This book investigates the complex history of microfinance and explores the social architecture of contemporary financial institutions to give the reader a clear sense of the state of the art in this important area of finance. This is a key starting point for anyone who wants to understand or become directly involved in microfinance.

This text explores the potential formation of a decentralized Technomass of individuals connected by technology and out of the control of traditional institutional structures, including governments and megacorporations. The style of the text, a collaboration between an economic theoretician - poet and a visual artist, is not, surprisingly, out of the usual textual box. It is simultaneously a work of theory, visual art, and poetry meant to reflect (as a two-way mirror) both the out-of-control-ness of the Technomass and the ongoing struggle to redefine humanity by shaping new types of social...

The technologies that have given rise to Cyberspace (borrowing the term from William Gibson), in conjunction with other political, cultural, and environmental conditions, have opened the possibility of a new dimension of social and, narrowly, economic space. Cyberspace creates a matrix of possibilities, sometimes contradictory, for new social and economic relationships, only a fraction of which have yet been realized. The papers comprising this text explore these possibilities from the unique perspective of senior seminar students who have grown up with these technologies and are free from...

China's economy is now comfortably among the world's elite in terms of size. This book examines the contemporary Chinese economy, focusing on the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus value.