The international business environment has always been characterized by continual change. The task facing MNE managers is to manage that change. The situation in the third decade of the twenty-first century is no different. Important shifts in political, social, economic, and technological forces have combined to create management challenges for today’s MNEs that differ fundamentally from those facing companies in the early 2000s. Yet, despite intense study by academics, consultants, and practicing managers, both the nature of the various external forces and their strategic and organizational implications are still disputed.

The Port, which had thrived off of its ambiguity and the smooth functioning of translocal networks, faced threats from growing nativism among its multiethnic constituency and the emergence of territorially focused regimes in its neighborhood. However, Mo Tianci was presented with several contingent opportunities to dominate the thrones of Siam and Cochinchina and forge his own state. But he lost on both occasions and ended up an exile in Siam, where he took refuge with his former rival, the half-Chaozhou Taksin. Suspecting him of trying to seize the throne, Taksin imprisoned him and his retinue, eventually resulting in his suicide. However, his descendants managed to play on the continued rivalry between Siam and Vietnam to ensure the survival of The Port as a distinct entity well into the nineteenth century, beyond its prime.

Surely this is not how I, or the women I worked with, had envisioned the conclusion. How does one begin to recalibrate lives now bracketed between two viruses? Albeit CoV-2 is not HIV, the intimate familiarity with another global contagion understandably generated a blasé attitude, as it happened in the early days of the epidemic in Sonagachi. With the closing of national borders, as though the virus too would respect them, my relationship with Sonagachi and the didis abruptly and solely devolved into the ecosphere of WhatsApp. While I was petulantly transitioning to “working from home,” they tenderly reminded me that “it's not so bad after all, we have been doing this all our lives.”

India announced a two-week-long nationwide lockdown beginning on March 22, 2020. The sex workers, like others, were used to bandhs (strikes), so the lockdown simply seemed another version of everyday life on pause. However, this time it was not the usual strike to protest a hike in fuel prices or a policy imposed on the state by the central government. Most importantly, bandhs have usually been a windfall for Sonagachi. Typically, around late afternoon, the bandh's grip loosened, and customers – from in and outside Kolkata who attended the political rally – began pouring into Sonagachi. The talabandi (lockdown), however, defied the hours and stared the women in the face with desolate streets and a troubling silence.

Everyone had heard about the indomitable creep of the “corona” but few paid attention to this respiratory virus that was gripping the globe. When Basu inquired, Kohinoor Begum explained:

The scenario began changing drastically on March 24: a police barricade was set up at the entrance to Sonagachi. The police were not just surveillance agents; the barricade was undoubtedly the cordon sanitaire.

This chapter explores how different proponents of the idea of a competition–democracy nexus envisaged the opertationalisation of the twin-goal of republican liberty and democracy through the protection of competitive markets as an institution of antipower. Various republican antitrust paradigms shared the idea that competitive markets operate as an institution of antipower that maximises liberty as non-domination and promotes republican democracy as long as they diffuse economic power polycentrically amongst a multitude of independent economic agents. Based on this assumption, all iterations of the competition–democracy nexus saw the role of legal rules and, most notably, competition law as securing a polycentric and deconcentrated market structure. The various republican antitrust paradigms also envisaged different ways through which competition law can guarantee and preserve polycentric competitive markets. These design approaches can be largely divided into two categories: situational and conduct-based structuralism.

In practice it may happen that a first-try econometric model is not appropriate because it violates one or more of the key assumptions that are needed to obtain valid results. In case there is something wrong with the variables, such as measurement error or strong collinearity, we may better modify the estimation method or change the model. In the present chapter we deal with endogeneity, which can, for example, be caused by measurement error, and which implies that one or more regressors are correlated with the unknown error term. This is of course not immediately visible because the errors are not known beforehand and are estimated jointly with the unknown parameters. Endogeneity can thus happen when a regressor is measured with error, and, as we see, when the data are aggregated at too low a frequency. Another issue is called multicollinearity, in which it is difficult to disentangle (the statistical significance of) the separate effects. This certainly holds for levels and squares of the same variable. Finally, we deal with the interpretation of model outcomes.

This is a reprinting of the famous May 1935 paper in Physical Review by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen. In this paper, the authors argued that the wavefunction fails to provide a complete description of reality unleashing the debate analysed in this volume.

We start by describing the fundamental theory of representation theory of a semisimple Lie group. This is followed by a classification of almost all irreducible tempered representations of a connected, semisimple, linear Lie group. We apply this classification to describe the structure of the reduced group C*-algebras of such groups.

This chapter delves into the transformative world of ray tracing, a technology reshaping computational graphics and data processing. It bridges the gap between advanced graphical rendering and general computational tasks, exploring how ray tracing hardware, originally designed for stunning visual effects, is now being harnessed for diverse applications beyond graphics. The chapter employs Nvidia GPU RT Cores and the OptiX programming framework as conduits to explain ray tracing’s fundamental concepts and practical implementations.

Why was “Japanese collectivism” established as the symbolic image of Japanese culture although it is unreal? The notion of “Japanese collectivism” was formed in the West about 140 years ago. A Westerner who highly valued individualism and believed that Japan is opposite to the West visited Japan and published a book in which he claimed that Japanese lack individuality. His view was widely accepted by Westerners who also highly valued individualism. Under the influence of this prevailing view, American anthropologist Ruth Benedict studied Japan for one year as a member of the U.S. government during World War II. During the American occupation of Japan, she published her study as a book in which she delineated Japanese culture as a collectivistic one. Her book was widely read by the personnel of the U.S. government and Occupation Army as a guide on how to deal with the Japanese. The prestige of Americans during the occupation period made Japanese accept “Japanese collectivism” as the basic nature of Japanese culture. Once established, the notion of “Japanese collectivism” was sustained by various cognitive biases such as confirmation bias and belief perseverance.