A Commodified World

A Commodified World
Author: Colin C. Williams
Publisher: Zed Books
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2005-03-04
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781842773550

This volume provides a critique of the assumption of increasing commodification in the modern economy.

Living Books

Living Books
Author: Janneke Adema
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2021-08-31
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0262366452

Reimagining the scholarly book as living and collaborative--not as commodified and essentialized, but in all its dynamic materiality. In this book, Janneke Adema proposes that we reimagine the scholarly book as a living and collaborative project--not as linear, bound, and fixed, but as fluid, remixed, and liquid, a space for experimentation. She presents a series of cutting-edge experiments in arts and humanities book publishing, showcasing the radical new forms that book-based scholarly work might take in the digital age. Adema's proposed alternative futures for the scholarly book go beyond such print-based assumptions as fixity, stability, the single author, originality, and copyright, reaching instead for a dynamic and emergent materiality. Adema suggests ways to unbind the book, describing experiments in scholarly book publishing with new forms of anonymous collaborative authorship, radical open access publishing, and processual, living, and remixed publications, among other practices. She doesn't cast digital as the solution and print as the problem; the problem in scholarly publishing, she argues, is not print itself, but the way print has been commodified and essentialized. Adema explores alternative, more ethical models of authorship; constructs an alternative genealogy of openness; and examines opportunities for intervention in current cultures of knowledge production. Finally, asking why it is that we cut and bind our research together at all, she examines two book publishing projects that experiment with remix and reuse and try to rethink and reperform the book-apparatus by taking responsibility for the cuts they make.

The Commodification of Academic Research

The Commodification of Academic Research
Author: Hans Radder
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2010-09-05
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0822977583

Selling science has become a common practice in contemporary universities. This commodification of academia pervades many aspects of higher education, including research, teaching, and administration. As such, it raises significant philosophical, political, and moral challenges. This volume offers the first book-length analysis of this disturbing trend from a philosophical perspective and presents views by scholars of philosophy of science, social and political philosophy, and research ethics. The epistemic and moral responsibilities of universities, whether for-profit or nonprofit, are examined from several philosophical standpoints. The contributors discuss the pertinent epistemological and methodological questions, the sociopolitical issues of the organization of science, the tensions between commodified practices and the ideal of "science for the public good," and the role of governmental regulation and personal ethical behavior. In order to counter coercive and corruptive influences of academic commodification, the contributors consider alternatives to commodified research and offer practical recommendations for establishing appropriate research standards, methodologies and institutional arrangements, and a corresponding normative ethos.

Illuminating Social Life

Illuminating Social Life
Author: Peter Kivisto
Publisher: Pine Forge Press
Total Pages: 457
Release: 2011
Genre: History
ISBN: 1412978157

Illuminating Social Life has enjoyed increasing popularity with each edition. It is the only book designed for undergraduate teaching that shows today's students how classical and contemporary social theories can be used to shed new light on such topics as the internet, the world of work, fast food restaurants, shopping malls, alcohol use, body building, sales and service, and new religious movements.A perfect complement for the sociological theory course, it offers 13 original essays by leading scholars in the field who are also experienced undergraduate theory teachers. Substantial introductions by the editor link the applied essays to a complete review of the classical and modern social theories used in the book.

The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx

The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx
Author: Matt Vidal
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 752
Release: 2019-03-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0190695560

Karl Marx is one of the most influential writers in history. Despite repeated obituaries proclaiming the death of Marxism, in the 21st century Marx's ideas and theories continue to guide vibrant research traditions in sociology, economics, political science, philosophy, history, anthropology, management, economic geography, ecology, literary criticism, and media studies. Due to the exceptionally wide influence and reach of Marxist theory, including over 150 years of historical debates and traditions within Marxism, finding a point of entry can be daunting. The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx provides an entry point for those new to Marxism. At the same time, its chapters, written by leading Marxist scholars, advance Marxist theory and research. Its coverage is more comprehensive than previous volumes on Marx in terms of both foundational concepts and state-of-the-art empirical research on contemporary social problems. It is also provides equal space to sociologists, economists, and political scientists, with substantial contributions from philosophers, historians, and geographers. The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx consists of six sections. The first section, Foundations, includes chapters that cover the foundational concepts and theories that constitute the core of Marx's theories of history, society, and political economy. This section demonstrates that the core elements of Marx's political economy of capitalism continue to be defended, elaborated, and applied to empirical social science and covers historical materialism, class, capital, labor, value, crisis, ideology, and alienation. Additional sections include Labor, Class, and Social Divisions; Capitalist States and Spaces; Accumulation, Crisis, and Class Struggle in the Core Countries; Accumulation, Crisis, and Class Struggle in the Peripheral and Semi-Peripheral Countries; and Alternatives to Capitalism.

