Legacies, Logics, Logistics

Legacies, Logics, Logistics
Author: Jane I. Guyer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2016-05-27
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 022632687X

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The present volume consists of a collection of essays written since the economic crash of 2007-8 by the eminent Africanist and economic anthropologist Jane Guyer. In a substantial Introduction written especially for this volume and eleven chapters, two of which are also new, divided into four parts Public Economic Cultures, Cultures of Calculation, Platforms, and Toward Ethnography and the People s Economies Guyer gives a comparative analysis of different aspects of public culture during recent economic transformations in West Africa (primarily Nigeria), Britain, and the United States. Her analysis is at once deeply comparative and historically and theoretically wide-ranging. The emphasis is not on the power of things or concepts to shape economies or markets, but on the effectuation of those things, the making of the elements, their own composition and their concatenation into new compositions, always tenuous, destined eventually to fall apart but not fade away entirely from the earth. This places the focus on those makings, the craft involved, the coordination needed to make the elements work and do work even though they might not always fit so nicely together. For the economy is a platform, lashed together from often unlikely, incongruous elements, duct tape where screws and nails are required. Far more than the sum of its parts this book will help set the stage for what may well be the some of the most exciting adventures of an anthropology in the making."

Legacies, Logics, Logistics

Legacies, Logics, Logistics
Author: Jane I. Guyer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2016-05-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 022632690X

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Legacies, Logics, Logistics brings together a set of essays, written both before and after the financial crisis of 2007–08, by eminent Africanist and economic anthropologist Jane I. Guyer. Each was written initially for a conference on a defined theme. When they are brought together and interpreted as a whole by Guyer, these varied essays show how an anthropological and socio-historical approach to economic practices—both in the West and elsewhere—can illuminate deep facets of economic life that the big theories and models may fail to capture. Focusing on economic actors—whether ordinary consumers or financial experts—Guyer traces how people and institutions hold together past experiences (legacies), imagined scenarios and models (logics), and situational challenges (logistics) in a way that makes the performance of economic life (on platforms made of these legacies, logics, and logistics) work in practice. Individual essays explore a number of topics—including time frames and the future, the use of percentages in observations and judgments, the explanation of prices, the coexistence of different world currencies, the reapplication of longtime economic theories in new settings, and, crucially, how we talk about the economy, how we use stable terms to describe a turbulent system. Valuable as standalone pieces, the essays build into a cogent method of economic anthropology.

The Logic of Logistics

The Logic of Logistics
Author: David Simchi-Levi
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 454
Release: 2013-11-19
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1461491495

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Fierce competition in today's global market provides a powerful motivation for developing ever more sophisticated logistics systems. This book, written for the logistics manager and researcher, presents a survey of the modern theory and application of logistics. The goal of the book is to present the state-of-the-art in the science of logistics management. As a result, the authors have written a timely and authoritative survey of this field that many practitioners and researchers will find makes an invaluable companion to their work.

The Logic of Logistics

The Logic of Logistics
Author: David Simchi-Levi
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2007-07-03
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 0387226192

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Fierce competition in today's global market provides a powerful motivation for developing ever more sophisticated logistics systems. This book, written for the logistics manager and researcher, presents a survey of the modern theory and application of logistics. The goal of the book is to present the state-of-the-art in the science of logistics management. As a result, the authors have written a timely and authoritative survey of this field that many practitioners and researchers will find makes an invaluable companion to their work.

The Everyday Practice of Valuation and Investment

The Everyday Practice of Valuation and Investment
Author: Horacio Ortiz
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2021-11-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0231553978

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The financial industry derives its legitimacy through the claim that it acts in the interest of shareholders. A vast international network of funds, banks, insurance companies, brokerages, rating agencies, and regulatory agencies defends its status by asserting that market mechanisms determine a company’s true value and therefore enriching shareholders contributes to the socially optimal allocation of capital. Is this how stock prices are determined in practice? What does stock valuation reveal about the supposed efficiency of markets and what it means to act on behalf of shareholders? Horacio Ortiz provides a critical analysis of the social institutions and practices that produce and regulate stock pricing and valuation. He examines how financial professionals evaluate and invest in listed companies, unraveling the contradictory definitions of financial value that shape their behavior. Ortiz demonstrates how ideologically laden notions of investing skill and efficient markets are central to the everyday practices of financial valuation, as well as how they function to justify the broader system. He scrutinizes the technical aspects of valuation and investment, their place in social relations within and among companies, and their relation to state regulation in order to demystify how the financial industry presents prices as truths that the rest of society must accept. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among stock brokers and investment management companies in New York and Paris, this book shows how the political imaginaries that underpin financial markets are central to producing, sustaining, and legitimizing global inequalities.

The Logic of Logistics

The Logic of Logistics
Author: David Simchi-Levi
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2008-11-01
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 9780387501529

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Fierce competition in today's global market provides a powerful motivation for developing ever more sophisticated logistics systems. This book, written for the logistics manager and researcher, presents a survey of the modern theory and application of logistics. The goal of the book is to present the state-of-the-art in the science of logistics management. As a result, the authors have written a timely and authoritative survey of this field that many practitioners and researchers will find makes an invaluable companion to their work.

