Michael West

"Awesome perfection" Irish Times Amidst the filth and fury of Dublin 1904, the theatrical event of the century is about to explode... Will the Irish National Theatre of Ireland seize its chance for glory? Fading stars, rebels, whores, and romantics irreverently expose the strange and lurid world of Dublin by Lamplight. Nominated for three Irish Times/ESB Irish Theatre Awards 2004 **** "Michael West's script brilliantly mixes fact and fiction, poetry and politics" Guardian "A tour de force of theatrical vision...wickedly entertaining... It's like leaving the table after a perfectly chosen and cooked meal served in terrific company." Sunday Independent "Awesome perfection...funny, clever, strange and thoughtful...superbly gifted cast" Irish Times "An absolute delight...a triumph of innovation" Sunday Business PostDublin by Lamplight was devised by Michael West with The Corn Exchange Theatre Company. It premiered in Project Arts Centre Dublin in November 2004, toured throughout Ireland to great critical and popular acclaim, and will be performed at the Traverse Theatre during the Edinburgh Festival in August 2005.

Real Process Improvement Using the CMMI® presents readers with non-academic, real-world approaches to process improvement via CMMI. The author provides concepts and techniques for CMMI-based process improvement which are as effective as they are innovative. Professionals at all levels from system engineers to CEOs will find a wealth of practical guidance and new ways to look at model-based process improvement that have already benefited large and small organizations in a variety of environments. Using plain language and enlightening illustrations, the author identifies the most critical concepts of the CMMI, and explains how to turn those concepts into real process improvement. This book provides you with key information that will significantly benefit all CMMI process improvement efforts. Topics include: · Ways to discover and understand the business goals and drivers for successful process improvement initiatives · How to recognize the structures and practices many organizations already have in place that can accelerate process improvement, even before they begin using the CMMI · Planning and managing the process improvement project · Innovative, untraditional yet highly effective and proven strategies for CMMI-based process improvement · A thorough debunking of many of the costly and wasteful myths surrounding CMMI-based improvement

A hugely acclaimed new play based on a 15th century Bohemian story Written in the 15th century by the Bohemian humanist and writer Johannes Von Saaz, Death and the Ploughman is a tragic dialogue between Death and a recently widowed farmer. It is here dramatised by the acclaimed translator Michael West as an adversarial duel where the farmer's defence of mankind is as strong as Death's ruthless prosecution of his own cause." Quite extraordinary... This translation is an eloquent one, filled with jewelled words and edged debate, a tribute to the original author and a serious achievement by his successor" - Irish Times "Immensely personal, manifestly sceptical of received religious wisdom, and utterly fascinating, a Durer engraving given audible life" - Sunday Independent Death and the Ploughman is published to tie in with its production at the Gate Theatre, London in October 2002 Praise for Michael West's FOLEY: "a gem" (Sunday Independent); "Splendidly crafted" (Washington Post); "Simply superb" (Irish Times)

Your inheritance is not the thing that come down to you, it's the things you can't get rid of. Foley is the last of his family, among the last Protestants in the Republic of Ireland, "the end point of all that evolution and fruitcake". He attempts to recall his life, to work out what went wrong along the way, why he's so fond of an old pair of shoes. Michael West's award-winning monologue Foley is a funny and moving exploration of what your family really passes on to you." A gem" (Sunday Independent) "Splendidly crafted" (Washington Post) "Simply superb" (Irish Times) "One of the best and most original pieces of new Irish dramatic writing to emerge in several years" (Irish Theatre Magazine) Foley premiered at the Belltable Arts Centre, Limerick and was subsequently performed at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh in August 2000 and transferred to Hampstead Theatre, London in November 2001.

Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, America was captivated by a muddled notion of "etymology." New England Transcendentalism was only one outcropping of a nationwide movement in which schoolmasters across small-town America taught students the roots of words in ways that dramatized religious issues and sparked wordplay. Shaped by this ferment, our major romantic authors shared the sensibility that Friedrich Schlegel linked to punning and christened "romantic irony." Notable punsters or etymologists all, they gleefully set up as sages, creating jocular masterpieces from their zest for oracular wordplay. Their search for a primal language lurking beneath all natural languages provided them with something like a secret language that encodes their meanings. To fathom their essentially comic masterpieces we must decipher it. Interpreting Thoreau as an ironic moralist, satirist, and social critic rather than a nature-loving mystic, Transcendental Wordplay suggests that the major American Romantics shared a surprising conservatism. In this award-winning study, Professor West rescues the pun from critical contempt and allows readers to enjoy it as a serious form of American humor.

Work role transitions are among the most significant yet least understood forms of social change, and how they affect individuals’ careers, self-concepts and organizational adjustment is of great practical and theoretical importance. This book provides the first comprehensive, large-scale study of the causes, form and outcomes of job change. Focussing on one of the most influential segments of society - middle to senior managers - the book offers a new theoretical approach to the analysis and understanding of job change. The authors ask how much job change is taking place, assess who is most affected, and evaluate the psychological consequences for the individual manager. They discuss organizations’ handling of job transitions, and provide a unique focus on women in management, evaluating how their experience of careers and job change differs from men’s. This book presents important new findings to specialists in life-span development, careers, managerial performance and organizational behaviour. It also offers the non-specialist insights into wider questions, such as the relationship between social change and organizational life, and the individual's experience of changes in industrial society's structures, practices and values.