This chapter considers the prominence of and play with temporality in imperial Greek epic through a reading of three poems which thematise time in particularly self-conscious ways: Quintus of Smyrna’s Posthomerica, Triphiodorus’ Sack of Troy and Colluthus’ Abduction of Helen. These epics all return directly to the world of Troy, resurrect Homer’s idiolect and style, and locate their plots before or in-between the timespan of the Iliad and Odyssey. Analysing some key moments of temporal reflexivity in these poems, the chapter outlines the specific ‘imperial Greek temporality’ that they share, which connects these otherwise very different poems and renders them distinct from, for instance, Apollonius’ Alexandrian epic as analysed by Phillips. These poets proudly return to the literary distant past and use this past to convey their own imperial identities, revelling in their paradoxical positions as both pre- and post-Homeric.

In Chapter 7, we conclude our reconceptualization of organizational control by discussing new forms of control, novel combinations of existing controls, new challenges to fundamental assumptions, and new forms of organizing – all of which represent promising directions for future organizational control research and practice.

When India became independent, the main livelihoods in this region, as in the rest of the country, were based on land. But unlike most other regions of India, a significant and relatively more prominent part of the economy (half or more of the domestic product) was urban and non-agricultural. Non-agricultural did not mean industrial. True, the processing of some commercial products involved non-mechanised factories. Alappuzha (Alleppey) had emerged as a hub of coir production and Quilon (Kollam) of cashew. Some isolated large, mechanised factories employed hundreds of people in one place in chemicals, rayon, paper and a few other lines. Thus, Aluva (Alwaye) had textiles, fertilisers, aluminium, glass and rayon industries, and Ernakulam oil and soap industries. There were also tea estates in the hills. A concentration of plantation businesses in rubber and spices occurred to the east of Kottayam. But collectively, these formed a smaller group than trade and the financing of marketing, which dominated the landscape of non-agricultural employment. All major towns lived mainly on trade and informal banking. Trichur and Kottayam were mostly service-based towns, with a concentration of banks, colleges and rich churches.

Over one-third of the workforce was in industry, trade, commerce and finance. In most large states of India, the percentage was 20–35. The exceptions were the industrialised states of West Bengal and Maharashtra, where factory-based large-scale industrial firms concentrated. Again, a contrast emerged with the rest of India. Most local businesses were small-scale, semi-rural and household enterprises, whereas non-agricultural enterprises in the rest of India were mainly urban.

Further, industrialisation almost everywhere else signified a sharp inequality between the countryside and the city. The former was trapped in low-yield farmland producing grains for subsistence or local markets, and the latter experienced growth of high-wage jobs. In the state, that distance was narrower. The presence of tree crops and their industrial processing made for a narrower gap between the rural and the urban. Many of the landholders were also owners of estates growing tree crops. Agriculture was not necessarily low yield nor subsistence oriented. In this way, agriculture and non-agriculture, rural and urban came much closer here compared with India.

None of the synoptic evangelists, whether Matthew, Mark, or Luke, made direct use of another’s final gospel. Apart from dicta of Jesus standardized in oral catechesis, verbal overlaps occur only in small patches. In a given passage, any of the three may conserve the most primitive form of words. Each contains numerous pieces of singular content and of edits, all of which are absent from both of the others, a state of affairs that cannot be due to coincidental omission had the others used it as a source. These phenomena confirm the patristic view that the gospel writers worked independently of one another.

Contrary to the claims of Vietnamese historiography, Chinese settlers had arrived in the water world well before the Viet. Their presence owed much to Cambodia’s focus on maritime trade, its encouragement of multiethnic trading communities, and conflict with Siam over the crucial Gulf of Siam passageway. Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong became the largest demographic group in the kingdom, overseeing foreign trade and forming their own mercenary armies. Their numbers and influence grew further as a result of the dynastic transition from Ming to Qing, competition among armed mercantile organizations for control over the East Asian sea-lanes, and the scramble between Cochinchina and Siam for influence over Cambodia. The enterprising Mo Jiu embodied and exploited these trends in forging his own polity at The Port.

