Information Economy/Society

Bu çalışma Japonya'nın bilgi toplumuna dönüşüm sürecini inceleyerek ülkenin kalkınma fonksiyonunun farklı değişkenlerini ortaya çıkarmak gayesindedir. Japonya günümüzde teknoloji ve kalkınma açısından en üst sıralarda bulunan ülkelerden biridir. Ülkeyi bugünkü konumuna getiren süreç iktisat yazınında genelde İkinci Dünya Savaşı sonrasından başlatılmaktadır. Ancak Japonya, 20. yüzyılın başından itibaren sanayileşmiş bir ekonomidir ve kalkınmışlık sürecini ancak daha bütüncül ve tarihsel bir bakış açısıyla kavramak mümkündür. Bu çalışma temelde iki bölümden oluşmaktadır. "Japon Gelişmesinin Kökleri" isimli ilk bölüm 17. yüzyıldan başlayarak 1950'lere kadar uzanan geniş bir dönemin iktisadi gelişimini, iç ve dış siyasetini, eğitim politikalarını değerlendirmektedir. "Japon Gelişmesinin Etkenleri" ise ülkenin gelişim tecrübesini politikalar ve diğer dış ve iç etkenler açısından değerlendirmektedir ki bu etkenler sanayi ve teknoloji politikaları başta olmak üzere, Japon işletme yönetim sistemi ve şirket ağları (Keiretsu'lar), eğitimin rolü, Japon kültürü ve kendine has (sui generis) kapitalizmidir.

The question of how and why people adopt technologies is an area that has received great scrutiny, but less attention is given to those who willingly choose to avoid particular technologies. This article considers current models of technology adoption and explores how technology influences us as a society and individually, paying special attention to how large-scale shifts in technological change come to bear on individuals who choose not to adopt specific technologies. By combining scholarship in the information sciences with observations from media ecology theorists, this article proposes a more nuanced view of technology adoption and resistance.

... The abandoning of the materialist basis leads inexorably from revolutionary socialism to reformism (Grossmann, 1970, p ... rise in the organic composi-tion of capital would lead to a falling rate of proJit ... only the variable part of capital that yields surplus-value, while the rate of profit ...

This article investigates how the “new spirit of capitalism” (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2007) gets inscribed in the fabric of search algorithms by way of social practices. Drawing on the tradition of the social construction of technology (SCOT) and 17 qualitative expert interviews I discuss how search engines and their “capital accumulation cycle” (Fuchs, forthcoming) are negotiated and stabilized in a network of actors and interests, website providers and users first and foremost. I further show how corporate search engines and their capitalist ideology are solidified in a socio-political context characterized by a techno-euphoric climate of innovation and a politics of privatization. This analysis provides a valuable contribution to contemporary search engine critique mainly focusing on search engines’ business models and societal implications. It shows that a shift of perspective is needed from impacts search engines have on society towards social practices and power relations involved in the construction of search engines to reconsider and renegotiate search engines and their algorithmic ideology in the future.

Under the planned economy China’s urban population was largely immobile and governed through the socialist workunit (danwei). Market reforms begun in the 1980s have culminated in the last decade with a dramatic decline of the state-sector and the emergence of a more mobile, heterogeneous and economically independent urban population. In rendering the old system obsolete, these trends have led the Chinese government to rethink its strategies for urban governance. At the turn of the millennium, a new campaign to ‘build communities’ was launched throughout the nation with the objective of establishing the residential ‘community’ as the new basic unit of urban governance. This paper explores the logic behind this policy innovation and analyzes the techniques adopted to operationalize ‘community governance’.

The following paper will trace the recently established field of Information Ethics through it’s various evolutions, from it’s origins in Librarianship to it’s role as a global player in areas as diverse as technology, media, global humanitarianism, and the philosophy of information. The praxis of the field will be outlined for the uninitiated reader, followed by an intimate history of the founding players and their continued contribution to this ever-evolving field. The current evolutions of Information Ethics will then be explored in the context of their application to the viral global phenomena of Intercultural Information Ethics (IIE), and finally, the paper will conclude with projections towards future evolutions in Information Ethics, as well as an exploration of potential definitions for the field.

