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Season of Rains: Africa in the World
Stephen Ellis
University of Chicago Press, 2012
Library of Congress HC800.E45 2012 | Dewey Decimal 330.96

Africa is playing a more important role in world affairs than ever before. Yet the most common images of Africa in the American mind are ones of poverty, starvation, and violent conflict. But while these problems are real, that does not mean that Africa is a lost cause. Instead, as Stephen Ellis explains in Season of Rains, we need to rethink Africa’s place in time if we are to understand it in all its complexity—it is a region where growth and prosperity coexist with failed states. This engaging, accessible book by one of the world’s foremost researchers on Africa captures the broad spectrum of political, economic, and social foundations that make Africa what it is today.

Ellis is careful not to position himself in the futile debate between Afro-optimists and Afro-pessimists. The forty-nine diverse nations that make up sub-Saharan Africa are neither doomed to fail nor destined to succeed. As he assesses the challenges of African sovereignties, Ellis is not under the illusion that governments will suddenly become more benevolent and less corrupt. Yet, he sees great dynamism in recent technological and economic developments. The proliferation of mobile phones alone has helped to overcome previous gaps in infrastructure, African retail markets are becoming integrated, and banking is expanding. Businesses from China and emerging powers from the West are investing more than ever before in the still land-rich region, and globalization is offering possibilities of enormous economic change for the growing population of one billion Africans, actively engaged in charting the future of their continent.

This highly readable survey of the continent today offers an indispensable guide to how money, power, and development are shaping Africa’s future.

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Trading Down: Africa, Value Chains, And The Global Economy
Peter Gibbon and Stefano Ponte
Temple University Press, 2005
Library of Congress HC800.G53 2005 | Dewey Decimal 382.0967

Africa's role in the global economy is evolving as a result of new corporate strategies, changing trade regulations, and innovative ways of overseeing the globalized production and distribution of goods both within Africa and internationally. African participants in the global economy, now faced with demands for higher levels of performance and quality, have generated occasional successes but also many failures. Peter Gibbon and Stefano Ponte describe the central processes that are integrating some African firms into the global economy while at the same time marginalizing others. They show the effects of these processes on African countries, and the farms and firms within them. The authors use an innovative combination of global value chain analysis—which links production, trade, and consumption—and convention theory, an approach to understanding the conduct of business. In doing so, Gibbon and Ponte present a timely overview of the economic challenges that lay ahead in Africa, and point to ways to best address them.

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Moral Philosophy and Development: The Human Condition in Africa
Tedros Kiros
Ohio University Press, 1992
Library of Congress HC800.K57 1992 | Dewey Decimal 338.96

Although development issues generally have been considered in a framework of economic theory and politics, in this volume Tedros Kiros looks to European ideas of moral philosophy to explain the underdevelopment of Africa and the persistent African food crisis. He draws upon the works of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx and the concepts of hegemony and counter-hegemony.

Kiros points out that Africans and Europeans held opposing worldviews upon their initial contact and agrees with those who explain the present condition in Africa partly as the result of European colonialism. In his concluding chapter he develops principles of moral philosophy to guide Africans and others in the future economic development of the African continent.

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New Presence of China in Africa
Edited by Meine Pieter van Dijk
Amsterdam University Press, 2009
Library of Congress HC800.N488 2009 | Dewey Decimal 330

China’s economic and political presence in Africa has expanded drastically over the past decade, especially in the sub-Saharan region. Convinced that Western attempts at providing aid to Africa have failed, Chinese officials have sought new forms of aid and invested billions to push further development in Africa. But some in the United States and around the word fear that China’s interest in sub-Saharan Africa could threaten previous efforts to protect human rights and to promote democracy in the region. The New Presence of China in Africa takes on this controversial issue, offering an overview of the Chinese model and evaluating whether it might serve as an example for future Western endeavors.

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Greening Africana Studies: Linking Environmental Studies with Transforming Black Experiences
Rubin Patterson
Temple University Press, 2014
Library of Congress HC800.Z9E5593 2015 | Dewey Decimal 338.9607

Insufficient attention has been given to the environment in Africana studies within the academy. In Greening Africana Studies, Rubin Patterson initiates an important conversation explaining why and how the gap between these two disciplines can and should be bridged. His comprehensive book calls for a green African transnationalism and focuses on the mission and major paradigms that identify the respective curriculum, research interests, and practices.

In his original work, Patterson demonstrates the ways in which black communities are harmed by local environmental degradation and global climate change. He shows that many local unwanted land use sites (LULUs), such as brownfields and toxic release inventory facilities, are disproportionately located in close proximity to neighborhoods of color, but also to colleges and universities with Africana studies programs. Arguing that such communities are not aggressively engaging in environmental issues, Greening Africana Studies also provides examples of how Africana studies students as well as members of black communities can prepare for green careers.

