This book advances an alternative critical posthumanist approach to mega-event organisation, taking into account both the new and the old crises which humanity and our planet face. Taking the delayed Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games as a case study, Tzanelli explores mega-event crisis and risk management in the era of extreme urbanisation, natural disasters, global pandemic, and technoscientific control. Using the atmospheric term 'irradiation' (a technology of glamour and transparency, as well as bodily penetration by harmful agents and strong affects), the book explores this epistemological statement diachronically (via Tokyo's relationship with Western forms of domination) and synchronically (the city as a global cultural-political player but victim of climate catastrophes). It presents how the 'Olympic enterprise's' 'flattening' of indigenous environmental place-making rhythms, and the scientisation of space and place in the Anthropocene lead to reductionisms harmful for a viable programme of planetary recovery. An experimental study of the mega-event is enacted, which considers the researcher's analytical tools and the styles of human and non-human mobility during the mega-event as reflexive gateways to forms of posthuman flourishing. Crossing and bridging disciplinary boundaries, the book will appeal to any scholar interested in mobilities theory, event and environment studies, sociology of knowledge, and cultural globalisation.

Israeli national neoliberalism has promoted innovation policies leading to an ostensible paradox: At the center is a startup nation with a vibrant and successful high-tech entrepreneurial ecosystem, accumulating resources and enabling constant growth. At the geographical and social periphery, there has emerged a parallel society with often-marginalized groups not able to keep up. In one of the most unequal countries with a high rate of poverty, entrepreneurial heroes are celebrated at the center, promoting a myth that all could be self-made successes. At the periphery, entrepreneurs are struggling to survive, often pushed into precarious working and living conditions. Applying critical theory discourse, this book illustrates how neoliberalism and entrepreneurship are intertwined and how the startup nation has evolved in Israel. It explores how national neoliberal state policies have targeted technological innovation as a tool to obtain a competitive advantage in the international arena rather than aiming at increasing economic achievements and well-being for all. It will demonstrate that the Israeli entrepreneurship scene exemplifies the existence of parallel entrepreneurial societal spaces, analyze the positionality of entrepreneurs belonging to a variety of groups that characterize Israeli society, and uncover structural disadvantages and related levels of precarity as well as existing links between entrepreneurial advantages and disadvantages, mobility and varying degrees of social marginality. Dark Sides of the Startup Nation sheds light onto the problematic and sometimes contradictory myth that entrepreneurship is meritocratic and that neoliberal capitalism provides everyone with equal opportunities to succeed. The book will be of interest to researchers, academics, policy makers and students in the fields of entrepreneurship and small business management, responsibility and business ethics, and technology and innovation.

British multinationals faced unprecedented challenges to their organizational legitimacy in the middle of the twentieth century as the European colonial empires were dismantled and institutional transformations changed colonial relationships in Africa and other parts of the world. This book investigates the political networking and internal organizational changes in five British multinationals (United Africa Company, John Holt & Co., Ashanti Goldfields Corporation, Bank of West Africa and Barclays Bank DCO). These firms were forced to adapt their strategies and operations to changing institutional environments in two English-speaking West African countries, Ghana (formerly the Gold Coast) and Nigeria, from the late 1940s to the late 1970s. Decolonization meant that formerly imperial businesses needed to develop new political networks and change their internal organization and staffing to promote more Africans to managerial roles. This postcolonial transition culminated in indigenization programmes (and targeted nationalizations) which forced foreign companies to sell equity and assets to domestic investors in the 1970s. Postcolonial Transition and Global Business History is the first in-depth historical study on how British firms sought to adapt over several decades to rapid political and economic transformation in West Africa. Exploring both postcolonial transitions and development discourse, this book addresses the topics with regard to business and economic history and will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of organizational change, political economy, African studies and globalization.

