VHS and the Transitional Phase of Polish Capitalism

Author(s):  
Krzysztof Świrek

The presented article is an attempt to interpret the historical phenomenon of VHS during the economic transformation in Poland. This technology is understood here as an ideological complex, which functioned on three levels: content distributed on videotapes, a business model, and an offer directed to a broad audience. Through films distributed on tape, VHS was a medium of capitalist realism: it showed capitalist social formation as a background for the way in which individuals experience their lives. VHS was also a transitory phenomenon: as a technology, medium of specific content, and practice it has lost popularity towards the end of the phase of capitalism, with which it was tied.

Author(s):  
Krzysztof Świrek

The presented article is an attempt to interpret the historical phenomenon of VHS during the economic transformation in Poland. This technology is understood here as an ideological complex, which functioned on three levels: content distributed on videotapes, a business model, and an offer directed to a broad audience. Through films distributed on tape, VHS was a medium of capitalist realism: it showed capitalist social formation as a background for the way in which individuals experience their lives. VHS was also a transitory phenomenon: as a technology, medium of specific content, and practice it has lost popularity towards the end of the phase of capitalism, with which it was tied.


Author(s):  
Hazel Gray

This chapter contrasts the way that the political settlement in both countries shaped the pattern of redistribution, reform, and corruption within public finance and the implications that this had for economic transformation. Differences in the impact of corruption on economic transformation can be explained by the way that their political settlements generated distinct patterns of competition and collaboration between economic and political actors. In Vietnam corrupt activities led to investments that were frequently not productive; however, the greater financial discipline imposed by lower-level organizations led to a higher degree of investment overall in Vietnam that supported a more rapid economic transformation under liberalization than in Tanzania. Individuals or small factional networks within the VCP at the local level were, therefore, probably less able to engage in forms of corruption that simply led to capital flight as happened in Tanzania, where local level organizations were significantly weaker.


Author(s):  
Shrutika Mishra ◽  
A. R. Tripathi

Abstract In today’s world, many digitally enabled start-ups are budding all over the globe because of the fast enhancement in digital technologies. For the establishment of new business, it is necessary to adopt a proper business model which needs to define the way in which the company will provide values and the ways in which the customers can pay for their services. This paper aims to study the various business models being used in today’s marketplace and to provide a better understanding for these business models by having an insight on the attributes.


PMLA ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 116 (5) ◽  
pp. 1377-1385
Author(s):  
Michael North

The Single Most Influential Contemporary Statement on Authorship is Still the Obituary that Roland Barthes pronounced over thirty years ago (Burke, Death 19). Partly by the stark extremity of its title, Barthes's essay “The Death of the Author” transformed New Critical distaste for the biographical into an ontological conviction about the status of language (Burke, Death 16) and in so doing made the dead author far more influential than living authors had been for some time. If authorship is now a subject of contention in the academy rather than a vulgar embarrassment, it is largely because of the way that Barthes inflated the issue in the very act of dismissing it. Though the idea that “it is language which speaks, not the author,” seems to demote the human subject (“Death” 143), it may also promote the written word, and it has been objected from the beginning, by Michel Foucault first of all, that the notion of écriture “has merely transposed the empirical characteristics of an author to a transcendental anonymity” (Foucault 120). Many later critics have agreed, and thus there have been a series of arguments, from the theoretical (Burke, Death) to the empirical (Stillinger), to the effect that the whole post-Saussurean turn exemplified by Barthes has not so much killed off the concept of the author as raised it to a higher plane of abstraction. But it may be that, approached from another angle, Barthes's essay will turn out to have its own relation to certain social and technological developments, and that these, in their turn, will help to situate the death of the author as a historical phenomenon.


Author(s):  
Joseph Atta-Mensah ◽  
Vanessa T. Tang ◽  
Timothy M. Shaw

2011 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henrike Donner

This article analyses the meaning of urban neighbourhoods for the emergence of Maoist activism in 1970s Calcutta. Through ethnography the article highlights the way recruitment, strategies and the legacy of the movement were located in the experience and politics of the urban neighbourhood. As a social formation, the neighbourhood shaped the relationships that made Maoist subjectivities feasible and provided the space for coalitions and cooperation across a wider spectrum than the label of a student movement acknowledges. The neighbourhood appears here as an emergent site for Maoist epistemologies, which depended on this space and its everyday practices, intimate social relations as well as the experience of the local state in the locality.


