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Bad News for Refugees
Greg Philo, Emma Briant, and Pauline Donald
Pluto Press, 2013

Bad News for Refugees analyses the political, economic and environmental contexts of migration and looks specifically at how refugees and asylum seekers have been stigmatised in political rhetoric and in media coverage.

Through forensic research it shows how hysterical and inaccurate media accounts act to legitimise political action which can have terrible consequences both on the lives of refugees and also on established migrant communities.

Based on new research by the renowned Glasgow Media Group, Bad News for Refugees is essential reading for those concerned with the negative effects of media on public understanding and for the safety of vulnerable groups and communities in our society.

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Baker & Botts in the Development of Modern Houston
By Kenneth J. Lipartito and Joseph A. Pratt
University of Texas Press, 1991

As counsel for Pennzoil's successful effort to recover billions of dollars in damages from Texaco over the acquisition of Getty Oil Company, the Baker & Botts law firm of Houston, Texas, achieved wide public recognition in the 1980s. But among its peers in the legal and corporate worlds, Baker & Botts has for more than a century held a preeminent position, handling the legal affairs of such blue-chip clients as the Southern Pacific Railroad, Houston Lighting & Power Company, Rice University, Texas Commerce Bank, and Tenneco. In this study, Kenneth J. Lipartito and Joseph A. Pratt chronicle the history of Baker & Botts, placing particular emphasis on the firm's role in Houston's economic development.

Founded in 1840, Baker & Botts literally grew up with Houston. The authors chart its evolution from a nineteenth-century regional firm that represented eastern-based corporations moving into Texas to a twentieth-century national firm with clients throughout the world. They honestly discuss the criticisms that Baker & Botts has faced as an advocate of big business. But they also identify the important impact that corporate law firms of this type have on business reorganization and government regulation. As the authors demonstrate in this case study, law firms throughout the twentieth century have helped to shape public policy in these critical areas.

Always prominent in the community, and with prominent connections (former Secretary of State James A. Baker III is the great-grandson of the original Baker), the Baker & Botts law firm belongs in any history of the development of Houston and the Southwest.

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The Bakumatsu Currency Crisis
Peter Frost
Harvard University Press, 1970

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Balance of Power
Central Banks and the Fate of Democracies
Éric Monnet
University of Chicago Press, 2024
Central banks now stand between societies and collapse, but are they still democratic?

Two decades of financial crises have dramatically expanded central banks’ powers. In 2008, and then again in 2020, unelected banking officials found themselves suddenly responsible for the public welfare—not just because it was necessary but based on an idea that their independence from political systems would insulate them from the whims of populism. Now, as international crises continue and the scope of monetary interventions grows in response, these bankers have become increasingly powerful.

In Balance of Power, economist and historian Éric Monnet charts the rise of central banks as the nominally independent—but unavoidably political—superpowers of modern societies. This trajectory, Monnet argues, is neither inevitable nor unstoppable. By embracing the political natures of today’s central banks, we can construct systems of accountability for how they interact with states and societies. Monnet shows that this effort will do more than guard against unjust power; it will put the banks to work for greater, more democratic ends.

With existential challenges looming and the work of the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank more important than ever, Balance of Power offers a trenchant case for what this century’s central banks can—and must—become.
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Balancing Act
Motherhood, Marriage, and Employment Among American Women
Daphne Spain
Russell Sage Foundation, 1996
"A wonderful compendium of everything you always wanted to know about trends in women's roles—both in and out of the home. It is a balanced and data-rich assessment of how far women have come and how far they still have to go. "—Isabelle Sawhill, Urban Institute "Based primarily on the 1990 population census, Balancing Act reports on the current situation of American women and temporal and cross-national comparisons. Meticulously and clearly presented, the information in this book highlights changing behaviors, such as the growing incidence of childbearing to older women, and unmarried women in general, and a higher ratio of women's earnings to men's. The authors' thoughtful analysis of these and other factors involved in women's fin de siècle 'balancing act' make this an indispensable reference book and valuable classroom resource." —Louise A. Tilly, Michael E. Gellert Professor of History and Sociology, The New School for Social Research In Balancing Act, authors Daphne Spain and Suzanne Bianchi draw upon multiple census and survey sources to detail the shifting conditions under which women manage their roles as mothers, wives, and breadwinners. They chronicle the progress made in education—where female college enrollment now exceeds that of males—and the workforce, where women have entered a wider variety of occupations and are staying on the job longer, even after becoming wives and mothers. But despite progress, lower-paying service and clerical positions remain predominantly female, and although the salary gap between men and women has shrunk, women are still paid less. As women continue to establish a greater presence outside the home, many have delayed marriage and motherhood. Marked jumps in divorce and out-of-wedlock childbirth have given rise to significant numbers of female-headed households. Married women who work contribute more significantly than ever to the financial well-being of their families, yet evidence shows that they continue to perform most household chores. Balancing Act focuses on how American women juggle the simultaneous demands of caregiving and wage earning, and compares their options to those of women in other countries. The United States is the only industrialized nation without policies to support working mothers and their families—most tellingly in the absence of subsidized childcare services. Many women are forced to work in less rewarding part-time or traditionally female jobs that allow easy exit and re-entry, and as a consequence poverty is the single greatest danger facing American women. As the authors show, the risk of poverty varies significantly by race and ethnicity, with African Americans—most of whose children live in mother-only families—the most adversely affected. This volume contributes to the national dialogue about family policy, welfare reform, and responsibility for children by highlighting the pivotal roles women play at the intersection of family and work.
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Balancing Nature and Commerce in Gateway Communities
Jim Howe, Ed McMahon, and Luther Propst; Sonoran/Rincon Institutes
Island Press, 1997

Increasing numbers of Americans are fleeing cities and suburbs for the small towns and open spaces that surround national and state parks, wildlife refuges, historic sites, and other public lands. With their scenic beauty and high quality of life, these "gateway communities" have become a magnet for those looking to escape the congestion and fast tempo of contemporary American society.

Yet without savvy planning, gateway communities could easily meet the same fate as the suburban communities that were the promised land of an earlier generation. This volume can help prevent that from happening.

The authors offer practical and proven lessons on how residents of gateway communities can protect their community's identity while stimulating a healthy economy and safeguarding nearby natural and historic resources. They describe economic development strategies, land-use planning processes, and conservation tools that communities from all over the country have found effective. Each strategy or process is explained with specific examples, and numerous profiles and case studies clearly demonstrate how different communities have coped with the challenges of growth and development. Among the cities profiled are Boulder, Colorado; Townsend and Pittman Center Tennessee; Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; Tyrrell County, North Carolina; Jackson Hole, Wyoming; Sanibel Island, Florida; Calvert County, Maryland; Tuscon, Arizona; and Mount Desert Island, Maine.

Balancing Nature and Commerce in Gateway Communities provides important lessons in how to preserve the character and integrity of communities and landscapes without sacrificing local economic well-being. It is an important resource for planners, developers, local officials, and concerned citizens working to retain the high quality of life and natural beauty of these cities and towns.

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Balancing the Economic Controls
A Review of the Economic Studies of the Employment Stabilization Research Institute, University of Minnesota
Russell Stevenson
University of Minnesota Press, 1935
Balancing the Economic Controls was first published in 1935. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.This very readable little book summarizes the economic aspects of the five-year program of research recently concluded by the Employment Stabilization Research Institute. The recommendations made, which are specific and practical, are based on the findings assembled in the course of scores of intensive studies.The authors discuss the competitive position of Minnesota and the Northwest, the prospects for new industries, what they believe to be the probable future development of the region, where government control of business might be applied beneficially, and what other methods would help remedy present difficulties. The program they outline might be undertaken, they believe, without serious disruption of American economic institutions and with good prospect of bringing about a larger measure of economic stability than has been achieved thus far.
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Banana Wars
Power, Production, and History in the Americas
Steve Striffler and Mark Moberg, eds.
Duke University Press, 2003
Over the past century, the banana industry has radically transformed Latin America and the Caribbean and become a major site of United States–Latin American interaction. Banana Wars is a history of the Americas told through the cultural, political, economic, and agricultural processes that brought bananas from the forests of Latin America and the Caribbean to the breakfast tables of the United States and Europe. The first book to examine these processes in all the western hemisphere regions where bananas are grown for sale abroad, Banana Wars advances the growing body of scholarship focusing on export commodities from historical and social scientific perspectives.

Bringing together the work of anthropologists, sociologists, economists, historians, and geographers, this collection reveals how the banana industry marshaled workers of differing nationalities, ethnicities, and languages and, in so doing, created unprecedented potential for conflict throughout Latin American and the Caribbean. The frequently abusive conditions that banana workers experienced, the contributors point out, gave rise to one of Latin America’s earliest and most militant labor movements. Responding to both the demands of workers’ organizations and the power of U.S. capital, Latin American governments were inevitably affected by banana production. Banana Wars explores how these governments sometimes asserted their sovereignty over foreign fruit companies, but more often became their willing accomplices. With several essays focusing on the operations of the extraordinarily powerful United Fruit Company, the collection also examines the strategies and reactions of the American and European corporations seeking to profit from the sale of bananas grown by people of different cultures working in varied agricultural and economic environments.

Contributors
Philippe Bourgois
Marcelo Bucheli
Dario Euraque
Cindy Forster
Lawrence Grossman
Mark Moberg
Laura T. Raynolds
Karla Slocum
John Soluri
Steve Striffler
Allen Wells

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The Bank War
Andrew Jackson, Nicholas Biddle, and the Fight for American Finance
Paul Kahan
Westholme Publishing, 2022
The Battle over the Charter of the Second Bank of the United States and Its Lasting Impact on the American Economy
Late one night in July 1832,Martin Van Buren rushed to the White House where he found an ailing President Andrew Jackson weakened but resolute. Thundering against his political antagonists, Jackson bellowed: “The Bank, Mr. Van Buren, is trying to kill me, but I shall kill it!”With those famous words, Jackson formally declared “war” against the Second Bank of the United States and its president Nicholas Biddle. The Bank of the United States, which held the majority of Federal monies, had been established as a means of centralizing and stabilizing American currency and the economy, particularly during the country’s vulnerable early years. Jackson and his allies viewed the bank as both elitist and a threat to states’ rights. Throughout his first term, Jackson had attacked the bank viciously but failed to take action against the institution. Congress’ decision to recharter the bank forced Jackson to either make good on his rhetoric and veto the recharter or sign the recharter bill and be condemned as a hypocrite.
In The Bank War: Andrew Jackson, Nicholas Biddle, and the Fight for American Finance, historian Paul Kahan explores one of the most important and dramatic events in American political and economic history, from the idea of centralized banking and the First Bank of the United States to Jackson’s triumph, the era of “free banking,” and the creation of the Federal Reserve System. Relying on a range of primary and secondary source material, the book also shows how the Bank War was a manifestation of the debates that were sparked at the Constitutional Convention—the role of the executive branch and the role of the federal government in American society—debates that endure to this day as philosophical differences that often divide the United States.
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Bankers and Empire
How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean
Peter James Hudson
University of Chicago Press, 2017
From the end of the nineteenth century until the onset of the Great Depression, Wall Street embarked on a stunning, unprecedented, and often bloody period of international expansion in the Caribbean. A host of financial entities sought to control banking, trade, and finance in the region. In the process, they not only trampled local sovereignty, grappled with domestic banking regulation, and backed US imperialism—but they also set the model for bad behavior by banks, visible still today. In Bankers and Empire, Peter James Hudson tells the provocative story of this period, taking a close look at both the institutions and individuals who defined this era of American capitalism in the West Indies. Whether in Wall Street minstrel shows or in dubious practices across the Caribbean, the behavior of the banks was deeply conditioned by bankers’ racial views and prejudices. Drawing deeply on a broad range of sources, Hudson reveals that the banks’ experimental practices and projects in the Caribbean often led to embarrassing failure, and, eventually, literal erasure from the archives.
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Banking on Reform
Political Parties and Central Bank Independence in the Industrial Democracies
William Bernhard
University of Michigan Press, 2002
Banking on Reform examines the political determinants of recent reforms to monetary policy institutions in the industrial democracies. With these reforms, political parties have sought to draw on the political credibility of an independent central bank to cope with electoral consequences of economic internalization and deindustrialization.
New Zealand and Italy made the initial efforts to grant their central banks independence. More recently, France, Spain, Britain, and Sweden have reformed their central banks' independence. Additionally, members of the European Union have implemented a single currency, with an independent European central bank to administer monetary policy.
Banking on Reform stresses the politics surrounding the choice of these institutions, specifically the motivations of political parties. Where intraparty conflicts have threatened the party's ability to hold office, politicians have adopted an independent central bank. Where political parties have been secluded from the political consequences of economic change, reform has been thwarted or delayed. The drive toward a single currency also reflects these political concerns. By delegating monetary policy to the European level, politicians in the member states removed a potentially divisive issue from the domestic political agenda, allowing parties to rebuild their support constructed on the basis of other issues. William T. Bernhard provides a variety of evidence to support his argument, such as in-depth case accounts of recent central bank reforms in Italy and Britain, the role of the German Bundesbank in the policy process, and the adoption of the single currency in Europe. Additionally, he utilizes quantitative and statistical tests to enhance his argument.
This book will appeal to political scientists, economists, and other social scientists interested in the political and institutional consequences of economic globalization.
William T. Bernhard is Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
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Banking on Slavery
Financing Southern Expansion in the Antebellum United States
Sharon Ann Murphy
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A sobering excavation of how deeply nineteenth-century American banks were entwined with the institution of slavery.

It’s now widely understood that the fullest expression of nineteenth-century American capitalism was found in the structures of chattel slavery. It’s also understood that almost every other institution and aspect of life then was at least entangled with—and often profited from—slavery’s perpetuation. Yet as Sharon Ann Murphy shows in her powerful and unprecedented book, the centrality of enslaved labor to banking in the antebellum United States is far greater than previously thought.
 
