Book Description
In Vinyl Leaves Professor Fjellman analyzes each ride and theater show of Walt Disney World and discusses the history, political economy, technical infrastructure, and urban planning of the area as well as its relationship with Metropolitan Orlando and the state of Florida. With brilliant technological legerdemain, Disney puts visitors into cinematically structured stories in which pieces of American and world culture become ideological tokens in arguments in favor of commodification and techno-corporate control. Culture is construed as spirit, colonialism and entrepreneurial violence as exotic zaniness, and the Other as child.
Customer Reviews:
I think someone needs a hug........2006-08-30
This book is complete rubbish. It is a scathing indictment of our university system and an argument against tenor. If my son or daughter came home spewing this tripe I would pull them immediately.
I surmise that maybe his [author] darkest day was in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell. In fact, the only praise I remember in the book was for the Chinese over some clever anti-Western words they used in their showcase film. I think he pines for "agrarian reformers" like Che (wink...wink).
The author is adamantly opposed to optimism (of any kind) and his main criticism of Disney comes from their inability to show history at its worst moments. I think he would be unsatisfied with a dark ride reliving the grimmest moments of US history.
My favorite trick of his is when he uses quotations around words like "free market". I think this is code to demonstrate to his smug friends his disdain for free enterprise and industry. He almost writes/types the words "nuclear family" angrily!
It is sad. He is sad.
Finally, you should never trust someone who writes about pop culture who places an AT-AT on Endor.
Nostalgic Descriptions of Early WDW, but lightweight 'scholarship'.......2005-09-13
Dr Fjellman probably spends at least 3/4 of his space describing attractions and environs at Walt Disney World, and less than 10% of his space offering any real scholarly analysis of the sociological impacts of WDW. It's hardly worth the price for the few pages of critique he offers, but if one is looking for a quasi-professorial description of WDW as it was 15 years ago - and especially of the first incarnation of EPCOT Center, this might be entertaining... or you could just read one of the early editions of "Steve Birnbaum Brings You the Best of Walt Disney World" - one of Fjellman's primary sources. Where I went to college, travel guides were hardly considered valid reference material! For a better study of Walt Disney's influence on American culture, spend your time and money on "The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life" by Steven Watts; "Married to the Mouse" by Richard Folgesong about the relationship of Walt Disney and Company with Orlando, FL, is also an interesting read.
A Mickey Mouse Book About Walt Disney World.......2004-07-07
I'm surprised to read that the "scholarly" Fjellman doesn't perpetuate the old chestnut about Walt being cryogenically frozen. As it is, he has his readers believing this ridiculous story about Walt making a series of films to be shown after his death to guide the company after he's gone.
This is a respected author? My God, where are his sources? Hopefully if he comes out with a second edition, he'll correct such glaring errors as these.
Still THE scholarly standard..........2002-05-02
I keep hoping that Fjellman will update his seminal book to encompass all that has happened in the last ten years; I'll be the first in line when he does. I wrote my MA thesis at NYU on Disney using Fjellman as a prime source, and have used various chapters from Fjellman's book to teach graduate classes in museum studies, design, and architecture. Students in many fields find a lot to think about, discuss, debate, and apply to their thinking.
Witty, engaging, balanced, factually accurate, yet still with a point of view... a great book all around. Other reviewers who complain about the writing level, or some of the more obscure academic theorizing, are missing the point. For a truly academic piece of literature, it is written in incredibly accessible, engaging, and clear style. Highly recommended.
Great imagineer and business model info.......2002-03-25
This is not a tell all/behind-the-scenes gossip book. It reads like a business venture case file with some interesting bits of Disney design and innovation thrown in. The author gives equal wonderment to the imagineers' genius as to the company's business decisions.
Also, this book was the catalyst for a to take a side trip to Celebration, Florida after our last Disney vacation in Dec 2001. The book peaked our curiosity to see Walt's real/intended version for a prototype community of the future.
Book Description
In Making a Market, Jean Ensminger analyzes the process by which the market was introduced into the economy of a group of Kenyan pastoralists. Professor Ensminger employs new institutional economic analysis to assess the impact of new market institutions on production and distribution, with particular emphasis on the effect of institutions on decreasing transaction costs over time. This study traces the effects of increasing commercialization on the economic well-being of individual households, rich and poor alike, over considerable time and analyzes the process by which institutions themselves are transformed as a market economy develops. This case study points out the importance of understanding the roles of ideology and bargaining power--in addition to pure economic forces, such as changing relative prices--in shaping market institutions.
