Are you guilty of e-mail "trigger finger"? Do you constantly "cc" people you never even see? What are today's rules for conducting business over the Internet? Now, The Elements of Style meets "the Mi
For most people, the game of blackjack provides excitement and entertainment—and somewhat erratic results. Although we may know the basic rules and even a few strategies, most of us still manage to lo
When a marketplace is considered in isolation, the implicit conclusion is that markets are a sufficient defence against the exercise of power. But market transactions do not occur in isolation: they are defined by rules, property rights, prior events and social values. This book widens the focus of traditional economic analysis to examine the ways in which people may affect each other within and around markets to give rise to real power. Using conventional neoclassical assumptions about human behaviour, the book begins by developing a workable concept of power, allowing for its presence in a variety of forms and degrees. It examines the conditions under which power would necessarily be absent from market transactions and those under which it would be possible. It considers the decision processes of potential exercisers and subjects of power to determine when the exercise and success of power would be rational.
Martha C. Howell challenges dominant interpretations of the relationship between the so-called commercial revolution of late medieval Europe and the capitalist age that followed. She argues that the merchants, shopkeepers, artisans, and consumers in cities and courts throughout Western Europe, even in the urbanized Low Countries that are the main focus of this study, were by no means proto-capitalist and did not consider their property a fungible asset. Even though they freely bought and sold property using sophisticated financial techniques, they preserved its capacity to secure social bonds by intensifying market regulations and by assigning new meaning to marriage, gift-giving, and consumption. Later generations have sometimes found such actions perplexing, often dismissing them as evidence that business people of the late medieval and early modern worlds did not fully understand market rules. Howell, by contrast, shows that such practices were governed by a logic specific to their
This exciting volume marks the birth of a new field, one which attempts to study law with reference to an accurate understanding of human behavior. It reports new findings in cognitive psychology which show that people are frequently both unselfish and over-optimistic; that people have limited willpower and limited self-control; and that people are 'boundedly' rational, in the sense that they have limited information-processing powers, and frequently rely on mental short-cuts and rules of thumb. Understanding this behavior has large-scale implications for the analysis of law, in areas including environmental protection, taxation, constitutional law, voting behavior, punitive damages for civil rights violations, labor negotiations, and corporate finance. With a better knowledge of human behavior, it is possible to predict the actual effects of law, to see how law can promote society's goals, and to reassess the questions of what law should be doing.
Justice, equity, and fairness are central concerns of everyday life, whether we are assessing the fairness of individual acts, social programmes, or institutional policies. This book explores how the distribution of costs and benefits determine our intuition about fairness and why individual behaviour sometimes deviates from normative theories of justice. To make any comparison, one must first state how fair distributions of resources or burdens should be made. Here, competing theories, such as utilitarianism and economic efficiency, are discussed. The chapters cover many topics including an investigation of various rules and heuristics that people use to make fair distributions; the motivation for people to conform to rules of fairness even when they conflict with self-interest; differences between the views of liberals and conservatives; societal rules for the distribution or allocation of critical or scarce resources; and implications for public policy. This mixture of theoretical a
Martha C. Howell challenges dominant interpretations of the relationship between the so-called commercial revolution of late medieval Europe and the capitalist age that followed. She argues that the merchants, shopkeepers, artisans, and consumers in cities and courts throughout Western Europe, even in the urbanized Low Countries that are the main focus of this study, were by no means proto-capitalist and did not consider their property a fungible asset. Even though they freely bought and sold property using sophisticated financial techniques, they preserved its capacity to secure social bonds by intensifying market regulations and by assigning new meaning to marriage, gift-giving, and consumption. Later generations have sometimes found such actions perplexing, often dismissing them as evidence that business people of the late medieval and early modern worlds did not fully understand market rules. Howell, by contrast, shows that such practices were governed by a logic specific to their
Kate Lundy, owner of the Tumbling B, and Conn Dury, her foreman, told Tom the rules: men from the cattle drives are forbidden on the north side of town. People appreciated the money the cowboys spent
This imaginative and incisive collection of pieces about life in contemporary China reveals, like a series of snapshots, a picture of the lives of ordinary people and the rules and rituals that govern their daily existence. Key themes surface: in particular, the emergence of a consumer culture driven by the market, and the way in which this intersects with the 'floating population' of vagrants, prostitutes, and liumang (hooligans). We see how, in turn, the official strategies of the state deal with this perceived social disorder and how the street responds. Underlying much of the discussion of contestation and transformation is the notion of human rights. There will be no better introduction to the discourses of contemporary China, and few more entertaining, vivid, and stimulating accounts of shifts in cultural life and politics.
This book challenges a central assumption of the international law of territory. The author argues that, contrary to the finding in the Frontier Dispute case, uti possidetis is not a general principle of law enjoining states to preserve pre-existing boundaries on state succession. It demonstrates that African state practice and opinio juris gave rise to customary rules that govern sovereign territory transfer in Africa. It explains that those rules changed international law as it relates to Africa in many respects, leading chiefly to creating norms of African jus cogens prohibiting secession and the redrawing of boundaries. The book examines in-depth the singularity of secession in Africa exploring extensive state practice and case law. Finally, it advances a daring argument for a right to egalitarian self-determination, addressing people-to-people domination in multi-ethnic African states, to serve as an exception to the fast special customary rule against secession.