'The definitive account of the history of poverty finance' - Susanne Soederberg Finance, mobile and digital technologies - or 'fintech' - are being heralded in the world of development by the likes of the IMF and World Bank as a silver bullet in the fight against poverty. But should we believe the hype? A Critical History of Poverty Finance demonstrates how newfangled 'digital financial inclusion' efforts suffer from the same essential flaws as earlier iterations of neoliberal 'financial inclusion'. Relying on artificially created markets that simply aren't there among the world's most disadvantaged economic actors, they also reinforce existing patterns of inequality and uneven development, many of which date back to the colonial era. Bernards offers an astute analysis of the current fintech fad, contextualised through a detailed colonial history of development finance, that ultimately reveals the neoliberal vision of poverty alleviation for the pipe dream it is.

This book examines the rise and agency of International Organizations (IOs) and their bureaucratic bodies- the International Public Administrations (IPAs)- as a reflection of an ongoing transfer of political authority and power from the domestic to the international level. It shows that IPAs represent actors per se, with autonomy and resources that allow them to exert an independent influence on global policy-making processes and outputs. Providing a combination of novel conceptual lenses and research design to capture IPAs as an empirical phenomenon, the book takes an open, theoretically and methodologically diverse approach to show that IPAs are far from being negligible actors in global public policy and must be taken seriously as actors in policy-making beyond the nation-state. This book will be of key interest to students, scholars, and practitioners in Public Policy and Public Administration, International Relations, International Political Economy, as well as Organizational Studies.

In an age of extreme political polarization and waning of reasoned debate across political divides, Capitalism for Realists carefully explores the inner workings of capitalism in a consciously non-partisan and balanced way. Does the modern capitalist economy alleviate poverty and exploitation, or exacerbate them? What, exactly, is 'neoliberalism,' and how well or poorly has it performed in the past 40 years? Does capitalism undermine democracy, or is it rather one of its key necessary conditions? How have altruism, cooperation, tolerance, violence, and trust fared under the influence of the modern market society? Should we analyse capitalism through the mainstream economic lens or a more critical Marxist perspective? This book offers answers to these questions. Synthesizing decades of research across disciplines, Capitalism for Realists offers an overarching perspective on the modern economy by theoretically unifying many of the claims and conclusions about it offered by various traditionally rivalrous social science paradigms, such as institutional, neoclassical, and public choice economics on the one hand, and Marxist sociology on the other. The book presents and critically assesses the latest data and debates on such crucial contemporary issues as the relationship between poverty, exploitation, inequality, and capitalism, the nature of 'neoliberalism' and the successes and failures of both state-led industrial policy and the Washington consensus, capitalist peace theory, historical origins of modern capitalism, and more. What emerges is a clear picture of the merits and demerits of the modern economy too nuanced to be simplified and categorized by the prevailing political discourses. Rich in empirical detail, this lively, accessible book will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students with interests in sociological theory, political theory, economics, and political and economic sociology.

This book explores America's decline as a global power, arguing that the implosion of Pax Americana was initiated by the process of globalization, preceding the collapse of the Soviet Union by nearly a decade. The era of Pax Americana, and with it American hegemony, is conclusively passed, and will not return in current global conditions. There is a stark contrast between the present epoch and the postwar era of American hegemony (1945-1979) in which the United States, at least outside of the Soviet sphere of influence, largely managed the international economy and reigned over international politics and relations. Drawing on both theoretical and empirical evidence, this book shows that the era of globalization unleashed forces-social, political, and economic-which broke down the status quo of American hegemony. Author Cyrus Bina also establishes that since the Iranian Revolution (1979), US involvement throughout the Middle East, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and now notably in Ukraine has been motivated by the freefall of American hegemony and an attempt to get it back by direct or indirect military force. Bina utilizes these contexts for wider analysis and critique of a number of theories commonly used to analyze economy, polity, geopolitical, and dynamics of crisis and social change in capitalism. This book will be of great interest to students, academics, and policymakers on subjects of Economics, International Relations, Global Studies, International Political Economy, Political Geography, Sociology, and postwar History.

