Flower of Capitalism

Flower of Capitalism PDF

Author: Olga Fedorenko

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2022-07-31

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0824893255

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

An ethnography of advertising in postmillennial South Korea, Flower of Capitalism: South Korean Advertising at a Crossroads details contests over advertising freedoms and obligations among divergent vested interests while positing far-reaching questions about the social contract that governs advertising in late-capitalist societies. The term “flower of capitalism” is a clichéd metaphor for advertising in South Korea, bringing resolutely positive connotations, which downplay the commercial purposes of advertising and give prominence to its potential for public service. Historically, South Korean advertising was tasked to promote virtue with its messages, while allocation of advertising expenditures among the mass media was monitored and regulated to curb advertisers’ influence in the name of public interest. Though this ideal was often sacrificed to situational considerations, South Korean advertising had been remarkably accountable to public scrutiny and popular demands. This beneficent role of advertising, however, came under attack as a neoliberal hegemony consolidated in South Korea in the twenty-first century. Flower of Capitalism examines the clash of advertising's old obligations and new freedoms, as it was navigated by advertising practitioners, censors, audiences, and activists. It weaves together a rich multi-sited ethnography—at an advertising agency and at an advertising censorship board—with an in-depth exploration of advertising-related controversies—from provocative advertising campaigns to advertising boycotts. Advertising emerges as a contested social institution whose connections to business, mass media, and government are continuously tested and revised. Olga Fedorenko challenges the mainstream notions of advertising, which universalize the ways it developed in Transatlantic countries, and offers a glimpse of what advertising could look like if its public effects were taken as seriously as its marketing goals. A critical and innovative intervention into the studies of advertising, Flower of Capitalism breaks new ground in current debates on the intersection of media, culture, and politics.

A Feast of Flowers

A Feast of Flowers PDF

Author: Christopher Krupa

Publisher:

Published: 2022-05-10

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 9780812225129

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In A Feast of Flowers, Christopher Krupa focuses on Ecuador's booming cut-flower sector and shows how capitalist expansion bound the Global South to new modes of financial dependency and subjected indigenous workers to elaborate forms of racial "improvement" and uplift.

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data PDF

Author: Viktor Mayer-Schönberger

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2018-02-27

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0465093698

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

From the New York Times bestselling author of Big Data, a prediction for how data will revolutionize the market economy and make cash, banks, and big companies obsolete In modern history, the story of capitalism has been a story of firms and financiers. That's all going to change thanks to the Big Data revolution. As Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, bestselling author of Big Data, and Thomas Ramge, who writes for The Economist, show, data is replacing money as the driver of market behavior. Big finance and big companies will be replaced by small groups and individual actors who make markets instead of making things: think Uber instead of Ford, or Airbnb instead of Hyatt. This is the dawn of the era of data capitalism. Will it be an age of prosperity or of calamity? This book provides the indispensable roadmap for securing a better future.

Favored Flowers

Favored Flowers PDF

Author: Catherine Ziegler

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2007-07-10

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 0822390019

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Billions of fresh-cut flowers are flown into the United States every year, allowing Americans to choose from a broad array of blooms regardless of the season. Favored Flowers is a lively investigation of the worldwide production and distribution of fresh-cut flowers and their consumption in the New York metropolitan area. In an ethnography filled with roses, orchids, and gerberas, flower auctions, new hybrids, and new logistical systems, Catherine Ziegler unravels the economic and cultural strands of the global flower market. She provides an historical overview of the development of the cut flower industry in New York from the late nineteenth century to 1970, and on to its ultimate transformation from a domestic to a global industry. As she points out, cut flowers serve no utilitarian purpose; rather, they signal consumers’ social and cultural decisions about expressing love, mourning, status, and identity. Ziegler shows how consumer behavior and choices have changed over time and how they are shaped by the media, by the types of available flowers, and by flower retailing. Ziegler interviewed more than 250 people as she followed flowers along the full length of the commodity chain, from cuttings in Europe and Latin America to vases in and around New York. She examines the daily experiences of flower growers in the Netherlands and Ecuador, two leading exporters of flowers to the United States. Primary focus, though, is on others in the commodity chain: exporters, importers, wholesalers, and retailers. She follows their activities as they respond to changing competition, supply, and consumer behavior in a market characterized by risk, volatility, and imperfect knowledge. By tracing changes in the wholesale and retail systems, she shows the recent development of two complementary commodity chains in New York and the United States generally. One leads to a high-end luxury market served by specialty florists and designers, and the other to a lower-priced mass market served by chain groceries, corner delis, and retail superstores.

Plants and Empire

Plants and Empire PDF

Author: Londa Schiebinger

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-07-01

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 0674043278

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Plants seldom figure in the grand narratives of war, peace, or even everyday life yet they are often at the center of high intrigue. In the eighteenth century, epic scientific voyages were sponsored by European imperial powers to explore the natural riches of the New World, and uncover the botanical secrets of its people. Bioprospectors brought back medicines, luxuries, and staples for their king and country. Risking their lives to discover exotic plants, these daredevil explorers joined with their sponsors to create a global culture of botany. But some secrets were unearthed only to be lost again. In this moving account of the abuses of indigenous Caribbean people and African slaves, Schiebinger describes how slave women brewed the "peacock flower" into an abortifacient, to ensure that they would bear no children into oppression. Yet, impeded by trade winds of prevailing opinion, knowledge of West Indian abortifacients never flowed into Europe. A rich history of discovery and loss, Plants and Empire explores the movement, triumph, and extinction of knowledge in the course of encounters between Europeans and the Caribbean populations.