Banking on Slavery sheds light on precisely how the financial relationships between banks and slaveholders worked across the nineteenth-century South. Murphy argues that the rapid spread of slavery in the South during the 1820s and ’30s depended significantly upon southern banks’ willingness to financialize enslaved lives, with the use of enslaved individuals as loan collateral proving central to these financial relationships. She makes clear how southern banks were ready—and, in some cases, even eager—to alter time-honored banking practices to meet the needs of slaveholders.  In the end, many of these banks sacrificed themselves in their efforts to stabilize the slave economy. Murphy also details how banks and slaveholders transformed enslaved lives from physical bodies into abstract capital assets. Her book provides an essential examination of how our nation’s financial history is more intimately intertwined with the dehumanizing institution of slavery than scholars have previously thought.

 
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Banking on Stability
Japan and the Cross-Pacific Dynamics of International Financial Crisis Management
Saori N. Katada
University of Michigan Press, 2001
Saori N. Katada examines international financial stability in the aftermath of financial crises--and how such stability is maintained through collective action among major financial powers across the Pacific, the United States, and Japan. She explores the important role that financial support by the Japanese government played in solving the Latin American debt crisis in the 1980s, as well as its lack of support for the Mexican rescue in 1994--95 and its inconsistency during the recent Asian financial crisis.
Banking on Stability looks at Japan's willingness to cooperate financially with the United States--its most important trade partner--in cases where such compliance yields an improvement in relations. Katada argues that the Japanese government carefully weighs the benefits arising in international and domestic realms when taking on the role of collective crisis manager and concludes that Japan is no exception in having private gain as a central motivation during international financial crises.
Saori Katada is Assistant Professor, School of International Relations, University of Southern California.
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Banking on Words
The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance
Arjun Appadurai
University of Chicago Press, 2015
In this provocative look at one of the most important events of our time, renowned scholar Arjun Appadurai argues that the economic collapse of 2008—while indeed spurred on by greed, ignorance, weak regulation, and irresponsible risk-taking—was, ultimately, a failure of language. To prove this sophisticated point, he takes us into the world of derivative finance, which has become the core of contemporary trading and the primary target of blame for the collapse and all our subsequent woes. With incisive argumentation, he analyzes this challengingly technical world, drawing on thinkers such as J. L. Austin, Marcel Mauss, and Max Weber as theoretical guides to showcase the ways language—and particular failures in it—paved the way for ruin.
           
Appadurai moves in four steps through his analysis. In the first, he highlights the importance of derivatives in contemporary finance, isolating them as the core technical innovation that markets have produced. In the second, he shows that derivatives are essentially written contracts about the future prices of assets—they are, crucially, a promise. Drawing on Mauss’s The Gift and Austin’s theories on linguistic performatives, Appadurai, in his third step, shows how the derivative exploits the linguistic power of the promise through the special form that money takes in finance as the most abstract form of commodity value. Finally, he pinpoints one crucial feature of derivatives (as seen in the housing market especially): that they can make promises that other promises will be broken. He then details how this feature spread contagiously through the market, snowballing into the systemic liquidity crisis that we are all too familiar with now. 
           
With his characteristic clarity, Appadurai explains one of the most complicated—and yet absolutely central—aspects of our modern economy. He makes the critical link we have long needed to make: between the numerical force of money and the linguistic force of what we say we will do with it. 
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Bankrupt in America
A History of Debtors, Their Creditors, and the Law in the Twentieth Century
Mary Eschelbach Hansen and Bradley A. Hansen
University of Chicago Press, 2020
In 2005, more than two million Americans—six out of every 1,000 people—filed for bankruptcy. Though personal bankruptcy rates have since stabilized, bankruptcy remains an important tool for the relief of financially distressed households. In Bankrupt in America, Mary and Brad Hansen offer a vital perspective on the history of bankruptcy in America, beginning with the first lasting federal bankruptcy law enacted in 1898.

Interweaving careful legal history and rigorous economic analysis, Bankrupt in America is the first work to trace how bankruptcy was transformed from an intermittently used constitutional provision, to an indispensable tool for business, to a central element of the social safety net for ordinary Americans. To do this, the authors track federal bankruptcy law, as well as related state and federal laws, examining the interaction between changes in the laws and changes in how people in each state used the bankruptcy law. In this thorough investigation, Hansen and Hansen reach novel conclusions about the causes and consequences of bankruptcy, adding nuance to the discussion of the relationship between bankruptcy rates and economic performance.
 
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Bankruptcy and Debt Collection in Liberal Capitalism
Switzerland, 1800–1900
Mischa Suter
University of Michigan Press, 2021

Drawing on perspectives from anthropology and social theory, this book explores the quotidian routines of debt collection in nineteenth-century capitalism. It focuses on Switzerland, an exemplary case of liberal rule. Debt collection and bankruptcy relied on received practices until they were standardized in a Swiss federal law in 1889. The vast array of these practices was summarized by the idiomatic Swiss legal term “Rechtstrieb” (literally, “law drive”). Analyzing these forms of summary justice opens a window to the makeshift economies and the contested political imaginaries of nineteenth-century everyday life. Ultimately, the book advances an empirically grounded and theoretically informed history of quotidian legal practices in the everyday economy; it is an argument for studying capitalism from the bottom up.

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The Banks Did It
An Anatomy of the Financial Crisis
Neil Fligstein
Harvard University Press, 2021

A comprehensive account of the rise and fall of the mortgage-securitization industry, which explains the complex roots of the 2008 financial crisis.

More than a decade after the 2008 financial crisis plunged the world economy into recession, we still lack an adequate explanation for why it happened. Existing accounts identify a number of culprits—financial instruments, traders, regulators, capital flows—yet fail to grasp how the various puzzle pieces came together. The key, Neil Fligstein argues, is the convergence of major US banks on an identical business model: extracting money from the securitization of mortgages. But how, and why, did this convergence come about?

The Banks Did It carefully takes the reader through the development of a banking industry dependent on mortgage securitization. Fligstein documents how banks, with help from the government, created the market for mortgage securities. The largest banks—Countrywide Financial, Bear Stearns, Citibank, and Washington Mutual—soon came to participate in every aspect of this market. Each firm originated mortgages, issued mortgage-backed securities, sold those securities, and, in many cases, acted as their own best customers by purchasing the same securities. Entirely reliant on the throughput of mortgages, these firms were unable to alter course even when it became clear that the market had turned on them in the mid-2000s.

With the structural features of the banking industry in view, the rest of the story falls into place. Fligstein explains how the crisis was produced, where it spread, why regulators missed the warning signs, and how banks’ dependence on mortgage securitization resulted in predatory lending and securities fraud. An illuminating account of the transformation of the American financial system, The Banks Did It offers important lessons for anyone with a stake in avoiding the next crisis.

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The Banks We Deserve
Reclaiming Community Banking for a Just Economy
Oscar Perry Abello
Island Press, 2025
We’ve never done anything big in this country without little banks. Yet the number of community banks in the US has been steadily declining for decades, giving way to big banks that have little connection to the communities they claim to serve. The massive, unprecedented shift toward such a highly concentrated banking sector has weakened our ability to take action at a community level and leaves many people, especially those who have been historically marginalized, without access to capital.
 
In The Banks We Deserve, journalist Oscar Perry Abello argues that community banking has a crucial role to play in addressing urgent social challenges, from creating a more racially just economy to preparing for a changing climate. At their best, community banks unleash the agency and aspirations of the communities that establish them.
Abello challenges people working on racial justice, community development, or addressing climate change to start more community banks or credit unions as part of their work, while also calling for policies and regulatory reforms that will help tilt the landscape back in favor of community banking.

The Banks We Deserve tells the stories of new community banks — like Adelphi Bank, in Columbus, Ohio, the first new Black bank in 20 years; or Walden Mutual Bank in Concord, New Hampshire, the first new mutual bank since 1973 and the first chartered specifically to finance a more sustainable food system; or Climate First Bank, in St. Petersburg, Florida, which has grown exponentially since opening for business in 2021. He hopes these stories inspire others to take some of these same daunting-but-not-impossible steps.

For a community or industry that is being ignored by big banks, the idea of starting up a new bank or credit union rarely figures as an option. In The Banks We Deserve, Abello shows advocates, organizers, and innovators that it can be done, that it is being done, and describes a path to support more community banks and credit unions.
 
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The Barbaric Counter Revolution
Cause and Cure
By W. W. Rostow
University of Texas Press, 1983

In the 1980s, troubled Americans saw interest rates in the United States climb to an alltime high, unemployment grow to over 10 percent, the federal deficit reach near monumental proportions, and the world economy as a whole fall stagnant.

Why did a once booming world economy give way to stagflation? Economist W. W. Rostow finds the roots of the problem in the phenomenon he terms the Barbaric Counter-Revolution—the effort to wring inflation out of the economic system by the rigorous application of a restricted rate of increase in the money supply. This policy was launched by the Carter administration in October 1979, reinforced by President Reagan in mid 1980, and abandoned in August 1982. In the end, it provided the United States with no mechanism for rapid recovery that did not bring with it a return to high interest rates, resumed inflation, and, soon, another recession.

In what he terms a Civilized Synthesis, Rostow sets forth a series of new policies that would permit rapid, sustained growth with inflation under control. He argues that fiscal and monetary policy must be joined by an incomes policy that would gear the rate of increase of wages and salaries to the average rate of increase in productivity. He explores how this could be accomplished within the context of American politics and existing institutions. Finally, Rostow identifies four directions for investment that, together, would yield economic and social benefits.

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Barons
Money, Power, and the Corruption of America's Food Industry
Austin Frerick
Island Press, 2024
“In this eye-opening debut study, Frerick, an agricultural policy fellow at Yale University, reveals the ill-gained stranglehold that a handful of companies have on America’s food economy…It’s a disquieting critique of private monopolization of public necessities.” --Publishers Weekly, starred

Barons is the story of seven corporate titans, their rise to power, and the consequences for everyone else. Take Mike McCloskey, Chairman of Fair Oaks Farms. In a few short decades, he went from managing a modest dairy herd to running the Disneyland of agriculture, where school children ride trams through mechanized warehouses filled with tens of thousands of cows that never see the light of day. What was the key to his success? Hard work and exceptional business savvy? Maybe. But more than anything else, Mike benefitted from deregulation of the American food industry, a phenomenon that has consolidated wealth in the hands of select tycoons, and along the way, hollowed out the nation’s rural towns and local businesses.

Along with Mike McCloskey, readers will meet a secretive German family that took over the global coffee industry in less than a decade, relying on wealth traced back to the Nazis to gobble up countless independent roasters. They will discover how a small grain business transformed itself into an empire bigger than Koch Industries, with ample help from taxpayer dollars. And they will learn that in the food business, crime really does pay—especially when you can bribe and then double-cross the president of Brazil.

These, and the other stories in this book, are simply examples of the monopolies and ubiquitous corruption that today define American food. The tycoons profiled in these pages are hardly unique: many other companies have manipulated our lax laws and failed policies for their own benefit, to the detriment of our neighborhoods, livelihoods, and our democracy itself. Barons paints a stark portrait of the consequences of corporate consolidation, but it also shows we can choose a different path. A fair, healthy, and prosperous food industry is possible—if we take back power from the barons who have robbed us of it.
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Barons of Labor
The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era
Michael Kazin
University of Illinois Press, 1989
From the depression of the 1890s through World War I, construction tradesman held an important place in San Francisco's economic, political, and social life. Michael Kazin's award-winning study delves into how the city’s Building Trades Council (BTC) created, accumulated, used, and lost their power. He traces the rise of the BTC into a force that helped govern San Francisco, controlled its potential progress, and articulated an ideology that made sense of the changes sweeping the West and the country. Believing themselves the equals of officeholders and corporate managers, these working and retired craftsmen pursued and protected their own power while challenging conservatives and urban elites for the right to govern. What emerges is a long-overdue look at building trades as a force in labor history within the dramatic story of how the city's 25,000 building workers exercised power on the job site and within the halls of government, until the forces of reaction all but destroyed the BTC.
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Barriers to Reentry?
The Labor Market for Released Prisoners in Post-Industrial America
Shawn D. Bushway
Russell Sage Foundation, 2007
With the introduction of more aggressive policing, prosecution, and sentencing since the late 1970s, the number of Americans in prison has increased dramatically. While many have credited these "get tough" policies with lowering violent crime rates, we are only just beginning to understand the broader costs of mass incarceration. In Barriers to Reentry? experts on labor markets and the criminal justice system investigate how imprisonment affects ex-offenders' employment prospects, and how the challenge of finding work after prison affects the likelihood that they will break the law again and return to prison. The authors examine the intersection of imprisonment and employment from many vantage points, including employer surveys, interviews with former prisoners, and state data on prison employment programs and post-incarceration employment rates. Ex-prisoners face many obstacles to re-entering the job market—from employers' fears of negligent hiring lawsuits to the lost opportunities for acquiring work experience while incarcerated. In a study of former prisoners, Becky Pettit and Christopher Lyons find that employment among this group was actually higher immediately after their release than before they were incarcerated, but that over time their employment rate dropped to their pre-imprisonment levels. Exploring the demand side of the equation, Harry Holzer, Steven Raphael, and Michael Stoll report on their survey of employers in Los Angeles about the hiring of former criminals, in which they find strong evidence of pervasive hiring discrimination against ex-prisoners. Devah Pager finds similar evidence of employer discrimination in an experiment in which Milwaukee employers were presented with applications for otherwise comparable jobseekers, some of whom had criminal records and some of whom did not. Such findings are particularly troubling in light of research by Steven Raphael and David Weiman which shows that ex-criminals are more likely to violate parole if they are unemployed. In a concluding chapter, Bruce Western warns that prison is becoming the norm for too many inner-city minority males; by preventing access to the labor market, mass incarceration is exacerbating inequality. Western argues that, ultimately, the most successful policies are those that keep young men out of prison in the first place. Promoting social justice and reducing recidivism both demand greater efforts to reintegrate former prisoners into the workforce. Barriers to Reentry? cogently underscores one of the major social costs of incarceration, and builds a compelling case for rethinking the way our country rehabilitates criminals.
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Basic Income
A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy
Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght
Harvard University Press, 2017

“Powerful as well as highly engaging—a brilliant book.”
—Amartya Sen


A Times Higher Education Book of the Week

It may sound crazy to pay people whether or not they’re working or even looking for work. But the idea of providing an unconditional basic income to everyone, rich or poor, active or inactive, has long been advocated by such major thinkers as Thomas Paine, John Stuart Mill, and John Kenneth Galbraith. Now, with the traditional welfare state creaking under pressure, it has become one of the most widely debated social policy proposals in the world. Basic Income presents the most acute and fullest defense of this radical idea, and makes the case that it is our most realistic hope for addressing economic insecurity and social exclusion.