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Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution
James Ferguson
Duke University Press, 2015
Library of Congress HC800.Z9P63 2015

In Give a Man a Fish James Ferguson examines the rise of social welfare programs in southern Africa, in which states make cash payments to their low income citizens. More than thirty percent of South Africa's population receive such payments, even as pundits elsewhere proclaim the neoliberal death of the welfare state. These programs' successes at reducing poverty under conditions of mass unemployment, Ferguson argues, provide an opportunity for rethinking contemporary capitalism and for developing new forms of political mobilization. Interested in an emerging "politics of distribution," Ferguson shows how new demands for direct income payments (including so-called "basic income") require us to reexamine the relation between production and distribution, and to ask new questions about markets, livelihoods, labor, and the future of progressive politics.

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Globalized Authoritarianism: Megaprojects, Slums, and Class Relations in Urban Morocco
Koenraad Bogaert
University of Minnesota Press, 2018
Library of Congress HC810.B64 2018 | Dewey Decimal 338.964

A rich investigation into Morocco’s urban politics

Over the past thirty years, Morocco’s cities have transformed dramatically. To take just one example, Casablanca’s medina is now obscured behind skyscrapers that are funded by global capital and encouraged by Morocco’s monarchy, which hopes to transform this city into a regional leader of finance and commerce. Such changes have occurred throughout Morocco. Megaprojects are redesigning the cityscapes of Rabat, Tangiers, and Casablanca, turning the nation’s urban centers into laboratories of capital accumulation, political dominance, and social control.

In Globalized Authoritarianism, Koenraad Bogaert links more abstract questions of government, globalization, and neoliberalism with concrete changes in the city. Bogaert goes deep beneath the surface of Morocco’s urban prosperity to reveal how neoliberal government and the increased connectivity engendered by global capitalism transformed Morocco’s leading urban spaces, opening up new sites for capital accumulation, creating enormous class divisions, and enabling new innovations in state authoritarianism. Analyzing these transformations, he argues that economic globalization does not necessarily lead to increased democratization but to authoritarianism with a different face, to a form of authoritarian government that becomes more and more a globalized affair.

Showing how Morocco’s experiences have helped produce new forms of globalization, Bogaert offers a bridge between in-depth issues of Middle Eastern studies and broader questions of power, class, and capital as they continue to evolve in the twenty-first century.

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Transition & Development in Algeria: Economic, Social and Cultural Challenges
Mohammed Saad
Intellect Books, 2013
Library of Congress HC815.T73 2005 | Dewey Decimal 338.965

Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo
Julia Elyachar
Duke University Press, 2005
Library of Congress HC830.Z7C338 2005 | Dewey Decimal 330.96216055

What happens when the market tries to help the poor? In many parts of the world today, neoliberal development programs are offering ordinary people the tools of free enterprise as the means to well-being and empowerment. Schemes to transform the poor into small-scale entrepreneurs promise them the benefits of the market and access to the rewards of globalization. Markets of Dispossession is a theoretically sophisticated and sobering account of the consequences of these initiatives.

Julia Elyachar studied the efforts of bankers, social scientists, ngo members, development workers, and state officials to turn the craftsmen and unemployed youth of Cairo into the vanguard of a new market society based on microenterprise. She considers these efforts in relation to the alternative notions of economic success held by craftsmen in Cairo, in which short-term financial profit is not always highly valued. Through her careful ethnography of workshop life, Elyachar explains how the traditional market practices of craftsmen are among the most vibrant modes of market life in Egypt. Long condemned as backward, these existing market practices have been seized on by social scientists and development institutions as the raw materials for experiments in “free market” expansion. Elyachar argues that the new economic value accorded to the cultural resources and social networks of the poor has fueled a broader process leading to their economic, social, and cultural dispossession.

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Empire State-Building: War and Welfare in Kenya, 1925–1952
Joanna Lewis
Ohio University Press, 2001
Library of Congress HC865.Z9D43 2000 | Dewey Decimal 338.9676200904

This history of administrative thought and practice in colonial Kenya looks at the ways in which white people tried to engineer social change.

It asks four questions:
- Why was Kenya’s welfare operation so idiosyncratic and spartan compared with that of other British colonies?
- Why did a transformation from social welfare to community development produce further neglect of the very poor?
- Why was there no equivalent to the French tradition of community medicine?
- If there was a transformatory element of colonial rule that sought to address poverty, where and why did it fall down?

The answers offer revealing insight into the dynamics of rule in the late colonial period in Kenya.

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Developing Uganda
Hölger Bernt Hansen
Ohio University Press, 1998
Library of Congress HC870.D48 1998 | Dewey Decimal 338.96761

Uganda's recovery since Museveni came to power in 1986 has been one of the heartening achievements in a continent where the media have given intense coverage to disasters. This book assesses the question of whether the reality lives up to the image that has so impressed the supporters of its recovery. What has actually happened? How successful have the reforms been thus far? What are the prospects for Uganda's future?

