RRE home page: http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html Best Books of 2004: 1. Ekaterina Haskins, Logos and Power in Isocrates and Aristotle 2. Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature 3. Bob Dylan, Chronicles 4. William Scheuerman, Liberal Democracy and the Social Acceration of Time 5. Barbara Mirel, Interaction Design for Complex Problem Solving Here, thanks to the excellent new Google Scholar, are some papers that I recommend. I have not included URL's for them because which version of the paper you can read depends on your domain. (Some domains will have site licenses for particular publishers and others will not.) Just copy and paste the title into <http://scholar.google.com/>. If Google Scholar doesn't retrieve a full-text version of the article, try the regular Google or (for those in .edu) <http://www.jstor.org/>. Talking in the Library: Implications for the Design of Digital Libraries The Digital Divide as a Complex and Dynamic Phenomenon Place as a Practical Concern of Mobile Workers Reflective Systems Development Out of Machine Age? Complexity, Sociotechnical Systems and Actor Network Theory Towards a Sociology of Information Technology Beyond Computation: Information Technology, Organizational Transformation and Business Performance Free Ride: An Institutionalist Analysis of Information in the Internet Age The Theory of the Firm: An Introduction to Themes and Contributions The Entrepreneurship of Resource-Based Theory The Sociology of Entrepreneurship Modern Economic Theory and Development Why Are Institutions the Carriers of History? Path Dependence and the Evolution of Conventions, Organizations and Institutions Positive Constitutional Economics: A Survey Democracy, Democratization, and Institutional Theory The Problem of Liberty in the Thought of Adam Smith Toward an Anthropology of Democracy Herder's Publikum: Language, Print, and Sociability in Eighteenth-Century Germany any paper by Cristiano Antonelli on the economics of innovation, Paul Dourish on computers and cooperative work, Brian Loasby on information and organizations, or Claus Offe or Johan Olsen on political institutions After my call for topics that RRE should be covering, I had some quite interesting discussions with RRE readers, and I drew a surprising conclusion. The 1990's, in my opinion, were a decade of breaking news. There were four major stories -- the popularization of the Internet, a new round of global integration of institutions, and the building of American conservatism, and then in 2001 the 9/11 attacks -- each of which had numerous and diverse strands, and all of which unfolded on a time-scale of months. The New York Times at least covered the Internet story reasonably well, and you could more or less understand the 9/11 story if you read online newspapers from every continent except Antarctica, but no publications anywhere even halfways covered the globalization or conservatism stories, even publications that think of themselves as global or conservative (much less this mailing list). There was also the war in Kosovo, for which the Internet was essential for the simple reason that the people being bombed were online. The 2000's are not a decade of breaking news. What is happening now that you need the Internet to understand? The most important story of the 2000's, in my opinion, is the war over language in the United States that I have discussed here earlier. And this is a story that happens on numerous time-scales from milliseconds to millennia. Important things are happening literally to the interfaces between the subjects and verbs in English sentences, yet these things are continuous with the arguments between conservatives and democrats in ancient Greece. That, for example, is why Ekaterina Haskins' "Logos and Power in Isocrates and Aristotle", in addition to being scholarship of the highest order, could scarcely be more relevant. Ten More Things That Piss Me Off 1. skits 2. people who claim that tomatoes are a fruit 3. PBS (i.e., American public television) 4. the brightly inane writing in most tourist guidebooks 5. those Citibank ads 6. the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 7. the verb "to morph" 8. anything pertaining to the "American Songbook" 9. mayonnaise, or as scientists call it, "death slime" 10. the phrase "thanks in advance"
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