“They have set forth, clearly and comprehensively, what is probably the best case to be made today for this form of economic and social policy.”
—Benjamin M. Friedman, New York Review of Books

“A rigorous analysis of the many arguments for and against a universal basic income, offering a road map for future researchers.”
Wall Street Journal

“What Van Parijs and Vanderborght bring to this topic is a deep understanding, an enduring passion and a disarming optimism.”
—Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post

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Basic Income on the Agenda
Policy Objectives and Political Chances
Edited by Loek Groot and Robert-Jan van der Veen
Amsterdam University Press, 2000
Persisting unemployment, poverty and social exclusion, labour market flexibility, job insecurity and higher wage inequality, changing patterns of work and family life are among the factors that exert pressure on welfare states in Europe. This book explores the potential of an unconditional basic income, without means test or work requirement, to meet the challenges posed by the new social question, compared to policies of subsidized insertion in work. It also assesses the political chances of basic income in various European countries. These themes are highly relevant to policy-makers in the field of labour markets and social security, economists, political philosophers, and a social science audience in general.
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Basic Income
The Material Conditions of Freedom
Daniel Raventos
Pluto Press, 2007
Basic Income is a policy idea that could help us revolutionize the way we organize society. This book is the first proper guide to basic income-what it is, how we can organize it, and how it can benefit everyone,rich and poor alike.
Basic Income is simply the idea that everyone has a right to a minimal income. This is paid by the state out of taxation. Set at a subsistence level, it would take the place of unemployment and other benefits. This would bring profound social changes. Anyone could opt out of employment at any time. Those with few skills would no longer be forced to take up jobs with poor prospects, and employers offering McJobs would be compelled to offer better terms. And money wasted by the state in means testing and tracing benefit fraud is saved.
The campaign in favor of basic income is growing and governments are beginning to take notice. The is a clear,concise guide to the principles and practicalities of this revolutionaty idea.
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The Beaches Are Moving
The Drowning of America's Shoreline
Wallace Kaufman and Orrin H. Pilkey Jr.
Duke University Press, 1983

Our beaches are eroding, sinking, washing out right under our houses, hotels, bridges; vacation dreamlands become nightmare scenes of futile revetments, fills, groins, what have you—all thrown up in a frantic defense against the natural system. The romantic desire to live on the seashore is in doomed conflict with an age-old pattern of beach migration. Yet it need not be so. Conservationist Wallace Kaufman teams up with marine geologist Orrin H. Pilkey Jr., in an evaluation of America's beaches from coast to coast, giving sound advice on how to judge a safe beach development from a dangerous one and how to live at the shore sensibly and safely.

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Beaches, Ruins, Resorts
The Politics of Tourism in the Arab World
Waleed Hazbun
University of Minnesota Press, 2008

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Becoming a Mighty Voice
Daniel Cornfield
Russell Sage Foundation, 1989
American labor unions resemble private representative democracies, complete with formally constituted conventions and officer election procedures. Like other democratic institutions, unions have repeatedly experienced highly charged conflicts over the integration of ethnic minorities and women into leadership positions. In Becoming a Mighty Voice, Daniel B. Cornfield traces the 55-year history of the United Furniture Workers of America (UFWA), describing the emergence of new social groups into union leadership and the conditions that encouraged or inhibited those changes. This vivid case history explores leadership change during eras of union growth, stability, and decline, not simply during isolated episodes of factionalism. Cornfield demonstrates that despite the strong forces perpetuating existing union hierarchies, leadership turnover is just as likely as leadership stagnation. He also shows that factors external to the union may influence leadership change; periods of turnover in the UFWA leadership reflected employer efforts to find cheap, non-union labor, as well as union efforts to unionize workers. When unions are threatened by intensified conflict with employers and when entrenched high status groups within the union are obliged to recruit members of lower socioeconomic status, then new social groups are likely to be integrated into union leadership. Becoming a Mighty Voice develops a theory of leadership change that will be of interest to many engaged in the labor, civil rights, and women's movements as well as to sociologists or historians of work, gender, and race, and to students of political and organizational behavior.
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Becoming Transnational Youth Workers
Independent Mexican Teenage Migrants and Pathways of Survival and Social Mobility
Isabel Martinez
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Becoming Transnational Youth Workers contests mainstream notions of adolescence with its study of a previously under-documented cross-section of Mexican immigrant youth. Preceding the latest wave of Central American children and teenagers now fleeing violence in their homelands, Isabel Martinez examines a group of unaccompanied Mexican teenage minors who emigrated to New York City in the early 2000s. As one of the consequences of intractable poverty in their homeland, these emigrant youth exhibit levels of agency and competence not usually assigned to children and teenage minors, and disrupt mainstream notions of what practices are appropriate at their ages. Leaving school and family in Mexico and financially supporting not only themselves through their work in New York City, but also their families back home, these youths are independent teenage migrants who, upon migration, wish to assume or resume autonomy and agency rather than dependence. This book also explores community and family understandings about survival and social mobility in an era of extreme global economic inequality.
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Before and Beyond Divergence
The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe
Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and R. Bin Wong
Harvard University Press, 2011

China has reemerged as a powerhouse in the global economy, reviving a classic question in economic history: why did sustained economic growth arise in Europe rather than in China?

Many favor cultural and environmental explanations of the nineteenth-century economic divergence between Europe and the rest of the world. This book, the product of over twenty years of research, takes a sharply different tack. It argues that political differences which crystallized well before 1800 were responsible both for China’s early and more recent prosperity and for Europe’s difficulties after the fall of the Roman Empire and during early industrialization.

Rosenthal and Wong show that relative prices matter to how economies evolve; institutions can have a large effect on relative prices; and the spatial scale of polities can affect the choices of institutions in the long run. Their historical perspective on institutional change has surprising implications for understanding modern transformations in China and Europe and for future expectations. It also yields insights in comparative economic history, essential to any larger social science account of modern world history.

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Before Porn Was Legal
The Erotica Empire of Beate Uhse
Elizabeth Heineman
University of Chicago Press, 2011

Struggling to survive in post­–World War II Germany, Beate Uhse (1919–2001)—a former Luftwaffe pilot, war widow, and young mother—turned to selling goods on the black market. A self-penned guide to the rhythm method found eager buyers and started Uhse on her path to becoming the world’s largest erotica entrepreneur. Battling restrictive legislation, powerful churches, and conservative social mores, she built a mail-order business in the 1950s that sold condoms, sex aids, self-help books, and more. The following decades brought the world’s first erotica shop, the legalization of pornography, the expansion of her business into eastern Germany, and web-based commerce.

Uhse was only one of many erotica entrepreneurs who played a role in the social and sexual revolution accompanying Germany’s transition from Nazism to liberal democracy. Tracing the activities of entrepreneurs, customers, government officials, and citizen-activists, Before Porn Was Legal brings to light the profound social, legal, and cultural changes that attended the growth of the erotica sector. Heineman’s innovative readings of governmental and industry records, oral histories, and the erotica industry’s products uncover the roots of today’s sexual marketplace and reveal the indelible ways in which sexual expression and consumption have become intertwined.

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Behavioral and Distributional Effects of Environmental Policy
Edited by Carlo Carraro and Gilbert E. Metcalf
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Most people would agree that it makes sense to tax a company that pollutes in a way that directly reflects the amount of environmental and social damage it has done. Yet in practice, such taxes are fraught with difficulty and have far-reaching implications. A company facing a new tax may lay off workers, for example, exacerbating an unemployment problem. This volume focuses on such external issues and examines in detail the trade-offs involved in designing policies to deal with environmental problems. Reflecting the broad nature of the subject, the contributors include leading economists in the areas of public finance, industrial organization, and trade theory, as well as environmental economists. Integrating both theoretical and empirical methods, they examine environmental policy design as it relates to location decisions, compliance costs, administrative costs, effects on research and development, and international factor movements. Shedding light on an extraordinarily complex and important topic, this collection will be of interest to all those involved in designing effective environmental policy.
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Behavioral Public Finance
Edward J. McCaffery
Russell Sage Foundation, 2006
Behavioral economics questions the basic underpinnings of economic theory, showing that people often do not act consistently in their own self-interest when making economic decisions. While these findings have important theoretical implications, they also provide a new lens for examining public policies, such as taxation, public spending, and the provision of adequate pensions. How can people be encouraged to save adequately for retirement when evidence shows that they tend to spend their money as soon as they can? Would closer monitoring of income tax returns lead to more honest taxpayers or a more distrustful, uncooperative citizenry? Behavioral Public Finance, edited by Edward McCaffery and Joel Slemrod, applies the principles of behavioral economics to government's role in constructing economic and social policies of these kinds and suggests that programs crafted with rational participants in mind may require redesign. Behavioral Public Finance looks at several facets of economic life and asks how behavioral research can increase public welfare. Deborah A. Small, George Loewenstein, and Jeff Strnad note that public support for a tax often depends not only on who bears its burdens, but also on how the tax is framed. For example, people tend to prefer corporate taxes over sales taxes, even though the cost of both is eventually extracted from the consumer. James J. Choi, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian, and Andrew Metrick assess the impact of several different features of 401(k) plans on employee savings behavior. They find that when employees are automatically enrolled in a retirement savings plan, they overwhelmingly accept the status quo and continue participating, while employees without automatic enrollment typically take over a year to join the saving plan. Behavioral Public Finance also looks at taxpayer compliance. While the classic economic model suggests that the low rate of IRS audits means far fewer people should voluntarily pay their taxes than actually do, John Cullis, Philip Jones, and Alan Lewis present new research showing that many people do not underreport their incomes even when the probability of getting caught is a mere one percent. Human beings are not always rational, utility-maximizing economic agents. Behavioral economics has shown how human behavior departs from the assumptions made by generations of economists. Now, Behavioral Public Finance brings the insights of behavioral economics to analysis of policies that affect us all.
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Behavioral Simulation Methods in Tax Policy Analysis
Edited by Martin Feldstein
University of Chicago Press, 1983
These thirteen papers and accompanying commentaries are the first fruits of an ongoing research project that has concentrated on developing simulation models that incorporate the behavioral responses of individuals and businesses to alternative tax rules and rates and on expanding computational general equilibrium models that analyze the long-run effects of changes on the economy as a whole.

The principal focus of the project has been on the microsimulation of individual behavior. Thus, this volume includes studies of individual responses to an over reduction in tax rates and to changes in the highest tax rates; a study of alternative tax treatments of the family; and studies of such specific aspects of household behavior as tax treatment of home ownership, charitable contributions, and individual saving behavior. Microsimulation techniques are also used to estimate the effects of alternative policies on the long-run financial status of the social security program and to examine the effects of alternative tax rules on corporate investment and of foreign-source income on overseas investment.

The papers devoted to the development of general equilibrium simulation models to include an examination of the implications of international trade and capital flows, a study of the effects of capital taxation that uses a closed economy equilibrium model, and an examination of the effect of switching to an inflation-indexed tax system. In the volume's final paper, a life-cycle model in which individuals maximize lifetime utility subject to a lifetime budget constraint is used to simulate the effects of tax rules on personal savings.
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Behind the Development Banks
Washington Politics, World Poverty, and the Wealth of Nations
Sarah Babb
University of Chicago Press, 2009

The World Bank and other multilateral development banks (MDBs) carry out their mission to alleviate poverty and promote economic growth based on the advice of professional economists. But as Sarah Babb argues in Behind the Development Banks, these organizations have also been indelibly shaped by Washington politics—particularly by the legislative branch and its power of the purse.

            Tracing American influence on MDBs over three decades, this volume assesses increased congressional activism and the perpetual “selling” of banks to Congress by the executive branch. Babb contends that congressional reluctance to fund the MDBs has enhanced the influence of the United States on them by making credible America’s threat to abandon the banks if its policy preferences are not followed. At a time when the United States’ role in world affairs is being closely scrutinized, Behind the Development Banks will be necessary reading for anyone interested in how American politics helps determine the fate of developing countries.

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Being Generous
Theodore Roosevelt Malloch
Templeton Press, 2010

Through the ages, the world’s cultures and great religions have in profound, though different, ways sought to answer the big question: how should we live? Part of the answer has to do with how we ought to treat others, particularly those who are most in need. Ample evidence suggests that giving selflessly to others lies at the heart of what it means to be a thoughtful and moral human being. In Being Generous, author Theodore Roosevelt Malloch leads an exploration of this important concept of generous giving.

He begins by examining how generosity fits into the various spiritual traditions, philosophical schools, and economic systems. Further chapters illustrate how generosity need not always be about money, showing how it might also involve the sharing of time and talent. Elsewhere, Malloch explores the science behind generosity, looking, for example, at the relationship between various chemicals in the brain and generous behavior. Beyond the theory and the science of generosity, readers will also find a wealth of inspiration in a collection of profiles of past and present icons of generosity.

Being Generous concludes with a practical action plan that lays out concrete steps to guide readers toward lives of greater giving.

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Being Present
Commanding Attention at Work (and at Home) by Managing Your Social Presence
Georgetown University Press, 2023

Gold Medal – Networking, Social Media, and Communication – Axiom Business Book Awards, 2022JP Morgan Summer Reading List 2022

Survival strategies for communicating in a notification-saturated world

As our ability to pay attention in a world of distractions vanishes, it’s no wonder that our ability to be heard and understood—to convey our messages—is also threatened. Whether working with our teams and customers or communicating with our families and friends, it is increasingly difficult to break through the digital devices that get in the way of communication. And the ubiquity of digital devices means that we are often “multicommunicating,” participating in multiple conversations at once. As a result, our ability to be socially present with an audience requires an intentional approach.

This increased strain on attention has never been more clear than during the global pandemic, when our homes suddenly accommodated both work and family life. What are our options when facing professional communications at all hours? Do we ask for the technology to be put away at the dinner table? Establish other ground rules? What about using digital communications to our advantage—how can we facilitate information-sharing in the midst of a world where we are overwhelmed with content?