Capitalism without Capital

Capitalism without Capital PDF

Author: Jonathan Haskel

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2018-10-16

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 0691183295

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Early in the twenty-first century, a quiet revolution occurred. For the first time, the major developed economies began to invest more in intangible assets, like design, branding, and software, than in tangible assets, like machinery, buildings, and computers. For all sorts of businesses, the ability to deploy assets that one can neither see nor touch is increasingly the main source of long-term success. But this is not just a familiar story of the so-called new economy. Capitalism without Capital shows that the growing importance of intangible assets has also played a role in some of the larger economic changes of the past decade, including the growth in economic inequality and the stagnation of productivity. Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake explore the unusual economic characteristics of intangible investment and discuss how an economy rich in intangibles is fundamentally different from one based on tangibles. Capitalism without Capital concludes by outlining how managers, investors, and policymakers can exploit the characteristics of an intangible age to grow their businesses, portfolios, and economies.

Milton Friedman

Milton Friedman PDF

Author: Jennifer Burns

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2023-11-14

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13: 0374601151

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

An Economist Best Book of 2023 | One of The New York Times's 33 Nonfiction Books to Read This Fall | Named a most anticipated fall book by the Chicago Tribune and Bloomberg "Wherever you sit on the political spectrum, there's a lot to learn from this book. More than a biography of one controversial person, it's an intellectual history of twentieth century economic thought." —Greg Rosalesky, Planet Money (NPR) The first full biography of America’s most renowned economist. Milton Friedman was, alongside John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the twentieth century. His work was instrumental in the turn toward free markets that defined the 1980s, and his full-throated defenses of capitalism and freedom resonated with audiences around the world. It’s no wonder the last decades of the twentieth century have been called “the Age of Friedman”—or that analysts have sought to hold him responsible for both the rising prosperity and the social ills of recent times. In Milton Friedman, the first full biography to employ archival sources, the historian Jennifer Burns tells Friedman’s extraordinary story with the nuance it deserves. She provides lucid and lively context for his groundbreaking work on everything from why dentists earn less than doctors, to the vital importance of the money supply, to inflation and the limits of government planning and stimulus. She traces Friedman’s longstanding collaborations with women, including the economist Anna Schwartz, as well as his complex relationships with powerful figures such as Fed Chair Arthur Burns and Treasury Secretary George Shultz, and his direct interventions in policymaking at the highest levels. Most of all, Burns explores Friedman’s key role in creating a new economic vision and a modern American conservatism. The result is a revelatory biography of America’s first neoliberal—and perhaps its last great conservative.

The Myth of Chinese Capitalism

The Myth of Chinese Capitalism PDF

Author: Dexter Roberts

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2020-03-10

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 1250089387

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The untold story of how restrictive policies are preventing China from becoming the world’s largest economy Dexter Roberts lived in Beijing for two decades working as a reporter on economics, business and politics for Bloomberg Businessweek. In The Myth of Chinese Capitalism, Roberts explores the reality behind today’s financially-ascendant China and pulls the curtain back on how the Chinese manufacturing machine is actually powered. He focuses on two places: the village of Binghuacun in the province of Guizhou, one of China’s poorest regions that sends the highest proportion of its youth away to become migrants; and Dongguan, China’s most infamous factory town located in Guangdong, home to both the largest number of migrant workers and the country’s biggest manufacturing base. Within these two towns and the people that move between them, Roberts focuses on the story of the Mo family, former farmers-turned-migrant-workers who are struggling to make a living in a fast-changing country that relegates one-half of its people to second-class status via household registration, land tenure policies and inequality in education and health care systems. In The Myth of Chinese Capitalism, Dexter Roberts brings to life the problems that China and its people face today as they attempt to overcome a divisive system that poses a serious challenge to the country’s future development. In so doing, Roberts paints a boot-on-the-ground cautionary picture of China for a world now held in its financial thrall. Dexter Roberts is an award-winning journalist and a regular commentator on the U.S.-China trade and political relationship. His prior speaking engagements include traditional news media outlets (NPR, Fox News, CNN International) as well as universities and institutes (George Washington University, Council on Foreign Relations, and the Overseas Press Club). He is available for virtual classroom visits to courses that adopt The Myth of Chinese Capitalism. Please contact [email protected] for more information.

A Feast of Flowers

A Feast of Flowers PDF

Author: Christopher Krupa

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2022-04-05

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 081229842X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In A Feast of Flowers, Christopher Krupa focuses on Ecuador's booming cut-flower sector and shows how capitalist expansion bound the Global South to new modes of financial dependency and subjected indigenous workers to elaborate forms of racial "improvement" and uplift.

Flowerevolution

Flowerevolution PDF

Author: Katie Hess

Publisher: Hay House, Inc

Published: 2016-11-15

Total Pages: 621

ISBN-13: 140194826X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Flowerevolution is part traditional guidebook, part “choose-your-own-adventure”. From a stunning array of flower photographs, readers can choose the flowers they’re most attracted to, and based on those choices discover an interactive system that reveals their state of mind. The book provides specific questions for reflection and action steps to catalyze transformation in their lives. Using flowers as teachers, they can rediscover how to find new insights about themselves and their world. In many ways, with the current advancements in technology, we’ve lost our connection to nature, and in turn, our connection to ourselves. This disconnection leads to stress, fatigue, and imbalance. In Flowerevolution, we will explore the vast and beautiful world of flowers and learn how flower elixirs can be used to help us bring nature back into our everyday modern lifestyles. Packed with information, stories, reflections, and rituals, this interactive book is designed to open up readers to a fresh new world of magic and possibility. Flowerevolution reveals the secret healing powers of flowers, including ancient and modern methods for harnessing their unique qualities, like flower rituals, flower baths, and special applications for flower elixirs. “Flowers only live for a week. This book will live in your heart forever —and that’s our gift to you.”