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The Chinese electricity sector is in the midst of a transition from a state-owned monopoly to a market-oriented structural unbundling. In the process of restructuring, the power system is facing significant deficiencies which hinder integration of sustainable solutions and dramatically impact the environment.

The chapter provides a qualitative analysis of the legislative, regulatory, and administrative provisions that have been recently implemented in the Chinese electricity sector, in order to identify the barriers that limit implementation of sustainable solutions and suggest prospects of change.

Despite a strong commitment to renewable energy, integration of sustainable solutions in the Chinese power system is hampered by an inefficient coordination between the players variously operating in the electricity sector and a lack of consistency at the regulatory design stage.

A clear picture of the legislative, regulatory, and administrative inconsistencies that characterize the Chinese electricity sector may help Chinese policy makers to overcome issues that hinder efficiency and hence develop a systemic approach useful to make the economic growth sustainable.

The chapter considers integration of sustainable solutions as related to the policy makers’ ability to conceptualize systemic efficiency in relation to an original understanding of proximity between efficient energy systems to be developed on a regional basis.

The chapter analyses the role of smart grid technology in the German energy transition. Information technologies promise to help integrate volatile renewable energies (wind and solar power) into the grid. Yet, the promise of intelligent infrastructures does not only extend to technological infrastructures, but also to market infrastructures. Smart grid technologies underpin and foster the design of a “smart” electricity market, where dispersed energy prosumers can adapt, in real time, to fluctuating price signals that register changes in electricity generation. This could neutralize fluctuations resulting from the increased share of renewables. To critically “think” the promise of smart infrastructure, it is not enough to just focus on digital devices. Rather, it becomes necessary to scrutinize economic assumptions about the “intelligence” of markets and the technopolitics of electricity market design. This chapter will first show the historical trajectory of the technopolitical promise of renewable energy as not only a more sustainable, but also a more democratic alternative to fossil and nuclear power, by looking at the affinities between market liberal and ecological critiques of centralized fossil and nuclear based energy systems. It will then elucidate the co-construction of smart grids and smart markets in the governmental plans for an “electricity market 2.0.” Finally, the chapter will show how smart grid and smart metering technology fosters new forms of economic agency like the domo oeconomicus. Such an economic formatting of smart grid technology, however, forecloses other ecologically prudent and politically progressive ways of constructing and engaging with intelligent infrastructures.

This chapter examines the framing of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) Movement in mainstream media. An analytic sample of 4,303 articles collected from the Dow Jones Factiva database reveals variation in depth, breadth, and intensity of BLM coverage in the following newspapers between 2012 and 2016: The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Al Jazeera English. We review contemporary literature on racial inequality and employ Media Framing and Critical Race Theory to discuss the implications of our findings on public perceptions, future policy formation, and contemporary social protest worldwide.

Just who is the ‘analyst’ who practices rhythmanalysis? The extension of the name ‘rhythmanalyst’ to other than scholarly practitioners makes possible an investigation of the relationship of rhythmanalysis to other rhythmanalytic forms of knowing and representing urban space and the ways in which these differing but related practices may challenge, undermine or inform each other. In this paper, drawing on years of ethnographic and autoethnographic research in three North American cities, I discuss the rhythmanalytical practice involved in cabdriving, as this is shaped by the technologies drivers use to sense the city and by the transformation of the taxicab into the ‘ridesharing’ or soft cab. First, I discuss the occupational knowledge and wayfinding practice of cabdrivers and the extent to which their work requires the development by means of a variety of tools and practices, of a sense of the city as composed of multiple interacting rhythmic movements or polyrhythmia, with which they must strategically converge and facilitate. Second, I discuss the redelegation of the role of rhythmanalyst to predictive algorithms and mobile interfaces, as part of the reinvention of the taxicab, and its associated micropolitics and power/knowledge relations, by smartphone-enabled hailing and dispatching services. Struggles over, and transformations of, these non-academic forms of rhythmanalysis may provide insight, in turn, into the contemporary politics of the production of social space.

This chapter extends the concept of associational power into the context of online platform work. To do so, this chapter centers on platforms' underlying economic model – the multisided market – to better understand how workers may be able to collectively influence their terms and conditions of employment. In illuminating how labor's associational power functions in platform work arrangements, this model helps explain how collective action may function in the “gig economy” and provides a roadmap for future academic inquiry.

This chapter develops a model of associational power in the ride-hail industry which can be extended to markets defined by geographically specific platforms, like ride-hail, delivery, domestic work, and home healthcare workers.

This chapter finds that there is substantial promise for labor unions and other worker associations in the gig economy. Additionally, we find that even well-intended regulations can harm workers' power if the regulators do not grapple with the structure of digital platforms.

This chapter identifies the foundations of workers' associational power: network effects and multihoming. In contrast to traditional analyses of workers' power, labor's ability to withdraw its effort from a single employer is not the basis of its collective power. Instead, labor's power resides in its ability to withdraw its labor from a competitor and promise its exclusive labor to a single platform. Existing literature has explored the interaction between network effects and market power from the companies' perspective but has yet to extend this analysis to workers' perspective.