front cover of Apprehending the Criminal
Apprehending the Criminal
The Production of Deviance in Nineteenth Century Discourse
Marie-Christine Leps
Duke University Press, 1992
In this wide-ranging analysis, Marie-Christine Leps traces the production and circulation of knowledge about the criminal in nineteenth-century discourse, and shows how the delineation of deviance served to construct cultural norms. She demonstrates how the apprehension of crime and criminals was an important factor in the establishment of such key institutions as national systems of education, a cheap daily press, and various welfare measures designed to fight the spread of criminality.
Leps focuses on three discursive practices: the emergence of criminology, the development of a mass-produced press, and the proliferation of crime fiction, in both England and France. Beginning where Foucault's work Discipline and Punish ends, Leps analyzes intertextual modes of knowledge production and shows how the elaboration of hegemonic truths about the criminal is related to the exercise of power.
The scope of her investigation includes scientific treatises such as Criminal Man by Cesare Lombroso and The English Convict by Charles Goring, reports on the Jack the Ripper murders in The Times and Le Petit Parisien, the Sherlock Holmes stories, Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and novels by Zola and Bourget.
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Banana Wars
Power, Production, and History in the Americas
Steve Striffler and Mark Moberg, eds.
Duke University Press, 2003
Over the past century, the banana industry has radically transformed Latin America and the Caribbean and become a major site of United States–Latin American interaction. Banana Wars is a history of the Americas told through the cultural, political, economic, and agricultural processes that brought bananas from the forests of Latin America and the Caribbean to the breakfast tables of the United States and Europe. The first book to examine these processes in all the western hemisphere regions where bananas are grown for sale abroad, Banana Wars advances the growing body of scholarship focusing on export commodities from historical and social scientific perspectives.

Bringing together the work of anthropologists, sociologists, economists, historians, and geographers, this collection reveals how the banana industry marshaled workers of differing nationalities, ethnicities, and languages and, in so doing, created unprecedented potential for conflict throughout Latin American and the Caribbean. The frequently abusive conditions that banana workers experienced, the contributors point out, gave rise to one of Latin America’s earliest and most militant labor movements. Responding to both the demands of workers’ organizations and the power of U.S. capital, Latin American governments were inevitably affected by banana production. Banana Wars explores how these governments sometimes asserted their sovereignty over foreign fruit companies, but more often became their willing accomplices. With several essays focusing on the operations of the extraordinarily powerful United Fruit Company, the collection also examines the strategies and reactions of the American and European corporations seeking to profit from the sale of bananas grown by people of different cultures working in varied agricultural and economic environments.

Contributors
Philippe Bourgois
Marcelo Bucheli
Dario Euraque
Cindy Forster
Lawrence Grossman
Mark Moberg
Laura T. Raynolds
Karla Slocum
John Soluri
Steve Striffler
Allen Wells

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Beauty's Rigor
Patterns of Production in the Work of Pier Luigi Nervi
Thomas Leslie
University of Illinois Press, 2017
Born in Sondrio, Italy, in 1891, Pier Luigi Nervi was a pioneer in the engineering and architecture of reinforced concrete. His buildings showed how the use of reinforced concrete expanded the possibilities of form and structure. His methods, meanwhile, ingrained his structures with patterns that came directly out of his economical, manual construction processes. The results were buildings that matched awe-inspiring spans with surprisingly human scale.

Beauty's Rigor offers a comprehensive overview of Nervi's long career. Drawing on the Nervi archives and a wealth of photographs and architectural drawings, Thomas Leslie explores celebrated buildings like Palazetto dello Sport built for the 1960 Rome Olympics, St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco, and the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. He also sheds new light on unbuilt projects such as the Pavilion of Italian Civilization for the Universal Exposition of Rome E42. What emerges is the first complete account of Nervi's contributions to modern architecture and his essential role in a revolution that realized concrete's potential to match grace with strength.

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Beyond Conversation
Collaboration and the Production of Writing
William Duffy
Utah State University Press, 2020
Collaboration was an important area of study in writing for many years, but interest faded as scholars began to assume that those working within writing studies already “got it.” In Beyond Conversation, William Duffy revives the topic and connects it to the growing interest in collaboration within digital and materialist rhetoric to demonstrate that not only do the theory, pedagogy, and practice of collaboration need more study but there is also much to be learned from the doing of collaboration.
 
While interrogating the institutional politics that circulate around debates about collaboration, this book offers a concise history of collaborative writing theory while proposing a new set of commonplaces for understanding the labor of coauthorship. Specifically, Beyond Conversation outlines an interactionist theory that explains collaboration as the rhetorical capacity that manifests in the discursive engagements coauthors enter into with the objects of their writing.
Drawing on new materialist philosophies, post-qualitative inquiry, and interactionist rhetorical theory, Beyond Conversation challenges writing and literacy educators to recognize the pedagogical benefits of collaborative writing in the work they do both as writers and as teachers of writing. The book will reinvigorate how teachers, scholars, and administrators advocate for the importance of collaborative writing in their work.
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Beyond the Iron Rice Bowl
Regimes of Production and Industrial Relations in China
Boy Lüthje, Siqi Luo, and Hao Zhang
Campus Verlag, 2013
A unique account of labor relations in the modern Chinese economy, Beyond the Iron Rice Bowl brings together more than thirty in-depth case studies of key multinational, Chinese, and overseas Chinese enterprises in the automotive, electronic, and garment industries. Analyzing the regimes of production and their segmentations in the context of global and national production networks, the authors discuss Chinese and international industrial relations theory and labor sociology and explore the perspectives of collective bargaining, trade union reform, and democratic workplace representation in China. 
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The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry
Howard Rambsy II
University of Michigan Press, 2013
The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry offers a close examination of the literary culture in which the Black Arts Movement’s poets (including Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Larry Neal, Haki Madhubuti, Carolyn Rodgers, and others) operated and of the small presses and literary anthologies that first published the movement’s authors. The book also describes the role of the Black Arts Movement in reintroducing readers to poets such as Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, Margaret Walker, and Phillis Wheatley.
 
