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...

Edith and Frances, living with their mother on a tiny farm in the south-east of Australia, are visited by their cousin Leopold and his Armenian friend Aram. The two young men are taking the long way home after working on an archaeological dig in Iraq. It is 1937. The modern world they say, is waiting to erupt. Among the tales they tell is the story of Gilgamesh, the legendary king of Uruk, in ancient Mesopotamia. Gilgamesh's great journey of mourning after the death of his friend Enkidu, a...

Nick and her cousin, Helena, have grown up sharing sultry summers at Tiger House, the glorious old family estate on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. As World War II ends they are on the cusp of adulthood, the world seeming to offer itself up to them. Helena is leaving for Hollywood and a new marriage, while Nick is to be reunited with her young husband Hughes, due to return from London and the war. Everything is about to change.Neither quite finds the life she had imagined, and as ...

Shortlisted for the 2012 Miles Franklin Award, PAST THE SHALLOWS is a powerful and hauntingly beautiful novel from an extraordinary new Australian writer who is compared with Cormac McCarthy and Tim Winton.'If you read only one book this year, make sure it's this' Sunday Times'I loved Past the Shallows' Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow BirdsEveryone loves Harry. Except his father.Joe, Miles and Harry are growing up on the remote s...

John Anselm's a former Beirut hostage; a war correspondent who went to one war too many. A burnt-out case, he's working for a semi-legal Hamburg surveillance firm and trying to come to terms with his past. Then into his life comes Con Niemand, ex-mercenary and professional survivor. Niemand has stumbled across evidence of a terrible secret and now he's on the run. Against his will, Anselm is plunged into a world of violence, betrayal and death. He must pit himself against forces he doesn't...

Rory Buchanan has it all: looks, talent, charisma – an all around good-guy, he's the centre of every party and a loving father and husband. Then one summer's afternoon, tragedy strikes. Those who are closest to him struggle to come to terms with their loss. Friendships are strained, marriages falter and loyalties are tested in a gripping and brilliantly crafted novel about loss, grief and desire. Told from the points of view of nine of the people who are mourning Rory, this riveting novel ...

“There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.” Anthony TrollopeIt’s the early 1980s. In American colleges, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. As Madeleine studies the age-old motivations of the human heart, real life, in the form of ...