The International Journal of Business Anthropology (IJBA) is a double-blinded peer reviewed journal focusing upon business anthropology. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, general business anthropology theories and methods; management; marketing; consumer behaviour; product design and development; knowledge management and competitive intelligence; human resources management; and international business. Practitioners, students, community members, and faculty from all disciplines are encouraged to submit articles. IJBA was originally published by the North American Business Press (NABP) biannually, and is currently published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, beginning with this volume.
While top-down policies and declarations have yet to establish equal status and opportunities for speakers of all languages in practice, activists and advocates at local levels are playing an increasingly significant role in the creation of new social imaginaries and practices in multilingual contexts. This volume describes how social actors across multiple domains contribute to the elusive goal of linguistic equality or justice through their language activism practices. Through an ethnographic account of Indigenous Isthmus Zapotec language activism in Oaxaca, Mexico, this study illuminates the (sometimes conflicting) imaginaries of what positive social change is and how it should be achieved, and the repertoire of strategies through which these imaginaries are being pursued. Ethnographic and action research conducted from 2013-2018 in the multilingual Isthmus of Tehuantepec brings to light the experiences of educators, students, writers, scholars and diverse cultural activists whose aspirations and strategies of social change are significant in shaping the future language ecology. Their repertoire of strategies may inform and encourage language activists, scholars, and educators working for change in other contexts of linguistic diversity and inequality.
There is surprisingly little fieldwork done on the United States by anthropologists from abroad. America Observed fills that gap by bringing into greater focus empirical as well as theoretical implications of this phenomenon. Edited by Virginia Dominguez and Jasmin Habib, the essays collected here offer a critique of such an absence, exploring its likely reasons while also illustrating the advantages of studying fieldwork-based anthropological projects conducted by colleagues from outside the U.S. This volume contains an introduction written by the editors and fieldwork-based essays written by Helena Wulff, Jasmin Habib, Limor Darash, Ulf Hannerz, and Moshe Shokeid, and reflections on the broad issue written by Geoffrey White, Keiko Ikeda, and Jane Desmond. Suitable for introductory and mid-level anthropology courses, America Observed will also be useful for American Studies courses both in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia is one of the most famous of the early works of Clifford Geertz. It principal thesis is that many centuries of intensifying wet-rice cultivation in Indonesia had produced greater social complexity without significant technological or political change, a process Geertz terms "involution". Written for a US-funded project on the local developments and following the modernization theory of Walt Whitman Rostow, Geertz examines in this book the agricultural system in Indonesia and its two dominant forms of agriculture, swidden and sawah. In addition to researching its agricultural systems, the book turns to an examination of their historical development. Of particular note is Geertz's discussion of what he famously describes as the process of "agricultural involution" in Java, where both the external economic demands of the Dutch rulers and the internal pressures due to population growth led to intensification rather than change.
"This issue of the International Journal of Business Anthropology contains seven articles related to the practice of business anthropology in various countries. The first article makes two arguments about China's Belt and Road Initiative (also known as "One Belt, One Road") based on two case studies in Tashkurgan in Xinjiang province and Houqiao in Yunnan province of China. The second discusses factors that led to the popularity of a Japanese adult video (AV) actress in China since 2010. The third paper examines variances in the representational framing of gender-roles in advertisements across cultures by employing traditional Hofstedian dimensions in conjunction with recent paradigms of horizontal-vertical cultural orientations. The fourth explores the significance of anthropology in management education by analyzing business education in India, which is undergoing a profound paradigm shift to respond to the challenges arising out of the rapidly changing business environmental factors. The fifth article investigates socio-cultural, environmental, religious, gender, educational, and health-care factors affecting women's smoking in Yunnan, China. The sixth paper discusses two problems (the lack of knowledge and the weakness in control and monitoring system) that hamper the majority of Islamic microfinance cooperative institutions in Indonesia, and suggests solutions. The last article probes the mechanism of reform and development of the Chaoshan Chamber of Commerce in Shenzhen City (CCCSC). The innovation of the CCCSC in its operation is concerned with three important aspects of the reform, including strategic basis, financial strategy and organizational structure. The reform practice of the CCCSC provides new information for academic research on the governance of chambers of commerce in China."
