Books
The Hillary Doctrine: Sex & American Foreign Policy
by Valerie M. Hudson and Patricia Leidl Given that much of the political science literature on women, gender, and U.S. foreign policy has primarily examined the legislative branch and public opinion, The Hillary Doctrine’s focus on the executive branch is an important and welcome contribution to the international relations field. Hudson and Leidl focus on Hillary Clinton’s prioritisation of women’s empowerment in all facets of U.S. foreign policy and national security during her tenure as secretary of state in the Obama administration, noting that “she was (and is) the world’s most influential and eloquent exponent of the proposition that the situation of women and the destiny of nations are integrally linked” (pp. xiii). The authors make clear, however, that the book is not about Hillary Clinton herself but about the Doctrine as an idea translated into policy, and hence their “foundational question” is as follows: “Do the situation, security, and status of women within a nation affect that nation’s security, stability, and prosperity? If so, then the premise of the Hillary Doctrine is sound, and warrants a prominent place in U.S. foreign policy” (p. 68). Building on Hudson’s previous work and the work of others demonstrating the strong link between women’s security and national security, and drawing on theory and extensive empirical research (interviews, field work, quantitative analysis, and detailed case studies), the authors examine the origins and implementation of the Hillary Doctrine. In her address to the UN Commission on the Status of Women in March 2010, Clinton first articulated what eventually became known as the Hillary Doctrine, stating that “the subjugation of women is a threat to the national security of the United States.” The Doctrine was officially included in the State Department’s first Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review of U.S. foreign policy, published in December 2010 (p. […]
Book Review:The Ethical Economy
The Ethical Economy: Rebuilding Value After the Crisis, by Adam Arvidsson and Nicolai Peitersen, Columbia University Press, 2013 The Ethical Economy introduces two major intellectuals mapping the transition from early industrial manufacturing and its economics based on objects (things you can drop on your foot) to today’s information economies where intellectual property, intangibles, brands and reputation are the new source of value. Authors Adam Arvidsson and Nicolai Peitersen join Don Tapscott, Yoichi Benkler, Michel Bauwens and others in mapping this new economic terrain where information offers non-rival “win-win” opportunities for abundance through sharing and cooperation (if you give me information, you still retain it as well). Following Yoichi Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams’ Wikinomics, Chris Anderson’s Makers and Michel Bauwens’ peer-to-peer sharing models (P2P Foundation), Arvidsson and Peitersen, both seasoned professionals in business and finance, delve deeper into the implications of this tectonic shift beyond the cover story in The Economist and recent books including Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers’ Collaborative Consumption and Lorna Gold’s The Sharing Economy to examine the role of technology, the internet, social media, the maker revolution, prosumers, crowdsourcing and “productive publics” and the socialisation of value creation. This is deeply researched, heady stuff enfolding insights from behavioral science, brand management, ethical investing and the growing importance of reputational risks and benefits. Mainstream economics and financial models are left behind in their material focus on competitive rival goods and assumptions of scarcity. The rise of this global informational, internet-based economy of social media, open-source, crowdsourcing by over 3 billion ever-more connected, interacting humans is a new economy of the commons – based largely on “publics” and their opinions, infrastructure resources and shared knowledge. This fuels the skepticism toward corporations, banks, governments and erodes trust in older norm-creating institutions, academia and religious […]
Book Review: Heartfulness -Beyond Mindfulness-Finding Your Real Life
Dr Stephen McKenzie Released by Exile publishing comes a truly inspiring book which we all ought to read to help find a little more peace in our lives. Dont we all need that and to make the world a better place to be in? Dr Stephen McKenzie looks at the lived examples of such luminnaires as Nelson Mandela to show how he lived with heartfulness in his truly difficult life. Heartfulness can help us move away from being so self-possessed and singularly focussed in these times of high social technology interaction – without seeing the smile of the other person on the computer or mobile phone! The mindfulness trend has seen mindfulness become valued more as an item in a personal toolkit as opposed to a full way of living. Dr Stephen McKenzie is a leading mindfulness author and teacher and he brings us back to its roots –—connecting the heart with mindfulness to become heartfulness. The paths to full living are clearly shown and demonstrated. Being heartful simply means being fully connected — with ourselves and with other people — and therefore fully alive, happy, without stress and at peace. There are exercises for the reader and chapters include adversity, humour, knowledge, kindness, love and hope, among others. With anecdotes, things to do and think about and lots to gently read and enjoy, this is a gentle warm book that seeks to bring the reader home to a happy state. As a researcher, lecturer and writer with years of clinical and teaching experience in many areas of psychology, Dr Stephen McKenzie has written several books including Exisle’s Mindfulness at Work and with Craig Hassed, Mindfulness for Life. Dr McKenzie lectures in psychology at Melbourne’s Monash University.
