scholarly journals Extraordinary Ethnographic Encounters in Extraordinary Times.

2021 ◽  
Vol 83 ◽  
pp. 14-26
Author(s):  
Ruzana Liburkina
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
Business Practices ◽  
Business Networks ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Food Sector ◽  
Knowledge Practices ◽  
Business Operations ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
Localized Knowledge

This contribution reconsiders ethnographic encounters with mainstream market actors in light of the ever-intensifying ecological crisis caused by prevalent patterns of economic activities. Effective experimental interventions in hegemonic configurations of capitalism are hitherto hard to realize due to fundamental incompatibilities between the logic of academic ethnographic work and that of conventional business operations. Viewing the private sector as comprised of interconnections of economic activities and knowledge production diminishes the epistemic pitfalls of such encounters. Based on empirical insights into the food sector, this paper suggests discarding the view of collaborations with economic actors as dyadic. Instead, it makes a case for approaching more-than-business networks that inextricably link knowledge and business practices. Such experimental interventions may tackle three constitutive pillars of contemporary capitalism: relations between localized knowledge practices and overarching discursive forms; relations between formalized expertise and market operations; and relations among conflicting truth claims and value arguments.

Invocations of Indigeneity in the Colonial Red/White/Black Triad

2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-158
Author(s):  
Carsten Junker
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Knowledge Practices ◽  
The Enlightenment

AbstractThis essay takes as its assumptive backdrop the “Red/White/Black demographic triad” in the sense of Stam and Shohat that resulted from the European colonial conquest and settlement of, and the transatlantic enslavement of Africans in, the Americas. It homes in on the ambivalent functions and effects of different evocations of Indigeneity in early abolitionist discourse, considering this very discourse as a specific strand of settler colonial knowledge production during the era of the Enlightenment. While Euro-American abolitionists around 1800 centrally and critically focused on relations between the positions marked by “Black” and “White,” they also made recourse to the position of “Red.” Paradigmatic readings highlight that abolitionists mobilized Red as a trope in contradictory ways according to their argumentative needs, substantiating the hegemonic character of White self-referential knowledge practices in the early US republic and abetting the justification of settler colonialism.

scholarly journals The Managerial Aspects of Integrating the Sustainable Development Principles into Practices of Mining Companies

2019 ◽  
Vol 134 ◽  
pp. 03011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuliia Lazarenko ◽  
Olga Garafonova ◽  
Vyktoriia Marhasova ◽  
Svetlana Grigashkina ◽  
Olena Kozureva
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Management Decision ◽  
Business Practices ◽  
Firm Level ◽  
The Sustainable Development ◽  
Business Operations ◽  
Management Decision Making ◽  
Management Context ◽  
Development Objectives ◽  
Sustainability Principles

In order to successfully achieve sustainable development objectives, modern enterprises have to establish a framework and implement appropriate managerial tools for the effective integration of sustainability into business operations. The paper aims to clarify the concept of sustainable development in the mine management context, highlight the main principles of sustainable mining and devise appropriate tools and mechanisms from a managerial viewpoint to implement the strategic sustainability priorities into business practice. Based on a literature review of research on sustainable mine management issues, the main dimensions of the sustainability concept are highlighted and the specific goals corresponding to each of the priority focus areas are identified in the paper. As a result of the study, the key organizational aspects and firm-level mechanisms that should be primarily taken into account from a management decision-making viewpoint to embed the strategic sustainability principles into business practices and corporate activities of mining operators are pointed out. From a practical perspective, the findings can be used by mining operators for defining strategic sustainability priorities and setting related corporate objectives, as well as devising guidelines for the effective implementation of the integrated sustainable mine management system.

Skyscrapers and Tall Buildings

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elihu Rubin
Keyword(s):  
Tall Buildings ◽  
Tall Building ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Land Values ◽  
American Business ◽  
Business Practices ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Curtain Wall ◽  
Regulatory Frameworks ◽  
Business District

The tall building—the most popular and conspicuous emblem of the modern American city—stands as an index of economic activity, civic aspirations, and urban development. Enmeshed in the history of American business practices and the maturation of corporate capitalism, the skyscraper is also a cultural icon that performs genuine symbolic functions. Viewed individually or arrayed in a “skyline,” there may be a tendency to focus on the tall building’s spectacular or superlative aspects. Their patrons have searched for the architectural symbols that would project a positive public image, yet the height and massing of skyscrapers were determined as much by prosaic financial calculations as by symbolic pretense. Historically, the production of tall buildings was linked to the broader flux of economic cycles, access to capital, land values, and regulatory frameworks that curbed the self-interests of individual builders in favor of public goods such as light and air. The tall building looms large for urban geographers seeking to chart the shifting terrain of the business district and for social historians of the city who examine the skyscraper’s gendered spaces and labor relations. If tall buildings provide one index of the urban and regional economy, they are also economic activities in and of themselves and thus linked to the growth of professions required to plan, finance, design, construct, market, and manage these mammoth collective objects—and all have vied for control over the ultimate result. Practitioners have debated the tall building’s external expression as the design challenge of the façade became more acute with the advent of the curtain wall attached to a steel frame, eventually dematerializing entirely into sheets of reflective glass. The tall building also reflects prevailing paradigms in urban design, from the retail arcades of 19th-century skyscrapers to the blank plazas of postwar corporate modernism.

