In the history business, calling a work a classic can be a double-edged sword. Daniel Cornford’s book is a classic in the best way. His analysis of California’s redwood forests and those who turned them into lumber is a finely wrought piece of historical scholarship Published in 1987 by Temple University Press, Workers and Dissent in the Redwood Empire focuses attention on a place that need…
When companies fail, several reasons (some more likely than others) can be turned to in order to explain why. Managers look for these typically interrelated networks of reasons in attempts to secure themselves and future companies from the same failure happening again. This necessitates knowledge, which, based on past experience, provides forecasts and is operational at an early stage. One reas…
Why is social media in southeast Italy so predictable when it is used by such a range of different people? This book describes the impact of social media on the population of a town in the southern region of Puglia, Italy. Razvan Nicolescu spent 15 months living among the town’s residents, exploring what it means to be an individual on social media. Why do people from this region conform on p…
Informed by the work of writers such as Henri Lefebvre, Paul Ricoeur and Michel de Certeau, this collection of essays examines through multiple lenses eight topics related to the contemporary urban domain. The author employs powerful geographic and literary concepts such as space, narrative, and metaphor to interpret the often-bewildering complexity of the post-modern city. Recalling key aspect…
The Global Network for the Economics of Learning, Innovation, and Competence Building Systems (Globelics) is an open and diverse community of scholars working on innovation and competence building in the context of economic development. The major purpose of the network is to contribute to building capacity and create a forum for exchange worldwide in the innovation and development research fiel…
One of the first ethnographic studies to explore use of social media in the everyday lives of people in Tamil Nadu, Social Media in South India provides an understanding of this subject in a region experiencing rapid transformation. The influx of IT companies over the past decade into what was once a space dominated by agriculture has resulted in a complex juxtaposition between an evolving know…
In 2018, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees documented a record high 71.4 million displaced people around the world. As states struggle with the costs of providing protection to so many people and popular conceptions of refugees have become increasingly politicized and sensationalized, researchers have come together to form regional and global networks dedicated to working with dis…
Sisterhood and Solidarity was one of the first volumes, and remains one of the few, to call attention to the importance of workers’ education for women. The ten original essays, written by some of the best known labor and working-class history scholars of the time, analyze an educational experiment in which industrial, clerical, and service workers participated with educators, feminists, and …
Recent years have witnessed considerable speculation about the potential of open data to bring about wide-scale transformation. The bulk of existing evidence about the impact of open data, however, focuses on high-income countries. Much less is known about open data’s role and value in low- and middle-income countries, and more generally about its possible contributions to economic and social…
A century ago, agriculture was the dominant economic sector in much of Africa. By the 1990s, however, African farmers had declining incomes and were worse off, on average, than those who did not farm. Colonial policies, subsequent ‘top-down’ statism, and globalization are usually cited as primary causes of this long-term decline. In this unprecedented study of the Igbo region of southeaster…