Author: Robert Hopkins
Publisher: Green Books
ISBN: 9780857840554
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 322
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Book Description
In 2008, the best selling The Transition Handbook suggested a model for a community-led response to peak oil and climate change. Since then, the Transition idea has gone viral across the globe, from universities and London neighbourhoods to Italian villages and Brazilian favelas. In contrast to the ever-worsening stream of information about climate change, the economy and resource depletion, Transition focuses on solutions, on community-scale projects and on positive results. The Transition Companion picks up the story today, describing one of the most fascinating experiments now under way in the world. It shows how communities are working for a future where local enterprises are valued and nurtured; where lower energy use is seen as a benefit; and where cooperation, creativity and the building of resilience are the cornerstones of a new economy. The first part discusses where we are now in terms of resilience to the problems of rising oil prices, climate change and economic uncertainty. It presents a vision of how the future might look if we succeed in addressing these issues. The book then looks in detail at the process a community in transition goes through, drawing on the experience of those who have already embarked on this journey. These examples show how much can be achieved when people harness energy and imagination to create projects that will make their communities more resilient. The Transition Companion combines practical advice; the tools needed to start and maintain a Transition initiative; with numerous inspiring stories from local groups worldwide.
Author: Gonçalo Santos
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295747390
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
China has undergone a remarkable process of urbanization, but a significant portion of its citizens still live in rural villages. To gain better access to jobs, health care, and consumer goods, villagers often travel or migrate to cities, and that cyclical transit and engagement with new technoscientific and medical practices is transforming village life. In this thoughtful ethnography, Gonçalo Santos paints a richly detailed portrait of one rural township in Guangdong Province, north of the industrialized Pearl River Delta region. Unlike previous studies of rural-urban relations and migration in China, Chinese Village Life Today—based on Santos’s more than twenty years of field research—starts from a rural community’s point of view rather than the perspective of major urban centers. Santos considers the intimate choices of village families in the face of larger forces of modernization, showing how these negotiations shape the configuration of daily village life, from marriage, childbirth, and childcare to personal hygiene and public sanitation. Santos also outlines the advantages of a rural existence, including a degree of autonomy over family planning and community life that is rare in urban China. Filled with vivid anecdotes and keen observations, this book presents a fresh perspective on China’s urban-rural divide and a grounded theoretical approach to rural transformation.
Author: Hongyi Chen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351812270
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 341
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Book Description
This title was first published in 2000: This work provides a new insight into china's township and village enterprises (TVEs). It views the governance structure of TVEs as effectively combining the comparative advantage of local government officials in external management and of dual firm managers in internal management to overcome imperfections in both market and government during the transitional period. Through extensive field investigation analysis and case studies, this work shows that the governance structure of TVEs has been evolving during the past fifteen years. To adapt to the changing environment, TVEs have continuously innovated firm contractual form from a government official dominant fixed-wage form to a partnership style profit-sharing form, then to a privatization oriented fixed-rent form. This work develops a complete model to explain how the central government’s partial reform efforts in market liberalization have become the driving force to induce the contractual form innovation, and to explicate how heterogeneity in firms’ technical structures and in local economic settings may affect local government’s decisions regarding contractual form innovation. Using the author’s unique data set, the model simulations predict that the development in the whole market system will result in the diffusion of contractual form innovation and lead to an 'induced privatization’ in this sector. The following empirical studies show this to be a powerful prediction and the progress toward such ’induced privatization' can be expected in China in near future. This research work provides a rich empirical study on China’s institutional transition towards a market system. It explains how a bottom-up endogenous, instead of top-down exogenous, property rights reform can be realized in transitional economies. This work will serve as a valuable reference for researchers and students in economics, economic development and institutional economics - and especially for those interested in research.
Author: Nancy Lundgren
Publisher: Wadsworth Publishing Company
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 194
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Book Description
The matrilineal Fante are members of one of the most populous ethnic groups in Ghana, the Akan. They are the dominant group in the Cape Coast area and have a long history in the region. They are Fanti speakers, but also speak the national language, which is English. This case study provides an intimate look at the Fante, who now reside in towns and villages, are predominantly Christian and earn their living primarily as traders, farmers and fishing people, but are found in all walks of life including: government officials, teachers, University professors, lawyers and doctors. The people of Akotokiyr and Abaasa and Nim want readers to know about their villages and the people associated with them because they represent a spirit and a tradition and a collaborative lifestyle that are rapidly changing. The book makes it possible for readers to become participants in the scene-be it in a home, a "palace" of a chief, a church, in the market place, or in the author's own home-where they can see firsthand the ways in which the new is being incorporated into the old. As the Series Editor says, "the blazing sun, the airless rooms with concrete block walls with roofs of sheet iron, the dust, flies, rough streets, the verdant forest, the streams the open, running sewers, all become habitats of our minds as we read of the author's interactions with people in the small villages where she is living and working."