Drawing from fifteen years of research, interviews, and experience from teaching students and executives, Jeanine W. Turner offers a framework to navigate social presence at work and at home. By exploring four primary communication choices—budgeted, entitled, competitive, and invitational—Turner shows when and where to employ each strategy to most effectively allocate our attention and command the attention of others. Each chapter includes concrete strategies and concludes with reflection questions and exercises to help readers further explore these decisions in professional and personal relationships.

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Believing in Cleveland
Managing Decline in “The Best Location in the Nation”
J. Mark Souther
Temple University Press, 2017

Detractors have called it "The Mistake on the Lake." It was once America’s "Comeback City." According to author J. Mark Souther, Cleveland has long sought to defeat its perceived civic malaise. Believing in Cleveland chronicles how city leaders used imagery and rhetoric to combat and, at times, accommodate urban and economic decline.

Souther explores Cleveland's downtown revitalization efforts, its neighborhood renewal and restoration projects, and its fight against deindustrialization. He shows how the city reshaped its image when it was bolstered by sports team victories. But Cleveland was not always on the upswing. Souther places the city's history in the postwar context when the city and metropolitan area were divided by uneven growth. In the 1970s, the city-suburb division was wider than ever.

Believing in Cleveland recounts the long, difficult history of a city that entered the postwar period as America's sixth largest, then lost ground during a period of robust national growth. But rather than tell a tale of decline, Souther provides a fascinating story of resilience for what some folks called "The Best Location in the Nation."

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Bengal in Global Concept History
Culturalism in the Age of Capital
Andrew Sartori
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Today people all over the globe invoke the concept of culture to make sense of their world, their social interactions, and themselves. But how did the culture concept become so ubiquitous? In this ambitious study, Andrew Sartori closely examines the history of political and intellectual life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Bengal to show how the concept can take on a life of its own in different contexts.
            Sartori weaves the narrative of Bengal’s embrace of culturalism into a worldwide history of the concept, from its origins in eighteenth-century Germany, through its adoption in England in the early 1800s, to its appearance in distinct local guises across the non-Western world. The impetus for the concept’s dissemination was capitalism, Sartori argues, as its spread across the globe initiated the need to celebrate the local and the communal. Therefore, Sartori concludes, the use of the culture concept in non-Western sites was driven not by slavish imitation of colonizing powers, but by the same problems that repeatedly followed the advance of modern capitalism. This remarkable interdisciplinary study will be of significant interest to historians and anthropologists, as well as scholars of South Asia and colonialism.
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The Best of Technology Writing 2006
Brendan I. Koerner, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2006
“The essays collected in this book are sparkling, imaginative pieces of journalism that just happen to be about technology. People steeped in the world of AJAX or Massively Mulitplayer Online Games will find a lot to value here, but so will readers simply in search of good writing.”
—James Fallows, National Correspondent for Atlantic Monthly


“The human experience is being shaped by our symbiotic relationship to technology. What makes this collection wonderful is that it’s not about the technology, per se, but it’s about this changing human experience. I will look forward to it every year.”
—Po Bronson, author of What Should I Do With My Life?


The Best of Technology Writing 2006 brings together some of the most important, timely, and just plain readable writing in the fast-paced, high-stakes field of technology. The first annual collection to target this vibrant and versatile area, The Best of Technology Writing 2006 features innovative work from an unusually diverse array of writers: best-selling authors, noted academics, and indie journalists and bloggers. The culmination of an open, on-line nominating process, this collection covers topics ranging from jetpacks, to the ethics of genetically cloned pets, to the meaning of life in the information age. By turns epic and intimate, serious and playful, The Best of Technology Writing 2006 captures the vitality, importance, and complexity of technology today. Koerner

Featuring contributions from:
David A. Bell
David Bernstein
Mike Daisey
Joshua Davis
Jay Dixit
Daniel Engber
Dan Ferber
Steven Johnson
Steven Levy
Farhad Manjoo
Lisa Margonelli
David McNeill
Justin Mullins
Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah
Adam L. Penenberg
Daniel H. Pink
Evan Ratliff
Alex Ross
Jim Rossignol
Jesse Sunenblick
Edward Tenner
Clive Thompson
Joseph Turow
Richard Waters
Brendan I. Koerner is a contributing editor for Wired, a columnist for both New York Times and Slate, and a fellow at the New America Foundation. His first book will be published by Henry Holt & Company in 2008.

digitalculturebooks is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Visit the website at www.digitalculture.org.

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Best Practice
Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization in China
Kimberly Chong
Duke University Press, 2018
In Best Practice Kimberly Chong provides an ethnography of a global management consultancy that has been hired by Chinese companies, including Chinese state-owned enterprises. She shows how consulting emerges as a crucial site for considering how corporate organization, employee performance, business ethics, and labor have been transformed under financialization. To date financialization has been examined using top-down approaches that portray the rise of finance as a new logic of economic accumulation. Best Practice, by contrast, focuses on the everyday practices and narratives through which companies become financialized. Effective management consultants, Chong finds, incorporate local workplace norms and assert their expertise in the particular terms of China's national project of modernization, while at the same time framing their work in terms of global “best practices.” Providing insight into how global management consultancies refashion Chinese state-owned enterprises in preparation for stock market flotation, Chong demonstrates both the dynamic, fragmented character of financialization and the ways in which Chinese state capitalism enables this process.
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The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One
How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry
By William K. Black
University of Texas Press, 2013

In this expert insider’s account of the savings and loan debacle of the 1980s, William Black lays bare the strategies that corrupt CEOs and CFOs—in collusion with those who have regulatory oversight of their industries—use to defraud companies for their personal gain. Recounting the investigations he conducted as Director of Litigation for the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, Black fully reveals how Charles Keating and hundreds of other S&L owners took advantage of a weak regulatory environment to perpetrate accounting fraud on a massive scale. In the new afterword, he also authoritatively links the S&L crash to the business failures of 2008 and beyond, showing how CEOs then and now are using the same tactics to defeat regulatory restraints and commit the same types of destructive fraud.

Black uses the latest advances in criminology and economics to develop a theory of why “control fraud”—looting a company for personal profit—tends to occur in waves that make financial markets deeply inefficient. He also explains how to prevent such waves. Throughout the book, Black drives home the larger point that control fraud is a major, ongoing threat in business that requires active, independent regulators to contain it. His book is a wake-up call for everyone who believes that market forces alone will keep companies and their owners honest.

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Bet the Farm
The Dollars and Sense of Growing Food in America
Beth Hoffman
Island Press, 2021
“Eloquent and detailed…precise and well-thought-out...Read her book — and listen.” — Jane Smiley, The Washington Post.

Beth Hoffman was living the good life: she had a successful career as a journalist and professor, a comfortable home in San Francisco, and plenty of close friends and family. Yet in her late 40s, she and her husband decided to leave the big city and move to his family ranch in Iowa—all for the dream of becoming a farmer, to put into practice everything she had learned over decades of reporting on food and agriculture. There was just one problem: money. 

Half of America's two million farms made less than $300 in 2019. Between rising land costs, ever-more expensive equipment, the growing uncertainty of the climate, and few options for health care, farming today is a risky business. For many, simply staying afloat is a constant struggle.

Bet the Farm chronicles this struggle through Beth’s eyes as a beginning farmer. She must contend with her father-in-law, who is reluctant to hand over control of the land. Growing oats is good for the environment but ends up being very bad for the wallet. And finding somewhere, in the midst of COVID-19, to slaughter grass-finished beef is a nightmare. The couple also must balance the books, hoping that farming isn’t a romantic fantasy that takes every cent of their savings.  

Even with a decent nest egg and access to land, making ends meet at times seems impossible. And Beth knows full well that she is among the privileged. If Beth can’t make it, how can farmers who confront racism, lack access to land, or don’t have other jobs to fall back on? Bet the Farm is a first-hand account of the perils of farming today and a personal exploration of more just and sustainable ways of producing food.
 
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Bethlehem Steel
Builder and Arsenal of America
Kenneth Warren
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010
In the late 19th century, rails from Bethlehem Steel helped build the United States into the world's foremost economy. During the 1890s, Bethlehem became America's leading supplier of heavy armaments, and by 1914, it had pioneered new methods of structural steel manufacture that transformed urban skylines. Demand for its war materials during World War I provided the finance for Bethlehem to become the world's second-largest steel maker. As late as 1974, the company achieved record earnings of $342 million. But in the 1980s and 1990s, through wildly fluctuating times, losses outweighed gains, and Bethlehem struggled to downsize and reinvest in newer technologies. By 2001, in financial collapse, it reluctantly filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Two years later, International Steel Group acquired the company for $1.5 billion.

In Bethlehem Steel, Kenneth Warren presents an original and compelling history of a leading American company, examining the numerous factors contributing to the growth of this titan and those that eventually felled it—along with many of its competitors in the U.S. steel industry.
Warren considers the investment failures, indecision and slowness to abandon or restructure outdated “integrated” plants plaguing what had become an insular, inward-looking management group. Meanwhile competition increased from more economical “mini mills” at home and from new, technologically superior plants overseas, which drove world prices down, causing huge flows of imported steel into the United States.

Bethlehem Steel provides a fascinating case study in the transformation of a major industry from one of American dominance to one where America struggled to survive.
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Betsy Ann Plank
The Making of a Public Relations Icon
Karla K. Gower
University of Missouri Press, 2022
In 1973, Betsy Ann Plank became the first woman to chair the Public Relations Society of America in its twenty-five-year history. It was a tumultuous time to assume the national association’s leadership. Civil society seemed to be fraying at the edges, and trust in political institutions and corporations had plummeted in the aftermath of Watergate. Nevertheless, Plank, in her fearless style, took up the challenge head-on. From the start and throughout the span of her sixty-three-year career in public relations, she managed to overcome the very real barriers she faced due to gender-based discrimination in what was a male-dominated industry. As a PR practitioner, Plank served as executive vice president of Daniel J. Edelman, Inc., director of PR planning at AT&T, and assistant vice president of external affairs at Illinois Bell. Beyond her service in the professional realm, Plank grew her legacy by taking the time to mentor countless PR professionals, educators, and students. She saw this dissemination of knowledge as her greatest gift to the field of public relations. In this highly readable biography, Karla Gower explores Plank’s personal life and career, tracing her evolution from a low-level job in advertising through her contributions to the rise of the rapidly changing PR industry in the 1960s and the evolution of her personal devotion to the enhancement of public relations education.
 
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Better Bankers, Better Banks
Promoting Good Business through Contractual Commitment
Claire A. Hill and Richard W. Painter
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Taking financial risks is an essential part of what banks do, but there’s no clear sense of what constitutes responsible risk. Taking legal risks seems to have become part of what banks do as well. Since the financial crisis, Congress has passed copious amounts of legislation aimed at curbing banks’ risky behavior. Lawsuits against large banks have cost them billions. Yet bad behavior continues to plague the industry. Why isn’t there more change?
           
In Better Bankers, Better Banks, Claire A. Hill and Richard W. Painter look back at the history of banking and show how the current culture of bad behavior—dramatized by the corrupt, cocaine-snorting bankers of The Wolf of Wall Street—came to be. In the early 1980s, banks went from partnerships whose partners had personal liability to corporations whose managers had no such liability and could take risks with other people’s money. A major reason bankers remain resistant to change, Hill and Painter argue, is that while banks have been faced with large fines, penalties, and legal fees—which have exceeded one hundred billion dollars since the onset of the crisis—the banks (which really means the banks’shareholders) have paid them, not the bankers themselves. The problem also extends well beyond the pursuit of profit to the issue of how success is defined within the banking industry, where highly paid bankers clamor for status and clients may regard as inevitable bankers who prioritize their own self-interest. While many solutions have been proposed, Hill and Painter show that a successful transformation of banker behavior must begin with the bankers themselves. Bankers must be personally liable from their own assets for some portion of the bank’s losses from excessive risk-taking and illegal behavior. This would instill a culture that discourages such behavior and in turn influence the sorts of behavior society celebrates or condemns.

Despite many sensible proposals seeking to reign in excessive risk-taking, the continuing trajectory of scandals suggests that we’re far from ready to avert the next crisis. Better Bankers, Better Banks is a refreshing call for bankers to return to the idea that theirs is a noble profession.
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Better Environmental Decisions
Strategies for Governments, Businesses, and Communities
Edited by Ken Sexton, Alfred A. Marcus, K. William Easter, and Timothy D. Burkhardt
Island Press, 1999
Better Environmental Decisions reponds to the need for improved environmental decision making by bringing together leading scholars and practitioners to provide a comprehensive interdisciplinary introduction to the subject. Each chapter describes an important aspect of environmental decision making; identifies key issues, problems, and barriers; and recommends ways to improve both the process and the final result.Topics examined include: Congressional decisions about regulatory reform environmental benefit/cost analysisvaluing environmental impacts comparing risks and setting priorities strategic environmental management corporate accounting for environmental and social factors corporate responses to rules and regulations community decisions about environmental riskscivic environmentalismcommunity partnerships with industry and governmentThroughout, contributors focus on providing tools to make better decisions, and on presenting solutions to real-world problems.Better Environmental Decisions describes and analyzes the key decision making criteria of each of the stakeholders involved -- governments, businesses, and communities -- and offers a compendium of techniques necessary for achieving success. It will be a landmark reference and resource for anyone involved with environmental decisionmaking, including legislators, regulators, business and environmental managers, environmental advocates, community activists, reporters, researchers, educators, and students.
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Better Health Economics
An Introduction for Everyone
Tal Gross and Matthew J. Notowidigdo
University of Chicago Press, 2024

An ideal entry point into health economics for everyone from aspiring economists to healthcare professionals.

The economics of healthcare are messy. For most consumers, there’s little control over costs or services. Sometimes doctors are paid a lot; other times they aren’t paid at all. Insurance and drug companies are evil, except when they’re not. If economics is the study of market efficiency, how do we make sense of this?

Better Health Economics is a warts-and-all introduction to a field that is more exceptions than rules. Economists Tal Gross and Matthew J. Notowidigdo offer readers an accessible primer on the field’s essential concepts, a review of the latest research, and a framework for thinking about this increasingly imperfect market.

