Download or read book Language Capital Culture written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Singapore has been taken by many researchers as a fascinating living language policy and planning laboratory. Language and education policy in Singapore has been pivotal not only to the establishment and growth of schooling, but to the very project of nation building. Since their inception, ‘mother tongue’ policies have been established with two explicit goals. Firstly there is the development and training of human and intellectual capital for the expansion and networking of a Singaporean service and information economy. Secondly there is the maintenance of cultural heritage and values as a means for social cohesion and, indeed, the maintenance of community and regional social capital. These tasks have been fraught with tension and contradiction, both in relation to the conditions of rapid cultural, economic and political change in Asia and globally, but as well because of the tensions between the so called ‘world language English’ and Singapore’s three other official languages, Tamil, Malay and Mandarin. This has been complicated, of course, by the challenges of vibrant regional dialects and the emergence of Singlish as a powerful medium of community life.
Download or read book Markets of English written by Joseph Sung-Yul Park and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The global spread of English both reproduces and reinforces oppressive structures of inequality. But such structures can no longer be seen as imposed from an imperial center, as English is now actively adopted and appropriated in local contexts around the world. This book argues that such conditions call for a new critique of global English, one that is sensitive to both the political economic conditions of globalization and speakers’ local practices. Linking Bourdieu’s theory of the linguistic market and his practice-based perspective with recent advances in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, this book offers a fresh new critique of global English. The authors highlight the material, discursive, and semiotic processes through which the value of English in the linguistic market is constructed, and suggest possible policy interventions that may be adopted to address the problems of global English. Through its serious engagement with current sociolinguistic theory and insightful analysis of the multiple dimensions of English in the world, this book challenges the readers to think about what we need to do to confront the social inequalities that are perpetuated by the global spread of English
Download or read book Confronting the Death Penalty written by Robin Conley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Confronting the Death Penalty probes how jurors make the ultimate decision about whether another human being should live or die. Drawing on ethnographic and qualitative linguistic methods, Robin Conley explores the means through which language helps to make death penalty decisions possible - how specific linguistic choices mediate and restrict jurors', attorneys', and judges' actions and experiences while serving and reflecting on capital trials."--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Capital and Affects written by Christian Marazzi and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2011-08-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christian Marazzi's first book: a post-Fordist classic on the roots to economic crises in the contemporary age. Communication as work: we have recently experienced a profound transformation in the processes of production. While the assembly line (invented by Henry Ford at the beginning of the last century) excluded any form of linguistic productivity, today, there is no production without communication. The new technologies are linguistic machines. This revolution has produced a new kind of worker who is not a specialist but is versatile and infinitely adaptable. If standardized mass production was dominant in the past, today we produce an array of different goods corresponding to specific consumer niches. This is the post-Fordist model described by Christian Marazzi in Capital and Affects (first published in 1994 as Il posto dei calzini [The place for the socks]). Tracing the development of this new model of labor from Toyota plants in Japan to the most recent innovations, Marazzi's critique goes beyond political economy to encompass issues related to social life, political engagement, democratic institutions, interpersonal relations, and the role of language in liberal democracies. This translation at long last makes Marazzi's first book available to English readers. Capital and Affects stands not only as the foundation to Marazzi's subsequent work, but as foundational work in post-Fordist literature, with an analysis startlingly relevant to today's troubled economic times. This Semiotext(e) edition includes the afterword Marazzi wrote for the 1999 Italian edition.
Download or read book The Value of Foreign Language Learning written by Tobias Schroedler and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on a highly interdisciplinary theoretical framework, Tobias Schroedler provides a comprehensive picture of the value of language skills within the Irish economy. The author manages to present and merge theories from economics, business studies, sociology, and applied linguistics making this an innovative and valuable contribution to the growing field of research on the value of multilingualism and languages. The first of two datasets presented in the book provides a macroeconomic quantification on the economic performance of four different global language communities. The second dataset consists of an expert interview study on the matter. Based on the data analysis, the author derives recommendations for economically beneficial language education policy making.
