Three decades after the publication of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s The Managed Heart, the processes of commodification of emotion she wrote about now reach into all areas of labor processes, extending even to private life and intimate relationships. The contributors to this volume take up her concepts to study the diversity of this economic intrusion into family, education, and nursing in the service sector as well as into corporate management. Aside from the powers and interests that force these developments, these essays argue, there are also productive uses and active resistances to them.   

How do policy debates work? How can interest groups and legislators influence political processes through the media? This book introduces discourse network analysis as a methodological toolbox for the study of policy debates. With this set of methods, political discourse is cast as a temporal network of actors and their statements in the media over time. In a case study, Philip Leifeld applies discourse network analysis to the policy debate on old-age security in Germany. Demonstrating that German pension politics was characterized by an increasing polarization of competing coalitions towards the end of the 1990s, Leifeld shows how structural breaks in the discourse network can explain major policy changes and a radical turn to privatization in 2001.

Policy Debates on Reprogenetics takes an in-depth look at recent public policy debates over stem cell research and therapeutic cloning in Great Britain and Germany in order to determine the effect of such debates on the progress of scientific knowledge. Svea Luise Herrmann argues that debates about government policy do not tend to lead to more societal and political control over scientific research; rather, the discussions, when framed as questions of ethics, allow societies to air anxieties without retarding or challenging scientific progress. As our understanding of genetics continues to grow, this volume will be a useful resource for scientists and policy makers alike.

Politics of Solidarity explores the transformation of public services in post-apartheid South Africa and the effects of privatization in three cities: Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni, and Cape Town. Drawing on extensive qualitative fieldwork, Carmen Ludwig sheds light on local conflicts on the provision of public services and on trade union strategies that cope with rising public-private partnerships. In the face of persistent social inequality and the rise of precarious work, Ludwig asks how trade unions can create solidarity in fragmented workforces and bridge the gap between permanent workers and those on the margins in the workplace and society. Politics of Solidarity offers insights into the changing world of municipal work, the struggles of precarious workers and more broadly, on the labor dynamics of contemporary South Africa.
 

Can Western modernity be analyzed and critiqued through the lens of enslavement and colonial history? As this volume reveals, such analysis is not only possible, it is essential to our understanding of contemporary race relations and society generally. Drawing from the fields of  postcolonial, decolonial, and black studies, this book assembles contributions from renowned scholars that offer timely and critical perspectives from a variety of disciplines, including history, sociology, political science, gender studies, cultural and literary studies, and philosophy.

Despite the understanding of scholars that masculinity, far from being a natural or stable concept, is in reality a social construction, the culture at large continues to privilege an idealized, coherent male point of view. The Privilege of Crisis draws on the work of authors such as H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad—as well as contemporary postcolonial writers such as J. M. Coetzee, Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith—to show how recurrent references to a "crisis" of masculinity or the decline of masculinity serve largely to demonstrate and support positions of male privilege.
 

Although digitalization or smart manufacturing might be considered a driving factor behind Procurement 4.0—the latest conceptualization of how modern companies procure goods and services—it is far too shortsighted to view Procurement 4.0 as simply a digitalized function. In Procurement 4.0, four leading experts on this revolutionary concept offer the first comprehensive framework to identify the interrelated opportunities and challenges it provides.

As the authors show, dynamic, interconnected value chains are key factors of sustainable business success, with procurement managed and steered by strategic purchasers in their new role as value chain managers. This evolving environment will be influenced by a variety of digitalization forces, including Industry 4.0, the Internet of Things, smart data and clouds, Enterprise 2.0, social media, and mobile computing. Integrating all network levels of procurement—from intra-company and inter-company relationships to global connectivity along value chains—and drawing on interviews with corporate heads of BMW, Lufthansa, Maersk, BP, and Allianz, the authors explore four dimensions of procurement that will address the business needs of the future: competing value chains, co-creation, leadership, and digital transformation.

It is time to leave capitalism behind. In Prosperity without Greed, Sahra Wagenknecht shows that we live in a system of economic feudalism that has nothing to do with a free market economy, where the innovations we require to solve myriad important societal problems are not forthcoming. How can it be, Wagenknecht asks, that technological developments financed by the taxpayer end up enriching private companies even if those companies’ activities violate public interests? Through clear analysis and concrete proposals, Wagenknecht suggestss new forms of ownership and sketches the outlines of an innovative and just economy that instead promotes and rewards talent, real performance, and start-ups with groundbreaking ideas.