scholarly journals Commentary: The Place of Labor in the History of Information-Technology Revolutions

2003 ◽  
Vol 48 (S11) ◽  
pp. 225-261 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greg Downey
Keyword(s):  
Information Technology ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Full Disclosure ◽  
Abstract Knowledge ◽  
Daunting Task ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
Information Labor ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Information

As co-editor of this IRSH supplement “Uncovering Labour in Information Revolutions”, I have to begin this commentary with a confession. Before I entered the world of abstract knowledge production, commodification, and consumption known as academia, I was myself a worker in a world of much more concrete information processing: I was a computer programmer in the US from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, a time we might now consider the nostalgic heyday of desktop-office information technology (IT). In the spirit of full disclosure, before I leap into an analysis of how we might more broadly conceptualize information technology together with information labor in different historical contexts, I have decided to work through my own historical narrative a bit. After all, if historical practice teaches us nothing else, it teaches that each of us makes sense of the world through the lens of personal experience, leaving historians (among others) with the daunting task of interpreting, translating, and finding patterns of meaning in those experiences. Thus I offer this candid admission: “I was a teenage information worker!”

The Great Influenza

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.
Keyword(s):  
Social Behaviour ◽  
East Coast ◽  
World History ◽  
Collective Violence ◽  
Large Cities ◽  
Surgeon General ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of Disease ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines evidence principally from the US that the Great Influenza provoked profiteering by landlords, undertakers, vendors of fruit, pharmacists, and doctors, but shows that such complaints were rare and confined mostly to large cities on the East Coast. It then investigates anti-social advice and repressive decrees on the part of municipalities, backed by advice from the US Surgeon General and prominent physicians attacking ‘spitters, coughers, and sneezers’, which included state and municipal ordinances against kissing and even ‘big talkers’. It then surveys legislation on compulsory and recommended mask wearing. Yet this chapter finds no protest or collective violence against the diseased victims or any other ‘others’ suspected of disseminating the virus. Despite physicians’ and lawmakers’ encouragement of anti-social behaviour, mass volunteerism and abnegation instead unfolded to an extent never before witnessed in the world history of disease.

The Historiography of Environmental History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. R. McNeill
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Industrial Pollution ◽  
Full Scale ◽  
Environmental Concerns ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter discusses the emergence of environmental history, which developed in the context of the environmental concerns that began in the 1960s with worries about local industrial pollution, but which has since evolved into a full-scale global crisis of climate change. Environmental history is ‘the history of the relationship between human societies and the rest of nature’. It includes three chief areas of inquiry: the study of material environmental history, political and policy-related environmental history, and a form of environmental history which concerns what humans have thought, believed, written, and more rarely, painted, sculpted, sung, or danced that deals with the relationship between society and nature. Since 1980, environmental history has come to flourish in many corners of the world, and scholars everywhere have found models, approaches, and perspectives rather different from those developed for the US context.

A Critical Review of Information Technology Innovations

2013 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 63-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruben Xing ◽  
John Wang ◽  
Qiyang Chen
Keyword(s):  
Information Technology ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
Competitive Advantage ◽  
Critical Review ◽  
Meta Analysis ◽  
Technology Innovations ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Information ◽  
Key Terms ◽  
National Competitive Advantage

The authors critically review the history of information technology innovations, from a national competitive advantage perspective. Definitions of key terms are grounded in a thorough literature review, to inform a future meta-analysis. The authors identify the most significant US-based innovations, which in turn are driving future IT development. Propositions are generated for future IT-related studies.

Automating the audience commodity: The unacknowledged ancestry of programmatic advertising

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (11-12) ◽  
pp. 2366-2385 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee McGuigan
Keyword(s):  
Information Technology ◽  
Data Processing ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Mathematical Optimization ◽  
Leading Edge ◽  
Digital Data ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Commercial Media ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Information

Programmatic advertising describes techniques for automating and optimizing transactions in the audience marketplace. Facilitating real-time bidding for audience impressions and personalized targeting, programmatic technologies are at the leading edge of digital, data-driven advertising. But almost no research considers programmatic advertising within a general history of information technology in commercial media industries. The computerization of advertising and media buying remains curiously unexamined. Using archival sources, this study situates programmatic advertising within a longer trajectory, focusing on the incorporation of electronic data processing into the spot television business, starting in the 1950s. The article makes three contributions: it illustrates that (1) demands for information, data processing, and rapid communications have long been central to advertising and media buying; (2) automation “ad tech” developed gradually through efforts to coordinate and accelerate transactions; and (3) the use of computers to increase efficiency and approach mathematical optimization reformatted calculative resources for media and marketing decisions.

