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728 books match the query 'Economic aspects' and 62 start with c

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Critically Capitalist

The Spirit of Asset Capitalism in South Korea

Bohyeong Kim

University of Michigan Press, 2025

Critically Capitalist presents an ethnography of South Korea’s asset seekers, including amateur stock investors, real estate enthusiasts, and money coaches, to demonstrate how financialized asset capitalism is sustained. As they hunt for profit margins, rent, and dividends, they simultaneously critique capitalism and posit their pursuit of assets as a form of resistance. Bohyeong Kim theorizes this new spirit of capitalism in South Korea as “critical capitalism,” arguing that it reflects the popular discontent with both national development and financial neoliberalism. As a paradoxical critique and legitimation, Bohyeong Kim argues that critical capitalism valorizes the capitalist economy not through a triumphant narrative, but by highlighting the emotional wounds, destroyed communities, and oppressive tactics of modern capitalism.

Drawing on multi-sited ethnography and in-depth interviews with a broad community of aspiring millionaires, Critically Capitalist illuminates how contemporary capitalism thrives by channeling discontent into financial and real estate markets, which in turn has cemented critical capitalism as the cultural and affective backbone of South Korea’s economy.

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Crooked Stalks

Cultivating Virtue in South India

Anand Pandian

Duke University Press, 2009

How do people come to live as they ought to live? Crooked Stalks seeks an answer to this enduring question in diverse practices of cultivation: in the moral horizons of development intervention, in the forms of virtue through which people may work upon their own desires, deeds, and habits, and in the material labors that turn inhabited worlds into environments for both moral and natural growth. Focusing on the colonial subjection and contemporary condition of the Piramalai Kallar caste—classified, condemned, and policed for decades as a “criminal tribe”—Anand Pandian argues that the work of cultivation in all of these senses has been essential to the pursuit of modernity in south India. Colonial engagements with the Kallars in the early twentieth century relied heavily upon agrarian strategies of moral reform, an approach that echoed longstanding imaginations of the rural cultivator as a morally cultivated being in Tamil literary, moral, and religious tradition. These intertwined histories profoundly shape how people of the community struggle with themselves as ethical subjects today.

In vivid, inventive, and engaging prose, Pandian weaves together ethnographic encounters, archival investigations, and elements drawn from Tamil poetry, prose, and popular cinema. Tacking deftly between ploughed soils and plundered orchards, schoolroom lessons and stationhouse registers, household hearths and riverine dams, he reveals moral life in the postcolonial present as a palimpsest of traces inherited from multiple pasts. Pursuing these legacies through the fragmentary play of desire, dream, slander, and counsel, Pandian calls attention not only to the moral potential of ordinary existence, but also to the inescapable force of accident, chance, and failure in the making of ethical lives. Rarely are the moral coordinates of modern power sketched with such intimacy and delicacy.

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Cultivating Coffee

The Farmers of Carazo, Nicaragua, 1880–1930

Julie A. Charlip

Ohio University Press, 2002

Many scholars of Latin America have argued that the introduction of coffee forced most people to become landless proletarians toiling on large plantations. Cultivating Coffee tells a different story: small and medium-sized growers in Nicaragua were a vital part of the economy, constituting the majority of the farmers and holding most of the land.

Alongside these small commercial farmers was a group of subsistence farmers, created by the state’s commitment to supplying municipal lands to communities. These subsistence growers became the workforce for their coffee-growing neighbors, providing harvest labor three months a year. Mostly illiterate, perhaps largely indigenous, they nonetheless learned the functioning of the new political and economic systems and used them to acquire individual plots of land.

Julie Charlip’s Cultivating Coffee joins the growing scholarship on rural Latin America that demonstrates the complexity of the processes of transition to expanded export agriculture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, emphasizing the agency of actors at all levels of society. It also sheds new light on the controversy surrounding landholding in Nicaragua during the Sandinista revolution.

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Cultivating Crisis

The Human Cost of Pesticides in Latin America

By Douglas L. Murray

University of Texas Press, 1994

Since World War II, the Green Revolution has boosted agricultural production in Latin America and other parts of the Third World, with money, technical assistance, and other forms of aid from United States development agencies. But the Green Revolution came at a high price—massive pesticide dependence that has caused serious socioeconomic and public health problems and widespread environmental damage.

In this study, Douglas Murray draws on ten years of field research to tell the stories of international development strategies, pesticide problems, and agrarian change in Latin America. Interwoven with his considerations of economic and geopolitical dimensions are the human consequences for individual farmers and rural communities.

This highly interdisciplinary study, integrating the perspectives of sociology, ecology, economics, political science, and public health, adds an important voice to the debate on opportunities for and obstacles to more lasting and sustainable development in the Third World. It will be of interest to a wide audience in the social and environmental sciences.

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Cultivating Machines

The Use and Maintenance of Technology in Midwestern Agriculture, 1845–1900

James Rick

Ohio University Press, 0

How farmers shaped the development of agricultural machinery

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, farmers in the midwestern United States and in Ontario began adopting new agricultural machines: threshers, reapers, and drills for more efficient production of grains, as well as sewing and washing machines for more efficient production within the farm household. By using, maintaining, and altering these machines within the natural and social contexts of their farms, rural people produced new technological systems of industrial agriculture. They also struggled with machine manufacturers and their agents for control of those systems—both individually and through farmers’ organizations. Cultivating Machines contributes to historiographies of capitalism, technology, and agriculture as it demonstrates the importance of everyday know-how and informed tinkering to the mechanization of grain agriculture.

