This book is a description of the process of constructing a productive Other for the purpose of being admitted to Canada as a Convention refugee. The whole claiming procedure is analyzed with respect to two actual cases, and contextualized by reference to pertinent national and international jurisprudence. Since legal analysis is deemed insufficient for a complete understanding of the argumentative and discursive strategies involved in the claiming and “authoring” processes, the author makes constant reference to methodologies from the realm of literary studies, discourse analysis and interaction theory, with special emphasis upon the works of Marc Angenot, M.M. Bakhtin, Pierre Bourdieu, Erving Goffman, Jürgen Habermas and Teun van Dijk. In so doing, he illustrates a reductive movement that inevitably occurs in legal argumentation which results in the displacement the subject from the realm of “refugee claimant” to that of claimant as “diminished Other.”

In an increasingly competitive environment, companies are being forced to think harder than ever about the way they work and how they can improve profitability. Creating the Productive Workplace provides a critical, multidisciplinary review of the factors affecting workplace productivity. Productivity is a key issue for individual companies as well as the national economy as a whole. With 70-90 per cent of the costs of running an organisation consisting of the salaries of the workforce, small increases in worker productivity can reap high financial returns. Many studies have shown that productivity at work bears a close relationship to the work environment. This book sets out the most important factors and evidence behind this phenomenon, and offers solutions to providing a work environment inducive to productivity. This book is essential reading for facilities and estates office managers, interior designers, architects and building environmental engineers. It is also a text for undergraduates and postgraduates studying these disciplines and related subjects.

A new edition of a classic title, featuring updated and additional material to reflect today’s competitive work environments, contributed by a team of international experts. Essential for anyone involved in the design, management and use of work places, this is a critical multidisciplinary review of the factors affecting productivity, as well a practical solutions manual for common problems and issues.

Praise for Make The Right Choice "Enjoying what you do is a must if one is to be truly successful in life. This book details with humor and ingenuity the essential elements of building an enjoyable and productive career." -Nido Qubein, President High Point University and Chairman, Great Harvest Bread Co. "Make the Right Choice is a combination of fun, passion, and happiness-a group of honest suggestions that all will find interesting and valuable. In his book and presentations, Zeff provides 'ta-da!' moments that bring smiles and laughter to all. By choosing Make the Right Choice you will reinvigorate your style and work teams." -Michael Perry, President Sonic Restaurants Inc. "Zeff is the first person we call when we need a presenter that will motivate and energize a meeting while delivering significant business-minded messages. He always comes up with the most creative and fun ideas to bond everyone in the room. In Make the Right Choice, he uses that same fun and creativity to give us valuable lessons which apply to our professional and personal lives." -Kimberly Cutchall, Executive Vice President Clear Channel Radio "Zeff is one of the funniest people I know. In this refreshing book, he reminds us of the importance of making the right choice in both business and in life." -Vince Poscente, author The Age of Speed "It's fun, it's smart, and it's honest. Zeff gives us a peek at who we really are, and what we can accomplish with a little creativity." -Neil B. Riemer, President Armstrong McCall Professional Beauty Supply

"Building a second brain is getting things done for the digital age. It's a ... productivity method for consuming, synthesizing, and remembering the vast amount of information we take in, allowing us to become more effective and creative and harness the unprecedented amount of technology we have at our disposal"--

Creating Productive Organizations is an interactive manual that challenges and encourages readers to assess and develop a clear vision of their areas of competence and interest in order to enhance productivity. This facilitator's guide offers solutions and addresses the challenges associated with motivating team members.

This volume gives an easily accessible, yet comprehensive, sophisticated, and example-rich introduction to Construction Grammar as it has been developed from the early 1980's by Charles J. Fillmore and his associates. It also provides a succinct account of the historical and intellectual background of the model and shows how Construction Grammar can easily be applied to typologically very different languages and to a variety of language-specific phenomena. All of the contributors to the volume came out of the Fillmorean school at UC-Berkeley and have worked consistently on applying and further developing the model in various domains of linguistic analysis.The 'Thumbnail sketch' by Fried & Östman is the only extensive introduction published so far to Fillmorean Construction Grammar.

This book is designed for those scholars, students, policy-makers – or just curious readers– who are looking for heterodox thinking on the issue of environmental economics and policy. Contributions to this book draw on multiple streams of institutional and evolutionary economics and help build an approach to environmental policy that radically diverges from mainstream prescriptions. No 'silver bullet' solutions emerge from the analyses. Even market-based tools – such as green taxes or tradable pollution permits – are bound to fail if they are not incorporated into an integrated, multi-dimensional and multi-actor policy for structural change.

The last decade has seen a rise in popularity in construction-based approaches to grammar. The various approaches within the rubric 'construction grammar' all see language as a network of constructions-pairings of form and meaning. Construction Grammar, as a kind of cognitive linguistics, differs significantly from mainstream generative grammar as espoused by Chomsky and his followers. Advocates of Construction Grammar see it as a psychologically plausible theory of human language. As such, it is capable of providing a principled account of language acquisition, language variation and language change. Research in Construction Grammar also includes multidisciplinary cognitive studies in psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and computational linguistics. The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar is the first authoritative reference work solely dedicated to Construction Grammar. Divided into five sections, the book will be an invaluable resource that students and scholars alike can turn to for a comprehensive account of current work on Construction Grammar, its theoretical foundations, and its applications to and relationship with other kinds of linguistic enquiry.

Adopting a corpus-based methodology, this volume analyses phraseological patterns in nine European languages from a monolingual, bilingual and multilingual point of view, following a mostly Construction Grammar approach. At present, corpus-based constructional research represents an interesting and innovative field of phraseology with great relevance to translatology, foreign language didactics and lexicography.