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AAE 540/MHR765: Intellectual Property Rights, Innovation and Technology Syllabus

 

Ideas and innovation have become the most important resource in today's economy. Successful managers should know how to recognize, manage and generate technological innovation for sustained competitive advantage. This course uses economic concepts to illustrate the nature of technological innovation and how it transforms competition between firms and generates economic growth.

At home and abroad, freedom of expression remains one of the most fundamental and fragile of all human rights. Surveying conflicts and resolutions, challenges and triumphs, this course engages the ongoing struggles over freedom of speech and access to information in countries around the world. Throughout the course, we will examine different legal frameworks used to regulate public expression, including landmark cases in the United States, and the rhetorical power of language in both majority and dissenting court decisions. Much of discussion will be explicitly comparative, exploring the ways different countries approach rights and responsibilities surrounding public speech in democracies, dictatorships, and nations that lie somewhere in between. Weekly discussions will compare, for example, repression and resistance within countries such as Burma (Myanmar) and North Korea vs. Indonesia under Suharto and Singapore—states that lie at opposite poles of economic and technological development yet share, or have shared, an extraordinary, almost Orwellian, control over information flows within their borders. Simultaneously, the course will examine the assumed relationships between political liberalization and democratic reform, comparing challenges to democracy and civic engagement in countries with broad and well-established speech freedoms, such as the Philippines and the U.S., with those in countries whose governments reject or distrust Western models of political and social liberalism, such as China, Malaysia and Thailand. Of equal import, the course will examine the rhetoric emerging in current debates over the War on Terror, and the role of such rhetoric in shifting the boundaries of individual freedoms and journalistic rights, at home and abroad.

Syllabus

Educational Policy Studies 600: Global Studies: Themes, Theories, and Methods
Amy Stambach, Director, Global Studies; Professor, Educational Policy Studies & Anthropology

It is commonly observed that the world operates as a global system, stitched together by far-reaching trade protocols, governance covenants, and communication networks. Although this process of integration engenders dramatic opportunities for cooperation and development, it is also characterized by profound inequities and uncertainties that breed tensions and conflicts. From education to culture to economy to environment, the great issues of our time require close attention to the dynamic interactions among actors and stakeholders around the world. This course provides a small graduate seminar setting for an interdisciplinary survey of major approaches to the study of globalization, including critical inquiry into the use of the term. It aims to familiarize students with key theories, issues, debates, and methodological tools. Topics include global economy, environment, education policy, culture, media, development, labor, health, and science and technology.

Syllabus

Environmental Studies 402/General Business 765: Business and the Social Side of Sustainability
Thomas Eggert, Co-Director of the Business, Environment and Social Responsibility Program
 
Business exists within human society. Since it does, it is both influenced by societal problems (including environmental problems) and itself influences those problems. Many businesses are coming to the conclusion that it is in their best interest (meaning their bottom line can be improved) if they strategically respond to societal problems.  The environment is one of the societal problems that business is responding to. But, there is another larger area of societal problems that business is just now struggling to come to grips with. These are issues involving people, communities and social justice/human rights. Businesses are just in the beginning stages of thinking about what, if any, responsibilities they might have, and what benefits there might be to companies that start responding to these challenges.

The concept of social rights and responsibilities for the business community must take into account the unprecedented interdependence that now exists in the world. This class will highlight important innovations - both technical and social - occurring around the world as people and business organizations start to work together in unprecedented ways. We will look at the business response to sweatshops and the emergence of fair trade efforts. We will look at the role of business in community development, especially in developing countries. We will look at climate change as a social issue - who wins and loses - and we will look at business's response to the emergence of a new customer: one that lives on less than $3/day.

Syllabus


Environmental Studies/General Business 601: Systems Thinking and Sustainable Businesses

Systems Thinking and Sustainable Businesses was developed in response to student requests to create a course that talked about how to operationalize the ideas of corporate social and environmental responsibility. One of the course objectives is to "To foster awareness, sensitivity and literacy regarding global environmental and social change, including challenges such as population growth, persistent poverty, social disintegration, wealth distribution inequalities, environmental pollution, loss of species, political instability, etc., focusing especially on the roles of industry in relation to these challenges".

This class brings together Business School students with students from the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies (and other schools and programs on campus) to dialogue on the relevance of sustainability in a focused and constructive way. It has been organized to provide better insights into how sustainable development can be a part of most decisions that are made, whether at the individual lifestyle level or at the organizational level.

Syllabus


History 753: The Cold War as World Histories
Jeremi Suri, Professor of History

 

This is a graduate reading course designed to encourage and facilitate historical research across regions and methodological approaches. In this course we will treat the Cold War as both a /multicultural/ and a /multidimensional/ historical subject. This involves attention to the many diverse interactions among peoples, institutions, and cultures that pervaded the period. We will analyze the conjunctions and disjunctions between different historical voices: center and periphery, rich and poor, political and social.