Author: Rob Hopkins
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1907448705
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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Book Description
Move from feeling anxious about the oil crisis to developing a positive visions and taking traction action to create a more self-reliant existence with this ground-breaking book. We live in an oil-dependent world, and have become reliant in a very short space of time, using vast reserves of oil in the process – and without planning for when the supply is not so plentiful. Most of us avoid thinking about what happens when the oil runs out (or becomes prohibitively expensive), but the reality may not be as bad as we think. The Transition Handbook shows how the inevitable and profound changes ahead could have a positive effect. Written by permaculture expert Rob Hopkins, he discusses the possibility of a rebirth of local communities, which will generate their own fuel, food and housing. These will encourage the development of local currencies, to keep money in the local area, and unleash a local 'skilling-up', so that people have more control over their lives. The growth in interest in the Transition model continues to be exponential. There are now more than 35 formal Transition Initiatives in the UK, including towns, cities, islands, villages and peninsulas, with more joining as the idea takes off. With little proactivity at government level, communities are taking matters into their own hands and acting locally. If your community has not yet become a Transition Initiative, this upbeat guide, filled with beautiful black and white photographs, offers you the tools to get started. The Transition Handbook is the perfect manual to guide communities, as they begin this 'energy descent' journey.
Author: Carola Suárez-Orozco
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814770711
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
Winner Best Edited Book Award presented by the Society for Research on Adolescence Immigration to the United States has reached historic numbers— 25 percent of children under the age of 18 have an immigrant parent, and this number is projected to grow to one in three by 2050. These children have become a significant part of our national tapestry, and how they fare is deeply intertwined with the future of our nation. Immigrant children and the children of immigrants face unique developmental challenges. Navigating two distinct cultures at once, immigrant-origin children have no expert guides to lead them through the process. Instead, they find themselves acting as guides for their parents. How are immigrant children like all other children, and how are they unique? What challenges as well as what opportunities do their circumstances present for their development? What characteristics are they likely to share because they have immigrant parents, and what characteristics are unique to specific groups of origin? How are children of first-generation immigrants different from those of second-generation immigrants? Transitions offers comprehensive coverage of the field’s best scholarship on the development of immigrant children, providing an overview of what the field needs to know—or at least systematically begin to ask—about the immigrant child and adolescent from a developmental perspective. This book takes an interdisciplinary perspective to consider how personal, social, and structural factors interact to determine a variety of trajectories of development. The editors have curated contributions from experts across a carefully selected variety of topics covering ecologies, processes, and outcomes of development pertinent to immigrant origin children.
Author: Kristen Ghodsee
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822351021
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
Through ethnographic essays and short stories based on her experiences in Eastern Europe between 1989 and 2009, Kristen Ghodsee explains why many Eastern Europeans are nostalgic for the communist past.
Author: Susan Pinker
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
ISBN: 0679604545
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 392
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Book Description
In her surprising, entertaining, and persuasive new book, award-winning author and psychologist Susan Pinker shows how face-to-face contact is crucial for learning, happiness, resilience, and longevity. From birth to death, human beings are hardwired to connect to other human beings. Face-to-face contact matters: tight bonds of friendship and love heal us, help children learn, extend our lives, and make us happy. Looser in-person bonds matter, too, combining with our close relationships to form a personal “village” around us, one that exerts unique effects. Not just any social networks will do: we need the real, in-the-flesh encounters that tie human families, groups of friends, and communities together. Marrying the findings of the new field of social neuroscience with gripping human stories, Susan Pinker explores the impact of face-to-face contact from cradle to grave, from city to Sardinian mountain village, from classroom to workplace, from love to marriage to divorce. Her results are enlightening and enlivening, and they challenge many of our assumptions. Most of us have left the literal village behind and don’t want to give up our new technologies to go back there. But, as Pinker writes so compellingly, we need close social bonds and uninterrupted face-time with our friends and families in order to thrive—even to survive. Creating our own “village effect” makes us happier. It can also save our lives. Praise for The Village Effect “The benefits of the digital age have been oversold. Or to put it another way: there is plenty of life left in face-to-face, human interaction. That is the message emerging from this entertaining book by Susan Pinker, a Canadian psychologist. Citing a wealth of research and reinforced with her own arguments, Pinker suggests we should make an effort—at work and in our private lives—to promote greater levels of personal intimacy.”—Financial Times “Drawing on scores of psychological and sociological studies, [Pinker] suggests that living as our ancestors did, steeped in face-to-face contact and physical proximity, is the key to health, while loneliness is ‘less an exalted existential state than a public health risk.’ That her point is fairly obvious doesn’t diminish its importance; smart readers will take the book out to a park to enjoy in the company of others.”—The Boston Globe “A hopeful, warm guide to living more intimately in an disconnected era.”—Publishers Weekly “A terrific book . . . Pinker makes a hardheaded case for a softhearted virtue. Read this book. Then talk about it—in person!—with a friend.”—Daniel H. Pink, New York Times bestselling author of Drive and To Sell Is Human “What do Sardinian men, Trader Joe’s employees, and nuns have in common? Real social networks—though not the kind you’ll find on Facebook or Twitter. Susan Pinker’s delightful book shows why face-to-face interaction at home, school, and work makes us healthier, smarter, and more successful.”—Charles Duhigg, New York Times bestselling author of The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business “Provocative and engaging . . . Pinker is a great storyteller and a thoughtful scholar. This is an important book, one that will shape how we think about the increasingly virtual world we all live in.”—Paul Bloom, author of Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil From the Hardcover edition.
Author: Marghanita Laski
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Courtship
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
Author: Gerald W. Creed
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271042237
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 322
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Book Description
The collapse of state socialism in 1989 focused attention on the transition to democracy and capitalism in Eastern Europe. But for many people who actually lived through the transition, the changes were often disappointing. In Domesticating Revolution, Gerald Creed explains this unexpected outcome through a detailed study of economic reforms in one Bulgarian village.
