Positing subjectivity as a structural formation arising dialectically at the cultural intersection of physical bodies and material conditions, Bodies of Capital: Spatial Subjectivity in Twentieth-Century U.S. Fiction identifies textual dynamics as revelatory of the intrinsic relationship between subjective experience and spatial practice. To advance this formulation, Bodies of Capital critically examines a series of U.S. fictional narrative texts from the late nineteenth-century to the present by placing them in dialogue with comparative articulations of U.S. ‘regimes of accumulation’ (spatial formations enacting particular capital organization and conditions) as they developed during this same historical period. Such an approach allows critical analysis to be devoted to material and empirical developments, such as geographical (e.g., urban and suburban growth), institutional (e.g., corporations and markets), and societal (e.g., types of labor) formations, but at all times places primary focus, through its recognition of subjectivity as a spatial and ideological formation, on the practices and dynamics of signification to which these developments critically contribute. Bodies of Capital’s spatio-textual formulation thereby advances the critical enterprise by illuminating the ways in which fictional narrative texts inherently both speak and are spoken by cultural ideologies spatially active at a given time and place. Bodies of Capital allows one, as well, to draw connections otherwise by-andlarge occluded between fictional works appearing at distinctly different times and places across a broad historical expanse, an expanse reflected in the selection of works the dissertation comparatively examines, including William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, Jack London’s Martin Eden, Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Sam Mendes’s American Beauty, Don DeLillo’s White Noise, and Richard Powers’s Gain.

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Intellectual property rights (IPR) have become a major problem in the relationship between the industrialized West and the developing South, primarily because the West demands that developing countries adopt and enforce Western IPR. Since the relationship between US corporations and Chinese businesses is among the most successful and at the center of the current process of globalization, IPR have been a major cause of conflict and controversy between them and serve as an exemplar for this thesis. I argue, first, that the reason that a large number of Chinese businesses, especially privately-owned small and medium-sized enterprises, infringe foreign IPR lies in the nature of the difference between what have been mostly low-tech traditional Chinese businesses and high-tech industrial economies, to which intellectual property laws belong. Second, I demonstrate that the steady improvement of intellectual property protection in the more successful areas of development in the Chinese economy suggests that the solution for improved IPR protection in China and perhaps other emerging nations will follow, not precede, the development and transformation of a low-tech pre-industrial economy into an industrial high-tech economy.

This doctoral thesis proposes an ethics of intercultural theatre, offering a materially engaged framework through which to approach both the problematics and positive potential of intercultural practice. Framing intercultural debates in terms of rights of representation, it suggests that the right to represent Othered people and cultures can be strengthened through 1) involvement of members of all represented cultures, 2) equality and creative agency of all collaborators, 3) advantageousness of a given project to all involved, and 4) positive socio-political effects of a production within its performance contexts. Working through four diverse case studies – Tim Supple's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Pan Pan Theatre Company's The Playboy of the Western World, Peter Brook's 11 and 12 and Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle's The Playboy of the Western World – this project uses a Bourdieusian theoretical framework to flag elements of contemporary intercultural practice that strengthen and weaken rights of representation. It recognises that Orientalist and Eurocentric modes of representing Otherness still require address; equally, it points to laudable working practices, moving towards a pragmatics of best intercultural theatre practice.

This thesis examines the transfer of an American pedagogical model to the Arabian Gulf against the wider context of the globalisation of higher education. Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar is used as a case study to examine how American medical knowledge and professional practice are transmitted to and assimilated by an Arabic social setting. It considers the workings of what is presumed to be a universal pedagogical model by examining how the degree is culturally translated and localised in Qatar. It addresses the question of whether or not the Cornell degree of “Doctor of Medicine” is simply an American product transplanted to the Middle East, or rather a malleable artefact: sought out, manipulated and shaped by the Qataris for their own ends. Medical education necessitates a highly challenging process of acculturation that is amplified for Arabic-educated students who enter the American medical curriculum without many of the values derived from a Western educational system. In addition to language, students from Arabic-medium schools cite dress, familial, cultural and ethical dissonance as issues that had to be negotiated while undertaking the degree. Students enrolled at the American-style medical college currently divide their clinical training between the Gulf and America. The structure of the imported curriculum and biomedical practices generated in the metropole demand that students become bilingually competent in both Arab and American health care systems. The “American way” of doing things, however, does not always translate or conform to cultural mores and standard practice within the Gulf setting. This thesis follows Arab students as they move between the coeducational American academic setting and local health care facilities, examining the ways that the physicians-in-training contextualise, appropriate and reconstruct the medical degree according to their own cultural referential framework. The thesis introduces the language of “transplantation” as a heuristic tool through which the globalisation of higher education might be explored conceptually. It is an ethnography of an emergent educational transplant propagated in a globalised era, which explores novel modes of knowledge transfer, institutional and social arrangements across local and transnational boundaries, changing subjectivities and the generation of new life forms. In a setting in the Islamic world, Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar provides a strategic site for observing the dynamics of a nation and its people grappling with modernity. Through its production of Americanstyle doctors in a non-American setting, Cornell’s transnational medical school serves as a niche through which to explore the tensions that arise in global models of tertiary education.