Six Rules of Engagement uses an engaging story of a manager in a new job in order to lead readers through a compact, easy-to-apply set of guidelines for handling people problems at work in the form of
How do people produce and reproduce identities? In How Americans Make Race, Clarissa Rile Hayward challenges what is sometimes called the 'narrative identity thesis': the idea that people produce and reproduce identities as stories. Identities have greater staying power than one would expect them to have if they were purely and simply narrative constructions, she argues, because people institutionalize identity-stories, building them into laws, rules, and other institutions that give social actors incentives to perform their identities well, and because they objectify identity-stories, building them into material forms that actors experience with their bodies. Drawing on in-depth historical analyses of the development of racialized identities and spaces in the twentieth-century United States, and also on life-narratives collected from people who live in racialized urban and suburban spaces, Hayward shows how the institutionalization and objectification of racial identity-stories enable
What explains the great variability in economic growth and political development across countries? Institutional and organizational analysis has developed since the 1970s into a powerful toolkit, which argues that institutions and norms rather than geography, culture, or technology are the primary causes of sustainable development. Institutions are rules that recognized authorities create and enforce. Norms are rules created by long-standing patterns of behavior, shared by people in a society or organization. They combine to play a role in all organizations, including governments, firms, churches, universities, gangs, and even families. This introduction to the concepts and applications of institutional and organizational analysis uses economic history, economics, law, and political science to inform its theoretical framework. Institutional and organizational analysis becomes the basis to show why the economic and political performance of countries worldwide have not converged, and rev
Intimate relationships exist in social domains, in which there are cultural rules regarding appropriate behaviors. But they also inhabit psychological domains of thoughts, feelings, and desires. How are intimate relationships experienced by people living in various types of romantic or sexual relationships and in various cultural regions around the world? In what ways are they similar, and in what ways are they different? This book presents a cross-cultural extension of the findings originating from the classic Boston Couples Study. Amassing a wealth of new data from almost 9,000 participants worldwide, Hill explores the factors that predict having a current partner, relationship satisfaction, and relationship commitment. These predictions are compared across eight relationship types and nine cultural regions, then uniquely combined in a Comprehensive Partner Model and a Comprehensive Commitment Model. The findings test the generalizability of previous theories about intimate relations
Much emphasis has been placed on the role that individualism, self-interest and reciprocity have in the formation and function of international legal rules. Rarely has attention been given to the presence of altruism in legal systems, let alone the international legal system. In a study that is the first of its kind in international legal scholarship, Altruism in International Law explores and analyses the emergence of altruistic legal relationships between states and people in other countries. The book also argues that the impulse for the emergence of these relationships is a cosmopolitan ideology, which co-exists with a persisting statist ideology, among the major actors in international law-making processes. Further still, the book reveals that individualistic legal norms are more often manifested as strict rules while altruistic legal norms find expression in flexible standards. This suggests that there is a connection between substance and form in international law.
The digital economy led to many new services where supply is matched with demand for various types of goods and services. More and more people and organizations are now in a position to design market rules that are being implemented in software. The design of markets is challenging as it needs to consider strategic behavior of market participants, psychological factors, and computational problems in order to implement the objectives of a designer. Market models in economics have not lost their importance, but the recent years have led to many new insights and principles for the design of markets, which are beyond traditional economic theory. This book introduces the fundamentals of market design, an engineering field concerned with the design of real-world markets.
How do people produce and reproduce identities? In How Americans Make Race, Clarissa Rile Hayward challenges what is sometimes called the 'narrative identity thesis': the idea that people produce and reproduce identities as stories. Identities have greater staying power than one would expect them to have if they were purely and simply narrative constructions, she argues, because people institutionalize identity-stories, building them into laws, rules, and other institutions that give social actors incentives to perform their identities well, and because they objectify identity-stories, building them into material forms that actors experience with their bodies. Drawing on in-depth historical analyses of the development of racialized identities and spaces in the twentieth-century United States, and also on life-narratives collected from people who live in racialized urban and suburban spaces, Hayward shows how the institutionalization and objectification of racial identity-stories enable
Intimate relationships exist in social domains, in which there are cultural rules regarding appropriate behaviors. But they also inhabit psychological domains of thoughts, feelings, and desires. How are intimate relationships experienced by people living in various types of romantic or sexual relationships and in various cultural regions around the world? In what ways are they similar, and in what ways are they different? This book presents a cross-cultural extension of the findings originating from the classic Boston Couples Study. Amassing a wealth of new data from almost 9,000 participants worldwide, Hill explores the factors that predict having a current partner, relationship satisfaction, and relationship commitment. These predictions are compared across eight relationship types and nine cultural regions, then uniquely combined in a Comprehensive Partner Model and a Comprehensive Commitment Model. The findings test the generalizability of previous theories about intimate relations
Computers have changed not just the way we work but the way we love. Falling in and out of love, flirting, cheating, even having sex online have all become part of the modern way of living and loving. Yet we know very little about these new types of relationship. How is an online affair where the two people involved may never see or meet each other different from an affair in the real world? Is online sex still cheating on your partner? Why do people tell complete strangers their most intimate secrets? What are the rules of engagement? Will online affairs change the monogamous nature of romantic relationships? These are just some of the questions Professor Aaron Ben Ze'ev, distinguished writer and academic, addresses in this book, a full-length study of love online. Accessible, shocking, entertaining, enlightening, this book will change the way you look at cyberspace and love forever.
The essays in this book trace the development of Joel Migdal's 'state-in-society' approach. That approach illuminates how power is exercised around the world, and how and when patterns of power change. Despite the triumph of concept of state in social science literature, actual states have had great difficulty in turning public policies into planned social change. The state-in-society approach points observers to the ongoing struggles over which rules dictating how people will lead their daily lives. These struggles, which ally parts of the state and groups in society against other such coalitions, determine how societies and states create and maintain distinct ways of structuring day-to-day life - the nature of the rules that govern people's behavior, whom they benefit and whom they disadvantage, which sorts of elements unite people and which divide them, what shared meaning people hold about their relations with others and their place in the world.