Essays by the top scholars in the Weld span the breadth of the issue, from Uganda's growth out of poverty to development at the grass roots level. Developing Uganda replaces the myth and misinformation the last decade has witnessed with a realistic scrutiny by those who have studied it with care and caution.

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Poverty and Wealth in East Africa: A Conceptual History
Rhiannon Stephens
Duke University Press, 2022
Library of Congress HC870.S747 2022

In Poverty and Wealth in East Africa Rhiannon Stephens offers a conceptual history of how people living in eastern Uganda have sustained and changed their ways of thinking about wealth and poverty over the past two thousand years. This history serves as a powerful reminder that colonialism and capitalism did not introduce economic thought to this region and demonstrates that even in contexts of relative material equality between households, people invested intellectual energy in creating new ways to talk about the poor and the rich. Stephens uses an interdisciplinary approach to write this history for societies without written records before the nineteenth century. She reconstructs the words people spoke in different eras using the methods of comparative historical linguistics, overlaid with evidence from archaeology, climate science, oral traditions, and ethnography. Demonstrating the dynamism of people’s thinking about poverty and wealth in East Africa long before colonial conquest, Stephens challenges much of the received wisdom about the nature and existence of economic and social inequality in the region’s deeper past.

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Ecology Control and Economic Development in East African History: The Case of Tanganyika, 1850–1950
Helge Kjekshus
Ohio University Press, 1995
Library of Congress HC885.K58 1996 | Dewey Decimal 338.9678

This pioneering book was one of the first to place the history of East Africa within the context of the environment. It has been used continuously for student teaching. It is now reissued with an introduction placing it within the debate that has developed on the subject; there is also an updated bibliography.

The book puts people at the centre of events. It thus serves as a modification to nationalist history with its emphasis on leaders. It presents environmental factors that had been underestimated; for instance, it points to the critical importance of the rinderpest outbreak.

Helge Kjekshus provides evidence to suggest that the nineteenth century was a period of relative prosperity with well-developed trade. He questions the view that warfare was pervasive and that the slave trade led to depopulation. He points to a balance between man and the environment.

This book is reissued at the same time as the first publication of Custodians of the Land: Ecology and Culture in the History of Tanzania edited by Gregory Maddox, James I. Giblin and Isaria N. Kimambo. The footnotes in that book point to the importance of the work of Helge Kjekshus.

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Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development: Cahora Bassa and Its Legacies in Mozambique, 1965–2007
Allen F. Isaacman
Ohio University Press, 2013
Library of Congress HC890.Z65I83 2013 | Dewey Decimal 333.71509679

Cahora Bassa Dam on the Zambezi River, built in the early 1970s during the final years of Portuguese rule, was the last major infrastructure project constructed in Africa during the turbulent era of decolonization. Engineers and hydrologists praised the dam for its technical complexity and the skills required to construct what was then the world’s fifth-largest mega-dam. Portuguese colonial officials cited benefits they expected from the dam—from expansion of irrigated farming and European settlement, to improved transportation throughout the Zambezi River Valley, to reduced flooding in this area of unpredictable rainfall. “The project, however, actually resulted in cascading layers of human displacement, violence, and environmental destruction. Its electricity benefited few Mozambicans, even after the former guerrillas of FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique) came to power; instead, it fed industrialization in apartheid South Africa.” (Richard Roberts)

This in-depth study of the region examines the dominant developmentalist narrative that has surrounded the dam, chronicles the continual violence that has accompanied its existence, and gives voice to previously unheard narratives of forced labor, displacement, and historical and contemporary life in the dam’s shadow.

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Learning From Robben Island: Govan Mbeki’s Prison Writings
Govan Mbeki
Ohio University Press, 1991
Library of Congress HC905.M39 1991 | Dewey Decimal 330.96806

In the late fifties and early sixties, Govan Mbeki was a central figure in the African National Congress and director of the ANC campaigns from underground. Born of a chief and the daughter of a Methodist minister in the Transkei of South Africa in 1910, he worked as a teacher, journalist, and tireless labor organizer in a lifetime of protest against the government policy of apartheid. Over two decades of imprisonment on Robben Island did not consign him to obscurity. Along with Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, his name has become a symbol of resistance, not only to the oppressed people of South Africa, but also to the international community who have conferred on him many honors and awards.

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Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa
Julie Livingston
Duke University Press, 2019
Library of Congress HC930.Z9E5 2019

Under capitalism, economic growth is seen as the key to collective well-being. In Self-Devouring Growth Julie Livingston upends this notion, showing that while consumption-driven growth may seem to benefit a particular locale, it produces a number of unacknowledged, negative consequences that ripple throughout the wider world. Structuring the book as a parable in which the example of Botswana has lessons for the rest of the globe, Livingston shows how fundamental needs for water, food, and transportation become harnessed to what she calls self-devouring growth: an unchecked and unsustainable global pursuit of economic growth that threatens catastrophic environmental destruction. As Livingston notes, improved technology alone cannot stave off such destruction; what is required is a greater accounting of the web of relationships between humans, nonhuman beings, plants, and minerals that growth entails. Livingston contends that by failing to understand these relationships and the consequences of self-devouring growth, we may be unknowingly consuming our future.

