[Review of] Kathryn Simpson 'Gifts, Market and Economies of Desire in Virginia Woolf'

Inspired by Lewis Hyde’s groundbreaking study, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (1999), Kathryn Simpson in Gifts, Market and Economies of Desire in Virginia Woolf, takes the notion of the market place and extends it to include gifts and gift economies, at the same time highlighting the homo-erotic importance accorded the gift in Woolf’s oeuvr

What happened to "efficient markets?"

The financial crisis of 2008 has challenged the reputation of the free-market economy in the public imagination in a way that it has not been challenged since the Great Depression. The intellectual consensus after World War II was that markets are unstable and exploitive and thus in need of government action on a variety of fronts to counteract these undesirable characteristics. In the United States, this intellectual consensus did not result in nationalization of industry, but in detailed regulation and heavy government involvement in economic life.Financial Crisis; History of Economic Thought; Market Process

Conceptualizing consumption in the imagination: Relationships and movements between imaginative forms and the marketplace

In this article we extend theory relating to the imagination and markets by reviewing explicit and implicit work in marketing, consumer research and sociology, drawing on a broader literature that provides a more comprehensive characterization of imagining. We map consumption in the imagination in order to better define the concept and to differentiate forms of imagining according to a number of characteristics that are identified in the literature. These are as follows: (1) temporal location, (2) range of emotions, (3) degree of elaboration, (4) level of abstraction (5) purpose, and (6) prompts. We also consider the role of consumption in terms of its level of presence and absence in the imagination. We then present a trajectory of consumption in the imagination that seeks to account for the relationships and movements between forms of imagining and the marketplace, noting the importance of the imagination in terms of implications for macro-level market structures and individual consumption practice

Strategy Research and the Market Process Perspective

We argue that strategizing fundamentally concerns disequilibrium phenomena, such as discovery, innovation, resource-combination, imagination - in short, entrepreneurship. Therefore, the understanding of strategizing is likely to be led astray by drawing too heavily on equilibrium theories. Arguably, the three dominant economic approaches to strategy - the Porter industry analysis approach, the new industrial organization, and the ressourcebased approach - are characterized precisely by their strong reliance on equilibrium methodology. We argue that the market process approach in its Austrian version offers much inspiration for bringing process issues to bear on strategy issues.Strategy, organization, competitive advantage.

The changing UK careers landscape : tidal waves, turbulence and transformation

This article explores how the UK careers landscape in each of the four home nations is changing in response to neo-liberal policies. In this context, careers services are increasingly under pressure to demonstrate their added value, impact and returns on investment. As fiscal arrangements tighten and governments state their preferences and priorities for national careers services, differing strategic responses are beginning to emerge. A quasi-market, experimental approach is now the dominant discourse in England, in contrast to differing and complementary arrangements in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The article suggests that insofar as these developments are transforming national careers services, they are also creating significant challenges which require new forms of policy imagery and imagination for high-impact, all-age careers services

Adding new narratives to urban imagination: an introduction to 'New directions of urban studies in China’

Rapid urban development in China provides rich cases for urban research. Current urban studies in China are heavily influenced by an urban imagination embedded in the West. Using the cases of land management and environmental governance, social transformation and the spatial and regional dimensions of urbanisation, this article attempts to rethink some surprising findings from empirical research in Chinese cities and to contribute to theoretical understandings of urbanisation beyond contextual particularities. Following the narrative of ‘planning centrality, market instruments’ in China, this article highlights the political logic behind managing growth and environmental governance, social differentiation produced by interwoven state and market forces and new geographies of Chinese cities beyond the economic-centred imagination

Why do Part-Time Workers invest less in Human Capital than Full-Timers?

We analyze whether lower investments in human capital of part-time workers are due to workers’ characteristics or human resource practices of the firm. We focus on investments in both formal training and informal learning. Using the Dutch Life-Long-Learning Survey 2007, we find that part-time workers have different determinants for formal training and informal learning than full-time workers. The latter benefit from firms’ human resource practices such as performance interviews, personal development plans and feedback. Part-time workers can only partly compensate the lack of firm support when they have a high learning motivation and imagination of their future development.education, training and the labour market;

Unknotting the Heart: Unemployment and Therapeutic Governance

[Excerpt] Since the mid-1990s, as China has downsized and privatized its state-owned enterprises, severe unemployment has created a new class of urban poor and widespread social and psychological disorders. In Unknotting the Heart, Jie Yang examines this understudied group of workers and their experiences of being laid off, counseled, and then reoriented to the market economy. Using fieldwork from reemployment programs, community psychosocial work, and psychotherapy training sessions in Beijing between 2002 and 2013, Yang highlights the role of psychology in state-led interventions to alleviate the effects of mass unemployment. She pays particular attention to those programs that train laid-off workers in basic psychology and then reemploy them as informal “counselors” in their capacity as housemaids and taxi drivers. These laid-off workers are filling a niche market created by both economic restructuring and the shortage of professional counselors in China, helping the government to defuse intensified class tension and present itself as a nurturing and kindly power. In reality, Yang argues, this process creates both new political complicity and new conflicts, often along gender lines. Women are forced to use the moral virtues and work ethics valued under the former socialist system, as well as their experiences of overcoming depression and suffering, as resources for their new psychological care work. Yang focuses on how the emotions, potentials, and “hearts” of these women have become sites of regulation, market expansion, and political imagination

Innovations

Innovation is a new device, providing qualitative increase in the efficiency of processes or products demanded by the market. It is the end result of human intellectual activity, his imagination, creative process, discoveries, inventions and rationalization. When you are citing the document, use the following link http://essuir.sumdu.edu.ua/handle/123456789/3387

Siren songs or path to salvation? Interpreting the visions of web technology at a UK regional newspaper in crisis, 2006-11

A 5-year case study of an established regional newspaper in Britain investigates journalists about their perceptions of convergence in digital technologies. This research is the first ethnographic longitudinal case study of a UK regional newspaper. Although conforming to some trends observed in the wider field of scholarship, the analysis adds to skepticism about any linear or directional views of innovation and adoption: the Northern Echo newspaper journalists were observed to have revised their opinions of optimum Web practices, and sometimes radically reversed policies. Technology is seen in the period as a fluid, amorphous entity. Central corporate authority appeared to diminish in the period as part of a wider reduction in formalism. Questioning functionalist notions of the market, the study suggests cause and effect models of change are often subverted by contradictory perceptions of particular actions. Meanwhile, during technological evolution, the ‘professional imagination’ can be understood as strongly reflecting the parent print culture and its routines, despite pioneering a new convergence partnership with an independent television company