Networks and Marketsargues that economists' knowledge of markets and sociologists' rich understanding of networks can and should be combined. Together they can help us achieve a more coherent view of economic life, where transactions follow both the logic of economic incentives and the established channels of personal relationships. Market exchange is impersonal, episodic, and carried out at arm's length. All that matters is how much the seller is asking, and how much the buyer is offering. An economic network, by contrast, is based upon more personalized and enduring relationships between people tied together by more than just price. Networks and Markets focuses on how the two concepts relate to each other: Are social networks an essential precondition for successful markets, or do networks arise naturally out of markets, as faceless traders build reputations and gain confidence in each other? This book proves that both economics and sociology provide stronger insights when they study markets and networks as parallel forms of exchange. But it also clarifies the healthy division of labor that remains between the two disciplines. Sociologists are adept at showing how markets are framed by social institutions; economists specialize in explaining how markets perform, taking the social context as a given. Networks and Markets showcases what each discipline does best and reveals where each discipline would do better by borrowing from the other.
In 1990, the tiny Soviet Republic of Lithuania declared independence and began restoring the mechanisms of independent government and democracy that had been suppressed by its Soviet invaders for half a century. Lithuania examines the first years of this rebirth in the face of the legacy of the Soviet occupation. In addition to chronicling the lively chain of events leading to and stemming from the declaration of independence, Alexandra Ashbourne studies the essential components of rebirth: the creation of domestic, foreign, and security policies and the revitalization of an independent economy. Drawing from the personal testimony of Lithuanians closely connected to these events, Ashbourne appraises Lithuania's attempts to rejoin the international community and acquire an effective security guarantee. She concludes that the damage caused by fifty years of Soviet domination created obstacles to the process of rebirth, obstacles that are proving difficult and even impossible to overcome. Readers of Lithuania will find its discussions applicable to most former Soviet republics and Eastern Bloc states. The book will be invaluable to students and scholars of Lithuania, Soviet history, and international political policy.
The 1950s were the golden years of haute couture, captured by iconic images of glamorous models wearing dramatic clothes. Yet the real women who wore these clothes adapted them to suit their own tastes, altered them to extend their life, and often could not bear to part with them long after the dresses had outlived their use. This gorgeously illustrated book demonstrates why so many of these designs are still in existence and why we are fascinated by them fifty years later. Couture and Commerce investigates how and why postwar couture fashion was important in its own day. The Paris couture houses survived due to the enthusiasm of the North American fashion press and commercial buyers. Alexandra Palmer traces the European haute couture trade with North America by following actual surviving couture dresses from the design house sketch, through the model used in New York fashion shows and as a template for copies and knock-offs, and finally to the consumer. Couture and Commerce is a remarkable mixture of accessible text, color photographs of the original garments, design house sketches and photographs, retailers’ advertisements, and society page images. Weaving together analysis of the clothes and interviews with those who traded, sold, and wore couture, Alexandra Palmer vividly recreates the 1950s fashion world.
This book explains how people can be radically manipulated by extreme groups and leaders to engage in incomprehensible and often dangerous acts through psychologically isolating situations of extreme social influence. These methods are used in totalitarian states, terrorist groups and cults, as well as in controlling personal relationships. Illustrated with compelling stories from a range of cults and totalitarian systems, Stein's book defines and analyses the common identifiable traits that underlie these groups, emphasizing the importance of maintaining open yet supportive personal networks. Using original attachment theory-based research this book highlights the dangers of closed, isolating relationships and the closed belief systems that justify them, and demonstrates the psychological impact of these environments, ending with evidence-based recommendations to support an educational approach to awareness and prevention. Featuring a foreword by John Horgan, the new edition has been fully updated to include recent work on political extremism and radicalization and totalitarian systems, as well as the recent highly publicized NXIVM case. Terror, Love and Brainwashing, second edition is essential reading for professionals, policy makers, legal professionals, educators and cult survivors and their families themselves.