Focusing on the material production of Black Arts poetry, the book combines genetic criticism with cultural history to shed new light on the period, its publishing culture, and the writing and editing practices of its participants. Howard Rambsy II demonstrates how significant circulation and format of black poetic texts—not simply their content—were to the formation of an artistic movement. The book goes on to examine other significant influences on the formation of Black Arts discourse, including such factors as an emerging nationalist ideology and figures such as John Coltrane and Malcolm X.
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Cartographic Memory
Social Movement Activism and the Production of Space
Juan Herrera
Duke University Press, 2022
In Cartographic Memory, Juan Herrera maps 1960s Chicano movement activism in the Latinx neighborhood of Fruitvale in Oakland, California, showing how activists there constructed a politics forged through productions of space. From Chicano-inspired street murals to the architecture of restaurants and shops, Herrera shows how Fruitvale’s communities and spaces serve as a palpable, living record of movement politics and achievements. Drawing on oral histories with Chicano activists, ethnography, and archival research, Herrera analyzes how activism has shaped Fruitvale. Herrera examines the ongoing nature of activism through nonprofit organizations and urban redevelopment projects like the Fruitvale Transit Village that root movements in place. Revealing that the social justice activism in Fruitvale fights for a space that does not yet exist, Herrera brings to life contentious politics about the nature of Chicanismo, Latinidad, and belonging while foregrounding the lasting social and material legacies of movements so often relegated to the past.
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The Cinematic Mode of Production
Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle
Jonathan Beller
Dartmouth College Press, 2006
“Cinema brings the industrial revolution to the eye,” writes Jonathan Beller, “and engages spectators in increasingly dematerialized processes of social production.” In his groundbreaking critical study, cinema is the paradigmatic example of how the act of looking has been construed by capital as “productive labor.” Through an examination of cinema over the course of the twentieth century, Beller establishes on both theoretical and historical grounds the process of the emergent capitalization of perception. This process, he says, underpins the current global economy. By exploring a set of films made since the late 1920s, Beller argues that, through cinema, capital first posits and then presupposes looking as a value-productive activity. He argues that cinema, as the first crystallization of a new order of media, is itself an abstraction of assembly-line processes, and that the contemporary image is a politico-economic interface between the body and capitalized social machinery. Where factory workers first performed sequenced physical operations on moving objects in order to produce a commodity, in the cinema, spectators perform sequenced visual operations on moving montage fragments to produce an image. Beller develops his argument by highlighting various innovations and film texts of the past century. These innovations include concepts and practices from the revolutionary Soviet cinema, behaviorism, Taylorism, psychoanalysis, and contemporary Hollywood film. He thus develops an analysis of what amounts to the global industrialization of perception that today informs not only the specific social functions of new media, but also sustains a violent and hierarchical global society.
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Climate Change and the Production of Knowledge
Ian Baucom and Matthew Omelsky, special issue editors
Duke University Press, 2017
Though the causes and effects of climate change pervade our everyday lives—the air we breathe, the food we eat, the objects we use—the way the discourse of climate change influences how we make meaning of ourselves and our world is still unexplored. Contributors to this issue bring diverse perspectives to the ways that climate change science and discourse have reshaped the contemporary architecture of knowledge itself: reconstituting intellectual disciplines and artistic practices, redrawing and dissolving boundaries, and reframing how knowledge is represented and disseminated. The contributors address the emergence of global warming discourse in fields like history, journalism, anthropology, and the visual arts; the collaborative study of climate change between the human and material sciences; and the impact of climate change on forms of representation and dissemination in this new interdisciplinary landscape.

Contributors. Ian Baucom, Rosi Braidotti, David Buckland, Matthew Burtner, Noel Castree, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook, Olivia Gray, Willis Jenkins, Catherine Malabou, Matthew Omelsky, Michael Segal, Bently Spang, Gary Tomlinson, Astrid Ulloa, Lucy Wood
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Communicating Physics
The Production, Circulation, and Appropriation of Ganot's Textbooks in France and England, 1851–1887
Josep Simon
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011
WINNER OF THE MARC-AUGUSTE PICTET PRIZE, 2010

The textbooks written by Adolphe Ganot (1804–1887) played a major role in shaping the way physics was taught in the nineteenth century. Ganot's books were translated from their original French into more than ten languages, including English, allowing their adoption as standard works in Britain and spreading their influence as far as North America, Australia, India and Japan.

Simon's Franco-British case study looks at the role of Ganot's two textbooks: Traité élémentaire de physique expérimentale et appliquée (1851) and Cours de physique purement expérimentale (1859), and their translations into English by Edmund Atkinson. The study is novel for its international comparison of nineteenth-century physics, its acknowledgement of the role of book production on the impact of the titles and for its emphasis on the role of communication in the making of science.
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Discourse and the Other
The Production of the Afro-American Text
W. Lawrence Hogue
Duke University Press, 1986
The central thesis of Lawrence Hogue's book is that criticism of Afro-American literature has left out of account the way in which ideological pressures dictate the canon. This fresh approach to the study of the social, ideological, and political dynamics of the Afro-American literary text in the twentieth century, based on the Foucauldian concept of literature as social institution, examines the universalization that power effects, how literary texts are appropriated to meet ideological concerns and needs, and the continued oppression of dissenting voices.

Hogue presents an illuminating discussion of the publication and review history of "major" and neglected texts. He illustrates the acceptance of texts as exotica, as sociological documents, or as carriers of sufficient literary conventions to receive approbation. Although the sixties movement allowed the text to move to the periphery of the dominant ideology, providing some new myths about the Afro-American historical past, this marginal position was subsequently sabotaged, co-opted, or appropriated (Afros became a fad; presidents gave the soul handshake; the hip-talking black was dressing one style and talking another.)

This study includes extended discussion of four works; Ernest J. Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Alice Walker's The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Albert Murray's Train Whistle Guitar, and Toni Morrison's Sula. Hogue assesses the informing worldviews of each and the extent and nature of their acceptance by the dominant American cultural apparatus.

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Disney's Star Wars
Forces of Production, Promotion, and Reception
William Proctor and Richard McCulloch
University of Iowa Press, 2019
In 2012, Disney purchased Lucasfilm, which meant it also inherited the beloved Star Wars franchise. This corporate marriage sent media critics and fans into a frenzy of speculation about what would happen next with the hugely popular series. Disney’s Star Wars gathers twenty-one noted fan and media studies scholars from around the world to examine Disney’s revival of the franchise.

