This case study presents innovative work by a Chinese state-owned enterprise (SOE) to use corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a key component of its business strategy in Kenya. AVIC International’s (“AVIC INTL’s”) core business is exporting Chinese machinery and vocational training to enhance the use of equipment in host countries and to build local training capacity. Through active learning with stakeholders in Kenya, AVIC INTL has developed the “Africa Tech Challenge” to host training and competitions for candidates from Kenya. This project, first initiated in 2014, later became a signature CSR project for the company, one which was repeated annually and received Chinese government awards for companies’ overseas brand-building. This case study shows how CSR can be an effective business strategy for Chinese SOEs operating in African states. Chinese SOEs have started to use CSR projects to gain market access, build a positive image, and cultivate ties with host country politicians, industry, and civil society. The study also demonstrates how Chinese SOEs, over the course of overseas operations, have experienced a steep learning curve in host countries and how, despite structural asymmetry vis-à-vis China, African actors can actively shape the behavior of Chinese SOEs that are financially powerful and technically strong.

The artes, in the sense of systematic treatises on various disciplines of specialized knowledge, are not well understood today because they are usually studied in isolation from one another. This book argues that the artes of the early Roman Empire—the period of the greatest flourishing of this kind of literature—belong to a common intellectual culture and ought to be studied together. Their unity stems ultimately from a shared preoccupation with relating theory to practice vis-à-vis disciplinary expertise. Within the artes, the theory–practice problem stimulated the emergence of theories of knowledge and theories of nature embedding Roman specialized knowledge in a broader understanding of the world. Indeed, the artes crystallize a uniquely Roman scientific culture that has not been previously recognized as such. The aim of this book is to study this scientific culture.

The artes of the early Roman Empire are much more than manuals or handbooks intended to communicate the elements of practical expertise: they are vehicles for the articulation of Roman understandings of nature, knowledge, and society. This intellectual culture is premised on a theoretically sophisticated notion of ars that developed in the late Republic. It deserves to be regarded as a scientific culture because inter alia the artes elaborate different theories of nature and knowledge, draw upon many branches of ancient scientific inquiry, and employ methods characteristic of ancient scientific thought and practice. The artes Romanize specialized knowledge insofar as they plot their scientific contents along the geographic and temporal axes of Roman power. Ultimately, the artes constitute a unified intellectual phenomenon and should be studied as a part of the scientific culture to which they belong.

This chapter reviews how literary and literal atmospheres have cut across each other in complex transactions of meaning and practice over the past 400 years. It traces how atmosphere was first literalised in early modern science, in a process that identified air as a new object of empirical knowledge while also awarding a new meaning of empirical objectivity to literalness. It then shows how this scientifically literal atmosphere was taken up in an expanded set of metaphoric and figurative uses from around 1800, in which such formulations as ‘political atmosphere’ and ‘poetic atmosphere’ breathed new life into traditional understandings of air that had moved fluidly between the spiritual and the empirical. The large-scale cultural re-metaphoricisation of air in this period formed the platform for the emergence of literary atmosphere as a specific practice of double troping, in which aerial figures were reflexively marked as at once figurative and literal. That marking proved integral to the emergence of both modernist poetry and the modern novel. But the discursive divisions and oppositions that underwrote it are brought under unprecedented pressure by climate change, which therefore requires new methods for the writing and reading of literary atmospheres.

This chapter discusses how innovations are reshaping the two major fundamental strategic options that a shipowner typically might have: asset-play, i.e., a typically short-term focus on “in-out/long-short”, vs. industrial shipping, i.e. more tailored ships employed on longer-term charters, and typically with relatively high financial gearing. Key innovations are reshaping the essence of each of these strategic options, above all, regarding what might now be a commercially modern ship. Customer closeness is increasingly seen as key to all of this.