This chapter charts how, from the early eighteenth century, imperial elites projected visions of improvement and abundance onto Russia’s wetlands, reimagining them as fuel deposits. The prospect of substituting peat for timber motivated state officials, landowners, scientists, and later the directors of industrial companies to explore ways to convert peat into heat energy. The chapter argues that the appropriation of wetlands for fuel generation was, by and large, an elite project that imposed the developmentalist visions of the imperial state and industrial elites on peatlands and the people living with them. While most peasants continued valuing peatlands for what they offered above ground, elite groups conceptualized peat as a substance on its own rather than a component of a larger web of relationships co-created by living organisms, water, abiotic matter, and the climate. This reductive understanding of peatlands would underpin the history of peat extraction in central Russia until the end of the Soviet period.

Chapter 1 should have left you with an understanding that innovation is absolutely central to the functioning of the modern economy and a key strategic concern for companies. In this chapter, we will examine why innovation is also inherently difficult. We will begin with a very material understanding of this challenge, as Abernathy lays out how the nature of the production process that enables short-term competitiveness can be anathema to the development of innovation. To nuance what Abernathy calls the Productivity Dilemma, we then move on to March’s analysis of how different modes of organizational learning and managerial decision-making can lead to a similar trade-off between short-term and long-term competitiveness. Finally, we emphasize the ways that innovation is made still more difficult by its inherent uncertainty.

This chapter focuses on “imaginary space” – literary spaces without a real-world referent. The question of how detached fantasy worlds like C. S. Lewis’ Narnia came to be thinkable in the twentieth century frames the chapter, which argues for fantasy space as a strategic response to the alienations produced by twentieth-century capitalism. Weaving together a history of exploration with a history of different types of imaginary space, the chapter traces the emergence of works like Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia out of earlier forms of imaginary space. Types of space reviewed include the settings of the traveler’s tale (e.g., Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West), Thomas More’s Utopia, and the Romantic atopias of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and William Wordsworth’s Prelude. The chapter draws on the theories of Yi-Fu Tuan, Fredric Jameson, Henri LeFebvre, and Michel Foucault to explain the distinctions between different formations of imaginary space. It concludes with a reading of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi as a text reflecting the changing value of fantasy space in the twenty-first century.

Building an effective recommender system requires more than just a strong model; it involves addressing a range of complex technical issues that contribute to the overall performance. This chapter explores recommender systems from seven distinct angles, covering feature selection, retrieval layer strategies, real-time performance optimization, scenario-based objective selection, model structure improvements based on user intent, the cold start problem, and the “exploration vs. exploitation” challenge. By understanding these critical aspects, machine learning engineers can develop robust recommender systems with comprehensive capabilities.

This chapter serves as a guide for heuristic inquiry into the social and emotional intelligences. The intent is for readers to come to know their relationships and emotions in ways that appreciate them as phenomena, where there is always something to be discovered. Heuristic inquiry offers a discovery process for application to a concerning or meaningful issue or challenge, which are associated with emotional experience. This allows readers to develop their own social and emotional intelligences to increase the quality of their lives and the effectiveness of their personal and professional endeavors.

This chapter focuses on the transition process, called the Expert Transition Cycle, which an individual goes through each time they make a transition. It reviews the more traditional models including vocational models, career anchors, psychometric models, work adjustment theories, and psychologically based models as well as ecologically and socially embedded models. It then reviews more contemporary transition process models, focusing on two models, working identity and identity status, which inform the study of identities in transition in the research. Finally, it presents the Expert Transition Cycle, which is the basis for determining how identity changes during a transition. This model includes five stages: Intention, Inquiry, Exploration, Commitment, and Integration.

This chapter presents new, annotated translations of the principal testimonia and fragments of Aristeas of Prokonnesos (archaic period), arranged as six extracts. His lost Arimaspeia, in three books of epic hexameters, told of his journey beyond the Black Sea in the company of Apollo and, some said, in the form of a bird or a disembodied soul. It took him to the Issedones, who told of peoples beyond them: the dangerous, one-eyed Arimaspoi, at war with gold-guarding griffins; the unreachable Hyperboreans, prominent in the mythical geography of the Greeks. The detailed chapter introduction examines Aristeas’ grounding in the Greek experience of the Black Sea, his wider importance across the colonial Greek world, including the far west, and his relationship to Pythagoreanism and Orphism in those parts. Scepticism about Aristeas developed much later; but he is best viewed as a respectable aristocrat from a respected polis (city-state).

This chapter presents new, annotated translations of the principal testimonia and fragments of Skylax of Karyanda (late 6th century BC), arranged as fourteen extracts. Skylax, we are told by Herodotos, was recruited by King Darius of Persia to explore the Indus. The chapter introduction assesses recent studies that trace the echoes of his travel narrative in Philostratos’ Life of Apollonios (3rd century AD) and suggest that Skylax descended the Ganges to the east coast of India, perhaps voyaging as far as Taprobane (Sri Lanka). A specially drawn map indicates the area within which he most likely travelled.

This chapter presents new, annotated translations of the testimonia and fragments of Pytheas of Massalia (active c.330–c.320 BC), arranged as 32 extracts. (Translations of passages from Strabo are adapted with permission from the work of D. W. Roller.) The chapter introduction observes the difficulty of assessing Pytheas accurately, given the dominance of Strabo’s testimony, to which alone we owe our knowledge of the criticisms of the Massaliote by Polybios, perhaps arising from class prejudice; but defends his reputation, as recent scholarship has tended to do, and relates him to contemporary activity in Aristotle’s Peripatos (Lyceum). Although Pytheas owed much to earlier Massaliote voyagers, he is an important and original figure, particularly for his application of mathematical astronomy to questions of latitude and the tides. A new map shows the key points in his travels around northern Atlantic coasts and the British Isles, including the possible locations of Thule.

This chapter presents a new, annotated translation of the purported Circumnavigation by Hanno of Carthage, preserved in one of the two major manuscript collections of Greek geography. It narrates an expedition round the coast of north-western Africa, perhaps as far as Cameroon. Selected testimonia and fragments are arranged as nine extracts. The chapter introduction outlines the main controversies surrounding the text–whether it is a genuine 5th-century BC work; whether it was translated from the Punic; whether it records an actual voyage–while the notes assess details of the content, such as the apparent description of an encounter with gorillas. A new map illustrates the possible extent of the journey.

Chapter 3 carries out a critical review of environmental strategies, from reactive postures, such as pollution control, to the most proactive and advanced ones, such as pollution prevention and product stewardship. In doing so, the literature review shows the main theoretical streams used to frame different environmental strategic positionings, such as the institutional theory, the natural resource-based view, a new stakeholder theory or the microfoundations of strategy. To carry out a critical review of existing typologies of environmental strategies, they are deconstructed into their main features and dimensions following two research traditions: strategy (defenders, prospectors, analysers and reactors) and innovation (exploitation, exploration and ambidexterity). We conclude that these conventional approaches can be catalogued as ‘business-as-usual’ environmental strategies and finally present a disruptive alternative called the regenerative strategy.