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Where is semiotics now? As the promised science of the social life of signs in general, semiotics has not been good to its word. Although well-established institutionally today--through specialist journals, research centres, international conferences, professional associations and the like--semiotics now seems quaintly out of place in a world where text, culture and technology defy metadisciplinary, if not metaphysical, explanation. When the semiotician has finished explaining the music of Primal Scream, the textuality of an email message or the culture of the internet, most would believe ther

Capturing the important place and power role that culture plays in the decision-making process of migration, this Handbook looks at human movement outside of a vacuum; taking into account the impact of family relationships, access to resources, and security and insecurity at both the points of origin and destination.

What does 'anticapitalism' really mean for the politics and culture of the twenty-first century?
Anticapitalism is an idea which, despite going global, remains rooted in the local, persisting as a loose collection of grassroots movements and actions. Anticapitalism needs to develop a coherent and cohering philosophy, something which cultural theory and the intellectual legacy of the New Left can help to provide, notably through the work of key radical thinkers, such as Ernesto Laclau, Stuart Hall, Antonio Negri, Gilles Deleuze and Judith Butler. Anticapitalism and Culture argues that there is a strong relationship between the radical tradition of cultural studies and the new political movements which try to resist corporate globalization. Indeed, the two need each other: whilst theory can shape and direct the huge diversity of anticapitalist activism, the energy and sheer political engagement of the anticapitalist movement can breathe new life into cultural studies. Anticapitalism is an idea which, despite going global, remains rooted in the local, persisting as a loose collection of
grassroots movements and actions. This work argues that there is a strong relationship between the radical tradition of cultural studies and the new political movements which try to resist corporate globalization. Contents: Introduction; 1. A political history of cultural studies, part one: The Post-War Years; 2. A political history of cultural studies, part two: The Politics of Defeat; 3. Another World is Possible: The Anti-Capitalist Movement; 4. (Anti)Capitalism and Culture; 5. Ideas in Action: Rhizomatics, Radical Democracy, and the Power of the Multitude; 6. Mapping the Territory: Prospects for Resistance in the Neoliberal Conjuncture; 7. Beyond the Activist Imaginary: Nomadic Strategies for the New Partisans; Conclusion - Liberating the Collective; Bibliography; Index.

The recent transnational, global and cultural turns have challenged international historians to reconsider the approach, purpose and value of their field. Although the new trends are beneficial to the extent that they challenge the premise that the nation state should be the primary framework of historical inquiry, the boundaries of international history have expanded too far and that the cultural turn's preoccupation with national discourses at the expense of international structures and processes is diverting the field away from the analysis of the causes of war and the conditions of peace. I will argue that international history should distinguish itself from global and transnational history by drawing clear yet open disciplinary boundaries. Every field of inquiry needs some consensus about what it is, where it is going and why, in other words, an identity, purpose and values. I will argue that what defines international history is its focus on the origins, structures, processes and outcomes of international politics, above all the causes of war and the conditions of peace.

International audience ; In France schooling is based on two principles : the desire for a democratization of education and the will to integrate individuals into modernity. Throughout the XXth century, schooling has historically been concerned with making education more democratic by endeavouring to base selection uniquely on criteria of merit and by attempting to turn individuals into full citizens. Today, these two principles are still considered as fundemental aims. But their meaning has changed and the school has to resolve problems of another nature. The democratization of the system no longer refers to the access of all pupils to secondary education (an aim which has practically been fulfilled). Rather it entails the administration and management of an extremely diverse population-both from the point of view of its educational level and of its relationship to schooling and knowledge. Integration no longer raises only the question of citizenship. It also raises questions regarding the recognition of the individual and his or her subjectivity. It is no longer simply a question of transmitting the universal values which help to mould individuals. On the contrary, the question today is how to preserve the specificity of each individual of each in order to protect him or her from a system which, in many respects, appears to brutalize them. Today, changes in French schools result not so much from structural reforms, as from transformations in society's relationship to the school system and in expectations regarding education. Presently school has become part of everyday life and debates over education are in fact discussions about society itself. Discussions about violence or immigration in schools, (in the case, for example, of the Muslim girls wearing 'headscarfs'), convey both the decline of the school as an institution and the need for it to face social problems. In this paper, I shall first present the organisation of the school system. Then I shall go on to discuss three major topics which reflect the ...