Download or read book Stages of Capital written by Ritu Birla and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-14 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Stages of Capital, Ritu Birla brings research on nonwestern capitalisms into conversation with postcolonial studies to illuminate the historical roots of India’s market society. Between 1870 and 1930, the British regime in India implemented a barrage of commercial and contract laws directed at the “free” circulation of capital, including measures regulating companies, income tax, charitable gifting, and pension funds, and procedures distinguishing gambling from speculation and futures trading. Birla argues that this understudied legal infrastructure institutionalized a new object of sovereign management, the market, and along with it, a colonial concept of the public. In jurisprudence, case law, and statutes, colonial market governance enforced an abstract vision of modern society as a public of exchanging, contracting actors free from the anachronistic constraints of indigenous culture. Birla reveals how the categories of public and private infiltrated colonial commercial law, establishing distinct worlds for economic and cultural practice. This bifurcation was especially apparent in legal dilemmas concerning indigenous or “vernacular” capitalists, crucial engines of credit and production that operated through networks of extended kinship. Focusing on the story of the Marwaris, a powerful business group renowned as a key sector of India’s capitalist class, Birla demonstrates how colonial law governed vernacular capitalists as rarefied cultural actors, so rendering them illegitimate as economic agents. Birla’s innovative attention to the negotiations between vernacular and colonial systems of valuation illustrates how kinship-based commercial groups asserted their legitimacy by challenging and inhabiting the public/private mapping. Highlighting the cultural politics of market governance, Stages of Capital is an unprecedented history of colonial commercial law, its legal fictions, and the formation of the modern economic subject in India.
Download or read book National Geographic Student Atlas of the World written by National Geographic Society (U.S.) and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Your multimedia interactive guide to the world"--Cover.
Download or read book Cultural Capital Language and National Identity in Imperial Spain written by Lucia Binotti and published by Tamesis Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the cultural mechanisms in early modern Spain that led to the translation, imitation and selective adoption of the values embodied by the Italian Renaissance.
Download or read book Capital and Ideology written by Thomas Piketty and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 1105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Bestseller An NPR Best Book of the Year The epic successor to one of the most important books of the century: at once a retelling of global history, a scathing critique of contemporary politics, and a bold proposal for a new and fairer economic system. Thomas Piketty’s bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century galvanized global debate about inequality. In this audacious follow-up, Piketty challenges us to revolutionize how we think about politics, ideology, and history. He exposes the ideas that have sustained inequality for the past millennium, reveals why the shallow politics of right and left are failing us today, and outlines the structure of a fairer economic system. Our economy, Piketty observes, is not a natural fact. Markets, profits, and capital are all historical constructs that depend on choices. Piketty explores the material and ideological interactions of conflicting social groups that have given us slavery, serfdom, colonialism, communism, and hypercapitalism, shaping the lives of billions. He concludes that the great driver of human progress over the centuries has been the struggle for equality and education and not, as often argued, the assertion of property rights or the pursuit of stability. The new era of extreme inequality that has derailed that progress since the 1980s, he shows, is partly a reaction against communism, but it is also the fruit of ignorance, intellectual specialization, and our drift toward the dead-end politics of identity. Once we understand this, we can begin to envision a more balanced approach to economics and politics. Piketty argues for a new “participatory” socialism, a system founded on an ideology of equality, social property, education, and the sharing of knowledge and power. Capital and Ideology is destined to be one of the indispensable books of our time, a work that will not only help us understand the world, but that will change it.
Download or read book Capital in the Twenty First Century written by Thomas Piketty and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-14 with total page 817 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In this work the author analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality. He shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality--the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth--today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values if political action is not taken. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, the author says, and may do so again. This original work reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.
Download or read book Capital and Its Structure written by Ludwig M. Lachmann and published by Ludwig von Mises Institute. This book was released on 1956 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book National Geographic Student World Atlas 5th Edition written by National Geographic Kids and published by Atlas. This book was released on 2019 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the Earth's geologic history, climate, vegetation, population, food, economies, and mineral resources, and offers physical, political, and subject maps of each continent.
Download or read book The Impact of International Television written by Michael G. Elasmar and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For several decades, cultural imperialism has been the dominant paradigm for conceptualizing, labeling, predicting, and explaining the effects of international television. It has been used as an unchallenged premise for numerous essays on the topic of imported television influence, despite the fact that the assumption of strong cultural influence is not necessarily reflected in the body of research that exists within this field of study. In The Impact of International Television: A Paradigm Shift, editor Michael G. Elasmar and his contributors challenge the dominant paradigm of cultural imperialism, and offer an alternative paradigm with which to evaluate international or crossborder message influence. In this volume, Elasmar has collected original research from leading scholars working in the area of crossborder media influence, and contributes his own meta-analysis to examine what research findings actually show on the influences of crossborder messages. The contributions included here illustrate points, such as: the contentions of cultural imperialism and the context in which its assumptions emerged and developed; the complexities of the relationship between exposure to foreign television and its subsequent effects on local audience members; the applicability of quantitative methods to a topic commonly tackled using argumentation, critical theory, and other qualitative approaches; and the difficulty of achieving strong and homogenous effects. In bringing together the work of independent researchers, The Impact of International Television: A Paradigm Shift bridges over 40 years of research efforts focused on imported television influence, the results of which, as a whole, challenge the de facto strong and homogenous effects assumed by those who support the paradigm of cultural imperialism. The volume sets a theory-driven agenda of research and offers an alternative paradigm for the new generation of researchers interested in international media effects. As such, the volume is intended for scholars, researchers, and students in international and intercultural communication, cross-cultural communication, mass communication, media effects, media and society, and related areas. It will also be of great interest to academics in international relations, cross-cultural and social psychology, intergroup and international relations, international public opinion, and peace studies.