The phrase “Cold War as World Histories” indicates that this course seeks to contribute to an emerging and creative scholarly conversation about internationalizing the study and teaching of history. We will define this endeavor broadly to include the following topics, among others: the international state system, world economic systems, decolonization, nationalist revolutions, domestic dissent, détente, human rights activism, and religious revivalism. In examining each of these topics we will rely on many analytical perspectives including, among others: great power diplomacy, imperialist expansion, social mobilization, the politics of memory, race, culture, and gender. “The Cold War as World Histories” situates all of these concerns in a global context that transcends the geographic boundaries of any particular nation-state or the details of any particular set of events. In approaching the Cold War, we will analyze the complex webs of causality that connect thoughts and actions in distant lands.

This course self-consciously crosses many traditional scholarly boundaries. The instructor has intentionally chosen a diverse group of students with different disciplinary, methodological, geographical, and personal points of view. Through intensive discussions and written assignments our collective community will encourage the exploration, analysis, and synthesis of divergent perspectives on the history of our contemporary world.

Syllabus


International Studies 606: Greening Business, Involving Consumers
Elizabeth Covington, Executive Director of the European Studies Alliance

In this course we will explore the complicated intersection between environmental legislation, business practice and consumer demand. The focus will be on the U.S. and the European Union, with particular emphasis upon Germany as a prime site of environmental and consumer activism. First, the course will explore how political ideology and historical context affect perceptions of the environment and consumption. Then the course will brief you on how Europeans and Americans have conceptualized the acts of purchasing and consumption as politicized behavior, since the very act of purchasing is an act of civic and cultural identity. We will also learn about the historical context of the relationship between individuals, social groups and national groups as purchasers and environmental polluters and/or activists. Our objective is to explore how globalization may be changing this politicization and policy from the individual through supranational levels. The second part of the course will be the development of a personal project, a case study on a junior manager in the business or public policy sector on environmental concerns.

This course provides an understanding of the role of international law in protecting the global environment, knowledge of existing international mechanisms and law in protecting different segments of the environment, an understanding of the inter-disciplinary nature of environmental protection, and a discussion on the impact on other areas such as economic development, poverty, socioeconomic rights and the role of sustainable development.

View Course Outline

Law 940: Chinese Law

 

This seminar is designed to give students an appreciation of the role of law in Chinese society, in the past, and today.  We will begin the seminar with an examination of law in traditional Chinese society, which constituted perhaps the world's most influential alternative to the Western legal tradition.  We then look briefly at past efforts to "modernize" Chinese law, during the Republican period before 1949, and during the influence of Soviet law after 1949.  The remainder of the semester will be spent on China's current efforts to establish a legal system, focusing on topics such as constitutional law and human rights, intellectual property law, environmental law, or corporate law.  The exact topics covered will depend upon students' interests.  Students will write papers, and will present those papers to the class during the last few sessions.  Grading will be on the basis of the papers and the presentations.

Syllabus

Public Affairs 854: Macroeconomic Policy and International Financial Regulation
Menzie Chinn, Professor of Public Affairs and Economics
 
This course surveys international macroeconomics, with special reference to international monetary policy and international financial market architecture. Topics include the structure of international financial markets; the role of central banks; exchange-rate systems; the determination of balance of payments and exchange rates; macroeconomics of open economies; policy analysis for open economies; policy coordination; and financial crises. The aim of this course is to provide an analytical background for those who plan to go into government service, international organizations and agencies, businesses involved in the global economy, nongovernmental organizations with international foci, and consulting firms analyzing international policy issues. Only those who are comfortable with algebraic and graphical analysis should enroll in this course. It requires sustained immersion in relevant economic theory, and does not present a primarily descriptive or historical approach. Enrollment limited to Public Affairs students or by permission of instructor.
 
Course Webpage 
Syllabus 

Public Affairs 866: Global Environmental Governance
Greg Nemet, Assistant Professor of Public Affairs and Environmental Studies

 

Heightened concern about environmental quality has increased demand for leaders and analysts who can navigate the political, economic, scientific, and technological dimensions of these issues to inform critical policy decisions in a multinational context. This class is designed to introduce students to the main concepts, frameworks, and actors involved in addressing environmental problems of international scale. The perspective taken here is that of a policy maker confronting decisions about the formation of international environmental policy and the management of it. A central theme of the course involves the challenges of addressing global problems while accommodating cross-national differences in interpretations of scientific risk and uncertainty.

