Metropolis, Money and Markets

Metropolis, Money and Markets
Author: Jeroen Klink
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2020-02-18
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0429602162

This book explores the impact of finance on urban spaces as well as cities' role in the social constitution and dissemination of financial logistics and techniques. It brings together literature from different disciplinary areas to increase our understanding of financialization. It observes how non-financial members of society, such as public bureaucrats, urban planners, the media and so on, are actively involved in the financialization of urban areas. With an explicit focus on Brazil, a developing country in the Global South, the book demonstrates how the country has been grappling with complex and contradictory processes of neoliberalization, decentralization, re-democratization and institutional-legal strengthening of frameworks for urban and regional planning, stressing the relations between urban space and finance capital. With a distinct view of filling a gap in the current literature on urban financialization, the book aims to focus on less developed areas in this field and link them with the literature on social studies of finance. This makes the text relevant for academics and scholars of urban studies and planning theory, geography, development studies and political economy, as well as scholars in the US and Europe interested in understanding Brazilian patterns of financialization.

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
Author: William Cronon
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 590
Release: 2009-11-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0393072452

A Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and Winner of the Bancroft Prize. "No one has written a better book about a city…Nature's Metropolis is elegant testimony to the proposition that economic, urban, environmental, and business history can be as graceful, powerful, and fascinating as a novel." —Kenneth T. Jackson, Boston Globe

Deciphering Markets and Money

Deciphering Markets and Money
Author: Jukka Gronow
Publisher: Helsinki University Press
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2020-02-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9523690019

Jukka Gronow’s book Deciphering Markets and Money solves the problem of the specific social conditions of an economic order based on money and the equal exchange of commodities. Gronow scrutinizes the relation of sociology to neoclassical economics and reflects on how sociology can contribute to the analyses of the major economic institutions. The question of the comparability and commensuration of economic objects runs through the chapters of the book. The author shows that due to the multidimensionality and principal quality uncertainty of products, markets would collapse without market devices that are either procedural, consisting of technical standards and measuring instruments, or aesthetic, relying on the judgements of taste, or both. In his book, Gronow demonstrates that in this respect, financial markets share the same problem as the markets of wines, movies, or PCs and mobile phones, and hence offer a highly actual case to study their social constitution in the process of coming into being.

Neon Metropolis

Neon Metropolis
Author: Hal Rothman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2015-10-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317958535

Praise for the Previous Edition (0 415 92612 2): ...lively and provocative...this book will teach you something startling on nearly every page... --The New York Times Book Review Like the Emerald City, Las Vegas glitters brightly in the vast Nevada desert, a haven for refugees from ordinary America. A hip, iconic, playground that exports nothing, it nonetheless earns billions from consumer services alone -- gambling, hotels, gaming, and entertainment. It is, historian Hal Rothman argues, the quintessential city of the future. As other cities try to mirror its success and huge, respectable corporations like Coca-Cola invest in a piece of the pie, the very traits that have ostracized Las Vegas in the past -- hedonism, money worship, and permissiveness -- have today made it America's fastest growing urban center. From the gambling-driven, mob-run Sin City of the 1940s to the corporatization of the Strip as a respectable family entertainment center after the 1970s, Las Vegas has shown incredible economic resilience and adaptability. The first full account of America's new dream capital, Neon Metropolis brilliantly shows how Las Vegas gambled on the post-industrial service economy well before the rest of the country knew it was coming, and won.

Karl Polanyi

Karl Polanyi
Author: Gareth Dale
Publisher: Polity
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2010-06-21
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0745640710

Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation is generally acclaimed as being among the most influential works of economic history in the twentieth century, and remains as vital in the current historical conjuncture as it was in his own. In its critique of nineteenth-century ‘market fundamentalism’ it reads as a warning to our own neoliberal age, and is widely touted as a prophetic guidebook for those who aspire to understand the causes and dynamics of global economic turbulence at the end of the 2000s. Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market is the first comprehensive introduction to Polanyi’s ideas and legacy. It assesses not only the texts for which he is famous – prepared during his spells in American academia – but also his journalistic articles written in his first exile in Vienna, and lectures and pamphlets from his second exile, in Britain. It provides a detailed critical analysis of The Great Transformation, but also surveys Polanyi’s seminal writings in economic anthropology, the economic history of ancient and archaic societies, and political and economic theory. Its primary source base includes interviews with Polanyi’s daughter, Kari Polanyi-Levitt, as well as the entire compass of his own published and unpublished writings in English and German. This engaging and accessible introduction to Polanyi’s thinking will appeal to students and scholars across the social sciences, providing a refreshing perspective on the roots of our current economic crisis.

African Markets and the Utu-Ubuntu Business Model. A perspective on economic informality in Nairobi

African Markets and the Utu-Ubuntu Business Model. A perspective on economic informality in Nairobi
Author: Njeri Kinyanjui
Publisher: African Books Collective
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2019-03-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1928331793

The persistence of indigenous African markets in the context of a hostile or neglectful business and policy environment makes them worthy of analysis. An investigation of Afrocentric business ethics is long overdue. Attempting to understand the actions and efforts of informal traders and artisans from their own points of view, and analysing how they organise and get by, allows for viable approaches to be identified to integrate them into global urban models and cultures. Using the utu-ubuntu model to understand the activities of traders and artisans in Nairobis markets, this book explores how, despite being consistently excluded and disadvantaged, they shape urban spaces in and around the city, and contribute to its development as a whole. With immense resilience, and without discarding their own socio-cultural or economic values, informal traders and artisans have created a territorial complex that can be described as the African metropolis. African Markets and the Utu-buntu Business Model sheds light on the ethics and values that underpin the work of traders and artisans in Nairobi, as well as their resilience and positive impact on urbanisation. This book makes an important contribution to the discourse on urban economics and planning in African cities.

The Architecture of Illegal Markets

The Architecture of Illegal Markets
Author: Jens Beckert
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2017
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0198794975

This book makes a contribution to understanding the structure of markets on which such illegal transactions occur. The authors apply the tools of economic sociology to develop conceptual frames allowing to understand the organization of such markets and present case studies that provide insights into the illegal side of the economy.