The concept of the cultural landscape represents a liminal space where physical and digital geographies intersect, creating a dynamic terrain where consumers, brands, and the landscape itself interact to create meaning and establish value. This introduction highlights the intricate relationship between brands and consumers within this landscape, exploring the fluid exchange of power and identity construction that occurs in these interactions. With a focus on how brands and consumers co-create meaning and value, the book examines the formation and exchange of capital, gender, authenticity, activism, and the power dynamics that come into play between consumers and brands.

This chapter focusses on the role of brands in shaping cultural intelligibility and consumer identity. It illustrates how brands, beyond their commercial role, embody cultural categories and stabilise societal norms. Brands are seen as multifaceted entities, serving as signs and symbols within a media-rich consumer environment. In exploring the company, consumer, and societal perspectives, this chapter presents an integrated approach to understanding the intricate relationship between brands and their audiences. This approach considers the complex milieu in which brands operate and the subjective realities constructed through social interactions in the habitus in branding, reflecting on how brands and consumers develop dispositions influencing social expectations. The dynamics of capital are highlighted in the exchange of economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital, wherein power, often veiled in accepted cultural perceptions, is dissected as a subtle force that both brands and consumers wield.

This chapter explains how the market process creates the right capital and technology to promote the process of development. It explains how an institutional environment of economic freedom best promotes the process of development and provides empirical evidence to support this view. It then reviews how economic freedom has evolved in countries that had sweatshops identified in the first edition of this book.

This chapter aims to redescribe the IPCC through the analytical framework of the book by identifying the actors, activities and forms of authority that shape the organisation and its assessment practice. Reviewing existing studies of the IPCC, the chapter begins by identifying two central concerns within this scholarship: first, the relationship between science and politics and second, the asymmetries between developed and developing country participation. The chapter contributes to this literature by using the framework of the book to identify the IPCC as five distinct units: the panel, the bureau, the technical support units (TSUs), the secretariat and the authors. This identifies other forms of authority that matter alongside scientific and political forms, most importantly the administrative, as found within the TSUs. Describing the historical emergence of the social order over thirty years and six assessment cycles reveals the relationship between economic capital and meaningful participation. It requires economic and human resources to undertake IPCC activities, and it through this investment individual actors and member government becomes meaningful and authoritative participants, with knowledge of and the symbolic power to write the meaning of climate change.

Chapter 6 relates how David establishes his position as Saul’s successor and has considerable achievements as king, acquiring a capital, planning a temple, and receiving God’s promise of a dynasty to succeed him.

This chapter describes the key changes in terms of money, credit and banking in the 1000 to 1500 period within the various kingdoms. It highlights how after a period of late monetization, each Christian kingdom transitioned to centralized models that were well-articulated with their European counterparts while keeping important distinctive traits. Nevertheless, the demand for means of payment on behalf of kings, merchants and other agents stimulated the development of credit. The need for credit spanned the entire Peninsula and the urban/rural divide. Thus, all countries saw the emergence of lively credit markets for (mostly private) borrowers, buttressed by functioning courts and regulations. These markets involved both specialists and non-specialists, but it was only in the Crown of Aragon where financial agents transitioned to institutionalized banks.

Making money from plantations meant engaging in the circuit of West India trade regulated through a mercantilist system that protected the interests of the ‘mother country’. Long needed to demonstrate to his metropolitan readership that Jamaica brought great wealth to Britain and that the production of sugar depended on slavery. The circuit of the West India trade connected England, West Africa and the Caribbean through a complex set of relations, at the heart of which sat the merchant house. Long’s Uncle Beeston headed the West India house of Drake and Long in the City of London and Long was well aware of the centrality of merchants and the use of bills of exchange to facilitate the sugar and slavery business. Given the increasing criticism of the conditions of the slave trade by the early 1770s, he attempted to sanitize it. The merchants used legers, accounting and numeracy to distance themselves from the realities of slavery. They controlled the system of credit and debt on which this mercantile capitalist formation depended.

