The politics of land are vital. They stretch from fights over fracking, gentrification, and taxation to land grabs, dispossession, and border conflicts. And they raise crucial questions about power, authority, violence, populism, and neoliberalism. This volume of Research in Political Sociology seeks to carve out a renewed political sociology of land, bringing together classic questions about the state, commodification, and social change and contemporary studies of contentious land use in various parts of the world. An introductory essay sketches foundations for a political sociology of land and specifies what is unique about land in comparison to other political objects. Chapters are based on highly original qualitative, quantitative, and/or historical analyses to shed light on numerous dimensions of land politics. They include analyses of anti-fracking campaigns, property tax caps, and "green gentrification" in the United States, soil protection regulation in Europe, squatter settlements in Peru, land grabs in peri-urban China and rural Senegal, violent expulsions in Colombia, and the privatization of property rights in Morocco. The volume brings together high quality, peer-reviewed research, opens up novel comparisons, and enriches theories of the state, commodification, and collective resistance.

What does it mean when consumers "shop with a conscience" and choose products labeled as fair or sustainable? Does this translate into meaningful changes in global production processes? To what extent are voluntary standards implemented and enforced, and can they really govern global industries? Looking behind the Label presents an informative introduction to global production and ethical consumption, tracing the links between consumers' choices and the practices of multinational producers and retailers. Case studies of several types of products-wood and paper, food, apparel and footwear, and electronics-are used to reveal what lies behind voluntary rules and to critique predominant assumptions about ethical consumption as a form of political expression.

This open access book explains why, in today's economy, companies need to implement artificial intelligence (AI) in a responsible and ethical way and how they can go about doing so. Business use of AI can produce tremendous insights and benefits. But it can also invade privacy, perpetuate bias, and produce other harms that injure people and damage business reputation. The authors interviewed and surveyed AI ethics managers at leading companies. They asked why these experts see AI ethics as important, and how they seek to achieve it. This book conveys the results of that research on a concise, accessible way that readers should be able to apply to their own organizations. Much of the existing writing on AI ethics focuses either on macro-level AI ethics principles, or on micro-level product design and tooling. The interviews showed that companies need a third component: AI ethics management. This third component consists of the management structures, processes, training and substantive benchmarks that companies use to operationalize their high-level AI ethics principles and to guide and hold accountable their developers.  AI ethics management is the connective tissue that makes AI ethics principles real. It is the focus of this book. This book provides a “snapshot� of AI ethics management at an array of highly sophisticated, AI-enabled companies. Other organizations, at an earlier stage in their AI journeys, should be able to draw from it useful lessons on how they, too, can pursue ethical and responsible AI and so succeed in the AI-driven economy.

What does it mean when consumers "shop with a conscience" and choose products labeled as fair or sustainable? Does this translate into meaningful changes in global production processes? To what extent are voluntary standards implemented and enforced, and can they really govern global industries? Looking behind the Label presents an informative introduction to global production and ethical consumption, tracing the links between consumers' choices and the practices of multinational producers and retailers. Case studies of several types of products-wood and paper, food, apparel and footwear, and electronics-are used to reveal what lies behind voluntary rules and to critique predominant assumptions about ethical consumption as a form of political expression.

This book brings together some of the most influential new research from the world-systems perspective. The authors survey and analyze new and emerging topics from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, from political science to archaeology. Each analytical essay is written in accessible language so that the volume serves as a lucid introduction both to the tradition of world-systems thought and the new debates that are sparking further research today.