A love letter to a traditionally unlovable topic, Better Health Economics provides an ideal entry point for students in social science, business, public policy, and healthcare. It’s a reminder that healthcare may be a failed market—but it’s our failed market.

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Better Living through Economics
John J. Siegfried
Harvard University Press, 2010

Better Living Through Economics consists of twelve case studies that demonstrate how economic research has improved economic and social conditions over the past half century by influencing public policy decisions.

Economists were obviously instrumental in revising the consumer price index and in devising auctions for allocating spectrum rights to cell phone providers in the 1990s. But perhaps more surprisingly, economists built the foundation for eliminating the military draft in favor of an all-volunteer army in 1973, for passing the Earned Income Tax Credit in 1975, for deregulating airlines in 1978, for adopting the welfare-to-work reforms during the Clinton administration, and for implementing the Pension Reform Act of 2006 that allowed employers to automatically enroll employees in a 401(k). Other important policy changes resulting from economists’ research include a new approach to monetary policy that resulted in moderated economic fluctuations (at least until 2008!), the reduction of trade impediments that allows countries to better exploit their natural advantages, a revision of antitrust policy to focus on those market characteristics that affect competition, an improved method of placing new physicians in hospital residencies that is more likely to keep married couples in the same city, and the adoption of tradable emissions rights which has improved our environment at minimum cost.

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Bettering Humanomics
A New, and Old, Approach to Economic Science
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey's latest meticulous work examines how economics can become a more "human" science.

Economic historian Deirdre Nansen McCloskey has distinguished herself through her writing on the Great Enrichment and the betterment of the poor—not just materially but spiritually. In Bettering Humanomics she continues her intellectually playful yet rigorous analysis with a focus on humans rather than the institutions. Going against the grain of contemporary neo-institutional and behavioral economics which privilege observation over understanding, she asserts her vision of “humanomics,” which draws on the work of Bart Wilson, Vernon Smith, and most prominently, Adam Smith. She argues for an economics that uses a comprehensive understanding of human action beyond behaviorism.
 
McCloskey clearly articulates her points of contention with believers in “imperfections,” from Samuelson to Stiglitz, claiming that they have neglected scientific analysis in their haste to diagnose the ills of the system. In an engaging and erudite manner, she reaffirms the global successes of market-tested betterment and calls for empirical investigation that advances from material incentives to an awareness of the human within historical and ethical frameworks. Bettering Humanomics offers a critique of contemporary economics and a proposal for an economics as a better human science.
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Betting the Earth
How We Can Still Win the Biggest Gamble of all Time
John Charles Kunich
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2010

"Betting the Earth explores the uneasy parallels between our contemporary environmental challenges and our national fascination with gambling. How much should we bet on preserving biodiversity? Should we bet more on responding to climate change? where should we place each bet: on federal or state laws, on acquiring public or private preserves, on preventing environmental harms or saving places of special environmental significance? Like it or not, we must make such choices every day, and Betting the Earth helps us to understand how we do so."

Professor John Copeland Nagle, John N. Matthews Chair in Law, University of Notre Dame Law School

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Between Field and Cooking Pot
The Political Economy of Marketwomen in Peru, Revised Edition
By Florence E. Babb
University of Texas Press, 1998

From reviews of the first edition:

"Between Field and Cooking Pot offers details of the daily lives of marketwomen in the central Andean departmental capital of Huaraz.... A welcome addition to studies of women and international development, this book contains a wealth of firsthand material, collected through informal participant-observation as well as formal interviews and analysis of statistical data.... The book encourages us to imagine how the dynamic culture of marketwomen might intersect with the construction, representation, and effects of class and gender."
American Anthropologist

"The book has a clear and readable style, moving easily between vignettes of marketwomen's lives, descriptions of the markets themselves, and surveys of the theoretical literature. Babb's long, close involvement with the Huaraz markets is apparent. As someone who has spent a lot of time in Andean markets, I found the book pleasurable to read, because it recreated the experience of the marketplace so well."
American Ethnologist

This revised edition of Between Field and Cooking Pot offers an updated appraisal of what neoliberal politics and economics mean in the lives of marketwomen in the nineties, based on new fieldwork conducted in 1997. Babb also reflects on how recent currents in feminist and anthropological studies have caused her to rethink some aspects of Andean marketers in Peruvian culture and society.

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Between Women
Domestics and Their Employers
Judith Rollins
Temple University Press, 1987

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The Bewitchment of Silver
The Social Economy of Mining in Nineteenth-Century Peru
Jose R. Deustua
Ohio University Press, 1999
Mining was crucial for the development of nineteenth-century Peru. Silver mining in particular was a key to both the export sector and the creation of an internal market and national development. The Bewitchment of Silver is an inquiry into the impact of that mineral on a national economy in a country at the periphery of nineteenth-century capitalism.

José Deustua argues that developing countries must be understood in terms of achieving domestic development as well as in their role in generating foreign exchange and in linking themselves to the world economy. Focusing on various sectors of Peru’s mining production, the mines, owners and mine workers, the transportation networks and the use of muleteers, this study is also concerned with market-building and domestic development in nineteenth-century Latin America.
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Beyond 40%
Record-Setting Recycling And Composting Programs
Institute for Local Self-Reliance
Island Press, 1991

Beyond 40% is a practical guide for communities trying to solve their solid waste disposal problems.


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Beyond College For All
Career Paths for the Forgotten Half
James E. Rosenbaum
Russell Sage Foundation, 2001
In a society where everyone is supposed to go to college, the problems facing high school graduates who do not continue their education are often forgotten. Many cannot find jobs, and those who do are often stuck in low-wage, dead-end positions. Meanwhile employers complain that high school graduates lack the necessary skills for today's workplace. Beyond College for All focuses on this crisis in the American labor market. Around the world, author James E. Rosenbaum finds, employers view high school graduates as valuable workers. Why not here? Rosenbaum reports on new studies of the interaction between employers and high schools in the United States. He concludes that each fails to communicate its needs to the other, leading to a predictable array of problems for young people in the years after graduation. High schools caught up in the college-for-all myth, provide little job advice or preparation, leading students to make unrealistic plans and hampering both students who do not go to college and those who start college but do not finish. Employers say they care about academic skills, but then do not consider grades when deciding whom to hire. Faced with few incentives to achieve, many students lapse into precisely the kinds of habits employers deplore, doing as little as possible in high school and developing poor attitudes. Rosenbaum contrasts the situation in the United States with that of two other industrialized nations-Japan and Germany-which have formal systems for aiding young people who are looking for employment. Virtually all Japanese high school graduates obtain work, and in Germany, eighteen-year-olds routinely hold responsible jobs. While the American system lacks such formal linkages, Rosenbaum uncovers an encouraging hidden system that helps many high school graduates find work. He shows that some American teachers, particularly vocational teachers, create informal networks with employers to guide students into the labor market. Enterprising employers have figures out how to use these networks to meet their labor needs, while students themselves can take steps to increase their ability to land desirable jobs. Beyond College for All suggests new policies based on such practices. Rosenbaum presents a compelling case that the problems faced by American high school graduates and employers can be solved if young people, employers, and high schools build upon existing informal networks to create formal paths for students to enter the world of work. A Volume in the American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology
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Beyond Debt
Islamic Experiments in Global Finance
Daromir Rudnyckyj
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Recent economic crises have made the centrality of debt, and the instability it creates, increasingly apparent. This realization has led to cries for change—yet there is little popular awareness of possible alternatives. 
 
Beyond Debt describes efforts to create a transnational economy free of debt. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Malaysia, Daromir Rudnyckyj illustrates how the state, led by the central bank, seeks to make the country’s capital Kuala Lumpur “the New York of the Muslim world”—the central node of global financial activity conducted in accordance with Islam. Rudnyckyj shows how Islamic financial experts have undertaken ambitious experiments to create more stable economies and stronger social solidarities by facilitating risk- and profit-sharing, enhanced entrepreneurial skills, and more collaborative economic action. Building on scholarship that reveals the impact of financial devices on human activity, he illustrates how Islamic finance is deployed to fashion subjects who are at once more pious Muslims and more ambitious entrepreneurs. In so doing, Rudnyckyj shows how experts seek to create a new “geoeconomics”—a global Islamic alternative to the conventional financial network centered on New York, London, and Tokyo. A groundbreaking analysis of a timely subject, Beyond Debt tells the captivating story of efforts to re-center international finance in an emergent Islamic global city and, ultimately, to challenge the very foundations of conventional finance.  
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Beyond Economic Man
A New Foundation for Microeconomics
Harvey Leibenstein
Harvard University Press

Harvey Leibenstein has written a major new book in microeconomic theory. It is a sophisticated reorientation of microtheory that breaks away from the conventional, highly refined neoclassical theory, which in turn is in the direct line of descent from Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations (1776). The author accomplishes this feat by introducing modern psychological concepts to microtheory, by using individuals instead of collections of individuals as his basic units of study, and by suggesting that relating the theory to the concept of effort (an X-efficiency factor) will provide the most significant results.

His innovative central variable, effort, is an X factor, he reminds us, because of its relatively unknown character in affecting output. Basically this leads to a new mode of thinking about economic problems in which the optimizing assumption of standard theory becomes a special extreme case.

The X-efficiency factors—motivation, effort, and so on—allow for a restatement of microtheory. and for new applications and new conclusions: (1) businesses do not minimize costs or maximize profits; (2) actual productivity is very far from optimal even under conditions that approximate competition; (3) current modes of regulating monopolistic industries are apt to be inefficient at the expense of the consumer.

Lebenstein’s new theory also has practical applications for the problems faced by management of businesses in the private or public sector, and in the fiscal affairs of the nation. When the theory is applied to inflation — one salient and timely example — it leads to results implying that inflation may be a cause of unemployment rather than an influence that reduces unemployment.

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Beyond Equality
Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872
David Montgomery
University of Illinois Press, 1981
"For anyone who believes that there was no important labor movement before Roosevelt, or before Gompers, or before the Knights of Labor, this well-documented work should prove a shocker. And for those who look to the past for enlightenment to guide us through our troubled tomorrows, this book is a reservoir of historic information and insights." -- New Leader
"Beyond Equality is a masterpiece. . . . A book of bold and brilliant originality, it is now shaping the perspective of a new generation of graduate students." -- David Brion Davis, author of The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture
 
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Beyond Individualism
Michael J. Piore
Harvard University Press, 1995

The Reagan and Bush years have left us with a troublesome dilemma: how to balance our budget deficit against our social deficit. This book takes up the urgent question of how, in a time of economic crisis and constraint, we can meet the pent-up demand for spending on our nation’s neglected poor, infirm, and disadvantaged, old and young. Michael Piore’s ambitious response is to develop a new social theory that balances individual preferences against the claims and responsibilities of the community. By explaining the role of groups in economic and social life, this theory makes sense of a host of perplexing social phenomena and policy issues, from equal employment opportunity to international competitiveness to the decline of organized labor, from multicultural education to health insurance to the underclass.

Piore traces our difficulties in addressing these issues to the limits of liberal social theory, particularly its sharp distinctions between individuality and community. He offers an alternative view of individuality as emerging through the discussions and debates conducted among a community’s members. These discussions, Piore suggests, have turned inward, away from the borderlands where social groups and economic organizations meet—and therein lies the crux of some of the country’s deepest political and economic problems. His book points beyond the liberal conception of politics as a negotiation among competing interests and of policymaking as technical decisionmaking. Instead, it prescribes a politics focused on the process of discussion and debate itself, a politics that enlarges the borderlands by broadening the range of people who talk to one another and the range of topics they address.

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Beyond Machiavelli
Tools for Coping with Conflict
Roger Fisher, Elizabeth Kopelman, and Andrea Kupfer Schneider
Harvard University Press, 1994

Conflict is a growth industry, as a glance at the daily paper or the nightly news tells us. Trade wars, global warming, ethnic strife, refugee crises--as the world draws closer together on a thousand fronts, trouble erupts, clashes occur, and new problems arise. What's wrong, and what can be done about it? This cogent book offers a clear approach for dealing with conflicting interests of any kind.

Roger Fisher, the world-renowned master of negotiation, with two of his leading colleagues--Elizabeth Kopelman and Andrea Kupfer Schneider--provides a step-by-step process for dealing with the persistent and complex disputes that mark our changing, often dangerous world. Instead of simply asking why things work--or don't--the authors ask: how can we affect the way things work? They break conflicts into manageable components and advance a process for problemsolving. Arguing that we need to move beyond oneshot "solutions" toward a constructive way of dealing with differences, they lay out tools for conflict analysis and practical applications for those tools in the international arena.

The authors also show that tactics which successfully influence an adversary are equally applicable to the task of persuading an employer, a community official, or a business associate. Originally drafted as a handbook for the diplomats and senior officials advised by Fisher and his colleagues, this succinct, lucid, and effective book is the primer about the new paradigm in conflict management.

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Beyond Money
A Postcapitalist Strategy
Anitra Nelson
Pluto Press, 2022
'A fascinating portal into arguments about why we need to get beyond money' - Harry Cleaver

What would a world without money look like? This book is a lively thought experiment that deepens our understanding of how money is the driver of political power, environmental destruction and social inequality today, arguing that it has to be abolished rather than repurposed to achieve a postcapitalist future.

Grounded in historical debates about money, Anitra Nelson draws on a spectrum of political and economic thought and activism, including feminism, ecoanarchism, degrowth, permaculture, autonomism, Marxism and ecosocialism. Looking to Indigenous rights activism and the defense of commons, an international network of activists engaged in a fight for a money-free society emerges.

Beyond Money shows that, by organizing around post-money versions of the future, activists have a hope of creating a world that embodies their radical values and visions.
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Beyond Nationalization
The Labor Problems of British Coal
George B. Baldwin
Harvard University Press

This book is an interim report on how the human problems of the British coal industry are handled under nationalization—one of the classic experiments in governmental control of a great industry. The book makes clear why the future progress of the industry will depend on the solution of specific labor problems regardless of the system of ownership or which political party may control the government or the Coal Board.

