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When Laura Anne Robinson offered £10,000 for Addie Jeffries’ youngest son Ian, Addie thought she was joking. After all, they were on their second bottle of Chablis, and Ian was, as they say, a street angel and a house devil. Why would this wealthy woman with her perfect figure, flawless make-up and beautiful home part with so much money to secure a summer playmate for her own son? For the Jeffries family, life in 1960s suburban Ireland is a constant battle with leaky roof, school fees and repeatedly darned socks. While Addie hankers after the finer things for herself and her family, husband Roy lacks ambition and lets promotion opportunities pass him by time and again, until Addie loses patience and takes matters into her own hands. It’s a risky endeavour, she knows. If all goes to plan, the Jeffries will never have to worry again about getting the roof fixed, but if it doesn’t, they stand to lose the one thing no amount of money can buy.
Form Follows Function: Industrial Design and the Emergence of Postwar Economic Culture -- Producing Modern German Homes: The Economy of National Branding -- Intra-German Trade and the Aesthetic Dialectic of European Integration -- From Competition to Cooperation: Cold War Diplomacy of German Design -- Conservative Modernity: The Reception of Functionalism in German Living Rooms.
A History of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change is a wide-ranging single volume history of the "lands between", the lands which have lain between Germany, Italy, and the Tsarist and Soviet empires. Bideleux and Jeffries examine the problems that have bedevilled this troubled region during its imperial past, the interwar period, under fascism, under communism, and since 1989. While mainly focusing on the modern era and on the effects of ethnic nationalism, fascism and communism, the book also offers original, striking and revisionist coverage of: * ancient and medieval times * the Hussite Revolution, the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation * the legacies of Byzantium, the ...
This volume assesses the achievements and limitations of a new set of non-state or multistakeholder institutions that are concerned with improving the social and environmental record of business, and holding corporations to account. It does so from a perspective that aims to address two limitations that often characterize this field of inquiry. First, fragmentation: articles or books typically focus on one or a handful of cases. Second, the development dimension: what does such regulation imply for developing countries and subaltern groups in terms of well-being, empowerment and sustainability? This volume examines more than 20 initiatives or institutions associated with different regulatory and development approaches, including the business-friendly corporate social responsibility (CSR) agenda, ‘corporate accountability’ and ‘fair trade’ or social economy.
This book offers an innovative examination of how ‘low–technology’ industries operate. Based on extensive fieldwork in India, the book fuses economic and sociological perspectives on information sharing by means of informal interaction in a low-technology cluster in a developing country. In doing so, the book sheds new light on settings where economic relations arise as emergent properties of social relations. This book examines industrial innovation and microeconomic network behaviour among producers and clusters, perceiving knowledge diffusion to be a socially-spatial, as much as a geographically spatial, phenomenon. This is achieved by employing two methods – simulation modelling,...
It is widely believed that economic development in much of the world is not happening quickly enough. Indeed, the standard of living in some parts of the world has actually been declining. Many experts now doubt that the solution can be purely technical and economic; it must also be political and moral. This book brings together contributions from leading authorities, such as Joseph Stiglitz, Jean-Jacques Laffont and Daniel Hausman, on economics and political philosophy to survey current barriers to growth, including problems with policy and problems with concepts and thinking. Getting policies right, the contributors stress, is a complicated task in itself, but it also may not be enough; instead, people in both the developed and developing worlds may also need to reconsider basic and time-worn beliefs about facts, values, the measurement of data, rights, needs and the nature of government. Of interest to economics and policy makers, Development Dilemmas is a long-awaited addition to the debate over economics and political philosophy in the developing world.
This highly topical volume, with contributions from leading experts in the field, explores a variety of questions about membership based organizations of the poor. Analyzing their success and failure and the internal and external factors that play a part, it uses studies from both developed and developing countries. Put together by a group of prestigious editors, the contributors address a range of questions, including: What structures and activities characterize MBOPs? What is meant by success and what factors account for success? What are the internal (governance structure and leadership) and external (policy environment) factors that account for success? Are these factors replicable acros...
Between 1978 and 2006, GDP growth in China maintained an annual average rate of 9.7%, meaning the Chinese economy increased by more than twelve times. This was achieved with quite unorthodox approaches to reform and development as China has adopted a gradualist approach to adopting key institutions, as well as modifying and experimenting with traditional recipes for economic growth. This collection brings together key researchers in the field from Asia, US, Europe and Australia to discuss how China has managed to push forward reforms in the face of political resistance, how the Chinese economy has maintained growth within an imperfect institutionalist environment and how the Chinese governme...
This book considers the history of the Prester John legend and its impact on the Crusades, investigating its entangled mythical history between East and West during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The present study thus responds to the still pressing need for a comprehensive historical investigation of the twelfth and thirteenth crusading history of the legend and its impact on the Muslim-Crusader encounters, examining various Latin, Arabic, Syriac, and Coptic accounts. It further reflects on new eastern aspects of the legend, presenting a new Arab scholarly view. This book first charts a pre-history of the legend in the late ancient Christian prophecy of the Last Emperor down to the e...