The economic system of competitive capitalism has proven to be both resilient and flexible over time and has contributed to the economic welfare of citizens in liberal and coordinated market economies in diverse regions and countries. At the same time, over the entire post-World War II period, there has been a notable endemic shortage of affordable housing in many advanced economies. This book points at both the causes and the consequences of this circumstance and provides an integrated economic and legal view of how housing production is dependent on housing finance, which, in turn, means that legal conditions and the sovereign state play an active role. Further, the book contributes to the literature from two otherwise partially separated disciplines-housing and urban development studies on the one hand and the institutional centrality of the finance industry in the contemporary economic system on the other. The author asserts that although somewhat assimilated due to the ambitions of policy makers to optimize social and economic welfare for their constituencies, the combining of these two realms of expertise generates many favorable outcomes, but also some costs derived from finance industry instabilities. The book connects theoretical perspectives and provides an empirical explanation for how affordable housing is generated in an actual real world economy context. The book will be relevant to the work of a number of academic disciplines including economics, government studies, housing policy and urban planning, social geography and law and society.

Small-scale agricultural producers in the peripheral world are often condescendingly assumed to be a single social class ('the peasantry') to be pitted against the state or corporation. This book challenges this rather idealistic view by demonstrating that under current capitalist social relations (competition, efficiency and productivity, and profit maximisation), these agricultural producers have been differentiated into different agrarian classes by exploitation. By comparing two different contexts of local agrarian change in Indonesia-rice cultivation in Java and oil palm in Sumatra-this book exposes the different class locations of the agrarian classes among petty agricultural producers and the class relations between them. These are often inextricably linked to gender, clanship and generational issues. The power of class dynamics crucially shapes how agricultural production in both rice and oil palm is organised. The share received by different agrarian classes from the production site then prominently shapes the different nature of class reproduction for each agrarian class. This analysis demonstrates that the different agrarian classes possess different capacities and responses in their relation to the state or corporations. Any real emancipation attempt in the Indonesian countryside (and beyond) must start from a proper understanding of these class dynamics. This book marks a significant contribution to the literature on agrarian change, the political economy of development, rural development and Marxist political economy.

May you sell your spare kidney? May gay men pay surrogates to bear them children? Should we allow betting markets on terrorist attacks and natural disasters? May spouses pay each other to do the dishes, watch the kids, or have sex? Should we allow the rich to genetically engineer gifted, beautiful children? May you ever sell your vote? Most people-and many philosophers-shudder at these questions. To put some goods and services for sale offends human dignity. If everything is commodified, then nothing is sacred. The market corrodes our character. In this expanded second edition of Markets without Limits, Jason Brennan and Peter M. Jaworski say it is now past time to give markets a fair hearing. The market does not, the authors claim, introduce wrongness where there was not any previously. Thus, the question of what rightfully may be bought and sold has a simple answer: if you may do it for free, you may do it for money. Contrary to the conservative consensus, Brennan and Jaworski claim there are no inherent limits to what can be bought and sold, but only restrictions on how we buy and sell. Key Updates and Revisions to the Second Edition: Includes revised introductory chapters to further clarify what's at stake in the commodification debate. Provides easier-to-follow chapters on semiotic objections, stronger analyses of these objections, and more evidence of these objections' widespread pervasiveness. Offers cogent responses to several recent papers that have raised counterexamples to the authors' thesis. Includes new empirical evidence on the ways markets sometimes crowd in virtue and altruism. Analyzes the topics of blackmail and "associative" objections to markets. Includes new material on issues surrounding exploitation and coercion, selling citizenship, residency rights, and arguments about "dignity" as objections to markets.

The embodied directedness of human practice has long been neglected in critical socio-spatial theory, in favor of analyses focused upon distance and proximity. This book illustrates the absence of a sense for direction in much theoretical discourse and lays important groundwork for redressing this lacuna in socio-spatial theory. Many accounts of the social world are incomplete, or are increasingly out of step with recent developments of neoliberal capitalism. Not least through new technological mediations of production and consumption, the much-discussed waning of the importance of physical distance has been matched by the increasing centrality of turning from one thing to another as a basic way in which lives are structured and occupied. A sensibility for embodied processes of turning, and for phenomena of direction more generally, is urgently needed. Chapters develop wide-ranging and original engagements with the arguments of Sara Ahmed, Jonathan Beller, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Virginia Held, Bernard Stiegler, Theodore Schatzki, Rahel Jaeggi, Hartmut Rosa and David Harvey. This book reinterprets practice, embodiment, alienation, reification, social reproduction and ethical responsibility from a directional perspective. It will be a new valuable resource and reference for political and social geography students, as well as sociologists and anthropologists.

