All the numbers on South Africa’s crisis dashboard are blinking red. The economy is failing to grow and more and more young people find themselves on the outside looking in as education falters and jobs disappear. Energy and transport are in crisis. Governance is floundering as debt mounts and government runs out of money.

Better Choices is a collection by South Africa’s top thinkers on the political economy, providing an unflinching account of the myriad challenges the country faces. The picture that emerges is of a nation on the brink of a catastrophic slide into failure unless better, if tough, policy choices are made. As stark as these problems are, their solutions are tantalisingly close at hand. The chapters in this book outline exactly the solutions – those ‘better choices’– that need to be made by leadership to alter the country’s bleak trajectory.

South Africa cannot talk its way out of trouble. Key to success is removing the sources of friction – the red tape, over-regulation and rents – that slow down investment. This is only possible if a more effective, focused government acts decisively.

Compiled by The Brenthurst Foundation, Africa’s leading think tank on economic development, Better Choices is for those who want to build a positive, inclusive future for South Africa.

“Rebels And Rage is a critically important contribution to public discussion about #FeesMustFall”–Eusebius McKaiser

Adam Habib, the most prominent and outspoken university official through the recent student protests, takes a characteristically frank view of the past three years on South Africa’s campuses in this new book. Habib charts the progress of the student protests that erupted on Wits University campus in late 2015 and raged for the better part of three years, drawing on his own intimate involvement and negotiation with the students, and also records university management and government responses to the events. He critically examines the student movement and individual student leaders who emerged under the banners #feesmustfall and #Rhodesmustfall, and debates how to achieve truly progressive social change in South Africa, on our campuses and off.

This book is both an attempt at a historical account and a thoughtful reflection on the issues the protests kicked up, from the perspective not only of a high-ranking member of university management, but also Habib as political scientist with a background as an activist during the struggle against apartheid. Habib moves between reflecting on the events of the last three years on university campuses, and reimagining the future of South African higher education.

An essential guide for those dealing with the Cape Water Crisis and for general water saving in South and southern Africa, a notoriously water-scarce region.

Three provinces in South Africa have been declared national disaster zones because of drought. The way we think about water needs to change, and fast. This is especially true for those of us who have running water and flush sanitation piped into our homes. For millions of South Africans, water is already a precious resource that costs toil to collect and fuel to heat. Our middle-class expectations that water will gush steaming from our dozens of indoor taps 24/7 are going to look as bizarre to future generations as the spectacle of Cleopatra bathing in asses’ milk. Our Roman-orgy relationship with water is over.

This book will hopefully help to alleviate water panic and distress. A “can-do” compendium, it’s meant to be a guide, not prescriptive – not all solutions or tips are one-size-fits-all. Think of it as an ally in your fight to save water and part of your survival kit, along with the first-aid box; Valium for water-worriers.

When André de Ruyter took over as Eskom CEO in January 2020, he quickly realised why it was considered the toughest job in South Africa.

Aside from neglected equipment, ageing power stations and an eroded skills base, he discovered that Eskom was crippled by corruption on a staggering scale. Fake fuel oil deliveries at just one power station cost Eskom R100 million per month; kneepads retailing for R150 a pair were purchased for R80 000; billions of rands of equipment supposedly housed in the company’s storerooms was missing. Faced with police inaction, he was compelled to plunge into a world that was foreign to him – a world of spies and safe houses, of bulletproof vests and bodyguards.

In Truth to Power, De Ruyter tells the behind-the-scenes story of how he launched a private investigation that exposed at least four criminal cartels feeding off Eskom. While fighting this scourge, he had to deal with political interference, absurd regulations, non-paying municipalities, unfounded accusations of racism, wildcat strikes, sabotage and a poisoning attempt. De Ruyter takes the reader inside the boardrooms and government meetings where South Africa’s future is shaped, with ministers often pulling in conflicting directions. He explains how renewable energy is the cheapest and quickest solution to our power crisis, in spite of fierce opposition from vested coal interests.

De Ruyter candidly reflects on his three years at the power utility, his successes and failures, his reasons for leaving and his hopes for the future. As someone who worked at the highest levels of the state but is not beholden to the ruling party, he is uniquely placed to speak truth to power.

There is a lot that they don’t (and probably can’t) teach you in school. It feels like we spend a lot of time learning about plant cells and different types of rocks and too little time learning about budgeting, being healthy, human rights, sexual health, surviving heartbreak, and financial freedom.

The truth is that sometimes (often!) it is hard to be an adult. It involves making decisions all the time. It’s expensive. You have to navigate mostly dodgy expectations and stories about work and relationships and sex and your finances. And sometimes you want to scream – WHY DID NOBODY TELL ME THIS?

