The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge Studies in Social & Cultural Anthropology)

Book Description

The contributors to this volume examine how things are sold and traded in a variety of social and cultural settings, both present and past. Bridging the disciplines of social history, cultural anthropology, and economics, the volume marks a major step in our understanding of the cultural basis of economic life and the sociology of culture.

Customer Reviews:

Interesting.......2005-03-30

This collection of essays is insightful but far from comprehensive, a good starting point for further discussion on commodification.

Average customer rating:

A slim volume with some excellent ideas!

Preventing Death By Lecture!
Sharon L. Bowman
Manufacturer: Bowperson Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Training | Management & Leadership | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

Pedagogy | Education | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books
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Presenting With Pizzazz
Active Learning: 101 Strategies to Teach Any Subject

ASIN: 0965685152

Customer Reviews:

A slim volume with some excellent ideas!.......2005-04-21

Teachers take note: the time of giving straight lectures and expecting your students to "get it" is over! This slim volume from Sharon Bowman will give you the strategies that you need to avoid this situation.

I teach in senior secondary classes. One of the biggest concerns with these groups is the never ending need to "cover the material" - the external exam is looming, and we need to get through it! As a result, it is easy to fall into the trap of lecturing for 40-50 minutes, and just hoping that they will remember enough to get through.

Of course, they won't. And it is not fair to expect that they could! Try listening to someone speak for that length of time and see how much YOU can remember!

So how do we overcome the problem? Ms Bowman suggests that traditional lectures are still necessary in some instances, and she provides a list of reasons that may encourage us to use this format. The bulk of the book is used to show us how to make this time more meaningful for our students. The end result is that you can still cover the material (phew!), but now you are more likely to create a learning situation in which the material will be able to be recalled and understood by your learners.

The strategies listed are a bit mixed - perhaps some are suited to a younger audience than I teach. For example, I can't imagine working with the "Tie A Yellow Ribbon" strategy from page 33. However, there is enough here to make your purchase worthwhile - I have already used the "Shout Out!" strategy from page 49 with great success, and others have been quickly integrated into my teaching practice as well.

A book filled with easy to implement strategies. And it seems certain to me that every teacher will find at least a few that they will use.

Average customer rating:

Lectures on Public Economics
A.B. Atkinson , and Joseph E. Stiglitz
Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill Education
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Public Finance | Economics | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

General | Reference | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0070841063

Getting Started in Speaking, Training, or Seminar Consulting (Getting Started In.....)

Average customer rating:

Excellent!
Bly provides excelent overview
Lacking
Some good info...
Not much help.

Getting Started in Speaking, Training, or Seminar Consulting (Getting Started In.....)
Robert W. Bly
Manufacturer: Wiley
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Communications | Skills | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

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1,001 Ways to Make More Money as a Speaker, Consultant or Trainer: Plus 300 Rainmaking Strategies for Dry Times
Speak and Grow Rich
Money Talks: How to Make a Million as a Speaker
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Become A Recognized Authority In Your Field - In 60 Days Or Less

ASIN: 0471388823

Book Description

How to make a living speaking, training, and running workshops and seminars

Expert Bob Bly shares his secrets for earning $1,000 to $5,000 a day, or more, as a self-employed speaker, lecturer, or trainer. He shows readers, step-by-step, everything they need to know to become polished speakers, create winning presentations, find a market niche, set fees, get bookings, and much more. Aspiring speakers will learn about the corporate training market-who buys training, what the hot topics are, how to package and sell training courses, and what to charge.

Bob Bly (Dumont, NJ) is an independent copywriter, advertising consultant, bestselling author, popular lecturer, and highly successful trainer.

Download Description

Expert Bob Bly shares his secrets for earning $1,000 to $5,000 a day, or more, as a self-employed speaker, lecturer, or trainer. He shows readers, step-by-step, everything they need to know to become polished speakers, create winning presentations, find a market niche, set fees, get bookings, and much more. Aspiring speakers will learn about the corporate training market--who buys training, what the hot topics are, how to package and sell training courses, and what to charge.

Customer Reviews:

Excellent!.......2006-02-03

A great book for someone contemplating entering the speaking/seminar business. I discovered the National Speakers Association through this book.

Bly provides excelent overview.......2004-12-08

Any aspiring to mid-career speaker will find most of this book's content highly useful.

Lacking.......2004-09-14

Nothing new here. For basic advice it is a passable book, but hardly of much value for serious candidates.

Some good info..........2003-12-01

If you've not had any exposure to the process of managing a speaking career, this would be a good overview book for you. Good information, easy to read, and some practical examples. The last 100 pages or so are sample letters, lists of associations, etc. which may or may not be useful to you.

Not much help........2003-05-04

This book will not lead you to a single speaking engagement. If you are serious about the speaking business contact the National Speakers Association.