E. Freya Williams on the Business Case for Sustainability
What’s the business case for sustainability? Over the past eight years that I’ve spent compiling evidence that brands can both maximize profit and be a force for social good, that’s the question I’ve been asked most often. And it’s one that tends to be on the minds of business leaders each year around Earth Day. This year that question has a new answer: a billion dollars. For a generation, influenced by the thinking of economist Milton Friedman, business wisdom has held that purpose and profit are fundamentally opposing forces. But there are now at least nine companies globally that generate a billion dollars or more in annual revenue from products, services, or lines of business with sustainability or social good at their core. They are the Green Giants. Far from the hemp-wrapped products of yore, they include some of the most sexy and dynamic brands out there today, from relatively new start-ups to business lines incubated within major blue chip corporations. They are Tesla, Chipotle, Nike Flyknit, Whole Foods, Unilever, GE Ecomagination, Toyota Prius, Natura and IKEA’s line of Products for a More Sustainable Life at Home. These companies cut across the global economy. They make products as diverse as burritos and beauty cream, sports shoes and sports cars, organic kale and airplane engines. They cover a spectrum of price points and spend types, from low-cost and discretionary to big-ticket, corporate purchases. They span B2B and B2C companies. Yet they share six factors in common. These factors enable them to generate over $100 billion in combined annual revenues from their sustainable business strategies. They are: An Iconoclastic Leader. In each case, the sustainability journey can be traced back to one individual who started it all. He or she is a resident of the C-Suite, and exhibits the 4 Cs […]
Green Giants, how smart companies turn sustainability into billion dollar businesses
E. Freya Williams Sustainability has come a long way in a decade. Once seen as a negative thing, sustainability is increasingly being recognised as a source of advantage for business. A number of companies stand out as exemplars in this field and their stories provide the backbone of this book by sustainability consultant Freya Williams. Williams is as much an insider as an observer, and the blurb here says she was the brains behind campaigns such as Coca-Cola’s PlantBottle, Hellmann’s switch to free range eggs and the award-winning Copenhagen campaign in support of the United Nationsat the COP15 climate change conference. Her skill, it seems, is in making sustainability relevant to the mainstream. Williams has drawn firm conclusions from the case studies she has examined to produce a very readable work on a subject that often receives a dull treatment. The green giants are businesses with a turnover of $1 billion or more that can be directly attributed to a product, service or line of business with sustainability at its core. They include restaurant chain Chipotle, which raises the meat in all its products in natural and sustainable ways, Unilever which is committed to halving its environmental footprint by 2020 and Tesla which makes the first commercially successful all-electric vehicle. Some businesses, meanwhile, have specific product lines that are sustainable, such as Toyota Prius or Ikea’s Sustainable Life at Home range. Old attitudes persist, however. Williams quotes conservative economist Milton Friedman dismissing businesses with a social conscience as “unadulterated socialism” in the 1970s. That view has hardened in some quarters, driven by the cynicism and short-term thinking of Wall Street. Scepticism about environmental concerns is rife in some boardrooms. In a briefing to journalists in 2008, Bob Lutz, then vice-chairman of GM, famously called global warming “a crock of shit”. […]
Book Review:The Shape of the New
Scott L Montgomery, Daniel Chirot Princeton University Press A broad survey of the ideas that have driven modern history since the 19th century—and on account of which millions of lives have been changed for good or ill. According to Montgomery (Does Science Need a Global Language?: English and the Future of Research, 2013, etc.) and Chirot (Contentious Identities: Ethnic, Religious and National Conflicts in Today’s World, 2011, etc.), both professors at the University of Washington, these ideas are fourfold, resting in the single persons of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Charles Darwin, and then in the struggle between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton over the nature of the new republic that would grow from certain parallel and antecedent ideas. The first two are economic in nature, the third biological, and the fourth political. But all are political, of course, and the authors nicely move to depersonified history by examining deeper values: the idea embodied by Smith, for instance, that “individuals should have the freedom to make all essential decisions affecting their material and moral lives.” The authors’ argument is fluent and mainly unobjectionable; as intellectual historians, it is their bread and butter to maintain that ideas matter, and the ideas they enumerate have inarguably “structured the modern world.” Their later elaborations sometimes seem a stretch, if by modern world one means modern ideas, which would discount some of their cases. The book is academic in outlook and attitude and sometimes in execution. The prose is accessible, though, and the narrative is well-written, made more interesting by the authors’ willingness to tangle with tough constituencies and mount tough arguments—against, say, the narrowness of religious fundamentalists or the aridity of “postmodern pedagogy and scholarship,” with their lamentable habit of reducing the love of and insistence on reason as a species of evil. […]
