The Doors of Compression

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Almquist

In the introduction to the third edition of Globalization: The Transformation of Social Worlds, editors D. Stanley Eitzen and Maxine Baca Zinn define globalization as a “process whereby goods, information, people, money, communication, fashion (and other forms of culture) move across national borders” (1). The anthology includes notable writers from a number of fields—Anthony Giddens, Khalid Koser, and Thomas Friedman, to name a few—and it contributes to a body of early twenty-first century scholarly and popular analyses that collectively described a new and ever-shrinking world.1 Technological advancements in transportation and communication allowed people, cultures, and capital to move easily and relatively freely, arguments go, making borders, real and metaphoric, if not anachronistic then at least more pliable than ever before. Neoliberal policies supposedly unleashed market forces and “flattened” the world, to use Friedman’s metaphor, but these processes also catalyzed a race to the bottom and widened gaps between the wealthy and poor, the secure and the insecure. The inevitability of the new global order manifest in freer movement and deeper global connections seems to have stalled, as seen in recent political events,such as 2016’s Brexit vote and the rise of nativist populism most notably emblematized in the United States’ election of Donald Trump.

Author(s):  
Yale H. Ferguson ◽  
Richard W. Mansbach

This chapter addresses the erosion of the postwar liberal global order and the accompanying disorder in global politics. It describes the perceptions of declining US hegemony during the Obama administration of American decline and the return of geopolitical and economic rivalries that are undermining the liberal order. The election of President Donald Trump in 2016 in the United States was the most significant manifestation of national populism that has emerged in recent years in Europe and elsewhere. The profile of supporters of national populism are much the same globally. They oppose so-called elites and immigrants (especially minorities) whom they blame for the loss of manufacturing jobs. After defining national populism, the chapter describes how it fosters isolationism and malignant nationalism and focuses on national interests rather than global cooperation. Such policies threaten the movement of goods and people, multinational global organizations, and the postwar order in which globalization thrives.


Author(s):  
Donna Kornhaber

The year 1929 is often seen as marking the end of silent film. “The secret afterlife of silent film” questions this date, demonstrating how that year only signaled the end of production in major studios in the United States. Once the technology for synchronization and amplification became available, the transition to sound in the motion picture industry was smoother than is often depicted. Silent film production continued in pockets around the globe until nearly the middle of the century, as did silent film exhibition. Elements of silent film persist even in the early twenty-first century, from avant-garde to animated films. Silent film is still beloved by critics and cinephiles, and the innovations of the silent period arguably contribute to the ongoing appeal of cinema itself.


2019 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 581-605 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine A. Moos

This paper estimates the net social wage—the difference between labor benefits and labor taxation—from 1959 to 2012 in the United States using two different methodologies. During this period the average NSW1/GDP and NSW2/GDP ratio are 1.3 and −3.8 percent, respectively. This paper finds a deviation in the net social wage data starting in 2002, suggesting greater redistribution to US workers in the early twenty-first century than in the twentieth century. This paper argues that the increase in the US net social wage in the early twenty-first century is being caused by a combination of cyclical, structural, and secular factors. US redistributive policy should be understood as stabilizing and subsidizing the social reproduction of labor. JEL Classification: H5, E62, B5


2017 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
TONY SHAW ◽  
TRICIA JENKINS

Film has been an integral part of the propaganda war fought between the United States and North Korea over the past decade. The international controversy surrounding the Hollywood comedy The Interview in 2014 vividly demonstrated this and, in the process, drew attention to hidden dimensions of the US state security–entertainment complex in the early twenty-first century. Using the emails leaked courtesy of the Sony hack of late 2014, this article explores the Interview affair in detail, on the one hand revealing the close links between Sony executives and US foreign-policy advisers and on the other explaining the difficulties studios face when trying to balance commercial and political imperatives in a global market.


2019 ◽  
Vol 82 (2) ◽  
pp. 303-330
Author(s):  
Jennifer G. Eidson ◽  
Christina J. Zamon

Encoded Archival Description (EAD) was adopted as the first standard for encoding finding aids using archival description in 1998. Since then, rapid changes in technology and archival standards have influenced access, use, and adoption of EAD across a variety of institutions. This article was inspired by an initial survey conducted by one of the authors. The results led to a broader survey and a twenty-year literature review surrounding EAD and online finding aids. The authors developed a twenty-five-question survey to reach a broader audience and delve deeper into the initial questions. The purpose was to answer the following questions: Is there a specific year or time period when a mass adoption of the standard can be identified? What factors influenced whether or not an institution adopted the standard? To what extent has technology influenced the usage of EAD? By surveying archivists across the United States, we gathered their input as to why they did or did not use EAD and how changes in technology and tools influenced their adoption and usage of EAD over the past twenty years. This article explores past trends and predictions, as well as current thoughts by archivists about the past, present, and future of this standard.


