Bøger udgivet af Stanford University Press

The case for innovation and a clear, targeted strategy for planning and implementation that will help small- and medium-sized mature enterprises (SMMEs) thrive through reinvention and renewal.In contrast to large companies, SMMEs are on their own to win or lose in the marketplace. They may lack the relative economies of scale and scope, available to large companies, to understand and invest in innovation. Often they are in a position of sustained disadvantage with no perceived path of renewal. As SMMEs approach maturity, it is common for them to choose to only maintain what they believe to be the safety of maturity attained rather than to opt for a strategy that also includes constant reinvention and renewal. But as Bruce A. Vojak and Walter B. Herbst argue, this path of seemingly least risk and least resistance can be the most detrimental to the company in the long run. The real risk is to not innovate.No-Excuses Innovation makes the case to owners, advisors, executives, and leaders-as well as those in the trenches-of the value of innovation: why it's worthy of investment and what it can do for the health and longevity of a company. This book also details how innovation, and thus reinvention and renewal, can be most effectively and efficiently implemented. With case studies and narrative examples drawn from their time in industry and the academy, the authors present a valuable strategy guide specific to SMMEs and to one of the biggest existential dilemmas they encounter.

In this new work, political theorist Michael J. Thompson argues that modern societies are witnessing a decline in one of the core building blocks of modernity: the autonomous self. Far from being an illusion of the Enlightenment, Thompson contends that the individual is a defining feature of the project to build a modern democratic culture and polity. One of the central reasons for its demise in recent decades has been the emergence of what he calls the "e;cybernetic society,"e; a cohesive totalization of the social logics of the institutional spheres of economy, culture and polity. These logics have been progressively defined by the imperatives of economic growth and technical-administrative management of labor and consumption, routinizing patterns of life, practices, and consciousness throughout the culture. Evolving out of the neoliberal transformation of economy and society since the 1980s, the cybernetic society has transformed how that the individual is articulated in contemporary society. Thompson examines the various pathologies of the self and consciousness that result from this form of socialization-such as hyper-reification, alienated moral cognition, false consciousness, and the withered ego-in new ways to demonstrate the extent of deformation of modern selfhood. Only with a more robust, more socially embedded concept of autonomy as critical agency can we begin to reconstruct the principles of democratic individuality and community.

This book builds upon Irina Carlota [Lotti] Silber's nearly 25 years of ethnographic research centered in Chalatenango, El Salvador, to follow the trajectories-geographic, temporal, storied-of several extended Salvadoran families. Traveling back and forth in time and across borders, Silber narrates the everyday unfolding of diasporic lives rich with acts of labor, love, and renewed calls for memory, truth, and accountability in El Salvador's long postwar. Through a retrospective and intimate ethnographic method that examines archives of memories and troubles the categories that have come to stand for "e;El Salvador"e; such as alarming violent numbers, Silber considers the lives of young Salvadorans who were brought up in an everyday radical politics and then migrated to the United States after more than a decade of peace and democracy. She reflects on this generation of migrants-the 1.5 insurgent generation born to forgotten former rank-and-file militants-as well as their intergenerational, transnational families to unpack the assumptions and typical ways of knowing in postwar ethnography. As the 1.5 generation sustains their radical political project across borders, circulates the products of their migrant labor through remittances, and engages in collective social care for the debilitated bodies of their loved ones, they transform and depart from expectations of the wounded postwar that offer us hope for the making of more just global futures.

In the 1950s-80s, Brazil built one of the most advanced industrial networks among the "e;developing"e; countries, initially concentrated in the state of Sao Paulo. But from the 1980s, decentralization of industry spread to other states reducing Sao Paulo's relative importance in the country's industrial product. This volume draws on social, economic, and demographic data to document the accelerated industrialization of the state and its subsequent shift to a service economy amidst worsening social and economic inequality.Through its cultural institutions, universities, banking, and corporate sectors, the municipality of So Paulo would become a world metropolis. At the same time, given its rapid growth from 2 million to 12 million residents in this period, So Paulo dealt with problems of distribution, housing, and governance. This significant volume elucidates these and other trends during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and will be an invaluable reference for scholars of history, policy, and the economy in Latin America.

Since 1989 and the breakup of the Soviet Union, both the threat of nuclear war and the threat of large-scale, interstate conventional war have receded. Yet, during the 1990s millions have died in wars in Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia, and millions more have become refugees from war-torn regions.

By placing Joseph Conrad's fiction at the center of an examination of the term "the West", this study reconceives the major contours of Conrad's work to show how the contemporary commonplace idea of the West emerged around the turn of the century from the combined and related phenomena of European imperial expansion and a crisis of democratic politics. The author argues that twentieth-century ideas of the West can be traced to the convergence of two distinct discursive contexts: the "new imperialism" of the 1890's that gave wider currency to oppositions between East and West, and the influence of nineteenth-century Russian debates on Western European ideas of Europe. The work of Conrad is shown to be uniquely suited to studying the relation between these two cultural and political contexts, since they provided Conrad with his two great themes - colonialism and revolution.

This is a brilliant exploration, from a sociological point of view, of what is still a taboo subject in modern societies: death and dying. In a sustained and gripping argument, the author puts forward a new theory explaining the individual, cultural, and institutional strategies for dealing with human mortality. The author demonstrates that the necessity of human beings to live with the constant awareness of death accounts for crucial aspects of the social organisation of all known societies.

The work of Erving Goffman (1922-82) has had an enormous impact throughout the social sciences, yet his writings have not received detailed scrutiny. This book not only assesses all of Goffman's seminal works but also demonstrates why his thought has been so influential to modern sociology. The book both explores and complements Goffman's ideas, drawing on the structuration theory of Anthony Giddens and on ethnomethodology to situate Goffman's work in relation to other, more systematic social theories while keeping an eye on how Goffman's work questions their basic presuppositions.

"Löwy explores in this remarkable study . . . a generation of Central European Jewish intellectuals of an antiauthoritarian political orientation who left a considerable mark on 20th-century radical thought. . . . As Löwy's subtle and profound book reminds us, their legacy is a rich one."--American Historical Review

Focusing on the cultural encounters between European explorers and non-European peoples between 1492 and 1800, this book reconstructs the experiences on both sides, and places them in case studies that span five continents. (Anthropology)