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Digiboo Verlag
The independent Swiss publishing house Digiboo is specialized in current topics in art, culture, "Zeitfragen" and history. Biographies complete the portfolio.
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Business, Economics & LawMarch 2024Markets and power in digital capitalism
by Philipp Staab
Today's global capitalism runs through digital networks. Its leaders are internet giants such as Google, Apple, Amazon and Tencent. Their technologies are ubiquitous: we carry high-performance computers around in our pockets, manage our lives in the cloud and display them on social media. They have also literally privatised the market, transforming capitalism in the process. Philipp Staab takes us on a virtual tour of modern digital capitalism. He shows how digital surveillance and evaluation practices have proliferated throughout the economy, exacerbating social inequality in the process. What is specific to digital capitalism, Staab argues, is the emergence of 'proprietary markets'. In the past the focus was on producing things and selling them at a profit. Today the meta-platforms extract their profits by owning the market itself.
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Business, Economics & LawMarch 2025Tadeusz Kowalik and Poland’s return from socialism to capitalism
Full circle
by Gavin Rae
Tadeusz Kowalik lived through ten decades and three economic and political systems in Poland. He combined his academic study of economic ideas with his socialist ideals of building a fairer and more just society. This book covers the intellectual and political work of Kowalik, within the context of modern Polish history. Kowalik was part of a Polish School of critical left-wing political economists, that included Michal Kalecki and Oskar Lange. Kowalik contributed to the body of work produced by this group, which included his interpretation of their work. Kowalik participated in some of the most momentous events in post-war Polish history, helping to organise a group of intellectuals to advise the shipyard workers at the Gdansk shipyards in 1980. He became a vehement opponent of Poland's neoliberal form of capitalism and left a body of work that illuminates our understanding of capitalism and socialism today.
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Humanities & Social SciencesNovember 2024The political ecology of colonial capitalism
Race, nature, and accumulation
by Bikrum Gill
This book situates the post financial crisis phenomenon of the "global land grab" within the longue duree of the capitalist world system. It does so by advancing a theoretical and historical framework, called the political ecology of colonial capitalism, that clarifies the key role played by the co-production of race and nature in provisioning the "ecological surplus" that has historically secured the emergence and reproduction of capitalist development. The key premise of this book is that the global land grab constitutes another such attempted moment of re-securing the cheap food premise through racialized frontier appropriation. The argument advanced here is that, within the neoliberal crisis conjuncture, the hegemonic resolution of capital's escalating social-ecological contradictions necessitates, through the practice of "global primitive accumulation," the racialized construction of frontiers of unused nature in emergent zones of appropriation.
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Business, Economics & LawJanuary 2024Capitalism in contemporary Iran
Capital accumulation, state formation and geopolitics
by Kayhan Valadbaygi
By situating Iran within the neoliberal global capitalism and resulting geopolitics, this book traces the patterns of capital accumulation and transformations in class and state formation emanating from it. It shows that Iranian neoliberalisation has brought about two capital fractions, namely the internationally-oriented capital fraction and the military-bonyad complex. It substantiates that the co-existence of these competing class fractions with different accumulation strategies has generated hybrid neoliberalism. The book further demonstrates how this new class formation has reorganised the function and operation of state institutions and transformed state ideology. By documenting the ways in which Iranian neoliberalisation has reshaped the subaltern classes and formed Iran's volatile foreign policy, it also provides a novel account of major events and processes in contemporary Iran, such as the post-2017 wave of uprisings, the nuclear programme and international sanctions.
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Business, Economics & LawJuly 2024False profits of ethical capital
Finance, labour and the politics of risk
by Claire Parfitt
False profits of ethical capital is a thought-provoking approach to understanding stakeholder capitalism. Rather than focusing on the inadequacies of corporate responsibility, sustainable investment and consumer politics, this book grapples with the technical and rhetorical functions of ethical capital for profit and accumulation. It provides a unique and eclectic analysis of the political dynamics between finance, capital and labour, offering a refreshing perspective on struggles interlocking social, ecological and economic crises, and suggesting new ways of thinking about sustainability politics.
