UnCommoditized: Uncommon Ideas for Commoditized Markets PDF Download

Author: Saikat Dey
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 0578154102
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
Commodity industries, such as oil and gas, chemicals, metals and mining, and many others, can be described as follows: You have to invest several billions of dollars into your facilities, your market grows slowly and in line with the gross domestic product at best, you can barely differentiate your product, and your sales price and cost structure are highly cyclical. Does this environment sound attractive to you? Managers find these markets frustrating, investors find them difficult, and business school graduates find them boring. Yet, there are several companies that consistently outperform others and create billions of dollars in shareholder value, such as ExxonMobil, Methanex, Cargill, or Koch Industries. How are these companies doing it? This book provides answers with basic micro-economic concepts and real-world case examples. Many of the explanations appear counter-intuitive to commonly applied industry practices, thereby providing for "uncommon ideas in commoditized markets."

Author: Harold Kent Baker
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780190656041
Category : Commodity exchanges
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
In today's dynamic financial environment, commodity markets can be accessed with products that create unique risk and return dynamics for investors worldwide. 'Commodities' provides a comprehensive view of commodity markets, describing historical commodity performance, vehicles for investing in commodities, portfolio strategies, and current topics.

Author: Zygmunt Bauman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745655823
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
With the advent of liquid modernity, the society of producers is transformed into a society of consumers. In this new consumer society, individuals become simultaneously the promoters of commodities and the commodities they promote. They are, at one and the same time, the merchandise and the marketer, the goods and the travelling salespeople. They all inhabit the same social space that is customarily described by the term the market. The test they need to pass in order to acquire the social prizes they covet requires them to recast themselves as products capable of drawing attention to themselves. This subtle and pervasive transformation of consumers into commodities is the most important feature of the society of consumers. It is the hidden truth, the deepest and most closely guarded secret, of the consumer society in which we now live. In this new book Zygmunt Bauman examines the impact of consumerist attitudes and patterns of conduct on various apparently unconnected aspects of social life politics and democracy, social divisions and stratification, communities and partnerships, identity building, the production and use of knowledge, and value preferences. The invasion and colonization of the web of human relations by the worldviews and behavioural patterns inspired and shaped by commodity markets, and the sources of resentment, dissent and occasional resistance to the occupying forces, are the central themes of this brilliant new book by one of the worlds most original and insightful social thinkers.

Author: Michelle Tenam-Zemach
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000360555
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
This book offers a comprehensive critique of how the assessment industry and standardized testing adversely impact students, teachers, and society. The authors present the case that the interconnected developments of the testing industry and the Assessment Industrial Complex (AIC) have effectively anchored American schooling to testing. Using an antiracist lens, the authors deconstruct the AIC, exposing the neoliberal agenda of education reformers and how proponents utilize the rhetoric of testing, and the data extracted from them, to normalize the reliance on AIC systems. This critique further exposes education reformers’ ideological agenda, their hypocrisy, and how they grossly profit from the AIC at the expense of society’s marginalized and most vulnerable students. The COVID-19 pandemic, society’s racial unrest, and anti-testing movements have aligned to underscore the need to examine systemic oppression and the impact it has on society through our education system. This text exposes how standardized testing perpetuates these injustices and provides the opportunity to disrupt the systems they rely upon and bolster the societal resistance that is needed.

Author: Priscilla Mensah
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319714864
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
This book, which contains a collection of review articles as well as focus on evidence-based policy making, will serve as a valuable resource not just for all postgraduate students conducting research using systems analysis thinking but also for policy makers. To our knowledge, a book of this nature which also has a strong African focus is currently not available. The book examines environmental and socio-economic risks with the aim of providing an analytical foundation for the management and governance of natural resources, disasters, addressing climate change, and easing the technological and ecological transitions to sustainability. It provides scientific and strategic analysis to better understand the dynamics of future energy transitions, their main driving forces, enabling factors, barriers, as well as their consequences for the social, economic and environmental dimensions of human wellbeing. Science-based policy advice is achieved through an integrated assessment and modeling of how to simultaneously address the major energy policy challenges in the areas of environment (climate change and air pollution), energy poverty (or access to affordable and clean energy for the poor), energy security and reliability. It also aims to improve our understanding of ecosystems and their management in today’s changing world—in particular, the current state of ecosystems, and their ecological thresholds and buffering capacities. It provides support for policy makers in developing rational, realistic and science-based regional, national and global strategies for the production of fuel, food and fibre that sustain ecosystem services and safeguard food security. Finally, it addresses the human development dimension of global change based on comprehensive studies on the changing size and composition of human populations around the world by analyzing both their impacts and the differential vulnerabilities by age, gender and level of education.

Author: Derek Sayer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134979126
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
First Published in 2004. The nature of modernity, and its connection with capitalism, are questions at the forefront of contemporary sociological debate. Derek Sayer re-examines the answers given by Karl Marx and Max Weber, authors of two of the most profound sociological critiques of modernity. His reassessment of Marx and Weber on capitalism and modernity provides a new reading which reveals the remarkable consonances between their sociologies of the modern condition. Going beyond the well-known stereotypes of ‘the Marx-Weber debate’, Professor Sayer shows that both Marx and Weber produced a challenging critique of the nature of power and subjectivity in modern society, a critique which retains all its intellectual force and moral relevance today. A major work of original scholarship, Capitalism and Modernity is clearly and accessibly written. It is an authoritative and provocative commentary on a debate central to modern sociology and politics and will be a key text in social theory for students of sociology, politics and philosophy.

Author: Alvaro Cuervo-Cazurra
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107073146
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
This book examines the challenges faced by emerging market multinationals as they develop their international operations and proposes actionable solutions.

Author: Kate A. F. Crehan
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520206601
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
"The Fractured Community: Landscapes of Power and Gender in Rural Zambia" is a book written by Kate Crehan. The University of California Press originally published the book in October 1997 and presents its online version, as well as a summary of its contents.

Author: Deborah Davis
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520082229
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
This collection of essays concerns both urban and rural Chinese communities, ranging from professional to working-class families. The contributors attempt to determine whether and to what extent the policy shifts that followed Mao Zedong's death affected Chinese families.

Author: Gilad Padva
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137266341
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
Queer Nostalgia in Cinema and Pop Culture is a fascinating study of queer nostalgia in films, animation and music videos as means of empowerment, re-evaluating and recreating lost gay youth, coming to terms with one's sexual otherness and homoerotic desires, and creatively challenging homophobia, chauvinism, ageism and racism.