IT workplaces can become hostile or even toxic environments for women. Not only are they more male-dominated than other types of firms but they also tend to be governed by “cultures of engineering” in which male technical prowess is an organizing principle for social relations. The following project seeks to expand on this important theoretical field to address the implications of these cultures of engineering in an increasingly global era. Little attention has been directed, first of all, to the issue of whether there might be different kinds of discriminating environments across national contexts. Common types of discrimination experienced by women engineers in the Global North may be less prevalent in other parts of the world. Moreover, there may be hidden advantages for women engineers in Global South settings, which are useful in alleviating tensions in the Global North, and vice versa. Second, there has been surprisingly little research attention given to the global dynamics of IT workplaces, even though the high tech industry is in a stage of rapid change.   Global Circuits of Gender- Women and High Tech Work

Since CEO Jeff Bezos’s 60 minutes showcase of Amazon’s unmanned drone delivery service, many have written the interview off as just another PR stunt to boost holiday sales. Considering the technology is estimated to be over a decade away, the doubters are most likely correct. When digging deeper though, Bezos’s latest octocopter obsession illuminates Amazon’s purpose perfectly, becoming the largest retailer on the planet (and not just online).

Unfortunately, these droning delivery men also reveal what Amazon believes to be their core hurdle in achieving this goal: competing with local brick and mortar retailers who also sell 95% of Amazon’s products. To combat this, Amazon has spent billions of dollars building Amazon Prime (guaranteed 2-Day delivery), purchased numerous urban locker shipping companies to circumvent the “I wasn’t home for my package” problem, and even brokered a deal with the US Postal Service to begin delivery on Sundays.

This intense focus and spending begs the question though: Do Amazon shoppers truly value and care about receiving their items almost immediately?  Insights for Entrepreneurs from Amazon’s Drone Program

If you had to pick a city on earth where the American investment banker did not belong, London would have been on any shortlist. In London, circa 1980, the American investment banker had going against him not just widespread commercial lassitude but the locals’ near-constant state of irony. Wherever it traveled, American high finance required an irony-free zone, in which otherwise intelligent people might take seriously inherently absurd events: young people with no experience in finance being paid fortunes to give financial advice, bankers who had never run a business orchestrating takeovers of entire industries, and so on. It was hard to see how the English, with their instinct to not take anything very seriously, could make possible such a space.

Yet they did. And a brand-new social type was born: the highly educated middle-class Brit who was more crassly American than any American. In the early years this new hybrid was so obviously not an indigenous species that he had a certain charm about him, like, say, kudzu in the American South at the end of the nineteenth century, or a pet Burmese python near the Florida Everglades at the end of the twentieth. But then he completely overran the place. Within a decade half the graduates of Oxford and Cambridge were trying to forget whatever they’d been taught about how to live their lives and were remaking themselves in the image of Wall Street. Monty Python was able to survive many things, but Goldman Sachs wasn’t one of them.  Review of Capital by John Lancaster   Capital