Book Description
The most common social phenomenon of Western societies is the organization, yet those
involved in real-world managing are not always willing to reveal the intricacies of their
everyday muddles. Barbara Czarniawska argues that in order to understand these uncharted
territories, we need to gather local and concrete stories about organizational life and subject
them to abstract and metaphorical interpretation.
Using a narrative approach unique to organizational studies, Czarniawska employs literary
devices to uncover the hidden workings of organizations. She applies cultural metaphors to
public administration in Sweden to demonstrate, for example, how the dynamics of a
screenplay can illuminate the budget disputes of an organization. She shows how the
interpretive description of organizational worlds works as a distinct genre of social analysis,
and her investigations ultimately disclose the paradoxical nature of organizational life: we follow
routines in order to change, and decentralize in order to control. By confronting such
paradoxes, we bring crisis to existing institutions and enable them to change.
Average customer rating:
- only one word: excellent!
|
Individual Strategy and Social Structure
H. Peyton Young
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
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Social Dynamics (Economic Learning and Social Evolution)
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Evolutionary Games and Population Dynamics
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Evolutionary Games and Equilibrium Selection (Economic Learning and Social Evolution)
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Evolution of the Social Contract
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The Theory of Learning in Games (Economic Learning and Social Evolution)
ASIN: 069102684X |
Book Description
Neoclassical economics as-sumes that people are highly rational and can reason their way through even the most complex economic problems. In Individual Strategy and Social Structure, Peyton Young argues for a more realistic view in which people have a limited understanding of their environment, are sometimes short-sighted, and occasionally act in perverse ways. He shows how the cumulative experiences of many such individuals coalesce over time into customs, norms, and institutions that govern economic and social life. He develops a theory that predicts how such institutions evolve and characterizes their welfare properties.
The ideas are illustrated through a variety of examples, including patterns of residential segregation, rules of the road, claims on property, forms of economic contracts, and norms of equity. The book relies on new results in evolutionary game theory and stochastic dynamical systems theory, many of them originated by the author. It can serve as an introductory text, or be read on its own as a contribution to the study of economic and social institutions.
Customer Reviews:
only one word: excellent!.......1999-08-03
A wonderful survey of the author's contributions to evolutionary games and their implications for institutional changes. The reader will learn from this book how random perturbation theory of Freidlin and Wentzell is applied to such an increasingly important field in both game theory and macroeconomics. I like chapter 6 "Local Interaction" the most and, of course, the other chapters are also great!
Book Description
The last quarter century has been marked by the ascension of neoliberalism--market deregulation, state decentralization, and reduced political intervention in national economies. Not coincidentally, this period of dramatic institutional change has also seen the emergence of several schools of institutional analysis. Though these schools cut across disciplines, they have remained isolated from and critical of each other. This volume brings together four--rational choice, organizational, historical, and discursive institutionalism--to examine the rise of neoliberalism. In doing so, it makes tremendous methodological strides while substantively enlarging our knowledge about neoliberalism.
The book comprises original empirical studies by top scholars from each school of analysis. They examine neoliberalism's rise on three continents and explore changes in macroeconomic policy, labor markets, taxation, banking, and health care. Neoliberalism appears as much more complex, diverse, and contested than is often appreciated. The authors find that there is no convergence toward a common set of neoliberal institutions; that neoliberalism does not incapacitate states; and that neoliberal reform does not necessarily yield greater efficiency than other institutional arrangements. Beyond these important empirical contributions, this book is a methodological milestone in that it compares different schools of institutionalist analysis by seeing how they tackle a common problem. It reveals a second movement within institutionalism--one toward rapprochement and cross-fertilization among paradigms--and explains how this might be furthered with benefits throughout the social sciences.
In addition to the editors, the contributors are Sarah L. Babb, Ellen M. Bradburn, Bruce G. Carruthers, Terence C. Halliday, Colin Hay, Edgar Kiser, Peter Kjaer, Jack Knight, Aaron Matthew Laing, David Strang, and Bruce Western.
Book Description
In the first collection of its kind, Paul Drew and John Heritage bring together the latest advances in the application of conversation analysis to the study of language and interaction of institutional settings.