The main body of the book consists of case studies of nine key problems: union structure, collective bargaining, joint consultation, absenteeism, labor supply, wage structure, methods of wage payment, labor’s attitudes toward technological change, and the relocation of labor in the Scottish coalfield. The exploration of these problems is based on many pit visits, attendance at union meetings and conventions, innumerable discussions with union and Coal Board officials at all levels, and wide familiarity with the extensive literature on the industry. As a result of the extensive amount of field work done by the author, the book contains much new material not published elsewhere.

Of particular interest are the detailed, realistic accounts of mining operations in a typical British pit, and the description and analysis of incentive wage systems and the effect on these of technological change. The analysis of handling union recognition, the problem of break-away groups, and provisions for union security are treated with detail not otherwise available. The book shows the impact of nationalization upon the structure and operation of the National Union of Mineworkers and the adjustments in management of the coal pits. Explicit comparisons between British and American labor relations practices should interest students in both countries.

For students of British labor relations or coal industry specialists, this book will be a valuable reference, and it will be of special interest to anyone investigating the claim of the socialists that they could make a unique contribution to the solution of labor problems.

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Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism, and Neoinstitutionalism in Economics
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
University of Chicago Press, 2022
A penetrating analysis from one of the defining voices of contemporary economics.

In Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism, and Neoinstitutionalism in Economics, Deirdre Nansen McCloskey zeroes in on the authoritarian cast of recent economics, arguing for a re-focusing on the liberated human. The behaviorist positivism fashionable in the field since the 1930s treats people from the outside. It yielded in Williamson and North a manipulative neo-institutionalism. McCloskey argues that institutions as causes are mainly temporary and intermediate, not ultimate. They are human-made, depending on words, myth, ethics, ideology, history, identity, professionalism, gossip, movies, what your mother taught you.  Humans create conversations as they go, in the economy as in the rest of life.

In engaging and erudite prose, McCloskey exhibits in detail the scientific failures of neo-institutionalism. She proposes a “humanomics,” an economics with the humans left in.  Humanomics keeps theory, quantification, experiment, mathematics, econometrics, though insisting on more true rigor than is usual. It adds what can be learned about the economy from history, philosophy, literature, and all the sciences of humans. McCloskey reaffirms the durability of “market-tested innovation” against the imagined imperfections to be corrected by a perfect government. With her trademark zeal and incisive wit, she rebuilds the foundations of economics.
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Beyond Regimes
China and India Compared
Prasenjit Duara
Harvard University Press, 2018

For many years, China and India have been powerfully shaped by both transnational and subnational circulatory forces. This edited volume explores these local and global influences as they play out in the contemporary era. The analysis focuses on four intersecting topics: labor relations; legal reform and rights protest; public goods provision; and transnational migration and investment. The eight substantive chapters and introduction share a common perspective in arguing that distinctions in regime type (“democracy” versus “dictatorship”) alone offer little insight into critical differences and similarities between these Asian giants in terms of either policies or performance. A wide variety of subnational and transnational actors, from municipal governments to international organizations, and from local NGO activists to a far-flung diaspora, have been—and will continue to be—decisive.

The authors approach China and India through a strategy of “convergent comparison,” in which they investigate temporal and spatial parallels at various critical junctures, at various levels of the political system, and both inside and outside the territorial confines of the nation-state. The intensified globalization of recent decades only heightens the need to view state initiatives against such a wider canvas.

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Beyond the Boycott
Labor Rights, Human Rights, and Transnational Activism
Gay W. Seidman
Russell Sage Foundation, 2007
As the world economy becomes increasingly integrated, companies can shift production to wherever wages are lowest and unions weakest. How can workers defend their rights in an era of mobile capital? With national governments forced to compete for foreign investment by rolling back legal protections for workers, fair trade advocates are enlisting consumers to put market pressure on companies to treat their workers fairly. In Beyond the Boycott, sociologist Gay Seidman asks whether this non-governmental approach can reverse the "race to the bottom" in global labor standards. Beyond the Boycott examines three campaigns in which activists successfully used the threat of a consumer boycott to pressure companies to accept voluntary codes of conduct and independent monitoring of  work sites. The voluntary Sullivan Code required American corporations operating in apartheid-era South Africa to improve treatment of their workers;  in India, the Rugmark inspection team provides 'social labels' for  handknotted carpets made without child labor; and in Guatemala,  COVERCO monitors conditions in factories producing clothing under contract for major American brands. Seidman compares these cases to explore the ingredients of successful campaigns, as well as the inherent limitations facing voluntary monitoring schemes. Despite activists' emphasis on educating individual consumers to support ethical companies, Seidman finds that, in practice, they have been most successful when they mobilized institutions—such as universities, churches, and shareholder organizations. Moreover, although activists tend to dismiss states' capabilities, all three cases involved governmental threats of trade sanctions against companies and countries with poor labor records. Finally, Seidman  points to an intractable difficulty of independent workplace monitoring: since consumers rarely distinguish between monitoring schemes and labels, companies can hand pick monitoring organizations, selecting those with the lowest standards for working conditions and the least aggressive inspections. Transnational consumer movements can increase the bargaining power of the global workforce, Seidman argues, but they cannot replace national governments or local campaigns to expand the meaning of citizenship. As trade and capital move across borders in growing volume and with greater speed, civil society and human rights movements are also becoming more global. Highly original and thought-provoking, Beyond the Boycott vividly depicts the contemporary movement to humanize globalization—its present and its possible future. A Volume in the American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology
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Beyond the Land Itself
Views of Nature in Canada and the United States
Marcia B. Kline
Harvard University Press, 1970
Marcia Kline's work, which inaugurates a new series of student essays sponsored by the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature, utilizes illustrations from both fictional and nonfictional writing of the mid-nineteenth century to contrast the views of nature held in the United States and Canada during that period. Her conclusions note that while Americans romanticized their West, Canadians responded in terror to the natural world.
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Beyond the Numbers
A Reader on Population, Consumption and the Environment
Edited by Laurie Ann Mazur; Foreword by Timothy Wirth
Island Press, 1994

Beyond the Numbers presents a thought-provoking series of essays by leading authorities on issues of population and consumption. The essays both define the poles of debate and explore common ground beyond the polarized rhetoric.

Specific chapters consider each of the broad topics addressed at the International Conference on Population and Development held in September 1994 in Cairo, Egypt. The essays are supplemented by sidebars and short articles featuring more-impassioned voices that highlight issues of interest not fully explored in the overviews.

As well as providing a sense of the difficulties involved in dealing with these issues, the essays make clear that constructive action is possible.

Topics covered include:

  • the interrelationships between population, economic growth, consumption, and development
  • the history of population and family planning efforts
  • gender equality and the empowerment of women
  • reproductive rights, reproductive health, family planning, health and mortality
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Beyond the Typewriter
Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modern American Office Work, 1900-1930
Sharon Hartman Strom
University of Illinois Press, 1992
In the early twentieth century, office jobs allowed increasing numbers of women a new option for careers. Sharon Hartman Strom's detailed account of early office working conditions and practices draws on archival and anecdotal data to analyze women office workers' ambitions. She also explores how the influences of scientific management, personnel management, and secondary vocational education affected office workplaces and hierarchies.
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Beyond the World Bank Agenda
An Institutional Approach to Development
Howard Stein
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Despite massive investment of money and research aimed at ameliorating third-world poverty, the development strategies of the international financial institutions over the past few decades have been a profound failure. Under the tutelage of the World Bank, developing countries have experienced lower growth and rising inequality compared to previous periods. In Beyond the World Bank Agenda, Howard Stein argues that the controversial institution is plagued by a myopic, neoclassical mindset that wrongly focuses on individual rationality and downplays the social and political contexts that can either facilitate or impede development.
            Drawing on the examples of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and transitional European economies, this revolutionary volume proposes an alternative vision of institutional development with chapter-length applications to finance, state formation, and health care to provide a holistic, contextualized solution to the problems of developing nations. Beyond the World Bank Agenda will be essential reading for anyone concerned with forging a new strategy for sustainable development. 
 

 
 
 
 
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Beyond Winning
Negotiating to Create Value in Deals and Disputes
Robert H. Mnookin, Scott R. Peppet, and Andrew S. Tulumello
Harvard University Press, 2004

Conflict is inevitable, in both deals and disputes. Yet when clients call in the lawyers to haggle over who gets how much of the pie, traditional hard-bargaining tactics can lead to ruin. Too often, deals blow up, cases don’t settle, relationships fall apart, justice is delayed. Beyond Winning charts a way out of our current crisis of confidence in the legal system. It offers a fresh look at negotiation, aimed at helping lawyers turn disputes into deals, and deals into better deals, through practical, tough-minded problem-solving techniques.

In this step-by-step guide to conflict resolution, the authors describe the many obstacles that can derail a legal negotiation, both behind the bargaining table with one’s own client and across the table with the other side. They offer clear, candid advice about ways lawyers can search for beneficial trades, enlarge the scope of interests, improve communication, minimize transaction costs, and leave both sides better off than before. But lawyers cannot do the job alone. People who hire lawyers must help change the game from conflict to collaboration. The entrepreneur structuring a joint venture, the plaintiff embroiled in a civil suit, the CEO negotiating an employment contract, the real estate developer concerned with environmental hazards, the parent considering a custody battle—clients who understand the pressures and incentives a lawyer faces can work more effectively within the legal system to promote their own best interests. Attorneys exhausted by the trench warfare of cases that drag on for years will find here a positive, proven approach to revitalizing their profession.

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A Bibliographical Guide to Japanese Research on the Chinese Economy, 1958–1970
W. P. J. Hall
Harvard University Press, 1972
W. P. J. Hall originally compiled this bibliography as an aid for his own research on the Chinese economy and Sino–Japanese trading relations. Now offered as an invaluable guide for the scholars of China’s economy, the volume is divided into eleven sections. An extensive subject index and a complete listing of the contents of each book enables the non–Japanese-speaking reader to easily locate and have translated a specific number of pages on a particular topic.
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The Biden School and the Engaged University of Delaware, 1961-2021
Daniel Rich
University of Delaware Press, 2023
This book reviews the history of the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration from 1961 to 2021. The focus is on the school’s accomplishments over its first sixty years, how they were achieved, and why they are significant. The analysis describes the challenges and opportunities that shaped the school’s development and its emergence as one of the nation’s leading public affairs schools. What began in 1961 as an experimental program supported by a single external grant emerged six decades later as one of the nation’s leading comprehensive schools of public affairs. That transformation unfolded during one of the most dynamic periods in the history of higher education when the public purpose of universities was expanded. The history of the Biden School is a story of institutional innovation, perseverance, adaptation, and resilience.
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Big Box USA
The Environmental Impact of America’s Biggest Retail Stores
Bart Elmore
University Press of Colorado, 2023
Big Box USA presents a new look at how the big box retail store has dramatically reshaped the US economy and its ecosystems in the last half century. From the rural South to the frigid North, from inside stores to ecologies far beyond, this book examines the relationships that make up one of the most visible features of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century American life.
 
The rise of big box retail since the 1960s has transformed environments on both local and global scales. Almost everyone has explored the aisles of big box stores. The allure of “everyday low prices” and brightly colored products of every kind connect shoppers with a global marketplace. Contributors join a growing conversation between business and environmental history, addressing the ways American retail institutions have affected physical and cultural ecologies around the world. Essays on Walmart, Target, Cabela’s, REI, and Bass Pro Shops assess the “bigness” of these superstores from “smokestacks to coat racks” and contend that their ecological impacts are not limited to the footprints of parking lots and manufacturing but also play a didactic role in educating consumers about their relationships with the environment.
 
A model for historians seeking to bring business and environmental histories together in their analyses of merchant capital’s role in the landscapes of everyday life and how it has remade human relationships with nature, Big Box USA is a must-read for students and scholars of the environment, business, sustainability, retail professionals, and a general audience.
 
 
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Big Business in China
Sino–Foreign Rivalry in the Cigarette Industry, 1890–1930
Sherman Cochran
Harvard University Press, 1980

This is the first major study in Chinese business history based largely on business's own records. It focuses on the battle for the cigarette market in early twentieth-century China between the British-American Tobacco Company, based in New York and London, and its leading Chinese rival, Nanyang Brothers Tobacco Company, whose headquarters were in Hong Kong and Shanghai.

From its founding in 1902, the British-American Tobacco Company maintained a lucrative monopoly of the market until 1915, when Nanyang entered China and extended tis operations into the country's major markets despite the use of aggressive tactics against it. Both companies grew rapidly during the 1920s, and competition between them reached its peak, but by 1930 Nanyang weakened, bringing an end to serious commercial rivalry. Though less competitive, both companies continued to trade in China until their Sino-foreign rivalry ended altogether with the founding of the People's Republic in 1949.

Debate over international commercial rivalries has often been conducted broadly in terms of imperialist exploitation and economic nationalism. This study shows the usefulness and limitations of these terms for historical purposes and contributes to the separate but related debate over the significance of entrepreneurial innovation in Chinese economic history. By analyzing the foreign Chinese companies' business practices and by describing their involvement in diplomatic incidents, boycotts, strikes, student protests, relations with peasant tobacco growers, dealings with the Kuomintang and Chinese Communist Party, and a host of other activities, the author brings to light the roles that big businesses played not only in China's economy but also in its politics, society, and foreign affairs.

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Big Data for Twenty-First-Century Economic Statistics
Edited by Katharine G. Abraham, Ron S. Jarmin, Brian C. Moyer, and Matthew D. Shapiro
University of Chicago Press, 2022
The papers in this volume analyze the deployment of Big Data to solve both existing and novel challenges in economic measurement. 

The existing infrastructure for the production of key economic statistics relies heavily on data collected through sample surveys and periodic censuses, together with administrative records generated in connection with tax administration. The increasing difficulty of obtaining survey and census responses threatens the viability of existing data collection approaches. The growing availability of new sources of Big Data—such as scanner data on purchases, credit card transaction records, payroll information, and prices of various goods scraped from the websites of online sellers—has changed the data landscape. These new sources of data hold the promise of allowing the statistical agencies to produce more accurate, more disaggregated, and more timely economic data to meet the needs of policymakers and other data users. This volume documents progress made toward that goal and the challenges to be overcome to realize the full potential of Big Data in the production of economic statistics. It describes the deployment of Big Data to solve both existing and novel challenges in economic measurement, and it will be of interest to statistical agency staff, academic researchers, and serious users of economic statistics.
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The Big Leagues Go to Washington
Congress and Sports Antitrust, 1951-1989
David George Surdam
University of Illinois Press, 2015
Between 1951 and 1989, Congress held a series of hearings to investigate the antitrust aspects of professional sports leagues. Among the concerns: ownership control of players, restrictions on new franchises, territorial protection, and other cartel-like behaviors.
 