Covering the period from Disney’s purchase through the release of The Force Awakens, the book reveals how fans anticipated, interpreted, and responded to the steady stream of production stories, gossip, marketing materials, merchandise, and other sources in the build-up to the movie’s release. From fears that Princess Leia would be turned into a “Disney princess” to collaborative brand management, the authors explore the shifting relationship between fans, texts, and media industries in the context of a crucial rebranding campaign. The result is a fascinating examination of a critical moment in the iconic series’ history.
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Electrical Steels
Production, characterisation and applications
Anthony Moses
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2019
This comprehensive, must-read reference covers the production, characterisation and applications of electrical steels. A range of uses are discussed, with renewable power generation covered in particular. The authors present the material in a systematic way, covering production, measurements, standards, uses, and a number of other important aspects, making it essential reading for any engineers and scientists working in the electrical generation and distribution sectors.
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Engaging Social Media in China
Platforms, Publics, and Production
Guobin Yang
Michigan State University Press, 2021
Introducing the concept of state-sponsored platformization, this volume shows the complexity behind the central role the party-state plays in shaping social media platforms. The party-state increasingly penetrates commercial social media while aspiring to turn its own media agencies into platforms. Yet state-sponsored platformization does not necessarily produce the Chinese Communist Party’s desired outcomes. Citizens continue to appropriate social media for creative public engagement at the same time that more people are managing their online settings to reduce or refuse connection, inducing new forms of crafted resistance to hyper-social media connectivity. The wide-ranging essays presented here explore the mobile radio service Ximalaya.FM, Alibaba’s evolution into a multi-platform ecosystem, livestreaming platforms in the United States and China, the role of Twitter in Trump’s North Korea diplomacy, user-generated content in the news media, the emergence of new social agents mediating between state and society, social media art projects, Chinese and US scientists’ use of social media, and reluctance to engage with WeChat. Ultimately, readers will find that the ten chapters in this volume contribute significant new research and insights to the fast-growing scholarship on social media in China at a time when online communication is increasingly constrained by international struggles over political control and privacy issues.
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Entropy Economics
The Living Basis of Value and Production
James K. Galbraith and Jing Chen
University of Chicago Press

Economists dream of equilibrium. It’s time to wake up.

In mainstream economics, markets are ideal if competition is perfect. When supply balances demand, economic maturity is orderly and disturbed only by shocks. These ideas are rooted in doctrines going back thousands of years yet, as James K. Galbraith and Jing Chen show, they contradict the foundations of our scientific understanding of the physical and biological worlds.

Entropy Economics discards the conventions of equilibrium and presents a new basis for thinking about economic issues, one rooted in life processes—an unequal world of unceasing change in which boundaries, plans, and regulations are essential. Galbraith and Chen’s theory of value is based on scarcity, and it accounts for the power of monopoly. Their theory of production covers increasing and decreasing returns, uncertainty, fixed investments over time, and the impact of rising resource costs. Together, their models illuminate key problems such as trade, finance, energy, climate, conflict, and demography.

Entropy Economics is a thrilling framework for understanding the world as it is and will be keenly relevant to the economic challenges of a world threatened with disorder.

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Exiling the Poets
The Production of Censorship in Plato's Republic
Ramona A. Naddaff
University of Chicago Press, 2002
The question of why Plato censored poetry in his Republic has bedeviled scholars for centuries. In Exiling the Poets, Ramona A. Naddaff offers a strikingly original interpretation of this ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy. Underscoring not only the repressive but also the productive dimension of literary censorship, Naddaff brings to light Plato's fundamental ambivalence about the value of poetic discourse in philosophical investigation.

Censorship, Nadaff argues, is not merely a mechanism of silencing but also provokes new ways of speaking about controversial and crucial cultural and artistic events. It functions philosophically in the Republic to subvert Plato's most crucial arguments about politics, epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. Naddaff develops this stunning argument through an extraordinary reading of Plato's work. In books 2 and 3, the first censorship of poetry, she finds that Plato constitutes the poet as a rival with whom the philosopher must vie agonistically. In other words, philosophy does not replace poetry, as most commentators have suggested; rather, the philosopher becomes a worthy and ultimately victorious poetic competitor. In book 10's second censorship, Plato exiles the poets as a mode of self-subversion, rethinking and revising his theory of mimesis, of the immortality of the soul, and, most important, the first censorship of poetry. Finally, in a subtle and sophisticated analysis of the myth of Er, Naddaff explains how Plato himself censors his own censorships of poetry, thus producing the unexpected result of a poetically animated and open-ended dialectical philosophy.
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Genre, Race, and the Production of Subjectivity in German Romanticism
Stephanie Galasso
Northwestern University Press, 2024
Exposes German Romanticism’s entanglements of aesthetic philosophy with racialized models of humanity

Late Enlightenment philosophers and writers like Herder, Goethe, and Schiller broke with conventions of form and genre to prioritize an idealized, and racially coded, universality. Newly translated literatures from colonial contexts served as the basis for their evaluations of how to contribute to a distinctly “German” national literary tradition, one that valorized modernity and freedom and thus fortified crucial determinants of modern concepts of whiteness. Through close readings of both canonical and less-studied Romantic texts, Stephanie Galasso examines the intimately entwined histories of racialized subjectivity and aesthetic theory and shows how literary genre is both symptomatic and generative of the cultural violence that underpinned the colonial project.

Poetic expression and its generic conventions continue to exert pressure on the framing and reception of the stories that can be told about interpersonal and structural experiences of oppression. Genre, Race, and the Production of Subjectivity in German Romanticism explores how white subjectivity is guarded by symbolic and material forms of violence. 
 
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Global Prescriptions
The Production, Exportation, and Importation of a New Legal Orthodoxy
Yves Dezalay and Bryant G. Garth, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2002
Global Prescriptions scrutinizes the movement to export a U.S.-oriented version of the " rule of law," found in the activities of philanthropic foundations, the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and several other developmental organizations. Yves Dezalay and Bryant G. Garth have brought together a group of scholars from a variety of disciplines--anthropology, economics, history, law, political science, and sociology--to create tools for understanding this movement.
Comprised of two sections, the volume first develops theoretical perspectives key to an understanding of the production and impact of new "global legal prescriptions." The second part shifts attention to the national importation of these legal orthodoxies. The scholars provide a diverse set of sophisticated approaches, both to the circumstances promoting the production of these prescriptions and to the limitations of the prescriptions in the different national settings. Thus, Global Prescriptions provides a unique treatment for readers interested in globalization generally or the potential spread of the "rule of law" in particular.
This volume will intrigue scholars and students interested in a political science, economics, history, anthropology, law, and sociology.
Contributors are Jeremy Adelman, Robert Boyer, Elizabeth Heger Boyle, Miguel Angel Centeno, Heinz Klug, Larissa Adler Lomnitz, John W. Meyer, Setsuo Miyazawa, Hiroshi Otsuka, Rodrigo Salazar, Kathryn Sikkink, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Catalina Smulovitz.
Yves Dezalay is Director of Research, National Center for Scientific Research, Paris. Bryant G. Garth is Director of the American Bar Foundation.
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God and Production in a Guatemalan Town
By Sheldon Annis
University of Texas Press, 1988

Since the late 1970s, Protestantism has emerged as a major force in the political and economic life of rural Guatemala. Indeed, as Sheldon Annis argues in this book, Protestantism may have helped tip Guatemala's guerrilla war in behalf of the army during the early 1980s.

