Ruchir Sharma, Breakout Nations (2013)

First paragraph: Breakout Nations is an international bestseller. It has been heralded by the Wall Street Journal (and other similar outlets) as the 'best choice' out there on our 'ongoing developing world'. The full title of this 2013 book is Breakout Nations – In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles, and it is published by W.W. Norton & Company, in New York.Output Type: Book Revie

My Love Affair with Grounded Theory: Making the Passion Work in the "Real" World

Grounded theory offers the interpretive researcher a cornucopia of possibilities. Thanks to its theory-generating ethos, grounded theory is open and flexible and applicable to a variety of research settings. Furthermore, it can be used as a method, a framework, an analytical tool, and a paradigm. For the purposes of inductive research, grounded theory is very alluring and many qualitative scholars fall for its theory-building promise. Few, however, embrace the paradigm for all that it has to offer, despite claiming to being grounded in their approach to generating theory. Here I share my own passion for grounded theory: from the epistemological journey that led me to the paradigm, to pragmatically applying the method to my own research. Grounded theory is best equipped for furthering our understanding of complex social phenomena, providing us with the tools to generate rich, innovative data-driven theory, making our adoption of the method a truly lovely affair

Painting the Nation:Examining the Intersection Between Politics and the Visual Arts Market in Emerging Economies

Politics and art have throughout history, intersected in diverse and complex ways. Ideologies and political systems have used the arts to create a certain image and, depending on the form of government this has varied from clear-cut state propaganda, to patronage, to more indirect arms-length funding procedures. Therefore, artists working within the macro-level socio-political context cannot help but be influenced, inspired and sometimes restricted by these policies and political influences. This article examines the contemporary art markets of two emerging, Socialist economies to investigate the relationship between state pol-itics and the contemporary visual arts market. We argue that the respective governments and art worlds are trying to construct a brand narrative for their nations, but that these discourses are often at cross-purposes. In doing so, we illustrate that it is impos-sible to separate a consideration of the artwork from the macro-level context in which it is produced, distributed, and consumed