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"The reverberations of an unparalleled labor shortage echo through service-based industries, leaving the hospitality, tourism, and food and beverage sectors grappling with a critical challenge. The fallout from the 2020-2021 global health crisis has laid bare a systemic flaw: the absence of sustainable career pathways for front-line workers. From airlines to cruise ships, theme parks to restaurants, and bars, the shortage of front-line workers has reached a critical level, preventing organizations from operating at full capacity even as public health restrictions are lifted. This crisis stems not only from the economic aftermath of the pandemic but also from the longstanding neglect within these industries to cultivate a resilient front-line workforce. Front-line positions, often considered transient and unskilled, lack the structured development pipelines that other professional industries utilize successfully. As organizations struggle to address these workforce challenges, Career Pathways and Professional Identities for Front-Line Workers in the Service Industries serves as a guide filled with solutions in the face of industry-wide adversity.Career Pathways and Professional Identities for Front-Line Workers in the Service Industries responds to the urgency within the hospitality, restaurant, and tourism industries, by applying the dynamics of the 4th Industrial Revolution and the Gig Economy, to propose innovative solutions to engineer sustainable career pathways and foster professional identities. Ideal for employers, educators, and researchers involved in these industries, the book aims to guide organizations in optimizing operations, implementing leadership-focused succession planning, and minimizing the impact of labor fluctuations. From an academic perspective, it harmonizes industry-focused programs, offering a distinct element for hospitality, restaurant, and tourism management curricula. Additionally, it opens avenues for research on transitioning low-pay roles into meaningful, long-term careers with a focus on continuous improvement."--

This paper presentation is a media archaeological investigation of the microphone. Its aim is to generate new speculations and figurations between humans, non-humans and technology, which may arrive out of the Anthropocene and its binary collapsing consequences. Specifically, I will interrogate and re-animate the microphone through its connective political, material and fictional ecologies. I will ask if microphones are agentive actors and if so, what the consequences might be? The paper's central argument is that the microphone is not merely a tool of servitude employed by human hands. Nor is it just an apparatus that facilitates the audiophile's pursuit of fidelity. Rather, the microphone is positioned as a "necromedia actant": part of a networked history of power relations and ethical consequences that can be situated amongst more sinister contexts of surveillance, parasites and horror.

This article examines the microphone and its connective political and nonhuman ecologies. A media archaeological excavation of Leon Theremin's role in the development of a specific bugging device ("The Thing") facilitates discussion throughout. Situating the microphone within a networked history of power relations and ethical consequences, the author draws upon contexts of surveillance, parasites and horror in order to ask whether microphones are agential actors and, if so, what the consequences might be.

This paper is written through the combined experience of my own artistic practice and periods of immobility during 2010-2011. With it, I aim to draw attention towards physical, mental and political states of stillness and absorption. I will show how a period of relative physical stasis impacted upon my own practice and prompted a counter project to the now dominant methodology of soundwalking. Through personal reflection, I will demonstrate how walking is not always an entitled right; how class, gender and geopolitical forces impact upon a walk; and how the methodology itself may even perpetuate a culture of pursuit and entrapment. In doing so, the paper re-evaluates the politics and aesthetics of soundwalking whilst optimistically proposing listening as a form of walking.

Since the turn of the twentieth century field recording, a practice based upon recording the sounds of a given environment, species or phenomena, has increasingly moved from hobbyist, science and ethnomusicology traditions, towards an artistic practice in its own right. Today it represents a key facet within contemporary sound art praxis and discourse, whilst continuing to cross-pollinate geographic, cultural, social science and anthropological studies. Built upon the persuasive foundations of an ecologically engaged practice, field recording - whether for science or art - is deemed an unobtrusive act of conservation or design, with little or no apparent consequences. Does this mean "the field" should be granted political, aesthetic or ethical immunity? If the extraction of sound from an environment or species may not be mining a finite resource, nor for that matter leaving a tangible footprint, perhaps we have to be more imaginative, more disruptive, even more absurd in how the practice is critically unpicked? This paper will propose a new methodological schema for field recording in light of 2008's global economic crash and its protracted socio-cultural fallout. Through personal and practice-based reflection I will draw parallels between field recording and banking bubbles; preservation and consumerism; silence and hegemony; sound and oil. Inspired by the ethnographic crisis of the mid to late 1970's, I intend to inflict a similar state of emergency upon my own practice and its broader contexts.