The attempt to establish a unified taxonomy for the field of Information Ethics is both unattainable and unwarranted. The categorization of Information Ethics as a defined discipline, an applicable practice, a philosophy and a worldview remains constantly in flux due to, what Luciano Floridi terms, ‘philosophical naturalism’. As such, a broadening understanding of the field will only serve to further collapse categorization. The following paper will outline, using a discourse analysis methodology, how the nature of the field of Information Ethics at a foundational level must necessarily defy classification. The assumptions behind the current classifications of the field will be questioned. Beginning with the history of the inception of the field through Librarianship and Cybernetics and questioning the yet unresolved ontological debates between information philosophers such as Rafael Capurro and Floridi, this paper will explicate how any such attempt to develop an agreed upon taxonomy will and should always remain incomplete.

The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) revolution has not only opened up new opportunities for economic growth and social development but has also posed problems and challenges. It can shape and enhance a wide range of developmental applications in agriculture, industry and social sectors and is influencing all sections of the society. ICT provides unique opportunities for human development. At the same time, ICT has been widening the gaps between and within countries, regions, gender while increasing disparities divide between the rural-urban, rich-poor, elite neglected and also within the different categories of women in various spheres of activity. It is necessary to build up women capacities to involve them in productive activities, institutional building, family and social transformation, decision-making process, political representation, trade and commerce, entrepreneurial development and social leadership. There is a need to enhance opportunities to women to enable them to own, manage and control industries and service enterprises including IT-based units. There is also need to provide more opportunities in e-related sectors to them in higher managerial, technical positions in government and non-government agencies, research, educational institutions in private and public sectors, without confining their role to only call centres, telecentres, data-entry level and lower levels in the organizations. ICT has to address all these problems of women as a whole and has to be used to facilitate to build women empowered society.

This paper addresses recent changes in governance patterns that significantly altered power relations and wealth distribution in global commodity chains. First, it emphasizes the rise of a financial sphere made up of institutional investors and executives of large corporations at the top of GCCs, and discusses its consequences for supplier relations and working conditions of women workers at the base of GCCs. Second, by linking recent governance debates at the level of the firm to issues of governance of the whole chain, it identifies three distinct normative views (shareholder, stakeholder and institutional) of the ways in which the distribution of social welfare can be improved in GCCs. Beyond the shareholder and stakeholder views, a call is made for strengthening an institutional view of GCC governance.

This paper engages with a wide range of social theories to argue for a more nuanced understanding of money that is attuned to its spatial and scalar dimensions. The paper begins with a brief overview of modernist and postmodernist accounts, including the works of These theories have provided a useful corrective to neoclassical economic accounts that distil the economic from society and culture, but they reinforce an understanding of money that is homogenizing, in that it is said to annihilate space by time. By contrast, network theories of money, which are reviewed in the following section of this paper, offer a more contextualized understanding of money's embeddedness in social relations, in particular vis-à -vis the trust that is invested in money forms and institutions that help to knit together the networks through which money circulates. The spatial dynamics of monetary circulation are intrinsic to this model, but there is little sense of the geopolitical dimensions of money's role in the territorialization of space. The studies of money that are reviewed in the penultimate section of this paper begin to address the dimensions of power at work in money's production and circulation, largely in terms of the rise of the state and national currencies, with particular attention to the particularities of money forms. As I argue in the conclusion to this paper, these various epistemological approaches are not easily reconciled. But I suggest that the aim should not be to resolve the paradoxes that emerge, but to foreground them. In so doing, not only will it be possible to think more carefully about the scales through which money circulates and which it helps to produce and reproduce, but to invest our understanding of money with a little more life and dynamism.

This paper considers the implications of the rise of the new molecular genetics for the ways in which we are governed and the ways in which we govern ourselves. Using examples of genetic screening and genetic discrimination in education, employment and insurance, and a case study of debates among those at risk of developing Huntington's Disease and their relatives, we suggest that some of the claims made by critics of these new developments are misplaced. While there are possibilities of genetic discrimination, the key event is the creation of the person 'genetically at risk'. But genetic risk does not imply resignation in the face of an implacable biological destiny: it induces new and active relations to oneself and one's future. In particular, it generates new forms of 'genetic responsibility', locating actually and potentially affected individuals within new communities of obligation and identi cation. Far from generating fatalism, the rewriting of personhood at a genetic level and its visualization through a 'molecular optic' transforms the relations between patient and expert in unexpected ways, and is linked to the development of novel 'life strategies', involving practices of choice, enterprise, self-actualization and prudence in relation to one's genetic make-up. Most generally, we suggest, the birth of the person 'genetically at risk' is part of a wider reshaping of personhood along somatic lines and a mutation in conceptions of life itself.