Bribery plays a significant role in international criminal activity. Terrorists pay bribes. Money-launderers pay bribes. Those who traffic in people, narcotics, and illegal arms pay bribes. People pay immigration officers not to ask, customs officials not to inspect, and police officers not to investigate. Bribes follow patterns that are not at all mysterious to the officials, salesmen, and citizens who seek them and pay them. Using a series of international cases, Wrage examines bribery, peeling back the mystique and ambiguity and exposing the very simple transactions that lie beneath. She shows how these seemingly everyday transactions can affect security, democratization, and human aid. Examples from around the world help to illustrate the nature of the problem and efforts at combating it. Bribery plays a significant role in international criminal activity. Terrorists pay bribes. Money-launderers pay bribes. Those who traffic in people, narcotics, and illegal arms pay bribes. People pay immigration officers not to ask, customs officials not to inspect, and police officers not to investigate. At corporate headquarters in the United States, it can be easy to dismiss modest bribes in distant countries as an unfortunate cost of doing business. Bribes follow patterns that are not at all mysterious to the officials, salesmen, and citizens who seek them and pay them. Using a series of international cases, Wrage examines bribery, peeling back the mystique and ambiguity and exposing the very simple transactions that lie beneath. She shows how these seemingly everyday transactions can affect security, democratization, and human aid around the globe. Bribery and Extortion presents a clear picture of the world of bribery and the havoc it can wreak on whole populations. Wrage covers commercial bribery, administrative and service-based bribery, and extortion. She considers bribery and extortion at both high levels of government and lower levels on the street. Examples from around the world help to illustrate the nature of the problem and efforts at combating it. The book concludes with practical suggestions and an assessment of current efforts to stem the tide of bribery and restore transparency to everyday transactions in all realms.
In this tour-de-force sequel to Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller returns to Africa with the story of her unforgettable family. In Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness Alexandra Fuller braids a multi-layered narrative around the Happy Valley-era Africa of her mother's childhood; the grimness of her father's English childhood; and the darker, civil war-torn Africa of her own childhood. Born on the Scottish Isle of Skye and raised in Kenya, Nicola Fuller holds dear the kinds of values most likely to get you hurt or killed in Africa: loyalty to blood, passion for land and a holy belief in the restorative power of all animals. Fuller captures her mother's distinctive voice with remarkable precision, rendering a life story that is as funny, terrifying, exotic and unselfconscious as Nicola herself. We see Nicola and Tim Fuller in their honeymoon period, when East Africa lies before them with all the promise of its liquid equatorial light, even as the British Empire wanes. But in short order, an accumulation of mishaps and tragedies bump up against history until the couple find themselves in a world they hardly recognize. We follow the Fullers as they run from war and unspeakable heartbreak, from Kenya to Rhodesia to Zambia, even returning to England briefly. But just when it seems that Nicola has been broken entirely by Africa, it is the African earth itself that revives her. In the end we find Nicola and Tim at a coffee table under their Tree of Forgetfulness on the banana and fish farm where they plan to spend their final days. In local custom, the Tree is where villagers meet to resolve disputes--and it is here that the Fullers at last find an African kind of peace. Following the ghosts and dreams of memory, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness is Alexandra Fuller at her very best.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929) is frequently portrayed in cultural histories as an aloof writer with a precious style, out of step with modern sensibilities. In Aesthetic Dilemmas Marlo Burks reassesses Hofmannsthal’s oeuvre and its place in twentieth-century European modernist aesthetics. Through an examination of a diverse range of Hofmannsthal’s ekphrastic writings – including poetry, essays, opera libretti, fiction, and letters – Burks argues that Hofmannsthal’s work aims to engage the consciousness and sensibility of readers, listeners, and viewers by way of dynamic encounters with works of art. Aesthetic Dilemmas thereby corrects a long-standing, flawed characterization of Hofmannsthal’s work as escapist and demonstrates how his place in the Modernist movement has been misunderstood in most scholarship. The book is in dialogue with a broad range of critical voices and treats a variety of themes, from aestheticism to money, interpersonal relationships, suffering, poverty, labour, futurity, legacy, and hope. Translating numerous passages into English for the first time, Aesthetic Dilemmas gives English-speaking readers the chance to evaluate Hofmannsthal’s literary merit and his contributions to the enduring conversation about art’s relation to ethics.