The Challenge of Oral History to Environmental History

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Williams ◽  
Mark Riley
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Environmental Knowledge ◽  
Research Practice ◽  
Environmental Practices ◽  
Knowledge Practices ◽  
Colonial Archives ◽  
Environmental Histories ◽  
Key Interventions

Oral history has much to offer environmental history, yet the possibilities and promises of oral history remain underutilised in environmental history and environmental studies more broadly. Through a reflection on work in environmental history and associated disciplines, this paper presents a case for the strength and versatility of oral history as a key source for environmental history, while reflecting on questions of its reliability and scope. We identify three major insights provided by environmental oral history: into environmental knowledge, practices and power. We argue that, rather than being a weakness, the (inter)subjective and experiential dimensions of oral accounts provide a rich source for situating and interrogating environmental practices, meanings, and power relations. Oral history, moreover, provides a counterweight to a reliance on colonial archives and top-down environmental accounts, and can facilitate a renewal - and deepening - of the radical roots of environmental history. Furthermore, as a research practice, oral history is a promising means of expanding the participatory and grassroots engagement of environmental history. By decentring environmental expertise and eroding the boundaries (both fictive and real) of environmental knowledge production, oral environmental histories can provide key interventions in pursuit of a more just, sustainable world.

scholarly journals Activist ESD Pedagogies and the End of Critique: An Edu/Poetic Attempt to Bring in the Missing Child—Becoming Child

2020 ◽  
pp. 107780042097874
Author(s):  
Anne Beate Reinertsen
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Collective Responsibility ◽  
Pedagogical Practices ◽  
Assessment Practices ◽  
Knowledge Practices ◽  
Affective Processes ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
Zero Points

The idea of this article is to interrogate what I conceive of as an onto-epistemic acceleration and knowledge production spoken by life. Immanent knowledge practices for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). Love, care, learning, and collective responsibility transmigrating throughout the aeons of time. It is an attempt to write planetary differential Activist Pedagogies and Life Sciences: experimentations and explorations of putting parts of components together, reaching into the future, playing toward an interest. It is a nonlinear, mannerist, and poetic approach to education, learning and play, research, and pedagogical practices of critique. An approach and style possibilizing and opening up for affective becomings in which ongoing processes are vitalist parts of ontological change. I work with thinkable categories as they disappear, collaboratively linked to a natural web of human and more-than-human agents. It implies a de-facto end of critique or a normalizing of judgment and/or our assessment practices: a Deleuzian clinical practice. Counting myself in and staying accountable to my immanent situatedness, to the child. Processes seen as zero points in action only graspable in hindsight, hence always unpredictable. Affective processes bring concepts into play and seek to continue keeping them in play. Concepts are thus always performative and methodological, inherently experimental, and open to yet-unknown territories of thought. I speak of happenings in language. Thinking with, through, and beyond concepts involves developing conceptual foci while also, and at the same time, designing for debate. I ask, how to continue not knowing what is right or wrong even in times of crisis?

The Rise of India in the Development of Africa: The Case of the Agro-food Sector

2015 ◽  
Vol 52 (6) ◽  
pp. 838-852
Author(s):  
Philippe Régnier
Keyword(s):  
Reliable Data ◽  
Business Networks ◽  
Food Sector ◽  
Western Africa ◽  
Main Driver ◽  
Rise Of China ◽  
Eastern And Southern Africa ◽  
The Government ◽  
Role Of The Government

Compared to the disputed rise of China in Africa, the emergence of India has been rather neglected. Facing a quasi-absence of reliable data and literature, this article makes an attempt to explore the expanding presence of India in Africa’s agro-food sector. Based on a preliminary collection of information in Eastern and Western Africa, the analysis suggests that India’s corporate sector has been the main driver, with the facilitation of pro-active Indo-African business networks historically established in Eastern and Southern Africa in particular. The role of the government of India has been occasional and subsidiary.

scholarly journals Is there a Post-Marxist Criticism to the Decolonial Critique?

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-142
Author(s):  
Dennis Stromback
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Intercultural Dialogue ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Academic World ◽  
Alain Badiou ◽  
Western Modernity ◽  
Slavoj Žižek ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
Enrique Dussel

This article makes explicit a hidden tension between post-Marxism and decolonial studies, which points to a challenge for intercultural dialogue. While post-Marxism seeks to rehabilitate a universal foundation for the construction of truth claims—a universal already formed within Western modernity—the decolonial critique seeks to dismantle all universals connected to the myths of modernity and therefore demands a departure from the standpoint of the cultural periphery. In fact, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, like other post-Marxists, have been rather critical of the standpoints articulated by decolonialists who strive to include cultural differences and marginalised identities in the process of knowledge production, but the reality is that the decolonial critique, more so than post-Marxism, is well-supported by the historical evidence, thus demonstrating the need for Enrique Dussel calls a ‘transmodern pluriverse’ in the academic world. In pursuit of diffusing this tension between the post-Marxists and the decolonialists, this article calls for further investigation in terms of determining if real dialogue is possible between these two trajectories of thought.

scholarly journals A Business Study of Michigan Retail Florists

HortScience ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 510B-510
Author(s):  
Carolyn A. Collins ◽  
Barbara S. Fails
Keyword(s):  
Business Practices ◽  
Financial Success ◽  
Floor Space ◽  
Business Operations ◽  
Delivery Services ◽  
Business Survey ◽  
General Business ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Business Study

In the spring of 1996, Michigan State Univ. and the Michigan Floral Assn. mailed a comprehensive business survey to all Michigan floral retailers. This was the first nonpartisan study of the retail florist industry in Michigan. Based upon the 183 responses from full-service retail florists (those who deliver and subscribe to a wire service), a profile of the “typical” Michigan florist was constructed. Data presented will include general business operations, such as store floor space and length of time in operation, delivery services, wire service membership, advertising and marketing practices, staffing and wages, and annual profit and loss figures. Results provide a comparative benchmark for common retail florist business practices and can be used to assess the impact certain business operations may have on sales and financial success.

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