Shortly after Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, hundreds of acres across Scotland were planted with tobacco. Cultivation centered on the market town of Kelso in the Borders. Andrew Wight estimated the land under tobacco at no less than one thousand acres in 1782. The trials in Kelso were part of a broader movement of civil cameralism in eighteenth-century Britain. Many natural historians and improvers in the late Enlightenment rejected the traditional conception of empire, both in theory and practice. Through information networks and voluntary associations, they promoted a host of projects that upset the conventional order of the expanding fiscal-military state and its major interest groups. These schemes of import substitution undercut both colonial and foreign trade in favor of an economic strategy of national autarky within the British Isles.

Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, "Scottish Tobacco and Rhubarb: the Natural Order of Civil Cameralism in the Scottish Enlightenment," Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 49, no. 2 (2016) Pp. 129–47.

This paper describes the practice of fasting to death in the Indian religion of Jainism. It shows how and why this form of self-killing is a highly regarded and publicly celebrated positive aspiration in Jainism. Through comparisons with some other forms of self-killing found in South Asia, it highlights the moral complexities of issues around volition and agency. And it illustrates how the practice embodies positions on some universal ethical issues.

Hoopla about the emergence of an information economy was widespread by the 1990s, when academics, politicians and the press celebrated the social transformations brought aboutby computers. Yet the rhetoric of high-tech revolution long predates Windows 95 or even the World Wide Web. Building on the work of Howard Brick and others on postwar debates over technology and the economy, this article explores how the trope of the “information revolution” entered public discourse in the United States in the 1960s. It considers how the general idea of a post-industrial society – an economy in which manufacturing might play a diminished role – became specifically tied in the public imagination to information technology and intellectual property. Technology firms waged a concerted campaign to assuage anxieties about technological unemployment while extolling the importance of computing and other new technologies to the nation’s economic future. It illustrates how advertisers developed a public relations message for firms such as RCA and IBM, aiming to reassure the public about the potential of computers and automation to transform society for the better. This promotion of the information revolution actually predated the influential discussions of a post-industrial society by theorists such as Daniel Bell and Alain Touraine in the early 1970s. The essay also highlights how prominent public intellectuals, such as Margaret Mead and Herman Kahn, and government officials lent their credibility to claims about the value of a future economy based on creating and processing information during the 1960s.

Business ethics as an academic discipline and a management practice related to corporate social responsibility (CSR) emerged in the late 1970s and the 1980s. It was a promising movement in the shadow of the globalization process. It started in the United States and followed five to ten years later in all industrialized countries, including those in Europe. Some companies developed their first codes of ethics, mission statements and charters of values at that time. Seminars were held for managers in order to look at ethical dilemmas and analyze ethical case studies. The Body Shop, the well-known cosmetics company, went a step further in the 1990s by launching a major social and ethical audit of its operations. In its famous report "People, Planet and Profits," Shell applied the notion of sustainable entrepreneurship to a new sort of reporting, which measured and analyzed not only the company's financial goals and results, but also its ecological and social goals.

