This chapter explores organizational configuration—how work is structured through task division, coordination, authority, and hierarchy. It introduces four configurations: Simple (centralized, small firms), Functional (grouped by specialization, efficient but less adaptive), Divisional (semi-independent units by product or region, flexible but may duplicate efforts), and Matrix (combines functional and divisional, supports adaptability but complex to manage). Firms may also use contract-based or digital configurations to enhance responsiveness. The Law of Requisite Variety suggests that organizational complexity must match environmental complexity. Misfits between configuration and external demands can cause inefficiencies, poor coordination, and performance loss. Aligning structure with strategy and environment is essential for long-term success

This chapter explores how the external environment influences organizational design. The environment includes customers, competitors, suppliers, regulations, and technology. Organizations must align their structure to fit external conditions to perform well. The environmental imperative, rooted in open systems theory, states that firms must adapt to complexity (number and interdependence of factors) and unpredictability (uncertainty). Four environment types are defined: calm (predictable, few factors), varied (many predictable factors), locally stormy (few but unpredictable), and turbulent (many unpredictable factors). Firms use environmental scanning, digital tools, big data, and AI to forecast and adapt. Contracts and ecosystems help manage fit through partnerships and outsourcing. Sustainability is a growing force, requiring integration of environmental and social goals. The chapter ends by stressing the need to align strategy, goals, and environment to avoid misfits that hinder performance.

This chapter deals with the aspects of political economy in British India from c. 1850 to c. 1950, focusing on the major debates and controversies about economic policies, which concerned the role of the colonial state and its implications for British imperial policies. British India had wider economic relations with surrounding Asian and African regions, located as it was within dense regional trading networks, as a hub of transactions of goods, money, people (migration), services and information. Through the development of global economic history, new works and interpretations are presented as a new paradigm against the traditional Eurocentric approach. Using recent works by Asian and Japanese scholars, this chapter analyses a changing economic shift from trade to finance in British India and the transformation of the economic international order of Asia and the role of India in the interwar years, with a special focus on the drastic impacts of the Second World War.

Suicide is a global phenomenon, with implications for HICs and LMICs alike, bec,ause of interconnectedness. Social injustice increases societies’ suicide risk and it is easily and frequently exported. Suicide is preventable but not always individually. Suicide prediction is difficult or impossible, so those measures that effect everyone work best. Hence assuring good quality, timely mental health coverage for the whole population is important. Those with the least resources must be targeted, as they are at greatest risk..

The chapter provides an overview situating the literatures produced or circulated in Britain and the racialized, classed, and gendered imaginaries of empire. English literature was informed by imperial concerns and anti-capitalist critique alike since the sixteenth century, even as England was a minor player among European imperial powers. Contemporary scholarship, while attending to marginalized authors, such as women, immigrants, minorities, and the working class, demonstrates that diverse literature, prose especially, but also drama and verse, were shaped by expanding trade, global markets, territorial appropriations, military conquests, human emigration, and cultural contact. A mix of ideologies spawned in the nineteenth century to rationalize British presence as not only inevitable but beneficial for the colonized; for colonized intellectuals, on the other hand, literature fostered alternative visions of resistance. Diasporic writers in twentieth-century Britain introduced readers to the vocabulary and memory of colonized lands. The chapter contends that many themes of contemporary culture are not unique to the present but variations of older, far-flung contests. Literature, in its ability to articulate shifts in perception, sensibilities, and relations before such changes are actualized, is an indispensable site of analysis and study.

The use of tests and assessments in employment-related decision making has the potential to benefit organizations and individuals. However, their use is frequently criticized because of their adverse potential for bias and unfairness. The saliency of and attention to these issues may also vary from one country to another. Therefore, in addition to an overview of the handbook and its objectives, the present chapter presents a synthesis of the twenty-three chapters organized around four themes pertaining to bias and unfairness in employment testing, specifically, (1) historical and/or cultural issues, (2) legal and professional guidelines and issues, (3) psychometric issues, and (4) future- and forward-looking issues. Furthermore, the theory of cultural tightness-looseness is used in an exploratory manner to gain additional insights into patterns, or the lack thereof, across countries as reported in the chapters. The patterns of associations indicated that, relative to tight countries, loose countries were generally more attune to and have in place practices and regulations addressing employment testing bias and unfairness. Finally, some thoughts and suggestions for future research are discussed.

