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In this study of the A & P. the author inquires into cost and price policy in one of America's large corporations, and examines the fact–finding process in government regulation of an industry. The first part of the book treats the history of The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company from 1919 to 1951 as a case study of a business management which is seeking to understand its market, formulate a rational price policy, and enforce the policy despite the inarticulate but effective opposition of subordinate executives. The second part deals with the buying methods of the company and A & P's relations with large and small suppliers. Particular attention is given to price discrimination. In the final part of his study, Mr. Adelman discusses in detail the antitrust suit of the 1940's against the company and the goals and values implicit in that suit. He shows the way in which these goals predetermined the "facts" that purportedly were found. The author shows how a standard inductive–deductive method of economic research would have improved on the process of ”trial by slogan and cliché.“
Examination of the international oil industry from an economic vantage point.
This book brings together his work, written over the past thirty years, on mineral depletion and the nature of monopoly in world oil.
In the decades that followed World War II, cheap and plentiful oil helped to fuel rapid economic growth, ensure political stability, and reinforce the legitimacy of liberal democracies. Yet waves of price increases and the use of the so-called “oil weapon” by a group of Arab oil-producing countries in the early 1970s demonstrated the West’s dependence on this vital resource and its vulnerability to economic volatility and political conflicts. Oil and Sovereignty analyzes the national and international strategies that American and European governments formulated to restructure the world of oil and deal with the era’s disruptions. It shows how a variety of different actors combined diplomacy, knowledge creation, economic restructuring, and public relations in their attempts to impose stability and reassert national sovereignty.
Originally published in 1975, Energy provides a comprehensive bibliography of energy in the context of the social sciences. The book argues that energy problems are best seen in the context of social phenomena, such as social attitudes, social behaviours, social institutions and structures and populations. The authors argue that to examine energy problems outside of the context of social factors is to lack a full and detailed examination of the subject. The bibliography provides a comprehensive collection of sources from a range of areas in the social sciences on the subject of energy.
Information is crucial when it comes to the management of resources. But what if knowledge is incomplete, or biased, or otherwise deficient? How did people define patterns of proper use in the absence of cognitive certainty? Discussing this challenge for a diverse set of resources from fish to rubber, these essays show that deficient knowledge is a far more pervasive challenge in resource history than conventional readings suggest. Furthermore, environmental ignorance does not inevitably shrink with the march of scientific progress: these essays suggest more of a dialectical relationship between knowledge and ignorance that has different shapes and trajectories. With its combination of empirical case studies and theoretical reflection, the essays make a significant contribution to the interdisciplinary debate on the production and resilience of ignorance. At the same time, this volume combines insights from different continents as well as the seas in between and thus sketches outlines of an emerging global resource history.
How did neighborhood groceries, parish halls, factories, and even saloons contribute more to urban vitality than did the fiscal might of postwar urban renewal? With a novelist’s eye for telling detail, Douglas Rae depicts the features that contributed most to city life in the early “urbanist” decades of the twentieth century. Rae’s subject is New Haven, Connecticut, but the lessons he draws apply to many American cities. City: Urbanism and Its End begins with a richly textured portrait of New Haven in the early twentieth century, a period of centralized manufacturing, civic vitality, and mixed-use neighborhoods. As social and economic conditions changed, the city confronted its end o...
For 200 years industrial civilization has relied on the combustion of abundant and cheap carbon fuels. But continued reliance has had perilous consequences. On the one hand there is the insecurity of relying on the world's most unstable region - the Middle East - compounded by the imminence of peak oil, growing scarcity and mounting prices. On the other, the potentially cataclysmic consequences of continuing to burn fossil fuels, as the evidence of accelerating climate change shows. Yet there is a solution: to make the transition to renewable sources of energy and distributed, decentralized energy generation. It is a model that has been proven, technologically, commercially and politically, ...