In The Big Leagues Go to Washington, David Surdam chronicles the key issues that arose during the hearings and the ways opposing sides used economic data and theory to define what was right, what was feasible, and what was advantageous to one party or another. As Surdam shows, the hearings affected matters as fundamental to the modern game as broadcasting rights, player drafts and unions, league mergers, and the dominance of the New York Yankees. He also charts how lawmakers from the West and South pressed for the relocation of ailing franchises to their states and the ways savvy owners dodged congressional interference when they could and adapted to it when necessary.
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Big Med
Megaproviders and the High Cost of Health Care in America
David Dranove and Lawton Robert Burns
University of Chicago Press, 2021
There is little debate that health care in the United States is in need of reform. But where should those improvements begin? With insurers? Drug makers? The doctors themselves? In Big Med, David Dranove and Lawton Robert Burns argue that we’re overlooking the most ubiquitous cause of our costly and underperforming system: megaproviders, the expansive health care organizations that have become the face of American medicine. Your local hospital is likely part of one. Your doctors, too. And the megaproviders are bad news for your health and your wallet.

Drawing on decades of combined expertise in health care consolidation, Dranove and Burns trace Big Med’s emergence in the 1990s, followed by its swift rise amid false promises of scale economies and organizational collaboration. In the decades since, megaproviders have gobbled up market share and turned independent physicians into salaried employees of big bureaucracies, while delivering on none of their early promises. For patients this means higher costs and lesser care. Meanwhile, physicians report increasingly low morale, making it all but impossible for most systems to implement meaningful reforms.

In Big Med, Dranove and Burns combine their respective skills in economics and management to provide a nuanced explanation of how the provision of health care has been corrupted and submerged under consolidation. They offer practical recommendations for improving competition policies that would reform megaproviders to actually achieve the efficiencies and quality improvements they have long promised.
This is an essential read for understanding the current state of the health care system in America—and the steps urgently needed to create an environment of better care for all of us.
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Big Med
Megaproviders and the High Cost of Health Care in America
David Dranove and Lawton Robert Burns
University of Chicago Press, 2021

This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

There is little debate that health care in the United States is in need of reform. But where should those improvements begin? With insurers? Drug makers? The doctors themselves? In Big Med, David Dranove and Lawton Robert Burns argue that we’re overlooking the most ubiquitous cause of our costly and underperforming system: megaproviders, the expansive health care organizations that have become the face of American medicine. Your local hospital is likely part of one. Your doctors, too. And the megaproviders are bad news for your health and your wallet.

Drawing on decades of combined expertise in health care consolidation, Dranove and Burns trace Big Med’s emergence in the 1990s, followed by its swift rise amid false promises of scale economies and organizational collaboration. In the decades since, megaproviders have gobbled up market share and turned independent physicians into salaried employees of big bureaucracies, while delivering on none of their early promises. For patients this means higher costs and lesser care. Meanwhile, physicians report increasingly low morale, making it all but impossible for most systems to implement meaningful reforms.

In Big Med, Dranove and Burns combine their respective skills in economics and management to provide a nuanced explanation of how the provision of health care has been corrupted and submerged under consolidation. They offer practical recommendations for improving competition policies that would reform megaproviders to actually achieve the efficiencies and quality improvements they have long promised.
This is an essential read for understanding the current state of the health care system in America—and the steps urgently needed to create an environment of better care for all of us.

[more]

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Big Oil Playground, Russian Bear Preserve or European Periphery?
The Russian Barents Sea Region towards 2015
Bjørn Brunstad, Eivind Magnus, Philip Swanson, Geir Hønneland, and Indra Øverlan
Eburon Academic Publishers, 2005
In the far northwestern corner of Russia lies the Barents Sea: a rich region of natural resources that has yet to be fully exploited. Future actions taken in Barents will create major environmental, political, and economic ripples around the globe. Big Oil Playground, Russian Bear Preserve or European Periphery? explores three plausible and thought-provoking scenarios for the region's future over the next two decades.

The volume considers whether the international energy industry will transform Barents into a "big oil playground," if environmental protection rules will make it a "Russian bear preserve," or if integration into world trade will put it on the "European periphery." The result is a valuable resource for understanding the changing dynamics and challenges in modern public planning and a globalized economy.
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The Big Reset Revised Edition
War on Gold and the Financial Endgame
Willem Middelkoop
Amsterdam University Press, 2015
A system reset seems imminent. The world's financial system will need to find a new anchor before the year 2020. Since the beginning of the credit crisis, the US realized the dollar will lose its role as the world's reserve currency, and has been planning for a monetary reset. According to Willem Middelkoop, this reset will be designed to keep the US in the driver's seat, allowing the new monetary system to include significant roles for other currencies such as the euro and China's renminbi. Prepare for the coming ResetIn all likelihood gold will be re-introduced as one of the pillars of this next phase in the global financial system. The prediction is that gold could be revalued at $ 7,000 per troy ounce. By looking past the American 'smokescreen' surrounding gold and the dollar long ago, China and Russia have been accumulating massive amounts of gold reserves, positioning themselves for a more prominent role in the future to come. The reset will come as a shock to many. The Big Reset will help everyone who wants to be fully prepared. This fully revised edition of Middelkoop's book takes into account developments since its original publication, which have only strengthened the case for the coming return of gold.
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Big Steel
The First Century of the United States Steel Corporation 1901-2001
Kenneth Warren
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001

At its formation in 1901, the United States Steel Corporation was the earth’s biggest industrial corporation, a wonder of the manufacturing world. Immediately it produced two thirds of America’s raw steel and thirty percent of the steel made worldwide. The behemoth company would go on to support the manufacturing superstructure of practically every other industry in America. It would create and sustain the economies of many industrial communities, especially Pittsburgh, employing more than a million people over the course of the century.

A hundred years later, the U.S. Steel Group of USX makes scarcely ten percent of the steel in the United States and just over one and a half percent of global output. Far from the biggest, the company is now considered the most efficient steel producer in the world. What happened between then and now, and why, is the subject of Big Steel, the first comprehensive history of the company at the center of America’s twentieth-century industrial life.

Granted privileged and unprecedented access to the U.S. Steel archives, Kenneth Warren has sifted through a long, complex business history to tell a compelling story. Its preeminent size was supposed to confer many advantages to U.S. Steel—economies of scale, monopolies of talent, etc. Yet in practice, many of those advantages proved illusory. Warren shows how, even in its early years, the company was out-maneuvered by smaller competitors and how, over the century, U.S. Steel’s share of the industry, by every measure, steadily declined.

Warren’s subtle analysis of years of internal decision making reveals that the company’s size and clumsy hierarchical structure made it uniquely difficult to direct and manage. He profiles the chairmen who grappled with this “lumbering giant,” paying particular attention to those who long ago created its enduring corporate culture—Charles M. Schwab, Elbert H. Gary, and Myron C. Taylor.

Warren points to the way U.S. Steel’s dominating size exposed it to public scrutiny and government oversight—a cautionary force. He analyzes the ways that labor relations affected company management and strategy. And he demonstrates how U.S. Steel suffered gradually, steadily, from its paradoxical ability to make high profits while failing to keep pace with the best practices. Only after the drastic pruning late in the century—when U.S. Steel reduced its capacity by two-thirds—did the company become a world leader in steel-making efficiency, rather than merely in size.

These lessons, drawn from the history of an extraordinary company, will enrich the scholarship of industry and inform the practice of business in the twenty-first century.

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Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons
Charles Tilly
Russell Sage Foundation, 1984
This bold and lively essay is one of those rarest of intellectual achievements, a big small book. In its short length are condensed enormous erudition and impressive analytical scope. With verve and self-assurance, it addresses a broad, central question: How can we improve our understanding of the large-scale processes and structures that transformed the world of the nineteenth century and are transforming our world today? Tilly contends that twentieth-century social theories have been encumbered by a nineteenth century heritage of "pernicious postulates." He subjects each misleading belief to rigorous criticism, challenging many standard social science paradigms and methodologies. As an alternative to those timeless, placeless models of social change and organization, Tilly argues convincingly for a program of concrete, historically grounded analysis and systematic comparison. To illustrate the strategies available for such research, Tilly assesses the works of several major practitioners of comparative historical analysis, making skillful use of this selective review to offer his own speculative, often unconventional accounts of our recent past. Historically oriented social scientists will welcome this provocative essay and its wide-ranging agenda for comparative historical research. Other social scientists, their graduate and undergraduate students, and even the interested general reader will find this new work by a major scholar stimulating and eminently readable. This is the second of five volumes commissioned by the Russell Sage Foundation to mark its seventy-fifth anniversary. "In this short, brilliant book Tilly suggests a way to think about theories of historical social change....This book should find attentive readers both in undergraduate courses and in graduate seminars. It should also find appreciative readers, for Tilly is a writer as well as a scholar." —Choice
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BigLaw
Money and Meaning in the Modern Law Firm
Mitt Regan and Lisa H. Rohrer
University of Chicago Press, 2021
The Great Recession intensified large law firms’ emphasis on financial performance, leading to claims that lawyers in these firms were now guided by business rather than professional values.  Based on interviews with more than 250 partners in large firms, Mitt Regan and Lisa H. Rohrer suggest that the reality is much more complex. It is true that large firm hiring, promotion, compensation, and termination policies are more influenced by business considerations than ever before and that firms actively recruit profitable partners from other firms to replace those they regard as unproductive. At the same time, law firm partners continue to seek the non-financial rewards of being members of a distinct profession and are sensitive to whether their firms are committed to providing them. Regan and Rohrer argue that modern firms responding effectively to business demands while credibly affirming the importance of non-financial professional values can create strong cultures that enhance their ability to weather the storms of the modern legal market.
[more]

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Bill Giles and Baseball
John B Lord
Temple University Press, 2014

 

Bill Giles oversaw one of the greatest eras of winning that the Philadelphia Phillies ever enjoyed. In Bill Giles and Baseball, John Lord chronicles Giles' remarkable career--which includes 44 years with the Phillies--to provide an insider's view of the business of the sport, which takes place off the field.

 

Based on extensive interviews, Bill Giles and Baseball spans Giles' life from his childhood growing up in the game to the tumultuous years he spent as the president and managing partner of the Phillies. Purchasing the team in 1981, when baseball experienced its first serious labor stoppages, Giles also watched baseball add franchises, grapple with franchise fees, realign the leagues, and restructure baseball's postseason. Yet Giles, the public face of the Phillies championship teams of 1980, 1983, and 1993, is best remembered for his critical role in creating innovative TV deals, and leading the efforts to build the Phillies' beautiful new ballpark.

 

A book about the business of baseball as seen through the eyes of one of the architects of the game, Bill Giles and Baseball captures the spectacle of the sport through fascinating behind-the-scenes stories of our national pastime. 

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Billionaires and Stealth Politics
Benjamin I. Page, Jason Seawright, and Matthew J. Lacombe
University of Chicago Press, 2018
In 2016, when millions of Americans voted for Donald Trump, many believed his claims that personal wealth would free him from wealthy donors and allow him to “drain the swamp.” But then Trump appointed several billionaires and multimillionaires to high-level positions and pursued billionaire-friendly policies, such as cutting corporate income taxes. Why the change from his fiery campaign rhetoric and promises to the working class? This should not be surprising, argue Benjamin I. Page, Jason Seawright, and Matthew J. Lacombe: As the gap between the wealthiest and the rest of us has widened, the few who hold one billion dollars or more in net worth have begun to play a more and more active part in politics—with serious consequences for democracy in the United States.

Page, Seawright, and Lacombe argue that while political contributions offer a window onto billionaires’ influence, especially on economic policy, they do not present a full picture of policy preferences and political actions. That is because on some of the most important issues, including taxation, immigration, and Social Security, billionaires have chosen to engage in “stealth politics.” They try hard to influence public policy, making large contributions to political parties and policy-focused causes, leading policy-advocacy organizations, holding political fundraisers, and bundling others’ contributions—all while rarely talking about public policy to the media. This means that their influence is not only unequal but also largely unaccountable to and unchallengeable by the American people. Stealth politics makes it difficult for ordinary citizens to know what billionaires are doing or mobilize against it. The book closes with remedies citizens can pursue if they wish to make wealthy Americans more politically accountable, such as public financing of political campaigns and easier voting procedures, and notes the broader types of reforms, such as a more progressive income tax system, that would be needed to increase political equality and reinvigorate majoritarian democracy in the United States.
 
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Biocapital
The Constitution of Postgenomic Life
Kaushik Sunder Rajan
Duke University Press, 2006
Biocapital is a major theoretical contribution to science studies and political economy. Grounding his analysis in a multi-sited ethnography of genomic research and drug development marketplaces in the United States and India, Kaushik Sunder Rajan argues that contemporary biotechnologies such as genomics can only be understood in relation to the economic markets within which they emerge. Sunder Rajan conducted fieldwork in biotechnology labs and in small start-up companies in the United States (mostly in the San Francisco Bay area) and India (mainly in New Delhi, Hyderabad, and Bombay) over a five-year period spanning 1999 to 2004. He draws on his research with scientists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and policymakers to compare drug development in the two countries, examining the practices and goals of research, the financing mechanisms, the relevant government regulations, and the hype and marketing surrounding promising new technologies. In the process, he illuminates the global flow of ideas, information, capital, and people connected to biotech initiatives.

Sunder Rajan’s ethnography informs his theoretically sophisticated inquiry into how the contemporary world is shaped by the marriage of biotechnology and market forces, by what he calls technoscientific capitalism. Bringing Marxian theories of value into conversation with Foucaultian notions of biopolitics, he traces how the life sciences came to be significant producers of both economic and epistemic value in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first.