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Humanities & Social SciencesFebruary 2023Globalized urban precarity in Berlin and Abidjan
Young men and the digital economy
by Hannah Schilling
Digital technologies promise efficiency and comfort, but the smoothness of platform services relies on the hidden social labour of those who keep the gig economy running. This book presents a comparative ethnography of young men making a living through digital technologies: selling mobile airtime in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, and app-based delivery riders in Berlin, Germany. These case studies explore the significance of symbolic capital in urban youth's social existence and organisation of livelihood in the digital economy, and the technological mechanisms producing a new form of urban precarity. Globalized urban precarity in Berlin and Abidjan puts forward an original comparative approach to develop a global urban sociology for the digital era. It provides an innovative analytical toolbox that decentres discussions of precarity from the standard of a normal employment contract. With its focus on symbolic capital, the ethnography shows the consequences of the proliferating gig economy for status struggles among urban youth, and carefully embeds the densification of software and services into the socio-material relations on which these new urban infrastructures are built.
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Sociology & anthropologyFebruary 2017Environment, labour and capitalism at sea
'Working the ground' in Scotland
by Penny McCall Howard. Series edited by Alexander Smith
This book explores how fishers make the sea productive through their labour, using technologies ranging from wooden boats to digital GPS plotters to create familiar places in a seemingly hostile environment. It shows how their lives are affected by capitalist forces in the markets they sell to, forces that shape even the relations between fishers on the same boat. Fishers frequently have to make impossible choices between safe seamanship and staying afloat economically, and the book describes the human impact of the high rate of deaths in the fishing industry. The book makes a unique contribution to understanding human-environment relations, examining the places fishers create and name at sea, as well as technologies and navigation practices. It combines phenomenology and political economy to offer new approaches for analyses of human-environment relations and technologies. It contributes to the social studies of fisheries through an analysis of how deeply fishing practices and social relations are shaped by political economy. It will be read in universities by social scientists and anthropologists and also by those with an interest in maritime Scotland.
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Humanities & Social SciencesFebruary 2024‘Survival Capitalism’ and the Big Bang
Culture, contingency and capital in the making of the 1980s financial revolution
by Emma Barrett
This book about the Thatcher government and the City of London tells the compelling human story of the people and processes that made Britain's 1980s financial revolution. Fusing insider testimony with new archival discoveries, it examines high stakes and networked solutions, and uncovers new objectives that drove reforms. In so doing it demystifies a major shift in capitalism. This has implications for our understandings of government and capitalism, from the way we think about the origins of subsequent financial crises to today's growing inequalities. Survival Capitalism offers new insights into the last major restructuring of the City, disrupts myths surrounding the logics of the market, and pays attention to people and processes at a time when the City of London again faces major change as Britain seeks to find its place outside the European Union in the wake of Brexit.
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Business, Economics & LawNovember 2020Communists constructing capitalism
State, market, and the Party in China’s financial reform
by Julian Gruin
Why has China's 'transition' to a market economy not catalysed corresponding political transformation? In an era of deepening synergy between authoritarian politics and capitalist economics, this book offers a novel perspective on this central dilemma of contemporary Chinese development, shedding light on how the Chinese Communist Party achieved rapid economic growth while preserving political stability. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and over sixty interviews with policymakers, bankers and former party and state officials, the book delves into the role of China's state-owned banking system since 1989, showing how political control over capital has been central to the country's experience of capitalist development. It challenges existing state-market paradigms of political economy and reveals the Eurocentric assumptions underpinning liberal perspectives towards Chinese authoritarian resilience.
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January 2023Diagnosis Digital Disaster
Can the healthcare system still be saved?
by Peter Schaar
— Ways out of the digital disaster — For healthcare professionals and informed patients Modern information technologies can and should contribute to improving the quality and transparency of medical care and making healthcare more economical – and all for the benefit and well-being of patients. Well, that would be the noble approach. All the talk about health insurance cards, telematics infrastructure and electronic patient files stirs up emotions. Peter Schaar, long-standing Federal Data Protection Commissioner, brings light to the dark data and health thicket. Why are innovations in the healthcare sector met with great scepticism by many stakeholders? How can we speed up the development and implementation of meaningful ITsupported solutions? What role does the narrow, small-scale regulatory framework play – not only, but also in data protection?