But what is it about Protestantism—and about Indians— that has led to massive religious conversion throughout the highlands? And in villages today, what are the dynamics that underlie the competition between Protestants and Catholics?

Sheldon Annis addresses these questions from the perspective of San Antonio Aguas Calieutes, an Indian village in the highlands of midwestern Guatemala. Annis skillfully blends economic and cultural analysis to show why Protestantism has taken root. The key "character" in his drama is the village Indian's tiny plot of corn and beans, the milpa, which Annis analyzes as an "idea" as well as an agronomic productive system. By exploring "milpa logic," Annis shows how the economic, environmental, and social shifts of the twentieth century have acted to undercut "the colonial creation of Indianness" and, in doing so, have laid the basis for new cultural identities.

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Henri Lefebvre on Space
Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory
Lukasz Stanek
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
In this innovative work, Lukasz Stanek frames a uniquely contextual appreciation of Henri Lefebvre’s idea that space is a social product. Stanek explicitly confronts both the philosophical and the empirical foundations of Lefebvre’s oeuvre, especially his direct involvement in the fields of urban development, planning, and architecture.

Countering the prevailing view, which reduces Lefebvre’s theory of space to a projection of his philosophical positions, Stanek argues that Lefebvre’s work grew out of his concrete, empirical engagement with everyday practices of dwelling in postwar France and his exchanges with architects and planners. Stanek focuses on the interaction between architecture, urbanism, sociology, and philosophy that occurred in France in the 1960s and 1970s, which was marked by a shift in the processes of urbanization at all scales, from the neighborhood to the global level. Lefebvre’s thinking was central to this encounter, which informed both his theory of space and the concept of urbanization becoming global.

Stanek offers a deeper and clearer understanding of Lefebvre’s thought and its implications for the present day. At a time when cities are increasingly important to our political, spatial, and architectural world, this reassessment proposes a new empirical, and practical, interpretation of Lefebvre’s ideas on urbanism.
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Hitting the Brakes
Engineering Design and the Production of Knowledge
Ann Johnson
Duke University Press, 2009
In Hitting the Brakes, Ann Johnson illuminates the complex social, historical, and cultural dynamics of engineering design, in which knowledge communities come together to produce new products and knowledge. Using the development of antilock braking systems for passenger cars as a case study, Johnson shows that the path to invention is neither linear nor top-down, but highly complicated and unpredictable. Individuals, corporations, university research centers, and government organizations informally coalesce around a design problem that is continually refined and redefined as paths of development are proposed and discarded, participants come and go, and information circulates within the knowledge community. Detours, dead ends, and failures feed back into the developmental process, so that the end design represents the convergence of multiple, diverse streams of knowledge.

The development of antilock braking systems (ABS) provides an ideal case study for examining the process of engineering design because it presented an array of common difficulties faced by engineers in research and development. ABS did not develop predictably. Research and development took place in both the public and private sectors and involved individuals working in different disciplines, languages, institutions, and corporations. Johnson traces ABS development from its first patents in the 1930s to the successful 1978 market introduction of integrated ABS by Daimler and Bosch. She examines how a knowledge community first formed around understanding the phenomenon of skidding, before it turned its attention to building instruments to measure, model, and prevent cars’ wheels from locking up. While corporations’ accounts of ABS development often present a simple linear story, Hitting the Brakes describes the full social and cognitive complexity and context of engineering design.

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Hollywood Shutdown
Production, Distribution, and Exhibition in the Time of COVID
By Kate Fortmueller
University of Texas Press, 2021

By March 2020, the spread of COVID-19 had reached pandemic proportions, forcing widespread shutdowns across industries, including Hollywood. Studios, networks and production companies, and the thousands of workers who make film and television possible, were forced to adjust their time-honored business and labor practices. In this book, Kate Fortmueller asks what happened when the coronavirus closed Hollywood.

Hollywood Shutdown examines how the COVID-19 pandemic affected film and television production, influenced trends in distribution, reshaped theatrical exhibition, and altered labor practices. From January movie theater closures in China to the bumpy September release of Mulan on the Disney+ streaming platform, Fortmueller probes various choices made by studios, networks, unions and guilds, distributors, and exhibitors during the evolving crisis. In seeking to explain what happened in the first nine months of 2020, this book also considers how the pandemic will transform Hollywood practices in the twenty-first century.