Author(s):  
María Camila Romero ◽  
Paola Lara ◽  
Jorge Villalobos

The business is an abstraction of the way in which value is created and delivered. The concrete representation is the business model, expressed by a group of artifacts built with different languages. It serves to describe, explain, analyze, design, and evaluate the business. The set of concepts, construction rules, artifacts, and languages required to express it, are defined by a Meta-Business Model (MBM). Multiple authors have proposed different MBMs, each one with a specific motivation and objective. Some of these MBMs are widely recognized and have been applied in contexts like innovation and entrepreneurship. Due to new challenges, such as sustainability, being faced by businesses and given new ways of producing and delivering value, like the sharing economy, Novel Complex Businesses (NCBs) are emerging. NCBs are businesses characterized by circular structures made out of numerous inter-related components, and by creating value out of the product/service schema. While existing MBMs fulfill certain purposes, they do not have the expressiveness required to describe NCBs precisely enough to describe and analyze them. This paper introduces an MBM with the concepts, construction rules, and graphical notation needed to represent NCBs. We also illustrate an NCB and present the results of the validation for our MBM.


2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (02) ◽  
pp. 335-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOAKIM BJÖRKDAHL

The rapid and persistent improvement in the performance and cost of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) with respect to their capabilities for capturing, processing, displaying, communicating and storing information provide abundant opportunities. This paper aims to explain the causes and effects of the phenomenon in which manufacturing firms integrate ICTs in their established manufacturing products. The study of this phenomenon is based on structured interviews with executives of 37 large Swedish manufacturing firms. The results show that the phenomenon is wide-spread among manufacturing firms, that the number of products that integrate ICTs is growing relative to firms' total product portfolios, and that the revenues from these products are increasing. Competition is a significant reason why firms integrate ICTs into their goods, but firms also want to reap the rewards of the value provided. Important here is that firms often find it necessary to transform aspects of the way they do business (business model) in order to create a better fit between activities that create value for their customers and activities that produce profits for themselves. They also try to find innovative ways to be rewarded for the value they deliver, mainly based on the provision of services.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-142
Author(s):  
Masud Ur Rashid

Urdu speaking people living in Geneva camp of Dhaka have become a marginally displaced community since 1971. Geneva camp is overcrowded as they have no chance of living outside of the camps because of their statelessness. The camp is a densely-populated settlement and have its own natural physical growth in terms of social and economic transformation day by day. This brings a lot of physical, socio-cultural and economic problems.  Geneva camp is a compact and confined living place for its inhabitants. For many of them it is also income generating place and thus source of their livelihood. It is important to identify the problems of this settlement to take further necessary actions to mitigate those. This study illustrates the housing problems in different domains in the Geneva camp with their attributes. Lack of spaces and other facilities in a low-income settlement have their impact on the way of overall livelihood of the inhabitants. The physical characteristics and other major factors that affect the physical environment of settlement are discussed in this paper.


2014 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-161
Author(s):  
Jonas Adelin Jørgensen

The contribution of E. Troeltsch towards a modern Protestanttheology of religions takes its point of departure in the conundrumof Christianity as (theologically) absolute and (historically) relative religion.The article describes the background for Troeltsch’s theology, his analysis of other religious traditions, and his theological reflections based on his approach informed by the ‘Religionsgeschichtliche Schule’. The article argues for a development in Troeltsch’s theology of religions from a fairly common liberal protestant hierarchical view to a much more relativistic understanding. Troeltsch’s contribution is contextualized and placed in the larger modern discussion on the relationship between Christianity as a historical phenomenon, its relation to other religious traditions, and the specific content of Christianity and its claim to truth. In conclusion, the article characterizes Troeltsch’s theology of religions as an act of balancing between a methodological or epistemological relativism and a more holistic relativism, which is the very possible dead-end of metaphysical thinking


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