Micromotives and Macrobehavior (Fels Lectures on Public Policy Analysis)

Average customer rating:

Micromotives and Macrobehavior
The Golden Rule and Self-Restraint
The big picture relevance of details
1970s Freakonomics
Great reading and very varied

Micromotives and Macrobehavior (Fels Lectures on Public Policy Analysis)
Thomas C. Schelling
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Popular Economics | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0393090094

Customer Reviews:

Micromotives and Macrobehavior.......2007-08-09

This is one of the best books I have ever read. I have read it at least three times and learn something new each time. Schelling is not only a great economist but a great writer. He has a knack for making arcane concepts accessible. I highly recommend it. This book uses economic methodology to tackle "non-economic" concepts, such as segregation, sorting and mixing and cooperation.

The Golden Rule and Self-Restraint.......2006-11-23

Schelling's book covertly drafts a model of economic support for the Golden Rule. While many of his examples may be repetitive, ultimately, we learn that by restraining ourselves in various enterprises, such as energy conservation, we are able to produce overall benefits for society. However, the hitch is that without critical mass or some basis for keeping rebels in line, no one adheres to the collective system and therefore no one benefits. Thus, the author intelligently posits an argument that in properly regulated environments, cooperation and selflessness produce stability and will lead to long-term success.

What is more interesting are Schelling's numerous examples and asides about human behavior that, once examined carefully, yield a greater understanding about everyday phenomena. For example, he writes, "Most people think that inflation reduces purchasing power without stopping to notice that their own pay increases are somebody else's inflation, and at least some of it must cancel out." This book is filled with such astute and not easily apparent statements. He also carries economic theory into social theory, showing that if all men married women four years younger than them where population is growing at three percent annually, eventually women of marrying age may outnumber men by more than 12%. The book has several of these nuggets, but leaves out an obvious and one of my favorite lessons about education: when a student goes to school, s/he not only "loses" the money s/he spends on tuition, but also her/his earning power during the years spent studying. For this reason, one could argue that it seems more sensical to attend school when there is a recession and to work when unemployment is low.

The glaring gap in this book is the problem of freeloaders--what do we do, for example, about the neighbor who waters his lawn excessively during a water shortage, thereby creating less incentive for others to conserve water? The author most likely believes that education will assist this problem, but this may be an idealistic notion at best. Still, Schelling manages to prove that cooperation rather than competition in some cases may produce better results, leading to viable arguments against selfish behavior.

The big picture relevance of details.......2006-03-25

I enjoyed this book for it's stimulating arguments and everyday examples of big picture, "big topics" issues. As a novice to any type of economic analysis I've found the book informative and interesting. I recommend this book to anybody wishing to increase their awareness of the relevance of everyday events and experience to bigger, more intellectual topics.

1970s Freakonomics.......2006-03-23

Game theory has been criticized for being able to explain anything, yet having little predictive capability. Whatever the case, Thomas Schelling's book is a gem. He takes everyday life phenomena and applies some systematic analysis as to why these things happen. It's a quick read and when you are done you too will keep viewing any issues coming your way as if they were seeking an equilibrium. With the varied topics and colorful examples it's the 1970s equivalent of "Freakonomics".

Great reading and very varied.......2005-11-18

This is probably Schelling's best book and is up against tough competition. But his mind is razor-sharp, his examples always fascinating and he is quite simply the best writer of economics around. This is not an introductory economics book - it's too original for that - but it is perfectly accessible to the general reader. Find out why neighbourhoods are segregated, why nobody sits in the front row of a lecture hall, and best of all, the economics of christmas card lists. A joy.

Political Determinants of Corporate Governance: Political Context, Corporate Impact (Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies)

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Political Determinants of Corporate Governance: Political Context, Corporate Impact (Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies)
Mark J. Roe
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Strategy & Competition | Management & Leadership | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

Management | Management & Leadership | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

Economic Policy & Development | Economics | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

Corporate Finance | Finance | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

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New Business Enterprises | Small Business & Entrepreneurship | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0199205302

Book Description

Before a nation can produce, it must achieve social peace. That social peace has been reached in different nations by differing means, some of which have then been embedded in business firms, in corporate ownership patterns, and in corporate governance structures. The large publicly held, diffusely owned firm dominates business in the United States despite its infirmities, namely the frequently fragile relations between stockholders and managers. But in other economically advanced nations, ownership is not diffuse but concentrated. It is concentrated in no small measure because the delicate threads that tie managers to shareholders in the public firm fray easily in common political environments, such as those in the continental European social democracies. Social democracies press managers to stabilize employment, to forego some profit-maximizing risks with the firm, and to use up capital in place rather than to downsize when markets no longer are aligned with the firm's production capabilities. Since managers must have discretion in the public firm, how they use that discretion is crucial to stockholders, and social democratic pressures induce managers to stray farther than otherwise from their shareholders' profit-maximizing goals. Moreover, the means that align managers with diffuse stockholders in the United States-incentive compensation, hostile takeovers, and strong shareholder-wealth maximization norms-are weaker and sometimes denigrated in continental social democracies. Hence, public firms there have higher managerial agency costs, and large-block shareholding has persisted as shareholders' best remaining way to control those costs. Social democracies may enhance total social welfare, but if they do, they do so with fewer public firms than less socially responsive nations. The author therefore uncovers not only a political explanation for ownership concentration in Europe, but also a crucial political prerequisite to the rise of the public firm in the United States, namely the weakness of social democratic pressures on the American business firm.

