Beyond the Factory Gates
Beyond the Factory Gates

Author: Peter Bartrip

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2006-07-01

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 0826488366

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Beyond the Factory Gates examines the issue of asbestos and health in the USA between the early 1900's to the mid-1970s. Areas covered include the emergence of medical concern about the three fatal diseases related to asbestos (asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma); the actions of the US Navy (the main consumer of asbestos-based insulation products); the response of the federal government before and after enactment of the Occupational Safety and Health Act in 1970; and the roles of organized labour and the asbestos industry. The book provides an important insight into occupational health and its regulation in twentieth century America, and is original in several ways. First, there is no satisfactory history of asbestos, health and medicine in the USA - a major gap in the literature. Second, no previous publication has examined the asbestos issue 'beyond the factory gates' in a non-manufacturing context and explored the complex interactions between organised labour, the US Government, business corporations and the US navy. Finally, Beyond the Factory Gates avoids the one-sided, anti-business interpretations that predominate much of the existing literature. It accepts that the history of asbestos is in many ways a human tragedy, but it rejects simplistic, universalised arguments that this has been a tragedy with a cast only villains, dupes and victims.

Supercommunity
Supercommunity

Author: E-Flux

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2017-12-05

Total Pages: 477

ISBN-13: 1786633574

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Leading artists, theorists, and writers exhume the dystopian and utopian futures contained within the present “I am the supercommunity, and you are only starting to recognize me. I grew out of something that used to be humanity. Some have compared me to angry crowds in public squares; others compare me to wind and atmosphere, or to software.” Invited to exhibit at the 56th Venice Biennale, e-flux journal produced a single issue over a four-month span, publishing an article a day both online and on site from Venice. In essays, poems, short stories, and plays, artists and theorists trace the negative collective that is the subject of contemporary life, in which art, the internet, and globalization have shed their utopian guises but persist as naked power, in the face of apocalyptic ecological disaster and against the claims of the social commons. “I convert care to cruelty, and cruelty back to care. I convert political desires to economic flows and data, and then I convert them back again. I convert revolutions to revelations. I don’t want security, I want to leave, and then disperse myself everywhere and all the time.”

Why Nations Fail
Why Nations Fail

Author: Daron Acemoglu

Publisher: Currency

Published: 2013-09-17

Total Pages: 546

ISBN-13: 0307719227

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Brilliant and engagingly written, Why Nations Fail answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine? Is it culture, the weather, geography? Perhaps ignorance of what the right policies are? Simply, no. None of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Otherwise, how to explain why Botswana has become one of the fastest growing countries in the world, while other African nations, such as Zimbabwe, the Congo, and Sierra Leone, are mired in poverty and violence? Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or lack of it). Korea, to take just one of their fascinating examples, is a remarkably homogeneous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on earth while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest. The south forged a society that created incentives, rewarded innovation, and allowed everyone to participate in economic opportunities. The economic success thus spurred was sustained because the government became accountable and responsive to citizens and the great mass of people. Sadly, the people of the north have endured decades of famine, political repression, and very different economic institutions—with no end in sight. The differences between the Koreas is due to the politics that created these completely different institutional trajectories. Based on fifteen years of original research Acemoglu and Robinson marshall extraordinary historical evidence from the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, medieval Venice, the Soviet Union, Latin America, England, Europe, the United States, and Africa to build a new theory of political economy with great relevance for the big questions of today, including: - China has built an authoritarian growth machine. Will it continue to grow at such high speed and overwhelm the West? - Are America’s best days behind it? Are we moving from a virtuous circle in which efforts by elites to aggrandize power are resisted to a vicious one that enriches and empowers a small minority? - What is the most effective way to help move billions of people from the rut of poverty to prosperity? More philanthropy from the wealthy nations of the West? Or learning the hard-won lessons of Acemoglu and Robinson’s breakthrough ideas on the interplay between inclusive political and economic institutions? Why Nations Fail will change the way you look at—and understand—the world.