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Humanities & Social SciencesDecember 2024The construction of public opinion in a digital age
by Catherine Happer
This book presents a new conceptual model for understanding the role of the media in the construction of public knowledge, belief and opinion in the context of a radically changed communications infrastructure. Drawing on a series of empirical studies conducted over nearly a decade, Happer deploys evidence of a 'disconnect' between neoliberal media and the public which is rooted in a disaffection with a mainstream political culture which has failed to deliver the societal outcomes promised. As people are pushed towards alternative digital sources, new communities of opinion are produced in ways which polarise publics and ultimately limit the potential for social change. Offering an innovative and urgently needed new sociological analysis, this book is required reading for an inter-disciplinary field of media, journalism, and politics/IR which has largely abandoned questions of media power and public opinion management, as well as policymakers, science communicators and journalists. Key points of the book: 1) public opinion formation and why people may come to different positions through the development of a new model 2) the societal outcomes produced when a widespread disconnect between journalism and public opinion emerges 3) the atomisation of opinion and its relations to newly constructed opinion communities (with consideration of the role of class) 4) the turn to digitally available alternatives which enable new, less visible power agents to exert control.
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Business, Economics & LawMarch 2023Water struggles as resistance to neoliberal capitalism
A time of reproductive unrest
by Madelaine Moore
This book provides an important intervention into social reproduction theory and the politics of water. Presenting an incorporated comparison, it analyses the conjuncture following the 2007 financial crisis through the lens of water expropriation and resistance. This brings into view the way that transnational capital has made use of and been facilitated by the strategic selectivities of both the Irish and the Australian state, as well as the particular class formations that emerged in resistance to such water grabs. What is revealed is a crisis-ridden system that is marked by increasing reproductive unrest - class understood through the lens of social reproduction theory. As an important analysis of two significant water struggles, the book makes a compelling argument for integrating the study of social movements within critical political economy.
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Humanities & Social SciencesMay 2024Off white
Central and Eastern Europe and the global history of race
by Catherine Baker, Bogdan C. Iacob, Anikó Imre, James Mark
This volume foregrounds racial difference as a key to an alternative history of the Central and Eastern European region, which revolves around the role of whiteness as the unacknowledged foundation of semi-peripheral nation-states and national identities, and of the region's current status as a global stronghold of unapologetic white, Christian nationalisms. Contributions address the pivotal role of whiteness in international diplomacy, geographical exploration, media cultures, music, intellectual discourses, academic theories, everyday language and banal nationalism's many avenues of expressions. The book offers new paradigms for understanding the relationships among racial capitalism, populism, economic peripherality and race.
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Humanities & Social SciencesApril 2025Islamophobia, anti-racism and the British left
by Scarlet Harris
Islamophobia is one of the most misunderstood and pernicious forms of racism in Britain. But how do those committed to challenging Islamophobia understand it? And what does this mean for their practices 'on the ground'? Islamophobia, anti-racism and the British left combines first-hand accounts from activists and community workers across two British cities with sociological theory, critically interrogating Islamophobia's relationship to 'race', racial capitalism and other modalities of racism. Setting this discussion against some of the most pertinent political shifts in Britain in recent years - from the resurgence of left nationalism to Black Lives Matter - the book assesses the limits of recent attempts to think about and tackle Islamophobia, and considers the possibilities of an alternative approach from and for the anti-racist left.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJanuary 2021Karl Polanyi and twenty-first-century capitalism
by Radhika Desai, Kari Polanyi Levitt
As far right movements, social disintegration and international conflict emerge from the decay of the neoliberal order, Karl Polanyi's warnings against the unbridled domination of markets, is ever more relevant. The essays in Karl Polanyi for the 21st Century extend the boundaries of our understanding of Polanyi's life and work. They will interest Polanyi scholars and all interested in socialism and our future after neoliberalism. One asks whether, following Keynes and Hayek, Polanyi's ideas will shape the twenty-first century. Some clarify, for the meaning of money as a fictitious commodity. Others resolve difficulties in understanding the building blocks of Polanyi's thought: fictitious commodities, the double movement, the United States' exceptional development, the reality of society, and socialism as freedom in a complex society. And yes others explore how Polanyi sheds light on income inequality, world systems theory, comparative political economy.
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Humanities & Social SciencesJune 2020Karl Polanyi and twenty-first-century capitalism
by Radhika Desai, Kari Polanyi Levitt, Radhika Desai, Alan Freeman
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Humanities & Social SciencesMay 2021Doing digital history
by Jonathan Blaney, Jane Winters, Sarah Milligan, Martin Steer
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Business, Economics & LawJune 2019Communists constructing capitalism
by Julian Gruin, Yangwen Zheng, Richard Madsen
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Humanities & Social SciencesNovember 2021Twenty-first-century capital
by Aleksander Buzgalin, Andrey Kolganov, Renfrey Clarke