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Investment and Production
A Study in the Theory of the Capital-Using Enterprise
Vernon L. Smith
Harvard University Press
Developing a unified theory of production and investment, Vernon L. Smith explores the empirical and theoretical nature of the interdependence between “short-run” current account production decisions and “long-run” investment planning, taking into account such technological factors as equipment replacement. The book builds an explicit theory of production planning by integrating production, investment, and equipment replacement policy, derives the decision implications of the use of durable capital goods, and examines the production function concept and the production decision process in engineering design and in general business practice.
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Making Media
Production, Practices, and Professions
Mark Deuze
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
Making Media uncovers what it means and what it takes to make media, focusing on the lived experience of media professionals within the global media, including rich case studies of the main media industries and professions: television, journalism, social media entertainment, advertising and public relations, digital games, and music. This carefully edited volume features 35 authoritative essays by 53 researchers from 14 countries across 6 continents, all of whom are at the cutting edge of media production studies. The book is particularly designed for use in coursework on media production, media work, media management, and media industries.Specific topics highlighted:the history of media industries and production studies; production studies as a field and a research method; changing business models, economics, and management; global concentration and convergence of media industries and professions; the rise and role of startups and entrepreneurship; freelancing in the digital age; the role of creativity and innovation; the emotional quality of media work; diversity and inequality in the media industries.
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Making the World Global
U.S. Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary
Isaac A. Kamola
Duke University Press, 2019
Following World War II the American government and philanthropic foundations fundamentally remade American universities into sites for producing knowledge about the world as a collection of distinct nation-states. As neoliberal reforms took hold in the 1980s, visions of the world made popular within area studies and international studies found themselves challenged by ideas and educational policies that originated in business schools and international financial institutions. Academics within these institutions reimagined the world instead as a single global market and higher education as a commodity to be bought and sold. By the 1990s, American universities embraced this language of globalization, and globalization eventually became the organizing logic of higher education. In Making the World Global Isaac A. Kamola examines how the relationships among universities, the American state, philanthropic organizations, and international financial institutions created the conditions that made it possible to imagine the world as global. Examining the Center for International Studies, Harvard Business School, the World Bank, the Social Science Research Council, and NYU, Kamola demonstrates that how we imagine the world is always symptomatic of the material relations within which knowledge is produced.
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Managerial Capitalism
Ownership, Management, and the Coming New Mode of Production
Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy
Pluto Press, 2018
Marxist analysis has traditionally been built on a two-class framework: workers and capitalists. With Managerial Capitalism, Gerard Duménil and Dominique Lévy mount a powerful argument that such a framework is outdated—we are in fact amid a transition to a new mode of production, one that is fundamentally shaped by a third, intermediary class: managerialism.
            Drawing examples from the United States and Europe, the authors offer a historically rooted interpretation of major current economic and political trends. Without eschewing Marx’s theory of history and political economy, they update it to take account of the changes underway in class patterns and relationships to production. The result is a robust new Marxism for the present and the future.
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The Mass Market for History Paintings in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam
Production, Distribution, and Consumption
Angela Jager
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
Millions of paintings were produced in the Dutch Republic. The works that we currently know and see in museums constitute only the tip of the iceberg-the top-quality part. But what else was painted? This book explores the low-quality end of the seventeenth-century art market and outlines the significance of that production in the genre of history paintings, which in traditional art historical studies is usually linked to high prices, famous painters and elite buyers. Angela Jager analyses the producers, suppliers and consumers active in this segment to gain insight in this enormous market for cheap history paintings. What did the supply consist of in terms of quantity, quality, price and subject? Who produced all these works and which production methods did these painters employ? Who distributed these paintings, to whom, and which strategies were used to market them? Who bought these paintings, and why?
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The Mesoamerican Codex Re-entangled
Production, Use and Re-use of Pre-colonial Documents
Ludo Snijders
Leiden University Press, 2017
This innovative work aims to piece together the cultural biography of Mesoamerica’s precolonial codices. Today, fewer than twenty manuscripts are all that remain of the Mesoamerican book-making tradition. These pictographic and hieroglyphic texts have often been researched according to their content, but such studies have ignored their nature as material objects. By tracing the paths these books have followed over the past five hundred years, Ludo Snijders offers fascinating insights into their production, use and reuse, destruction, rediscovery, and reinvention.
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Mex-Ciné
Mexican Filmmaking, Production, and Consumption in the Twenty-first Century
Frederick Luis Aldama
University of Michigan Press, 2013
Mex-Ciné offers an accessibly written, multidisciplinary investigation of contemporary Mexican cinema that combines industrial, technical, and sociopolitical analysis with analyses of modes of reception through cognitive theory. Mex-Ciné aims to make visible the twenty-first century Mexican film industry, its blueprints, and the cognitive and emotive faculties involved in making and consuming its corpus. A sustained, free-flowing book-length meditation, Mex-Ciné enriches our understanding of the way contemporary Mexican directors use specific technical devices, structures, and characterizations in making films in ways that guide the perceptual, emotive, and cognitive faculties of their ideal audiences, while providing the historical contexts in which these films are made and consumed.
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Museum Processes in China
The Institutional Regulation, Production and Consumption of the Art Museums in the Greater Pearl River Delta Region
Chui-fun Selina Ho
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
This book challenges the museum enterprise in China as a state monopoly and considers it as a new cultural agency that has emerged in the early twenty-first century. Following a constructive and multi-perspectival approach, it discusses the roles of political and cultural-economic agents, museum intermediaries, and museum publics in the interlinked processes of regulation, cultural production and consumption, and the issues of identity and representation faced by the art museums in the Greater Pearl River Delta Region. It broadly traces the art museum from its origin as a tool of nationalism and adoption as a vehicle of modernization in both nationalist and early communist periods, until its role in the present, as it reflects the contested and alternative representations, diverse publics, and fissured identities of the post-economic reform period of China.
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Natural Aristocracy
History, Ideology, and the Production of William Faulkner
Kevin Railey
University of Alabama Press, 1999
Kevin Railey uses a materialist critical approach--which envisions literature as a discourse necessarily interactive with other forces in the world--to identify and historicize Faulkner’s authorial identity. Working from the assumption that Faulkner was deeply affected by the sociohistorical forces that surrounded his life, Railey explores the interrelationships between American history and Faulkner’s fiction, between southern history and Faulkner’s subjectivity. Railey argues that Faulkner’s obsession with history and his struggle with specific ideologies affecting southern society and his family guided his development as an artist, influencing and overdetermining characterizations and narrative structures as well as the social vision manifest in his work. By seeing Faulkner the artist and Faulkner the man as one and the same, Railey concludes that the celebrated author wrote himself into history in a way that satisfied the image he had of himself as a natural, artistic aristocrat, based on the notion of natural aristocracy.
 
After examining two prevailing and opposing ideologies in the South of Faulkner’s lifetime--paternalism and liberalism--Railey shows how Faulkner’s working-through of his identifications with these forces helped develop his values and perceptions as an artist and individual. Railey reads Faulkner’s fiction as exploring social concerns about the demise of paternalism, questions of leadership within liberalism, and doubts about both an aristocracy of heritage and one of wealth. This reading of The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, the Snopes trilogy and The Reivers details Faulkner’s explorations of various manifestations of paternalism and liberalism and the intense conflict between them, as well as his attempts to resolve that conflict.
 
Providing new insights into the full range of Faulkner’s fiction, Natural Aristocracy is the first systematic materialist critique of the author and his world.
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Ontology of Production
Three Essays
Nishida KitarM
Duke University Press, 2012
Ontology of Production presents three essays by the influential Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945), translated for the first time into English by William Haver. While previous translations of his writings have framed Nishida within Asian or Oriental philosophical traditions, Haver's introduction and approach to the texts rightly situate the work within Nishida's own commitment to Western philosophy. In particular, Haver focuses on Nishida's sustained and rigorous engagement with Marx's conception of production.

Agreeing with Marx that ontology is production and production is ontology, Nishida in these three essays—"Expressive Activity" (1925), "The Standpoint of Active Intuition" (1935), and "Human Being" (1938)—addresses sense and reason, language and thought, intuition and appropriation, ultimately arguing that in this concept of production, ideality and materiality are neither mutually exclusive nor oppositional but, rather, coimmanent. Nishida's forceful articulation of the radical nature of Marx's theory of production is, Haver contends, particularly timely in today's speculation-driven global economy. Nishida's reading of Marx, which points to the inseparability of immaterial intellectual labor and material manual labor, provokes a reconsideration of Marxism's utility for making sense of—and resisting—the logic of contemporary capitalism.