are having an increasing impact on societies and in the globalization process that is integrating them. Societies are trying to regulate this impact, and adapt it to their respective cultural infra-structures. Societies and cultures are in reciprocal co-adaptations with Information and Communication Technologies. Synergic relationships might emerge in this co-adaptation process by means of positive and negative feedback loops, as well as feedforward ones. This would make the whole larger than the sum of its parts, generating emergent properties in the parts involved as well as in the whole coming forth. The academic, private, and public sectors are integrating their activities; multi-disciplinary groups and inter-disciplinary teams are being formed, and collaborative research and development projects are being organized in order to facilitate and adequately orient the design and implementation of the feedback and the feedforward loops, so the synergic relationships are socially positive and personally human. One of the main purposes of the 4 th International Multi-Conference on Society, Cybernetics and Informatics (IMSCI 2010) is to bring together academics, professionals, and managers from the private and the public sectors, so they can share ideas, results of research, and innovative services or products, in a multi-disciplinary and multi-sector forum. Educational technologies, socio-economic organizations, and socio-political processes are essential domains among those involved in the evolving co-adaptation and cotransformation between societies and cultures on the one hand, and between informatics and cybernetics (communication and control) on the other hand. Consequently, the main conferences in the context of the IMSCI 2010 Multi-Conference are the following: • These three conferences are related to each other and, as a whole, are producing or might produce synergic relationships with Information and Communication Technologies. This is why the Organizing Committees of the three of them have the purpose of combining their efforts in a way that would lead to the organization of an adequate joint event, where academics, researchers, consultants, professionals, innovators, and practitioners from the three areas might relate and interact with each other in the same event. These types of interaction might generate possibilities of cross-fertilization and analogical thinking, as well as possibilities of new working hypothesis, ideas, and reflections on the impact, significance, and usefulness of Informatics and Cybernetics in important • What ethical and legal issues will be a part of the social transformation produced by the ICTs? On behalf of the Organizing Committees, I extend our heartfelt thanks to: WMSCI 2010 711 1841 3586 1.95 5.04 242 34.04% IMETI 2010 425 1124 2480 2.21 5.84 134 31.53% IMSCI 2010 321 720 1751 2.43 5.45 131 40.81% CISCI 2010 622 1174 3321 2.83 5.34 224 36.01% TOTAL 2079 4859 11138 2.29 5.36 731 35.16% We also extend our gratitude to the co-editors of these proceedings, for the hard work, energy and eagerness they shown preparing their respective sessions. We express our intense gratitude to Professor William Lesso for his wise and opportune tutoring, for his eternal energy, integrity, and continuous support and advice, as the Program Committee Chair of past conferences, and as Honorary President of WMSCI 2010, as well as for being a very caring old friend and intellectual father to many of us. We also extend our gratitude to Professor Belkis Sanchez, who brilliantly managed the organizing process. We also express our immense gratitude to Professor Freddy Malpica for distinguishing this conference by accepting the position of Honorary Chair of EISTA 2010 and the past conferences of PISTA and SOIC; to Professors Friedrich Welsch for serving as the Program Co-Chair of EISTA

The thought of Gabriel Tarde has recently been presented as a radical alternative to a modernist tradition in social theory that continues to rely on supposedly moribund concepts of class, action, statehood, and the like. Focussing on Tarde's political writings, this article seeks to counter this prevalent vision of Tarde as a thinker of molecular social processes who provides us with the tools to think beyond the parameters of sovereignty and to embrace a transnational understanding of social change. Tarde's thinking of politics is analysed in terms of its reliance on a political anthropology of obedience, its ambivalent attitude towards the democratization of the political sphere, its image of the state as an enabler and filter of inventions, and its attempts to articulate the relation between the social and the political. By means of the notion of 'empowering pacification', the article concludes that the significance of Tarde for the present lies in his contradictory and symptomatic conceptualization of the persistence of political power and institutional centralization in the midst of a tendency towards the global expansion of the field of social interactions, as well as in his strategic attempt to imagine forms of power that would neutralize the possibility of social turmoil and class conflict.

The concept of the circular economy has gained increasing prominence in academic, practitioner and policy circles and is linked to greening economies and sustainable development. However, the idea is more often celebrated than critically interrogated. Analysis shows the concept circulates as an idea and ideal, exemplified by industrial symbiosis and extended product life. Yet, its actual enactment is limited and fragile. Instead, circular economies are achieved mostly through global recycling networks which are the primary means by which wastes are recovered as resources. European policies eschew these circuits. Resource recovery through global recycling networks is regarded as a dirty and illegal trade. In its place, EU circular economies attempt to transform wastes to resources within the boundaries of the EU. Through an analysis of two case studies of resource recovery in the UK, we highlight the challenges that confront making circular economies within the EU, showing that these are borne of a conjuncture of politically created markets, material properties and morally defined materials circuits. We show resource recovery in the EU to be framed by moral economies, driven by discourses of ecological modernisation, environmental justice and resource (in)security, the last of which connects to China's resource-intensive development.

