'In Energy without Conscience' David McDermott Hughes investigates why climate change has yet to be seen as a moral issue. He examines the forces that render the use of fossil fuels ordinary and ...therefore exempt from ethical evaluation. Hughes centers his analysis on Trinidad and Tobago, which is the world's oldest petro-state, having drilled the first continuously producing oil well in 1866. Marrying historical research with interviews with Trinidadian petroleum scientists, policymakers, technicians, and managers, he draws parallels between Trinidad's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave labor energy economy and its contemporary oil industry. Hughes shows how both forms of energy rely upon a complicity that absolves producers and consumers from acknowledging the immoral nature of each. He passionately argues that like slavery, producing oil is a moral choice and that oil is at its most dangerous when it is accepted as an ordinary part of everyday life.
Social media is fundamentally changing the way travellers and tourists search, find, read and trust, as well as collaboratively produce information about tourism suppliers and tourism destinations. ...Presenting cutting-edge theory, research and case studies investigating Web 2.0 applications and tools that transform the role and behaviour of the new generation of travellers, this book also examines the ways in which tourism organisations reengineer and implement their business models and operations, such as new service development, marketing, networking and knowledge management. Written by an international group of researchers widely known for their expertise in the field of the Internet and tourism, chapters include applications and case studies in various travel, tourism and leisure sectors.
Power to the people Kander, Astrid; Malanima, Paolo; Warde, Paul
2014., 20140105, 2014, 2014-01-05, 20130101, 2013, Volume:
46
eBook, Book
Power to the Peopleexamines the varied but interconnected relationships between energy consumption and economic development in Europe over the last five centuries. It describes how the traditional ...energy economy of medieval and early modern Europe was marked by stable or falling per capita energy consumption, and how the First Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century--fueled by coal and steam engines--redrew the economic, social, and geopolitical map of Europe and the world. The Second Industrial Revolution continued this energy expansion and social transformation through the use of oil and electricity, but after 1970 Europe entered a new stage in which energy consumption has stabilized. This book challenges the view that the outsourcing of heavy industry overseas is the cause, arguing that a Third Industrial Revolution driven by new information and communication technologies has played a major stabilizing role.
Power to the Peopleoffers new perspectives on the challenges posed today by climate change and peak oil, demonstrating that although the path of modern economic development has vastly increased our energy use, it has not been a story of ever-rising and continuous consumption. The book sheds light on the often lengthy and complex changes needed for new energy systems to emerge, the role of energy resources in economic growth, and the importance of energy efficiency in promoting growth and reducing future energy demand.
Through a series of case studies in diverse regions of the world, this book explores how transnational Norwegian energy and extractive industries handle corporate social responsibility (CSR) when ...operating abroad in places such as China, Brazil, and Turkey. With significant state ownership and embeddedness in the Nordic societal model, Norwegian capitalism is often represented as “benign" or ethical. By tracing CSR policy and practice—from headquarters to operations—this volume critically explores the workings of Norwegian corporate capitalism and its engagement with key issues of responsibility, accountability, and sustainability.
What are corporations, and to whom are they responsible? Anthropologist Marina Welker draws on two years of research at Newmont Mining Corporation’s Denver headquarters and its Batu Hijau copper and ...gold mine in Sumbawa, Indonesia, to address these questions. Against the backdrop of an emerging Corporate Social Responsibility movement and changing state dynamics in Indonesia, she shows how people enact the mining corporation in multiple ways: as an ore producer, employer, patron, promoter of sustainable development, religious sponsor, auditable organization, foreign imperialist, and environmental threat. Rather than assuming that corporations are monolithic, profit-maximizing subjects, Welker turns to anthropological theories of personhood to develop an analytic model of the corporation as an unstable collective subject with multiple authors, boundaries, and interests. Enacting the Corporation demonstrates that corporations are constituted through continuous struggles over relations with—and responsibilities to—local communities, workers, activists, governments, contractors, and shareholders.
In the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, employees of Internet startups took risks--left well-paying jobs for the chance of striking it rich through stock options (only to end up unemployed a year ...later), relocated to areas that were epicenters of a booming industry (that shortly went bust), chose the opportunity to be creative over the stability of a set schedule. In Venture Labor, Gina Neff investigates choices like these made by high-tech workers in New York City's "Silicon Alley" in the 1990s. Why did these workers exhibit entrepreneurial behavior in their jobs--investing time, energy, and other personal resources that Neff terms "venture labor"--when they themselves were employees and not entrepreneurs? Neff argues that this behavior was part of a broader shift in society in which economic risk shifted away from collective responsibility toward individual responsibility. In the new economy, risk and reward took the place of job loyalty, and the dot-com boom helped glorify risks. Company flexibility was gained at the expense of employee security. Through extensive interviews, Neff finds not the triumph of the entrepreneurial spirit but a mixture of motivations and strategies, informed variously by bravado, naïveté, and cold calculation. She connects these individual choices with larger social and economic structures, making it clear that understanding venture labor is of paramount importance for encouraging innovation and, even more important, for creating sustainable work environments that support workers.
