New technologies, with their practical contributions, provide social value. The chapters in this volume view this social value from a program evaluation perspective, and the focus of the evaluations is the generation of new technology funded by public sector agencies. The authors provide important background on methodology and application and show that it is relevant not only to the established scholars and practitioners, but also to students.
Companies are increasingly championed for their capacity to solve social problems. Yet what happens when such goods as water, education, and health are sold by companies - rather than donated by nonprofits - to the disadvantaged and when the pursuit of mission becomes entangled with the pursuit of profit? In Caring Capitalism, Emily Barman answers these important questions, showing how the meaning of social value in an era of caring capitalism gets mediated by the work of 'value entrepreneurs' and the tools they create to gauge companies' social impact. By shedding light on these pivotal actors and the cultural and material contexts in which they operate, Caring Capitalism accounts for the unexpected consequences of this new vision of the market for the pursuit of social value. Proponents and critics of caring capitalism alike will find the book essential reading.
Social Value Investing presents a new way to approach some of society’s most difficult and intractable challenges. Although many of our world’s problems may seem too great and too complex to solve — inequality, climate change, affordable housing, corruption, healthcare, food insecurity — solutions to these challenges do exist, and will be found through new partnerships bringing together leaders from the public, private, and philanthropic sectors. In their new book, Howard W. Buffett and William B. Eimicke present a five-point management framework for developing and measuring the success of such partnerships. Inspired by value investing — one of history’s most successful investment paradigms — this framework provides tools to maximize collaborative efficiency and positive social impact, so that major public programs can deliver innovative, inclusive, and long-lasting solutions. It also offers practical insights for any private sector CEO, public sector administrator, or nonprofit manager hoping to build successful cross-sector collaborations. Social Value Investing tells the compelling stories of cross-sector partnerships from around the world — Central Park and the High Line in New York City, community-led economic development in Afghanistan, and improved public services in cities across Brazil. Drawing on lessons and observations from a broad selections of collaborations, this book combines real life stories with detailed analysis, resulting in a blueprint for effective, sustainable partnerships that serve the public interest. Readers also gain access to original, academic case material and professionally produced video documentaries for every major partnerships profiled — bringing to life the people and stories in a way that few other business or management books have done.
A comparative study of the impact of increased modernization in the rural sector on seven important developing countries. This book should be of interest to students and lecturers in development studies.
This book introduces the students, researchers and practitioners into the subject and enabling technologies and applications pertaining to of technology, entrepreneurship and business development through research articles, case studies etc. It is primarily intended for academic purposes for learners of computer Science, management, accounting and information systems disciplines, economics,- entrepreneurship. Publishing chapters in the book is new innovative idea to spread the book in the Middle East and Arab countries and make the book achieve more sales. As many students in all levels, graduates and undergraduates in addition to research, professionals are not able to get sufficient resources because of the language concern.
This book treats the mechanisms of growth and cycles in capitalist economies in a unified manner, incorporating a highly original macro-dynamic theory based on Marxian micro-foundations and historical perspectives. That theory was developed about 50 years ago by Nobuo Okishio (1927–2003) and included the ideas of Keynes and Harrod. In mainstream economics, it used to be standard to analyse long-term economic growth and business cycles in different frameworks. That approach has been changing recently, but it still tends to be common to discuss them separately. At the outbreak of the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 and the prolonged stagnation that followed, there was strong criticism among policymakers and businesspeople that mainstream macroeconomics failed to provide convincing explanations and effective policy recommendations. This book offers an alternative perspective that responds to those criticisms. All these macroeconomic difficulties call for new wisdom beyond the limited neoclassical framework. The sharp, wise thoughts of Okishio will add new tools for young researchers worldwide to meet the challenges of the current resource misallocation, the Great Recession and the Lost Decades problems. Okishio proposes a historical perspective for the capitalist system, first. He argues that production relations are conditioned by productive force. The former should evolve as the latter improves, and the latter should evolve in order for human society to survive. While reproduction is indispensable for the economy to continue in any production relations, it takes a specific form in capitalist economy. He next shows that the existence of profit requires the exploitation of the labourer. This is called the Fundamental Marxian Theorem. He also shows a trade-off relationship between the real wage rate and the profit rate. In his theory, the real wage rate is determined to clear commodity markets in the short run as in the Keynesian theory, while Marx believed that the real wage rate is given at subsistence level or is influenced by the labour market. Okishio attributes the origin of the business cycle to labourers’ under-consumption and private capitalists’ dispersive decision of accumulation. The former is caused by exploitation, and the latter is based on the capitalist class’s private ownership of the means of production. Both are derived from the nature of the capitalist economy. He argues lastly that, in the long term, the development of productive force through the business cycle will transform the production relation into a new economic system.
This book examines the discourse surrounding the wireless, created by the Anglo-Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi. The wireless excited early twentieth-century audiences before it even became a viable black box technology. The wireless adhered to modernist values—speed, efficiency, militarization, and progress. Language surrounding the wireless is a form of technical communication, overlooked by today’s practitioners. This book establishes a broader definition for technical communication by examining a selection of the discourse surrounding Marconi's wireless. The book’s main themes are the following: 1) technical communication is all discourse surrounding technology, 2) the field of technical communication (or technical writing) should incorporate analyses of discourse surrounding technologies into its epistemology, 3) the wireless is a product of the society from which it comes (early twentieth-century Western civilization), and 4) the discourse surrounding the wireless is infused with tropes of progress—speed, efficiency, evolution, and ahistoricity.
Marc R. Tool, both through his writings and his editorship of the Journal of Economic Issues, has had a profound influence on institutional economics. Tool's efforts, in his own words, "has been to keep values on the agenda of economic inquiry," which is another way of saying "keep economic inquiry relevant. " Tool's work on the theory of social value and instrumental valuation has helped to keep institutional economics focused on the core economic and social issues facing society, providing both a perspective from which to analyze the economy and a criteria for evaluating outcomes. This collection of essays is a testament to this legacy. Although these 15 chapters cover a wide and diverse range of topics, it is the common themes which are most striking: the inescapable necessity of values in economic discourse; the central role of valuation in economic activity; and most importantly, the requirement of democratic participation to achieve "efficient" solutions to the economic problem. These essays are offered to honor a body of work, a set of ideas, but mostly a man who, by directing economic inquiry to these core issues, has promoted "the continuity of human life and the noninvidious recreation of community through the instrumental use of knowledge.
The hypercomplex digital-technological environment is exponential and revolutionary. Our social mindset adaptation, instead, is slower and evolutionary, as an individual’s or an organization culture needs time to transform. This book offers students, institutions, and organisations innovative and interdisciplinary digital sociology tools to help build an adaptive, flexible, imaginative social mindset in order to cope with such a gap and to match a sustainable digital transformation (DT). By disrupting traditional linear approaches to understand the context into which business models are designed, institutions and students are challenged with innovative transdisciplinary holistic models grounded into business case studies. If the book stimulates students to learn how purposefully and autonomously to explore the web, to grasp the deeper meaning of DT and its social impact, institutions are solicited to answer to direct quests that go right to the core of their transformative DNA as: ‘How effectively are you carrying on DT in a sustainable, people-centred way? Which is your socio-cultural DT profile and what are your DT areas of strength and areas of improvement?' In this frame of work, the innovative Four Paradigm Model indicates new coordinates and provides original tools to profile an institution’s digital transformation strategy, to analyse it, and measure the level of sustainable socio-economic value. Sample syllabi, PowerPoint slides and quizzes are available online to assist in the teaching experience.
