Benjamin Stachursky's book questions the unvarying positive view of transnationalism on domestic forms of activism, arguing for a more nuanced analysis that permits an understanding of the enabling and restricting effects of transnationalism. Looking at the period from the mid-1980s up to present developments such as the Arab Spring, Stachursky analyzes the emergence and development of NGO activism in Egypt and Iran, the social, political, and legal context of NGO activism, and key domestic debates on the impact and legitimacy of the actors operating in women's rights activism.
The advancement of transportation and communication technology has facilitated greater interaction between people throughout the world, a process known as globalization. Because of its various economic, social, cultural, and environmental implications, attitudes toward globalization are ambivalent. There are concerns about the exploitation of people and resources from less economically stable countries and the destruction of cultural traditions, but at the same time it has allowed the world to open up for people on an international scale. It is important to weigh the many costs and benefits of this complicated issue to form a reasoned response, which this book adeptly supports.
How an antisemitic legend gave voice to widespread fears surrounding the expansion of private credit in Western capitalism The Promise and Peril of Credit takes an incisive look at pivotal episodes in the West’s centuries-long struggle to define the place of private finance in the social and political order. It does so through the lens of a persistent legend about Jews and money that reflected the anxieties surrounding the rise of impersonal credit markets. By the close of the Middle Ages, new and sophisticated credit instruments made it easier for European merchants to move funds across the globe. Bills of exchange were by far the most arcane of these financial innovations. Intangible and written in a cryptic language, they fueled world trade but also lured naive investors into risky businesses. Francesca Trivellato recounts how the invention of these abstruse credit contracts was falsely attributed to Jews, and how this story gave voice to deep-seated fears about the unseen perils of the new paper economy. She locates the legend’s earliest version in a seventeenth-century handbook on maritime law and traces its legacy all the way to the work of the founders of modern social theory—from Marx to Weber and Sombart. Deftly weaving together economic, legal, social, cultural, and intellectual history, Trivellato vividly describes how Christian writers drew on the story to define and redefine what constituted the proper boundaries of credit in a modern world increasingly dominated by finance.
In Interop, technology experts John Palfrey and Urs Gasser explore the immense importance of interoperability -- the standardization and integration of technology -- and show how this simple principle will hold the key to our success in the coming decades and beyond. The practice of standardization has been facilitating innovation and economic growth for centuries. The standardization of the railroad gauge revolutionized the flow of commodities, the standardization of money revolutionized debt markets and simplified trade, and the standardization of credit networks has allowed for the purchase of goods using money deposited in a bank half a world away. These advancements did not eradicate the different systems they affected; instead, each system has been transformed so that it can interoperate with systems all over the world, while still preserving local diversity. As Palfrey and Gasser show, interoperability is a critical aspect of any successful system -- and now it is more important than ever. Today we are confronted with challenges that affect us on a global scale: the financial crisis, the quest for sustainable energy, and the need to reform health care systems and improve global disaster response systems. The successful flow of information across systems is crucial if we are to solve these problems, but we must also learn to manage the vast degree of interconnection inherent in each system involved. Interoperability offers a number of solutions to these global challenges, but Palfrey and Gasser also consider its potential negative effects, especially with respect to privacy, security, and co-dependence of states; indeed, interoperability has already sparked debates about document data formats, digital music, and how to create successful yet safe cloud computing. Interop demonstrates that, in order to get the most out of interoperability while minimizing its risks, we will need to fundamentally revisit our understanding of how it works, and how it can allow for improvements in each of its constituent parts. In Interop, Palfrey and Gasser argue that there needs to be a nuanced, stable theory of interoperability -- one that still generates efficiencies, but which also ensures a sustainable mode of interconnection. Pointing the way forward for the new information economy, Interop provides valuable insights into how technological integration and innovation can flourish in the twenty-first century.
The MIT Sloan School of Management, as conceived by the legendary General Motors chairman Alfred P. Sloan, was founded in 1952 to draw on the scientific and technical resources of MIT and approach the problems of management with the rigorous research practices for which MIT was famous. Fifty years later, the Sloan School gathered international leaders in business and management, MIT faculty, students, and alumni to address again the basic principles that should guide business and management. This book presents the papers prepared by student-faculty teams, speeches by business and world leaders, and summaries of the discussions from this special convocation; taken together, they offer a guide to the future of management based on the hallmarks of MIT and Sloan--creativity and innovation.The topics considered coalesced around three main themes. First, and paramount, is the necessity of building and maintaining trust by means of openness, transparency, and accountability; this was addressed in speeches by Kofi Annan and Carly Fiorina and exemplified by the case study presented of Nike's efforts to rebuild the trust of customers. The increasingly complex conditions of the modern global economy emerged as another recurring theme, as the participants considered the effect of the growing spectrum of stakeholders on issues of corporate governance. The third common theme was the inescapability of technological and scientific change, from the Internet as a marketing tool to the organizational impact of information technology.