In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars Britain found itself faced with a stagnant economy. Economist David Ricardo believed that the full re-integration of Britain into the world market would allow for both capital accumulation and population growth, and used arguments that anticipate ideas entertained in modern contributions to the theory of economic growth and development. However, several of these arguments have not yet been translated into the language of modern classical economics. Ricardo's Theory of Growth and Accumulation seeks to overcome this striking lacuna. The latest entry in the Graz Schumpeter lecture series, this text explores and elaborates Ricardo's arguments and the models utilized by those who subsequently followed in support of his work. The Ricardian system is first examined through a one-sector economy, following Kaldor's model, and a two-sector economy, following Pasinetti's model. These building blocks are developed through the exploration of a small open economy, which allows an analysis of the impact of international trade in exceedingly simple circumstances. This discussion expands further by considering the world economy. More sophisticated variants of the two-sector model are presented, in which commodity prices are endogenously determined by the trading interplay amongst several countries. A final analysis makes Ricardo's case by introducing accumulation in the world economy. This book is of interest to students and scholars of Ricardo, classical economics, and - more broadly - growth theory, the theory of international economics, and globalization. The author was keen to render the analytical parts compelling to the historian and the historical parts compelling to the theorist.

How does social spending relate to economic growth and which countries have got this right and wrong? Peter Lindert examines the experience of countries across the globe to reveal what has worked, what needs changing, and who the winners and losers are under different systems. He traces the development of public education, health care, pensions, and welfare provision, and addresses key questions around intergenerational inequality and fiscal redistribution, the returns to investment in human capital, how to deal with an aging population, whether migration is a cost or a benefit, and how social spending differs in autocracies and democracies. The book shows that what we need to do above all is to invest more in the young from cradle to career, and shift the burden of paying for social insurance away from the workplace and to society as a whole.

Following a remarkable epoch of greater dispersion of wealth and opportunity, we are inexorably returning towards a more feudal era marked by greater concentration of wealth and property, reduced upward mobility, demographic stagnation, and increased dogmatism. If the last seventy years saw a massive expansion of the middle class, not only in America but in much of the developed world, today that class is declining and a new, more hierarchical society is emerging. The new class structure resembles that of Medieval times. At the apex of the new order are two classes-a reborn clerical elite, the clerisy, which dominates the upper part of the professional ranks, universities, media and culture, and a new aristocracy led by tech oligarchs with unprecedented wealth and growing control of information. These two classes correspond to the old French First and Second Estates. Below these two classes lies what was once called the Third Estate. This includes the yeomanry, which is made up largely of small businesspeople, minor property owners, skilled workers and private-sector oriented professionals. Ascendant for much of modern history, this class is in decline while those below them, the new Serfs, grow in numbers-a vast, expanding property-less population. The trends are mounting, but we can still reverse them-if people understand what is actually occurring and have the capability to oppose them.

This volume explores the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for the sustainability of the present global political and economic system and the extent to which that system may as a result be undergoing transformation. Towards this aim, the contributing authors raise a number of key questions. First, what is likely to be the impact of the pandemic on the current global order based on neoliberal hyper-globalization? Second, what insights do earlier pandemics along with other inter-related crises such as those of climate, inequality, social reproduction, and continued fallout of the global financial crisis offer for understanding the medium- to long-term implications of COVID-19? Third, to what extent might the COVID pandemic lead to progressive political transformations? Towards this latter goal, the contributors to this volume also offer a number of suggestions as to what a post-COVID-19 world might look like and how post-COVID transformations might be channeled in a direction more conducive towards social justice and equality. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Globalizations.