Markets in the Making

Markets in the Making
Author: Michel Callon
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2021-12-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1942130589

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Slicing through blunt theories of supply and demand, Callon presents a rigorously researched but counterintuitive model of how everyday market activity gets produced. If you’re convinced you know what a market is, think again. In his long-awaited study, French sociologist and engineer Michel Callon takes us to the heart of markets, to the unsung processes that allow innovations to become robust products and services. Markets in the Making begins with the observation that stable commercial transactions are more enigmatic, more elusive, and more involved than previously described by economic theory. Slicing through blunt theories of supply and demand, Callon presents a rigorously researched but counterintuitive model of market activity that emphasizes what people designing products or launching startups soon discover—the inherent difficulties of connecting individuals to things. Callon’s model is founded upon the notion of “singularization,” the premise that goods and services must adapt and be adapted to the local milieu of every individual whose life they enter. Person by person, thing by thing, Callon demonstrates that for ordinary economic transactions to emerge en masse, singular connections must be made. Pushing us to see markets as more than abstract interfaces where pools of anonymous buyers and sellers meet, Callon draws our attention to the exhaustively creative practices that market professionals continuously devise to entangle people and things. Markets in the Making exemplifies how prototypes, fragile curiosities that have only just been imagined, are gradually honed into predictable objects and practices. Once these are active enough to create a desired effect, yet passive enough to be transferred from one place to another without disruption, they will have successfully achieved the status of “goods” or “services.” The output of this more ample process of innovation, as redefined by Callon, is what we recognize as “the market”—commercial activity, at scale. The capstone of an influential research career at the forefront of science and technology studies, Markets in the Making coherently integrates the empirical perspective of product engineering with the values of the social sciences. After masterfully redescribing how markets are made, Callon culminates with a strong empirical argument for why markets can and should be harnessed to enact social change. His is a theory of markets that serves social critique.

African cities and collaborative futures

African cities and collaborative futures
Author: Michael Keith
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2021-03-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1526155354

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This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This groundbreaking volume brings together scholars from across the globe to discuss the infrastructure, energy, housing, safety and sustainability of African cities, as seen through local narratives of residents. Drawing on a variety of fields and extensive first-hand research, the contributions offer a fresh perspective on some of the most pressing issues confronting urban Africa in the twenty-first century. At a time when the future of the region as a whole will be determined in large part by its cities, the implications of these developments are profound. With case studies from cities in Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, South Africa and Tanzania, this volume explores how the rapid growth of African cities is reconfiguring the relationship between urban social life and its built forms. While the most visible transformations in cities today can be seen as infrastructural, these manifestations are cultural as well as material, reflecting the different ways in which the city is rationalised, economised and governed. How can we ‘see like a city’ in twenty-first-century Africa, understanding the urban present to shape its future? This is the central question posed throughout this volume, with a practical focus on how academics, local decision makers and international practitioners can collaborate to meet the challenge of rapid growth, environmental pressures and resource gaps.

The Political Economy of Everyday Life in Africa

The Political Economy of Everyday Life in Africa
Author: Wale Adebanwi
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2017
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1847011659

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Multi-disciplinary examination of the role of ordinary African people as agents in the generation and distribution of well-being in modern Africa. What are the fundamental issues, processes, agency and dynamics that shape the political economy of life in modern Africa? In this book, the contributors - experts in anthropology, history, political science, economics, conflict and peace studies, philosophy and language - examine the opportunities and constraints placed on living, livelihoods and sustainable life on the continent. Reflecting on why and how the political economy of life approach is essential for understanding the social process in modern Africa, they engage with the intellectual oeuvre of the influential Africanist economic anthropologist Jane Guyer, who provides an Afterword. The contributors analyse the politicaleconomy of everyday life as it relates to money and currency; migrant labour forces and informal and formal economies; dispossession of land; debt and indebtedness; socio-economic marginality; and the entrenchment of colonial andapartheid pasts. Wale Adebanwi is the Rhodes Professor of Race Relations at the University of Oxford. He is author of Nation as Grand Narrative: The Nigerian Press and the Politics of Meaning (University of Rochester Press).

Lion's Share

Lion's Share
Author: Veit Erlmann
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2022-10-28
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1478023597

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In the aftermath of apartheid, South Africa undertook an ambitious revision of its intellectual property system. In Lion’s Share Veit Erlmann traces the role of copyright law in this process and its impact on the South African music industry. Although the South African government tied the reform to its postapartheid agenda of redistributive justice and a turn to a postindustrial knowledge economy, Erlmann shows how the persistence of structural racism and Euro-modernist conceptions of copyright threaten the viability of the reform project. In case studies ranging from antipiracy police raids and the crafting of legislation to protect indigenous expressive practices to the landmark lawsuit against Disney for its appropriation of Solomon Linda’s song "Mbube" for its hit “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” from The Lion King, Erlmann follows the intricacies of musical copyright through the criminal justice system, parliamentary committees, and the offices of a music licensing and royalty organization. Throughout, he demonstrates how copyright law is inextricably entwined with race, popular music, postcolonial governance, indigenous rights, and the struggle to create a more equitable society.