"One evening in early August, just before 6pm, I pressed record on a hand-held audio device and walked into Parliament Square, London. As the sound of Big Ben began to toll, I threw the recorder into the air, using each chime as a prompt. After the sixth bell strike I walked out of the square, recorder in hand and pressed stop". Mark Peter Wright, 2014. Part of an on-going series of site-specific interventions. First presented at Kinokophone, New York Public Library, 2014.

The author presents an historical account of scientific work conducted at a commercial biotech firm in San Diego called Hybritech. It tells of disruptions in research programs following the acquisition of the company by the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly in 1986. The story centers on responses to an organizational challenge that research managers and scientists in any setting, academic or industrial, must confront—how to create and sustain an organizational culture that is conducive to creativity and innovation. The case provides an occasion for evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of two leading theoretical accounts of innovation in social studies of science and technology—sociological network analysis and actor-network theory.

The creation of markets in China has been most commonly analyzed through the lens and vocabulary of the new institutional economics in which broad, national-level institutional reforms are seen to be effective because they altered the incentive structures of farmers, local government officials, or factory managers. Drawing from literature on comparative capitalism which focuses on the processes of production, this dissertation examines markets through deconstructing production to the level of specific commodities. It utilizes a value chain framework by beginning with the cultivation of cotton, wool and silk agricultural commodities, and tracing them through China's textile and garment industries and into domestic and foreign trade. It considers each of these links along the chain as a locus of conflict between China's many ministries, local governments and economic actors, highlighting the political contestation and the complexity of state policy underlying the institutionalization of markets. By tracing how the terms of trade become structured along the chain over time, it details the re-creation of economic order and the distribution of resources among different producer groups. This approach is employed to construct a comparative historical narrative of China's textile agro-industries, starting from the domestic market reforms in the 1980s through to China's international integration in the 1990s, a period which coincided with major transformations in global manufacturing. In terms of domestic market reforms in the 1980s, it first shows that an institutional economics perspective mistakenly draws too clear a line between China's planned economy and the market reforms over the 1980s. By examining reforms at the level of concrete commodities and along the value chain, the planned economy and market reforms are re-conceptualized as being deeply interpenetrated such that the vitality of China's nascent market economy grew not simply from the liberation of economic interests through institutional re-engineering, but from the structure of China's version of a planned economy. Second, it examines China's international integration over the 1990s by analyzing the impact of the contemporary transformations in global manufacturing, in which vertically integrated production along the value chain has been sliced up and re-integrated through cross-national networks of production. This fragmentation of production introduced a new form of capitalist development in China in terms of the organization and regulation of industry and the composition of its labor force. Finally, the dissertation's approach offers new insights into the study of China's rapid rise in regional inequality. Instead of explaining regional inequality through differences in location advantages, it finds that regional inequalities arose more from changes in regulation between direct producers along the production chain. The dissertation employs a variety of data sources, including fieldwork interviews, Chinese newspapers and trade journals, internal government documents and statistics, yearbooks and local gazetteers, industrial and population censuses and digital mapping techniques.

Introduction -- Defining the state and its institutions, allies and protagonists -- The state, corporations and organised crime -- Drugs and thugs: examples of organised crime, state collusion and limited responses -- The media as both an influential and a supportive arm of the state -- Beyond the borders: state terrorism from without and against the "other" -- Without and within: state crime in Northern Ireland (violence, collusion and the paramilitaries) -- Fighting "the enemy within": internal state terrorism, Argentina's "Dirty War" (1976-83) and the UK miners' strike (1984-85) -- Conclusion: the role, nature and control of state crime.

How might polyphony operate across the collective, communal, and participatory dimen-sions of sonic practices? What aesthetic and political observations can be gleaned from listening and sound making that attend to the simultaneous affects of shared sonic experi-ences? This essay reflects on the possibility of plurality in collective and participatory listening and sound making in relation to the project Points of Listening (PoL), an ongoing series of workshops and discussions, co-convened by the authors, in association with Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice, CRiSAP, University of the Arts London.

Live performance made in collaboration with Helena Hunter. The work follows the trail of the 'Teredo Navalis', a tunneling shipworm that gouged its way through the global network of undersea telegraph cables in the 19th Century. Tracing events from 1500's to 1860 and the present day and traveling from the forests of Indonesia, to the Red Sea, Britain, Egypt and India, the work deals with themes of ecology and environmental change, colonialism, geopolitics and the entangled relationship between the technological and the animal. The performance contains pre-recorded audio, live sound and radio broadcast, spoken word, film, and sculptural installation. First presented as part of The Political Animal (The Showroom, London)