This introductory chapter outlines the key themes and scope of the book, exploring how digital technologies reshape fundamental rights, create new regulatory challenges, and deepen existing inequalities. It describes the role of the Global Digital Human Rights Network in shaping this book and the benefits of this interdisciplinary network for the analysis provided in the chapters. Central to the coherence of the book’s narrative is the innovative use of fundamental questions, forming the cornerstones of each of the parts of the volume. The book is structured around four core questions: (a) What difference does it make to move online? (b) How should freedom of expression be applied in the digital environment? (c) How should human rights law respond to the challenges of digital technologies? and (d) What challenges do vulnerable groups face in the digital realm? By framing its analysis around fundamental questions and diverse regional contexts, the book aims to provide a comprehensive and forward-looking examination of human rights in the digital era.

This chapter explores the ways in which British imperial reforms were part of broader imperial rivalries and interconnections; the racial, gender, and political limits of Enlightenment reforms; the perceptions and bargaining that shaped reforms; and the relationship between reform and Revolution. It questions teleological approaches that cast British imperial reforms in the 1760s and 1770s as having led to Revolution in the thirteen colonies. In a global and Enlightenment context, British reformers did not pursue particularly radical reforms until the Intolerable Acts of 1774. These Acts were reactionary punishments intended to reform colonial thinking and behavior. They foreclosed the previously vital bargaining process between the imperial government and the colonists, and the colonists saw dire parallels with the monopolistic and tyrannical East India Company. The government’s attempt to use non-negotiable punishment to reform colonial thinking and behavior, rather than reforms to imperial tax and trade policies, most directly stimulated Revolution.

The American war, as the War of American Independence was known in Britain, was a highly misleading description; it was much more than just a bilateral struggle between Britain and the rebel colonies that became the United States. Though the conflict began in North America, from when the French intervened in 1778 to support the new states, the war spread to the West Indies, West Africa, South Asia, and the waters off the British Isles. When the Spanish became belligerents in 1779, the geographical reach of the struggle expanded still further, taking in Central America and Britain’s Mediterranean outposts of Gibraltar and Minorca. At the end of 1780, the list of Britain’s enemies extended when the British (rather quixotically) declared war on the Dutch. Dutch possessions in the Caribbean, West Africa and South Asia were drawn into a truly worldwide contest. In all theaters of the war, including in North America, the European belligerents called on the military support of local manpower and the services of other Europeans, making it a transnational as well as a global conflict.

This chapter discusses the variegated dynamics of English-language rap in the complex, stratified, and multilingual sociolinguistic environment of India. The first section provides a brief overview of the historical and sociocultural positioning of English in India. The following section lays out a genealogy of English rap in India, discussing its evolution over the past three decades. The third and final section, which forms the analytical crux of the chapter, uses examples from lyrics and an interview to contextually analyze how the choice to rap in English reproduces as well as contests the intersections between sociolinguistic dynamics, politics of regionalism and marketability, caste identities, and racialization. The chapter concludes with a discussion on how English rap in India is simultaneously rife with possibilities for artists while also transcending the oversimplifications associated with English usage in India.

The years of the French Revolution and First Empire are remembered as much for war and imperial expansion as for the great political and social reforms they introduced. The Revolutionaries saw themselves as sons of the Enlightenment, devoted to ideals of freedom and the betterment of humanity. Yet they unleashed a long period of almost continuous warfare, fought across the European continent and beyond, in North Africa and the Near East, in North America, Asia, and the Caribbean. In Europe, France faced a succession of coalitions of other European powers, from the First Coalition of 1792–7 – an international alliance that included Austria, Prussia, Britain, Spain, Piedmont, Naples, and Sardinia – through to the final coalition, the Seventh, which wearily regrouped to defeat Napoleon after his ill-judged return to France in 1815. The other governments of Europe feared France’s political ambitions as much as its military might, and they invariably saw themselves as the victims of French aggression, forced to make war to protect their territory from attack. Britain also feared the challenge to its naval and colonial supremacy which a revitalised France would pose; for London the war was as much about Jamaica and India as the balance of power in Continental Europe, about global competition for resources as much as the ideas of the Revolution in France.

Chapter 2, Stereotyped Knowledge, examines irregular practitioners’ global trade in cheap manuals on venereal disease, sexual debility, and fertility problems. While previous scholarship has largely focused on these manuals’ lurid depictions of weakened male bodies, this chapter emphasizes their origins in respected publications: often calling themselves “consulting surgeons,” a term from hospital practice, irregular practitioners combined verbatim sections from textbooks and treatises aimed at medics with snippets from works in other genres to construct their own “popular treatises.” Some of these productions were issued in several different languages and circulated around the globe. At home and abroad, they offered readers an affordable means of acquiring modern information about sex reproduction, derived from the science of anatomy, and their authors a means of cultivating trust in their expertise and advertising more expensive products and services. Examining other medical practitioners’ responses, this chapter argues that these manuals and their makers were seen as both an economic and existential threat to regular medicine.