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Opera—Dead or Alive
Production, Performance and Enjoyment of Musical Theatre
Ronald E. Mitchell
University of Wisconsin Press, 1972
Playwright, director, and critic Ronald E. Mitchell offers general readers a richer understanding of traditions, terms, styles, and staging techniques of musical theater, including an introduction to seventeen examples of operas and musicals, from baroque and romantic operas to Gilbert & Sullivan, from proletarian dramas to Broadway shows like Oklahoma.
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Police, Power, and the Production of Racial Boundaries
Muñiz, Ana
Rutgers University Press, 2015
Based on five years of ethnography, archival research, census data analysis, and interviews, Police, Power, and the Production of Racial Boundaries reveals how the LAPD, city prosecutors, and business owners struggled to control who should be considered “dangerous” and how they should be policed in Los Angeles. Sociologist Ana Muñiz shows how these influential groups used policies and everyday procedures to criminalize behaviors commonly associated with blacks and Latinos and to promote an exceedingly aggressive form of policing.
 
Muñiz illuminates the degree to which the definitions of “gangs” and “deviants” are politically constructed labels born of public policy and court decisions, offering an innovative look at the process of criminalization and underscoring the ways in which a politically powerful coalition can define deviant behavior. As she does so, Muñiz also highlights the various grassroots challenges to such policies and the efforts to call attention to their racist effects. Muñiz describes the fight over two very different methods of policing: community policing (in which the police and the community work together) and the “broken windows” or “zero tolerance” approach (which aggressively polices minor infractions—such as loitering—to deter more serious crime). Police, Power, and the Production of Racial Boundaries also explores the history of the area to explain how Cadillac-Corning became viewed by outsiders as a “violent neighborhood” and how the city’s first gang injunction—a restraining order aimed at alleged gang members—solidified this negative image. As a result, Muñiz shows, Cadillac-Corning and other sections became a test site for repressive practices that eventually spread to the rest of the city.
 
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Politics and Scholarship
Feminist Academic Journals and the Production of Knowledge
Patrice McDermott
University of Illinois Press, 1994
"Well argued and documented, Politics and Scholarship is a fascinating reading of a broader historical perspective of feminist concerns than just the three journals of focus: Feminist Studies, Frontiers, and Signs. The author's historical framework establishes an important overview that should have greater visibility."
-- J'nana Morse Sellery, coauthor of Elizabeth Bowen: A Bibliography
 
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Prices and Production of Machinery in the Soviet Union, 1928-1958
Richard Moorsteen
Harvard University Press

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The Production of Living Knowledge
The Crisis of the University and the Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America
Gigi Roggero
Temple University Press, 2011

Evaluating higher education institutions—particularly the rise of the “global university”—and their rapidly changing role in the global era, Gigi Roggero finds the system in crisis. In his groundbreaking book, The Production of Living Knowledge, Roggero examines the university system as a key site of conflict and transformation within “cognitive capitalism”—a regime in which knowledge has become increasingly central to the production process at large. Based on extensive fieldwork carried out through the activist method of conricerca, or “co-research,” wherein researchers are also subjects, Roggero’s book situates the crisis of the university and the changing composition of its labor force against the backdrop of the global economic crisis.

Combining a discussion of radical experiments in education, new student movements, and autonomist Marxian (or post-operaista) social theory, Roggero produces a distinctly transnational and methodologically innovative critique of the global university from the perspective of what he calls “living knowledge.”

In light of new student struggles in the United States and across the world, this first English-language edition is particularly timely.

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The Production of Local Knowledge
History and Politics in the Work of René Zavaleta Mercado
Luis Tapia Mealla
Seagull Books, 2016
This volume presents a comprehensive examination of the work of René Zavaleta Mercado (1939–1984), the most notable Bolivian political thinker of the twentieth century. While Zavaleta did not live to see the triumph of the indigenous social movements that have made Bolivia famous in recent years, his writings influenced many of the activists and ideologues who made today’s changes possible. This exploration of Zavaleta’s work by Luis Tapia, a contemporary political analyst who has been a colleague of many of the central actors in today’s government, presents a detailed panorama of Bolivian history that establishes the context of Zavaleta’s analysis of the events of his time, from the revolutionary nationalist movement which took power in 1952 through the military dictatorships that followed it from 1964 onwards to the popular protests that eventually defeated the dictatorship and restored democratic government in 1982. The book will be necessary reading for anyone who wants to understand the decades of history and the ideological currents that laid the groundwork for the rise to power of the neo-indigenists lead by Evo Morales in the twenty-first century.
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The Production of Modernization
Daniel Lerner, Mass Media, and The Passing of Traditional Society
Authored by Hemant Shah
Temple University Press, 2011

Daniel Lerner's 1958 book The Passing of Traditional Society was central in shaping Cold War–era ideas about the use of mass media and culture to promote social and economic progress in postcolonial nations. Based on a study of the effectiveness of propaganda in the Middle East, Lerner’s book claimed that exposure to American media messages could motivate “traditional” people in the postcolonial nations to become “modern” by cultivating empathy for American ideas, goods, and ways of life.

The Production of Modernization examines Lerner’s writings to construct the intellectual trajectory of his thinking about mass media and modernization up to and beyond the publication of his famous book. Shah has written not just an intellectual biography of Lerner but also a history of the discipline he shaped.

