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This book studies the variety of organizational strategies selected to cope with critical uncertainties during crises. This research formulates and applies an institutional sense-making model to explain the selection of strategies for coping with uncertainties during crises to answer the question why some organizations select a rule-based strategy to cope with uncertainties, whereas others pursue a more ad hoc-based strategy. It finds that the level of institutionalization does not affect strategy selection in the initial phase of responding to crises; that three rigidity effects can be identified in the selection of sense-making strategies once organizations have faced the failure of their selected strategies; that discontinuities in the feedback loop of sense-making do not necessarily move organizations to switch their sense-making strategies, but interact with institutionalization to contribute to switching sense-making strategies. This book bridges the gap between institutional thinking and crisis management theorizing. A major step forward in the world of crisis management studies!----Professor Arjen Boin, Leiden University, the NetherlandsIn a world of increasingly complex, sociotechnical systems interacting in high-risk environments, Professor Lu's analysis of how organizations manage uncertainty is both timely and profound.

Previous studies on the application of corpus linguistics (CL) to education have primarily examined language-related contexts where students are pursuing a formal degree (e.g. undergraduate and Master's programs). Little do we know about the informal learning of CL especially by (but not limited to) academics/professionals who are not educated and/or do not work in language-oriented fields. The present study addresses these research gaps by examining the perspective of participants in a non-credit-bearing continuous professional development (CPD) project aimed at academics/professionals in a range of disciplines, who did not need to have any prior knowledge of CL. More specifically, we administered a questionnaire to 28 participants of a UK-based CPD project on CL with a view to researching four main aspects: (i) these participants' CL background; (ii) their motivations to participate in this type of project; (iii) the advantages and barriers of employing CL in their teaching practice; and (iv) their appraisal of corpus analysis integration in their research practice. The results point out to the role of CPD projects in democratizing access to CL education both to language-oriented and non-language oriented academics/professionals and in potentially raising their interest in CL learning. Lack of knowledge is perceived to be the main barrier in embedding corpus approaches to teaching and research, thus reinforcing the relevance of developing formal and informal CL learning opportunities for academics/professionals in different fields.

From 2014–15, China witnessed a super bull in its stock market, as the major SSE Composite Index was more than doubled, but it was followed by an unprecedented crash triggering a global sell-off. This article argues that margin trading, which means investors that borrow money from stock brokers or shadow banks to purchase shares, accounted for the stock bubble.