Join Jen Thorpe as she tells you about all the things you wish you knew as an adult. Thorpe covers your health, relationships, sex, work and money. She also discusses the government, media and social media, crime and climate change. This book is about how to survive in the real world, filled with helpful advice and practical tips, it has everything you need to know.

In this examination of how the rise of online sharing economy platforms has facilitated online crime, this book shows how, while marketed as trustworthy peer-to-peer services, these platforms are highly vulnerable to misuse by scammers and are used for the dissemination of delusive speech.

The analysis centres around the concept of delusive speech, a sub-set of disinformation, designed to deceive and motivate by criminal intent. Looking beyond the economic and disruptive impacts of sharing economy platforms like Uber, Airbnb, and others, this book situates these Big Tech giants as mass communication channels that are frequently misused by bad actors to distribute dangerous content globally. Drawing from over 600 cases of victims lured into scams or physical danger via misleading Airbnb listings, the book provides a detailed case study exposing Airbnb's failure to establish legitimate safety measures despite branding its platform as a 'community of trust'. Incorporating netnography and thematic analysis, the author theorises the deceptive semiotic structure of delusive speech and evaluates practical mechanisms Airbnb could employ to prevent scams and crime on its platform.

With a global audience including researchers in communication and media studies, digital media, and media industries, as well as tech journalists, Silicon Valley critics, policymakers, and digital rights advocates, this book unmasks how sharing economy giants like Airbnb contribute to an epidemic of online deception causing real-world harm.

Food poisoning cases in South Africa have risen, though the increase remains unquantified. Existing legislation has gaps and fails to fully align with international obligations. Government departments and agencies adopt fragmented approaches to handle food safety concerns. As key stakeholders, communities are not fully aware of their role in food safety surveillance, leaving them vulnerable to foodborne illnesses.

The book highlights the serious global issue of food poisoning, food fraud, and the potential presence of food terrorism in South Africa. Its goal is to raise awareness about the importance of food safety surveillance, even in the face of the current socio-economic challenges, while promoting internationally recognized practices to combat the rising incidence of food fraud and food poisoning in the country.

Despite two-and-a-half decades of black majority rule after 1994, much of South African higher education in the area of humanities continues to embrace European models and paradigms. This is despite concepts such as Africanisation, indigenisation and decolonisation of the curriculum having become buzzwords, especially after the #MustFall campaigns, student-led protests from 2015.

This book argues that, beyond the use of internally constructed strategies to foster curriculum transformation in South Africa, it is important to draw lessons from the curriculum transformation efforts of other African countries and African-American studies in the United States (US).

The end of colonialism in Africa from the 1950s marked the most important era in curriculum transformation efforts in African higher education, evident in the rise of leading decolonial schools: the Ibadan School of History, the Dar es Salaam School of Political Economy and the Dakar School of Culture. These centres used rigorous research methods such as nationalist historiography and oral sources to challenge Eurocentric epistemologies. African-American studies emerged in the US from the 1920s to debunk notions of white superiority and challenge racist ideas and structures in international relations. The two important schools of this scholarship were the Atlanta School of Sociology and the Howard School of International Affairs.

Zamantungwa Khumalo is a rising star on the South African property scene. An award-winning media and content specialist, she is also a property entrepreneur who bought her first properties at age 27. Now, she wants other people to follow in her footsteps, climbing the property ladder on their way to building wealth and security.

All her passion and expertise is concentrated in this volume, which covers a range of topics vital to property ownership. She also includes interviews with leading property industry experts like Gil Sperling, Michelle Dickens, and Silindile Leseyane who is the chairperson of Sakhisizwe Property Stokvel.

This book is aimed at helping a wide range of people – women, young professionals, and also men who want to buy property but don’t quite know how to go about it – to take that first step.

As she says in her introduction: ‘My hope is that this book will help to make your property dreams come true.’

A revolution is taking place in the great marketplaces of the informal sector and it contains an unquantified scale and power as an economic engine and a way of life for the majority of our low income populations. The KasiNomic Revolution may still be a murmur in the streets, a grassroots economic groundswell, but it is the future of African economic activity.

Kasi is the South African term for the township – a teeming conurbation of homes and businesses, entertainment venues and social meeting places. GG Alcock uses the term KasiNomics to describe the informal sectors of Africa, whether they are in the township, a rural marketplace, at a taxi rank or on a pavement in the shadow of skyscrapers. Brought up in a rural Zulu community, GG has learnt and shares the lessons of African culture, language, stick fighting, lifestyle and tribal politics, along with shared poverty and community, which have prepared him for accessing the great informal marketplaces of Africa. He is uniquely placed to uncover the extraordinary stories of kasi businesses which not only survive but excel, revealing a revolutionary entrepreneurship which is mostly invisible to the formal sector.

