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Recent research on early nineteenth-century slave households at James Madison’s Montpelier in Virginia has focused on comparative household assemblage analysis on a number of levels, including the local (between households in a single community), the regional (households within a market region), and the Atlantic (comparison of households between Jamaica and the Chesapeake). An important element in this comparative household analysis is scalar analysis. Scalar analysis is an analytical tool that allows archaeologists to find the most effective scale to explain patterns of material culture—whether it be at the local or Atlantic level. By addressing similarities and differences between household assemblages, scalar analysis allows researchers to contextualize patterns observed between individual household contexts. This chapter will examine how household comparisons made at a multiscalar level can facilitate interpretation of past human behavior, especially with regard to household market choices within a larger community framework.

This chapter talks about penetration of quantification into literary discourse. Lovers of literature could resist information and wax nostalgic for the deserted island reading of their youths, but adventure novels of the long nineteenth century show how “the accounting of literature” could also be aesthetically enchanting. British and American adventure novels from the period register a productive tension: guided by atavistic, preindustrial texts, characters flee from civilized realms marked by information overload only to impose informational modernity on the deserted islands and lost worlds they find. The chapter also explores the limits and wonders of quantification by using a sustained multiscalar approach—a close reading of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, a literary-historical argument that draws on a dozen transatlantic adventure fictions, and a distant reading project based on keyword frequencies in a corpus of 105 adventure novels. The chapter does not only explain how nineteenth-century literature accommodated the rise of information but also the prospect that the digital humanities might begin to tell a deeper history of itself.

This chapter argues that IR scholars interested in global normative transformations should better theorise institutional forms. In result of methodological choices made in research design, it is argued, the national-territorial ‘level’ is simply taken to be the natural site and extent of modern state power by most IR scholarship. The chapter shows why Weberian-configurational and realist-emergentist approaches, respectively, move the field beyond the impasse of ‘levels’. The state’s theoretical status as an emergent institutional ensemble, reproduced and transformed by strategic/normative political projects of state agents, is discussed. Tying the methodological and ontological strands of the argument together, the third part argues that when both ‘levels’ and ‘units’ of analysis are placed in a philosophical realist explanatory framework, the state will be understood as institutional ensemble on multiple scales of politics, specific to its form, institutions and organizational projects.

This chapter outlines the three main concepts that are derived from transnational migration studies. Transnational migration signifies mobility that not only spans geographies but also space and social fields, allowing scholars to account for and understand how (new) forms of identity, belonging, and nationhood materialize. In turn, the ongoing societal changes taking shape by way of transnational migration reflect a new reality and social condition, that of mobility and encounters between/among people across relations of difference that are themselves constantly shifting. To expand on new directions for management scholarship that are possible based on transnational migration studies, this chapter identifies three key concepts: multiscalar global perspective, moving beyond methodological nationalism and globalhistorical conjunctures. Each of these concepts are expanded upon in terms of their main points and contributions to thinking about the new social condition of mobility as it relates to theorizing people, difference and work—an endeavour that is the focus of the following three chapters.

This chapter focuses explicitly on inequalities to outline why and how they need much more attention in organizational research. The starting point of this chapter is examination of why ‘diversity work’ or practices to become more inclusive in organizations continues to be necessary in the context of multicultural societies. It then moves onto discuss power relations as relevant to the replication and emergence of inequalities in organizations, something that is not examined sufficiently in current scholarship on diversity and cross-cultural management. The chapter then moves on to outline how future diversity scholarship requires an ethical commitment to tracing the formation of multiscalar inequalities inclusive of organizational practices and policies that may be producing and/or replicating them. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the mobility turn in social sciences is not a celebratory one to suggest that everyone moves but rather, a serious engagement with the interrelated relations of power, inequality and dispossession taking shape in a multiscalar fashion as people move either out of choice, force or need in relation to work and organizations. In all, the chapter focuses on the relevance of inequality for scholarship on people and difference that span social fields in work contexts that span geographies.