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Implementing Inequality: The Invisible Labor of International Development
Rebecca Warne Peters
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Library of Congress HC950.Z9E444 2020 | Dewey Decimal 338.9109673

Implementing Inequality argues that the international development industry’s internal dynamics—between international and national staff, and among policy makers, administrators, and implementers—shape interventions and their outcomes as much as do the external dynamics of global political economy. Through an ethnographic study in postwar Angola, the book demonstrates how the industry’s internal social pressures guide development’s methods and goals, introducing the innovative concept of the development implementariat: those in-country workers, largely but not exclusively “local” staff members, charged with carrying out development’s policy prescriptions. The implementariat is central to the development endeavor but remains overlooked and under-supported as most of its work is deeply social, interactive, and relational, the kind of work that receives less recognition and support than it deserves at every echelon of the industry. If international development is to meet its larger purpose, it must first address its internal inequalities of work and professional class.

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Doing Development in West Africa: A Reader by and for Undergraduates
Charles Piot
Duke University Press, 2016
Library of Congress HC1015.Z9E443 2016

In recent years the popularity of service learning and study abroad programs that bring students to the global South has soared, thanks to this generation of college students' desire to make a positive difference in the world. This collection contains essays by undergraduates who recount their experiences in Togo working on projects that established health insurance at a local clinic, built a cyber café, created a microlending program for teens, and started a local writers' group. The essays show students putting their optimism to work while learning that paying attention to local knowledge can make all the difference in a project's success. Students also conducted research on global health topics by examining the complex relationships between traditional healing practices and biomedicine. Charles Piot's introduction contextualizes student-initiated development within the history of development work in West Africa since 1960, while his epilogue provides an update on the projects, compiles an inventory of best practices, and describes the type of projects that are likely to succeed. Doing Development in West Africa provides a relatable and intimate look into the range of challenges, successes, and failures that come with studying abroad in the global South.

Contributors. Cheyenne Allenby, Kelly Andrejko, Connor Cotton, Allie Middleton, Caitlin Moyles, Charles Piot, Benjamin Ramsey, Maria Cecilia Romano, Stephanie Rotolo, Emma Smith, Sarah Zimmerman

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African Miracle, African Mirage: Transnational Politics and the Paradox of Modernization in Ivory Coast
Abou B. Bamba
Ohio University Press, 2016
Library of Congress HC1025.B36 2016 | Dewey Decimal 330.9666805

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Ivory Coast was touted as an African miracle, a poster child for modernization and the ways that Western aid and multinational corporations would develop the continent. At the same time, Marxist scholars—most notably Samir Amin—described the capitalist activity in Ivory Coast as empty, unsustainable, and incapable of bringing real change to the lives of ordinary people. To some extent, Amin’s criticisms were validated when, in the 1980s, the Ivorian economy collapsed.

In African Miracle, African Mirage, Abou B. Bamba incorporates economics, political science, and history to craft a bold, transnational study of the development practices and intersecting colonial cultures that continue to shape Ivory Coast today. He considers French, American, and Ivorian development discourses in examining the roles of hydroelectric projects and the sugar, coffee, and cocoa industries in the country’s boom and bust. In so doing, he brings the agency of Ivorians themselves to the fore in a way not often seen in histories of development. Ultimately, he concludes that the “maldevelopment” evident by the mid-1970s had less to do with the Ivory Coast’s “insufficiently modern” citizens than with the conflicting missions of French and American interests within the context of an ever-globalizing world.

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Market Encounters: Consumer Cultures in Twentieth-Century Ghana
Bianca Murillo
Ohio University Press, 2017
Library of Congress HC1060.Z9C64 2017 | Dewey Decimal 381.309667

In Market Encounters, Bianca Murillo explores the shifting social terrains that made the buying and selling of goods in modern Ghana possible. Fusing economic and business history with social and cultural history, she traces the evolution of consumerism in the colonial Gold Coast and independent Ghana from the late nineteenth century through to the political turmoil of the 1970s.

Murillo brings sales clerks, market women, and everyday consumers in Ghana to the center of a story that is all too often told in sweeping metanarratives about what happens when African businesses are incorporated into global markets. By emphasizing the centrality of human relationships to Ghana’s economic past, Murillo introduces a radical rethinking of consumption studies from an Africa-centered perspective. The result is a keen look at colonial capitalism in all of its intricacies, legacies, and contradictions, including its entanglement with gender and race.

