This book gathers the work of leading scholars from several disciplines on fragile regions, especially those regions seeking to preserve, strengthen or create processes to restore or reestablish security and effective social and economic management. It tackles the multifarious issues that shape and affect fragile regions, drawing upon a wide range of intellectual and methodological approaches, including such fields as area studies, natural resource science, biology, environmental and resource economics and management, and political economy. The volume brings together the perspectives of a diverse group of contributors from Australia, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, and the United States. Managing Fragile Regions: Method and Application addresses a variety of factors - natural, political, administrative, legislative, economic, social, and cultural - and examines how they exert influences on the operational mechanisms of fragile regions, especially in the contexts of peace and security, economic development, and environmental management. The volume's nine chapters cover a wide range of examples of fragile regions and their challenges. It will be of interest and utility to practitioners and policy-makers engaged in disaster management and post-disaster reconstruction. Students, researchers, and other professionals involved in resource management, regional science, and environmental science will also find it valuable reading.

This book gathers the work of leading scholars from several disciplines on fragile regions, especially those regions seeking to preserve, strengthen or create processes to restore or reestablish security and effective social and economic management. It tackles the multifarious issues that shape and affect fragile regions, drawing upon a wide range of intellectual and methodological approaches, including such fields as area studies, natural resource science, biology, environmental and resource economics and management, and political economy. The volume brings together the perspectives of a diverse group of contributors from Australia, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, and the United States. "Managing Fragile Regions: Method and Application" addresses a variety of factors - natural, political, administrative, legislative, economic, social, and cultural - and examines how they exert influences on the operational mechanisms of fragile regions, especially in the contexts of peace and security, economic development, and environmental management. The volume's nine chapters cover a wide range of examples of fragile regions and their challenges. It will be of interest and utility to practitioners and policy-makers engaged in disaster management and post-disaster reconstruction. Students, researchers, and other professionals involved in resource management, regional science, and environmental science will also find it valuable reading.

"High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy" is an ethnography of globalization positioned at the intersection between political economy and cultural studies. Carla Freeman's fieldwork in Barbados grounds the processes of transnational capitalism--production, consumption, and the crafting of modern identities--in the lives of Afro-Caribbean women working in a new high-tech industry called "informatics." It places gender at the center of transnational analysis, and local Caribbean culture and history at the center of global studies.
Freeman examines the expansion of the global assembly line into the realm of computer-based work, and focuses specifically on the incorporation of young Barbadian women into these high-tech informatics jobs. As such, Caribbean women are seen as integral not simply to the workings of globalization but as helping to shape its very form. Through the enactment of "professionalism" in both appearances and labor practices, and by insisting that motherhood and work go hand in hand, they re-define the companies' profile of "ideal" workers and create their own "pink-collar" identities. Through new modes of dress and imagemaking, the informatics workers seek to distinguish themselves from factory workers, and to achieve these new modes of consumption, they engage in a wide array of extra income earning activities. Freeman argues that for the new Barbadian pink-collar workers, the globalization of production cannot be viewed apart from the globalization of consumption. In doing so, she shows the connections between formal and informal economies, and challenges long-standing oppositions between first world consumers and third world producers, as well as white-collar and blue-collar labor.
Written in a style that allows the voices of the pink-collar workers to demonstrate the simultaneous burdens and pleasures of their work, "High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy" will appeal to scholars and students in a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, women's studies, political economy, and Caribbean studies, as well as labor and postcolonial studies.

"Entrepreneurial Selves" is an ethnography of neoliberalism. Bridging political economy and affect studies, Carla Freeman turns a spotlight on the entrepreneur, a figure saluted across the globe as the very embodiment of neoliberalism. Steeped in more than a decade of ethnography on the emergent entrepreneurial middle class of Barbados, she finds dramatic reworkings of selfhood, intimacy, labor, and life amid the rumbling effects of political-economic restructuring. She shows us that the deja vu of neoliberalism, the global hailing of entrepreneurial flexibility and its concomitant project of self-making, can only be grasped through the thickness of cultural specificity where its costs and pleasures are unevenly felt. Freeman theorizes postcolonial neoliberalism by reimagining the Caribbean cultural model of 'reputation-respectability.' This remarkable book will allow readers to see how the material social practices formerly associated with resistance to capitalism (reputation) are being mobilized in ways that sustain neoliberal precepts and, in so doing, re-map class, race, and gender through a new emotional economy.

Surging middle-class aspirations and anxieties throughout the world have recently compelled anthropologists to pay serious attention to middle classes and middle-class spaces, sentiments, lifestyles, labours, and civic engagements. Middle classness has become a powerful category for self-identification, as political and corporate leaders increasingly hail "the middle classes" as the ideal subject-citizenry. Ethnographically rich and culturally particular, the essays in this volume elucidate middle-class experience and discourse and in so doing add critical nuance to theories of class itself.

Sara and Sam Moore raised two beautiful children, Andrew and Angela, inspite of being the head of the mob underworld. Now the family is legit and has diversified into other businesses. Andrew and Angela have taken over the business to give Mom and Dad a chance to retire. But still memories are forever and grudges eat away until one day their whole world crashes down around them. Sam's sudden and tragic death has put Sara into a deep and depressive grieving period. This hit on the family might be just the cure to get her back into life again. Andrew and Angela have run the family for sometime and now must go encourage Sara to take back the helm. But Sara must teach her children how to stay alive. How to fight to win. And most important, how to keep their perspective while doing so.

Sara Bentley a young P.I. just widowed and on her own has to find the culprit that took her husbands life. She meets Sam Moore a bodyguard that comes into her life and changes the way she thinks about love and happiness. Through the twists and turns she has a difficult time seperating the good guys from the bad. Sara runs into an old childhood friend who helps turn her life around and sends her on an adventure that will change her life forever. You will laugh and love along with Sara and Sam while trying to capture the murderers of her family. Meeting very interesting charactors from the twenty-four-hour state of Nevada.

Sara, the mob boss of Las Vegas, has turned her company into a legitimate corporation, so why is someone trying to bring her down. Sara and Sam Moore must look into their past and take a close look at the present to find the person responsible for the bombing of her Country Club and later the death of her friend. For nine years the Moore family has lived in peace. Who could do such a thing? No one gets away with trying to harm her family and now she must gather her troops and go to war one more time to save their future and their childrens future. There are enough twists and turns to keep you entertained to the very end and wondering who will come out alive.

"Entrepreneurial Selves" is an ethnography of neoliberalism. Bridging political economy and affect studies, Carla Freeman turns a spotlight on the entrepreneur, a figure saluted across the globe as the very embodiment of neoliberalism. Steeped in more than a decade of ethnography on the emergent entrepreneurial middle class of Barbados, she finds dramatic reworkings of selfhood, intimacy, labor, and life amid the rumbling effects of political-economic restructuring. She shows us that the deja vu of neoliberalism, the global hailing of entrepreneurial flexibility and its concomitant project of self-making, can only be grasped through the thickness of cultural specificity where its costs and pleasures are unevenly felt. Freeman theorizes postcolonial neoliberalism by reimagining the Caribbean cultural model of 'reputation-respectability.' This remarkable book will allow readers to see how the material social practices formerly associated with resistance to capitalism (reputation) are being mobilized in ways that sustain neoliberal precepts and, in so doing, re-map class, race, and gender through a new emotional economy.