Public Affairs 974: Regional Integration and International Governance: The EU in Comparative Perspective
Jonathan Zeitlin, Professor of Public Affairs, Sociology, History and Political Science

Regional integration is one of the most controversial and widely debated phenomena in international governance and political economy, with the rise of the European Union and the development of other regional organizations and trading blocs such as NAFTA, Mercosur, ASEAN, and the African Union. What are the drivers of regional integration and how extensive are such regionalization trends within the global economy? Do regional trade agreements threaten the multilateral trading system, or do they facilitate international economic and regulatory cooperation? Should regional organizations such as the EU or ASEAN be understood as shelters against globalization, challenges to US international hegemony, or building blocks of global governance? How do patterns of integration vary across different world regions, and what accounts for such variations? Are other regions likely to follow the European model, or are looser and more open forms of integration more probable and sustainable elsewhere?

View more about this course.

Syllabus

Sustainability Meets Entrepreneurship - A Business, Environment and Social Responsibility (BESR) Community Forum
 
This forum brings together graduate students from the university and community members to hear from experts on a topic that is both timely and important.  The first BESR Community Forum will focus on Clean Technology and will be called “Sustainability meets Entrepreneurship.
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Every other week, the BESR Community Forum presents an opportunity for community members from all segments of the community — businesses, state and local government, non-profit organizations, academia and others — to learn about and discuss some of the most pressing issues facing our world. Our goal is to facilitate positive, productive and insightful interactions among this broad constituency during this six-part series.


Undergraduate

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Agricultural and Applied Economics/Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies 344: The Environment and the Global Economy
Daniel W. Bromley, Anderson-Bascom Professor of Applied Economics

 

The global economy holds important implications for the global environment and for domestic economic conditions.  In this course we will explore topics concerning how humans impact nature, how we think of (and "construct") nature and the environment, how ethics and economics inform environmental policy, and how population growth affects levels of human consumption and therefore environmental quality.  In addition, we will explore how economic knowledge can be useful for understanding issues of biodiversity and sustainability, the global economy, international trade in timber and oil, air pollution (greenhouse gasses that cause global climate change), and pollution of international rivers.  The intent here is to help students understand how an economic perspective can provide important insights into the causes and solutions of various global environmental problems.

Course Website

Agricultural and Applied Economics 373 - Globalization, Development and Poverty
Brad Barham, Professor of Agricultural and Applied Economics
Ian Coxhead, Professor of Agriculture and Applied Economics

Agricultural and Applied Economics/Economics/International Business 462: Latin American Economic Development
Laura Schechter, Assistant Professor of Agricultural and Applied Economics

 

Economic theory and historical accounts are combined in an attempt to understand the various forces that have shaped economic development in Latin America. The first half of the course looks at historic and macroeconomic issues. We will discuss development policies ranging from the import-substituting industrialization policies of the 1950s-1970s, to the market-oriented reforms of the 1980s through the present. The second half of the course will look at microeconomic issues such as poverty, inequality, agriculture, education, and corruption. Not every topic fits neatly into the macro/micro breakdown of the course, and the macro discussions will be informed by micro fundamentals while the micro discussions will be informed by macro issues.

Syllabus

Communication Arts 470: The Rhetoric of Modern Democratic Revolutions
Mary E. McCoy, Visiting Professor of Communication Arts

This course will explore the ideas and rhetoric of the non-violent mass movements that have played such a defining role in the making of our modern world. From Mahatma Gandhi'’s discovery of non-violence as an effective weapon for overthrow of the world’s most powerful empire, the course will explore the imagery and symbolic actions shared by subsequent democratic movements on five continents for nearly a century. For Gandhi did not simply destroy an empire and build a nation; he created a powerful, enduring form of mass mobilization through speech and non-violent action that influenced and continues to influence succeeding movements. Thus, the course will trace, for example, links from Gandhi’s influence on Martin Luther King and the American Civil Rights Movement to the various “people power” revolutions that toppled repressive governments on both sides of the Iron Curtain, bringing an end to the Cold War. In pursuit of this inquiry, the course will examine a range of political discourse, from the soaring speeches of key leaders to pivotal acts of defiance, and will also allow students to study the role of different communications technologies in transforming publics and counter-publics within and outside democratic movements. Students will be encouraged to consider both the promise and perils of such technologies in relation to civic empowerment and political goals.

Syllabus

The forces of globalization and regionalisation/regionalism play a fundamental role in the reworking of the global space economy. This course will examine perspectives on the complex reconfiguration of global economic geographies. We will pay particular attention to the evolving debate about the nature and significance of 'globalization', and the role of economic, political and technological processes in shaping geographically specific development processes.

Syllabus

Geography 305: Introduction to the City
Kris Olds, Professor of Geography

 

This course is designed to provide a broad-based introduction to the city, and the process of urbanization. By broad-based I mean we will deal with economic, political, social, cultural dynamics, and at a range of scales (from the body to the global). This year, though, we will explore such dynamics through the lens of a conceptual and practical type of city –the ‘global city’.