Women at the Threshold of Globalisation
Women at the Threshold of Globalisation

Author: Narendar Pani

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-04-04

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1317809211

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The popular perception of globalisation is rooted in its image of dissolving senses of distance and boundaries. It is so preoccupied with the technology that enables globalisation that little attention is paid to questions of ‘how’ and ‘where’ the circuits of globalisation actually get realised. This book attempts a more nuanced view of globalisation by focusing on its less-explored, non-technological dimensions. It examines the transformation of the woman worker — from a rural woman to an urban one, from a dependent daughter, wife and mother to an earning member, and from a homemaker to a factory worker, and the attendant transformation of the home into a base for migrant workers. None of these transformations is absolute, as the woman worker continues to play the traditional roles of wife and mother at home alongside fulfilling her responsibilities at work. In the process of negotiating boundaries in the village, city, home, and global factory, she confronts a reality that she fears because of its unfamiliarity, coping with which necessarily entails falling back on her kin networks — institutions that are rarely seen as enablers of globalisation, although they play a critical role in determining how globalisation is sustained. Focusing on such workers in Bangalore, a city otherwise known for its IT industry, the book examines the global garment circuit, especially the institutions and processes outside the workplace that influence how the global circuit is completed. It will appeal to those in economics, sociology, gender studies, urban studies, as well as to those interested in issues relating to globalisation.

The Future of Capitalism
The Future of Capitalism

Author: Paul Collier

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2018-12-04

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0062748661

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Bill Gates's Five Books for Summer Reading 2019 From world-renowned economist Paul Collier, a candid diagnosis of the failures of capitalism and a pragmatic and realistic vision for how we can repair it. Deep new rifts are tearing apart the fabric of the United States and other Western societies: thriving cities versus rural counties, the highly skilled elite versus the less educated, wealthy versus developing countries. As these divides deepen, we have lost the sense of ethical obligation to others that was crucial to the rise of post-war social democracy. So far these rifts have been answered only by the revivalist ideologies of populism and socialism, leading to the seismic upheavals of Trump, Brexit, and the return of the far-right in Germany. We have heard many critiques of capitalism but no one has laid out a realistic way to fix it, until now. In a passionate and polemical book, celebrated economist Paul Collier outlines brilliantly original and ethical ways of healing these rifts—economic, social and cultural—with the cool head of pragmatism, rather than the fervor of ideological revivalism. He reveals how he has personally lived across these three divides, moving from working-class Sheffield to hyper-competitive Oxford, and working between Britain and Africa, and acknowledges some of the failings of his profession. Drawing on his own solutions as well as ideas from some of the world’s most distinguished social scientists, he shows us how to save capitalism from itself—and free ourselves from the intellectual baggage of the twentieth century.

Factfulness
Factfulness

Author: Hans Rosling

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Published: 2018-04-03

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 125012381X

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INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “One of the most important books I’ve ever read—an indispensable guide to thinking clearly about the world.” – Bill Gates “Hans Rosling tells the story of ‘the secret silent miracle of human progress’ as only he can. But Factfulness does much more than that. It also explains why progress is so often secret and silent and teaches readers how to see it clearly.” —Melinda Gates "Factfulness by Hans Rosling, an outstanding international public health expert, is a hopeful book about the potential for human progress when we work off facts rather than our inherent biases." - Former U.S. President Barack Obama Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts. When asked simple questions about global trends—what percentage of the world’s population live in poverty; why the world’s population is increasing; how many girls finish school—we systematically get the answers wrong. So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess teachers, journalists, Nobel laureates, and investment bankers. In Factfulness, Professor of International Health and global TED phenomenon Hans Rosling, together with his two long-time collaborators, Anna and Ola, offers a radical new explanation of why this happens. They reveal the ten instincts that distort our perspective—from our tendency to divide the world into two camps (usually some version of us and them) to the way we consume media (where fear rules) to how we perceive progress (believing that most things are getting worse). Our problem is that we don’t know what we don’t know, and even our guesses are informed by unconscious and predictable biases. It turns out that the world, for all its imperfections, is in a much better state than we might think. That doesn’t mean there aren’t real concerns. But when we worry about everything all the time instead of embracing a worldview based on facts, we can lose our ability to focus on the things that threaten us most. Inspiring and revelatory, filled with lively anecdotes and moving stories, Factfulness is an urgent and essential book that will change the way you see the world and empower you to respond to the crises and opportunities of the future. --- “This book is my last battle in my life-long mission to fight devastating ignorance...Previously I armed myself with huge data sets, eye-opening software, an energetic learning style and a Swedish bayonet for sword-swallowing. It wasn’t enough. But I hope this book will be.” Hans Rosling, February 2017.

