Search results

The works of Stephen Bunker represent early, sometimes unacknowledged, contributions to a sociological imagination regarding the role of nature and raw material extraction in processes of social change. By engaging debates defined within a world-systems frame of national state power and cycles of capital accumulation, Bunker's work maintains the hierarchy of core, semi-peripheral, and peripheral states. While bridging the local and the global in unusual ways, his emphasis is predominantly on the external limits posed by nature and global markets on peripheries and the converse advantages offered to cores, thus allowing less room in the analysis for questioning which particular totality(ies) of social structure and relations are open to sociological inquiry. Gleaning the contributions from a socionatural approach and relating them back to Bunker's commodity-based approach may expand the purview for analyses of the intersection of the natural and the social. In this chapter, I argue that attention to ‘nature’ in its multiple socionatural occurrences contributes to an understanding of the structuring of power in time and place. I rely on geographer Eric Swyngedouw's deployment of the concept of ‘socionature’ and the framework of actor-network theory to explore the benefits as well as challenges of a more relational, nondualistic sociological analysis of society and nature.

The purpose of this chapter is to critically examine the extent to which oil multinational corporations (MNCs) can be both money makers and peace makers in the Niger Delta area of Nigeria, and to consider its implication for the role of business in conflict mitigation in resource-rich African countries.

The chapter presents a theoretical analysis based on secondary data and empirical research.

There is now an emerging consensus that business can be peace makers and money makers in developing countries as part of their social responsibility. However, the tendency to explore business-conflict linkage largely from a business perspective and to see conflict as an “incidence” that business has to respond to, as opposed to a “dynamic process” that is a function of the breakdown of stakeholder relationship, limits our understanding of the relationship between business and conflict. Focusing on the Niger Delta in Nigeria, it is argued that the contradictory tension inherent in the peace making efforts of oil MNCs and the nature of their core business activities (i.e., oil extraction) limits the incentives and undermines the capacity of oil MNCs to be peace makers.

The chapter contributes a critical perspective to the literature on business and conflict informed by nearly two decades of empirical research undertaken by the author in Africa. It analyzes how contextual factors in resource-rich African countries, previously neglected in the literature, influence both the willingness and ability of business to contribute to peace. It concludes by discussing the theoretical and practical implications for the role of business in conflict zones.

In 1920 Margaret Sanger called voluntary motherhood “the key to the temple of liberty” and noted that women were “rising in fundamental revolt” to claim their right to determine their own reproductive fate (Rothman, 2000, p. 73). Decades later Barbara Katz Rothman reflected on the social, political and legal changes produced by reproductive-rights feminists since that time. She wrote: So the reproductive-rights feminists of the 1970s won, and abortion is available – just as the reproductive-rights feminists of the 1920s won, and contraception is available. But in another sense, we did not win. We did not win, could not win, because Sanger was right. What we really wanted was the fundamental revolt, the “key to the temple of liberty.” A doctor’s fitting for a diaphragm, or a clinic appointment for an abortion, is not the revolution. It is not even a woman-centered approach to reproduction (2000, p. 79).

The cycle of external indebtedness of dependent countries has become a huge constraint on any strategy for radical social change.

Argentina has recently entered a new process of debt overhang and renegotiation with the International Monetary Fund and private global creditors. The dominant debate around the country's foreign debt revolves around the conditions that can guarantee the sustainability of repayment. The underlying objective is to remain in the debt system that produces and reproduces dependency.

This chapter will seek to analyze the question of debt sustainability from another point of view: Is it possible to guarantee the (financial) sustainability of the debt at the same time as guaranteeing the sustainability of life? Our argument is that by remaining in the global debt system, Argentina creates conditions that violate the requirements for the sustainability of human and nonhuman life. Drawing on a discussion from Marxist dependency theory and the traditions of Marxist feminism and environmentalism, we will discuss how the debt sustainability argument presupposes the impossibility of reproducing life. In particular, we will show how the conditions required to guarantee debt sustainability in Argentina entail the deepening of the superexploitation of the “productive” and “reproductive” labor force, and the exacerbation of extractivism, putting social reproduction in crisis.

