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Re: reference suggestion -- 2nd try by Quee-Young Kim 02 May 2002 23:24 UTC |
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Note: For some reason, my message gets chopped off after several lines. I am sending it again to see if it will go through intact this time. Sorry. Hi, If you are looking for an overview of the processes of evolution of modern interstate system, especially for undergraduates, try Chapter 1, "The Territorial State and Global Politics" in Global Transformations, prepared by David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt, and Jonathan Perraton. Also try "The European System Becomes Worldwide," in Adam Watson, in The Evolution of International Society. For your second question, (incidentally, I would like to point out some troubling underlying assumptions in your second question. Cultural forms of business did not and do not spread from the center to the periphery, for that matter, in a certain identifiable uniform pattern), you may have to go to a number of case studies rather than any single satisfactory work. In the above mentioned Global Transformations, you may find two or three chapters that deal with globalization of financial activities and global diffusion of corporate forms of business. If you want to introduce to your students specific details about things like, the introduction of business suit, office building, etc. in other cultures, you should try the excellent historical example from the Japanese Meiji period. Try works by Marius Jansen and of other scholars who have studied the transition of Japan from the Tokugawa to Meiji period. If you want some contrasts for comparative purposes, try some works by Jonathan Spence (about China, if you are interested in questions like, Why did the Chinese mandarins fail to change into the Western forms? Or why did the Japanese 'samurais" successfully transform themselves into 'Western-style' businessmen? ). As Max Weber must have learned many years ago, the "profit and wealth accumulation as a creed" is historically and culturally specific, somewhat grounded in a tension between religious tradition and the quest for legitimacy of new opportunity structure. There are several excellent critiques (and re-analyses) of the classic, "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" and it is usually a great undergraduate experience of having to go through the literature and critiques. (See Richard F. Hamilton, The Social Misconstruction of Reality, and the recent work by Jere Cohen, Protestantism and Capitalism: The Mechanism of Influence.) Quee-Young Kim Sociology University of Wyoming Kim@uwyo.edu
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