Search results

The Chicago School of Sociology heralded a new age: that of the rise and establishment of sociology as an academic discipline in the US. It also spurred on an intellectual tradition in ethnography that focuses on a wide array of methodological tools and empirical data with a focus on the specificity of place that continues to live on in contemporary urban sociology. Yet, its traditions have also been extensively criticized. Burawoy (2000) is one preeminent scholar, who has denounced the Chicago School as being parochial, ahistorical, and decontextualized from the national and international processes that shape cities. Instead, he calls for a move toward “global ethnography,” one that focuses on “global processes, connections, and imaginations” (Burawoy et al., 2000). Increasingly, US urban sociologists study research sites that are located outside the US and pay attention to how global actors and/or transnational connections influence US dynamics. Given this trend, what, if any lessons can global and urban sociologists take away from the Chicago School? In this chapter, I highlight three such lessons: (1) the global is central to city life; (2) rooting our work in the specificities of place helps extend and build theory; and (3) the School still provides useful conceptual and methodological tools to study the global. In doing so, I argue that scholars should recognize the plurality of approaches to global ethnography and how each approach can further our understanding of how the global shapes social life.

The purpose of this paper is to address questions policymakers, working in a global marketplace, might ask about ethical and theological considerations of ambiguities or uncertainties of justice issues in the global markets in which they operate.

The paper draws on earlier research and published works in examining four specific questions about ambiguities of justice, from ethical and theological perspectives, and their relevance for policymakers in the global marketplace.

Justice, including social justice, is a significant value impacting on decision and policymakers in government and other types of organizations in a global marketplace. However, the value “justice” exhibits ambiguity or uncertainty. Even if a claim that economic policies developed through prudential judgement are not subject to the moral or ethical code is accepted, it does not absolve individual participants in the policymaking and administrative processes from ethical and moral responsibility if the outcomes of the policies are deemed to be selfish and unjust.

This paper is limited by the ability to examine all the literature in the field at a greater depth. However, this has been ameliorated by examining a sufficient sample of theological and social scientific literature and relating these to the writings of the theologian, Paul Tillich, on questions about the four ambiguities of justice.

This paper provides a useful appraisal of the various social justice issues that might be encountered by managers working in a global marketplace. It provides some definitive alternatives from which policymakers may select a course of action for their organizations in individual and collective markets throughout the world.

An identified need is fulfilled in this paper in that it supports executives and managers who may have doubts about ethical and theological justice issues that arise through the policies adopted and processes employed in their operations in the global marketplace.

The paper employs a critical version of Abbott’s “system of professions” in order to analyse how new management practices in UK clearing banks have been influenced by competing bodies of expert knowledge promoted by the banks’ own profession, their senior management and outside professions. The main loser in this contest has been the professional expertise represented by the Chartered Institute of Bankers (CIOB). For most of the last 100 years the banks based their management control systems on cultural controls embedded in the branch system. In the 1970s and 1980s, the branch culture was challenged by a new marketing ethos and by the impact of new technology. In the early 1990s, changes in the structure of banks plus a continuing profits crisis induced further changes that saw the introduction of new management accounting techniques such as activity‐based costing. Finally, notes that, while recent commercial and regulatory problems offer potential opportunities for the non‐accountancy finance professions, the banks are unlikely to allow the emergence of a more independent profession within their own organizations.

Drawing on sociolinguistics, this chapter proposes an encoding–decoding perspective on evaluation, conceptualizing codes as interpretive schemas that are encoded by firms and decoded by audiences. A key element in this process is code complexity, denoting combinations of interdependent elements. We demonstrate that the evaluation of code complexity depends on the type of audience (professionals and laypersons) and the type of complexity (technological and aesthetic). We analyze the attribution of awards by professionals and the public in luxury watchmaking, featuring three mechanisms: the social embeddedness of audiences, their motivation for evaluation and supply-and-demand matching. The results attest to significant differences in the evaluation of technological and aesthetic code complexity by professionals and laypersons. There is a premium attributed to aesthetic code complexity by professionals and a premium attributed to technological complexity by laypersons. Finding the right type and level of code complexity to pursue in their offerings is a key strategic challenge for producers.

On April 2, 1987, IBM unveiled a series of long‐awaited new hardware and software products. The new computer line, dubbed the Personal Systems 30, 50, 60, and 80, seems destined to replace the XT and AT models that are the mainstay of the firm's current personal computer offerings. The numerous changes in hardware and software, while representing improvements on previous IBM technology, will require users purchasing additional computers to make difficult choices as to which of the two IBM architectures to adopt.

The Jason Bourne series of films (2002–2016) are widely acknowledged with helping to successfully re-invent the action thriller genre in the 2000s by focusing more on motivation and plot than over-the-top spectacle. Featuring a profoundly wounded son figure in the titular character, the films are indicative of an awareness of the vulnerabilities and reactions of a fatherless masculinity within a post-Cold War political reality.

This chapter will argue that Bourne's onscreen pain and subsequent violent responses to his various narrative predicaments are a result of being repeatedly betrayed by a series of older males, in many cases, father surrogates. Bourne's experience of this paternal disruption and betrayal is the key psychological motivating factor, with the films and the story arc of the character only being resolved when both he and the audience finally discover and reconcile the role that his biological father played in shaping his destiny and his life. This ‘father hunger’ – in effect a need for a continuative masculinity – that Jason Bourne experiences, and that is arguably at the heart of the franchise, will be analysed and explored within the contexts of post-Jungian screen theory. Alongside the deliberately casting of ‘quality’ actors (such as Brian Cox, Joan Allen, Tommy Lee Jones, David Strathairn) and other formalist elements of the text, archetypal energies and symbolism are also rife throughout the film, and can be, in part, credited with the critical and commercial success of the films. Finally, the films are put in their cinematic context in terms of the influence they subsequently exerted on other action film franchises – particularly James Bond (1962 to present).

In previous efforts I have indicated that Social Catholicism, qua Roman‐Catholic Social Economycs or Économie politique chrétienne, is now at the one and a half century mark, given its formal introduction with the publication of Charles de Coux's Essais d' économie politique at Paris/Lyon in 1832. This was soon to be followed by Alban de Villeneuve‐Bargemont's Christian Political Economy, or Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of Poverty in France and Europe, etc, (1837), the subsequent founding of the Société d'Economie Sociale in 1856 and publication — inter alia — of La réforme sociale (1864) and Exposition of Social Economics (1867) by P. G. Frédéric Le Play; and, contemporarily, by the separate but related efforts of a host of other “thinkers and doers” to both the left or more radical (“Catholic/Christian‐Socialist”) and the right or “individualist” (cum Christianised individuals!) of Le Play's more centrist‐traditional (and, hence, “reactionary”) position. All this was well prior to the promulgation of the first great social encyclical, Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum (RN), in 1891.

The topic of transportation incorporates a vast amount of divergent information. The subject matter varies greatly, and includes titles ranging from Camels of the Outback to The Great American Motion Sickness; or Why You Can't Get There from Here. To establish boundaries for this resource guide, the present authors referred to Public Law 87–449, 14 May 1962, which authorized the president to proclaim an annual National Transportation Week. Using this as a basis, they defined transportation As the movement of people or goods from one place to another, and included a little tourism to break up the concrete and steel. While some historical materials are included, this resource guide emphasizes modes of transportation currently used in the United States.