John Ruskin and Karl Marx – two heterodox economic thinkers writing in England in the 1860s – both considered production, circulation, and exchange in relation to the natural environment. After first discussing the imbrication of the economic and the ecological in their work, this chapter turns to George Eliot’s Felix Holt [GK19](1866) and Anthony Trollope’s Orley Farm [GK20](1861–62) to explore points of intersection between heterodox economic thought and literary realism. Focusing on soil fertility, an issue that evokes the uses of water, soil, and manure in service of capitalism, the chapter shows that Eliot and Trollope trace the ways in which ownership, labor, or trade transforms humans’ relations to animals, plants, and landscapes. Heterodox economic thought and literary realism in the 1860s took into account historical dimensions of the natural world, especially its economic involvement.

Adopting a sociological perspective, Chapter 1 examines the rise of the professional public moralist and situates early India reformism among concurrent campaigns such as transatlantic abolitionism, free trade, and aboriginal protection. It addresses the reformers’ acquisition of social and symbolic capital, the possibilities for “link-ups” between groups, and the controversies that inhibited cooperation. Agents of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, for instance, clashed with the reformers over their approach to the abolition of indigenous slavery in India and their connections to the heterodox American Garrisonians. Delving into these conflicts demonstrates that early advocates of “conservationist” reform were an embattled lot, contending with the obstructionism of a reactionary Company-state and the derision of detractors within the metropolitan philanthropic community as well.

This chapter follows microcosmic worlds figured in the skyscraper across three “Chicago Schools”: in architecture, in urban sociology, and in political economy. Three novels map three historical phases: Frank Norris’s The Pit (1902), the financialization of wheat in Chicago’s early skyscrapers; Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), the “color line” and the public sphere on Chicago’s South Side; and Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (1984), the landscapes of oil and steel in Dubai. In each the skyscraper appears fleetingly on the horizon, glimpsed out of the corner of the eye as it shifts scales from stage to prop. The three corresponding “Chicago Schools” are: the architects of early skyscrapers assembled around the slogan “form follows function”; the group of urban sociologists that included St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, authors of Black Metropolis (1945); and the economists who supplied the neoliberal precepts by which oil wealth was converted into speculative real estate in Dubai and elsewhere. The article concludes with a coda that records, with reference to the work of urban sociologist Janet Abu-Lughod and the writer Deepak Unnikrishnan, the stark divisions of labor that haunt these three “Chicagos” and their skyscrapers, from Lake Michigan to the Persian Gulf.

This chapter seeks to ground what follows in debates within the International Relations of the Middle East, with a particular focus on how scholars have sought to characterize the rivalry between Riyadh and Tehran. In a departure from these debates, the chapter seeks to understand Saudi and Iranian efforts to exert order over space. Lastly, it brings together geopolitical, ideational, and spatial analysis to set out a (comparative) framework to understand the impact of the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran on local politics, and vice versa.

Chapter 5 is based on the conviction that the problems dealt with in the preceding chapters need to be embedded into the larger multilingual ecologies in which they occur. Since language dominance has proven an important predictor of cross-linguistic influence, which, in turn, determines the acquisition of additional languages, including expectable benefits of previous multilingual experience, one needs to follow up on the factors that are responsible for language dominance. Evidently, these factors are related to or the result of various issues of language policy and planning – both explicit and implicit – that shape the language ecology encountered in a particular region, even down to the nuclear family. It makes a difference whether one studies these issues in traditional European monolingual ecologies where other languages are learnt as classic second or foreign languages, in de jure monolingual ecologies with high numbers of immigrant speakers of other languages, in bilingual territories where the two languages enjoy the same status, coexist peacefully, and where the number of balanced bilinguals is high, in bilingual or multilingual areas with minority languages or stigmatized languages, or in highly multilingual ecologies with a common lingua franca.

This chapter identifies the factors likely to influence employees, managers, and firms given that businesses operate within the context of capitalism. Several common presuppositions about capitalism are discussed – consumers know best, industry and innovation will be rewarded, growth should be encouraged, no centralized distribution, and individual self-interest always leads to mutual benefit. The term “market morality” is introduced as a background for factors such as spending on nonrecyclable goods or a focus on price rather than employee conditions where the goods are made, providing a means to identify consumer hypocrisy and corporate greenwashing. The implications of market failures such as oligopolies are noted, and questions about proper use of government regulation are raised. Moral concerns about the globalization of supply chains and varying normative standards around the world are also discussed, as well as the balance between World Trade Organization standards and national sovereignty. The fact that currencies and credit rely on the moral principle of trust is considered. The final case deals with the ethical concerns that are raised when international companies promote GMO crops to poorer countries.