Books published by Stanford University Press

"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"--

"Over the last few decades, the decline of the public university has dramatically increased under intensified commercialization and privatization, with market-driven restructurings leading to the deterioration of working and learning conditions. A growing reserve army of scholars and students, who enter precarious learning, teaching, and research arrangements, have joined recent waves of public unrest in both developed and developing countries to advocate for reforms to higher education. Yet even the most visible campaigns have rarely put forward any proposals for an alternative institutional organization. Based on extensive fieldwork in Venezuela, The Alternative University outlines the origins and day-to-day functioning of the colossal effort of late President Hugo Châavez's government to create a university that challenged national and global higher education norms. Through participant observation, extensive interviews with policymakers, senior managers, academics, and students, as well as in-depth archival work, Mariya Ivancheva historicizes the Bolivarian University of Venezuela (UBV), the vanguard institution of the higher education reform, and examines the complex and often contradictory and quixotic visions, policies, and practices that turn the alternative university model into a lived reality. This book offers a serious contribution to debates on the future of the university and the role of the state in the era of neoliberal globalization, and outlines lessons for policymakers and educators who aspire to develop higher education alternatives"--

"Unexpected Routes chronicles the refugee journeys of six writers whose lives were upended by fascism in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and during World War II: Cuban-born Spanish writer Silvia Mistral, German-born Spanish writer Max Aub, German writer Anna Seghers, German author Ruth Rewald, Swiss-born political activist, photographer, and ethnographer Gertrude Duby, and Czech writer and journalist Egon Erwin Kisch. While these six writers came from different backgrounds, wrote in different languages, and enjoyed very different levels of recognition in their lifetimes and posthumously, they all made sense of their forced displacement in works that reveal their conflicted relationships with the people and places they encountered in transit as well as in Mexico, the country in which they all eventually found asylum. The literary output of these six brilliant, prolific, but also flawed individuals reflects the most salient contradictions of what it meant to escape from fascist occupied Europe. In a study that bridges history, literary studies, and refugee studies, Tabea Alexa Linhard draws connections between colonialism, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II and the Holocaust to shed light on the histories and literatures of exile and migration, drawing connections to today's refugee crisis and asking larger questions around the notions of belonging, longing, and the lived experience of exile"--

"The Philosophical Pathos of Susan Taubes offers a detailed analysis of an extraordinary figure in the twentieth-century history of Jewish thought, Western philosophy, and the study of religion. Drawing on close readings of Susan Taubes' writings, including her correspondence with her husband Jacob Taubes, scholarly essays, literary compositions, and poems, Elliot R. Wolfson plumbs the depths of a tragic worldview hovering between the poles of nihilism and hope. Susan Taubes presciently explored the hypernomian status of Jewish ritual and belief after the Holocaust, as well as the theopolitical challenges of Zionism and the dangers of ethnonationalism. She engaged with numerous other thinkers, analyzing the antitheological theology and gnostic repercussions of Heideggerian thought; and the mystical atheism and apophaticism of tragedy in Simone Weil. And she understood poetry as the means to face the faceless and to confront the silence of death in the temporal overcoming of time through time. Wolfson delves into the abyss that molded Susan Taubes's mytheological thinking, making a powerful case for the relevance of her work to the study of philosophy and religion today"--

"This book is the cultural history of an idea which now seems so self-evident as barely to be worth stating: through writing imaginative literature, an author can accrue significant and lasting economic and cultural power. We take for granted, now, that authority dwells in literature and in being its author. This state of affairs was not naturally occurring, but deliberately invented. This book tells the story of that invention. The story's central figures are Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson. But its narrative begins in the 1680s, with the last gasp of the bond linking literary to political authority. While Jacobite poets celebrated (and mourned) the Stuart dynasty, Whig writers traced the philosophical and aesthetic consequences of the accession of William of Orange. Both groups left behind sets of literary devices ready-made to confer and validate authority. Claude Willan challenges the continued reign of the "Scriblerian" model of the period and shows how that reign was engineered. In so doing he historicizes the relationship between "good" and "bad" writing, and suggests how we might think about literature and beauty had Pope and Johnson not taken literary authority for themselves. What might literature have looked like, and what could we use it for, he provocatively asks"--

