This wide-ranging, original account of the politics and economics of the giant military supply project in the North reconstructs an important but little-known part of Civil War history. Drawing on ...new and extensive research in army and business archives, Mark R. Wilson offers a fresh view of the wartime North and the ways in which its economy worked when the Lincoln administration, with unprecedented military effort, moved to suppress the rebellion.
This task of equipping and sustaining Union forces fell to career army procurement officers. Largely free from political partisanship or any formal free-market ideology, they created a mixed military economy with a complex contracting system that they pieced together to meet the experience of civil war. Wilson argues that the North owed its victory to these professional military men and their finely tuned relationships with contractors, public officials, and war workers.
Wilson also examines the obstacles military bureaucrats faced, many of which illuminated basic problems of modern political economy: the balance between efficiency and equity, the promotion of competition, and the protection of workers' welfare. The struggle over these problems determined the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars; it also redirected American political and economic development by forcing citizens to grapple with difficult questions about the proper relationships among government, business, and labor.
Students of the American Civil War will welcome this fresh study of military-industrial production and procurement on the home front—long an obscure topic.
Social movement studies have addressed the issue of nostalgia within two perspectives, focusing, respectively, on emotions and on memory. Our contribution looks at nostalgia in social movements by ...building upon the combination of these two streams in social movement studies. Going beyond a stereotypical vision of reactionary movements as backward looking and progressive ones as forward looking, we will suggest that while both types of movements look at some aspects of the past with nostalgia, they do it in a very different combination of emotions and memory. To compare how different movements perform their emotional and memory work, we focused on the recent uprising in Lebanon as a critical case in which mobilizations and counter‐mobilizations have been carried out by different actors at the same time. In both cases, nostalgia was strategically developed for different moments of Lebanon's history through the movements' choices of the very spaces for the performance of contentious acts, but also the symbolic meaning attributed to them and the emotional work performed around the protest events. By developing a “tick description” of some main contentious moments where nostalgia emerged in the Lebanon uprisings, we aim to understand the ways in which nostalgia intervenes in the social construction of memories and counter‐memories, in an emotionally dense environment.
Riders on the Storm Tassinari, Arianna; Maccarrone, Vincenzo
Work, employment and society,
02/2020, Letnik:
34, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
In light of the individualisation, dispersal and pervasive monitoring that characterise work in the ‘gig economy’, the development of solidarity among gig workers could be expected to be unlikely. ...However, numerous recent episodes of gig workers’ mobilisation require reconsideration of these assumptions. This article contributes to the debate about potentials and obstacles for solidarity in the changing world of work by showing the processes through which workplace solidarity among gig workers developed in two cases of mobilisation of food delivery platform couriers in the UK and Italy. Through the framework of labour process theory, the article identifies the sources of antagonism in the app-mediated model of work organisation and the factors that facilitated and hindered the consolidation of active solidarity and the emergence of collective action among gig workers. The article emphasises the centrality of workers’ agential practices in overcoming constraints to solidarity and collective action, and the diversity of forms through which solidarity can be expressed in hostile work contexts.
We develop a conceptual understanding of when and how organizations respond to normative pressures. More precisely, we examine two main factors underlying the willingness and ability of organizations ...to respond to an issue: issue salience and the cost-benefit analysis of resource mobilization. We suggest that decision makers' interpretation of issue salience in conjunction with their perception of the costs and benefits of taking action to address the issue generates five potential responses: symbolic compliance and symbolic conformity, substantive compliance and substantive conformity, and inaction. We extend the baseline model by examining a number of boundary conditions. By focusing on the willingness and ability of organizations to respond to normative pressures, and by adopting the issue as the unit of analysis, our model helps explain intraorganizational as well as interorganizational response heterogeneity to institutional complexity. We contribute to the institutional research tradition and offer useful implications for managerial practice, from strategic management to policy making.
Recent breakthroughs in using viral transduction of a few genes for the reprogramming of both mouse and human somatic cells into induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells have opened up tremendous ...opportunities for the stem cell field (Maherali et al., 2007, Meissner et al., 2007, Nakagawa et al., 2008, Okita et al., 2007, Takahashi et al., 2007, Takahashi and Yamanaka, 2006, Wernig et al., 2007, Wernig et al., 2008 and Yu et al., 2007). For the iPS cell approach to be clinically relevant, several challenges remain to be addressed, including the elimination of the risks and drawbacks associated with the current iPS cell method, such as the use of genetic manipulation and the low efficiency and slow kinetics of induction. Recent studies have shown that c-Myc, one of the four genes originally thought to be required for iPS cell generation, is dispensable, but in its absence the reprogramming efficiency is reduced (Nakagawa et al., 2008 and Wernig et al., 2008). Here, we have explored two approaches toward identifying conditions that can replace viral transduction of oncogenic transcription factors (TFs) and enhance reprogramming efficiency. In one, we have found that neural progenitor cells can be reprogrammed with fewer genetic manipulations than previously reported somatic cells, and in the other we have found that small molecules may be able to replace viral integration of certain transcription factors and promote the reprogramming process.
