Colleague Stewart Ellis, Reuters, and a clarification

Thank you, colleagues. In fact, several reactions to my postings were right
in saying that the costs of Reuters are huge, not to say, enormous, and
giving the URL would produce a nice answer - enter your credit card number
please.

To Stewart Ellis, a friendly clarification and a mea culpa. I should have
announced - that is my mea culpa - the following large postings in advance,
but: for the average subscriber in the list - institutionally linked or
private persons - the Reuters Business Briefing costs which run at around
5000 $ a year for just 80 hours of searching per  year are, I think, beyond
imagination. The point of the postings was that I wanted to share with you
the almost unique chance to see, once and for all, what the 'world press'
had to say on world systems theory.

That the echo of the world's media to the theories is so selective, is
revealing in itself. It shows, above all, that - although the major works of
non-US-authors are available in English from - including - US book sellers,
the Anglo-American media rather concentrate on authors who are in some way
or the other, within the general, even if dissenting, cultural orbit of the
US (my good friend Andre Gunder Frank, whom I saw here in Vienna at a
magnificent dinner organized by his German language publisher, Hannes
Hofbauer, will now nearly lynch me). But AGF - please never mind - I was so
surprised that the world press in the other languages included in the
Reuters archive (and it is very large indeed!) reacted so little to the many
translations of his books and articles, while the English language media -
especially in the Asia Pacific region - did indeed.

My analysis confirms again the necessity of cultural plurality of world
systems research, theory and practice, and once again confirmed to me the
intellectual capital that the works especially of Samir Amin provide to the
world.

Amin, being a Marxist of Coptic Christian origin from Egypt, writing in
French and Arabic, and sometimes publishing - please note! - in the
important English edition of the journal Al Ahram, 

http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/

is so to speak at the cultural under-cross currents of our tormented globe,
and indeed he has many things to say and let us hope, will continue to say
in future. To confess to you, his very writings and his very person to me is
the absolute anti-pode to a Huntington vision of the world!

Amaon.com titles currently well available:

Capitalism in the Age of Globalization : The Management of Contemporary
Society
by Samir Amin

Price: $19.95
Availability: This title is currently on back order. We expect to be able to
ship it to you within 3-5 weeks.
Paperback - 176 pages (April 1997) 
Zed Books; ISBN: 1856494683 ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.54 x 8.51 x 5.36 

Eurocentrism
by Samir Amin, Russell Moore

Price: $15.00
Used Price: $6.50 
Availability: This title is currently on back order. We expect to be able to
ship it to you within 3-5 weeks
Paperback (April 1989) 
Monthly Review Press; ISBN: 0853457867 

Re-Reading the Postwar Period : An Intellectual Itinerary
by Samir Amin

Price: $17.00
Availability: Usually ships within 24 hours

Paperback (May 1994) 
Monthly Review Press; ISBN: 0853458944 


The Arab World : Nation, State, and Democracy (Studies in African Political
Economy, General Ed Samir Amin)
by Fawzy Mansour, M. Wolfers (Translator)

Price: $49.95 + $1.99 sourcing fee
Availability: This title usually ships within 4-6 weeks. Please note that
titles occasionally go out of print or publishers run out of stock. We will
notify you within 2-3 weeks if we have trouble obtaining this title. 

Hardcover (June 1992) 
Zed Books; ISBN: 0862328845 

Global Capitalism, Liberation Theology, and the Social Sciences : An
Analysis of the Contradictions of Modernity at the Turn of the Millennium
by Andreas Muller (Editor), Arno Tausch (Editor), Paul M. Zulehner (Editor)

Price: $69.00 + $1.99 sourcing fee

Hardcover (April 2000) 
Nova Science Publishers, Inc.; ISBN: 1560726792 

Book Description 
At a time of the profound crisis of the world capitalist system, a group of
social scientists and theologians takes up anew the issue of liberation
theology. Having arisen out of the struggle of the poor Churches in the
world's South, its pros and cons dominated the discourse of the Churches
throughout much of the 1970s and 1980s. Then, dependency theory was
considered to be the analytical tool at the basis of liberation theology.
But the world economy - since the Fall of the Berlin Wall - has dramatically
changed to become a truly globalized capitalist system in the 1990s. Even in
their wildest imaginations, social scientists from the dependency tradition
and theologians alike would not have predicted for example the elementary
force of the Asian and the Russian crisis of today. The Walls have gone, but
poverty and social polarization spread to the center countries. After having
initially rejected Marxist ideology in many of the liberation theology
documents, the Vatican and many other Christian Church institutions moved
forward in the 1980s 1990s to strongly declare their "preferential option
for the poor". Now, the authors of this book, among them Samir Amin, one of
the founders of the world system approach, take up the issues of this
preferential option anew and arrive at an ecumenical vision of the dialogue
between theology and world system theory at the turn of the new millenium. 


Please do not expect from me to summarize all these articles that I posted.
Some of them are very good, some of them are rubbish, but they form a near
total picture of what the world press has to say on us - world systems
researchers (if I were working at a University, I would do the summaries for
you perhaps, or at least post them in a numbered and more ordered fashion.
But do not forget, I posted the results to you in the style, that Reuters
Business Briefing delivered them to me directly). You now might say, that
for around 5000 $ a year you would expect more in terms of ordered or
numbered output, but that is up to you.

What happened was that you received so to speak the quick by-product of an
ongoing search that I did on social policy and globalization, using inter
alia our Reuters connection.

You can work it through for yourself, or pass it on to your class-room, or
do what you deem necessary. If it is your ultimate joy to use the delete
button, please do it, but please know that from a commercial literature
research service you would be paying a lot to get these results, and you
would be throwing away a result list whose price would correspond to the
average monthly salary of a worker in the semi-periphery today.

The results thus sent to you show - lamentably enough - some of the still
existing internal weaknesses of the otherwise magnificent Reuters system,
which by the way you can visit for a discription at their site (see below).


Kind regards

Arno Tausch

Reuters/Factiva say:


http://www.factiva.com/rbb/sources/index.asp?node=content-link2



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