Through an examination of official and unofficial maps and atlases produced and used in Egypt in the twentieth century, this chapter provides a critical reading of the construction and the contestation of Egyptian national identity. Most research concerned with postindependence nation building, whether cartographic or not, has examined nation building at the scale of the state. Indeed, the state is so prevalent in our thinking and framing of national identities that it has often limited our understandings of other ways in which the world is divided, ordered, and imagined. Therefore, this chapter uses a multiscalar approach that moves among the supranational, national, and local scales of analysis to highlight how different geographic narratives at all these scales intersect to both support and at times contest an Egyptian national identity. My intention is not merely to change the scale of analysis but to consider the ways in which processes such as cartographic nation building operate at intersecting scales. Examining Egyptian cartography produced at multiple scales provides an opportunity to examine the Arab-Egyptian-Muslim national identity has dominated Egypt since the mid-twentieth century as well as the counter national narratives of Nubians and Copts.

This chapter discusses ritual interactions at the Middle Woodland site of Tunacunnhee (9Dd25) in Dade County, Georgia. Previous excavation and analysis demonstrates that Tunacunnhee was located in a strategic position for Middle Woodland exchange throughout the Southeast, and modern perspectives on leadership, landscape, and identity further illuminate these social interactions. This chapter presents evidence of ritual practices at Tunacunnhee and proposes a landscape model for ritual interactions at the site. Landscape approaches are not simply regional studies of settlement and exchange, but are rather detailed considerations of social possibilities and restrictions within particular geographical and temporal locations. Landscapes are also multiscalar and this study of Tunacunnhee’s ritual landscape examines social interaction at three different analytical scales: (1) the larger Hopewell region across Eastern North America, (2) local politics in the lower Tennessee River basin, and (3) individual identity as discerned through varying mortuary contexts.

Key themes of the volume are summarized in this chapter, which addresses the challenge of multiscalar analysis, the balance between structure and agency, and the impact of unresolved colonial legacies on the character, processes, and ethics of archaeological engagements with the public. In addition to reflecting upon the case studies presented in chapters 1-10, additional evidence from Northern Ireland, Great Britain, and Virginia is considered in light of the complicated relationship between colonial identities (and identity formation) with material culture, and the manner of its contemporary interpretation. Suggestions are made for re-framing archaeologies of comparative colonialism to ensure that both the violence and inequity of colonial encounters and the proactive manner in which all those caught in colonialism’s grasp enacted strategies to cope with its forces are acknowledged and critically considered.

The introduction contextualizes long history of North American intentional communities within what we assume to be fundamentally American visions and values. It introduces how social, economic, and literary movements inspired groups to seek alternatives to the mainstream's perceived flaws and injustices. The chapter introduces archaeology's disciplinary contributions to better understanding past communities and describes the multiscalar method of organizing archaeological views presented in subsequent chapters.

Physical events that transpire across many size scales require significant data compression for their successful handling. A popular remedy practiced within modern multiscalar methods breaks a descriptive task into sub-problems focused upon dominant behaviors that arise on different length scales. Each localized form of description employs the same language in different ways. This contextualization requires that these localized veins of description share data with one another in non-standard ways. We employ allied techniques in everyday life as well and philosophical confusions arise when the underlying strategic architecture is not properly recognized. Nine general morals concerning language usage are abstracted from this examination.

Any straightforward attempt to capture the interactive relationships between size scales within a complexly layered material such as a bar of steel encounters immediate descriptive obstacles sometimes called the “tyranny-of-scales problem.” These obstacles trace not only to the unmanageable number of descriptive parameters required for such a task but to the fact that the localized models that capture the material’s scale-centered behaviors most effectively are syntactically inconsistent with one another. The innovations of modern multiscalar modeling have surmounted these barriers by developing descriptive architectures that implement clever forms of “divide and conquer” tactics. The tremendous effectiveness of these innovations offers great insight into the workings of practical language in general.