The Act of Reading

In the economic development literature, cultural diversity has been shown to have a positive impact on economic outcomes. A culturally diverse society or interaction among different cultures encourages exchange and competition and generates efficient outcome. Our paper hypothesizes that a culturally diverse society has a positive impact on the rate of entrepreneurship. We show that in the United States, a country with good institutions, that cultural diversity or greater cultural capital has clear economic benefits - it increases the rate of entrepreneurship.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1837605_code819184.pdf?abstractid=1837605&mirid=1

Does Cultural Diversity Increase the Rate of Entrepreneurship

In the last 3 decades, developing economies continuously have increased their manufacturing industries with an impressive growth rate. Rising the trend of globalization, these underdeveloped economies are receiving economic growth at the cost of environmental degradation. In this context, this study investigates the impact of globalization and human capital on carbon emissions (CO2) in the 78 developing economies from 1990 to 2016. Our findings based on robust system generalized method of moments (GMM) indicate that human capital and political globalization significantly reduce environmental degradation while economic, social, and overall globalization decrease the environmental quality. Furthermore, our empirical results support the inverted U-shaped environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis. However, globalization (without interactive term with human capital) appears to have no significant association with CO2 emissions, while (with an interactive term) it appears to have a significant negative influence on environmental quality. Moreover, our results are robust to various robustness checks; I have performed for scrutiny the consistency of our findings. This study also offers useful policy implications for stakeholders, policymakers, and governments for promoting environmental sustainability.

Impact of globalization on CO2 emissions based on EKC hypothesis in developing world: the moderating role of human capital

Even laissez-faire capitalism has its rules. Its fundamental enabling premise is of course the humble contract between the "parties," each of whom has access in advance to pertinent information, each of whom freely consents to the binding terms of the agreement. In jurisprudential terms, tort law provides civil guarantees that the contract will be honored by the consenting parties and sets out formal rules by which disagreements can be adjudicated and resolved. Aside from legalisms, a contract is also built on simple trust between the signatories, and their confident expectation that this and all agreements will be honored in good faith, notwithstanding the specter of lawsuits should nonperformance of

The "Saturated Self": Don DeLillo on the Problem of Rogue Capitalism

This study establishes and empirically explores the relationship between knowledge, cultural diversity and various entrepreneurial outcomes across European cities in 2008–2010. We demonstrate that the mechanism of knowledge spillover entrepreneurship is contextual and contend that cultural diversity and knowledge have differential impact on entrepreneurial outcomes across cities and countries. Cities with high cultural diversity provide more opportunities for entrepreneurship in sectors where technology and knowledge play more important role. While in technology-based sectors, we observe a decline in employment, in cities where cultural diversity is moderately high, this effect is counteracted by an increase in demand for skilful labour that is more concentrated in culturally diverse contexts. Implications for regional and national policy makers and international entrepreneurs are offered.

/pdf/cultural-diversity-and-knowledge-in-explaining-1ocys1rq08.pdf

Cultural diversity and knowledge in explaining entrepreneurship in European cities

Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World's Cultures (review)

There’s nothing quite like the review of a program or of a department to focus the attention, and to induce alternating bouts of exhilaration, dread, and even occasional panic. While the bylaws of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) do not require periodic reviews as such, they do mandate the issuing of decennial reports on the “state of the discipline,” which bring with them their own stresses and joys. Founded in 1960, ACLA has generated four such reports to date: 1965, 1975, 1993, and 2004, the most recent presented here in Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, along with eleven position papers on specific sub-fields and various issues as well as seven “responses.” (The story goes that the person responsible for the 80s report was so dissatisfied with it that he never released it; these things happen, even in the best of associations.) It should be noted for clarity that a preoccupation with the discipline’s American formation is evident in the first three reports, tendered under the chairmanship of, respectively, Harry Levin (1965), Thomas Greene (1975), and Charles Bernheimer (1993), and this is largely true of the report authored here by Haun Saussy, even as the latter departs from tradition in offering not a consensus report as such, but rather a self-styled “multivocal” “dissensus,” a Heraclitean collocation of views on comparative literature (CL) that differ widely among themselves and present, in aggregate, a portrait of an extremely vibrant, responsive discipline (vii).2 And so we

Comparative Literature Without Borders: A Decennial Taking of Stock

Suman Gupta’s Globalization and Literature joins others in Polity Press’ series on Themes in 20th and 21st Century Literature and Culture. Gupta’s project is timely given both the acceleration of globalization as a structuring phenomenon of—or, minimally, an inescapable backdrop to—nearly every aspect of our day-to-day lives. Still, and Gupta makes the point, literary scholars have been a little late to the party of globalization studies, an area marked out already in the seventies and eighties (and beyond) by social scientists working in sociology, political science, and anthropology. The vastness and variegation of the topic of globalization and literature leave an unusually broad range of possible approaches to it. Gupta chooses an eclectic model which concentrates heavily on literature review and suggestive synopses, yielding a text that is focally extensive, though at times diffuse in insight. Chapter 1 briefly reviews the provenance of “globalization” as a term and, collaterally, theories of globalization, citing, among others, the work of Anthony Giddens, Roland Robertson, David Held, and Immanuel Wallerstein. Gupta himself construes globalization as a relatively recent and contemporary development, separating himself from those who would trace it back centuries and view all manner of human interaction across space as (notionally) symptomatic of globalizing processes. Rather than “empty the term ‘globalization’ of its historical and contextual content,” rather than “extend it retrospectively in an ahistorical and acontextual fashion,” Gupta foregrounds globalization’s “specificities” as defined by time and space (10-11). Finally, while acknowledging the determinative role of economics in the shaping of globalization, Gupta eschews the econocentric biases found in, notably, Wallerstein, Mandel, and Jameson. As the author sets out in the introductory chapter, the book falls into “broadly two uneven parts”: chapters 2 and 3, which deal with prominent

Under Construction: "World Literature" in the Twenty-First Century

The American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) is obliged by its constitution to issue a state-of-the-discipline report every ten years, and it has been mostly compliant. The fi rst two iterations of this process yielded conventional reports on “professional standards” named after the respective chairs of the drafting committees, Harry Levin (1965) and Thomas Greene (1975). (Apparently due to dissatisfaction with the draft of the eighties report, none was issued.) The two subsequent reports—the Bernheimer (1993) on Comparative Literature in the “age of multiculturalism” and the Saussy (2004) on the discipline in an “age of globalization”—moved beyond the confi ned perimeter of a unitary, apparently consensus-based declamation as seen in the Levin and Greene reports, through supplementation with essays from eminences in the fi eld.2 In a sense, then, each of the latter is a compilation of essays rather than a report, pure and simple. The volume under review here, the 2014-2015 ACLA “state-of-the discipline” report, happily extends the catholicity of the Bernheimer and Saussy initiatives. In Futures of Comparative Literature: ACLA State of the Discipline Report— and we note the plurality of that “future”—Ursula Heise and her co-editors have gone to great pains to “curate” an extraordinarily diverse collection of notes, defi nitions, short essays, brief position papers, and richly informative interviews. Gathering in excess of fi fty entries, Futures derives from an open call for submissions from across the professional community, and therein is far more representative of the discipline as an “actually existent” intellectual practice than any of its predecessors which relied almost exclusively on the

Jerry A. Varsava

Papers

Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World's Cultures (review)

Comparative Literature Without Borders: A Decennial Taking of Stock

Under Construction: "World Literature" in the Twenty-First Century

The (Really Big) Shape Of Comparative Literature Now, Or, A Discipline'S Totalizing Conceit1