This handbook, representing the collaboration of 36 scholars, provides a multi-faceted exploration of Chinese business and management.The volume represents an ‘inside-out’ perspective, offering local knowledge and experience, in conjunction with an ‘outside-in’ approach, presenting measured and sensitive observations from an outsider’s perspective. The handbook’s approach is organised around five key themes:Cultural and institutional contexts for business in China

Does guanxi still matter in 21st century Chinese business and management? Is it really still a culturally distinct form of social interaction, impenetrable by outsiders? Or does it simply resemble the countless other elite networks embedded in business and political spheres across the globe?This book answers these questions through a combination of new empirical insight and nuanced conceptual development. Research examples include investigations of multinational enterprise...

Business Networks in East Asian Capitalisms: Enduring Trends, Emerging Patterns builds on the foundational studies conducted in the 1990s by gathering contemporary empirical and theoretical chapters which explore these themes in a comparative perspective. The book includes contributions from authors working on the relationship between personal and business networks in countries including China, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand. Authors ...

When China’s economic reforms were beginning, there was an expectation in the west that China’s financial markets would be opened to western banks and that China’s banks would be reformed along western lines. Joint ventures between Chinese banks and western banks, minority shareholding by western banks and the involvement of western banking personnel in assisting Chinese banks with their reforms were all seen as moves towards reform along western lines. This book analyses the role which we...

Luke and Anna, thirty-something and restless, decide on a sea change. Worn down by city life and wounded by a loss neither can talk about, they flee to a sleepy village by the coast. There, surrounded by nature, they begin to feel rejuvenated. But when bushfire threatens their new home, they must confront what they have tried to put behind them.Vertigo is a fable of love and awakening by one of Australia's finest writers, about the unexpected way emotions can return and life can ch...

When their father is critically injured, foreign correspondent Mandy and her siblings return home. Mandy’s head is filled with terror and war, and her homecoming only heightens her disconnection from ordinary life. Cathy, her younger sister, has stayed in contact with her parents, unlike their brother Stephen who, has distanced himself from the family for years. In the hospital the children sit, struggling to connect with their emotions, their past and each other. Finally the pressure inte...

Naomi and Sally Durance are daughters of a dairy farmer from the Macleay Valley. Bound together in complicity by what they consider a crime, when the Great War begins in 1914 they hope to submerge their guilt by leaving for Europe to nurse the tides of young wounded. They head for the Dardanelles on the hospital ship Archimedes. Their education in medicine, valour and human degradation continues on the Greek island of Lemnos, then on the Western Front. Here, new outrages – gas, shell-shock...

A humble soldier, known only as 'Jones', wakes in hospital with no recollection of his past. The few fleeting fragments of memory he glimpses are horrifying moments from the battlefield at Ypres. His very identity becomes a puzzle he must solve. Then Eden Valentine comes gliding into his world, a stunning seamstress who has a dream of her own business in high fashion but duty to her family may never permit her to fulfil it while her fiancé resents the intrusion of the disarming Jones in su...

Lavender farmer Luc Bonet is raised by a wealthy Jewish family in the foothills of the French Alps. When the Second World War breaks out he joins the French Resistance, leaving behind his family's fortune, their home overrun by soldiers, their lavender fields in disarray. Lisette Forestier is on a mission of her own: to work her way into the heart of a senior German officer – and to bring down the Reich in any way she can. What Luc and Lisette hadn't counted on was meeting each other. When...

'Love comes out of nowhere for most of us, when we least expect it.' Amidst the carnage of Gallipoli, British nurse Claire Nightingale meets Australian Light Horseman Jamie Wren. Despite all odds, they fall deeply in love. Their flame burns bright and carries them through their darkest hours, even when war tears them apart. When Jamie encounters Turkish soldier Açar Shahin on the bloodstained battlefield, the men forge an unforgettable bond. Their chance meeting also leaves a precious clue...

Ruth is widowed, her sons are grown, and she lives in an isolated beach house outside town. Her routines are few and small. One day a stranger arrives at her door, looking as if she has been blown in from the sea. This woman—Frida—claims to be a care worker sent by the government. Ruth lets her in.Now that Frida is in the house, is Ruth right to fear the tiger she hears on the prowl at night, far from its jungle habitat? Why do memories of her childhood in Fiji press upon her with ...

Tom Keely’s reputation is in ruins. And that’s the upside. Divorced and unemployed, he’s lost faith in everything precious to him. From his seedy high-rise flat Keely looks down at a society from which he’s retired hurt and angry, well past caring. But he cannot avoid entanglement with the neighbours: a woman from his past, a boy the likes of whom he’s never met before. Two strangers leading a life beyond his experience and into whose orbit he falls despite himself.