Sustained lipolysis and insulin resistance increase the risk of metabolic dysfunction in dairy cows during the transition period. Proinflammatory cytokines are key regulators of adipose tissue ...metabolism in nonruminants, but biological functions of these molecules in ruminants are not well known. Thus, the objective of this study was to investigate whether tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) could affect insulin sensitivity and lipolysis in bovine adipocytes as well as the underlying mechanisms. Bovine adipocytes (obtained from the omental and mesenteric adipose depots) isolated from 5 Holstein female calves (1 d old) with similar body weight (median: 36.9 kg, range: 35.5–41.2 kg) were differentiated and used for (1) treatment with different concentrations of TNF-α (0, 0.1, 1, or 10 ng/mL) for 12 h; (2) pretreatment with 10 μM lipolytic agonist isoproterenol (ISO) for 3 h, followed by treatment with or without 10 ng/mL TNF-α for 12 h; and (3) pretreatment with the c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK) inhibitor SP600125 (20 μM for 2 h) and nuclear factor kappa B (NF-κB) inhibitor BAY 11–7082 (10 μM for 1 h) followed by treatment with or without 10 ng/mL TNF-α for 12 h. The TNF-α increased glycerol content in supernatant, decreased triglyceride content and insulin-stimulated phosphorylation of protein kinase B suggesting activation of lipolysis and impairment of insulin sensitivity. The TNF-α reduced cell viability, upregulated mRNA abundance of Caspase 3 (CASP3), an apoptosis marker, and increased activity of Caspase 3. In addition, increased phosphorylation of NF-κB and JNK, upregulation of mRNA abundance of interleukin-6 (IL-6), TNFA, and suppressor of cytokine signaling 3 (SOCS3) suggested that TNF-α activated NF-κB and JNK signaling pathways. Furthermore, ISO plus TNF-α-activated NF-κB and JNK signaling pathway to a greater extent than TNF-α alone. Combining TNF-α and ISO aggravated TNF-α-induced apoptosis, insulin insensitivity and lipolysis. In the absence of TNF-α, inhibition of NF-κB and JNK did not alter glycerol content in supernatant, triglyceride content or insulin-stimulated phosphorylation of protein kinase B. In the presence of TNF-α, inhibition of NF-κB and JNK alleviated TNF-α-induced apoptosis, insulin insensitivity and lipolysis. Overall, TNF-α impairs insulin sensitivity and induces lipolysis and apoptosis in bovine adipocytes, which may be partly mediated by activation of NF-κB and JNK. Thus, the data suggested that NF-κB and JNK are potential therapeutic targets for alleviating lipolysis dysregulation and insulin resistance in adipocytes.
AIM: To investigate the efficacy of exercise interventions on hepatic fat mobilization in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease(NAFLD) patients.METHODS: Ovid-Medline, Pub Med, EMBASE and Cochrane ...database were searched for randomized trials and prospective cohort studies in adults aged ≥ 18 which investigated the effects of at least 8 wk of exercise only or combination with diet on NAFLD from 2010 to 2016. The search terms used to identify articles, in which exercise was clearly described by type, duration, intensity and frequency were: "NASH", "NAFLD", "nonalcoholic steatohepatitis", "non-alcoholic fatty liver disease", "fat", "steatosis", "diet", "exercise", "MR spectroscopy" and "liver biopsy". NAFLD diagnosis, as well as the outcome measures, was confirmed by either hydrogen-magnetic resonance spectroscopy(H-MRS) or biopsy. Trials that included dietary interventions along with exercise were accepted if they met all criteria. RESULTS: Eight studies met selection criteria(6 with exercise only, 2 with diet and exercise with a total of 433 adult participants). Training interventions ranged between 8 and 48 wk in duration with a prescribed exercise frequency of 3 to 7 d per week, at intensities between 45% and 75% of VO2 peak. The most commonly used imaging modality was H-MRS and one study utilized biopsy. The effect of intervention on fat mobilization was 30.2% in the exercise only group and 49.8% in diet and exercise group. There was no difference between aerobic and resistance exercise intervention, although only one study compared thetwo interventions. The beneficial effects of exercise on intrahepatic triglyceride(IHTG) were seen even in the absence of significant weight loss. Although combining an exercise program with dietary interventions augmented the reduction in IHTG, as well as improved measures of glucose control and/or insulin sensitivity, exercise only significantly decreased hepatic lipid contents.CONCLUSION: Prescribed exercise in subjects with NAFLD reduces IHTG independent of dietary intervention. Diet and exercise was more effective than exercise alone in reducing IHTG.
Women's mobilizations in Mexico have caused controversy due to violent protest strategies. Also, the government discredited them as being manipulated by the conservative opposition. This study ...analyzes press coverage of women's mobilizations from 2019 to 2021 in three Mexican newspapers with different ideological orientations, applying frame analysis. The findings point to the predominant frames in the three newspapers as legitimizing the mobilization. However, although the ideological orientation of a newspaper is relevant, it does not automatically define a preference for specific frames, suggesting that the novelty of a phenomenon translates into a more significant interaction between the creators and receivers of the frames.
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