Our Cultural Fabric

From Paleolithic flax to 3D knitting, explore the global history of textiles and the world they weave together in this enthralling and educational guide. The story of humanity is the story of textiles -- as old as civilization itself. Since the first thread was spun, the need for textiles has driven technology, business, politics, and culture. In The Fabric of Civilization, Virginia Postrel synthesizes groundbreaking research from archaeology, economics, and science to reveal a surprising history. From Minoans exporting wool colored with precious purple dye to Egypt, to Romans arrayed in costly Chinese silk, the cloth trade paved the crossroads of the ancient world. Textiles funded the Renaissance and the Mughal Empire; they gave us banks and bookkeeping, Michelangelo's David and the Taj Mahal. The cloth business spread the alphabet and arithmetic, propelled chemical research, and taught people to think in binary code. Assiduously researched and deftly narrated, The Fabric of Civilization tells the story of the world's most influential commodity.

The Fabric of Cultures examines the impact of fashion as a manufacturing industry and as a culture industry that shapes identities of nations and cities in a cross-cultural perspective and within a global framework.

Many of our greatest business thought leaders proclaim that the most powerful way to transform a business is to transform its culture. In Shift: Indigenous Principles for Corporate Change, author Glenn Geffcken offers a culturally based process and path to help move companies from stagnation to change, from mediocrity to innovation, and from disconnection to harmony. Geffcken details a set of principles that underlie indigenous societies throughout the world--principles that have kept them in a state of grace and harmony with nature for longer than recorded history can account. Shift draws on the wisdom of indigenous cultures, their teachings, and their implications for significant transformation of core behaviors, beliefs, values, and ethics--which, taken as a whole, represent a paradigm shift of magnitude rarely seen in the business world. Through personal stories and experiences from Glenn Geffcken's twenty-four years in the corporate world, in parallel with an eighteen-year immersion in North American indigenous culture and religion, Shift traces a path of self-discovery and organizational transformation. Geared toward businesspeople and entrepreneurs focused on culture as a force of positive change, it offers a methodology to help you break free and consider a different course.

This remarkable new work reconciles two distinct disciplinary fields; the study of culture and the study of markets, to expand our understanding of the world of markets and business enterprise.