"In this volume leading historians and anthropologists with an interest in law gather to analyse the nature and meaning of law in diverse societies. They start from the concept of legalism, taken from the anthropologist Lloyd Fallers, whose 1960s work on Africa engaged, unusually, with jurisprudence. The concept highlights appeal to categories and rules. The degree to which legalism in this sense informs people's lives varies within and between societies, and over time, but it can colour equally both 'simple' and 'complex' law. Breaking with recent emphases on 'practice', nine specialist contributors explore, in a wide-ranging set of cases, the place of legalism in the workings of social life. The essays make obvious the need to question our parochial common sense where ideals of moral order at other times and places differ from those of modern North Atlantic governance. State-centred law, for instance, is far from a 'central case'. Legalism may be 'aspirational', connecting people to wider visions of morality; duty may be as prominent a theme as rights; and rulers from thirteenth-century England to sixteenth-century Burma appropriate, as much they impose, a vision of justice as consistency. The use of explicit categories and rules does not reduce to simple questions of power. The cases explored range from ancient Asia Minor to classical India, and from medieval England and France to Saharan oases and southern Arabia. In each case they assume no knowledge of the society or legal system discussed. The volume will appeal not only to historians and anthropologists with an interest in law, but to students of law engaged in legal theory, for the light it sheds on the strengths and limitations of abstract legal philosophy."--Publisher's description

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the influence of national culture on corporate governance. We postulate that national culture can shape the contracting environments by serving as an informal constraint that affects incentives and choices in corporate governance. We hypothesize that national culture can explain cross-country variations in corporate governance after controlling for legal, political, financial, and economic institutions. We develop a Rule Preference Index as a proxy of national culture for a sample of 12,909 firm-year observations from 41 countries. Employing a hierarchical linear modeling approach to isolate the effects of firm-level and country-level variables, we find robust evidence that firms (and countries) with a higher Rule Preference Index tend to have better corporate governance.

Globalization and Global History argues that globalization is not an exotic and new phenomenon. Instead it emphasizes that globalization is something that has been with us as long as there have been people who are both interdependent and aware of that fact. Studying globalization from the vantage point of long-term global history permits theoretical and empirical investigation, allowing the authors collected to assess the extent of ongoing transformations and to compare them to earlier iterations. With this historical advantage, the extent of ongoing changes - which previously

Abstract Harmful environmental consequences of growth have been rigorously documented and widely publicized throughout the past half-century. Yet, the quantity of matter and energy used by human economies continues to increase by the minute, while governments and businesses continue to promise and to prioritize further economic growth. Such a paradox raises questions about how we humans change course. This introduction to a Special Section offers a new theoretical approach to change, together with glimpses of adaptations underway around the world. It directs attention away from individual decision-making and toward systems of culture and power through which socialized humans and socioecological worlds are (re)produced, sustained and adapted. Potential for transformative change is found in habitual practices through which skills, perspectives, denials and desires are viscerally embodied, and in cultural systems (economic, religious, gender and other) that govern those practices and make them meaningful. Case studies reviewed illuminate diverse communities acting to maintain old and to forge new moral and material worlds that prioritize wellbeing, equity and sustainability rather than expansion. This article endeavors to galvanize change by conceptualizing degrowth, by decolonizing worldviews of expansionist myths and values, and by encouraging connections between science and activism, north and south. Key words: degrowth, transition, climate change, socioecological systems

Overlapping and interconnected, interdisciplinary and heterogeneous, amorphous and multi-layered, and deep and broad as it is, countless topics on ecoliterature make ecocriticism a comprehensive catchall term that proposes to look at a text--be it social, cultural, political, religious, or scientific--from naturalist perspectives and moves us from "the community of literature to the larger biospheric community which […] we belong to even as we are destroying it" (William Rueckert).