This article examines the construction of the homo economicus in Argentina in the context of the last military dictatorship (1976–83). While the worldviews of the military and neo-liberal economists of the time were very different, their common concern for distortions in economic and political life made them translatable. These economists provided a new economic identity that would be in tune with monetarist theory, replace ‘distorting’ collective identities and allow individuals to be governed from a distance. I argue that the homo economicus was performed through two sets of tools: consumer campaigns and the financial press. However, individuals did not always behave as expected. The contradictions of neo-liberalism, between its liberalism and its quest to create self-regulating spheres through active government intervention, led to the financial crisis of 1980. Economists later blamed the crash on the irresponsibility of market actors and expressed doubt regarding the self-regulating model they had promoted. In the conclusion, the legacy of the attempt to perform the homo economicus is assessed.

This paper shows that Marx's theory of agricultural rent is not an adjunct t o his theory of capital at the level of distribution but is inseparably developed from it. The forms of differential and absolute rent are shown to correspond to the formation of market value and price of production in the agricultural sector respectively, these in turn depending upon the barriers posed by landed property to intensive and extensive cultivation. In appendices, Marx's critique of Ricardo's theory of rent, differential rent on the worst land, a critique of other interpretations of Marx, and the 'historical transformation problem' are each considered briefly.

This note is a rejoinder to Hodgson's second attempt at a critique of our model of participatory planning through negotiated coordination. The rejoinder is organized under four headings: market exchange and market forces/negotiated coordination; subsidiarity and pluralism; innovation, entrepreneurship, and tacit knowledge; and autonomy and self-government. We consider Hodgson's characterization of our position to be a travesty and rebut his assertions under each heading. The note concludes with a restatement of the promise of participatory planning – a self-governing society in which people have both the right to autonomy and privacy and also the right and responsibility to participate in the running of their society's economy, rather than leaving economic activity to be shaped by an economic ruling class and/or the coercion of market forces.

Das vorliegende Memorandum zeigt ein Zwischenergebnis des GI-Arbeitskreises «Nachhaltige Informationsgesellschaft» (GIANI) und soll zur Diskussion anregen. Entwurf des Titelblatts: Wolf Göhring Graphische Gestaltung/Layout: Therese Bracher Diese und aktualisierte Versionen des Memorandums werden auch unter http://www.giani-memorandum.de veröffentlicht. Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Bibliothek: Die Deutsche Bibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.ddb.de abrufbar. Druck: Satz-und Druck-Center des Fraunhofer-Informationszentrums Raum und Bau IRB, Stuttgart. Fraunhofer-Informationszentrum Raum und Bau IRB Nobelstraße 12, D-70569 Stuttgart Telefon 07 11 / 970 -25 00 Telefax 07 11 / 970 -25 08 E-Mail [email protected] www.irb.fraunhofer.de ISBN 3-8167-6446-0 Seite 5 Memorandum «Nachhaltige Informationsgesellschaft» Mit diesem Memorandum will der Arbeitskreis «Nachhaltige Informationsgesellschaft» der Gesellschaft für Informatik aufzeigen, welchen Beitrag Informations-und Kommunikationstechnologien (Information and Communication Technologies, ICT) zu einer nachhaltigen Entwicklung leisten können. Der immer breitere Einsatz von ICT begünstigt nicht automatisch eine nachhaltige, dauerhaft umweltgerechte Entwicklung. Vielmehr ist politischer Gestaltungswille erforderlich, wenn auf dem Weg in eine globale Informationsgesellschaft die Idee der nachhaltigen Entwicklung eine Chance bekommen soll. Damit sind zwei Themen von globaler Bedeutung angesprochen, die heute kontrovers diskutiert werden: • Nachhaltige Entwicklung (sustainable development), eine Leitidee, die mit dem «Brundtland-Report» von 1987 in die Diskussion globaler Umweltund Entwicklungsfragen eingeführt wurde und seit dem UNO-Weltgipfel von 1992 in Rio wachsenden Einfluss auf die politische Willensbildung ausübt. Der UNO-Weltgipfel 2002 in Johannesburg hat neue Meilensteine in dieser Diskussion gesetzt. • Informationsgesellschaft (information society) oder auch Wissensgesellschaft (knowledge society), eine Vision der Veränderungen, die durch den breiten Einsatz der ICT in der Wirtschaft und anderen Bereichen der Gesellschaft ermöglicht oder beschleunigt werden. Der UNO-Weltgipfel zur Informationsgesellschaft (2003 in Genf und 2005 in Tunis) zeigt das wachsende politische Interesse an diesem Thema. Auf dem Weg in eine globale Informationsgesellschaft bieten sich bedeutende, ja vielleicht einzigartige Chancen für eine Kurskorrektur in Richtung Nachhaltigkeit. Zugleich bringt die rasante Weiterentwicklung und Verbreitung von ICT aber auch neuartige Risiken für Natur, Gesellschaft und Individuum mit sich. Erstaunlich ist, dass trotz dieser Zusammenhänge die Themen Nachhaltigkeit und Informationsgesellschaft in Wissenschaft, Politik und Medien noch weitgehend getrennt behandelt werden. Allerdings nimmt die Zahl der Projekte und Publikationen rasch zu, die sich mit der Beziehung zwischen Nachhaltigkeit und Informationsgesellschaft befassen. (Ein Verzeichnis ist im Anhang zu finden.) Mit diesem Memorandum will der Arbeitskreis «Nachhaltige Informationsgesellschaft» der Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI): • die Chancen und Risiken aufzeigen, die sich auf dem Weg in eine globale Informationsgesellschaft für das Ziel einer nachhaltigen Entwicklung ergeben,