In this study, James Rick moves from the middle decades of the nineteenth century, and the introduction of horse-powered machines, to the end of the century, when mechanized technologies became indispensable and central parts of farms themselves. Ultimately, large-scale wheat production, the increased complexity of machines, the need for replacement parts, and the efforts of manufacturers and their agents to assert themselves as authorities over industrial agriculture diminished the technological independence of farming people.

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Cultural Crowdfunding

Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization

Vincent Rouzé

University of Westminster Press, 2019

This new book analyses the strategies, usages and wider implications of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding platforms in the culture and communication industries that are reshaping economic, organizational and social logics. Platforms are the object of considerable hype with a growing global presence. Relying on individual contributions coordinated by social media to finance cultural production (and carry out promotional tasks) is a significant shift, especially when supported by morphing public policies, supposedly enhancing cultural diversity and accessibility.

The aim of this book is to propose a critical analysis of these phenomena by questioning what follows from decisions to outsource modes of creation and funding to consumers. Drawing on research carried out within the ‘Collab’ programme backed by the French National Research Agency, the book considers how platforms are used to organize cultural labour and/or to control usages, following a logic of suggestion rather than overt injunction. Four key areas are considered: the history of crowdfunding as a system; whose interests crowdfunding may serve; the implications for digital labour and lastly crowdfunding’s interface with globalization and contemporary capitalism. The book concludes with an assessment of claims that crowdfunding can democratize culture.

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Cultural Industries in Shanghai

Policy and Planning inside a Global City

Edited by Rong Yueming and Justin O’Connor

Intellect Books, 2018

This volume gathers articles by Chinese scholars dealing with developments in Shanghai’s cultural industries over the past thirty years. Like many cities in China and elsewhere, Shanghai has explicitly stated that fostering the creative economy is its top economic and political priority over the next decade. This book examines, among other aspects of Shanghai’s approach to culture, the effects of this policy focus on the city’s creative growth in economic terms.

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Cultural Production of Hallyu in the Digital Platform Era

Industry Perspectives

Dal Yong Jin

University of Michigan Press, 2025

Cultural Production of Hallyu in the Digital Platform Era explores how histories, industry structures, and politics interact in the platformization of the Korean Wave. Dal Yong Jin argues that while much research centers on the Korean culture takeover and the dominance of Korean products on premier global media platforms, Korean cultural industries also experience reshaping and changing depending on the platforms, often on the global stage.

Addressing the increasing significance of digital platforms, this work examines the transformative roles of over-the-top streaming services—Netflix, Viki, and V Live—video-sharing platforms such as YouTube, and social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, and the power relations between content producers, information technology sectors, the government, creative laborers, and audiences in the globalization of Korean culture and media. By developing critical cultural industries studies as a new theoretical framework, Cultural Production of Hallyu in the Digital Platform Era explores the ever-growing Korean Wave phenomenon with the advent of global digital platforms.

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Culture Incorporated

Museums, Artists, And Corporate Sponsorships

Mark W. Rectanus

University of Minnesota Press, 2002

An exposé of the hidden costs of corporate funding of the arts

Photographer Annie Leibowitz collaborates with American Express on a portrait exhibition. Absolut Vodka engages artists for their advertisements. Philip Morris mounts an "Arts Against Hunger" campaign in partnership with prominent museums. Is it art or PR, and where is the line that separates the artistic from the corporate? According to Mark Rectanus, that line has blurred. These mergers of art, business, and museums, he argues, are examples of the worldwide privatization of cultural funding.

In Culture Incorporated, Rectanus calls for full disclosure of corporate involvement in cultural events and examines how corporations, art institutions, and foundations are reshaping the cultural terrain. In turn, he also shows how that ground is destabilized by artists subverting these same institutions to create a heightened awareness of critical alternatives. Rectanus exposes how sponsorship helps maintain social legitimation in a time when corporations are the target of significant criticism. He provides wide-ranging examples of artists and institutions grappling with corporate sponsorship, including artists’s collaboration with sponsors, corporate sponsorship of museum exhibitions, festivals, and rock concerts, and cybersponsoring. Throughout, Rectanus analyzes the convergence of cultural institutions with global corporate politics and its influence on our culture and our communities.

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Cultures of Migration

The Global Nature of Contemporary Mobility

By Jeffrey H. Cohen and Ibrahim Sirkeci

University of Texas Press, 2011

Around the globe, people leave their homes to better themselves, to satisfy needs, and to care for their families. They also migrate to escape undesirable conditions, ranging from a lack of economic opportunities to violent conflicts at home or in the community. Most studies of migration have analyzed the topic at either the macro level of national and global economic and political forces, or the micro level of the psychology of individual migrants. Few studies have examined the "culture of migration"—that is, the cultural beliefs and social patterns that influence people to move.

Cultures of Migration combines anthropological and geographical sensibilities, as well as sociological and economic models, to explore the household-level decision-making process that prompts migration. The authors draw their examples not only from their previous studies of Mexican Oaxacans and Turkish Kurds but also from migrants from Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific, and many parts of Asia. They examine social, economic, and political factors that can induce a household to decide to send members abroad, along with the cultural beliefs and traditions that can limit migration. The authors look at both transnational and internal migrations, and at shorter- and longer-term stays in the receiving location. They also consider the effect that migration has on those who remain behind. The authors' "culture of migration" model adds an important new dimension to our understanding of the cultural beliefs and social patterns associated with migration and will help specialists better respond to increasing human mobility.

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