Syllabus


Management and Human Resources 365: Managing Across Cultures: Learning from the Books and Streets of China
Alex Stajkovic, Professor of Organizational Behavior
Jessica Greenwald, Teaching Assistant

This course combines traditional classroom learning with a study trip to China.  The class will meet before the trip (Wednesdays 4-7pm) to discuss business and cultural aspects of China, with emphasis on management practices of Chinese enterprises. Students will complete final projects regarding lessons learned, and related presentations following the trip.

The study trip to China will entail visits to Beijing and Shanghai. Departure from Madison is planned tentatively for Thursday, March 12, 2009, returning Saturday, March 21, 2009. We will arrive in Beijing on Friday, have a cultural weekend, and do business (e.g., visit companies, meet with executives, attend lectures) on Monday and Tuesday. We will depart for Shanghai by train on Tuesday evening. The next three days will be used for business and cultural visits in Shanghai. Return to Madison is on Saturday. 

The cost of the trip will be around $3,000 per student, plus a variable cost (e.g., most food will be provided, personal entertainment, and other non-programmatic expenses) at students’ discretion. Professor Stajkovic has already obtained about $10,000 in support funds from CIBER that will be made fully available to students in class. We are hopeful that we will be able to bring the fixed cost down to about $2,500 per student through various sources of support.

Professor Stajkovic’s Website
Email Jessica Greenwald to express interest in this course.

Syllabus


Political Science 312: Politics of the World Economy.
Ed Friedman, Professor of Political Science

In Political Science, international political economy (IPE) is studied as part of the field of international relations.  IPE asks why certain polities become rich and powerful and others do not.  It explores regions, eras, the role of the state, politically influential interests, technology changes, institution building, and international organizations and other international actors.  With an eye to debates over and projections on where our globalized age is going, this course looks at IPE in historical, comparative and theoretical perspectives.

Syllabus

Political Science 313: Bargaining in the Global Economy
Neil Richardson, Professor of Political Science

Whether you love Harley-Davidsons or hate them, the fact is that this Milwaukee motorcycle manufacturer continues to exist because OTHER motorcycle firms -- and the U.S. and Japanese governments -- came to a negotiated agreement about Harley's survival.  This course explores such agreements because, after all, these arrangements determine much of what we see, hear, have, and do.  More specifically, we will examine some categories of decisions that represent what firms and states want of each other.  Because their goals diverge, neither firms nor states ordinarily get all of what they want.  Nevertheless, the sum of their conjoined activities constitutes the global political economy and very much shapes our lives.

The Harley example is one of may descriptive cases we will read this semester in order to gain a sense of what actually transpires in the fairly complicated -- and often obscure -- world of bargains struck in the global political economy.  And, to make better sense of the case studies, we will also ready and apply conceptual materials that provide understandings of both negotiating processes and the participants (both states and firms) involved in those negotiations.

The course focus is Chinese foreign policy in the post-Mao era.  The goal is to explore the causes and consequences of the economic rise of post-Mao China, and, to comprehend the implications of the rise of China as a world power.  Historical approaches, political science methodologies, and case studies of Chinese relations with different nations and issues (energy, environment, multilateralism, disease, war and peace) will be examined to clarify today’s political dynamics and more or less probable future prospects.

Syllabus


Rural Sociology 375; Institute for Environmental Studies 402; and Sociology 496 -
International Development, Environment, and Sustainability

For the past three decades, debates about international development had been increasingly focusing on environmental issues.  How can we sustain economic development, especially in poor, third world nations, protect the integrity of the global environment, and avoid pollution and ecosystem degradation, all at the same time?  On the face of it, this question seems to be harmless and progressive.  It mobilizes the international community in an effort to eradicate global problems of “underdevelopment” (poverty and hunger most prominently) while at the same time protecting the environment for our, as well as future generations.  However, upon further inquiry, this question does not seem as innocent as once believed.  If nothing else, it takes as unproblematic both assertions: that “economic development” articulates a promise for peace; and that “environmental vulnerability” constitutes a looming threat. Even though the question of how best to achieve developmental goals while preserving the environment will constitute the background for our readings and discussions, our aim will be to unpack these concepts and place them in their historical and political contexts, examine the images they invoke, and critique the assumptions they build upon. 

What is most striking is that development institutions, both national and international, had the tendency to simplify questions of development, environment and sustainability and produce universal solutions that are thought to fit all cases.  Among other things, this tendency ignores questions of identity along gender, class, and race lines; sidesteps different cultural and economic contexts; and, avoids discussion of power relations that are relevant to people’s experiences on the ground.

Readings in this course will come from a number of disciplines that grappled with these issues over the years—from environmental sociology, development studies, international relations, feminist theories of development, and theories of power.  On the substantive level, we will read and discuss cases that include, among others, issues of hunger, poverty, population change, biotechnology, genetically modified foods, the green revolution, and women’s positions in the development project.

Syllabus