The increasing importance and proliferation of text data provide a unique opportunity and novel lens to study human communication across a myriad of business and marketing applications. For example, consumers compare and review products online, individuals interact with their voice assistants to search, shop, and express their needs, investors seek to extract signals from firms' press releases to improve their investment decisions, and firms analyze sales call transcripts to increase customer satisfaction and conversions. However, extracting meaningful information from unstructured text data is a nontrivial task. In this chapter, we review established natural language processing (NLP) methods for traditional tasks (e.g., LDA for topic modeling and lexicons for sentiment analysis and writing style extraction) and provide an outlook into the future of NLP in marketing, covering recent embedding-based approaches, pretrained language models, and transfer learning for novel tasks such as automated text generation and multi-modal representation learning. These emerging approaches allow the field to improve its ability to perform certain tasks that we have been using for more than a decade (e.g., text classification). But more importantly, they unlock entirely new types of tasks that bring about novel research opportunities (e.g., text summarization, and generative question answering). We conclude with a roadmap and research agenda for promising NLP applications in marketing and provide supplementary code examples to help interested scholars to explore opportunities related to NLP in marketing.

This chapter relates Bunker's innovative view of nature, raw materials and political economy to the “global commodity chains” (GCCs) approach. The chapter contends that his view of the importance of primary material extraction, shipping, and energy used in various “transformations” of these crucial products can be fruitfully married to a GCCs perspective.

David Gordon was, at once, a highly creative economist with an enormous range of interests, while also uncompromising in maintaining rigorous research standards. He focused equally on hard-core academic research and pressing policy issues. He was also openly committed to the political left, with this commitment animating all his work. One distinctive feature of Gordon’s work was his keenness to dive into the most important topics engaging mainstream economists and to inject explicitly left political economy perspectives into these mainstream debates. This paper focuses on two important examples of Gordon’s contributions that examine front-and-center mainstream macroeconomics questions. The first is the relationship between aggregate saving and investment. The second is the development of the concept of the “natural rate of unemployment.” The evolution of mainstream research on these two questions played a critical role in overturning what had been, over the first two post-World War II decades, a prevailing Keynesian/social democratic consensus, at both the levels of analytic economics as well as economic policy. As the paper reviews, Gordon challenges the analytic findings and policy implications of these perspectives at their core. Gordon’s own basic premises and results are straightforward. He argues that, in fact, investment decisions, not saving rates, are the main driver of economic activity in capitalist economies and that operating capitalist economies at something akin to genuine full employment – that is, in the range of 2–3 percent official unemployment – is a realistic goal. As such, these papers by Gordon contribute significantly toward envisioning a post-neoliberal social structure of accumulation that is committed to the egalitarian principles that were central to Gordon’s life work.

The World Bank report Changing Wealth of Nations 2018 is only the most recent reminder of how much poorer Africa is becoming, losing more than US$100 billion annually from minerals, oil, and gas extraction, according to (quite conservatively framed) environmentally sensitive adjustments of wealth. With popular opposition to socioeconomic, political, and ecological abuses rising rapidly in Africa, a robust debate may be useful: between those practicing anti-extractivist resistance, and those technocrats in states and international agencies who promote “ecological modernization” strategies. The latter typically aim to generate full-cost environmental accounting, and to do so they typically utilize market-related techniques to value, measure, and price nature. Between the grassroots and technocratic standpoints, a layer of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) do not yet appear capable of grappling with anti-extractivist politics with either sufficient intellectual tools or political courage. They instead revert to easier terrains within ecological modernization: revenue transparency, project damage mitigation, Free Prior and Informed Consent (community consultation and permission), and other assimilationist reforms. More attention to political-economic and political-ecological trends – including the end of the commodity super-cycle, worsening climate change, financial turbulence and the potential end of a 40-year long globalization process – might assist anti-extractivist activists and NGO reformers alike. Both could then gravitate to broader, more effective ways of conceptualizing extraction and unequal ecological exchange, especially in Africa’s hardest hit and most extreme sites of devastation.

The chapter investigates three channels through which private benefits are hypothesized to be extracted in dual class companies: excess executive compensation, excess capital expenditures and excess cash holdings.

With a propensity score matched sample of S&P 1500 dual class and single class companies with concentrated control, the chapter analyzes the relationship between the valuation discount of dual class companies and measures of excess executive compensation, excess capital expenditure and excess cash holdings.

Executives in dual class firms earn greater compensation relative to their counterparts in single class firms. This excess compensation is more pronounced when the executive is a family member. The value of dual class shares is discounted most when cash holdings and executive compensation of dual class are excessive. Excess compensation is highest for executives who are family members of dual class companies. The dual class discount is not related to excess capital expenditures.

The research shows that the discount in the value of dual class shares in relation to the value of closely controlled single class company shares is directly related to the channels through which controlling shareholder-managers can extract private benefits.