The migration crisis of recent years has elicited a double response: on the one hand, many states have responded by tightening border controls, in an attempt to restrict population movements, while on the other hand many citizens have responded by welcoming new arrivals, offering them shelter, food and whatever help they could provide. By so doing, they have re-awakened an old form of anthropology that was long-considered to be dead – that of hospitality. In this book, Agier develops an original anthropology of hospitality that starts from the reality of hospitality as a social relationship, albeit an asymmetrical one, in which each party has rights and duties. He argues that, with the decline of state and religious support, hospitality is now making a comeback at individual and municipal levels but these local initiatives, while important, are insufficient to respond to the scale of migration in the world today. We need a new hospitality policy for the modern era, one that will regard hospitality as a right rather than a favour and will treat the stranger as a guest rather than as an alien or an enemy. This timely and original book will be of great interest to students and scholars in anthropology, sociology and the social sciences generally, and to anyone concerned with migration and refugees in the world today.
This volume presents a much-needed rethinking and proposes a more nuanced, inclusive, and capacious approach to energy ethics that will help us grapple with some of the most pressing issues of our time. The contributors demonstrate how ethics emerge through people’s everyday thoughts and practices, whether they work in renewables, nuclear, or fossil fuels; whether they work in industry, policy, or advocacy; whether they produce, distribute, or consume energy It shows how to create an analytical space in which we can attend to people’s own experiences and evaluations without uncritically imposing judgements of how we would like the world to be By attending to the broader political and economic contexts in which these everyday energy encounters take place, this volume draws attention to the plurality and complexity that characterises the multiple and overlapping ‘ethical worlds’ in which we, our interlocutors, and other beings participate
Good,No Highlights,No Markup,all pages are intact, Slight Shelfwear,may have the corners slightly dented, may have slight color changes/slightly damaged spine.
Standing on the broken ground of resource extraction settings, the state is sometimes like a chimera: its appearance and intentions are misleading and, for some actors, it is unknowable and incomprehensible. It may be easily mistaken for someone or something else, like a mining company, for example. With rich ethnographic material, this volume tackles critical questions about the nature of contemporary states, studied from the perspective of resource extraction projects in Papua New Guinea, Australia and beyond. It brings together a sustained focus on the unstable and often dialectical relationship between the presence and the absence of the state in the context of resource extraction. Across the chapters, contributors discuss cases of proposed mining ventures, existing large-scale mining operations and the extraction of natural gas. Together, they illustrate how the concept of absent presence can be brought to life and how it can enhance our understanding of the state as well as relations and processes forming in extractive contexts, thus providing a novel contribution to the anthropology of the state and the anthropology of extraction. ‘The Absent Presence fills a major gap in our knowledge about the relationship between states and companies – at a time when resource extraction seems to be more contested than ever. Bainton and Skrzypek have curated an incredibly impressive volume that should be read by all those interested in exploring corporate and state power, and the ever-present impacts of extraction. A highly recommended read.’ — Professor Deanna Kemp, Director of the Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining, The University of Queensland ‘Countless books have been written on the sovereign state and how it imposes a particular kind of order on economic and social interactions. What is original and compelling about this collection is the portrait of how two very different states converge when it comes to “extractive ventures”. From the presumption of exclusive sovereignty over mineral resources, to the bargains that are struck with major (often global) corporations, and the relative indifference to environmental impacts, there is a remarkable consistency in the patterns that are referred to as “state effects”. These effects are brought from the background to the foreground in this book through the blending of creative and critical thinking with detailed empirical research.’ — Tim Dunne, Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Professor of International Relations, The University of Queensland ‘This brilliant and intriguing title provides a timely contribution to understanding the actual functions and strategies of state (and state-like) institutions in resource arenas. The dialectics of presence-absence and its refractions at different levels and scales of government allow the authors to go beyond stereotypes about the (strong, weak, failed or corrupt) state, highlighting more commonalities than expected between Papua New Guinea and Australia, and even New Caledonia.’ — Dr Pierre-Yves Le Meur, Anthropologist, Senior Researcher, French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development, Joint Research Unit SENS (Knowledge Environment Society)
