Digital technologies deeply changed the way the audience thinks about TV shows, actually the most common kind of audiovisual practice. One of many symbols of this transformation is Netflix, a ...platform coming from Silicon Valley. Netflix is in a disruptive dynamic toward audiovisual, more specifically in France, where the practices of the platform are incompatible with the audiovisual regulations. This article shows the stakes of the implantation of Netflix in France, the way this American giant disturbed French audiovisual balance and the response of in place structures and finally the projects of industrials and politics to counter or cooperate with Netflix.
This study examined the sustainable growth of post-suburban cities based on the cognitive-cultural capital economy. The case of Tsukuba, located in the Tokyo suburb, is suitable for examining an ...important aspect of social contexts that has been overlooked by conventional cognitive capitalism. Since 2000, Tsukuba has experienced a continuous outflow of research institutes and their associated high-level human resources. As a result, factories and logistics facilities have been relocated to the former research institute sites, and the share of wholesale and retail trade, manufacturing, and transportation services has increased. The findings suggested that the restructuring of the Tokyo metropolitan area had opened up local employment opportunities in Tsukuba and strengthened the centrality of the urban system in the suburbs. The city's success in sustaining its growth as a cognitive-cultural capitalist hub resulted from its ability to leverage the local potential of the suburbs. The Tsukuba case highlights the importance of recognizing the potential of suburban areas as well as the need for a comprehensive approach that considers the diverse interests of different population. Tsukuba's experience offers lessons for other urban centers seeking to balance economic growth with social and environmental sustainability.
•We examined the sustainable growth of post-suburban cities based on the cognitive-cultural capital economy.•Tsukuba is a globally competitive science city with a high concentration of research institutions.•Urban restructuring in the Tokyo metropolitan area has made Tsukuba increasingly central to the local urban system.•Increasing both international competitiveness and local centripetal force is important for urban sustainability.
Using sociological literature as a foundation, this article examines such a phenomenon as employee competence in the current landscape. In part one of the article we sought to formulate the ...sociological concept of uncertainty and trace its evolution depending on the stage of social development. Uncertainty in the postindustrial period is defined as a plethora of processes and phenomena associated with increasingly autonomous living, susceptibility to an environment that’s constantly changing, as well as a multitude of potential alternative solutions and actions. These conditions foster massive opportunities for people to unlock their creative potential, the downside being increased anxiety and insecurity, social isolation and inequality. The second part of the article focuses on studying such a phenomenon as the competence of modern-day workers, given the current context of socio-economic uncertainty. Although competence has developed based on the industrial model of professional training, it is currently transitioning to the next stage of its evolution. With modern capitalism undergoing rejuvenation, competence is sort of individualizing, becoming defined by one’s cultural capital, personality traits and biography, turning out to be unique and possessing internal complexity and flexibility. This new sort of competence is welcome in places where the main criteria are high level of qualification and up to date knowledge, that contribute to developing the most cutting edge and creative sectors of the economy, new spaces and forms of work activity. When it comes to non-ideal workers, for them competence embodies a rational strategy of situational adaptation of their skills and abilities to the current labor market. Certain new educational and political initiatives are developing in that same general direction, with them aiming to reproduce “aptitude for employment” among the vast majority of the working population. But at the same time labor markets and organizations are starting to function as “machines that reproduce inequality”. Despite the fact that modern competence is being engulfed by an entire industry of intermediaries, achieving it is proving to be a difficult task for modern society.
City-regions reconsidered Scott, Allen J.
Environment and planning. A,
05/2019, Letnik:
51, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
I seek to provide an overview of the historical and geographical emergence of city-regions and to reflect on some of the debates that have arisen in regard to the theoretical status of these ...phenomena. I briefly describe the growth and spread of city-regions in the world since the mid-1950s and I consider how contemporary capitalism and globalization have fostered the development of this distinctive urban form. The internal organization of city-regions is then examined, with special reference to four generic outcomes: (1) aestheticized land-use intensification; (2) gentrification; (3) social polarization and informality; and (4) postsuburban landscapes. Issues of governance and policy are scrutinized and basic dilemmas of political coordination in city-regions are described. The argument ends with an evaluative review of certain critiques of the city-region idea in the current academic literature.
