As Wall Street rose to dominate the U.S. economy, income and pay inequalities in America came to dance to the tune of the credit cycle. As the reach of financial markets extended across the globe, ...interest rates, debt, and debt crises became the dominant forces driving the rise of economic inequality almost everywhere. Thus the “super-bubble” that investor George Soros identified in rich countries for the two decades after 1980 was a super-crisis for the 99 percent—not just in the U.S. but the entire world. This book demonstrates that finance is the driveshaft that links inequality to economic instability. The book challenges those, mainly on the right, who see mysterious forces of technology behind rising inequality. And it also challenges those, mainly on the left, who have placed the blame narrowly on trade and outsourcing. Inequality and Instability presents straightforward evidence that the rise of inequality mirrors the stock market in the U.S. and the rise of finance and of free-market policies elsewhere. Starting from the premise that fresh argument requires fresh evidence, this book brings new data to bear, presenting information built up over fifteen years in easily understood charts and tables. By measuring inequality at the right geographic scale, the book shows that more equal societies systematically enjoy lower unemployment. It shows how this plays out inside Europe, between Europe and the United States, and in modern China. It explains that the dramatic rise of inequality in the U.S. in the 1990s reflected a finance-driven technology boom that concentrated incomes in just five counties, very remote from the experience of most Americans—which helps explain why the political reaction was so slow to come. That the reaction is occurring now, however, is beyond doubt. In the aftermath of the Great Financial Crisis, inequality has become, in America and the world over, the central issue.
What is the state? The State of Freedom offers an important new take on this classic question by exploring what exactly the state did and how it worked. Patrick Joyce asks us to re-examine the ...ordinary things of the British state from dusty government files and post offices to well-thumbed primers in ancient Greek and Latin and the classrooms and dormitories of public schools and Oxbridge colleges. This is also a history of the 'who' and the 'where' of the state, of the people who ran the state, the government offices they sat in and the college halls they dined in. Patrick Joyce argues that only by considering these things, people and places can we really understand the nature of the modern state. This is both a pioneering new approach to political history in which social and material factors are centre stage, and a highly original history of modern Britain.
Ecological States critically examines ecological policies in the People's Republic of China to show how campaigns of scientifically based environmental protection transform nature and society. While ...many point to China's ecological civilization programs as a new paradigm for global environmental governance, Jesse Rodenbiker argues that ecological redlining extends the reach of the authoritarian state. Although Chinese urban sustainability initiatives have driven millions of citizens from their land and housing, Rodenbiker shows that these migrants are not passive subjects of state policy. Instead, they creatively navigate resettlement processes in pursuit of their own benefit. However, their resistance is limited by varied forms of state-backed infrastructural violence. Through extensive fieldwork with scientists, urban planners, and everyday citizens in southwestern China, Ecological States exposes the ways in which the scientific logics and practices fundamental to China's green urbanization have solidified state power and contributed to dispossession and social inequality This book is freely available in an open access edition through the generous support of the Henry Luce Foundation.
Energy related infrastructures are crucial to political
organization. They shape the contours of states and international
bodies, as well as corporations and communities, framing their
material ...existence and their fears and idealisations of the future.
Ethnographies of Power brings together ethnographic
studies of contemporary entanglements of energy and political
power. Revisiting classic anthropological notions of power, it asks
how changing energy related infrastructures are implicated in the
consolidation, extension or subversion of contemporary political
regimes and discovers what they tell us about politics today.
This open access book examines the relationship between trade and women’s economic empowerment by focusing on small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in six countries: Cambodia, Ghana, Madagascar, ...Nigeria, Senegal and Vietnam. The authors make use of both survey data and qualitative analysis to understand why and how trade can create more jobs for women, and how the jobs created are contributing to women’s empowerment. They propose strategies and policies for ensuring that women can benefit from trade. After providing the context for the research and reviewing the literature on trade and gender in the introductory chapter, the second chapter analyzes survey data collected for this project. This is followed by a qualitative analysis of the six country cases in the next two chapters: Cambodia and Vietnam (Chapter 3), followed by Ghana, Madagascar, Nigeria and Senegal (Chapter 4). The final chapter concludes with a summary of our findings and policy recommendations.
Helen Thompson'sIngenuous Subjectionoffers a new feminist history of the eighteenth-century domestic novel. By reading social contract theory alongside representations of the domestic sphere by ...authors such as Mary Astell, Mary Davys, Samuel Richardson, Eliza Haywood, and Frances Sheridan, Thompson shows how these writers confront women's paradoxical status as both contractual agents and naturally subject wives. Over the long eighteenth century, Thompson argues, domestic novelists appropriated the standard of political modernity advanced by John Locke and others as a citizen's free or "ingenuous" assent to the law. The domestic novel figures feminine political difference not as women's deviation from an abstract universal but rather as their failure freely or ingenuously to submit to the power retained by Enlightenment husbands.Ingenuous Subjectionclaims domestic novelists as vital participants in Enlightenment political discourse. By tracing the political, philosophical, and generic significance of feminine compliance, this book revises our literary historical account of the rise of the novel. Rather than imagining a realm of harmonious sentiment, domestic fiction represents the persistent arbitrariness of eighteenth-century men's conjugal power.Ingenuous Subjectionrevises feminist theory and historiography, locating the genealogy of feminism in a contractual model of ingenuous assent which challenges the legitimacy of masculine conjugal government. The first study to treat feminine compliance as something other than a passive, politically neutral exercise,Ingenuous Subjectionrecovers in this practice the domestic novel's critical engagement with the limits of Enlightenment modernity.
The Ambivalence of Power in the Twenty-First Century
Economy contributes to the understanding of the ambivalent
nature of power, oscillating between conflict and cooperation,
public and private, ...global and local, formal and informal, and does
so from an empirical perspective. It offers a collection of
country-based cases, as well as critically assesses the existing
conceptions of power from a cross-disciplinary perspective. The
diverse analyses of power at the macro, meso or micro levels allow
the volume to highlight the complexity of political economy in the
twenty-first century. Each chapter addresses key elements of that
political economy (from the ambivalence of the cases of former
communist countries that do not conform with the grand narratives
about democracy and markets, to the dual utility of new
technologies such as face-recognition), thus providing mounting
evidence for the centrality of an understanding of ambivalence in
the analysis of power, especially in the modern state power-driven
capitalism. Anchored in economic sociology and political economy,
this volume aims to make 'visible' the dimensions of power embedded
in economic practices. The chapters are predominantly based on
post-communist practices, but this divergent experience is relevant
to comparative studies of how power and economy are interrelated.
Inwiefern ist ein positives Körpererleben auch für queere Menschen an normative Konzepte von Geschlechtlichkeit, Körperlichkeit und Subjektivität gebunden? Corinna Schmechels emotionstheoretischer ...Ansatz zeigt fundiert die immanenten Ambivalenzen eines normkritischen »Empowerment durch Sport« im Kontext der Fitnesskultur als spätmoderner Subjekt- und Körperkultur auf.
