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"Industrialisation"
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The railway navvies : a history of the men who made the railways
This is the definitive story of the men who built the railways - the unknown Victorian labourers who blasted, tunnelled, drank and brawled their way across nineteenth-century England. Preached at and plundered, sworn at and swindled, this anarchic elite endured perils and disasters, and carved out of the English countryside an industrial-age architecture unparalleled in grandeur and audacity since the building of the cathedrals.
Book
People's Car
India is witnessing a unique moment in populism, with sentiments divided between economic reforms that promise fast industrialization and protests that thwart such industrialization. This book offers an ethnographic study of divergent local responses to the proposed construction of a Tata Motors factory in eastern India that would have produced the Nano, the so-called people's car. Initial excitement was followed by long protests against the factory, and then, after its relocation, by further demonstrations seeking to bring it back. Taking this ambivalence as a way past romantic clichés about urban/rural divisions,People's Caroffers a single analytical framework demonstrating how pro- and anti-industrialization forces feed off each other.A careful ethnography of the complex interactions and desires within a single community experiencing the pressures of globalization.Explores the ambivalences produced by global development by tracing the conflicting and responses to the building and subsequent closure of a car factory on agricultural land in India, in which the same people often expressed contradictory views.
eBook
Regionalising global chains in critical inputs: South America in the face of recent transformations and expected effects on the Global North and South
This article examines the slowdown of globalisation following the 2008 crisis and the growing significance of the Global South, focusing on value chain shortening and regionalisation in critical inputs. It analyses the general and sectoral performances of the Global North and Global South, with particular attention to South America’s positioning. A multi-country input-output model is employed, incorporating hypothetical extraction exercises for critical inputs. The findings highlight challenges and opportunities for South American nations within the regionalisation process, offering key insights into its implications for macro-regional spaces and their evolving dynamics.
Journal Article
Big AI: Cloud infrastructure dependence and the industrialisation of artificial intelligence
Critical scholars contend that ‘There is no AI without Big Tech’. This study delves into the substantial role played by major technology conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google (Alphabet), in the ‘industrialisation of artificial intelligence’. This concept encapsulates the shift of AI technologies from the research and development stage to practical, real-world applications across diverse industry sectors, resulting in new dependencies and associated investments. We employ the term ‘Big AI’ to encapsulate the structural convergence of AI and Big Tech, characterised by the profound interdependence of AI with the infrastructure, resources, and investments of these major technology companies. Using a ‘technographic’ approach, our study scrutinises the infrastructural support and investments of Big Tech in the AI sector, focussing on corporate partnerships, acquisitions, and financial investments. Additionally, we conduct a detailed examination of the complete spectrum of cloud platform products and services offered by Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. We demonstrate that AI is not merely an abstract idea but an actual technology stack encompassing infrastructure, models, applications, and an ecosystem of applications and companies relying on this stack. Significantly, these tech giants have seamlessly integrated all three components of the stack into their cloud offerings. Furthermore, they have developed industry-focussed solutions and marketplaces aimed at attracting third-party developers and businesses, fostering the growth of a broader AI ecosystem. This analysis underscores the intricate interdependence between AI and cloud infrastructure, emphasising the industry-specific aspects of cloud AI.
Journal Article
Founders of the Future
In this ambitious new interdisciplinary study, Useche proposes the metaphor of the social foundry to parse how industrialization informed and shaped cultural and national discourses in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spain. Across a variety of texts, Spanish writers, scientists, educators, and politicians appropriated the new economies of industrial production—particularly its emphasis on the human capacity to transform reality through energy and work—to produce new conceptual frameworks that changed their vision of the future. These influences soon appeared in plans to enhance the nation’s productivity, justify systems of class stratification and labor exploitation, or suggest state organizational improvements. This fresh look at canonical writers such as Emilia Pardo Bazán, Concha Espina, Benito Pérez Galdós, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, and José Echegaray as well as lesser known authors offers close readings of their work as it reflected the complexity of Spain’s process of modernization.
eBook
Chicago in the Age of Capital
In this sweeping interpretive history of mid-nineteenth-century Chicago, historians John B. Jentz and Richard Schneirov boldly trace the evolution of a modern social order. Combining a mastery of historical and political detail with a sophisticated theoretical frame, Jentz and Schneirov examine the dramatic capitalist transition in Chicago during the critical decades from the 1850s through the 1870s, a period that saw the rise of a permanent wage worker class and the formation of an industrial upper class._x000B__x000B_Jentz and Schneirov demonstrate how a new political economy, based on wage labor and capital accumulation in manufacturing, superseded an older mercantile economy that relied on speculative trading and artisan production. The city's leading business interests were unable to stabilize their new system without the participation of the new working class, a German and Irish ethnic mix that included radical ideas transplanted from Europe. Jentz and Schneirov examine how debates over slave labor were transformed into debates over free labor as the city's wage-earning working class developed a distinctive culture and politics._x000B__x000B_The new social movements that arose in this era--labor, socialism, urban populism, businessmen's municipal reform, Protestant revivalism, and women's activism--constituted the substance of a new post-bellum democratic politics that took shape in the 1860s and '70s. When the Depression of 1873 brought increased crime and financial panic, Chicago's new upper class developed municipal reform in an attempt to reassert its leadership. Setting local detail against a national canvas of partisan ideology and the seismic structural shifts of Reconstruction, Chicago in the Age of Capital vividly depicts the upheavals integral to building capitalism.
eBook
Industrialisierte Medizin
Die explodierenden Kosten unseres öffentlichen Gesundheitswesens haben dazu gezwungen, industrielle Methoden der Kostenbegrenzung in die Medizin einzuführen. Ähnlich wie in der industrialisierten Landwirtschaft und in der Pharmazie sind wir an Grenzen der Industrialisierung gelangt. Außerdem ist es nicht geglückt, den Kostenanstieg tatsächlich zu reduzieren. Dabei hat allerdings die Qualität gelitten, nicht die der Ökonomen, sondern die der Patientenversorgung. Unsere Patienten nehmen offensichtlich zunehmend die Angebote der Alternativmedizin wahr, um der angeblichen Fließbandmedizin zu entkommen. Wir brauchen wieder mehr menschliche Qualitäten: Beziehung, Zuwendung, Vertrauen, Sorge.
Journal Article