This book investigates how African countries respond to socioeconomic shocks, drawing out lessons to help to inform future policy and development efforts. The challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic affected all sectors of the economy, exposing substantial structural weaknesses and complexities in supply chains and logistics across the African continent. This book examines the disruptive impact of the pandemic across Africa. However, it also goes beyond the current crisis to investigate how socioeconomic pressures in general impact commodity prices, national budgeting processes, food, business, energy sectors, education, health, and sanitation. Overall, the book presents evidence-based solutions and policy recommendations to enable readers to improve resilience and responses to future crises. The insights provided by this book will be of interest to policymakers and development agencies, as well as to researchers of global development, politics, economics, business, and African studies.

Is political equality viable given the unequal private property holdings characteristic of a capitalist economy? This book places the wealth-politics nexus at the centre of scholarly analysis. It brings the moral and political links between wealth and power into clear focus.

This book considers the past and present legacies, continuities and change of the United Nations Trusteeship System by assessing consequences and legacies of decolonization in contemporary society, international organizations and international politics. International contributors address the UN Trusteeship System as a venue for multiple state and non- state actors and its effect on the international system. Rather than viewing UN trusteeship as a bygone phenomenon, the volume underscores its current relevance, particularly in view of the recent resurgence of trusteeship models such as in Kosovo and East Timor. Offering a novel and robust, yet simple and intuitive analytical framework through which to understand a broad range of cases related to the Trusteeship System and its impact on the international system, the book places emphasis on the agency of states in the Global South and highlights the importance of multiple actors in global governance. It will be of interest to scholars of international relations theory and history in a variety of fields, ranging from African Politics to Intergovernmental Organizations and Comparative Politics.

Clusters and Sustainable Regional Development conceptualises the role of organised clusters in the transition towards sustainability. It introduces a novel perspective on these clusters, viewing them as deliberate collective actors within their environments that can become the driving force for transformation in their regions or nations. The book draws upon the meta-organisational perspective in cluster studies, in contrast to traditional approaches. This view suggests that clusters are not merely territories or geographical areas, but organised entities. As such, they are defined as territorially anchored groups of independent organisations engaging in joint decision-making, pursuing system-level goals and capable of purposive collective action. This text introduces a new set of ideas and questions at the intersection of economic geography, regional and cluster studies, organisation and management, policy and governance research. It will appeal to researchers from these diverse fields seeking to further develop the meta-organisational view of clusters as well as conceptualise their role in sustainability transitions. This book will also be a useful guide for policymakers who have an interest in the dynamics of economic development and the transition towards sustainability.

Connecting Practices develops a distinctive method of conceptualising significant trends and global issues including environmental sustainability and inequalities in wealth and health, arguing that these are outcomes of the ways in which social practices interact and combine across space and time. Engaging with the question of how connections are made between practices and how past and present combinations make some futures more likely than others, this book brings practice theory to bear on large problems in society. Richly illustrated with examples from the spreading of germs to the history of shipping containers, this powerful analysis of how societies hang together and how they change will appeal to scholars and students of sociology and social theory.

Nunzio Ali's Proportional Justice and Economic Inequality - Explores how social justice correlates with economic inequality to favour the best-off and advocates for a system of proportional justice. - discusses the primary rules of society and material domination in contemporary politics; how money influences politics and what are the remedies for this phenomenon; the space of 'merit' in a liberal democracy; social justice faces the questions of power, poverty, efficiency, individual merit, and economic liberties; and most importantly, how to determine income and wealth limit ratios in a liberal democracy. - will be of great interest to students and researchers of political theory, political philosophy, economics and development, economics theory and philosophy, and social policy.