KasiNomic Revolution is a story of kasi entrepreneurs on one side and, on the other, of great corporate successes and failures in the informal community. KasiNomic Revolution is at once a business book, and at the same time a deeply human book about the people and lives of rural and urban informal societies.

KasiNomic Revolution is about the lessons of marketing, distribution, culture and modernity in an informal African world.

The purpose of this handbook - Know your Rights, Claim your Rights - is to provide a straightforward overview of the Constitution of South Africa; to set out the basic constitutional rights and responsibilities of all South African citizens and to assist in drawing the attention of civil society to the remedies available when their rights have not been respected and upheld.

This book explores the impact of brutalist aesthetics on contemporary capitalism, emphasizing the blurring of natural and artificial realms and advocates Afro-diasporic thought as a solution for societal transformation.

Eminent social and critical theorist Achille Mbembe invokes the architectural aesthetic of brutalism in his latest book to describe society’s current moment, caught up in the pathos of demolition and production on a planetary scale. Just as brutalist architecture creates an affect of overwhelming weight and destruction, Mbembe contends that contemporary capitalism crushes and dominates all spheres of existence. In our digital, technologically focused era, capitalism has produced a becoming-artificial of humanity and the becoming-human of machines. This blurring of the natural and artificial presents a planetary existential threat in which contemporary society’s goal is to precipitate the mutation of the human species into a condition that is at once plastic and synthetic.

Mbembe argues that Afro-diasporic thought presents the only solution for breaking the totalizing logic of contemporary capitalism: repairing that which is broken, developing a new planetary consciousness, and reforming a community of humans in solidarity with all living things.

Many theories that form the bedrock of good parenting were created decades before devices even existed - they don't consider the significant impact on a child's psychological and physical development. The landscape of the early years has changed so quickly, yet parents and caregivers do not have access to the evidence-based, practical advice they need to manage this invasion of screens. They can see their children become addicted to devices, but don't know what to do. Generation Zombie will fill this knowledge gap.

Through her clinical work as a psychotherapist, work with schools and as a duty of care psychologist, Dr Charlotte Armitage has witnessed the terrifying impact of screen time on her clients and their families. However, unlike other addictions, the harmful consequences of devices are not widely recognised.

With the vital insights in her book - including practical tips and engaging case studies - her mission is hopeful and empowering; to enable parents to make a positive change. Away from devices, you will be amazed how quickly you notice children's behaviour change.

Turn your wanderlust into reality with expert strategies from Brian Kelly, the founder of The Points Guy—the leading voice in travel and loyalty programs—with this ultimate resource for everything from leveraging airline and credit card points to planning your dream itinerary.

In How to Win at Travel, Brian Kelly shares his greatest tips and strategies to experience the world in ways you never thought possible. This comprehensive guide is a road map with all of the knowledge and tools you need to become an expert traveler.

Get practical advice on a range of topics, including how to find the cheapest flights; effectively leverage airline, hotel, and credit card loyalty programs; conquer your fear of flying; beat jet lag; and score free flights and upgrades. Kelly also covers the ins and outs of travel insurance and getting the right credit cards to make your travel more affordable and enjoyable. He discusses the art of dealing with travel mishaps, speaks to the technology you need to manage modern travel, and shares ideas for pinpointing the best destination for you.

Whether you’re a young adult traveling solo, a road warrior business traveler, a growing family looking for new experiences, or a retiree ready to explore the world, reach for this guide to plan an unforgettable trip. Easy to read, informative, and inspirational, How to Win at Travel is the definitive travel guide for your next adventure, no matter how big or small.

Offering a critical approach to digital marketing strategies, this innovative book introduces the ‘phygital’, a new ecosystem that creates a continuum between physical and digital settings to aid the design of successful customer experiences. Combining theory with practical case studies, it provides a timely prediction of the evolution of customer experience and effective means of brand communication in an increasingly phygital era.

Delineating how digital and physical experiences differ, this book characterizes the role of digital, AI, and extended reality technologies in creating successful and engaging phygital experiences and the customer values they engender. Chapters identify the underlying mechanisms for designing a compelling phygital customer experience and how it is enhanced by digital tools, devices, immersive technologies, chatbots, AI, and robotics. The book concludes by addressing how these technologies can help businesses create the ultimate brand experience in a phygital-driven context by rethinking their strategies and tools.

