only emerged from the slacker culture of the mid-1980s, but enunciate the undermining of the ideologies of late capitalist materialism through the form, content, style, and themes of his filmmaking. Through this city, Linklater applied the techniques associated with representations of alienation in post-war European cinema to a specifically regional concept of American cinema that was also informed by existentialist and Marxist undercurrents. Consequently, his films associated slacker culture with the deliberate wider critical project of communal estrangement from political and national hegemonies, and reterritorialised a part of America that would find common identity and cause in the development of independent cinema.

The chapter proposes the metaphor of the carousel to explore Girls’ gendered identities, highlighting both the show’s tendency to omit crucial moments in character's plots as well as to position certain cultural types as – often insufficient – points of orientation for a character’s gender performance. The model of carousel gendering charts how characters move in and out of their critics’ (analytical) gazes, as well as run circles around certain cultural types and tropes. Drawing on the sociological framework of gender relations and hegemony by Raewyn Connell and its refinements by Mimi Schippers and Amanda Lotz, the chapter provides readings of how certain genders are positioned as preferred within the narrative.

This chapter examines enduring questions such as “where is society headed” with respect to the new surveillance and the issues raised by Huxley, Orwell and Foucault. Trends supporting and countering the Hux-Orw-Fouc panoptic (and related dystopic or utopic) view of surveillance are are inherent value conflicts that work against simple moral and policy conclusions. The idea of the perhapsicon incorporates the contradictory trends. Four questions and related concepts (surveillance slack, ratio, achieved privacy ratio, reciprocity-equity ratio, personal information penetration ratio) are discussed. The book concludes calling for appreciation of the complexity of the topic and suggests a series of “meta-method moral mandates” for studying surveillance. Can we grant that in complex settings, rules are often unclear or in conflict; that means and ends are imperfectly integrated; that obtaining one goal may mean sacrificing another; that societies are awash in moral dilemmas and tradeoffs; that desirable as well as dastardly deeds can occur under cover of darkness; that those in positions of authority sometimes do the wrong thing in order to do the right thing, and that reluctantly, while Dr. Faustus may sometimes be granted a place at (or under) the table, he may be invited reluctantly and only with oversight?

A key idea of pragmatism is the inseparability of theory and practice, thought and action. Pragmatism is said to have had few contacts with the organizational world, and few direct practical applications, except in the domain of education. In particular, the pragmatist direct influence on the managerial world is often undervalued. However, pragmatist ideas have had a significant impact on managerial doctrines and can be traced in today’s debates amongst organization practitioners. This chapter studies three of those channels: Follett’s direct or indirect (for example through Chester Barnard’s work) influence on the corporate world as well as the management of public institutions; the stream of action research and reflection-in-action, in particular Donald Schön’s work; and the development of the quality movement as an anti-Taylorian revolution, deeply influenced by pragmatist thinkers (exploratory inquiry, community of inquiry, instrumental mediations, process perspective), more recently distorted into a Taylorian revival under the “lean management” label.

Geomorphology is the study of form and structure of sand dunes. Dunes are found in three types of landscapes: sea coasts and lakeshores, river valleys, and arid regions. Coastal dunes are formed along coasts in areas above the high water mark of sandy beaches. They occur in both the northern and southern hemi sphere from the Arctic and Antarctic to the equator, and in arid and semi-arid regions. They are very common in temperate climates but are less frequent in tropical and subtropical coasts. Dunes are also common around river mouths where the sand carried in water is deposited (Carter et al. 1990b). During floods rivers overflow their banks and deposit sand in river valleys that is subsequently dried by wind and shaped into dunes. In dry regions with less than 200 mm of precipitation per year, the weathering of sandstone and other rocks produce sand that is subject to mass movement by wind because of sparsity of vegetation. There are many similarities in processes and patterns of dune form and structure among these three systems, however each location has its own unique features. In this chapter the emphasis will be on the geomorphology of dune systems along the coasts of oceans and lakes. Coastal geomorphologists have been attempting to classify the coastal land forms but they defy a simple classification because of tremendous variability in plant taxa, sand texture, wind velocity, climate, sand supply, coastal wave energy and biotic influences including human impact. According to Carter et al. (1990b) the great variety of coastal land forms around the world is primarily related to sediment availability, climate, wave energy, wind regime and types of vegetation. Classification based on these criteria would be more useful in distinguishing between shoreline dune forms than the use of subjective terms—for example white, grey or yellow dunes—sometimes employed by plant ecologists (Tansley 1953). Cowles (1899) said ´a dune complex is a restless maze´ because the great topographic diversity depends on changes in the dune terrain from day to day, month to month, season to season and year to year.

The Introduction offers a brief overview of Paul Slack’s contribution to early modern history, distinguishing between an earlier phase concerned with social policy and the ideas which informed it, and a later phase concerned with the history of political economy, and particularly the shifting discourse of happiness which, he argued, informed it. It then explores recent interest in the history of emotions, distinguishing a variety of approaches to that subject. Reviewing three broad approaches taken by the contributors to the volume, it goes on to suggest that the history of emotions is most stimulating when seen as a focal point for different kinds of history rather than as a discrete subject of enquiry. A further implication is that a variety of forms of expertise need to be brought to bear.