Spectacular Speculation is a history and sociological analysis of the semantics of speculation from 1870 to 1930, when speculation began to assume enormous importance in popular culture. Informed by the work of Luhmann, Foucault, Simmel and Deleuze, it looks at how speculation was translated into popular knowledge and charts the discursive struggles of making speculation a legitimate economic practice. Noting that the vocabulary available to discuss the concept was not properly economic, the book reveals the underside of putting it into words. Speculation's success depended upon non-economic language and morally questionable thrills: a proximity to the wasteful practice of gambling or other "degenerate" behaviors, the experience of financial markets as seductive, or out of control. American discourses of speculation take center stage, and the book covers an unusual range of material, including stock exchange guidebooks, ticker tape, moral treatises, plays, advertisements, and newspapers.

Illuminates Britain's literary field during the 1820s as a decade of improvisation, speculation and rapid cultural change.

The Speculative City explores property speculation as a key aspect of financialization and its role in reshaping the contemporary built environment. The book offers a series of case studies that encompass a range of cities whose urban fabrics have undergone significant transformation in recent years. While the forms of these developments shared many similarities, their trajectories and social outcomes were contingent upon existing planning and policy frameworks and the historical roles assumed by the state and the private sector in housing and welfare provision. By paying close attention to the forces and actors involved in property development, this book underscores that the built environment has played an integral part in the shaping of new values and collective aspirations while facilitating the spread of financial logics in urban governance. It also shows that these dynamics represent a larger shift of politics and culture in the ongoing production of urban space and prompts reflections on future trajectories of finance-led property speculation.

From dial-up to wi-fi, an engaging cultural history of the commercial web industry In the 1990s, the World Wide Web helped transform the Internet from the domain of computer scientists to a playground for mass audiences. As URLs leapt off computer screens and onto cereal boxes, billboards, and film trailers, the web changed the way many Americans experienced media, socialized, and interacted with brands. Businesses rushed online to set up corporate “home pages” and as a result, a new cultural industry was born: web design. For today’s internet users who are more familiar sharing social media posts than collecting hotlists of cool sites, the early web may seem primitive, clunky, and graphically inferior. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, this pre-crash era was dubbed “Web 1.0,” a retronym meant to distinguish the early web from the social, user-centered, and participatory values that were embodied in the internet industry’s resurgence as “Web 2.0” in the 21st century. Tracking shifts in the rules of “good web design,” Ankerson reimagines speculation and design as a series of contests and collaborations to conceive the boundaries of a new digitally networked future. What was it like to go online and “surf the Web” in the 1990s? How and why did the look and feel of the web change over time? How do new design paradigms like user-experience design (UX) gain traction? Bringing together media studies, internet studies, and design theory, Dot-com Design traces the shifts in, and struggles over, the web’s production, aesthetics, and design to provide a comprehensive look at the evolution of the web industry and into the vast internet we browse today.

In the modern world, why do we still resort to speculation? Advances in scientific and statistical reasoning are supposed to have provided greater certainty in making claims about the future. Yet we constantly spin out scenarios about tomorrow, for ourselves or for entire societies, with flimsy or no evidence. Insubstantial speculations—from utopian thinking to high-risk stock gambles—often provoke fierce backlash, even when they prove prophetic for the world we come to inhabit. Why does this hypothetical way of thinking generate such controversy? In this cultural, literary, and intellectual history, Gayle Rogers traces debates over speculation from antiquity to the present. Celebrated by Boethius as the height of humanity’s mental powers but denigrated as sinful by John Calvin, speculation eventually became central to the scientific revolution’s new methods of seeing the natural world. In the nineteenth century, writers such as Jane Austen used the concept to diagnose the marriage market, redefining speculation for the purpose of social critique. Speculation fueled the development of modern capitalism, spurring booms, busts, and bubbles, and recently artificial intelligence has automated the speculation previously done by humans, with uncertain and troubling consequences. Unraveling these histories and many other disputes, Rogers argues that what has always been at stake in arguments over speculation, and why it so often appears so threatening, is the authority to produce and control knowledge about the future. Recasting centuries of contests over the power to anticipate tomorrow, this book reveals the crucial role speculation has played in how we create—and potentially destroy—the future.

Nowhere in Europe are people more likely to enjoy a regular flutter in stocks and shares than in Britain. Whether we consider the millions of online stockbroking accounts or the billions spent on spread betting - it is a national pastime in today's Britain to play the markets. How did this distinctively British obsession with investment and speculation come about? Playing the Market tells this story by exploring the history of financial capitalism in Britain during the twentieth century from below. It explains how and why everyday British people increasingly invested, speculated, and gambled in stocks and shares from the outbreak of World War I, over the postwar decades and the Thatcher years, up until the premiership of Tony Blair. The study accounts for a momentous shift in attitudes towards stock market investment that occurred throughout the twentieth century. In the interwar period, traditional moral and cultural constraints about the stock market, which were still powerful in the Victorian period, gradually began to collapse in public and private life. In the following decades, financial securities lost their stigma of being either immoral or suitable only for the upper classes. Promising higher than average returns and a similar thrill of risk and reward as gambling in horses or the football pools, the stock market became a popular pastime for millions of Britons - even in the postwar decades, when Britain had nationalized industries and politicians of both parties indulged in staunchly anti-finance rhetoric. With the expansion of popular investment after both world wars, Britain developed a stock market culture that was unique across Europe and gave rise to a market populist sentiment that eventually proved fertile soil for the arrival of Thatcherism.

Introduction : three centuries of financial advice -- Making the market (1720-1800) -- Navigating the market (1800-1870) -- Playing the market (1870-1910) -- Chartists and fundamentalists (1910-1950) -- Domestic budgets and efficient markets (1950-1990) -- Gurus and robots (1990-2020) -- Conclusion : investing through the crisis.

Content Description #Includes bibliographical references and index.

Project Description: Theories are part and parcel of every human activity that involves knowing about the world and our place in it. In all areas of inquiry from the most commonplace to the most scholarly and esoteric, theorizing plays a fundamental role. The SAGE Encyclopedia of Theory in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics focuses on the ways that various STEM disciplines theorize about their subject matter. How is thinking about the subject organized? What methods are used in moving a novice in given field into the position of a competent student of that subject? Within the pages of this landmark work, readers will learn about the complex decisions that are made when framing a theory, what goes into constructing a powerful theory, why some theories change or fail, how STEM theories reflect socio-historical moments in time and how – at their best – they form the foundations for exploring and unlocking the mysteries of the world around us. Featuring more than 200 authoritative articles written by experts in their respective fields, the encyclopedia includes a Reader’s Guide that organizes entries by broad themes; lists of Further Readings and cross-references that conclude each article; and a Resource Guide listing classic books in the field, leading journals, associations, and key websites.

'A wonderful growth' : investment culture from 1840 to 1980 -- Over the counter : speculation and the small investor -- Shopping for shares: The rise of financial consumerism -- 'The moneymen's Sunday sermon': the making of a mass-market financial advice industry -- Yuppies : finance and investment in popular culture -- Are we rich yet? : investment clubs and investor activism.