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Reconstructing Reconstruction
The Supreme Court and the Production of Historical Truth
Pamela Brandwein
Duke University Press, 1999
Was slavery over when slaves gained formal emancipation? Was it over when the social, economic, and political situation for African Americans no longer mimicked the conditions of slavery? If the Thirteenth Amendment abolished it in 1865, why did most of the disputed points during the Reconstruction debates of 1866–75 concern issues of slavery? In this book Pamela Brandwein examines the post–Civil War struggle between competing political and legal interpretations of slavery and Reconstruction to reveal how accepted historical truth was established.
Delving into the circumstances, assumptions, and rhetoric that shaped the “official” story of Reconstruction, Brandwein describes precisely how a dominant interpretation of events ultimately emerged and what its implications have been for twentieth-century judicial decisions, particularly for Supreme Court rulings on civil rights. While analyzing interpretive disputes about slavery, Brandwein offers a detailed rescoring of post–Civil War legislative and constitutional history, including analysis of the original understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment. She identifies the perspectives on Reconstruction that were endorsed or rejected by the Supreme Court. Explaining what it meant—theoretically and practically—to resolve Reconstruction debates with a particular definition of slavery, Brandwein recounts how the Northern Democratic definition of “ending” slavery was not the only definition, just the one that prevailed. Using a familiar historical moment to do new interpretive work, she outlines a sociology of constitutional law, showing how subjective narrative construction can solidify into opaque institutional memory.
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The Red Cell
Production, Metabolism, Destruction—Normal and Abnormal, Revised Edition
John Harris
Harvard University Press, 1970
Every chapter in this classic on hematology has been entirely updated. Beginning at the molecular level, the book gives a detailed description of the way a red blood cell is produced, its metabolic processes, and how it is destroyed. Data and examples drawn from experiments illustrate current knowledge of the subject and substantiate conclusions. Although the work is clinically oriented, the text emphasizes the experimental approach to seeking the pathophysiology and mechanisms of disease resulting from alterations in the life processes of the red cell. Nearly 100 illustrations accompany the text.
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Representing
Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema
S. Craig Watkins
University of Chicago Press, 1998
In this engaging and provocative book, S. Craig Watkins examines two of the most important developments in the recent history of black cinema—the ascendancy of Spike Lee and the proliferation of "ghettocentric films." Representing explores a distinct contradiction in American society: at the same time that black youth have become the targets of a fierce racial backlash, their popular expressive cultures have become highly visible and commercially viable.

"Watkins is at his most sophisticated and persuasive when he explains the surprising success of hyper-talented, entrepreneurial, and energetic black artists."—Archon Fung, Boston Book Review
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Silent Looms
Women and Production in a Guatemalan Town
By Tracy Bachrach Ehlers
University of Texas Press, 2000

Based on new fieldwork in 1997, Tracy Bachrach Ehlers has updated her classic study of the effects of economic development on the women weavers of San Pedro Sacatepéquez. Revisiting many of the women she interviewed in the 1970s and 1980s and revising her earlier hopeful assessment of women's entrepreneurial opportunities, Ehlers convincingly demonstrates that development and commercial growth in the region have benefited men at the expense of women.

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The Slumbering Volcano
American Slave Ship Revolts and the Production of Rebellious Masculinity
Maggie Montesinos Sale
Duke University Press, 1997
In The Slumbering Volcano, Maggie Montesinos Sale investigates depictions of nineteenth-century slave ship revolts to explore the notion of rebellion in formulations of United States national identity. Analyzing how such revolts inspired citizens to debate whether political theory directed at free men could be extended toward blacks, Sale compares the reception of fictionalized versions of ship revolts published in the 1850s—Benito Cereno by Herman Melville and The Heroic Slave by Frederick Douglass—with the previous decade’s public accounts of actual rebellions by enslaved people on the ships Amistad and Creole.
This comparison of narrative response with written public reaction to the actual revolts allows Sale to investigate the precise manner in which public opinion regarding definitions of liberty evolved over this crucial period of time between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. Mapping the ways in which unequally empowered groups claimed and transformed statements associated with the discourse of national identity, Sale succeeds in recovering a historically informed sense of the discursive and activist options available to people of another era.
In its demonstration of how the United States has been uniquely shaped by its dual status as both an imperial and a postcolonial power, this study on the discourse of natural rights and national identity in the pre-Civil War United States will interest students and scholars of American studies, African American studies, gender studies, and American history and literature.
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Sound Reporting
The NPR Guide to Audio Journalism and Production
Jonathan Kern
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Perhaps you’ve always wondered how public radio gets that smooth, well-crafted sound. Maybe you’re thinking about starting a podcast, and want some tips from the pros. Or maybe storytelling has always been a passion of yours, and you want to learn to do it more effectively. Whatever the case—whether you’re an avid NPR listener or you aspire to create your own audio, or both—Sound Reporting: The NPR Guide to Audio Journalism and Production will give you a rare tour of the world of a professional broadcaster.
            Jonathan Kern, who has trained NPR’s on-air staff for years, is a gifted guide, able to narrate a day in the life of a host and lay out the nuts and bolts of production with equal wit and warmth. Along the way, he explains the importance of writing the way you speak, reveals how NPR books guests ranging from world leaders to neighborhood newsmakers, and gives sage advice on everything from proposing stories to editors to maintaining balance and objectivity. Best of all—because NPR wouldn’t be NPR without its array of distinctive voices—lively examples from popular shows and colorful anecdotes from favorite personalities animate each chapter.
            As public radio’s audience of millions can attest, NPR’s unique guiding principles and technical expertise combine to connect with listeners like no other medium can. With today’s technologies allowing more people to turn their home computers into broadcast studios, Sound Reporting couldn’t have arrived at a better moment to reveal the secrets behind the story of NPR’s success.
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Soundworks
Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production
Anthony Reed
Duke University Press, 2021
In Soundworks Anthony Reed argues that studying sound requires conceiving it as process and as work. Since the long Black Arts era (ca. 1958–1974), intellectuals, poets, and musicians have defined black sound as radical aesthetic practice. Through their recorded collaborations as well as the accompanying interviews, essays, liner notes, and other media, they continually reinvent black sound conceptually and materially. Soundwork is Reed’s term for that material and conceptual labor of experimental sound practice framed by the institutions of the culture industry and shifting historical contexts. Through analyses of Langston Hughes’s collaboration with Charles Mingus, Amiri Baraka’s work with the New York Art Quartet, Jayne Cortez’s albums with the Firespitters, and the multimedia projects of Archie Shepp, Matana Roberts, Cecil Taylor, and Jeanne Lee, Reed shows that to grasp black sound as a radical philosophical and aesthetic insurgence requires attending to it as the product of material, technical, sensual, and ideological processes. 
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Space and the Production of Cultural Difference among the Akha Prior to Globalization
Channeling the Flow of Life
Deborah E. Tooker
Amsterdam University Press, 2012
Based on the author's extensive fieldwork among the Akha people prior to full nation-state integration, this illuminating study critically reexamines assumptions about space, power, and the politics of identity, so often based on modern, western contexts. Tooker explores the active role that spatial practices have played in maintaining cultural autonomy. The book expands current debates about power relations in the region from a mostly political and economic framework into the domains of ritual, cosmology, and indigenous meaning and social systems.
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Surplus
The Politics of Production and the Strategies of Everyday Life
Christopher T. Morehart
University Press of Colorado, 2015

The concept of surplus captures the politics of production and also conveys the active material means by which people develop the strategies to navigate everyday life. Surplus: The Politics of Production and the Strategies of Everyday Life examines how surpluses affected ancient economies, governments, and households in civilizations across Mesoamerica, the Southwest United States, the Andes, Northern Europe, West Africa, Mesopotamia, and eastern Asia.