The Economic Effects of Constitutions (Munich Lectures)

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The Economic Effects of Constitutions (Munich Lectures)
Torsten Persson , and Guido Tabellini
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Policy & Current Events | Popular Economics | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

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Understanding the Process of Economic Change (Princeton Economic History of the Western World)

ASIN: 0262661926

Book Description

The authors of The Economic Effects of Constitutions use econometric tools to study what they call the "missing link" between constitutional systems and economic policy; the book is an uncompromisingly empirical sequel to their previous theoretical analysis of economic policy. Taking recent theoretical work as a point of departure, they ask which theoretical findings are supported and which are contradicted by the facts. The results are based on comparisons of political institutions across countries or time, in a large sample of contemporary democracies. They find that presidential/parliamentary and majoritarian/proportional dichotomies influence several economic variables: presidential regimes induce smaller public sectors, and proportional elections lead to greater and less targeted government spending and larger budget deficits. Moreover, the details of the electoral system (such as district magnitude and ballot structure) influence corruption and structural policies toward economic growth.

Persson and Tabellini's goal is to draw conclusions about the causal effects of constitutions on policy outcomes. But since constitutions are not randomly assigned to countries, how the constitutional system was selected in the first place must be taken into account. This raises challenging methodological problems, which are addressed in the book. The study is therefore important not only in its findings but also in establishing a methodology for empirical analysis in the field of comparative politics.

Slavery And American Economic Development (Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History)

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Slavery And American Economic Development (Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History)
Gavin Wright
Manufacturer: Louisiana State University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Economic Policy & Development | Economics | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

Economic History | Economics | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

American Taxation, American Slavery
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Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market
A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868 (Civil War America)

ASIN: 0807131830

Book Description

Through an original analysis of slavery as an economic institution, Gavin Wright presents a fresh look at the economic divergence between North and South in the antebellum era. Wright draws a distinction between slavery as a form of work organization (the aspect that has dominated historical debates) and slavery as a set of property rights. Slaves could be purchased and carried to any location where slavery was legal; they could be assigned to any task regardless of gender or age; the could be punished for disobedience, with no effective recourse to the law; they could be accumulated as a form of wealth; they could be sold or bequeathed. Wright argues that slave-based commerce was central to the eighteenth-century rise of the Atlantic economy, not because slave plantations were superior as a method of organizing production, but because slaves could be put to work on sugar plantations that could not have attracted free labor on economically viable terms. On the mainland, Wright suggests that the decisive steps in regional divergence came with the abolition of slavery in the northern states and the exclusion of slavery from the Northwest Territory, measures whose economic impact has been underappreciated. He portrays the seventy years between the Constitution and southern secession as an economic cold war between two fundamentally different systems of property rights. Paradoxically, both sides had reason to claim victory in this contest, if each were allowed to use an economic scoreboard appropriate to its property-rights regime. Rather than seeing the slave South as a flourishing economy that subsequently declined, Wright maintains that the roots of postbellum backwardness were evident in the antebellum era. Startling, insightful, rigorously argued yet accessible to a broad readership, Slavery and American Economic Development is certain to become a classic. AUTHOR BIO: Gavin Wright is William Robertson Coe Professor in American Economic History at Stanford University and the author of The Political Economy of the Cotton South and Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War, winner of the Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Award of the Southern Historical Association. He is a past president of the Economic History Association and the Agricultural History Society.

Computer-Aided Transit Scheduling: Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Computer-Aided Scheduling of Public Transport (Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems)

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Computer-Aided Transit Scheduling: Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Computer-Aided Scheduling of Public Transport (Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems)

Manufacturer: Springer
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

Operations Research | Management & Leadership | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

Manager's Guides to Computing | Business & Culture | Computers & Internet | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 3540601937

Book Description

This volume gives an overview on new theoretical approaches on computer-aided methods for strategic and operational planning in public mass transit. Interesting results in scheduling theory are shown, using procedures for solving combinatorial problems with more complex structures. Experiences in the application of specific software tools are also presented. Readers of this book obtain detailed information on the current developments in scheduling theory and in solving such problems in practice. The papers of this volume describe the most important steps of the complete process on planning and operational control in public mass transit.

The Limits of Organization (Fels Lectures on Public Policy Analysis)

Average customer rating:

excellent
Easy to read overview of organizational limits.

The Limits of Organization (Fels Lectures on Public Policy Analysis)
Kenneth J. Arrow
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Popular Economics | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

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Meritocracy and Economic Inequality
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Administrative Behavior, 4th Edition

ASIN: 0393093239

Customer Reviews:

excellent.......2005-08-12

this book is so incredibly awesome. it is about how the world works, generally. Arrow critiques capitalism and a bit more from a sane perspective. I really couldn't over emphasize how good this book is. He even makes laws look good. So he doesn't give you the answers of how the world should work, but would you really trust someone who did? This is about the situations we're in. Please find time for this one.

Easy to read overview of organizational limits........1999-08-23

A good read that, at under 80 pages, quickly gets to the point. Based on a lecture series, this book explores public choice concepts with regards to organizations. This is a good augment to North's books on institutions.

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