This book addresses the rapidly changing citizen roles in innovation, technology adoption, intermediation, market creation, and legitimacy building for low-carbon solutions. It links research in ...innovation studies, sustainability transitions, and science and technology studies, and builds a new approach for the study of user contributions to innovation and sociotechnical change. Citizen Activities in Energy Transition gives detailed and empirically grounded overall appraisal of citizens’ active technological engagement in the current energy transition, in an era when Internet connectivity has given rise to important new forms of citizen communities and interactions. It elaborates a new way to study users in sociotechnical change through long-term ethnographic and historical research and reports its deployment in a major, decade-long line of investigation on user activities in small-scale renewables, addressing user contributions from the early years to the late proliferation stages of small-scale renewable energy technologies (S-RETs). It offers a much-needed empirical and theoretical understanding of the dynamics of the activities in which users are engaged over the course of sociotechnical change, including innovation, adoption, adjustment, intermediation, community building, digital communities, market creation, and legitimacy creation. This work is a must-read for those seeking to understand the role of users in innovation, energy systems change and the significance of new digital communities in present and future sociotechnical change. Academics, policymakers, and managers are given a new resource to understand the "demand side" of sociotechnical change beyond the patterns of investment, adoption, and social acceptance that have traditionally occupied their attention.
At the close of the twentieth century, Denmark, Finland, and Ireland emerged as unlikely centers for high-tech competition. InWhen Small States Make Big Leaps, Darius Ornston reveals how these ...historically low-tech countries managed to assume leading positions in new industries such as biotechnology, software, and telecommunications equipment. In each case, countries used institutions that are commonly perceived to delay restructuring to accelerate the redistribution of resources to emerging enterprises and industries.
Ornston draws on interviews with hundreds of politicians, policymakers, and industry representatives to identify two different patterns of institutional innovation and economic restructuring. Irish policymakers worked with industry and labor representatives to contain costs and expand market competition. Denmark and Finland adopted a different strategy, converting an established tradition of private-public and industry-labor cooperation to invest in high-quality inputs such as human capital and research. Both strategies facilitated movement into new high-tech industries but with distinctive political and economic consequences. In explaining how previously slow-moving states entered dynamic new industries, Ornston identifies a broader range of strategies by which countries can respond to disruptive challenges such as economic internationalization, rapid technological innovation, and the shift to services.
We all witness, in advertising and on supermarket shelves, the fierce competition for our food dollars. In this engrossing exposé, Marion Nestle goes behind the scenes to reveal how the competition ...really works and how it affects our health. The abundance of food in the United States--enough calories to meet the needs of every man, woman, and child twice over--has a downside. Our over-efficient food industry must do everything possible to persuade people to eat more--more food, more often, and in larger portions--no matter what it does to waistlines or well-being. Like manufacturing cigarettes or building weapons, making food is big business. Food companies in 2000 generated nearly
After World War II, several late-developing countries registered astonishingly high growth rates under strong state direction, making use of smart investment strategies, turnkey factories, and ...reverse-engineering, and taking advantage of the postwar global economic boom. Among these economic miracles were postwar Japan and, in the 1960s and 1970s, the so-called Asian Tigers-Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan-whose experiences epitomized the analytic category of the "developmental state."
InBetting on Biotech, Joseph Wong examines the emerging biotechnology sector in each of these three industrial dynamos. They have invested billions of dollars in biotech industries since the 1990s, but commercial blockbusters and commensurate profits have not followed. Industrial upgrading at the cutting edge of technological innovation is vastly different from the dynamics of earlier practices in established industries.
The profound uncertainties of life-science-based industries such as biotech have forced these nations to confront a new logic of industry development, one in which past strategies of picking and making winners have given way to a new strategy of throwing resources at what remain very long shots. Betting on Biotech illuminates a new political economy of industrial technology innovation in places where one would reasonably expect tremendous potential-yet where billion-dollar bets in biotech continue to teeter on the brink of spectacular failure.
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