Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of acronyms
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Power, interests, and negotiations
- 3 Services and intellectual property: multilateral framework negotiations
- 4 Cultural industries and telecommunications: multilateral sectoral negotiations
- 5 Infrastructure pricing negotiations: evaluating alternatives when facing a significant market power
- 6 Electronic commerce: reaching agreement when facing market power in Internet governance and data privacy
- 7 Conclusion: power and governance
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - Conclusion: power and governance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 June 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of acronyms
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Power, interests, and negotiations
- 3 Services and intellectual property: multilateral framework negotiations
- 4 Cultural industries and telecommunications: multilateral sectoral negotiations
- 5 Infrastructure pricing negotiations: evaluating alternatives when facing a significant market power
- 6 Electronic commerce: reaching agreement when facing market power in Internet governance and data privacy
- 7 Conclusion: power and governance
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The social, political, and cultural consequences of the common meal are extraordinarily varied; moreover, their outcomes can turn out to be positive or negative. The common meal or banquet contributed to the “invention” of democracy in the age of classical Athens, on the one hand; in the Imperial Germany of Heinrich Mann, on the other, commensality could lead to the degradation of human relations in political life.
Albert O. Hirschman “Melding the Public and Private Spheres: Taking Commensality Seriously”Digital information networks are expanding the scope of the global information economy, but the sociology of international interactions shaping these networks is understudied. Technology is not merely an apparatus, its instruments reflect and shape prior human understandings regarding the problem to be solved and the means for doing so. Whatever the technology, we need a historical sociological context for understanding its origins and effects.
The Internet stands out as an important conduit facilitating commercial exchanges these days. The telegraph and telephone did the same in a bygone era and, arguably, continue to do so. Global rules underlying these media are important: without rules, networks would neither interconnect nor expand.
Shortly after the invention of the telegraph, twenty European states signed a convention in Paris in 1865 “after two and a half months of arduous negotiations” to lay the foundations of what later became the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
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- Negotiation and the Global Information Economy , pp. 276 - 308Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008
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