This book explores the malaise present in post-colonial Tonga, analyzing the way in which segments of this small-scale society hold on to different understandings of what modernity is, how it should be made relevant to local contexts, and how it should mesh with practices and symbols of tradition.
Life in twenty-first century Tonga is rife with uncertainties. Though the postcolonial island kingdom may give the appearance of stability and order, there is a malaise that pervades everyday life, a disquiet rooted in the feeling that the twin forces of "progress" and "development"—and the seemingly inevitable wealth distribution that follows from them—have bypassed the society. Niko Besnier's illuminating ethnography analyzes the ways in which segments of this small-scale society grapple with their growing anxiety and hold on to different understandings of what modernity means. How should it be made relevant to local contexts? How it should mesh with practices and symbols of tradition? In the day-to-day lives of Tongans, the weight of transformations brought on by neoliberalism and democracy press not in the abstract, but in individually significant ways: how to make ends meet, how to pay lip service to tradition, and how to present a modern self without opening oneself to ridicule. Adopting a wide-angled perspective that brings together political, economic, cultural, and social concerns, this book focuses on the interface between the different forms that modern uncertainties take.
Why are policymakers, scholars, and the general public so surprised when the world turns out to be unpredictable? World Politics at the Edge of Chaos suggests that the study of international politics needs new forms of knowledge to respond to emerging challenges such as the interconnectedness between local and transnational realities; between markets, migration, and social movements; and between pandemics, a looming energy crisis, and climate change. Asserting that Complexity Thinking (CT) provides a much-needed lens for interpreting these challenges, the contributors offer a parallel assessment of the impact of CT to anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric (post-human) International Relations. Using this perspective, the result should be less surprise when confronting the dynamism of a fragile and unpredictable global life. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to Knowledge Unlatched—an initiative that provides libraries and institutions with a centralized platform to support OA collections and from leading publishing houses and OA initiatives. Learn more at the Knowledge Unlatched website at: https://www.knowledgeunlatched.org/, and access the book online at the SUNY Open Access Repository at http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/7129.
Over the last quarter century, no other city like Miami has rapidly transformed into a global city. The Global Edge charts the social tensions and unexpected consequences of this remarkable process of change. Acting as a follow-up to the highly successful City on the Edge, The Global Edge examines Miami in the context of globalization and scrutinizes its newfound place as a major international city. Written by two well-known scholars in the field, the book examines Miami’s rise as a finance and banking center and the simultaneous emergence of a highly diverse but contentious ethnic mosaic. The Global Edge serves as a case study of Miami’s present cultural, economic, and political transformation, and describes how its future course can provide key lessons for other metropolitan areas throughout the world.
The old model of globalization—including offshoring to save money—no longer applies. Globalization now means you can better position your company for innovation and growth. To be a global leader, you must change and lead from the edge. Every day as a global leader seems to be a paradox: balancing the needs of daily operations while creating conditions that drive success in the future. Rather than try to resolve that paradox, this book helps you think about how to live within it, by developing essential traits and hearing from leaders who succeed globally. Learn from seven top executives how they shifted from individual thinkers to leading and growing organizations in an ever-changing economy. Learn the specific traits and model for business professionals to emulate and achieve success in global business enterprises. Get the on-the-ground, common-sense advice that has been applied by today’s successful global executives.
In this urgent time, World on the Edge calls out the pivotal environmental issues and how to solve them now. We are in a race between political and natural tipping points. Can we close coal-fired power plants fast enough to save the Greenland ice sheet and avoid catastrophic sea level rise? Can we raise water productivity fast enough to halt the depletion of aquifers and avoid water-driven food shortages? Can we cope with peak water and peak oil at the same time? These are some of the issues Lester R. Brown skilfully distils in World on the Edge. Bringing decades of research and analysis into play, he provides the responses needed to reclaim our future.
Annotation. The global interconnections that the twenty-first-century world is experiencing have raised new questions about agency. Some argue that the destabilization of local truths have given rise to new forms of self-understanding that draw on multiple and ungrounded images. These claims must be scrutinized through an examination of agents' everyday negotiations over the meaning of the local and the global, the modern and the traditional. Through an analysis of vignettes from my ethnographic research in two small-scale societies on the edge of global currents, Tonga (South Pacific) and Tuvalu (Central Pacific), I demonstrate that the crafting of the self constitutes a never-ending and always-contested project, in which performance figures prominently as a resource. I propose a research plan for cultural anthropology at the University of Amsterdam that problematizes modernity by focusing, ethnographically and comparatively, on performance as symbolic and material resources for the formation of subjectivity. This title can be previewed in Google Books - http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN9789056294885.
As globalization creates the need for leaders who transcend national borders, this book provides an insider's view of what makes them special. This is the first book to present a framework for understanding this fast-growing and influential group and it provides tools for readers to discover their own inner competitive edge.
Aid has become a tangle of donors and recipients, so unwieldy that it is in danger of collapse. This ground-breaking book presents fresh thinking that transcends the 'more' verses 'less' arguments. Drawing on complexity theory it shows how aid could be transformed into a truly dynamic form of global cooperation fit for the twenty-first century.
Maureen O'Hara and Graham Leicester explore the competencies - the ways of being, doing, knowing and organising - that can help us navigate in complex and powerful times. They argue that these competencies are innate and within reach of all of us - given the right setting, plenty of practice and some gentle guidance. But they are seldom seen because they are routinely undervalued in today's culture. That must change, the authors insist, and this book is intended to begin that change.The book is based on the authors' extensive research and their practical experience observing the qualities demonstrated by some of today's most successful cultural, political and business leaders. They write of 'persons of tomorrow' that they have witnessed:"e;We find that people who are thriving in the contemporary world, who give us the sense of having it all together and being able to act effectively and with good spirit in challenging circumstances, have some identifiable characteristics in common... They are the people already among us who inhabit the complex and messy problems of the 21st century in a more expansive way than their colleagues. They do not reduce such problems to the scale of the tools available to them, or hide behind those tools when they know they are partial and inadequate. They are less concerned with 'doing the right thing' according to standard procedure than they are with really doing the right thing in the moment, in specific cases, with the individuals involved at the time. In a disciplined yet engaging way they are always pushing boundaries, including their own. They dance at the edge."e;