This paper compares and evaluates two recently developed and increasingly popular general approaches in comparative and historical political economy: the regulation approach and theories of governance. 1 There are at least four good reasons for such a review at the present time. Its first, and immediate, pretext is the close connection often made between the alleged transition from Fordism to a post-Fordist accumulation regime and the purported development of new forms of economic and political governance. 2 Second, even without this direct and explicitly drawn connection, the regulation approach and theories of governance would seem to have enough (meta-)theoretical assumptions in common to merit a systematic comparison. Third, in addition to various underlying parallels and (sometimes conscious) convergences in their theoretical apparatus, the two perspectives share substantive or practical concerns across a wide range of topical issues. 3 And, fourth, as anyone who has tried to grapple with the complexities of either the regulation approach or theories of governance will have found, there are serious difficulties with each paradigm. So it is worth asking whether such difficulties would be alleviated, left unchanged, or magnified in the attempt to combine them into a more general account of contemporary economic and political change.

... & Swedberg, 1994; Granovetter & Swedberg, 2001), the term 'new economic sociology' was introduced into the sociological lexicon the same ... of respectful distance from economics, there was a second and more proximate target in his sights: the new institutional economics. ...

In: XXVI World Congress of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy of the Internationale Vereinigunf für Rechts und Sozialphilosophie, 2015. Human Rights, Rule of Law and the Contemporary Social Challenges in Complex Societies. p. 813-821.

At the beginning of his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Foucault poses the following question: “What is so perilous about the fact that people speak, and that their speech proliferates? Where is the danger in that?”. Soon after, Foucault advances his hypothesis, according to which “in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures”. Following this line proposed by Foucault, we should not dream of a world without any kind of discursive control or coercion over speech. The very “conquest of freedom of speech” should not be seen as a complete liberation. Moreover, freedom of speech (which is always limited) was associated with a set of transformations that replaced the power based on the censorship of the Sovereign or the Church. The recognition of this right is linked, in the eighteenth century, to a new technology of power based on press, public opinion and mass media. In short: Is the freedom to speak or publish one’s ideas an achievement or an evolution of mankind? We can say yes, but without forgetting that it also introduced a new form of domination, which takes place precisely through the exercise of this "freedom". Nowadays, with the internet, the freedom of speech acquires a new dimension and meaning, and new forms of control and domination emerge. I highlight three contemporary forms of information control: (1) ownership of content through private monopoly on large databases; (2) control over computer file formats through proprietary software and codes or technological mechanisms to control information, such as DRM (Digital Rights Management) technologies, (3) control over access, which occurs through search engines and providers, as we see in the selection criteria imposed by the Google algorithm. At the same time, new forms of resistance are raising: practices of illegal sharing, free software movements and hacker groups. Like the press in the eighteenth century, the internet today brings back the libertarian discourse, promising the end of media’s control and the fullest liberty. But the supposed freedom of information brings withal new forms of control, linked to new monopolies and a new information economy.