This thesis examines the problems engendered by ongoing Western dominance in the field of francophone African publishing, with specific reference to Guinea and Senegal. This dominance raises complex issues of power, authority and voice that are familiar tropes in postcolonial analyses, but this thesis seeks to re-place such questions in a wider context, looking at the current material circumstances of the publishing industry and “socially contaminated” instances such as international donor funding and national language policy as a perspective. This allows the links between the two rather distinct fields of the cultural and the commercial to be explored.  The guiding theme is a critique of the argument for full indigenisation or africanisation of African publishing, a debate which is based on questions of language, critical authority and identity.  The thesis seeks to cut through the inevitable polemics raised by the dominance of Western publishers in African publishing, to clearly identify the problems thrown up by this imbalance, and to explore the ramifications for ‘African literature’.

Supply Chain Management (SCM) aims to synchronize the requirements of customers with the flow of materials from suppliers, in order to satisfy the needs of the customers as costefficiently as possible. This has become a difficult task due to several developments in the market, such as increased competition, increased demand variability, increased product variety, increased amounts of customer-specific products, and shortening product life cycles. These developments, due in part to globalization, provide additional management challenges and new practices in which supply chains are designed and managed, and can eventually make the difference between companies staying competitive or not. The overall purpose of this thesis is to investigate how complexity and globalization affect supply chain design and operations. The main emphasis has been on producing descriptive results of the studied phenomenon. This research involves five case studies covering international transportation structures used in SCM, the selection of supply chain strategies in different business environments, and the role of information systems and technology in achieving the objective of SCM. In this thesis it has been concluded that in order to cope with increasingly complex and fragmented markets companies need more differentiated transportation structures, modes, and supply chains. Furthermore, to effectively manage this, information systems and advanced decision support tools are required. In addition, this thesis has shown that current taxonomies for supply chain strategy selection are too simplistic due to three major problems: they mediate that it is a question of choosing one supply chain strategy for the entire company, they regard markets as rather homogeneous, and they link each supply chain strategy to a specific business context. Instead, it has been concluded that in order to better satisfy differing customer needs in various markets it is increasingly necessary to develop a differentiated supply chain strategy by utilizing different manufacturing and delivery strategies concurrently. Thus, a need exists for new taxonomies for supply chain strategy selection which recognize that the markets are becoming more fragmented and complex, that customer preferences differ across customer/market segments, and that there is a need to differentiate the supply chain strategy. This thesis also highlights several requirements of a differentiated supply chain strategy. Firstly, extended supply chain collaboration is required, since a differentiated supply chain strategy will involve more supply chain partners than a traditional supply chain strategy. Secondly, there is a need for more transportation mode alternatives, particularly intermodal, both in supply and distribution operations, due to the fact that differentiation requires diversity. In this thesis, intermodal landbridge freight services are highlighted as one interesting avenue, which could potentially facilitate a more differentiated supply chain strategy. Thirdly, more integrated information systems are needed along with decision support tools. This study illustrates that agent based modeling appears to be an interesting method for developing realistic decision support tools in the context of complex supply chains. An interesting aspect for further research is to investigate how different manufacturing and delivery strategies can be used concurrently in international supply chains. Moreover, there are several requirements and opportunities of a differentiated supply chain strategy, and these have to be investigated further

This dissertation analyzes moments in which presidents interact with transnational audiences, identifying and explaining their rhetorical strategies for developing a global imaginary. Specifically, I first consider how George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev negotiate geo-political and spatial metaphors leading up to their joint press conference, symbolically ending the Cold War. Second, I discuss how Bill Clinton and George W. Bush universalize the trope of “democracy” in their speeches before the United Nations General Assembly. Third, I explain how Barack Obama figures transnational citizens and himself as a global leader in his transnational town hall meetings. Together, these case studies show the ways contemporary presidents call forth particular understandings of “the global” through speech. Politically, this study is significant because it broadens our understanding of the institution of the presidency from the framework of a national institution to that of a global one. Rhetorically, this study illuminates the relationship between presidential speech, transnational audiences, and the rhetorical imaginary of the global sphere.

DURING the sixties, higher education was mainly given by public universities. There were twenty-one public and ten private universities. 1 Growth in education went from 2.3 percent in 1961 to 4.4 percent in 1972, and jumped to 9.9 percent in 1981.

Thesis (M.Com. (Development Theory and Policy))--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, School of Economic and Business Sciences, 2016 / Lenin's theory of imperialism is a strong basis of contemporary analysis for the interaction between countries in the core and those in the periphery. This paper examines the theoretical coherence of his theory in light of the advent of global value chains. The distribution of benefits between countries in the core and the periphery is a topic that is aimed at describing the distribution patterns that prevail as a result of the globalisation of trade and the decentralization of production activities by multinational firms [Information taken from introduction. No abstract provided]. / MT2017