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The Biological Consequences of Socioeconomic Inequalities
Barbara Wolfe
Russell Sage Foundation, 2013
Social scientists have repeatedly uncovered a disturbing feature of economic inequality: people with larger incomes and better education tend to lead longer, healthier lives. This pattern holds across all ages and for virtually all measures of health, apparently indicating a biological dimension of inequality. But scholars have only begun to understand the complex mechanisms that drive this disparity. How exactly do financial well-being and human physiology interact? The Biological Consequences of Socioeconomic Inequalities incorporates insights from the social and biological sciences to quantify the biology of disadvantage and to assess how poverty gets under the skin to impact health. Drawing from unusually rich datasets of biomarkers, brain scans, and socioeconomic measures, Biological Consequences of Socioeconomic Inequalities illustrates exciting new paths to understanding social inequalities in health. Barbara Wolfe, William N. Evans and Nancy Adler begin the volume with a critical evaluation of the literature on income and health, providing a lucid review of the difficulties of establishing clear causal pathways between the two variables. In their chapter, Arun S. Karlamangla, Tara L. Gruenewald, and Teresa E. Seeman outline the potential of biomarkers—such as cholesterol, heart pressure, and C-reactive protein—to assess and indicate the factors underlying health. Edith Chen, Hannah M. C. Schreier, and Meanne Chan reveal the empirical power of biomarkers by examining asthma, a condition steeply correlated with socioeconomic status. Their analysis shows how stress at the individual, family, and neighborhood levels can increase the incidence of asthma. The volume then turns to cognitive neuroscience, using biomarkers in a new way to examine the impact of poverty on brain development. Jamie Hanson, Nicole Hair, Amitabh Chandra, Ed Moss, Jay Bhattacharya, Seth D. Pollack, and Barbara Wolfe use a longitudinal Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) study of children between the ages of four and eighteen to study the link between poverty and limited cognition among children. Michelle C. Carlson, Christopher L. Seplaki, and Teresa E. Seeman also focus on brain development to examine the role of socioeconomic status in cognitive decline among older adults. Featuring insights from the biological and social sciences, Biological Consequences of Socioeconomic Inequalities will be an essential resource for scholars interested in socioeconomic disparities and the biological imprint that material deprivation leaves on the human body.
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The Biological Foundations of Organizational Behavior
Edited by Stephen M. Colarelli and Richard D. Arvey
University of Chicago Press, 2014
In recent years, evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics have emerged as prominent theoretical perspectives within the social sciences. Yet despite broad levels of commonality between the disciplines—including an emphasis on adaptation, evolved mechanisms that guide behavior, and consequences of mismatch between these mechanisms and novel environments—studies that apply these perspectives on social behavior to organizations remain relatively rare.

The Biological Foundations of Organizational Behavior brings together contributors who shed light on the potential that behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology offer for studies of organizational behavior. In addition to examining the extant literature integrating these disciplines and organizational behavior, the book reconsiders a wide range of topics through the lens of biology within organizational behavior, including decision making, leadership and hierarchy, goals and collective action, and individual difference. Contributions also explore new areas of potential application and provide a critical assessment of the challenges that lie ahead. With accessible insights for scholars and practitioners, The Biological Foundations of Organizational Behavior marks a promising step forward in what is increasingly perceived to be an underdeveloped area of organizational behavior.
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Biology Is Technology
The Promise, Peril, and New Business of Engineering Life
Robert H. Carlson
Harvard University Press, 2011

Technology is a process and a body of knowledge as much as a collection of artifacts. Biology is no different—and we are just beginning to comprehend the challenges inherent in the next stage of biology as a human technology. It is this critical moment, with its wide-ranging implications, that Robert Carlson considers in Biology Is Technology. He offers a uniquely informed perspective on the endeavors that contribute to current progress in this area—the science of biological systems and the technology used to manipulate them.

In a number of case studies, Carlson demonstrates that the development of new mathematical, computational, and laboratory tools will facilitate the engineering of biological artifacts—up to and including organisms and ecosystems. Exploring how this will happen, with reference to past technological advances, he explains how objects are constructed virtually, tested using sophisticated mathematical models, and finally constructed in the real world.

Such rapid increases in the power, availability, and application of biotechnology raise obvious questions about who gets to use it, and to what end. Carlson’s thoughtful analysis offers rare insight into our choices about how to develop biological technologies and how these choices will determine the pace and effectiveness of innovation as a public good.

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Birth and Fortune
The Impact of Numbers on Personal Welfare
Richard A. Easterlin
University of Chicago Press, 1987
In this influential work, Richard A. Easterlin shows how the size of a generation—the number of persons born in a particular year—directly and indirectly affects the personal welfare of its members, the make-up and breakdown of the family, and the general well being of the economy.

"[Easterlin] has made clear, I think unambiguously, that the baby-boom generation is economically underprivileged merely because of its size. And in showing this, he demonstrates that population size can be as restrictive as a factor as sex, race, or class on equality of opportunity in the U.S."—Jeffrey Madrick, Business Week
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Birth of a Salesman
The Transformation of Selling in America
Walter A. Friedman
Harvard University Press, 2005

In this entertaining and informative book, Walter Friedman chronicles the remarkable metamorphosis of the American salesman from itinerant amateur to trained expert. From the mid-nineteenth century to the eve of World War II, the development of sales management transformed an economy populated by peddlers and canvassers to one driven by professional salesmen and executives.

From book agents flogging Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs to John H. Patterson's famous pyramid strategy at National Cash Register to the determined efforts by Ford and Chevrolet to craft surefire sales pitches for their dealers, selling evolved from an art to a science. "Salesmanship" as a term and a concept arose around the turn of the century, paralleling the new science of mass production. Managers assembled professional forces of neat responsible salesmen who were presented as hardworking pillars of society, no longer the butt of endless "traveling salesmen" jokes. People became prospects; their homes became territories. As an NCR representative said, the modern salesman "let the light of reason into dark places." The study of selling itself became an industry, producing academic disciplines devoted to marketing, consumer behavior, and industrial psychology. At Carnegie Mellon's Bureau of Salesmanship Research, Walter Dill Scott studied the characteristics of successful salesmen and ways to motivate consumers to buy.

Full of engaging portraits and illuminating insights, Birth of a Salesman is a singular contribution that offers a clear understanding of the transformation of salesmanship in modern America.

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The Birth of American Tourism
New York, the Hudson Valley, and American Culture, 1790-1835
Richard H. Gassan
University of Massachusetts Press, 2008
Today the idea of traveling within the United States for leisure purposes is so commonplace it is hard to imagine a time when tourism was not a staple of our cultural life. Yet as Richard H. Gassan persuasively demonstrates, at the beginning of the nineteenth century travel for leisure was strictly an aristocratic luxury beyond the means of ordinary Americans. It wasn't until the second decade of the century that the first middle-class tourists began to follow the lead of the well-to-do, making trips up the Hudson River valley north of New York City, and in a few cases beyond. At first just a trickle, by 1830 the tide of tourism had become a flood, a cultural change that signaled a profound societal shift as the United States stepped onto the road that would eventually lead to a modern consumer society.

According to Gassan, the origins of American tourism in the Hudson Valley can be traced to a confluence of historical accidents, including the proximity of the region to the most rapidly growing financial and population center in the country, with its expanding middle class, and the remarkable beauty of the valley itself. But other developments also played a role, from the proliferation of hotels to accommodate tourists, to the construction of an efficient transportation network to get them to their destinations, to the creation of a set of cultural attractions that invested their experience with meaning. In the works of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper and the paintings of Thomas Cole and others of the Hudson River School, travelers in the region encountered the nation's first literary and artistic movements. Tourism thus did more than provide an escape from the routines of everyday urban life; it also helped Americans of the early republic shape a sense of national identity.
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Birth of Hegemony
Crisis, Financial Revolution, and Emerging Global Networks
Andrew C. Sobel
University of Chicago Press, 2012
With American leadership facing increased competition from China and India, the question of how hegemons emerge—and are able to create conditions for lasting stability—is of utmost importance in international relations. The generally accepted wisdom is that liberal superpowers, with economies based on capitalist principles, are best able to develop systems conducive to the health of the global economy.
 
In Birth of Hegemony, Andrew C. Sobel draws attention to the critical role played by finance in the emergence of these liberal hegemons. He argues that a hegemon must have both the capacity and the willingness to bear a disproportionate share of the cost of providing key collective goods that are the basis of international cooperation and exchange. Through this, the hegemon helps maintain stability and limits the risk to productive international interactions. However, prudent planning can account for only part of a hegemon’s ability to provide public goods, while some of the necessary conditions must be developed simply through the processes of economic growth and political development. Sobel supports these claims by examining the economic trajectories that led to the successive leadership of the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States.
 
Stability in international affairs has long been a topic of great interest to our understanding of global politics, and Sobel’s nuanced and theoretically sophisticated account sets the stage for a consideration of recent developments affecting the United States.
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The Birth of Solidarity
The History of the French Welfare State
François Ewald
Duke University Press, 2020
François Ewald's landmark The Birth of Solidarity—first published in French in 1986, revised in 1996, with the revised edition appearing here in English for the first time—is one of the most important historical and philosophical studies of the rise of the welfare state. Theorizing the origins of social insurance, Ewald shows how the growing problem of industrial accidents in France throughout the nineteenth century tested the limits of classical liberalism and its notions of individual responsibility. As workers and capitalists confronted each other over the problem of workplace accidents, they transformed the older practice of commercial insurance into an instrument of state intervention, thereby creating an entirely new conception of law, the state, and social solidarity. What emerged was a new system of social insurance guaranteed by the state. The Birth of Solidarity is a classic work of social and political theory that will appeal to all those interested in labor power, the making and dismantling of the welfare state, and Foucauldian notions of governmentality, security, risk, and the limits of liberalism.
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Black Business in the New South
A Social History of the NC Mutual Life Insurance Company
Walter B. Weare
Duke University Press, 1993
At the turn of the century, the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company became the "world's largest Negro business." Located in Durham, North Carolina, which was known as the "Black Wall Street of America," this business came to symbolize the ideas of racial progress, self-help, and solidarity in America. Walter B. Weare's social and intellectual history, originally published in 1973 (University of Illinois Press) and updated here to include a new introduction, still stands as the definitive history of black business in the New South. Drawing on a wide range of sources—including personal papers of the company's leaders and oral history interviews—Weare traces the company's story from its ideological roots in the eighteenth century to its economic success in the twentieth century.
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The Black Death in Egypt and England
A Comparative Study
By Stuart J. Borsch
University of Texas Press, 2005

Throughout the fourteenth century AD/eighth century H, waves of plague swept out of Central Asia and decimated populations from China to Iceland. So devastating was the Black Death across the Old World that some historians have compared its effects to those of a nuclear holocaust. As countries began to recover from the plague during the following century, sharp contrasts arose between the East, where societies slumped into long-term economic and social decline, and the West, where technological and social innovation set the stage for Europe's dominance into the twentieth century. Why were there such opposite outcomes from the same catastrophic event?

In contrast to previous studies that have looked to differences between Islam and Christianity for the solution to the puzzle, this pioneering work proposes that a country's system of landholding primarily determined how successfully it recovered from the calamity of the Black Death. Stuart Borsch compares the specific cases of Egypt and England, countries whose economies were based in agriculture and whose pre-plague levels of total and agrarian gross domestic product were roughly equivalent. Undertaking a thorough analysis of medieval economic data, he cogently explains why Egypt's centralized and urban landholding system was unable to adapt to massive depopulation, while England's localized and rural landholding system had fully recovered by the year 1500.

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Black Entrepreneurs in America
Stories of Struggle and Success
Woodard, Michael
Rutgers University Press, 1996
Beginning with a summary of 200 years of entrepreneurship among African Americans, then moving to in-depth interviews with contemporary entrepreneurs, Michael Woodard provides a powerful record of entrepreneurial vitality in a market that is often hostile and exclusive. The book covers businesses nationwide, representing diverse industries. Woodard ends on a practical note with resources and advice for anyone contemplating an entrepreneurial future.
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Black Star
African American Activism in the International Political Economy
Ramla M. Bandele
University of Illinois Press, 2007

This book describes how the first African American mass political organization was able to gain support from throughout the African diaspora to finance the Black Star Line, a black merchant marine that would form the basis of an enclave economy after World War I. Ramla M. Bandele explores the concept of diaspora itself and how it has been applied to the study of émigré and other ethnic networks.

In characterizing the historical and political context of the Black Star Line, Bandele analyzes the international political economy during 1919-25 and considers the black politics of the era, focusing particularly on Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association for its creation of the Black Star Line. She offers an in-depth case study of the Black Star Line as an instance of the African diaspora attempting to link communities and carry out a transnational political and economic project. Arguing that ethnic networks can be legitimate actors in international politics and economics, Bandele also suggests, however, that activists in any given diaspora do not always function as a unit.

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The Black Tax
150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America
Andrew W. Kahrl
University of Chicago Press, 2024
Revealing a history that is deep, broad, and infuriating, The Black Tax casts a bold light on the racist practices long hidden in the shadows of America’s tax regimes.
 
American taxation is unfair, and it is most unfair to the very people who critically need its support. Not only do taxpayers with fewer resources—less wealth, power, and land—pay more than the well-off, but they are forced to fight for their rights within an unjust system that undermines any attempts to improve their position or economic standing. In The Black Tax, Andrew W. Kahrl reveals the shocking history and ruinous consequences of inequitable and predatory tax laws in this country—above all, widespread and devastating racial dispossession.

Throughout the twentieth century, African Americans acquired substantial amounts of property nationwide. But racist practices, obscure processes, and outright theft diminished their holdings and their power. Of these, Kahrl shows, few were more powerful, or more quietly destructive, than property taxes. He examines all the structural features and hidden traps within America’s tax system that have forced Black Americans to pay more for less and stripped them of their land and investments, and he reveals the staggering cost. The story of America’s now enormous concentration of wealth at the top—and the equally enormous absence of wealth among most Black households—has its roots here.

Kahrl exposes the painful history of these practices, from Reconstruction up to the present, describing how discrimination continues to take new forms, even as people continue to fight for their rights, their assets, and their power. If you want to understand the extreme economic disadvantages and persistent racial inequalities that African American households continue to face, there is no better starting point than The Black Tax.
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