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Knowledge Management: An Introduction
Kevin C. Desouza
American Library Association, 2011
Library of Congress HD30.2.D469 2011 | Dewey Decimal 658.4038

Digital Depression: Information Technology and Economic Crisis
Dan Schiller
University of Illinois Press, 2014
Library of Congress HD30.2.S325 2014 | Dewey Decimal 338.926

The financial crisis of 2007-08 shook the idea that advanced information and communications technologies (ICTs) as solely a source of economic rejuvenation and uplift, instead introducing the world to the once-unthinkable idea of a technological revolution wrapped inside an economic collapse. In Digital Depression, Dan Schiller delves into the ways networked systems and ICTs have transformed global capitalism during the so-called Great Recession. He focuses on capitalism's crisis tendencies to confront the contradictory matrix of a technological revolution and economic stagnation making up the current political economy and demonstrates digital technology's central role in the global political economy. As he shows, the forces at the core of capitalism--exploitation, commodification, and inequality--are ongoing and accelerating within the networked political economy.

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Collected Papers of Kenneth J. Arrow
Kenneth J. Arrow
Harvard University Press, 1984
Library of Congress HD30.23.A74 1984 | Dewey Decimal 658.8343

Unlike the papers of some other great economists, those of Kenneth Arrow are being read and studied today with even greater care and attention than when they first appeared in the journals. The publication of his collected papers will therefore be welcomed by economists and other social scientists and in particular by graduate students, who can draw from them the deep knowledge and the discernment in selection of scientific problems that only a master can offer. The author has added headnotes to certain well-known papers, describing how he came to write them.

The third volume of Kenneth Arrow's Collected Papers concerns the basic concept of rationality as it applies to an economic decision maker. In particular, it addresses the problem of choice faced by consumers in a multicommodity world and presents specific models of choice useful in economic analysis. It also discusses choice models under uncertainty, giving the basic theory and critiques of this theory based on experimental evidence and applications. Among the major papers are "Alternative Approaches to the Theory of Choice in Risk-Taking Situations," a masterly survey of subjective probability and choice theory, and "The Theory of Risk Aversion," an exposition of the theory of choice under uncertainty.

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Value-Focused Thinking: A Path to Creative Decisionmaking
Ralph L. Keeney
Harvard University Press, 1992
Library of Congress HD30.23.K354 1992 | Dewey Decimal 658.403

The standard way of thinking about decisions is backwards, says Ralph Keeney: people focus first on identifying alternatives rather than on articulating values. A problem arises and people react, placing the emphasis on mechanics and fixed choices instead of on the objectives that give decisionmaking its meaning. In this book, Keeney shows how recognizing and articulating fundamental values can lead to the identification of decision opportunities and the creation of better alternatives. The intent is to be proactive and to select more attractive decisions to ponder before attempting any solutions.

Keeney describes specific procedures for articulating values by identifying and structuring objectives qualitatively, and he shows how to apply these procedures in various cases. He then explains how to quantify objectives using simple models of values. Such value analysis, Keeney demonstrates, can yield a full range of alternatives, thus converting decision problems into opportunities. This approach can be used to uncover hidden objectives, to direct the collection of information, to improve communication, to facilitate collective decisionmaking, and to guide strategic thinking. To illustrate these uses, Keeney shows how value-focused thinking works in many business contexts, such as designing an integrated circuit tester and managing a multibillion-dollar utility company; in government contexts, such as planning future NASA space missions and deciding how to transport nuclear waste to storage sites; and in personal contexts, such as choosing career moves and making wise health and safety decisions.

An incisive, applicable contribution to the art and science of decisionmaking, Value-Focused Thinking will be extremely useful to anyone from consultants and managers to systems analysts and students.

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Competitive Environmental Strategy: A Guide To The Changing Business Landscape
Andrew J. Hoffman
Island Press, 2000
Library of Congress HD30.255.H638 2000 | Dewey Decimal 658.408

Environmental concerns can greatly affect business success, regardless of whether a business person or corporation shares those concerns. Today's corporate managers must understand the power of environmental issues, and shift their mindset from one focused on environmental "management" to one focused on strategy.Competitive Environmental Strategy examines the effects of environmentalism on corporate management, explaining how and why environmental forces are driving change and how business managers can think about environmental issues in a strategic way. The author discusses: the evolving drivers of corporate environmental strategy, including regulators, shareholders, buyers and suppliers, insurers, investors, and consumers how environmentalism alters basic conceptions of competitive strategy and organizational design how external institutions create both opportunity and limitations for environmental strategy how environmental threats can be incorporated into risk management, capital acquisition, competitive position, and other management concerns The book ends with an overall discussion of competitive environmental strategy and draws connections to the emerging issue of sustainable development. Each chapter features insets that ask fundamental questions about the relationship between environmental protection and business strategy, and ends with a list of additional recommended readings. Every individual who wishes to engage in business management in the 21st century will need an appreciation for the implications of environmental issues on corporate activities, and vice-versa.Competitive Environmental Strategy offers a valuable overview of the subject, and provides a wealth of real-world examples that demonstrate the validity and applicability of the concepts for business people, clearly showing how managers are turning an understanding of environmental issues to competitive advantage.