Providing new market research tools and frameworks to better understand digital transformation, this book will prove vital to practitioners, students, and marketing scholars. Advising how to design compelling customer experiences that connect physical and digital settings, it will also prove a valuable resource to a vast range of businesses and consultants.

A riveting investigation into the dark underbelly of the global trash trade - a dirty, multi-billion-dollar industry that almost no one knows exists.

The total mass of the world's manmade materials has recently come to equal the entire biomass of the earth. This means we are living in a world where man's ability to create garbage, or eventual garbage, has surpassed the earth's ability to create life. Dumps and landfills around the world are overflowing, and disputes about what to do with the tons of garbage generated every day have given rise to waste wars waged in just about every country on earth. Some are border skirmishes, fought to move trash out of one place and dump it into another. Others are waged across thousands of miles.

But no matter the scale, one thing is true about almost all of them: few people have any idea they're happening. For every story about how a commodity gets hustled through world supply chains for consumption, there exists another untold story about how it gets discarded for renewal - or for eternity. Some trash gets tossed onto roadsides. Some gets burned for fuel. Some gets buried underground. But most of it lives a hot potato second life, getting bartered, sold, re-sold, smuggled, salvaged, re-purposed from one country or mafia or corporation to another, with devastating consequences for millions of people.

Waste Wars tells the stories of five trash conflicts being waged in different corners of the world right now. They are representative but rich strands in the story of our planet's runaway garbage pandemic. In each theater, a different commodity is being smuggled or imported or bartered. Sometimes there is a winner; sometimes there is a loser. And in each theater a different political dilemma - from global inequality to the pitfalls of green politics - is presenting itself through the seemingly pedestrian medium of trash. A globe-trotting work of relentless investigative reporting, Waste Wars exposes the multi-billion-dollar global garbage trade in which almost everyone in the world unknowingly engages and asks: If the handling of its trash reveals deeper truths about a particular society, what does the global business of trash say about our world today?

The world is emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, more fragmented and further away from the more equal and equitable iteration imagined in 2015 when the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were conceptualised. As we hurtle, at seemingly lightning speed, towards the 2030 deadline to achieve these goals, the urgency is palpable. Although we have certainly strayed further away from the targets, there is still time to act in order to ensure that we inch closer to this vision.

Tshilidzi Marwala paints a stark, and often grim, picture of our current context – one defined by monumental setbacks in the SDGs. Yet, as he carves out each developmental goal and its implications, it is apparent that there are tangible solutions that can be implemented, now. Tshilidzi’s assertion that now is the time to act is backed by intricate and actionable data with a simple mission statement: we must heal the future.

He offers a new narrative that addresses how we can translate the latent potential that exists through technology, innovation and new approaches to leadership and policy-making, to deal with, among others, poverty eradication, joblessness, an education system in crisis, declining economies and food insecurity.

Heal our World is a deep-dive into the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly relating to the African context, and looks toward securing a future in which our divisions are blurred, and our goals almost seem in reach again.

A sophisticated and subversive guide on how to make a difference ... one day at a time. You watch the news every night. You turn off your television set, disturbed by what you've seen and wondering what, if anything, you can do to make a difference. This is the book you need to get started. You may think that the issues which confront us are so huge, so complicated, so difficult to deal with that it's hard to believe anything we can do will have a meaningful impact but Michael Norton will prove you wrong. A lot of people doing a lot of little things could have a huge impact. This book has an idea-a-day for changing the world. Most are quite simple, can be done from home, and will not take much time. You can make a start whenever you like. Just open the book at today's date, read, enjoy, be inspired to action - and do something!

The emergence of new technologies within the industrial revolution has transformed businesses to a new socio-digital era. In this new era, businesses are concerned with collecting data on customer needs, behaviors, and preferences for driving effective customer engagement and product development, as well as for crucial decision making. However, the ever-shifting behaviors of consumers provide many challenges for businesses to pinpoint the wants and needs of their audience. Consumer Behavior Change and Data Analytics in the Socio-Digital Era focuses on the concepts, theories, and analytical techniques to track consumer behavior change. It provides multidisciplinary research and practice focusing on social and behavioral analytics to track consumer behavior shifts and improve decision making among businesses. Covering topics such as consumer sentiment analysis, emotional intelligence, and online purchase decision making, this premier reference source is a timely resource for business executives, entrepreneurs, data analysts, marketers, advertisers, government officials, social media professionals, libraries, students and educators of higher education, researchers, and academicians.