"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"--

The first book in a planned series dealing with the social structure of the European colonial services in Africa, this volume examines Germany's military and administrative personnel in the colonies of German East Africa, South-West Africa, Cameroun, and Togo: their performance on the scene, their educational and class background, their ideology, their continuing ties with the homeland, and their subsequent careers.Although the African colonies played a negligible part in German trade and foreign investment, they were profoundly affected by thirty years of German rule. Brutal and overbearing though many German administrators were, they had substantial achievements to their credit. Among other things, they introduced European technology, medicine, and education in their colonies, and they laid the groundwork for today's states by establishing firm geographic boundaries and building an infrastructure of ports, roads, and railways.

In this new work, political theorist Michael J. Thompson argues that modern societies are witnessing a decline in one of the core building blocks of modernity: the autonomous self. Far from being an illusion of the Enlightenment, Thompson contends that the individual is a defining feature of the project to build a modern democratic culture and polity. One of the central reasons for its demise in recent decades has been the emergence of what he calls the "e;cybernetic society,"e; a cohesive totalization of the social logics of the institutional spheres of economy, culture and polity. These logics have been progressively defined by the imperatives of economic growth and technical-administrative management of labor and consumption, routinizing patterns of life, practices, and consciousness throughout the culture. Evolving out of the neoliberal transformation of economy and society since the 1980s, the cybernetic society has transformed how that the individual is articulated in contemporary society. Thompson examines the various pathologies of the self and consciousness that result from this form of socialization-such as hyper-reification, alienated moral cognition, false consciousness, and the withered ego-in new ways to demonstrate the extent of deformation of modern selfhood. Only with a more robust, more socially embedded concept of autonomy as critical agency can we begin to reconstruct the principles of democratic individuality and community.

This book builds upon Irina Carlota [Lotti] Silber's nearly 25 years of ethnographic research centered in Chalatenango, El Salvador, to follow the trajectories-geographic, temporal, storied-of several extended Salvadoran families. Traveling back and forth in time and across borders, Silber narrates the everyday unfolding of diasporic lives rich with acts of labor, love, and renewed calls for memory, truth, and accountability in El Salvador's long postwar. Through a retrospective and intimate ethnographic method that examines archives of memories and troubles the categories that have come to stand for "e;El Salvador"e; such as alarming violent numbers, Silber considers the lives of young Salvadorans who were brought up in an everyday radical politics and then migrated to the United States after more than a decade of peace and democracy. She reflects on this generation of migrants-the 1.5 insurgent generation born to forgotten former rank-and-file militants-as well as their intergenerational, transnational families to unpack the assumptions and typical ways of knowing in postwar ethnography. As the 1.5 generation sustains their radical political project across borders, circulates the products of their migrant labor through remittances, and engages in collective social care for the debilitated bodies of their loved ones, they transform and depart from expectations of the wounded postwar that offer us hope for the making of more just global futures.

In the 1950s-80s, Brazil built one of the most advanced industrial networks among the "e;developing"e; countries, initially concentrated in the state of Sao Paulo. But from the 1980s, decentralization of industry spread to other states reducing Sao Paulo's relative importance in the country's industrial product. This volume draws on social, economic, and demographic data to document the accelerated industrialization of the state and its subsequent shift to a service economy amidst worsening social and economic inequality.Through its cultural institutions, universities, banking, and corporate sectors, the municipality of So Paulo would become a world metropolis. At the same time, given its rapid growth from 2 million to 12 million residents in this period, So Paulo dealt with problems of distribution, housing, and governance. This significant volume elucidates these and other trends during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and will be an invaluable reference for scholars of history, policy, and the economy in Latin America.