Download or read book We Are Our Language written by Barbra A. Meek and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2011-01-15 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For many communities around the world, the revitalization or at least the preservation of an indigenous language is a pressing concern. Understanding the issue involves far more than compiling simple usage statistics or documenting the grammar of a tongue—it requires examining the social practices and philosophies that affect indigenous language survival. In presenting the case of Kaska, an endangered language in an Athabascan community in the Yukon, Barbra A. Meek asserts that language revitalization requires more than just linguistic rehabilitation; it demands a social transformation. The process must mend rips and tears in the social fabric of the language community that result from an enduring colonial history focused on termination. These “disjunctures” include government policies conflicting with community goals, widely varying teaching methods and generational viewpoints, and even clashing ideologies within the language community. This book provides a detailed investigation of language revitalization based on more than two years of active participation in local language renewal efforts. Each chapter focuses on a different dimension, such as spelling and expertise, conversation and social status, family practices, and bureaucratic involvement in local language choices. Each situation illustrates the balance between the desire for linguistic continuity and the reality of disruption. We Are Our Language reveals the subtle ways in which different conceptions and practices—historical, material, and interactional—can variably affect the state of an indigenous language, and it offers a critical step toward redefining success and achieving revitalization.
Download or read book The Knowledge Capital of Nations written by Eric A. Hanushek and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-08-15 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rigorous, pathbreaking analysis demonstrating that a country's prosperity is directly related in the long run to the skills of its population. In this book Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann make a simple, central claim, developed with rigorous theoretical and empirical support: knowledge is the key to a country's development. Of course, every country acknowledges the importance of developing human capital, but Hanushek and Woessmann argue that message has become distorted, with politicians and researchers concentrating not on valued skills but on proxies for them. The common focus is on school attainment, although time in school provides a very misleading picture of how skills enter into development. Hanushek and Woessmann contend that the cognitive skills of the population—which they term the “knowledge capital” of a nation—are essential to long-run prosperity. Hanushek and Woessmann subject their hypotheses about the relationship between cognitive skills (as consistently measured by international student assessments) and economic growth to a series of tests, including alternate specifications, different subsets of countries, and econometric analysis of causal interpretations. They find that their main results are remarkably robust, and equally applicable to developing and developed countries. They demonstrate, for example, that the “Latin American growth puzzle” and the “East Asian miracle” can be explained by these regions' knowledge capital. Turning to the policy implications of their argument, they call for an education system that develops effective accountability, promotes choice and competition, and provides direct rewards for good performance.
Download or read book Madhubun Educational Atlas written by Anjali Saxena & N K Chowdhry and published by Vikas Publishing House. This book was released on with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Madhubun School Atlas is a comprehensive atlas suitable for both classroom use and home learning. Designed with the purpose of generating interest among middle school learners about geography and cartography, this atlas offers a variety of maps and reference material on the physical, cultural, economic, historical and environmental characteristics of the world. The maps show different attributes of the same area, making comparison easy.
Download or read book Capital Choices written by Juergen Braunstein and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2019-07-09 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sovereign wealth funds are state-controlled pools of capital that hold financial and real assets, including shares of state enterprises, and manage them to grow the nation’s base of sovereign wealth. The dramatic rise of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) in both number and size—this group is now larger than the size of global private equity and hedge funds, combined—and the fact that most are located in non-OECD countries, has raised concern about the direction of capitalism. Yet SWFs are not a homogenous group of actors. Why do some countries with large current account surpluses, notably China, create SWFs while others, such as Switzerland and Germany, do not? Why do other countries with no macroeconomic justification, such as Senegal and Turkey, create SWFs? And why do countries with similar macroeconomic features, such as Kuwait and Qatar or Singapore and Hong Kong, choose different types of SWFs? Capital Choices analyzes the creation of different SWFs from a comparative political economy perspective, arguing that different state-society structures at the sectoral level are the drivers for SWF variation. Juergen Braunstein focuses on the early formation period of SWFs, a critical but little understood area given the high levels of political sensitivity and lack of transparency that surround SWF creation. Braunstein’s novel analytical framework provides practical lessons for the business and finance organizations and policymakers of countries that have created, or are planning to create, SWFs.
