Author: Donald Chisholm
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804735254
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 924
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Book Description
This monumental study provides an innovative and powerful means for understanding institutions by applying problem solving theory to the creation and elaboration of formal organizational rules and procedures. Based on a meticulously researched historical analysis of the U.S. Navys officer personnel system from its beginnings to 1941, the book is informed by developments in cognitive psychology, cognitive science, operations research, and management science. It also offers important insights into the development of the American administrative state, highlighting broader societal conflicts over equity, efficiency, and economy. Considering the Navys personnel system as an institution, the book shows that changes in that system resulted from a long-term process of institutional design, in which formal rules and procedures are established and elaborated. Institutional design is here understood as a problem-solving process comprising day-to-day efforts of many decision makers to resolve the difficulties that block completion of their tasks. The officer personnel system is treated as a problem of organized complexity, with many components interacting in systematic, intricate ways, its structure usually imperfectly understood by the participants. Consequently, much problem solving entails decomposing the larger problem into smaller, more manageable components, closing open constraints, and balancing competing value premises. The author finds that decision makers are unlikely to generate many alternatives, since searching for existing solutions elsewhere or inventing new ones is an expensive, difficult enterprise. Choice is usually a matter of accepting, rejecting, or modifying a single solution. Because time constraints force decisions before problems are well structured, errors are frequently made, problem components are at best only partially addressed, and the chosen solution may not solve the problem at all and even if it does is likely to generate unanticipated side-effects that worsen other problem components. In its definitive treatment of a critical but hitherto entirely unresearched dimension of the administration of the U.S. Navy, the book provides full details over time concerning the elaboration of officer grades and titles, creation of promotion by selection, sea duty requirements, graded retirement, staff-line conflicts, the establishment of the Reserve, and such unusual subjects as tombstone promotions. In the process, it transcends the specifics of the personnel system to give a broad picture of the Navys history over the first century and a half of its development.
Author: Richard Hunt
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780727822550
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
DCI Sidney Walsh must dig deeper into the murder case of a hated businessman when the prime suspect has an airtight alibi.
Author: Leo Bruce
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 161373266X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
Everyone knew there'd been a murder, everyone knew who the murderer was, and when this murderer committed suicide by jumping overboard from the cargo boat Saragossa, they thought "Good riddance." Everyone, that is, except Carolus Deene.
Author: Day Keene
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
ISBN: 1667600176
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 31
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Book Description
What's the first thing you think of doing when you find you only have months to live? Hint: it involves money. A lot of it. And it isn't yours. And the second thing...?
Author: Mike Carey
Publisher: Orbit
ISBN: 0446551457
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 494
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Book Description
Author of The Girl With All the Gifts Mike Carey presents the third book in his hip supernatural thriller series featuring freelance exorcist Felix Castor. You might think that helping a friend's widow to stop a lawyer from stealing her husband's corpse would be the strangest thing on your To Do list. But life is rarely that simple for Felix Castor. A brutal murder in the heart of London bears all the hallmarks of a long-dead American serial killer, and it takes more good sense than Castor possesses not to get involved. He's also fighting a legal battle over the body -- if not the soul -- of his possessed friend, Rafi, and can't shake the feeling that his three problems might be related. With the help of the succubus Juliet and paranoid zombie data-fence Nicky Heath, Castor just might have a chance of fitting the pieces together before someone drops him down an elevator shaft or rips his throat out. Or not. . .
Author: Peter James
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 0230760511
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 518
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Book Description
It's a race against time as Detective Superintendent Roy Grace tries to stop a grieving mother from taking the law into her own hands in Dead Man's Grip, by award winning crime writer Peter James. A university student is killed in a tragic traffic accident while riding their bicycle. When two of the drivers involved are hunted down by a sadistic killer, Grace knows that the third driver, Carly Chase, may be next. Carly, a solicitor, believes hiding is not an option and heads to New York to speak with the cyclist’s mother. But Grace knows about the mother’s underworld connections and that the family will stop at nothing to take an eye for an eye . . . Although the Roy Grace novels can be read in any order, Dead Man's Grip is the seventh thrilling title in the bestselling series. Enjoy more of the Brighton detective’s investigations with Not Dead Yet and Dead Man's Time. Now a major ITV series, Grace, starring John Simm.
Author: Carolyn Hart
Publisher: Crimeline
ISBN: 0307569373
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
“A sassy heroine . . . [Henrie O] says what she thinks (when it serves her purposes) and pulls no punches.”—Chicago Sun-Times When arrogant media magnate Chase Prescott is nearly killed by a box of cyanide-laced candy, he dials his long-ago lover, retired newshound Henrietta O’Dwyer Collins, with a simple request: He’ll assemble all the suspects if Henrie O will kindly point out the would-be murderer. It’s a case—her first—that fills Henrie O with grave misgivings, especially when she arrives on Chase’s private island off the South Carolina coast to meet the players in this deadly drama. Among Prescott’s unstable young wife, his sullen stepson, and his toady of a secretary, she has trouble narrowing the field of suspects—even when a second attempt is made on Chase’s life. As Henrie O unearths a will and fascinating new evidence, a killer hurricane sweeps up from Cuba, threatening to maroon them in this vacation hell . . . where the trappings of luxury are put to lethal use and the secrets of the past have the power to engulf them all.
Author: Keith McCafferty
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 014312613X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 338
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Book Description
The third novel starring Montana's favorite fly fisherman-cum-detective Sean Stranahan, for fans of Craig Johnson and C. J. Box. Cold Hearted River, the sixth in the series, is forthcoming from Viking. Wolves howl as a riderless horse returns at sunset to the Culpepper Dude Ranch in the Madison Valley. The missing woman, Nanika Martinelli, is better known as the Fly Fishing Venus, a red-haired river guide who lures clients the way dry flies draw trout. As Sheriff Martha Ettinger follows hoof tracks in the snow, she finds one of the men who has fallen under the temptress’s spell impaled on the antler tine of a giant bull elk, a kill that’s been claimed by a wolf pack. An accident? If not, is the killer human or animal? With painter, fly fisherman, and sometimes private detective Sean Stranahan’s help, Ettinger will follow clues that point to an animal rights group called the Clan of the Three-Clawed Wolf and to their svengali master, whose eyes blaze with pagan fire. In their most dangerous adventure yet, Stranahan and Ettinger find themselves in the crossfire of wolf lovers, wolf haters, and a sister bent on revenge, and on the trail of an alpha male gone terribly wrong.
Author: Henry Christopher Bailey
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 168
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Book Description
Author: Sarah Ruhl
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1458766306
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 146
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Book Description
An incessantly ringing cell phone in a quiet caf. A stranger at the next table who has had enough. And a dead man - with a lot of loose ends. So begins Dead Man's Cell Phone, a wildly imaginative new comedy by playwright Sarah Ruhl, recipient of a MacArthur ''Genius'' Grant and Pulitzer Prize finalist for her play The Clean House. A work about how we memorialize the dead - and how that remembering changes us - it is the odyssey of a woman forced to confront her own assumptions about morality, redemption, and the need to connect in a technologically obsessed world. Sarah Ruhl's plays have been produced at theaters around the country, including Lincoln Center Theater, the Goodman Theatre, Arena Stage, South Coast Repertory, Yale Repertory Theatre, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, among others, and internationally. She is the recipient of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize (for The Clean House, 2004), the Helen Merrill Emerging Playwrights Award, and the Whiting Writers' Award. The Clean House was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2005. She is a member of 13P and New Dramatists.