Commodifying Everything

Commodifying Everything
Author: Susan Strasser
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2013-12-16
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1136706852

Commodification refers most explicitly to the activities of turning things into commodities and of commercializing that which is not commercial in essence. The mass marketing of pets, the rise of the coffin industry, the conversion of preacher into salesmen, and the globalization of Taleggio cheese are some of the exciting but surprising topics in this volume that show how friendship, death, spirituality, and artisanship all have a price after being commodified. This unique collection of essays is a fascinating take on creating consumer products and consumer identities when what's for sale goes well beyond the thing itself. It will be a course-in-a-box for instructors who want to teach their students about commodification.

Commodified Communion

Commodified Communion
Author: Antonio Eduardo Alonso
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Total Pages: 126
Release: 2021-06-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0823294137

WINNER, 2021 HTI BOOK PRIZE Resist! This exhortation animates a remarkable range of theological reflection on consumer culture in the United States. And for many theologians, the source and summit of Christian cultural resistance is the Eucharist. In Commodified Communion, Antonio Eduardo Alonso calls into question this dominant mode of theological reflection on contemporary consumerism. Reducing the work of theology to resistance and centering Christian hope in a Eucharist that might better support it, he argues, undermines our ability to talk about the activity of God within a consumer culture. By reframing the question in terms of God’s activity in and in spite of consumer culture, this book offers a lived theological account of consumer culture that recognizes not only its deceptions but also traces of truth in its broken promises and fallen hopes.

Commodifying Cannabis

Commodifying Cannabis
Author: Bradley J Borougerdi
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2020-09-28
Genre:
ISBN: 9781498586399

This study examines the cultural history of cannabis and its various uses in the Atlantic world over the past two centuries. The author analyzes the Orientalist mindset that colored Western reception of the plant in the nineteenth century and the cultural associations that inf...

Red Gold

Red Gold
Author: Jennifer E. Telesca
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2020-04-21
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1452962332

Illuminating the conditions for global governance to have precipitated the devastating decline of one of the ocean’s most majestic creatures The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) is the world’s foremost organization for managing and conserving tunas, seabirds, turtles, and sharks traversing international waters. Founded by treaty in 1969, ICCAT stewards what has become under its tenure one of the planet’s most prominent endangered fish: the Atlantic bluefin tuna. Called “red gold” by industry insiders for the exorbitant price her ruby-colored flesh commands in the sushi economy, the giant bluefin tuna has crashed in size and number under ICCAT’s custodianship. With regulations to conserve these sea creatures in place for half a century, why have so many big bluefin tuna vanished from the Atlantic? In Red Gold, Jennifer E. Telesca offers unparalleled access to ICCAT to show that the institution has faithfully executed the task assigned it by international law: to fish as hard as possible to grow national economies. ICCAT manages the bluefin not to protect them but to secure export markets for commodity empires—and, as a result, has become complicit in their extermination. The decades of regulating fish as commodities have had disastrous consequences. Amid the mass extinction of all kinds of life today, Red Gold reacquaints the reader with the splendors of the giant bluefin tuna through vignettes that defy technoscientific and market rationales. Ultimately, this book shows, changing the way people value marine life must come not only from reforming ICCAT but from transforming the dominant culture that consents to this slaughter.

Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from The Baffler

Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from The Baffler
Author: Thomas Frank
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2011-07-18
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0393342808

From the pages of The Baffler, the most vital and perceptive new magazine of the nineties, sharp, satirical broadsides against the Culture Trust. In the "old" Gilded Age, the barons of business accumulated vast wealth and influence from their railroads, steel mills, and banks. But today it is culture that stands at the heart of the American enterprise, mass entertainment the economic dynamo that brings the public into the consuming fold and consolidates the power of business over the American mind. For a decade The Baffler has been the invigorating voice of dissent against these developments, in the grand tradition of the muckrakers and The American Mercury. This collection gathers the best of its writing to explore such peculiar developments as the birth of the rebel hero as consumer in the pages of Wired and Details; the ever-accelerating race to market youth culture; the rise of new business gurus like Tom Peters and the fad for Hobbesian corporate "reengineering"; and the encroachment of advertising and commercial enterprise into every last nook and cranny of American life. With its liberating attitude and cant-free intelligence, this book is a powerful polemic against the designs of the culture business on us all.