I want to talk of the kind of writing done by those of us who conduct research in the social sciences, humanities, and philosophy. Although we all think of ourselves as working to analyze or explain human conduct in ways that can lead to its refinement or improvement, are we in fact doing what we claim to be doing? Far too often, it seems to me, those we research into - who are outsiders to the disciplines within which our writing has its currency - find what we have to say distant and inaccessible. It does not touch them in their being; it does not change their lives. This is because, I shall suggest, as researchers we all too often mistake the words (analytic terms) we use in attending to the features of their conduct we think of as important, as referring to the actual influences they sense as important in giving shape to their lives. Our terms of analysis bear little resemblance, unfortunately, to their lived experience. In attempting to analyze and explain people’s lived lives causally or logically, in terms of rational systems, we have ignored the fact of them being lived, if Bakhtin’s (1981, 1984, 1986) claims are correct, dialogically.

... where material marks are constituted through physical and not ideational ingestion, not necessarily of the order of ... materialization of technologies, and the role of those materializations in the 'coming to matter' of human bodies, is to avoid privileging physis over techne. ...

ABSTRACT This article addresses the issue of how the market and the non-market are to be understood especially by concentrating on the theory of money. For mainstream economics, the market is simply an institution facilitating exchange, money being the key instrument for alleviating the inefficiencies of barter. In contrast, recent work in other social sciences, such as that by Zelizer, distinguishes among markets, and various roles of money, depending on cultural and social content. While being sympathetic to such an approach, we claim that the commodity is a better analytical starting point than the market. Based on Marx's work, we then show what commodities have in common and establish a common essence for money as generalized purchasing power. This is a peculiarly bland essence that allows money to undertake the variety of social roles identified by Zelizer.

This paper uses the changing historical and theoretical frames within which management pay and investor claims are considered to provide a critique of the functionalist approach of agency and to develop an alternative, positional explanation of rewards. The first part of the paper draws on the contrast between the pre-1940 critique of the rentier and the post-1980 discursive construction of the shareholder to raise important contemporary questions about position and reward. The second part develops the idea of positional rewards to challenge agency assumptions by arguing that both giant firm managers and the less visible, though larger, group of intermediaries use their position to skim value. In contrast, the experience of position is more mixed for shareholders, who are generally passive value surfers. The final section of the paper argues that a renewed emphasis on position will enable a problem shift from value creation to value capture.

This paper considers the phenomenon of e-commerce as an achievement of serial acts of representation and re-representation. Drawing upon the concepts of virtualism and the cultural circuit of capital, we attempt to demonstrate the material consequences of economic abstractions. The paper looks at the constitutive role of virtualism within the development of a domain called e-commerce. Mobilized by a heterodox group of actors, including academics, consultants, journalists and practitioners, abstractions demonstrated considerable agency in the construction of e-commerce, and were used in an attempt to demonstrate that a new, and potentially hyper-profitable, form of capitalism was being born. This paper undertakes a critical evaluation of these processes and draws attention to the neglected role of the cultural circuit of capital and a range of practical knowledges that are continually being revised and which we argue are equally constitutive of e-commerce. While it is easy to dismiss the promises of e-commerce as so much hyperbole, particularly in the wake of the dot.com crash, we argue that the success of e-commerce is signaled by the fact that it has lost much of its rhetorical power and has faded into the business background. E-commerce now constitutes an increasingly ambient set of technologies and practices.

The status of universalism has been much debated by feminists at the end of the twentieth century. Poststructuralist feminism is readily positioned in these debates as antagonistic to normative universalism. It is criticized as such: how is injustice to be judged and condemned if contestation and the openness of ungrounded universalism are the only ideals? This paper is a 'sub-philosophical' enquiry into the normative commitments to equality implicit in poststructuralist feminism and its relationship to 'actually existing' human rights for women as they have been re-worked by the international feminist movement. It argues that poststructuralist feminism can be used to provide support for one possible understanding of equality encoded in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. It addresses feminist concerns over universal rights as androcentric and ethnocentric, arguing that extending human rights to women is compatible with poststructuralist commitments to anti-essentialism and anti-foundationalism and required by the model of 'deconstructive equality' implicitly shared by CEDAW and poststructuralist feminism.

... Ponte , S. 2007 . Governance in the global value chain for South African wine . TRALAC Working Paper 2007/9 , Stellenbosch, , South Africa : Trade Law Centre for Southern Africa . ... Ponte , S. 2007 . Governance in the global value chain for South African wine . ...