This chapter explores the crucial alternative to traditional data processing methods, focusing on in-memory data processing. It discusses storing large volumes of data in DRAM for efficient and rapid data access, while using disk and SSD storage mainly for backup and archival purposes. The chapter sheds light on the benefits and significance of this approach, emphasizing its role in enabling efficient computing tasks. It also examines the implications of this shift for disk utilization, highlighting the transition towards using disk and SSD storage as secondary mediums, rather than primary data sources.

The development of blue and green hydrogen has been identified as national priorities in a number of Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries, most notably Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states such as Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Oman, and Qatar. For example, Qatar announced plans for a US$1 billion plant to make blue ammonia, while Saudi Arabia already commenced work on the NEOM Green Ammonia project, a $US5 billion green hydrogen plant and one of the world’s largest hydrogen projects. With increasing investment and capital outlay on hydrogen projects, the MENA region is projected to become one of the world’s largest exporters of green hydrogen by the year 2050 with an approximate export value of US$200 billion. Despite the rise in hydrogen investments, corresponding law, governance, and institutional frameworks to support hydrogen production are yet to be formulated and communicated, and key vectors for implementation remain, at best, loosely articulated, including mission-critical public–private partnerships (P3), which have been so successful in similar contexts. There is a rather limited legal and/or policy framework that specifically relates to hydrogen across the MENA region. The injection of significant amounts of hydrogen into the national energy networks and grids comes with a wide range of questions across the entire hydrogen production and supply chain. A comprehensive legal framework is required to clarify licensing and permitting processes for hydrogen production, storage, commercialization, and export; while health, safety and design standards for hydrogen infrastructure will need to be elaborated upon to limit environmental, social and governance risks. The chapter explores the guiding principles of an optimal hydrogen regulation framework for MENA countries. It analyses current regulatory uncertainties and gaps in the design and implementation of hydrogen projects across the MENA region and draws upon experiences from other regions with legal pathways for addressing those challenges.

This chapter explores the religious influences on Nigeria, the spread and development of these religions, and their incorporation or imposition in various precolonial and colonial institutions. The topics explored throughout the chapter will lay the foundation for modern-day Nigeria’s religious make-up and sectarian conflict. There are two primary phenomena detailed in the chapter. The first is the efforts of colonial forces to implement a system of indirect rule, an essential component of which was the incorporation of pre-existing religious institutions into the colonial fold. The second was the desire of colonial and missionary forces to spread Christianity and Western culture to the various peoples of Nigeria. Both processes would promote Islam and Christianity at the expense of African traditional religions. However, Indigenous practices would vigorously resist, often infusing their beliefs into colonial institutions and various sects of Christianity.

In the 1980s and 90s in psychology, many cross-cultural comparisons were made concerning individualism and collectivism with questionnaires and experiments. The largest number of them compared “collectivistic” Japanese with “individualistic” Americans. This chapter reviewed 48 such empirical comparisons and found that Japanese were no different from Americans in the degree of collectivism. Both questionnaire studies and experimental studies showed essentially the same pattern of results. Many researchers who believed in “Japanese collectivism” suspected flaws in those empirical studies. However, none of the suspected flaws was consistent with empirical evidence. For example, although it was suspected that “Japanese collectivism” was not supported because college students provided data as participants, the studies with non-student adults did not support this common view either. It is thus unquestionable that as a whole the empirical studies disproved the reality of “Japanese collectivism.”

This chapter explores three key ways that epic has expressed a sense of temporality. The first is foundational: epic uses genealogy to express the structure of things, through aetiologies and causations and the preserving function of memory. Goldhill shows how this sense of foundational time can be enacted through cosmology, in Hesiod’s Theogony, through social structures, in Hesiod’s Works and Days, and on a political plain, as in Vergil’s Aeneid or Lucan’s Pharsalia. The second is narratological and thematic: epics make time a subject of their narrative, through the centralisation of delay within the heroic mission (as in the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid), and even through making time itself a character, as Nonnus does in his Dionysiaca. The third is poetic: how epic marks its awareness of its place in tradition. As shown most strikingly by works like Quintus’ Posthomerica and Eudocia’s Martyrdom of St Cyprian, epic inhabits its own moment whilst forging connections with previous epics and looking ahead to posterity. Using these three vectors, Goldhill explores the ancient epic tradition on a broad scale in a way that grounds the next two chapters in this section.