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Shareholder value provides the rationale, incentive, and justification for investor engagement. The chapter outlines the basic concepts of shareholder value, its preconditions, and the reasons for its growth since the 1980s, especially in the UK and the USA. Shareholder value developed out of responses to the economic crises of the 1970s, facilitated by the dominance of liberal economics and the absence of counter definitions of corporate transformation by organized labour.

This chapter begins with the cultural impact of the June War and its coda, Gamal Abdel Nasser's death in 1970. As the chapter shows, the defeat fundamentally altered Arab conceptions of political theatre's role. A well-developed high culture was no longer considered enough to guarantee the world's respect. Psychological interiority was irrelevant: what mattered was not deserving agentive power but seizing it. Disillusioned with their regimes, dramatists stopped addressing subtly allegorical plays to the government; instead, they appealed directly to audiences, trying to rouse them to participate in political life. Analyzing two early 1970s Hamlet adaptations from Egypt and Syria, the chapter demonstrates how the 1970s Hamlet became a Che Guevara in doublet and hose. Guilt and sadness over his father's death only sharpened his anger; his fierce pursuit of justice left no room for introspection or doubt.

This chapter analyzes the early years of the first generation of biotechnology companies. The setting is the 1970s, a time when landmark scientific discoveries in molecular biology triggered all manner of perturbations in university science, pharmaceutical research, and venture finance. The result was the creation of a new form—a science-based commercial entity, which emerged from overlapping networks of science, finance, and commerce. This novel collection of organizational practices that coalesced into a dedicated biotech firm (DBF) proved highly disruptive. Using historical analysis of archival materials, supplemented by interviews with DBF founders, this chapter pieces together the “lash-up” process that melded elements from three separate realms—academic science, venture finance, and commercial health care—into an interactively stable pattern.

The West‐German avant‐garde music scene of the early 1970s—the period in which the spirit of the New Left manifested itself most intensively in the musical field—was especially marked by the numerous discussions and debates about the nature of political music, its perfection and failures, conducted by musicians and music writers with endless energy and engagement. This chapter throws light on one of these debates: the argument between Nikolaus A. Huber and Clytus Gottwald in 1971–72 about Huber's composition Harakiri. It investigates the terms of the debate, firstly with regard to the musical facts—and in particular a comparison made at the time between Huber's Harakiri and Hans Otte's contemporary piece, Zero—and secondly with regard to the ideas of Theodor W. Adorno, who provided the New Leftist avant‐gardists with politico‐aesthetical ideas.

This chapter details the conflict between domestic workers and guestworkers as the United Farm Workers of America (UFW), with the Florida Rural Legal Services, became involved in a struggle for “the worst jobs in the world.” Florida Rural was working to transform every aspect of farmworkers' lives. Its lawyers sued to gain access to labor camps, to integrate those camps, to get workers transported in buses rather than flatbed trucks, to get any Florida county to set up a Food Stamp program, to get farmworkers paid what they were owed, and to enforce local sanitation and housing ordinances. And although Florida Rural took all sorts of cases—including straight forward divorce and landlord–tenant cases—a great deal of their time would be spent suing on behalf of Caribbean guestworkers who alleged exploitation by sugarcane companies and to prove that domestic workers had been unfairly deprived of those same miserable jobs.

This chapter offers an overview of the state of higher education in an age of diversity. Without the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War to thicken the relationship between the state and higher education, a rightward political shift commenced during the economic downturn of the 1970s. Ideological differences dating back to the campus turmoil of the 1960s, combined with real financial concerns, helped to drive a wedge between the government and higher education. Ultimately, the drift toward “privatization” in the final two decades of the twentieth century readjusted higher education's role as a mediator between citizens and the state once again—changing how students paid for college and moving students closer to a privatized conception of democratic citizenship inextricably tied to the “personal politics” of identity.

This introductory chapter reveals that the years between 1973 and 1979 witnessed a critical transition that made American society simultaneously more equal and less equal, and American culture still more individualistic, than they had been before. Like a line of thunderstorms rolling across the prairie, a series of jolts hit Americans in 1973, leaving them uncertain of what new weather would come along behind this powerful storm front. U.S. troops withdrew from Vietnam; the cover-up of the Watergate scandal unraveled amid calls for the president's impeachment; the oil embargo by Arab members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) began, while Nixon unplugged the dollar from the gold standard and average real wages (adjusted for inflation) declined for the first time in forty years.

This concluding chapter gives a brief overview of the dominant contemporary American values of formal equality and free-market economics after the 1970s. It also considers the relationship between two developments: the simultaneous flowerings of egalitarianism and free-market values. Both commitments had deep roots in the American past and had long helped shape the nation's politics and culture. The shedding of formal systems of social hierarchy was a continuing process, one that did not begin in the 1970s but did accelerate dramatically during that decade. In addition, the chapter considers other areas of American public life that has changed since the 1970s.

This introductory chapter offers a quick glimpse into the historical milieu during which this volume is set. Between the Second World War and the 1970s, this chapter shows that scientists from a wide range of disciplines crafted a historical trajectory for humanity that was self-consciously anti-eugenic. The best of humanity had not degenerated from living in the artificial constructs of civilization, would not dissolve because of the overbreeding of the lower classes, and could not be corrupted through miscegenation. Instead, these evolutionists argued that our common past provided evidence of our continued remarkable success as a species. In essence, so these scientists reasoned, our present human nature resulted from the synergy of biology and culture, both in dynamic flux throughout our development as a species. We had become the most recent manifestation of a human lineage destined for even greater things in the future. Through their work, an evolutionary perspective wended its way into each discipline perched at the intersection of the natural and social sciences.

This chapter discusses the tensions between advocates of Christianity and those of Man: A Course of Study (MACOS). Throughout the 1970s, alternative Christian radio and television shows gained in popularity, as did Christian movies, sex manuals, textbooks, and universities. As a young ambitious lawyer, John Conlan sought to channel this energy, transforming his constituents' collective outrage into political action. When he entered the fray against MACOS in the early spring of 1975, trouble had already been brewing for the curriculum. The shifting political landscape of the early 1970s caught Man: A Course of Study (MACOS) designers by surprise. They had taken the progressive nature of humanity's deep history for granted, but this was precisely how critics of Man: A Course of Study (MACOS) attacked the curriculum's sincere embrace of anthropological cultural relativism and its secular undertones.

This chapter explores how the decades after World War II were a period of rapid growth for Turkey. Despite the crises in the mid-1950s and in the second half of the 1970s, GDP per capita increased at an average annual rate above three percent and more than doubled during the period 1950–1980. These rates of growth were unprecedented for Turkey. The long-term rates of growth achieved in Turkey after World War II were roughly comparable to the averages for both the developed countries and developing countries as a whole. As a result, the per capita GDP gap between Turkey and the developed countries changed little during this period.

This chapter explores how, in the decades after World War II, Turkey had attained unprecedented rates of growth by raising both its savings and investments rates from 11 percent of GDP in the early 1950s to 22 percent of GDP in the late 1970s. Investments in plant and equipment as well as education were financed primarily by domestic savings, even though as per capita incomes continued to rise after 1980, the savings rate did not rise. The growing dependence on short-term foreign capital inflows caused a significant increase in macroeconomic instability. The fluctuations in short-term movements of capital, arising from both global trends and domestic political instability, have led to major fluctuations in the economy since 1980.