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Strategic Corporate Conservation Planning: A Guide to Meaningful Engagement
Margaret O'Gorman
Island Press, 2019
Library of Congress HD30.255.O36 2020 | Dewey Decimal 658.4083

Industries that drive economic growth and support our comfortable modern lifestyles have exploited natural resources to do so. But now there’s growing understanding that business can benefit from a better relationship with the environment. Leading corporations have begun to leverage nature-based remediation, restoration, and enhanced lands management to meet a variety of business needs, such as increasing employee engagement and establishing key performance indicators for reporting and disclosures. Strategic Corporate Conservation Planning offers fresh insights for corporations and environmental groups looking to create mutually beneficial partnerships that use conservation action to address business challenges and realize meaningful environmental outcomes.

Recognizing the long history of mistrust between corporate action and environmental effort, Strategic Corporate Conservation Planning begins by explaining how to identify priorities that will yield a beneficial relationship between a company and nonprofit. Next, O’Gorman offers steps for creating ecologically-focused projects that address key business needs. Chapters highlight existing projects with different scales of engagement, emphasizing that headline-generating, multimillion dollar commitments are not necessarily the most effective approach. Myriad case studies featuring programs from habitat restoration to environmental educational initiatives at companies like Bridgestone USA, General Motors, and CRH Americas are included to help spark new ideas.

With limited government funding available for conservation and increasing competition for grant support, corporate efforts can fill a growing need for environmental stewardship while also providing business benefits. Strategic Corporate Conservation Planning presents a comprehensive approach for effective engagement between the public and private sector, encouraging pragmatic partnerships that benefit us all.

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Sustainability Strategies for Industry: The Future Of Corporate Practice
Edited by Nigel J. Roome
Island Press, 1998
Library of Congress HD30.255.S87 1998 | Dewey Decimal 658.408

Sustainability Strategies for Industry contains essays by members of the Greening of Industry Network that examine the emerging picture of sustainability and its implications for industry and for the relationship between industry and other social actors -- consumers, employees, and the community at large. The book seeks to define sustainability in an industrial context, and addresses how the shift to sustainaibility will affect the role of industry in society, its managerial functions, and its relationships with stakeholders and the environment.

An introductory chapter establishes the scope of the book and its contents, sets out the historical context, and explores the unifying concepts and themes running through the text. Chapters examine.

the meaning of sustainability for industry from a theoretical stance corporate environmentalism company paradigms technology reporting and management systems the role of networks and systems developing country perspectives implications for business research and management educatio.

Contributors -- including Thomas Gladwin, Richard Welford, Andrew Hoffman, John Ehrenfeld, and David Pearce -- offer a bold vision of the sustainable industrial organization of the future and the role and approach that managers in sustainable organizations will assume.

Sustainability Strategies for Industry represents an important work for those interested in the relationship between sustainability and environmental management and protection, and for those interested in the future direction of industrial organization. It will be a valuable text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in business and economics, as well as in environmental studies programs, and for researchers interested in business strategy and interactions between business practice and the environment.

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Politics Of Social Ecology
Janet Biehl
Black Rose Books, 1997
Library of Congress HD30.27.O54 1998

The culmination of a lifetime of thinking about how society might best be transformed.

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Mobilizing Invisible Assets
Hiroyuki Itami
Harvard University Press, 1987
Library of Congress HD30.28.I85 1987 | Dewey Decimal 658.4012

Successful corporate strategies, says this leading professor of management, depend upon dynamic marshaling of a firm's “invisible assets”—information-based resources such as technological know-how, the visibility of a brand name, or knowledge of a customer base—as well as tangible assets such as people, goods, and money. Hiroyuki Itami emphasizes the ways strategy must fit the firm's external environment (customers, competitors, and ever-changing technology) and also the importance of internal fit within the organization. He uses invisible assets as a single organizing concept to discuss the appropriateness of strategy in each area.

Strategy, Itami insists, must be adapted to rapidly changing conditions and must sometimes be prepared in advance of expected change. The most powerful strategy may often intentionally create imbalance in the short run in order to accumulate invisible assets and energize the organization. Itami examines successful strategies of Japanese firms, which have always operated in an environment of uncertainty and all-pervasive change. Sony and Honda are not the only examples, however—Itami also discusses IBM, Volkswagen, and the Swiss watch industry. The range of examples gives the book wide applicability and appeal to American business executives, who are now facing a similar situation of rapid change.