Unlike the original WestWorld film, realized by Michael Crichton during the seventies, the homonymous television series could be considered to be a symptom of the collective acceptance of both the ...technological singularity and the theories of transhumanism. However, by reformulating some important concepts which derive from a phenomenological approach, the series generates critical insights regarding the transhumanist hypothesis and, above all, on the role played by this hypothesis in the consolidation of a post-industrial society. This essay examines the ways in which this television series built a fertile terrain for the reformulation of some concepts that, in the tradition of Science Fiction, represent solid instruments used to criticize forms of the production of value, labor, exploitation, and exclusion. This essay also proposes a possible relationship between a transhumanist hypothesis and the production of value in a post-industrial society.
Collectively termed the "Sharing Economy", collaborative platforms are said to be challenging and redesigning traditional business models and ridding the tourism industry of monopolies and resource ...inefficiencies as they efficiently allocate assets and human resources. This paper explores the global "disruptive" brand Airbnb by utilizing the concept of cultural capitalism to ask questions as to how disruptive and innovative this platform is. We conclude that research about Airbnb and the sharing economy needs to overcome ahistorical, static, and narrow perspectives to integrate critical theories using diverse intellectual approaches to more fully explore platform's that seek enclosure and control so as to allow market capitalism to function more expediently.
This article explores the historic-geographic evolution of contemporary craft production, with sensitivity to materiality of labor process, product design, and accompanying place mythologies. Craft ...production-increasingly interpolated as a form of creative work-is shaped by concerns about retrieving archaic tools and ways of making things, celebrating provenance and the haptic skills of makers, and delivering (and marketing) manual labor process. In contrast to evolutionary economic geography's seeming immateriality and abstraction, attention is drawn to material aspects of place and path dependence that undergird geographies of new craft industries: how labor process evolves, in iteration with technical lock-ins that stem from production method, product design, and capacities of component materials, but also how legacies of mass manufacturing linger in putatively authentic places-shaping new geographic concentrations. An especially vivid case is explored: a cluster of cowboy bootmaking workshops in El Paso, Texas. Bootmaking has metamorphosed from artisanal to factory to a craft-based creative mode of production. Crucial were continuity in product design and evolution of labor process. So, too, was geography: an iconic borderland city location with historic legacies of labor intensive mass manufacturing; migrant workers with requisite embodied skills; antique tools; and significant stocks of leather, the core input material that must be seen, felt, and smelt by makers before fabrication. I argue for a grounded, critical evolutionary economic geography that requires stronger intersection with labor process, with the cultural logics infusing capitalism, and with greater recognition of material inheritances that are reconfigured in place over successive generations.
After situating Andreas Reckwitz’s
within the broader context of the tradition of social theory, we discuss in detail the obvious strengths of this book, notably its impressive range and originality. ...Subsequently, we elaborate on two limitations of Reckwitz’s argument. Firstly, we argue that Reckwitz’s use of categories such as ‘singularity’ and ‘universality’ is too all-embracing, lacking the clarity and focus needed to sustain a productive line of inquiry. Secondly, and related to the previous point, we contend that Reckwitz’s claims about the recent trend towards increasing singularity are so broad that they are difficult to refute empirically. Further, we discuss briefly contemporary political developments to demonstrate why the core societal issues at stake cannot be explained through all-inclusive categories such as singularity. Finally, we maintain that existence theory can provide an alternative fruitful perspective on some of the phenomena discussed in this book.
A través de esta obra el autor va respondiendo a diferentes cuestiones sobre la realidad, que va enlazando entre sí, dándoles respuesta y preocupándose por la actualidad socioeconómica a través de ...las reflexiones y cuestiones filosóficas. Realiza una crítica a la ideología capitalista actual y a los pilares que la sostienen.
This contribution focuses on Andreas Reckwitz’s considerations on phenomena of ‘exhausted self-realization’ and ‘disappointment’ in
, as well as in his follow-up volume,
. Under discussion is the ...range of analytical distinctions that tend to come into play in this area between what one might call a generally primordial concept of self-realization and more derivative articulations of the concept that exhibit various aspects of instrumentalization—variously termed ‘self-maximization’ or ‘self-optimization’. The paper argues that while Reckwitz’s work offers great resources for an understanding of how and why ‘self-realization’ so frequently appears to take on an instrumentalizing character in late-modern social behaviour, the extent to which his work attributes this tendency to a wholly immanent cultural-cognitive logic of lifestyle singularization is open to criticism. The reasons must also be sought from within the more directly economic contexts of diminished material security and solidarity typical of contemporary societies shaped by neoliberal economic governance orders at the level of policy.
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