Author(s):  
Deepak Nayyar

This chapter analyses the striking changes in the geographical distribution of manufacturing production amongst countries and across continents since 1750, a period that spans more than two-and-a-half centuries, which could be described as the movement of industrial hubs in the world economy over time. Until around 1820, world manufacturing production was concentrated in China and India. The Industrial Revolution, followed by the advent of colonialism, led to deindustrialization in Asia and, by 1880, Britain became the world industrial hub that extended to northwestern Europe. The United States surpassed Britain in 1900, and was the dominant industrial hub in the world until 2000. During 1950 to 2000, the relative, though not absolute, importance of Western Europe diminished, and Japan emerged as a significant industrial hub, while the other new industrial hub, the USSR and Eastern Europe, was short lived. The early twenty-first century, 2000–2017, witnessed a rapid decline of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan as industrial hubs, to be replaced largely by Asia, particularly China. This process of shifting hubs, associated with industrialization in some countries and deindustrialization in other countries in the past, might be associated with premature deindustrialization in yet other countries in the future.


2020 ◽  
Vol 108 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bethany Myers

Objective: This study seeks to gain initial insight into what is talked about and whose voices are heard at Medical Library Association (MLA) annual meetings.Methods: Meeting abstracts were downloaded from the MLA website and converted to comma-separated values (CSV) format. Descriptive analysis in Python identified the number of presentations, disambiguated authors, author collaboration, institutional affiliation type, and geographic affiliation. Topics were generated using Mallet’s Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm for topic modeling.Results: There were 5,781 presentations at MLA annual meetings from 2001–2019. Author disambiguation resulted in approximately 5,680 unique authors. One thousand ninety-three records included a hospital-related keyword in the author field, and 4,517 records included an academic-related keyword. There were 438 presentations with at least 1 international author. The topic model identified 16 topics in the MLA abstract corpus: events, electronic resources, publications, evidence-based practice, collections, academic instruction, librarian roles and relationships, technical systems, special collections, general instruction, literature searching, surveys, research support, community outreach, patient education, and library services.Conclusions: Academic librarians presented more frequently than hospital librarians, though more research should be done to determine if this discrepancy was disproportionate to hospital librarians’ representation in MLA. Geographic affiliation was concentrated in the United States and appeared to be related to population density. Health sciences librarians in the early twenty-first century are spending more time at MLA annual meetings talking about communities, relationships, and visible services, and less time talking about library collections and operations. Further research will be needed to boost the participation of underrepresented members.


2020 ◽  
pp. 38-80
Author(s):  
Raul P. Lejano ◽  
Shondel J. Nero ◽  
Michael Chua

Chapter 3 traces the emergence and evolution of the climate skeptical narrative in the United States, showing how it has become more ideological over time, in tandem with sociopolitical events and movements. It examines the development and shifts in the narrative from the early twenty-first century to the present through narrative and critical discourse analyses of summary plots of articles and accompanying comments in conservative media outlets over five successive periods of time, providing textual evidence of how the narrative grew increasingly ideological in each period. The following textual analyses illustrate how skeptics have constructed an alternative ideological narrative through invariance, repetition, alternative data, binary frames (us vs. them), attributing sinister motives to and demonizing the other side, and reinforcing positions by sharing the narrative with like-minded people. In so doing, they created their own narrative-network by denaturalizing the dominance of anthropogenic climate change, framing it as unsettled science, and linking it to politics and fundamental American values of freedom.


2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 706-731
Author(s):  
Lucy Henning

In this paper, I argue that the mainstream assumptions that inform current educational policy and practice for young children’s in-school literacy development in schools are insufficient to secure a helpful account of young children’s classroom literacy practices. A particular problem lies with the reliance of such policy and practice on perspectives that assume, first, that literacy acquisition comprises the orderly acquisition of predefined concepts, skills and knowledge; and second, that the task of schools is to bring individual children’s concepts, skills and knowledge of literacy in line with what is considered ‘normal’ for their age. I argue that such perspectives are too narrow to secure a clear enough view of the complex phenomenon of young children’s encounter with being taught to read and write in school. In this paper, I present two alternative theoretical lenses through which the familiar phenomenon of young children’s encounter with being schooled in literacy can be viewed: first, that of Literacy as a Social Practice (henceforth LSP); and second, that of ‘interpretive reproduction’, a theoretical account of young children’s participation in their social worlds developed by William Corsaro. To demonstrate how helpful such perspectives can be in understanding the familiar phenomenon of young children’s literacy schooling, I apply them to the analysis of one child, Dean’s, encounter with schooled literacy within the social world of an early twenty-first century London classroom.


2010 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 468-523
Author(s):  
Rob Schorman

In 1906, a writer declared that it remained an “unsolved problem whether the automobile is to prove a fad like the bicycle, or a lasting factor in the industry of the country.” A few years later, concerned with the possibility of overproduction and market saturation, auto executives and other commentators were writing articles for the advertising trade press with titles like “Why Auto Production Must Be Curtailed” and “The Fading of the Automobile Rainbow.” Considering that by the early twenty-first century, the United States had a population of nearly 300 million people and an average of 2.1 registered motor vehicles per household, it is difficult to appreciate how uncertain the industry’s status seemed in its early years. Yet although contemporary observers may not have known it, in many ways by the end of 1908 the foundation stoneswere already in place for a hundred years of automotive economic and cultural preeminence in the United States. Two events from that year are well known as harbingers of the industry’s future. In September, General Motors was established, and in October, Ford introduced its Model T to the nation's auto dealers. In time, these developments had a profound impact on American automobile manufacture and management.


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