This new book analyses the strategies, usages and wider implications of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding platforms in the culture and communication industries that are reshaping economic, organizational and social logics. Platforms are the object of considerable hype with a growing global presence. Relying on individual contributions coordinated by s...
David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity rationalised capitalism's transformation during an extraordinary year: 1989. It gave theoretical expression to a material and cultural reality that was just then getting properly started - globalisation and postmodernity - whilst highlighting the geo-spatial limits to accumulation imposed by o...
A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via the OAPEN Library platform, www.oapen.org. This book examines the significance of networks among the firms operative in the contemporary Russian software industry in the St. Petersburg region....
This book presents an ethnographic study of how grassroots activism in Venezuela during the Chávez presidency can be understood in relation to the country's history as a petro-state. Taking the contested relationship between the popular sectors and the Venezuelan state as a point of departure, Iselin Åsedotter Strønen explores how notions s...
In the current crisis of the capitalist world system, elites promote fear of crime and terrorism to keep and expand their privileges and control the masses. This book offers an analysis of the crisis and strategies for rebellion....
We are entering a new era of technological determinism and solutionism in which governments and business actors are seeking data-driven change, assuming that Artificial Intelligence is now inevitable and ubiquitous. But we have not even started asking the right questions, let alone developed an understanding of the consequences. Urgently needed is ...
Vladimir Ilich Lenin (1870 - 1924) led the first successful revolt against market-based liberal democracy and founded the Soviet State in 1917, serving as the new nation s chief architect and sole ruler for the next five years. This collection of primary sources allows readers to learn about Lenin through his own words and emphasizes Lenin s action...
This book presents an incisive outline of the historical development and geography of cities. It focuses on three themes that constitute essential foundations for any understanding of urban form and function. These are: (a) the shifting patterns of urbanization through historical time, (b) the role of cities as centers of production and work in a ...
Faced with a global threat to food security, it is perfectly possible that society will respond, not by a dystopian disintegration, but rather by reasserting co-operative traditions. This book, by a leading expert in urban agriculture, offers a genuine solution to today's global food crisis. By contributing more to feeding themselves, cities c...
This open book discusses financial crisis management and policy in Europe and Latin America, with a special focus on equity and democracy. Based on a three-year research project by the Jean Monnet Network, this volume takes an interdisciplinary, comparative approach, analyzing both the role and impact of the EU and regional organizations in Latin A...
While the rise of social protection in the global North has been widely researched, we know little about the history of social protection in the global South. This open book investigates the experiences of four middle-income countries - Brazil, India, China and South Africa - from 1920 to 2020, analysing if, when, and how these countries articulate...
This open book focuses on the dimensions of the discourse of 'The World Class University', its alleged characteristics, and its policy expressions. It offers a broad overview of the historical background and current trajectory of the world-class-university construct. It also deepens the theoretical discussion, and points a way forward out...
There is virtually nowhere on Earth today that remains untouched by plastic and ecosystems are evolving to adapt to this new context. While plastics have revolutionized our modern world, new and often unforeseen effects of plastic and its production are continually being discovered. Plastics are entangled in multiple ecological and social crises, f...
Drawing on Indigenous peoples' struggles against settler colonialism, Theft Is Property! reconstructs the concept of dispossession as a means of explaining how shifting configurations of law, property, race, and rights have functioned as modes of governance, both historically and in the present. Through close analysis of arguments by Indigenou...