Showing papers by "Danny Miller published in 2005"

Managing For The Long Run: Lessons In Competitive Advantage From Great Family Businesses

Abstract: Conventional thinking holds that family-controlled businesses are beset by inherent weaknesses from "clan" cultures to stable ownership that hobble success and erode competitive advantage. This book argues that those very traits are part of what has ensured the sustained success of some of the world's leading and long-lived family controlled businesses. This is not a book for "mom and pop" family businesses. Rather, it is for firms of all kinds and sizes who want to emulate the strategies of the best family-controlled businesses for long term success.

Clothing as material culture

Abstract: Introduction--Daniel Miller, University College London * Looking good: feeling right-aesthetics of the self--Sophie Woodward, University College London * The other half: the material culture of new fibres--Kaori O'Connor, University College London * Aesthetics, Ethics and the Politics of the Turkish Headscarf--zlem Sandikci, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey and Gliz Ger, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey * Cloth that lies: the secrets of recycling in India--Lucy Norris, University College London * From Thrift to Fashion: Materiality and Aesthetics in Dress Practices in Zambia--Karen Tranberg Hansen, Northwestern University * Nga Aho Tipuna (ancestral threads): Maori cloaks from New Zealand--Amiria Henare, University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology * Relative Imagery: Patterns of Response to the Revival of Archaic Chiefly Dress in Fiji--Chlo Colchester, University College London * Pattern, Efficacy And Enterprise: On the Fabrication of Connections In Melanesia-- Graeme Were, Goldsmiths College, London * Why are there quilts in Polynesia?--Susanne Kchler, University College London

From kinship to link-up - Cell phones and social networking in Jamaica

Abstract: On the basis of lists of numbers saved on individuals cell phones and other evidence, it is argued here that lowincome Jamaicans use the cell phone to establish extensive networks, a practice identified as linkup. Linkup has many of the same characteristics as those found by R. T. Smith in a classic study of Jamaican kinship and genealogy. However, the new evidence suggests that kinship merely exemplifies a pattern that may be found in a wider range of Jamaican networking strategies including the creation of spiritual and church communities, the search for sexual partners, and the coping strategies adopted by lowincome households. Linkup also accounts for the rapid adoption of cell phones and the patterns of their use by lowincome Jamaicans and highlights the importance of understanding the local incorporation of cell phones and local forms of networking enacted through new communication technologies.

Information Society: Emergent Technologies and Development Communities in the South (Final Report)

Abstract: Daniel Miller, Andrew Skuse, Don Slater, Jo Tacchi Tripta Chandola, Thomas Cousins, Heather Horst, Janet Kwami

Coca-Cola: a black sweet drink from Trinidad.

Abstract: Coca-Cola: a black sweet drink from Trinidad1 Daniel MillerThe context for much of the current interest in material culture is a fear. It is a fear of objects supplanting people. That this is currently happening is the explicit contention of much of the debate over postmodernism which is one of the most fashionable approaches within contemporary social science. It provides the continuity between recent discussions and earlier critical debates within Marxism over issues of fetishism and reification, where objects were held to stand as congealed and unrecognized human labour. As most of the chapters in this book demonstrate, this is often an exaggerated and unsubstantiated fear, based upon the reification not of objects but of persons. It often implies and assumes a humanity that arises in some kind of pure pre-cultural state in opposition to the material world, although there is no evidence to support such a construction from either studies of the past or from comparative ethnography, where societies are usually understood as even more enmeshed within cultural media than ourselves. Rather our stance is one that takes society to be always a cultural project in which we come to be ourselves in our humanity through the medium of things.

Information Society: Emergent Technologies and Development Communities in the South

Abstract: This paper examines rural telecommunications access and use amongst poor village households in the Eastern Cape, South Africa Discussion is based upon a content analysis of 165 telephone calls, as well as a broader information and communication technology (ICT) ownership, access and use survey undertaken in 50 households within a number of rural villages in Mount Frere District These data are complimented and supported by qualitative data emerging from a longer-term DFID-funded study of ICT use and social communication practices amongst poor people within the same district The purpose of the paper is to: (i) question existing notions of telecommunications access; (ii) assess the extent to which rural inequalities are exacerbated or ameliorated by telecommunications access; and (iii) examine how telecommunications are enlisted as a strategic tool for maintaining kin-based redistributive networks and enhancing livelihood sustainability by poor households

Une rue du nord de Londres et ses magasins : imaginaire et usages

Abstract: L’auteur s’interroge sur la facon de penser une rue et ses commerces dans le Londres cosmopolite d’aujourd’hui. Il privilegie l’« ordinaire » par rapport au « particulier » ; cela le conduit a choisir comme terrain d’etude une rue la plus « quelconque » possible, avec pour paradigme ce qu’il nomme « empirisme radical ». Contre toute attente, seuls deux petits commerces, le coiffeur et le quincaillier, parviennent a donner du « sens a la rue », c’est-a-dire a devenir un lieu de sociabilite intense. Le reste des boutiques est en declin. Les habitants des couches populaires ne s’identifient pas a ces magasins qui restent, a leurs yeux, trop chers. Ils aspirent a consommer dans les supermarches plus eloignes geographiquement et socialement. Les classes moyennes ne frequentent pas regulierement les petits commerces. Pourtant, elles les defendent comme services de proximite pour les classes plus modestes. Elles preferent se rendre dans les boutiques selectes de galeries commercantes plus huppees. Elles y trouvent un decor victorien qui suscite de la nostalgie, a partir de laquelle elles construisent un imaginaire. L’auteur analyse cet imaginaire comme un mythe – au sens anthropologique – c’est-a-dire un recit susceptible de resoudre des contradictions ideologiques. Ce recit est aussi une esthetique urbaine qu’il est necessaire d’etudier pour comprendre le « sens de la ville ».

Noël à Trinidad ou l'« alter-matérialisme »

Abstract: II est generalement admis que Noel etait une fete autrefois purement religieuse qui a ete sacrifiee au profit du commerce et du materialisme — c'est une opinion qui trouve un large echo a Trinidad. L'objet de cet article est de decrire en detail ce que font la plupart des Trinidadiens a ce moment de l'annee : ils consacrent des mois entiers au nettoyage et a l'embellissement de leur demeure ainsi qu'aux preparations culinaires specifiques au repas de Noel et effectuent apres d'innombrables visites entre voisins et amis. On constate que le Noel trinidadien possede sa propre dimension ethnique, qui s'appuie sur la conception de ce qui est vecu comme « espagnol », laquelle renvoie a la population amerindienne originelle. A l'evidence, cela permet de montrer que cette fete est devenue une strategie populaire pour contrer les effets potentiellement anti-sociaux et percus comme tels du materialisme.