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Trade impacts on the lives of all global citizens, influencing the range of commodities available for consumption and where those commodities are produced. Driven increasingly by market exchange, trade shapes the nature of work and how the costs and benefits of that work are distributed around the world. Economic growth and development are closely associated with the flows of goods and services between countries. International Trade: The Basics offers an accessible and engaging introduction to contemporary debates on international trade, inviting readers to explore the connections between national political economies within a globally integrated world. Topics covered include: Why nations tra...
Introduces the techniques and concepts of statistics in human and physical geography. This book explains not only how to apply quantitative tools but also why and how they work. It helps students gain important skills for utilizing conventional and spatial statistics in their own research, as well as for critically evaluating the work of others.
In a study crucial to our understanding of American social inequality, Edna Bonacich and Richard Appelbaum investigate the return of sweatshops to the apparel industry, especially in Los Angeles. The "new" sweatshops, they say, need to be understood in terms of the decline in the American welfare state and its strong unions and the rise in global and flexible production. Apparel manufacturers now have the incentive to move production to wherever low-wage labor can be found, while maintaining arm's-length contractual relations that protect them from responsibility. The flight of the industry has led to a huge rise in apparel imports to the United States and to a decline in employment. Los Ang...
What happened to the so-called "golden age" of the postwar boom? Unprecedented rates of economic growth, profitability, and wage increases during the 1950s and 60s have given way to a global capitalist economy in disarray. Reassessing common interpretations of postwar economic history and geography, this book focuses on the evolution of the global economy from the 1950s to the present. Based on extensive research, the book assesses histories of growth, profitability, and technological change in core industrial economies (Japan and the USA), raw material dependent economies (Australia and Canada), and several newly industrializing countries (Brazil, South Korea, and Taiwan). The authors build on standard models of economic change to incorporate new developments in regional dynamics: they use nonlinear, nonequilibrium, and evolutionary arguments to frame discussions of profit rates, technological change, and interregional capital flows.
Digital technologies have changed how we shop, work, play, and communicate, reshaping our societies and economies. To understand digital capitalism, we need to grasp how advances in geospatial technologies underpin the construction, operation, and refinement of markets for digital goods and services. In The Map in the Machine, Luis F. Alvarez Leon examines these advances, from MapQuest and Google Maps to the rise of IP geolocation, ridesharing, and a new Earth Observation satellite ecosystem. He develops a geographical theory of digital capitalism centered on the processes of location, valuation, and marketization to provide a new vantage point from which to better understand, and intervene in, the dominant techno-economic paradigm of our time. By centering the spatiality of digital capitalism, Alvarez Leon shows how this system is the product not of seemingly intangible information clouds but rather of a vast array of technologies, practices, and infrastructures deeply rooted in place, mediated by geography, and open to contestation and change.
Awarded NASOH's 2012 "John Lyman Book Award for Best U.S. Naval History," Allied Master Strategists describes the unique and vital contribution to Allied victory in World War II made by the Combined Chiefs of Staff. Based on a combination of primary and secondary source material, this book proves that the Combined Chiefs of Staff organization was the glue holding the British-American wartime alliance together. As such, the Combined Chiefs of Staff was probably the most important international organization of the Twentieth Century. Readers will get a good view of the personalities of the principals, such as Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke and Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King. The book provides insi...
In this significant Marxist critique of contemporary American imperialism, the cultural theorist Randy Martin argues that a finance-based logic of risk control has come to dominate Americans’ everyday lives as well as U.S. foreign and domestic policy. Risk management—the ability to adjust for risk and to leverage it for financial gain—is the key to personal finance as well as the defining element of the massive global market in financial derivatives. The United States wages its amorphous war on terror by leveraging particular interventions (such as Iraq) to much larger ends (winning the war on terror) and by deploying small numbers of troops and targeted weaponry to achieve broad effec...
The economics profession in twentieth-century America began as a humble quest to understand the "wealth of nations." It grew into a profession of immense public prestige--and now suffers a strangely withered public purpose. Michael Bernstein portrays a profession that has ended up repudiating the state that nurtured it, ignoring distributive justice, and disproportionately privileging private desires in the study of economic life. Intellectual introversion has robbed it, he contends, of the very public influence it coveted and cultivated for so long. With wit and irony he examines how a community of experts now identified with uncritical celebration of ''free market'' virtues was itself shap...
Men and Masculinity: The Basics is an accessible introduction to the academic study of masculinity which outlines the key ideas and most pressing issues concerning the field today. Providing readers with a framework for understanding these issues, it explores the ways that masculinity has been understood in the Social Sciences and Humanities to date. Addressing theories which view masculinity as being in a permanent state of flux and crisis, it explores such problem areas as: the male body men and work men and fatherhood male sexuality male violence. With a glossary of key terms, case studies reflecting the most important studies in the field of masculinity research and suggestions for further study, Men and Masculinity: The Basics is an essential read for anyone approaching the study of masculinity for the first time.
This pioneering volume proposes a compelling new theory of how regions have sustained their economic viability in the era of multinational corporations. Unlike traditional approaches, which analyze economic systems in terms of their mechanics (inputs, outputs, prices, technology, etc.), this work views them as systems for coordinating human actions and relationships. Reconceptualizing the role of learning, technology, and local institutions in development, Storper illuminates the key role of regional economies as building blocks of the increasingly connected world. A thought-provoking and timely work, The Regional World carries resounding implications for educators, students, and policymakers in economic geography, economic sociology, and international business. It is an essential primary or supplementary text for graduate-level courses on economic, regional, or industrial development and policy and international business.