A hallmark of archaeological research on sociopolitical complexity, surplus is central to theories of political inequality and institutional finance. This book investigates surplus as a macro-scalar process on which states or other complex political formations depend and considers how past people—differentially positioned based on age, class, gender, ethnicity, role, and goal—produced, modified, and mobilized their social and physical worlds.

Placing the concept of surplus at the forefront of archaeological discussions on production, consumption, power, strategy, and change, this volume reaches beyond conventional ways of thinking about top-down or bottom-up models and offers a comparative framework to examine surplus, generating new questions and methodologies to elucidate the social and political economies of the past.

Contributors include Douglas J. Bolender, James A. Brown, Cathy L. Costin, Kristin De Lucia, Timothy Earle, John E. Kelly, Heather M. L. Miller, Christopher R. Moore, Christopher T. Morehart, Neil L. Norman, Ann B. Stahl, Victor D. Thompson, T. L. Thurston, and E. Christian Wells.


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Textile Ascendancies
Aesthetics, Production, and Trade in Northern Nigeria
Elisha P. Renne and Salihu Maiwada, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2020

Until this century, Northern Nigeria was a major center of textile production and trade. Textile Ascendancies: Aesthetics, Production, and Trade in Northern Nigeria examines this dramatic change in textile aesthetics, technologies, and social values in order to explain the extraordinary shift in textile demand, production, and trade.

Textile Ascendancies provides information for the study of the demise of textile manufacturing outside Nigeria. The book also suggests the conundrum considered by George Orwell concerning the benefits and disadvantages of “mechanical progress,” and digital progress, for human existence. While textile mill workers in northern Nigeria were proud to participate in the mechanization of weaving, the “tendency for the mechanization of the world” represented by more efficient looms and printing equipment in China has contributed to the closing of Nigerian mills and unemployment.

Textile Ascendancies will appeal toanthropologists for its analyses of social identity as well as how the ethnic identity of consumers influences continued handwoven textile production. The consideration of aesthetics and fashionable dress will appeal to specialists in textiles and clothing. It will be useful to economic historians for the comparative analysis of textile manufacturing decline in the 21st century. It will also be of interest to those thinking about global futures, about digitalization, and how new ways of making cloth and clothing may provide both employment and environmentally sound production practices.

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Towards an Aesthetics of Production
Sebastian Egenhofer
Diaphanes, 2017
Throughout the twentieth century, art history has been too narrowly focused on formalism. As a result, analyses regularly reduced works of art to their materials, texture, and composition. By contrast, art historian Sebastian Egenhofer takes Gilles Deleuze’s readings of Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson as the basis for a new resistance to the overly reductive account of art history. 
           
After laying out his argument for a new aesthetics of production in introductory chapters that discuss the work of Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson, as well as Heidegger and Kant, Egenhofer applies this theoretical framework to case studies on Michael Asher, Marcel Duchamp, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Piet Mondrian. An aesthetics of production does not, he argues, imply a nostalgia for the artisanal or for a work of art’s singularity, but a way to bring together elements of critical materialism with a thorough reevaluation of the modern art and abstraction.
 
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Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities
Martha C. Howell
University of Chicago Press, 1986
In this bold reinterpretation of Women's changing labor status during the late medieval and early modern period, Martha C. Howell argues that women's work was the product of the intersection of two systems, one cultural and one economic. Howell shows forcefully that patriarchal family structure, not capitalist development per se, was a decisive factor in determining women's work. Women could enjoy high labor status if they worked within a family production unit or if their labor did not interfere with their domestic responsibilities or threaten male control of a craft or trade.
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Worlds of Production
The Action Frameworks of the Economy
Michael Storper and Robert Salais
Harvard University Press, 1997

This intellectually bold but accessible book seeks to go beyond limitations of the reigning neoclassical and institutional paradigms in explaining the organization of economic activity. It does this by construing “non-economic” factors such as institutions, cultures, and social practices as conventions, which coordinate economic actors by defining specific “frameworks of economic action.” In these conventional frameworks, the standard distinction between economic and non-economic no longer exists. The authors explore in detail four basic frameworks—or “possible worlds of production”—which underpin the mobilization of economic resources, the organization of production systems and factor markets, patterns of economic decision making, and forms of profitability. The case studies examine how these possible worlds act to support innovative production complexes in a variety of sectors in several countries.

Michael Storper and Robert Salais show that economic actors coordinate actions with one another and interpret what others are doing in ways that are constructed by convention. The principal challenge to economic policy today, they argue, is to reconcile internally coherent conventions with the external tests of product and financial markets, which tend increasingly to escape jurisdictional borders. There is no single model of growth and efficiency that brings these two sides together around the world today, even in narrowly defined product markets. If policies are to deal effectively with an increasingly unified global system of flows of commodities, money, and people, they must be aware of the diverse, economically viable action frameworks found in different industries, regions, and nations.

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Yutopian
Archaeology, Ambiguity, and the Production of Knowledge in Northwest Argentina
By Joan M. Gero
University of Texas Press, 2015

Around 400 BCE, inhabitants of the Southern Andes took up a sedentary lifestyle that included the practice of agriculture. Settlements were generally solitary or clustered structures with walled agricultural fields and animal corrals, and the first small villages appeared in some regions. Surprisingly, people were also producing and circulating exotic goods: polychrome ceramics, copper and gold ornaments, bronze bracelets and bells. To investigate the apparent contradiction between a lack of social complexity and the broad circulation of elaborated goods, archaeologist Joan Gero co-directed a binational project to excavate the site of Yutopian, an unusually well-preserved Early Formative village in the mountains of Northwest Argentina.

In Yutopian, Gero describes how archaeologists from the United States and Argentina worked with local residents to uncover the lifeways of the earliest sedentary people of the region. Gero foregounds many experiential aspects of archaeological fieldwork that are usually omitted in the archaeological literature: the tedious labor and constraints of time and personnel, the emotional landscape, the intimate ethnographic settings and Andean people, the socio-politics, the difficult decisions and, especially, the role that ambiguity plays in determining archaeological meanings. Gero’s unique approach offers a new model for the site report as she masterfully demonstrates how the decisions made in conducting any scientific undertaking play a fundamental role in shaping the knowledge produced in that project.

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