A grotesque, surreal and darkly comic series of tales about the most terrible family on the planet. Mrs Bott, an horrendous “unlanced boil” of a woman and Mr Bott, “a balloon of a man”, are very unhappily married. Into this disaster enter two unwanted arrivals: The Bott Twins. Born bad? Or driven bad? It doesn’t matter. What you do need to know is that: “If you ever meet the Bott Twins, run. Run and don’t look back.” Too few people take this advice and the results are not pretty.

This book examines the history and literary representation of one of the most idiosyncratic aspects of English socio-economic history, namely primogeniture as a rule governing the succession to landed estates. This double approach roughly covers the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Although this inheritance custom usually made the elder son sole heir to the whole paternal estate, to the exclusion and sometimes the utter impoverishment of the other children, and was therefore denounced as unjust and against nature, it also had its unflinching supporters. Indeed there was enough weight in the socio-political arguments of the latter to explain why this custom continued to dominate English social life for so long. This fundamental contradiction was at the heart of an ideological debate in which the plight of younger sons and the relationship between the individual, the nuclear and patrilineal family were among the issues permanently discussed. Neither were these issues the only hotly debated primogeniture-related questions. Indeed there was not one major economic, social and political development throughout the period examined to which primogeniture and entail did not directly or indirectly relate. The survey of the ideological debate on primogeniture and entail undertaken here is, to our knowledge, unprecedented. Moreover, primogeniture and entail were perceived by playwrights and novelists as a major cultural phenomenon and treated as such. The overview of their literary representation attempted here is, we believe, also unprecedented. As may be expected, emphasis throughout this book is laid on the interaction between history and literature.

A history of the community and people of Lawrence County, Arkansas.

The contemporary economy is primarily understood through the rationalist and formalist lenses of economic theory and its accompanying (mainstream) theories of organization and management. In this corpus of work, the economy is commonly portrayed as emerging on the basis of the calculated and instrumental use of heterogeneous resources. Innovation - the capacity to produce new goods and services, being of key importance in a competitive capitalist economic regime - is a joint collaborative process embedded in social action, i.e., through forms of agency. In contrast to individualist, calculative, and utilitarian images of economic agency, sociologists, historians, anthropologists, and others have demonstrated that economic agency is determined in many cases by social and cultural conditions that extend beyond the narrow sphere of instrumental economic behavior. A Social Theory of Innovation makes a connection between innovation, economic agency, and three complementary perspectives - i.e. those of playfulness, reciprocity, and squandering (the conspicuous and symbolic waste of excess resources) - in terms of being three principles that underlie innovative and creative work. Rather than postulating the homo oeconomicus model of economic agency - prescribed by neoclassical economic theory - as the only possible and legitimate image of economic agency, alternative models exist which in various ways contribute to our understanding of how and why innovation is produced in contemporary society. The book draws on a diverse corpus of literature from management studies, economics, economic sociology, and the humanities to provide a less confined and narrow image of innovation and economic agency. This book is intended for undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate business school curricula in both economic sociology and other educational programs addressing the organization of the economy and society at large.