David Goddard

For decades, we have looked to management theorists, organizational psychologists and economists to tell us how we can squeeze the most out of people at work. The result? People are uninspired, feel like cogs in a machine and prefer to leave traditional work structures behind. Numbers and productivity can only get you so far.

How are Pacific lives imagined, written and read? How are they refracted through prisms of process? From legends about culture heroes to biographies of national leaders, from tales of ancestors to stories of contemporary men and women, from lives told of both the famous and the nameless, this collection of essays by historians and anthropologists, Islanders and Island scholars probes questions of personhood, identity, memory, and time across the sweep of the Pacific, as well as practical issues of research and writing.