'An amazing portrait of how grifters came to be called visionaries and high finance lost its mind.' Charles Duhigg, bestselling author of The Power of Habit The definitive inside story of WeWork, its audacious founder, and the company's epic unravelling from the journalists who first broke the story wide open. In 2001, Adam Neumann arrived in New York after five years as a conscript in the Israeli navy. Just over fifteen years later, he had transformed himself into the charismatic CEO of a company worth $47 billion. With his long hair and feel-good mantras, the six-foot-five Neumann looked the part of a messianic Silicon Valley entrepreneur. The vision he offered was mesmerizing: a radical reimagining of work space for a new generation. He called it WeWork. As billions of funding dollars poured in, Neumann's ambitions grew limitless. WeWork wasn't just an office space provider; it would build schools, create cities, even colonize Mars. In pursuit of its founder's vision, the company spent money faster than it could bring it in. From his private jet, sometimes clouded with marijuana smoke, the CEO scoured the globe for more capital but in late 2019, just weeks before WeWork's highly publicized IPO, everything fell apart. Neumann was ousted from his company, but still was poised to walk away a billionaire. Calling to mind the recent demise of Theranos and the hubris of the dotcom era bust, WeWork's extraordinary rise and staggering implosion were fueled by disparate characters in a financial system blind to its risks. Why did some of the biggest names in banking and venture capital buy the hype? And what does the future hold for Silicon Valley 'unicorns'? Wall Street Journal reporters Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell explore these questions in this definitive, rollicking account of WeWork's boom and bust.

*Selected by Emma Watson for her Ultimate Book List* Fashion is political. From the red carpets of the Met Gala to online fast fashion, clothes tell a story of inequality, racism and climate crisis. In The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion, Tansy E. Hoskins unpicks the threads of capitalist industry to reveal the truth about our clothes. Fashion brands entice us to consume more by manipulating us to feel ugly, poor and worthless, sentiments that line the pockets of billionaires exploiting colonial supply chains. Garment workers on poverty pay risk their lives in dangerous factories, animals are tortured, fossil fuels extracted and toxic chemicals spread just to keep this season's collections fresh. We can do better than this. Moving between Karl Lagerfeld and Karl Marx, The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion goes beyond ethical fashion and consumer responsibility showing that if we want to feel comfortable in our clothes, we need to reshape the system and ensure this is not our last season.

Elgar Research Agendas outline the future of research in a given area. Leading scholars are given the space to explore their subject in provocative ways, and map out the potential directions of travel. They are relevant but also visionary. Evaluating achievements, challenges and future avenues for research, this book explores how new dimensions of knowledge and practice contest, reshape and advance traditional understandings of sustainable consumption governance. By questioning existing academic discourse and advocating collective solutions, up-and-coming and established scholars help readers to understand diverse governance processes through a wide variety of topics. These range from consumption impacts, the circular and sharing economy, sustainable business models, consumer behaviour and work time, to understanding the role of new actors such as prosumers and city governments. The research agenda supports transformative system changes to a more sustainable society. Policy makers at international, national and local levels will benefit from the practical advice offered and forward-thinking policy suggestions. It will also be a timely read for scholars of sustainability studies, sociology of consumption, political economy and political ecology, human geography, wellbeing, environment studies and human ecology looking to gain a more well-rounded understanding of the topic.

Airbnb, gaming, escape rooms, major sporting events: contemporary capitalism no longer demands we merely consume things, but that we buy experiences. This book is concerned with the social, cultural and personal implications of this shift. The technologically-driven world we live in is no closer to securing the utopian ideal of a leisure society. Instead, the pursuit of leisure is often an attempt to escape our everyday existence. Exploring examples including sport, architecture, travel and social media, Steven Miles investigates how consumer culture has colonised 'experiences', revealing the ideological and psycho-social tensions at the heart of the 'experience society'. This first critical analysis of the experience economy sheds light on capitalism's ever more sophisticated infiltration of the everyday.

The Reading Augustine series presents short, engaging books offering personal readings of St. Augustine of Hippo's contributions to western philosophical, literary, and religious life. Mark Clavier's On Consumer Culture, Identity, The Church and the Rhetorics of Delight draws on Augustine of Hippo to provide a theological explanation for the success of marketing and consumer culture. Augustine's thought, rooted in rhetorical theory, presents a brilliant understanding of the experiences of damnation and salvation that takes seriously the often hidden psychology of human motivation. Clavier examines how Augustine's keen insight into the power of delight over personal notions of freedom and self-identity can be used to shed light on how the constant lure of promised happiness shapes our identities as consumers. From Augustine's perspective, it is only by addressing the sources of delight within consumerism and by rediscovering the wellsprings of God's delight that we can effectively challenge consumer culture. To an age awash with commercial rhetoric, the fifth-century Bishop of Hippo offers a theological rhetoric that is surprisingly contemporary and insightful.