Book Review: Atmosphere of Hope
Tim Flannery, Text Publishing A decade ago, Tim Flannery’s #1 international bestseller, The Weather Makers, was one of the first books to break the topic of climate change out into the general conversation. Today, Earth’s climate system is fast approaching a crisis. Political leadership has not kept up, and public engagement with the issue of climate change has declined. Opinion is divided between technological optimists and pessimists who feel that catastrophe is inevitable. The publication of this new book is timed for the lead-up to the Climate Change Conference in Paris in December 2015, which aims to achieve a legally binding and universal agreement on climate from all the nations in the world. This book anticipates and will influence the debates. Time is running out, but catastrophe is not inevitable. Around the world people are now living with the consequences of an altered climate—with intensified and more frequent storms, wildfires, droughts and floods. For some it’s already a question of survival. Drawing on the latest science, Flannery gives a snapshot of the trouble we are in and more crucially, proposes a new way forward, including rapidly progressing clean technologies and a “third way” of soft geo-engineering. Tim Flannery, with his inimitable style, makes this urgent issue compelling and accessible. This is a must-read for anyone interested in our global future.
Book Review: Two Futures – Australia at a Critical Moment
Text Publishing What will Australia be like in 2047? Good question, who can possibly know? However Claire O’Neil federal Labor member for the seat of Hotham and Tim Watts federal member for the Labor seat of Gellibrand are doing some projecting in their book Two Futures – Australian at a Critical Moment. How will society be? Who is treated unfairly, who is equal? How will we make money; to be precise what will drive economic growth? The book is full of questions and challenges that we all need to face and it is good that politicians have combined their passion and vision to work together on setting us all a challenge. We, the reader, can think about these issues too. It’s a bit like sitting round a table with Claire and Tim and providing input into the visions and pictures for tomorrow. In this agenda-setting book, these two young parliamentarians take the long view. They identify the dramatic changes looming on the horizon and outline creative ideas for tackling them. Fact-driven and progressive, optimistic and impassioned, Two Futures begins the debate about the decades ahead that we need to have. ‘A refreshing look at the big issues in the decades ahead.’ from the Foreword by Laura Tingle, Political Editor, Australian Financial Review ‘An insightful contribution to the policy debate about the future of our country.’Catherine Livingstone, President, Business Council of Australia ‘A must-read publication from two talented federal members concerned about a better and fairer future for Australia.’ Steve Bracks, former Premier of Victoria
Book Review: How Propaganda Works
Our democracy today is fraught with political campaigns, lobbyists, liberal media, and Fox News commentators, all using language to influence the way we think and reason about public issues. Even so, many of us believe that propaganda and manipulation aren’t problems for us—not in the way they were for the totalitarian societies of the mid-twentieth century. InHow Propaganda Works, Jason Stanley demonstrates that more attention needs to be paid. He examines how propaganda operates subtly, how it undermines democracy—particularly the ideals of democratic deliberation and equality—and how it has damaged democracies of the past. Focusing on the shortcomings of liberal democratic states, Stanley provides a historically grounded introduction to democratic political theory as a window into the misuse of democratic vocabulary for propaganda’s selfish purposes. He lays out historical examples, such as the restructuring of the US public school system at the turn of the twentieth century, to explore how the language of democracy is sometimes used to mask an undemocratic reality. Drawing from a range of sources, including feminist theory, critical race theory, epistemology, formal semantics, educational theory, and social and cognitive psychology, he explains how the manipulative and hypocritical declaration of flawed beliefs and ideologies arises from and perpetuates inequalities in society, such as the racial injustices that commonly occur in the United States. How Propaganda Works shows that an understanding of propaganda and its mechanisms is essential for the preservation and protection of liberal democracies everywhere. Jason Stanley is professor of philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of Knowledge and Practical Interests,Language in Context, and Know How. Review: “”[T]he book crackles with brilliant insights and erudition, while also managing to explain the arcane preoccupations of analytic philosophy in a way that’s accessible to a wider audience.”–Bookforum “How Propaganda Works deserves huge praise and should be […]