Film editing - history, theory and practice
Film editing - history, theory and practice

Author: Don Fairservice

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2019-01-04

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 1526141388

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The first-ever comprehensive examination of the film editor's craft from the beginning of cinema to the present day. Of all the film-making crafts, editing is the least understood. Using examples drawn from classic film texts, this book clarifies the editor's role and explains how the editing process maximises the effectiveness of the filmed material. Traces the development of editing from the primitive forms of early cinema through the upheavals caused by the advent of sound, to explore the challenges to convention that began in the 1960s and which continue into the twenty-first century. New digital technologies and the dominance of the moving image as an increasingly central part of everyday life have produced a radical rewriting of the rules of audio-visual address. It is not a technical treatise; instructive and accessible, this historically-based insight into filmmaking practice will prove invaluable to students of film and also appeal to a much wider readership.

Behind the Lines
Behind the Lines

Author: Russell Miller

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2014-07-08

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13: 146687564X

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This is the story of special operations in the second world war as it has never been told before--directly by those who took part. Compiled by Russell Miller from interviews, diaries, letters and contemporaneous first-person accounts--many unpublished until now--the oral history in Behind the Lines follows the adventures of the courageous men and women who volunteered for service with the Untied States' Office of Strategic Services and Britain's Special Operations Executive. They parachuted behind enemy lines, often alone, with orders to cause mayhem. Arrest almost always resulted in torture and imprisonment; sometimes in execution. Trained in the black arts of warfare--sabotage, subversion, espionage, guerrilla tactics and undermining enemy morale by the distribution of insidious propaganda--theirs was a war fought in the shadows. Their activities extended to every theatre of operations: in occupied France, equipped with false identities, they played a deadly game of cat and mouse with the Gestapo; in the Balkans they discovered that the fiery politics of the region were as dangerous as the enemy; in the Burmese jungle, in some of the worst combat conditions of the war, they led native marauders in surprise attacks against the Japanese. From Britain they were supported by a team of back-room inventors who produced expertly forged documents and dreamed up ingenious devices like exploding rats and invisible ink. The special agents of World War Two really were a breed apart. This is their extraordinary story. In their own words.

Industrial Labour in an Unequal World
Industrial Labour in an Unequal World

Author: Christian Strümpell

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2023-10-02

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 311131166X

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The volume scrutinizes the fundamentally uneven character of industrial production and working class formation by bringing together anthropologists specializing on industrial labour in various locations from South America, Western and Eastern Europe, North Africa, and South Asia. Through their engagement with Leon Trotsky’s concept of ‘uneven and combined development’ the authors unravel the complex relations that connect (and disconnect) labour in their sites of research with workers in other places and other times. As the contributions likewise reveal, the unevenness and combination inherent in industrial developments shape and are at the same time also shaped by the different politics workers in an unequal world pursue, as well as the historical experiences and future expectations of workers that inform these. With the attention the authors pay to the specificities of ethnographic detail as well as to broader regional and global developments the volume demonstrates the value of long-term ethnographic research and is of interest to a wide audience ranging from specialists in the fields of anthropology, history, sociology and development studies to students and activists.

From Peoples into Nations
From Peoples into Nations

Author: John Connelly

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-01-21

Total Pages: 968

ISBN-13: 0691189188

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A sweeping narrative history of Eastern Europe from the late eighteenth century to today In the 1780s, the Habsburg monarch Joseph II decreed that henceforth German would be the language of his realm. His intention was to forge a unified state from his vast and disparate possessions, but his action had the opposite effect, catalyzing the emergence of competing nationalisms among his Hungarian, Czech, and other subjects, who feared that their languages and cultures would be lost. In this sweeping narrative history of Eastern Europe since the late eighteenth century, John Connelly connects the stories of the region's diverse peoples, telling how, at a profound level, they have a shared understanding of the past. An ancient history of invasion and migration made the region into a cultural landscape of extraordinary variety, a patchwork in which Slovaks, Bosnians, and countless others live shoulder to shoulder and where calls for national autonomy often have had bloody effects among the interwoven ethnicities. Connelly traces the rise of nationalism in Polish, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman lands; the creation of new states after the First World War and their later absorption by the Nazi Reich and the Soviet Bloc; the reemergence of democracy and separatist movements after the collapse of communism; and the recent surge of populist politics throughout the region. Because of this common experience of upheaval, East Europeans are people with an acute feeling for the precariousness of history: they know that nations are not eternal, but come and go; sometimes they disappear. From Peoples into Nations tells their story.