How Innovation Works

Matt Ridley’s book How Innovation Works (2020) is a mass market book that offers a thematic run down of innovations (in health, energy, transportation, etc). The chapters are mostly brief descriptions, with little on the “so what?” of the innovation processes. When there are very interesting questions, such as simultaneous innovations in distant locations, these […]

Tags: #Experiment #Incentives #Innovation #Matt Ridley #Research

Telling About Society

Howard Becker’s 2007 “Telling About Society” is a collection on a diverse ways to tell a story. This book is about the art of storytelling for social scientists, drawing on sociological roots. Useful reference book for thinking about communication, and in parts potentially manipulation and propaganda. A few notes: “If you know the audience the […]

Tags: #Communication #Howard Becker #Storytelling #Telling About Society

Empire, Global Coloniality and African Subjectivity

The book “Empire, Global Coloniality and African Subjectivity” is authored by one the leading scholars of ideas relating to decolonization and coloniality. In this 2013 book, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni draws out the meaning and implications of coloniality, and sets the foundation for his widely cited 2018 book (Epistemic Freedom in Africa). There are chapters on South Africa […]

Tags: #Africa #Coloniality #Empire #Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni #Subjectivity

The Idea of Development in Africa

Taking its cue from another book, The Idea of Africa, this book presents the idea of the idea of development with a focus on Africa – its emergence, meanings, and connotations – and how its conceptualization is deeply rooted in colonialism. “The Idea of Development: A History” (2021) is written by Corrie Decker and Elisabeth McMahon, […]

Tags: #Africa #Colonialism #Development #History #The idea of development

Nobody

Media personality and journalist Marc Lamont Hill wrote “Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyon” (2016). The book aims for a broad audience. Several chapters detail the histories and people who were killed by police or racially motivated murders. Others zoom out to the systems of mass incarceration […]

Political Power and Environmental Sustainability in Gulf Monarchies

Tobias Zumbraegel completed a PhD with a focus on politics and sustainability in Qatar, Saudi and Kuwait, which was revised / expanded and published as “Political Power and Environmental Sustainability in Gulf Monarchies” in 2022 with Palgrave. The basis of the study is existing literature and 53 interviews. Given it is a doctoral dissertation at […]

Tags: #Arabian Gulf #GCC #Politics #Sustainability #Tobias Zumbraegel