Pastoral Capitalism

Download or read book Pastoral Capitalism written by Louise A. Mozingo and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-05-27 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How business appropriated the pastoral landscape, as seen in the corporate campus, the corporate estate, and the office park. By the end of the twentieth century, America's suburbs contained more office space than its central cities. Many of these corporate workplaces were surrounded, somewhat incongruously, by verdant vistas of broad lawns and leafy trees. In Pastoral Capitalism, Louise Mozingo describes the evolution of these central (but often ignored) features of postwar urbanism in the context of the modern capitalist enterprise. These new suburban corporate landscapes emerged from a historical moment when corporations reconceived their management structures, the city decentralized and dispersed into low-density, auto-dependent peripheries, and the pastoral—in the form of leafy residential suburbs—triumphed as an American ideal. Greenness, writes Mozingo, was associated with goodness, and pastoral capitalism appropriated the suburb's aesthetics and moral code. Like the lawn-proud suburban homeowner, corporations understood a pastoral landscape's capacity to communicate identity, status, and right-mindedness. Mozingo distinguishes among three forms of corporate landscapes—the corporate campus, the corporate estate, and the office park—and examines suburban corporate landscapes built and inhabited by such companies as Bell Labs, General Motors, Deere & Company, and Microsoft. She also considers the globalization of pastoral capitalism in Europe and the developing world including Singapore, India, and China. Mozingo argues that, even as it is proliferating, pastoral capitalism needs redesign, as do many of our metropolitan forms, for pressing social, cultural, political, and environmental reasons. Future transformations are impossible, however, unless we understand the past. Pastoral Capitalism offers an indispensible chapter in urban history, examining not only the design of corporate landscapes but also the economic, social, and cultural models that determined their form.

Download or read book Australian Pastoral written by Jeanette Hoorn and published by Fremantle Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Australian Pastoral is a radical history of the pastoral landscape in Australian painting. As a primary means through which white settlement was described and legitimised, the pastoral was transcendent in European Australian art from the late eighteenth to the middle of the twentieth century. This book shows how pastoralism displaced all in its path, and how the pastoral landscape became a special art form in Australia and the primary means through which 'whiteness' and the taming of Australia was celebrated in painting. The book traces the history of pastoral painting through to the emergence in recent times of a black 'pastoral' landscape painting.

Download or read book Cattle, Capitalism, and Class written by Peter Rigby and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the Ilparakuyo Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania, Peter Rigby discusses why third world development policies with regard to pastoral societies are inappropriate and likely to fail. A political economy of development, Rigby maintains, must incorporate historical, cultural, linguistic, and even aesthetic dimensions of the peoples involved. Using ethnography and other research materials, and basing his understanding on his years of living with the people he writes about, the author illuminates the culture and explores the prospects for a distinct section of pastoral Maasai--the Ilparakuyo. In addition, he attempts to develop a historical materialist theory of language in relation to a specific East African culture. While rural development is a priority in many recently independent third world countries, it is often not designed for the benefit of the producer. Rigby analyzes the language and customs of the Maasai to chronicle the changes forces upon them by both colonial and post-colonial governments, and the complexity of their responses to these challenges. The cultures, languages, and aspirations of such pastoral societies are often overlooked by development planners. Rigby describes how government expectations should be based on an understanding and respect of such social conditions. Author note: Peter Rigby is Professor of Anthropology at Temple University.

Download or read book Cubed written by Nikil Saval and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2015-01-06 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book • Daily Beast Best Nonfiction of 2014 • Inc. Magazine's Most Thought-Provoking Books of the Year “Man is born free, but he is everywhere in cubicles.” How did we get from Scrooge’s office to “Office Space”? From bookkeepers in dark countinghouses to freelancers in bright cafes? What would the world be like without the vertical file cabinet? What would the world be like without the office at all? In Cubed, Nikil Saval chronicles the evolution of the office in a fascinating, often funny, and sometimes disturbing anatomy of the white-collar world and how it came to be the way it is. Drawing on the history of architecture and business, as well as a host of pop culture artifacts—from Mad Men to Dilbert (and, yes, The Office)—and ranging in time from the earliest clerical houses to the surprisingly utopian origins of the cubicle to the funhouse campuses of Silicon Valley, Cubed is an all-encompassing investigation into the way we work, why we do it the way we do (and often don’t like it), and how we might do better.

Download or read book Meaning and Ideology in Historical Archaeology written by Heather Burke and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the city of Armidale during the period 1830 to 1930, this book investigates the relationship between the development of capitalism in a particular region (New England, Australia) and the expression of ideology within architectural style. The author analyzes how style encodes meaning and how it relates to the social contexts and relationships within capitalism, which in turn are related to the construction of ideology over time.

Download or read book Sovereign Individuals of Capitalism (RLE Social Theory) written by Bryan S. Turner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-08-21 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this sequel to their acclaimed The Dominant Ideology Thesis, the authors develop their analysis of the social and cultural underpinnings of modern capitalism. They confront a central assumption of western culture: namely, that the individual is sovereign, and that capitalism above all other economic forms depends on individualism. These ideas have an unbroken history from Alexis de Tocqueville to Milton Friedman. The paradox of the modern world is that the moral emphasis on the individual is contradicted by the actual organization of economy and society. The authors suggest that individualism and capitalism have no enduring or necessary relationship. Their linkage is entirely accidental and was confined to one particular historical period in the West. Against the background of what they term the Discovery of the Individual, the authors show how individualism gave capitalism a particular shape, and capitalism in turn highlighted the possessive features of the individual. Oriental capitalism and late capitalism in the West bear no particular relationship to individualism; indeed, they flourish best in the absence of individualistic culture. Collectivism increasingly dominates both economic and social life. These issues once informed the sociological enterprise, but have not been systematically addressed in recent times. This book revives the classical tradition of the historical and comparative analysis of culture and economy in capitalist society, in the context of the late twentieth-century world.

Download or read book Citizenship and Capitalism (RLE Social Theory) written by Bryan S. Turner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-08-21 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study of politics in capitalist society Bryan Turner explores the development of citizenship as a way of demonstrating the effective use of political institutions by the working class and other subordinate groups to promote their interests. Marxist criticisms of reformism are rejected; it is shown that subordinate groups can achieve significant advances in social and economic rights, and that democracy is not a sham but a necessary mechanism for the pursuit of interests.