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In a process termed “organizational centrifugalism,” this chapter describes how avant-garde artists sought new, alternative organizational spaces for innovations in the visual arts from the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth century and how new alternative marketspaces co-evolved with these new organizational spaces. Organizational centrifugalism begins with the denouement of the state-run Salon and Academy in the mid-nineteenth century; the rise of the dealer-critic system and other, non-salon alternative exhibition spaces of French Impressionism in the latter half of the nineteenth century; and through many new organizational spaces associated with Modernism such as formal artists groups, museums, great exhibitions, schools of art, and Modernist art itself. The ultimate effect of organizational centrifugalism is drawing avant-garde art closer to the public and eventually the masses. Excessive organizational centrifugalism, however, can be dangerous to the avant-garde art.

The chapter looks for the conditions of a contribution of microcredit to poverty alleviation.

It uses socioeconomical hypotheses for defining a direct and fast positive effect of microcredit on the income of the poorest. The contribution raises ten issues or conditions at a micro, meso and macro level.

It is not often that these ten conditions are all completely met. So, the impact of microcredit is generally low as regards the alleviation of poverty. The problems to achieve them are linked to the specificities of the clients and of the prevailing institutions in various sub-Saharan Africa countries.

The chapter clearly identifies the limits of microcredit and their reasons.

Conflicting theoretical perspectives present radical innovation as originating either from the core or the periphery of a system. Studies tend to bridge this divide by way of positions or roles. This paper proposes a process interface, where ideas from the core are radicalized on the periphery, inverting the established tendency of “tempering” of innovation. This approach realigns the primacy of the core in diffusing ideas and that of the periphery in reinforcing distinctiveness. Radicalization and tempering are interdependent, to the extent that the realization of one denotes other’s termination. Quantitative and qualitative evidence from the history of art lend support to the arguments, including breakthrough paintings, such as The Scream by Munch and Black Square by Malevitch. Radicalization is facilitated by simultaneously increasing differences and exchanges between core and periphery. The mobility of new ideas from the core to the periphery is likely to provoke resistance in a conservative environment. The collision of opposing social forces raises the stakes, making compromise less feasible or desirable.

Baudelaire (1863) and Benjamin (1983) used the term flaneur to denote a modern man who could evocatively describe social life in urban areas. A flaneur was poetically to describe the ephemeral nature of modern urban life, but without acting as a consumer. Here I approach Las Vegas from the perspective of a flaneur, and discuss the possibilities in that city for flanerie today. I introduce the concept pseudo-flanerie, and apply it to postmodern tourism. In Las Vegas, pseudo-flaneurs wander from one impersonation of a city/culture/era to another, stroll from one game to another, and move from one presentation of self to another. However, surveillance, social control, and the organizing principles of capitalism structure each. I also discuss pseudo-flanerie in Las Vegas in terms of temporality, morality, and consumption practices. I find that the flaneur’s traditionally anti-consumer stance has been endangered in tourist cities like Las Vegas, where mock cities have commodified city-like experiences to tourists who ultimately pay to engage in practices traditionally associated with flaneurs. A postmodern tourist environment like Las Vegas, therefore, creates the conditions for the pseudo-flaneur to emerge.

Ethnography is not only a set of tools with which to collect data, but an epistemological vantage point from which to apprehend the social world. In this vein, we articulate a model of teaching and learning ethnography that entails focusing on how to construct an ethnographic object. In this chapter, we describe our way of teaching ethnography as not simply a method of data collection, but as a manner of training that pays particular attention – before, during, and after fieldwork – to the theory-driven moments of the construction of sociological objects. How, as ethnographers, do we structure and give structure to the social milieu we investigate? In teaching the ethnographic craft, we focus on a specific series of elements: theory, puzzles, warrants, the relationship between claims and evidence, and the reconstruction of the local point of view. Moreover, we maintain that attention to these components of ethnographic object construction should be coupled with epistemological vigilance throughout the research process.