The clarity and sound construction of Itami's argument will make it useful not only to MBAs and theorists of international business and comparative management, but also to “real world” planners and managers who are currently coping with just the sort of situations Itami describes.

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The Essence of Scenarios: Learning from the Shell Experience
Angela Wilkinson and Roland Kupers
Amsterdam University Press, 2014
Library of Congress HD30.28.W55 2014 | Dewey Decimal 330

In 1965, Royal Dutch Shell started experimenting with a new approach to preparing for the future. This approach, called scenario planning, eschewed forecasting in favor of plausible alternative stories. By using stories, or Ÿscenarios,Œ Shell aimed to avoid the false assumption that the future would look much like the present“an assumption that marred most corporate planning at the time. The Essence of Scenarios offers unmatched insight into the company’s innovative practice, which still has a huge influence on the way businesses, governments, and other organizations think about and plan for the future.In the course of their research, Angela Wilkinson and Roland Kupers interviewed almost every living veteran of the Shell scenario planning operation, along with many top Shell executives from later periods. Drawing on these interviews, the authors identify several principles that characterize the Shell process and explain how it has survived and thrived for so long. They also enumerate the qualities of successful Shell scenarios, which above all must be plausible stories with logical trajectories. Ultimately, Wilkinson and Kupers demonstrate the value of scenario planning as a sustained practice, rather than as a one-off exercise.

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Language at Work: Analyzing Communication Breakdown in the Workplace to Inform Systems Design
Keith Devlin and Duska Rosenberg
CSLI, 1996
Library of Congress HD30.3.D478 1996 | Dewey Decimal 658.4038

People are very creative in their use of language. This observation was made convincingly by Chomsky in the 1950s and is generally accepted in the scientific communities concerned with the study of language. Computers, on the other hand, are neither creative, flexible, nor adaptable. This is in spite of the fact that their ability to process language is based largely on the grammars developed by linguists and computer scientists. Thus, there is a mismatch between the observed human creativity and our ability as theorists to explain it. Language at Work examines grammars and other descriptions of language by combining the scientific and the practical. The scientific motivation is to unite distinct intellectual traditions, mathematics and descriptive social science, which have tried to provide an adequate explanation of language and its use on their own to no avail. This volume argues that Situation Theory, a theory of information couched in mathematics, has provided a uniform framework for the investigation of the creative aspects of language use. The application of Situation Theory in the study of language use in everyday communication to improve human/computer interaction is explored and espoused.

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Why Are You Here and Not Somewhere Else: Selected Essays
Harry L. Davis
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Library of Congress HD30.4.D384 2013 | Dewey Decimal 650.071

Harry L. Davis joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 1963, and he has since become one of the most influential figures in business education in the United States and abroad. He helped develop the first core leadership program of any top-rated MBA institution in the country and the Management Lab. Davis also helped Booth pioneer its first international campus in Barcelona in 1983, where he served as deputy dean for a decade.

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Davis’s arrival at the Booth School, Why Are You Here and Not Somewhere Else offers seven essays by Davis that offer new perspectives and contribute to a more well-rounded understanding of business education. Adapted from convocation addresses given by Davis at different points during his five-decade career, the essays encapsulate the spirit of business education at the Booth School, while at the same time providing encouraging, invaluable wisdom for those about to embark on business careers or take on leadership positions. Topics addressed range from the role of the university in the business world to the crucial role of intangible values in shaping one’s career.

Davis has been a formative influence on more executives and leaders than perhaps any other business educator living today, and Why Are You Here and Not Somewhere Else provides a unique and valuable perspective on how leaders in business and elsewhere can shape and define their careers in new ways.

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Handbook for International Management Research
Betty Jane Punnett and Oded Shenkar, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2004
Library of Congress HD30.4.H345 2004 | Dewey Decimal 658.0072

Success in business today requires an understanding of the nature of globalization and its impact on managers. Now in a fully revised second edition, The Handbook for International Management Research provides a complete and up-to-date assessment of the field of international management. Part 1 provides a useful context and overview for the book. Part 2, "Designing Effective Research," will help readers develop effective, rigorous, and theory-based research designs for international management research, including qualitative research and experimental methods. Part 3, "Topical Issues in International Management Research," explores areas such as cross-cultural management, international alliances, human resources, and negotiations research. The conclusion to the volume considers where and how the field should progress.
Intended primarily for those doing research in the field of international management, this book should also interest scholars and students of public institutions, sociology, and industrial psychology. Managers will find the book's comprehensive overview of international management to be invaluable. Its global perspective will appeal to readers around the world.
Betty Jane Punnett is Professor of International Business, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus.
Oded Shenkar is Ford Motor Company Chair in Global Business Management, Fisher College of Business, the Ohio State University.

