Tag: Motives

Free Download Kevin Simler, "The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life"
English | ISBN: 0197551955 | 2020 | 416 pages | EPUB | 820 KB
Human beings are primates, and primates are political animals. Our brains, therefore, are designed not just to hunt and gather, but also to help us get ahead socially, often via deception and self-deception. But while we may be self-interested schemers, we benefit by pretending otherwise. The less we know about our own ugly motives, the better – and thus we don’t like to talk or even think about the extent of our selfishness. This is "the elephant in the brain." Such an introspective taboo makes it hard for us to think clearly about our nature and the explanations for our behavior. The aim of this book, then, is to confront our hidden motives directly – to track down the darker, unexamined corners of our psyches and blast them with floodlights. Then, once everything is clearly visible, we can work to better understand ourselves: Why do we laugh? Why are artists sexy? Why do we brag about travel? Why do we prefer to speak rather than listen?

Free Download Brent Auerbach, "Musical Motives: A Theory and Method for Analyzing Shape in Music"
English | ISBN: 0197526020 | 2021 | 400 pages | AZW3 | 8 MB
All music fans harbor in their memories vivid fragments of their favorite works. The starting guitar solo of "Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones, the da-da-da-DUM gesture that opens Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the lush swelling chords of a beloved movie soundtrack: hearing the briefest snippet of any of these is enough to transport listeners into the piece’s sonic and emotional world. But what makes musical motives so powerful? In Musical Motives, author Brent Auerbach looks at the ways that motives ― the small-scale pitch and rhythm shapes that are ever-present in music ― unify musical compositions and shape our experiences of them.

Free Download History’s Assassins: Motives for Murder by Don Mann, Jeff Emde
English | January 3, 2023 | ISBN: 1510768017 | 288 pages | PDF | 23 Mb
A fact-based book that highlights political assassins in history. The book includes the stories of the assassins rather than just their famous victims. The book dissects selected political assassinations and and why the assassins acted; detail stheir political goals, addresses why they chose the methods they chose, and describes the ultimate outcome of the assassination. In many cases, the assassinations were not effective and actually worked against the stated goals of the assassins. People of questionable sanity and cases where the act was strictly personal are not included. For the more modern subjects, there is supporting documentation with detailed accounts written at the time in question. However, with some of the historic cases, specifics on methodology, coconspirators, etc. are not well known or there are conflicting accounts. In such cases, reasoned dramatizations are used to ensure the stories are entertaining to the reader as well as educational.The book is organized chronologically with examples from Ancient Persia and Rome and ending with several of the 19th and 20th Centuries’ high profile assassinations. The assassins and the victims are representative of men and women, and eastern and western civilizations.

Free Download Motives for and Consequences of Minority Equity Purchases By Friedel Drees (auth.)
2010 | 109 Pages | ISBN: 3834921645 | PDF | 1 MB
Minority block purchases describe the acquisition of a non-controlling equity stake below 50 percent in a corporation. The individual motives behind these transactions can vary significantly across different types of investors and firms. Friedel Drees examines the capital markets’ reaction to the announcements of minority equity purchases in Europe and the U.S. and identifies the potential sources of value creation. He shows that company-specific characteristics, such as the strategic relatedness between two corporations, can have a significant effect on shareholder value.

Free Download Rearticulating Motives
English | 2023 | ISBN: 3031434935 | 596 Pages | PDF EPUB (True) | 30 MB
This book presents a theory of motives that has evolved over decades in dialogue with academics and with practitioners. The key proposal is that of collectively cultivating meta-motives – rather than the ubiquitous recipes for manipulating self-regulation. Cultivating meta-motives can proceed through rearticulating motives. Such rearticulation engages with theories and practices of motivation and motives. First, this is a discussion of the psychologies of motivation, and a reflection of post-psychology as a way forward. Second, this discussion takes us back to fundamental problems with subjectivity, and with psychology, even critical psychology, as a way of addressing it. Third, out of this theoretical work come concepts that are put to work in understanding practices of modelling and cultivating motives – clinical, social work, and educational practices. In the first instance, as a critique of contemporary pragmatic practices, and then by rearticulating aesthetic practices as ways to expand and overcome those. Fourth, this has implications for the cultivation of the competence in care for motives, and for the place of theory in this competence. The book provides both a theoretical argument and a resource for those professionals in education, social work, and health who seek a qualitative understanding of what they do.

Free Download Agency and Transformation: Motives, Mediation, and Motion
English | 2024 | ISBN: 1009153676 | 420 Pages | PDF | 4 MB
Understanding and promoting agency are crucial to addressing urgent social problems of our time. Through agency, we can take transformative steps toward the future that ought to be. This book shows how contemporary conceptualizations from cultural-historical activity theory can inform research and practice that fosters positive change. At the core of this book’s novel approach to agency and transformation are three motifs: motives, mediation, and motion. These take inspiration from the original work of Vygotsky and subsequent generations of scholarship, enabling us to understand agency in ways that recognize the social and cultural aspects of agency without losing sight of individuals’ contributions to changing their own lives and the lives of others. Referring to connections between learning, pedagogy, and agency, the chapters address power, freedom, and the future in contexts including adolescence, school exclusion, children’s activism, Indigenous communities, environmental activism, homelessness, childbirth, and young people during the COVID-19 pandemic.