Customer Reviews:
"Talk at Work" & "Talk AS work".......2002-04-24
This volume collects an excellent set of papers, each concerned with explicating the ways that people, through talk-in-interaction, do institutional work, (and thereby also 'do' or 'achieve' institutions as stable settings). The papers in this volume were written by leaders in the field of conversation analysis, including: Max Atkinson, Jorg Bergman, Graham Button, Steve Clayman, Paul Drew, John Heritage, Gail Jefferson, Douglas Maynard, Emanuel Schegloff, & Don Zimmerman. This book should be read by every serious social scientist.
Average customer rating:
- Essential reading for those interested in studying Japan
|
Making Common Sense of Japan (Pitt Series in Policy and Institutional Studies)
Steven R. Reed
Manufacturer: Univ of Pittsburgh Pr (Txt)
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Japan's New Party System
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Shadow Shoguns: The Rise and Fall of Japan's Postwar Political Machine
ASIN: 0822955105 |
Customer Reviews:
Essential reading for those interested in studying Japan.......2000-01-05
Various movies, books, and other sources have contributed to an "eroticisation" of Japanese, its people and its culture. Steven R. Reed, in his book, Making Common Sense of Japan, sets out to dispel common myths about Japanese culture some Americans still cling to.
In the first chapter, he sets out his framework by which asking whether Japan is a unique nation, and his conclusion on this may startle Americans: only when the United States is eliminated from comparison Japan is not unique. In fact, he says, it has much in common with Western European countries, with similar sizes of population and land space and that they are industrialized democracies. It is America, not Japan that is unique, in that it has a large population, land mass, and huge crime rate.
The second chapter tackles the question of culture. Reed looks at why people act they way they do, and de-emphasizes rationality (this is a sticking point for rational-choice theorists, who would have a rather technical criticism of his analysis), and dispels the notion of a mystical explanation of culture. Reed's conceptualizes culture in terms of "common sense", which is simply the knowledge gained by experience. He says that too much about a country is attributed to its culture, and for this he gives the example of the use of umbrellas. Upon visiting Japan, he found it odd that many Japanese would open their umbrellas when there was a mist, and quickly attributed it to their culture (they are "wimps" or "conformist"). He found, that after walking for a short period during a mist, that umbrellas were actually quite practical, because he found that walking in a mist made the shoulders of his suit very wet.
The subsequent three chapters deal with (in order) a structural learning approach, an explanation for Japanese permanent employment, and an the the nature of co-operation between government and business. The first chapter is a bit complicated, but the following two are interesting, especially in his concluding remarks of each chapter. Japanese permanent was a compromise between business and labour after World War II, which meant that in return for less worker autonomy, the unions would gain higher job security. Whether the Japanese like it or not, it's been institutionalized, meaning the cost of changing the system is higher than maintaining it. With regard to business-government co-operation, he says that "bureaucrats are the referees, not the players". He argues that some ministries lack enough enforcement power to force companies to stop cheating in the market, but more often than not, a threat is often enough to get companies to fly right.
In the concluding chapter Reed argues for a "reconceptualization of the market." He goes on: "We need to recognize that markets are created by governments and can be manipulated by governments...We need to study markets as institutions, not icons." Reed also makes some remarks on what America can learn from Japan, using his two examples of permanent employment and business-government co-operation. He fails to mention what Japan could learn from America, but it's a minor quibble. Another quibble is that I would have liked for him to touch on more topics than the two, for instance the legal system. But I really enjoyed the book, if not just for the main text but for the extensive notes in the back of the book, where he talks about his experiences with his students will lecturing at university and other wisdom. This book is essential for anybody who wishes to learn about Japan as a country and the Japanese as a people.
Book Description
Following World War II, the American Occupation created Western style democratic institutions in Japan and sought to develop a society and culture that would support a democratic political system. Now, after four decades, the successes and failures of Japanese democracy can be assessed. How equal are Japan’s citizens? To what extent are their views represented in the legislature? How does Japan handle dissent and protest? How stable is its democracy?
In closely related and readable essays, thirteen leading experts consider three main components of democracy in Japan - political, social, and economic. The editors’ introduction provides historical background, making this book accessible and valuable for students, the general reader interested in Japan, as well as the specialist.
Books:
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- A Game as Old as Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption (BK Currents)
- Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette
- Adopting After Infertility
- Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 (Studies in Comparative World History)
- Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir
- Bitter is the New Black : Confessions of a Condescending, Egomaniacal, Self-Centered Smartass,Or, Why You Should Never Carry A Prada Bag to the Unemployment Office
- Biz-War and the Out-of-Power Elite: The Progressive-Left Attack on the Corporation
Books Index
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The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life
