Luxury And Legitimation

Utilizing a variety of ancient sources, including cuneiform texts, images and archaeological finds, Luxury and Legitimation explores how the collecting of luxury objects contributed to the formation of royal identity in one of the world's oldest civilizations, ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). Allison Thomason makes a significant and timely contribution to the subjects of collecting and material culture studies by bringing a new understanding to the political, cultural and social institutions of an important pre-Classical, non-Western civilization.

Founded in 1919 along with the League of Nations, the International Labour Organization (ILO) establishes labor standards and produces knowledge about the world of work, serving as a forum for nations, unions, and employer associations. Before WWII, it focused on enhancing conditions for male industrial workers in Western, often imperial, economies, while restricting the circumstances of women's labors. Over time, the ILO embraced non-discrimination and equal treatment. It now promotes fair globalization, standardized employment and decent work for women in the developing world. In Making the Woman Worker, Eileen Boris illuminates the ILO's transformation in the context of the long fight for social justice. Boris analyzes three ways in which the ILO has classified the division of labor: between women and men from 1919 to 1958; between women in the global south and the west from 1955 to 1996; and between the earning and care needs of all workers from 1990s to today. Before 1945, the ILO focused on distinguishing feminized labor from male workers, whom the organization prioritized. But when the world needed more women workers, the ILO (a UN agency after WWII) highlighted the global differences in women's work, began to combat sexism in the workplace, and declared care work essential to women's labor participation. Today, the ILO enters its second century with a mission to protect the interests of all workers in the face of increasingly globalized supply chains, the digitization of homework, and cross-border labor trafficking. As Boris shows, the ILO's treatment of women is a window into the modern history of labor. The historic relegation of feminized labor to the part-time, short-term, and low-waged prefigures the future organization of work. The labor force is increasingly self-employed and working as long as possible--a steep price for flexibility--with minimal governmental oversight. How we treat workers in the next century will inevitably build upon evolving ideas of the woman worker, shaped significantly through the ILO.

Despite being vastly different both socially and economically, art and fashion are increasingly converging to collaborate in mutually advantageous ways. This book discusses the mutual benefits of collaboration through analysis of successful case studies, including corporate art collections and museums, patronage and sponsorship initiatives, and art-based brand management in the fashion sector. It provides a categorization of the strategies that fashion firms employ when they join the art world and illustrates how art and fashion brands can interact strategically at different levels. This book will be a valuable resource to researchers, providing an enhanced understanding of the potential of artification for managing brands and products.

Far from being a Judeo-Christian invention, apocalyptic thought had its roots in the ancient Near East and was expressed in its art.

"The main aim of this thoughtful and thought-provoking book is to characterize and explain the difference between pre-scientific systems of belief within which science could, and did, emerge and develop. Using the armoury of both philosophy and anthropology, Ernest Gellner attacks his task with his customary sharp wit and polemical gusto." - Times Literary Supplement.

"Sherman's insightful ethnography sheds light on the interactional dimension of symbolic boundaries and class relations as they are lived by luxury hotel clients and the workers who serve them. We learn how both groups perform class through emotion work and deepen our understanding of the role played by "niceness" in constituting equality and reversing hierarchies. As such, Class Acts is a signal contribution to a growing literature on the place of the self concept in class boundaries. It will gain a significant place in a body of work that broadens our understanding of class by moving beyond structural determinants and taking into consideration the performative, emotional, cognitive, and expressive dimensions of inequality."--Michele Lamont, author of The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration "Eye-opening, amusing, and appalling, Rachel Sherman's Class Acts explains how class inequality is normalized in the refined atmosphere of luxury hotels. This beautifully observed and engagingly written ethnography describes what kinds of deference and personal recognition money can buy. Moreover, it shows how workers who provide luxury service avoid seeing themselves as subordinate and how those whose whims are catered to are made comfortable with their privilege. Class Acts is a sobering and timely account of the legitimation of extreme inequality in a culture that prizes egalitarianism."--Robin Leidner, University of Pennsylvania "Rachel Sherman provides a penetrating and engrossing study of workers and guests in luxury hotels. Do workers resent the guests? Do guests disdain the workers? Sherman argues neither is true-and explains why."--Julia Wrigley, author of Other People's Children

In The Management of Luxury, 50 contributors from 11 countries and 23 top academic institutions working at the forefront of luxury management research provide experienced luxury managers and luxury researchers with insightful marketing and management perspectives on the luxury market. The Management of Luxury is a book for those who marvel at the industry unlike any other; those who consider managing in it as a constant balance between trusting the conventional and trying the innovative to enable the extraordinary. Including case studies on iconic brands such as Burberry, Louis Vuitton, and Leica, The Management of Luxury equips readers with innovative insights and perspectives to better understand the nature of the luxury industry so they can more effectively manage businesses in the luxury market.