From the award-winning New York Times-bestselling author of Don’t Let’s Go To The Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller, comes a career defining memoir about grieving the sudden loss of her twenty-one-year-old child “Fair to say, I was in a ribald state the summer before my fiftieth birthday.” And so begins Alexandra Fuller’s open, vivid new memoir, Fi. It’s midsummer in Wyoming and Alexandra is barely hanging on. Grieving her father and pining for her home country of Zimbabwe, reeling from a midlife breakup, freshly sober and piecing her way uncertainly through a volatile new relationship with a younger woman, Alexandra vows to get herself back on even keel. And then – suddenly and incomprehensibly - her son Fi, at 21 years old, dies in his sleep. No stranger to loss - young siblings, a parent, a home country - Alexandra is nonetheless leveled. At the same time, she is painfully aware that she cannot succumb and abandon her two surviving daughters as her mother before her had done. From a sheep wagon deep in the mountains of Wyoming to a grief sanctuary in New Mexico to a silent meditation retreat in Alberta, Canada, Alexandra journeys up and down the spine of the Rocky Mountains in an attempt to find how to grieve herself whole. There is no answer, and there are countless answers – in poetry, in rituals and routines, in nature and in the indigenous wisdom she absorbed as a child in Zimbabwe. By turns disarming, devastating and unexpectedly, blessedly funny, Alexandra recounts the wild medicine of painstakingly grieving a child in a culture that has no instructions for it.
Why has the mask been such an enduring generic motif in horror cinema? This book explores its transformative potential historically across myriad cultures, particularly in relation to its ritual and mythmaking capacities, and its intersection with power, ideology and identity. All of these factors have a direct impact on mask-centric horror cinema: meanings, values and rituals associated with masks evolve and are updated in horror cinema to reflect new contexts, rendering the mask a persistent, meaningful and dynamic aspect of the genre’s iconography. This study debates horror cinema’s durability as a site for the potency of the mask’s broader symbolic power to be constantly re-explored, re-imagined and re-invented as an object of cross-cultural and ritual significance that existed long before the moving image culture of cinema.
The Heimat film genre, assumed to be outdated by so many, is very much alive. Who would have thought that this genre - which has been almost unanimously denounced within academic circles, but which seems to resonate so deeply with the general public - would experience a renaissance in the 21st century? The genre's recent resurgence is perhaps due less to an obsession with generic storylines and stereotyped figures than to a basic human need for grounding that has resulted in a passionate debate about issues of past and present. This book traces the history of the Heimat film genre from the early mountain films to Fatih Akin's contemporary interpretations of Heimat.
This volume represents the latest advances in the field of theoretical and computational acoustics. The coverage includes results in the areas of underwater acoustics, seismics, scattering, inversion, genetic algorithms, reverberation, IFEM, Radon transforms, wavelet statistics, PE modeling, and Gaussian beams.
Intertextual Weaving in the Work of Linda Lê: Imagining the Ideal Reader uncovers the primary textual relationship that Linda Lê (1963– ), the most prolific Francophone author of the Vietnamese diaspora, fosters with a literary precursor of Austrian descent: the feminist writer-in-exile, Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973). This study offers an overdue exploration of the notably European roots of Lê’s writerly formation. It traces an unexamined feminist import in her work to a sixteen-year inter- and intra-textual engagement with Bachmann and positions the latter as an imagined ideal reader of Lê’s oeuvre. Intertextual analyses of Bachmann’s post-war novel, Malina, with Lê’s literary essays, early fiction, and trilogy, reveal that to overcome the challenges of writing in exile Lê adopts an alternative literary fore-bear of the European tradition.
Birnbaum travel guides are "excellently organized for the casual traveler who is looking for a mix of recreation and cultural insight" (Washington Post) and "the information they offer is up-to-date, crisply presented" (New York Times). "No other guide has as much to offer . . . a pleasure to read".--Today Show.
Im Dezember 2005 wurde der Zukunftsfonds der Republik Österreich per Bundesgesetz mit einem Etat von 20 Millionen Euro errichtet. In den zehn Jahren seines Bestehens förderte der ÖZF rund 1.370 Projekte, die sich vor allem auch der Erforschung totalitärer Systeme im 20. Jahrhundert widmen. Mit dem expliziten Ziel des „Niemals wieder!“ avancierte der Zukunftsfonds zu einer nationalen Institution, deren zentrale Aufgabe in der Förderung einer nachhaltigen und zukunftsorientierten Erinnerungskultur sowie des demokratiepolitischen und menschenrechtlichen Engagements liegt. Das Buch präsentiert die wichtigsten Etappen der Entstehung und Tätigkeit des Zukunftsfonds. Neben einer Dokumentation seiner Wirkungsweisen analysiert es die Bedeutung des ÖZF für Forschung und Gesellschaft. Auf der Grundlage von Interviews kommen Persönlichkeiten zu Wort, die an der Entwicklung des Zukunftsfonds maßgeblich beteiligt waren. Exemplarisch dargestellte Projekte und deren vollständige Liste geben einen Einblick in die Vielfalt seiner Fördertätigkeit.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.