This book explores the combination of capital's changing composition and labour's subjective agency to examine whether the waning days of the 'sweatshop' have indeed begun. Focused on the garment and footwear sectors, it introduces a universal logic that governs competition and reshapes the chain. By analysing workers' collective action at various sites of production, it observes how this internal logic plays out for labour who are testing the limits of the social order, stretching it until the seams show. By examining the most valorised parts of underdeveloped sectors, one can see where capital is going and how it is getting there. These findings contribute to ongoing efforts to establish workers' rights in sectors plagued by poverty and powerlessness, building fires and collapses. With this change and a capable labour movement, there's hope yet that workers may close the gap.
This book demonstrates the swift progress achieved in the field of diamond for electronic and bioelectronic applications. Predicted to become the 'ultimate semiconductor' in the early 1990s, diamond initially failed to match the impressive developments made with other wide-bandgap semiconductors. The situation is changing, with single-crystal electronic-grade diamond becoming a commercially available material. As importantly, the spectacular properties of single-point defects in diamond, as well as its superlative thermal conductivity, radiation 'hardness' and inherent biocompatibility, are being recognized as vital for devices used in biosensing, quantum informatics, and environmentally challenging applications. Not all recent advances relate to single-crystal diamond. Nanocrystalline diamond (NCD), ultra-nanocrystalline diamond (UNCD) and diamond-like carbon (DLC) are very important forms of carbon, as are multiphase carbon nanostructures and graphene. It features results in all area
