English

This course introduces students to theories and practices of human resource management (HRM). Emphasis is placed on understanding how HRM as a function relates to strategic business decision-making. In addition, the course discusses the design of key high-performance and high-commitment HR practices. The course stimulates critical thinking about the roles that alternative HRM strategies and practices can play in contributing to positive employee and organizational outcomes.

This course examines English as a historical, sociocultural, ideological and personal reality for Hong Kong speakers. It covers the legitimacy of Hong Kong English (HKE) as a variety in its own right and its sociolinguistic backing; the attempts at drawing up a phonology and a morphosyntax of HKE as well as the complications involved; the current standing of HKE in comparison with the ‘inner-circle’/‘standard’ varieties (British and American English) and other varieties (e.g., other Asian Englishes); and the values of HKE as an ideological concept, a fiction, and/or as protean yet homely, lay experience.

Since the mid twentieth century the German welfare state has seen public health outcomes improve with sustained economic growth. But when the pandemic forced governments round the world to consider imposing lockdowns, journalists portrayed the choice in stark terms: either protect the population or the “health” of the economy. Lock­downs were feasible, however, only where governments increased welfare spending substantially, and as the pandemic unfolded other significant links between health and the economy—in Germany, the importance of the biomedical industry, for instance—became patent. Each week, the course focuses on an aspect of the complex interplay between health and “economy” in the history of the German welfare state, arguably the oldest in the world. Topics include the establishment of social insurance; the German coal and chemical industries; the therapeutic revolution during the so-called golden age of the welfare state; population politics, including abortion law, in East and West Germany; surprising trends in public health outcomes in east and west Germany since reunification; and the challenges posed by population ageing and immigration. Along the way, the class discusses questions which the study of the welfare state raises and to which the pandemic has given renewed significance: How should governments act to improve public health outcomes? To what extent should they intervene in people's lives in pursuing such objectives?

This course will study the design and analysis of exact and approximation algorithms for various optimization problems using advanced techniques such as combinatorial methods, probabilistic methods, linear programming, semidefinite programming, and spectral methods. The course also covers spectral algorithms and related convex programs, SDP duality, multiplicative weight update, graph spectrum, eigenvalue interlacing, Cheeger–Alon–Milman inequality, random walks, local graph partitioning, expanders, Laplacian solver, effective resistance, sparsification, matrix scaling, abstract simplicial complex, and random spanning trees.

Designed to familiarize students with basic aspects of Japanese history, art, and literature, this course focuses on examining the relationship between traditional and modern Japan as well as understanding Japan within a broad comparative framework. The course may involve out-of-classroom work such as field trips, interviews, and first-hand observation.  

This course provides an overview of the history of law in Europe. The course sketches the history of a common civilization, to which people contributed coming from different and faraway lands, cities, kingdoms, and towns. A special focus is on the sources of law: legislation, legal doctrine, and legal practice. The relevance of each of these sources varied over time. In order to shed light on the common features throughout the history of Europe, the course focuses on a selection of the institutions of private and public law which are most representative of each epoch and each country. A special emphasis is on the correlation between the laws and the role played by professional jurists. All topics in the course are dealt with particular attention to the exchange of normative bodies, legislations, doctrines, judicial decisions, and customs within Europe, including English Common Law. Overall, the course introduces students to the complexities of European legal history through in-depth analysis of the sources of the law, from the middle ages to the present time. The course recommends students have background knowledge with the fundamentals of Private Law and Public Law.

This course provides students with a clear idea of the diversity of European social policies, their political background, and allows for the assessment of their performance. The course also provides an in-depth account of current welfare reforms, in the perspective of their historical development. The social science analysis concepts (de-/re-commodification, path dependency, Varieties of Capitalisms) are used in order to understand the issues at stake in recent debates concerning the welfare state and the trajectories of their reforms.