Historical Preface

1875 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. v-xcvii
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government

IT is a mere truism in the history of revolutions to assert that they are seldom brought to a close by the persons or political parties with whom they originate. Men whose existence was perhaps scarcely known to the world at large when the onward movement took its origin rise in succession to the surface, acquire the government, and carry forward the work to lengths and heights which their predecessors never contemplated. It is in tracing this sequence of political parties, the gradual growth of what was looked upon in the first instance as a contemptible and almost senseless faction, its struggles for the mastery, the arts (too often unworthy) by which it acquired the ascendancy, its acts whilst in a condition of dominancy, and finally the errors by which it forfeited power and made way for the next in turn, that much of the interest of historical narrative is found.

scholarly journals The Global History of Inequality

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 309-323
Author(s):  
Pim de Zwart
Keyword(s):  
Economic History ◽  
Demographic History ◽  
Economic Inequality ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Governmental Organization ◽  
Occupy Movement ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Inequality has increased in most Western countries since the early 1980s. In a recent report, the international non-governmental organization Oxfam noted that the twenty-six richest people in the world own as much wealth as the poorest fifty per cent of the world's population. Discontent with the growing disparities in wealth and income has soared in recent years, especially in the wake of the 2007/2008 financial crisis and the “Great Recession” that followed. The Occupy movement protested against the greed of the “one per cent”, referring to the highly skewed income distribution in the US. Former US president Barack Obama proclaimed the growth of within-country economic inequality as “the defining challenge of our time”. Yet, he enacted few policies that reduced inequality during his two terms in office; the Gini coefficient in the US actually increased slightly between 2007 and 2016. His successor, whose election has often been explained as a consequence of these high levels of inequality, has slashed taxes for the wealthy, probably causing further rises in inequality in the future. In this essay, I will review two recent economic history books that examine the historical roots of within-country inequality on a global scale: Branko Milanovic's Global Inequality (2016) and Walter Scheidel's The Great Leveler (2017). Formerly a lead economist at the World Bank, Milanovic is a well-known scholar working in the field of economic inequality, while Scheidel has a background as a specialist in the economic, social, and demographic history of antiquity.

Halil İnalcık 1916? - 2016

2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-165
Author(s):  
Linda T. Darling
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
North Africa ◽  
World History ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Crucial Part

Halil İnalcık was born in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, into a refugee family, probably in 1916 (he did not know his birthday; in Turkey he adopted 29 May, in the US 4 July). He died at age 100 in Ankara on 25 July 2016, as the premier Ottoman historian in the world. To quote one of his students, “Professor İnalcık transformed the field of Ottoman studies from an obscure and exotic subfield into one of the leading historical disciplines that covers the history of the greater Middle East and North Africa as well as the Balkans from the late medieval to the modern period. He set the tone of debate and critical inquiry from the early modern to the modern period.” Born an Ottoman, he made Ottoman studies a crucial part of world history.

The Multinational Corporation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula De la Cruz-Fernandez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Multinational Corporations ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Multinational Corporation ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multinational Businesses

A multinational corporation is a multiple unit business enterprise, vertically managed, that operates in various countries, called host economies. Operations beyond national borders are controlled and managed from one location or headquarters, called the home economy. The units or business activities such as manufacturing, distribution, and marketing are, in the modern multinational as opposed to other forms of international business, all structured under a single organization. The location of the headquarters of the multinational corporation, where the business is registered, defines the “nationality” of the company. While United Kingdom held ownership of over half of the world’s foreign direct investment (FDI), defined not as acquisition but as a managed, controlled investment that an organization does beyond its national border, at the beginning of the 20th century, the United States grew to first place throughout the 20th century—in 2002, 22 percent of the world’s FDI came from the United States, which was also home to ten of the fifty largest corporations in the world. The US-based, large, modern corporation, operated by salaried managers with branches and operations in many nations, emerged in the mid-19th century and has since been a key player and driver in both economic and cultural globalization. The development of corporate capitalism in the United States is closely related with the growth of US-driven business abroad and has unique features that place the US multinational model apart from other business organizations operating internationally such as family multinational businesses which are more common in Europe and Latin America. The range and diversity of US-headquartered multinationals changed over time as well, and different countries and cultures made the nature of managing business overseas more complex. Asia came strong into the picture in the last third of the 20th century as regulations and deindustrialization grew in Europe. Global expansion also meant that societies around the world were connecting transnationally through new channels. Consumers and producers globally are also part of the history of multinational corporations—cultural values, socially constructed perceptions of gender and race, different understandings of work, and the everyday lives and experiences of peoples worldwide are integral to the operations and forms of multinationals.

“Palm Beach” on the Curaray River

2019 ◽  
pp. 9-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn T. Long
Keyword(s):  
Young Men ◽  
Innovative Technology ◽  
Tribal People ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
The Us ◽  
Amazonian Ecuador ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Evangelicalism

This chapter presents the history of an event in January 1956 that gave birth to an iconic missionary martyr narrative with a lasting impact on American evangelicalism and on the future of the Waorani people in Amazonian Ecuador. It began with five young men, representing evangelical faith missions. They were determined to make peaceful contact with the Waorani (aucas), a violent and isolated tribal people who had never heard the Christian gospel. The five men used aviation as an innovative technology to locate a Wao clearing and attempt to pacify the inhabitants by dropping trade goods from the air, followed by a face-to-face encounter. After the apparent friendliness of this first meeting, the Waorani returned two days later with spears and killed the missionaries. News of their deaths was publicized in the US and around the world.

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