At a critical time of democratic reform across many parts of Southeast Asia, Subang Jaya is regarded as Malaysia's electronic governance laboratory. The focus of the study is Subang Jaya's field of residential affairs, a digitally mediated social field in which residents, civil servants, politicians, online journalists and other social agents struggle over how the locality is to be governed at the dawn of the "Information Era." Drawing on the field theories of both Pierre Bourdieu and the Manchester School of political anthropology, this study challenges the unquestioned predominance of "netwo
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"We have witnessed the growing worldwide trends in moving from digitization to digitalization to digital transformation. In order to survive in today's environment, organizations must embrace digital transformation. In fact, digital transformation transcends all elements of society, whether agriculture, home, business, transportation, and the like. This book focuses on digital transformation and its impact upon society"--
"Entangled Things takes the concept of entanglement as its starting point in investigating the relationship between us and the material things we engage with. Each chapter illustrates a particular form of entanglement - desiring things, hoarding things, creating things, ridding ourselves of things - using ethnographic examples and theoretical perspectives. Hulme encourages a wider consideration of the place of humans in the world, and the kind of choices we enact when influenced by the material things around us. She explores our relationships with material objects in light of both personal and planetary 'space', and personal and historical time, from the space in our homes, storage spaces, landfill and oceans; to the times in our lives and the times in wider shared histories that things connect us to, not to mention our sense of time and our own place in the world. In so doing, Hulme intentionally places discussions on our entanglement with things squarely back into the context of the Anthropocene, with a provocative analysis in which the Anthropocene is posited as a concept which on one hand takes away human agency, placing us in the context of immense geological epochs, whilst on the other hand pushes agency upon humans, blaming us for the extreme challenges of the current era and looking to us to solve those challenges. For Hulme, material things are instrumental in helping us to grasp our existential place in the world and weave a way through the complications of living in epochal times"--
"This book examines the relationship between business-based peacebuilding and the opportunities that emerge from the pluralisation of regulation. The core message is, notwithstanding the broad range of regulatory initiatives and actors that exist in conflict-affected settings, the state should assume responsibilities for defining the types of contribution that business can and ought to make to peace. It also demonstrates how the state, through different forms and methods of regulation, is well-placed to engage businesses to do so. It is particularly concerned with the potential for regulation to help address what is identified as a state of optimistic uncertainty in the field of business and peacebuilding. On one level, there is a sense of optimism around the types of contributions that businesses can and often do make as agents for peace. On another, there are varying degrees of uncertainty surrounding the actual peacebuilding impacts of business activities; how businesses are to understand the ways in which to make these contributions, and why businesses would do so. Regulation, this book will argue, can play an important role in bridging the chasm between optimism and uncertainty. This book will be of interest to those engaged not only with business and peacebuilding but also business and human rights, business and development and business and the environment. Moreover, this book is also of contemporary interest in other ways - the aftermath of the Ukranian conflict, as an example, will require a concerted effort to rebuild that society after war. Private sector actors could be a powerful vehicle for reconstruction and development and this book examines how regulation can be used to facilitate businesses involvement in peacebuilding efforts"--
The Green and the Blue explores the opportunities presented by the digital age for combining green environmental policies with blue digital solutions to strengthen democracy, reform capitalism, and work toward a sustainable and equitable future. With an engaging and readable style, world-renowned philosopher Luciano Floridi lays out a timely and convincing case for embracing responsible practices to ensure a sustainable environment, a better democracy, and an equitable information society
"Hilke Schellmann is an Emmy award-winning investigative reporter, Wall Street Journal and Guardian contributor, and journalism professor at NYU. In "The Algorithm," she investigates the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the world of work. AI is now being used to decide who has access to an education, who gets hired, who gets fired, and who receives a promotion. Drawing on exclusive information from whistleblowers, internal documents, and real-world tests, Schellmann discovers that many of the algorithms making high-stakes decisions are biased, racist, and do more harm than good. Algorithms are on the brink of dominating our lives and threaten our human future-if we don't fight back. Schellmann takes readers on a journalistic detective story, testing algorithms that have secretly analyzed job candidates' facial expressions and tone of voice. She investigates algorithms that scan our online activity, including Twitter and LinkedIn, to construct personality profiles a la Cambridge Analytica. Her reporting reveals how employers track the location of their employees, the keystrokes they make, access everything on their screens, and, during meetings, analyze group discussions to diagnose problems in a team. Even universities are now using predictive analytics for admission offers and financial aid"--
"This book critically examines how boundaries, physical and symbolic, unfold in different geographies and spaces. It aims to understand why and how boundaries exist and how they are constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed. It explores why certain boundaries persist while others are removed, and new ones are established. The book benefits from visual essays that complement the theoretical and empirical chapters, showing the complexity of boundaries in a simple and effective way. It does not focus on one form of boundary or geographic location. It shifts its attention to different geographies and boundaries. It also focuses on intersections between these boundaries and how symbolic and physical boundaries complete each other. The book provides case studies from the past and present, allowing readers to connect subjects, periods and geographies. The chapters address 'classical' boundaries such as nation-states and tackle novel questions such as ownership against access, i.e., of urban infrastructures, COVID-19 and lockdowns and the divides within digital worlds. The book will be of interest to academics, researchers and students working in the fields of urban and rural studies, urban sociology, cities and communities, urban and regional planning, urban anthropology, political sciences and migration studies, human geography, cultural geography, urban anthropology, and visual arts"--
"Crisis and Criticism is a series of interventions from 2009 to 2021 engaging with the literary, cultural and political responses to the capitalist crisis of 2007-8. Challenging the tendency to treat crisis as natural and beyond human control, this book interrogates our cultural understanding of crisis and suggests the necessity of ruthless criticism of the existing world. While responses to crisis have retreated from the critical, choosing to inhabit apocalyptic fantasies instead, only a critical understanding of the causes of crisis within capitalism itself can promise their eventual overcoming"--
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"In Political Species, Karsten Ronit expertly argues that evolutionary biology can provide important sources of inspiration for analyzing the proliferation of private actors/organizations in domestic and global politics. Focusing on the evolution of a diversity of such private actors/organizations in politics, Ronit emphasizes that individuals are affected by and contribute to societal, cultural, and political evolution through a range of formal organizations and that societies, cultures, and politics influence and build upon values and norms transmitted by individuals via these formal organizations. Mindful of these contextual factors and keeping in mind the important research done in the micro- and macro-perspectives, we can gain a better understanding of the diversity of private actors/organizations and how they evolve and adapt. Evolutionary biology teaches us that over time, different varieties emerge, specialize, and adapt to the ever-changing conditions in complex environments before accumulating into new species. Much change characterizes these processes of political evolution because actors constantly emerge and add to the existing population of private actors that in one way or another are engaged in politics"--
"In today's world, the acceleration of megatrends - increasing longevity and the explosion of technology among many others - are transforming life as we now know it. In The Perennials, bestselling author of 2030 Mauro Guillén unpacks a sweeping societal shift triggered by demographic and technological transformation. Guillén argues that outmoded terms like Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z have long been used to pigeonhole us into rigid categories and life stages, artificially preventing people from reaching their full potential. A new postgenerational workforce known as "perennials" - individuals who are not pitted against each other either by their age or experience - makes it possible to liberate scores of people from the constraints of the sequential model of life and level the playing field so that everyone has a chance at living a rewarding life. Guillén unveils how this generational revolution will impact young people just entering the workforce as well as those who are living and working longer. This multigenerational revolution is already happening and Mauro Guillén identifies the specific cultural, organizational and policy changes that need to be made in order to switch to a new template and usher in a new era of innovation powered by the perennials"--