In an age of extreme political polarization and waning of reasoned debate across political divides, Capitalism for Realists carefully explores the inner workings of capitalism in a consciously non-partisan and balanced way. Does the modern capitalist economy alleviate poverty and exploitation, or exacerbate them? What, exactly, is 'neoliberalism,' and how well or poorly has it performed in the past 40 years? Does capitalism undermine democracy, or is it rather one of its key necessary conditions? How have altruism, cooperation, tolerance, violence, and trust fared under the influence of the modern market society? Should we analyse capitalism through the mainstream economic lens or a more critical Marxist perspective? This book offers answers to these questions. Synthesizing decades of research across disciplines, Capitalism for Realists offers an overarching perspective on the modern economy by theoretically unifying many of the claims and conclusions about it offered by various traditionally rivalrous social science paradigms, such as institutional, neoclassical, and public choice economics on the one hand, and Marxist sociology on the other. The book presents and critically assesses the latest data and debates on such crucial contemporary issues as the relationship between poverty, exploitation, inequality, and capitalism, the nature of 'neoliberalism' and the successes and failures of both state-led industrial policy and the Washington consensus, capitalist peace theory, historical origins of modern capitalism, and more. What emerges is a clear picture of the merits and demerits of the modern economy too nuanced to be simplified and categorized by the prevailing political discourses. Rich in empirical detail, this lively, accessible book will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students with interests in sociological theory, political theory, economics, and political and economic sociology.

Insurance Market Integration in the European Union offers an in-depth analysis of the mechanisms of insurance market integration and measures the degrees of this integration. It examines the operation of the EU single financial market and, against this backdrop, the regulation relating to the insurance market. In addition, the book focuses on the specificity and determinants of international insurance market development and the issues with assimilation set against other financial market segments such as money market, credit-deposit and bond and equity. It discusses the advantages and disadvantages of insurance market integration on an international scale. The authors propose a unique approach to the subject in the context of the EU and particularly in relation to the European area. They also apply new measures of insurance market integration in the EU in practice through the use of statistical data and implementation of econometric modeling. Further, they investigate how the financial and fiscal crisis has affected the insurance market in EU countries and the impact of European Central Bank monetary policy on the degrees of integration in the European area during and after the financial crisis. This book will find an audience among academics and researchers in the fields of international economics and finance and applied, financial and growth economics.

"Why is it so difficult to develop and sustain liberal democracy? The best recent work on this subject comes from a remarkable pair of scholars, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. In their latest book, The Narrow Corridor, they have answered this question with great insight." -Fareed Zakaria, The Washington Post From the authors of the international bestseller Why Nations Fail, a crucial new big-picture framework that answers the question of how liberty flourishes in some states but falls to authoritarianism or anarchy in others--and explains how it can continue to thrive despite new threats. In Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson argued that countries rise and fall based not on culture, geography, or chance, but on the power of their institutions. In their new book, they build a new theory about liberty and how to achieve it, drawing a wealth of evidence from both current affairs and disparate threads of world history. Liberty is hardly the "natural" order of things. In most places and at most times, the strong have dominated the weak and human freedom has been quashed by force or by customs and norms. Either states have been too weak to protect individuals from these threats, or states have been too strong for people to protect themselves from despotism. Liberty emerges only when a delicate and precarious balance is struck between state and society. There is a Western myth that political liberty is a durable construct, arrived at by a process of "enlightenment." This static view is a fantasy, the authors argue. In reality, the corridor to liberty is narrow and stays open only via a fundamental and incessant struggle between state and society: The authors look to the American Civil Rights Movement, Europe's early and recent history, the Zapotec civilization circa 500 BCE, and Lagos's efforts to uproot corruption and institute government accountability to illustrate what it takes to get and stay in the corridor. But they also examine Chinese imperial history, colonialism in the Pacific, India's caste system, Saudi Arabia's suffocating cage of norms, and the "Paper Leviathan" of many Latin American and African nations to show how countries can drift away from it, and explain the feedback loops that make liberty harder to achieve. Today we are in the midst of a time of wrenching destabilization. We need liberty more than ever, and yet the corridor to liberty is becoming narrower and more treacherous. The danger on the horizon is not "just" the loss of our political freedom, however grim that is in itself; it is also the disintegration of the prosperity and safety that critically depend on liberty. The opposite of the corridor of liberty is the road to ruin.