Bøker utgitt av Stanford University Press

"The twenty-first century has witnessed a pervasive militarization of aesthetics with Western military institutions co-opting the creative worldmaking of art and merging it with the destructive forces of warfare. In Martial Aesthetics, Anders Engberg-Pedersen examines the origins of this unlikely merger, showing that today's creative warfare is merely the extension of a historical development that began long ago. Indeed, the emergence of martial aesthetics harkens back to a series of inventions, ideas, and debates in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Already then, military thinkers and inventors adopted ideas from the field of aesthetics about the nature, purpose, and force of art and retooled them into innovative military technologies and a new theory that conceptualized war not merely as a practical art, but as an aesthetic art form. This book shows how military discourses and early war media such as star charts, horoscopes, and the Prussian wargame were entangled with ideas of creativity, genius, and possible worlds in philosophy and aesthetic theory (by thinkers such as Leibniz, Baumgarten, Kant, and Schiller) in order to trace the emergence of martial aesthetics. Adopting an approach that is simultaneously historical and theoretical, Engberg-Pedersen presents a new frame for understanding war in the twenty-first century"--

"Digital transformation is an ongoing process of the marketplace and one that requires continual strategic planning, reflection, and action. Organizations must constantly reconsider their digital transformation strategies in order to leverage new technologies and access to new data sets, as new competitors continue to emerge. In this environment, successful managers will constantly ask: how are you going to competitively position your organization in a digitally transforming marketplace? How will you create value for your business in new ways, including changing your value proposition by leveraging data and adopting new business models available in a digital world? How will you capture value in a world where the basis for competitive advantage is shifting, especially when marked by platforms and network externalities? And what capabilities do you need to secure this, and how will you develop them? Timely in its analysis, the book covers major topics such as big tech, data analytics, artificial intelligence, blockchain, cryptocurrency, autonomy, cybersecurity, data privacy, and antitrust. Michael Lenox delivers an insightful volume that offers a foundational understanding of this dynamic environment, and an action plan for those seeking a path to digital strategy implementation for their organization"--

"In this book, Amy R. Wong unravels the colonial and racial logic behind seemingly innocuous assumptions about "speech": that our words belong to us, and that self-possession is a virtue. Through readings of late-Victorian fictions of empire, Wong revisits the scene of speech's ideological foreclosures as articulated in postcolonial theory. Engaging Afro-Caribbean thinkers like âEduoard Glissant and Sylvia Wynter, Refiguring Speech reroutes attention away from speech and toward an anticolonial poetics of talk, which emphasizes communal ownership and embeddedness within the social world and material environment. Analyzing novels by Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, George Meredith, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford, Wong refashions the aesthetics of disordered speech--such as parroting, eavesdropping, profuse inarticulacy, and dysfluency--into alternate forms of communication that stand on their own as talk. Wong demonstrates how late nineteenth-century Britain's twin crises of territorialization--of empire and of new media--spurred narrative interests in capturing the sense that speech's tethering to particular persons was no longer tenable. In doing so, Wong connects this period to U.S. empire by constructing a genealogy of Anglo-American speech's colonialist and racialized terms of proprietorship. Refiguring Speech offers students and scholars of Victorian literature and postcolonial studies a powerful conceptualization of talk as an insurgent form of communication"--

"Gay bars had been closing by the hundreds in recent decades, even before another global pandemic brought nightlife to its knees. The story goes that increasing mainstream acceptance of LGBTQ people, plus dating apps like Grindr and Tinder, have rendered these spaces obsolete. Beyond that, rampant gentrification in big cities has pushed gay bars out of the neighborhoods they helped make hip. Greggor Mattson's titular question Who Needs Gay Bars? plays on these narratives, accepting that the answer for some might be: maybe nobody. And yet... Inspired by the closing of his own favorite watering hole, Greggor Mattson embarked on a journey across and around the country to paint a much more complex picture of the cultural significance of these spaces. While they may no longer be the only places for LGBTQ patrons to openly socialize, he finds that their value has evolved--they are historical archives, safe spaces, community centers, and places of celebration, entertainment, and discovery. The question that frames this story is not asking whether these spaces are needed, but for whom, earnestly exploring the diversity of folks and purposes they serve today."--

"The Soviet Union was one of the most secretive states that ever existed. Defended by a complex apparatus of rules and checks administered by the secret police, the Soviet state had seemingly unprecedented capabilities based on its near monopoly of productive capital, monolithic authority, and secretive decision making. But behind the scenes, Soviet secrecy was double-edged: it raised transaction costs, incentivized indecision, compromised the effectiveness of government officials, eroded citizens' trust in institutions and in each other, and led to a secretive society and an uninformed elite. The result is what this book calls the secrecy/capacity tradeoff: a bargain in which the Soviet state accepted the reduction of state capacity as the cost of ensuring its own survival. This book is the first comprehensive, analytical, multi-faceted history of Soviet secrecy in the English language. Harrison combines quantitative and qualitative evidence to evaluate the impact of secrecy on Soviet state capacity from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Based on multiple years of research in once-secret Soviet-era archives, this book addresses two gaps in history and social science: one the core role of secrecy in building and stabilizing the communist states of the twentieth century; the other the corrosive effects of secrecy on the capabilities of authoritarian states"--