A landmark insider’s tour of how social media affects our decision-making and shapes our world in ways both useful and dangerous, with critical insights into the social media trends of the 2020 election and beyond “The book might be described as prophetic. . . . At least two of Aral’s three predictions have come to fruition.”—New York NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY WIRED • LONGLISTED FOR THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD Social media connected the world—and gave rise to fake news and increasing polarization. It is paramount, MIT professor Sinan Aral says, that we recognize the outsize effect social media has on us—on our politics, our economy, and even our personal health—in order to steer today’s social technology toward its great promise while avoiding the ways it can pull us apart. Drawing on decades of his own research and business experience, Aral goes under the hood of the most powerful social networks to tackle the critical question of just how much social media actually shapes our choices, for better or worse. He shows how the tech behind social media offers the same set of behavior influencing levers to everyone who hopes to change the way we think and act—from Russian hackers to brand marketers—which is why its consequences affect everything from elections to business, dating to health. Along the way, he covers a wide array of topics, including how network effects fuel Twitter’s and Facebook’s massive growth, the neuroscience of how social media affects our brains, the real consequences of fake news, the power of social ratings, and the impact of social media on our kids. In mapping out strategies for being more thoughtful consumers of social media, The Hype Machine offers the definitive guide to understanding and harnessing for good the technology that has redefined our world overnight.
“A fascinating book about how platform internet companies (Amazon, Facebook, and so on) are changing the norms of economic competition.” —Fast Company Shoppers with a bargain-hunting impulse and internet access can find a universe of products at their fingertips. But is there a dark side to internet commerce? This thought-provoking exposé invites us to explore how sophisticated algorithms and data-crunching are changing the nature of market competition, and not always for the better. Introducing into the policy lexicon terms such as algorithmic collusion, behavioral discrimination, and super-platforms, Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice E. Stucke explore the resulting impact on competition, our democratic ideals, our wallets, and our well-being. “We owe the authors our deep gratitude for anticipating and explaining the consequences of living in a world in which black boxes collude and leave no trails behind. They make it clear that in a world of big data and algorithmic pricing, consumers are outgunned and antitrust laws are outdated, especially in the United States.” —Science “A convincing argument that there can be a darker side to the growth of digital commerce. The replacement of the invisible hand of competition by the digitized hand of internet commerce can give rise to anticompetitive behavior that the competition authorities are ill equipped to deal with.” —Burton G. Malkiel, Wall Street Journal “A convincing case for the need to rethink competition law to cope with algorithmic capitalism’s potential for malfeasance.” —John Naughton, The Observer
The instant New York Times bestseller. From Microsoft's president and one of the tech industry's broadest thinkers, a frank and thoughtful reckoning with how to balance enormous promise and existential risk as the digitization of everything accelerates. “A colorful and insightful insiders’ view of how technology is both empowering and threatening us. From privacy to cyberattacks, this timely book is a useful guide for how to navigate the digital future.” —Walter Isaacson Microsoft President Brad Smith operates by a simple core belief: When your technology changes the world, you bear a responsibility to help address the world you have helped create. This might seem uncontroversial, but it flies in the face of a tech sector long obsessed with rapid growth and sometimes on disruption as an end in itself. While sweeping digital transformation holds great promise, we have reached an inflection point. The world has turned information technology into both a powerful tool and a formidable weapon, and new approaches are needed to manage an era defined by even more powerful inventions like artificial intelligence. Companies that create technology must accept greater responsibility for the future, and governments will need to regulate technology by moving faster and catching up with the pace of innovation. In Tools and Weapons, Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne bring us a captivating narrative from the cockpit of one of the world's largest and most powerful tech companies as it finds itself in the middle of some of the thorniest emerging issues of our time. These are challenges that come with no preexisting playbook, including privacy, cybercrime and cyberwar, social media, the moral conundrums of artificial intelligence, big tech's relationship to inequality, and the challenges for democracy, far and near. While in no way a self-glorifying "Microsoft memoir," the book pulls back the curtain remarkably wide onto some of the company's most crucial recent decision points as it strives to protect the hopes technology offers against the very real threats it also presents. There are huge ramifications for communities and countries, and Brad Smith provides a thoughtful and urgent contribution to that effort.
The second edition of Government Contracting: Promises and Perils picks up where the first edition’s mission left off: exposing fraud, incompetence, waste, and abuse (FIWA) and analyzing corruption, mismanagement, and ineptitude that defile government contracting. The first edition thoroughly outlined procurement throughout the contracting cycle including initial planning, contractor selection, contract administration, contract closeout, and auditing. This significantly revised new edition provides additional much-needed guidance on contracting documents, management tools, and processes for addressing negative influences on government contracting, including an improved approach to evaluating proposals. Specific guidance for avoiding FIWA is provided for government officials and employees, government agencies, and government contractors, and practical solutions to problems faced by individuals and organizations involved in government contracting are intended for both practitioner and pedagogical applications. The "Government Procurement Corruption Wall of Shame" that was introduced in the first edition to illustrate contracting perils such as conflicts of interest, duplicity, favoritism, incompetence, kickbacks, and protests is continued in the second edition, and cases illustrating the existence of FIWA in government contracting have been thoroughly updated. Contracting documents and contract management tools are provided on a website designed to accompany the book. Written at the graduate level and specifically intended for state, local, federal, and international government procurement activities, this textbook is required reading for public procurement, contract management, business, and public administrations courses.