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R&D, Patents and Productivity
Edited by Zvi Griliches
University of Chicago Press, 1984
Library of Congress HD30.42.U5R2 1984 | Dewey Decimal 338.06

"An essential reference for specialists in the economics of technological change."--D. G. McFertridge, Canadian Journal of Economics

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Models of Management: Work, Authority, and Organization in a Comparative Perspective
Mauro F. Guillén
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Library of Congress HD30.55.G85 1994 | Dewey Decimal 658

In this book, Mauro F. Guillén explores differing historical patterns in the adoption of the three major models of organizational management: scientific management, human relations, and structural analysis. Moving beyond Reinhard Bendix's classic Work and Authority, Models of Management takes a fresh look at how managers have used these models in four countries during the twentieth century.

Guillén's study of two liberal-democratic societies (the United States and Great Britain) and two corporatist societies (Germany and Spain) reveals significant differences in the way managerial elites and firms have adopted the three models. His data show that ideas themselves—independent of material interests and technology—can cause organizational change. Throughout the book, contrasts between modernist-technocratic and liberal-humanist mentalities, as well as between Protestant and Catholic religious backgrounds, emerge as decisive factors in determining managerial ideology and practice.

In addition to analyzing management methods in organizations, Guillén explores larger issues: the interaction among managerial, government, and labor elites; the impact of the state and the professions on managerial behavior; and the role that managers play in modern societies.

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The Sustainable Company: How to Create Lasting Value through Social and Environmental Performance
Chris Laszlo
Island Press, 2003
Library of Congress HD31.L31568 2003 | Dewey Decimal 658.408

The Sustainable Company shows how to create value for shareholders while balancing responsibilities to society and the environment. Its step-by-step approach and tool-kit for managers make this book the solutions manual for the twenty-first-century manager.

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Modern Organization
Victor A. Thompson
University of Alabama Press, 1961
Library of Congress HD31.T49 1977 | Dewey Decimal 658

Modern Organization is a classic text of organization development that addresses the complications that occur in power structures within which workers with specialized skills are managed by superiors without those skills. Thompson is interested in exploring and righting the creative tensions between knowledge and power, demonstrating that within hierarchical structures, the wielders of power often lack not only the technical know-how of their employees but charisma and other attributes that would win the loyalty and confidence of those employees.

Thompson coins the phrase “bureaupathic” behavior to describe the rise in a perceived need for regulations and rituals that result from the insecurity in these structures. This behavior only confounds working life and efficiency. Technical specialization is rapidly advancing, while cultural definitions of authority are not. Authority must be redefined in order to make allowances for its limitations. What once made a leader, namely charisma, may no longer suffice.

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Starting and running a nonprofit organization
Joan M. Hummel
University of Minnesota Press, 1980
Library of Congress HD38.H84 | Dewey Decimal 658.048

A best-selling resource on nonprofit management. Starting and Running a Nonprofit Organization is a book for people who are forming new nonprofits; thinking about converting an informal, grassroots group into tax-exempt status; reorganizing an existing agency; or currently managing a nonprofit. It provides practical and basic how-to information on legal, tax, organizational, and other issues particular to nonprofits. This one-of-a-kind resource has been an invaluable guide to nonprofit management for more than fifteen years. Its unique, compact format provides all of the necessary information in an easy-to-understand style. The long-awaited revised edition retains all of the useful features of the original, adding important new insights and strategies for the challenges of today's nonprofit operating climate. The book describes, step-by-step, all of the phases of creating and operating a new nonprofit, including incorporation, establishing a board of directors, writing bylaws, obtaining tax-exempt status, creating a strategic plan, budgeting and grant seeking, understanding accounting principles, managing human resources, and creating a community relations plan. The information provided is specific enough to be immediately useful, yet can be generalized to any nonprofit practitioner in any state. Handy checklists and worksheets, as well as a list of sources for assistance and management development and a bibliography on nonprofit management, make Starting and Running a Nonprofit Organization a valuable and unique resource. "The book emphasizes small non-profit groups, and it covers bylaws, registration requirements, accounting procedures, strategic planning, fund raising, public relations, and assembling a board of directors. Ms. Hummel includes rudimentary work sheets on budgeting, shoring up mission objectives. and taking advantage of news-media opportunities." --The Chronicle of Philanthropy "A valuable and unique resource." --Nonprofit Management News Joan M. Hummel has served as both staff and board member for a number of nonprofit organizations, as well as working with foundations and other supporters of nonprofits. The Center for Nonprofit Management is a department of the Graduate School of Business at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis and St. Paul. It provides training and guidance in all aspects of the nonprofit sector to existing organizations as well as individuals or groups who are seeking help in starting a nonprofit.

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Black Corporate Executives
Sharon Collins
Temple University Press, 1996
Library of Congress HD38.25.U6C65 1997 | Dewey Decimal 305.896073

Critical Studies in Organization and Bureaucracy: Revised and Expanded
Frank Fischer
Temple University Press, 1993
Library of Congress HD38.4.C74 1994 | Dewey Decimal 302.35