front cover of Sail, Steam, and Diesel
Sail, Steam, and Diesel
Moving Cargo on the Great Lakes
Eric Hirsimaki
Michigan State University Press, 2024
Water transportation has played a key role in the Great Lakes region’s settlement and economic growth, from providing entry into the new lake states to offering cheap transportation for the goods they produced. There are numerous tales surrounding the Great Lakes shipping trade, but few storytellers have addressed the factors that influenced the use, design, and evolution of the ships that sailed the inland seas. Sail, Steam, and Diesel: Moving Cargo on the Great Lakes provides a comprehensive overview of the evolution of Great Lakes ships over the centuries, from small birch-bark canoes originally used in the region to the massive thousand-footers of today. The author also looks at the economics of vessel operation in the context of the expanding scope of the shipping industry, which was crucial in catapulting America into becoming an industrial juggernaut. The captains of industry and the sailors whose labor propelled the trade populate this account, which also offers solemn acknowledgment of the high cost paid in both lost ships and lives. Although they might not realize it, millions of Americans have owed their livelihoods to the Great Lakes boats, and this volume is an excellent way to recognize the importance of this regional industry.
[more]

front cover of Salaula
Salaula
The World of Secondhand Clothing and Zambia
Karen Tranberg Hansen
University of Chicago Press, 2000
When we donate our unwanted clothes to charity, we rarely think about what will happen to them: who will sort and sell them, and finally, who will revive and wear them. In this fascinating look at the multibillion dollar secondhand clothing business, Karen Tranberg Hansen takes us around the world from the West, where clothing is donated, through the salvage houses in North America and Europe, where it is sorted and compressed, to Africa, in this case, Zambia. There it enters the dynamic world of Salaula, a Bemba term that means "to rummage through a pile."

Essential for the African economy, the secondhand clothing business is wildly popular, to the point of threatening the indigenous textile industry. But, Hansen shows, wearing secondhand clothes is about much more than imitating Western styles. It is about taking a garment and altering it to something entirely local, something that adheres to current cultural norms of etiquette. By unraveling how these garments becomes entangled in the economic, political, and cultural processes of contemporary Zambia, Hansen also raises provocative questions about environmentalism, charity, recycling, and thrift.
[more]

logo for Ohio University Press
Sales and Celebrations
Retailing and Regional Identity in Western New York State, 1920–1940
Sarah Elvins
Ohio University Press, 2004

Between the two world wars, the retail world experienced tremendous changes. New forms of competition, expanded networks of communication and transportation, and the proliferation of manufactured goods posed challenges to department store and small shopkeeper alike.

In western New York, and in Buffalo and Rochester in particular, retailers were a crucial part of urban life, acting as cultural brokers and civic leaders. They were also cultivators of area pride. Even as they adopted the latest merchandising techniques or stocked the newest items, merchants emphasized their local roots and their ability to put a local spin on national trends and innovations. Regional identity became a powerful selling tool not only during the prosperity of the 1920s but also through the economic crisis of the Great Depression.

Sales and Celebrations explains how local traditions and institutions affected the evolution of American consumer culture. It expands our understanding of American consumerism, demonstrating that local particularities and loyalties could often coexist with, and occasionally challenge, the spread of mass consumption. In her award-winning study, Professor Sarah Elvins provides new insight into the relationship between America’s largest metropolises and its smaller centers. Retailers in Buffalo and Rochester did not simply imitate the practices of their counterparts in Manhattan and Chicago; they highlighted their unique ability to serve the wants and needs of their particular markets.

By drawing attention to this persistent power of the local, Sales and Celebrations illuminates a neglected aspect of the story of American culture in the interwar period.

[more]

front cover of Salt as a Factor in the Confederacy
Salt as a Factor in the Confederacy
Ella Lonn
University of Alabama Press, 1965
An exhaustive study of the role salt played in the drama of the War Between the States
 
It is only when a prime necessity thrusts itself upon public attention by its absence that a person ceases to take it for granted. Only when he no longer has it, does he realize what an important ingredient for his palate and digestion is plain, ordinary salt, necessary alike for man and beast. He then recalls that the salt licks and salt springs have from the earliest times been centers of interest and development.
 
The author has searched into the archives of most of the states of the old confederacy, and also into departments of knowledge remote from her own, so that she has had to delve into geological libraries, consult colleagues in the fields of chemistry and physiology, and do more sums in arithmetic than have fallen to her lot since she was in the primary school. But it has been a pleasant and profitable search.
 
[more]

front cover of Samuel Bronfman
Samuel Bronfman
The Life and Times of Seagram’s Mr. Sam
Michael R. Marrus
Brandeis University Press, 1991
As the creator of the Seagram whiskey empire Sam Bronfman became a mythic figure in the business world, and in the years after his death the legend has developed further and further away from the life. Now for the first time the complete story of the man and the business he built is available. Sam Bronfman was according to Business Week "a volatile, shrewd, and highly individualistic leader [whose] technical knowledge and financial acumen remain unchallenged." For over twenty years, Forbes noted, Sam judged the U.S. market correctly -- as virtually no one else did. The story includes the passing on of the vast Seagram enterprise to the leadership of his sons, Edgar and Charles. Samuel Bronfman's father failed as a wheat farmer and then found success selling frozen fish, firewood and horses. At this point young Sam observed to his father, "The bar makes more profits than we do. Instead of selling horses, we should be selling the drinks." And thus began what was to become the Seagram whiskey empire. Sam's insight and timing were right as Canada, and especially the United States, were coming under the influence of the temperance movement. While legend often places Sam in the thick of Prohibition era bootlegging and rum running, in fact he built for the long term and kept his operations within both the law and its loopholes as he supplied American bootleggers. Sam demonstrated his marketing genius by insisting on quality in a business notorious for cutting corners and thereby set the standard for the industry in the decades to follow. Sam's success in penetrating the American market was such that after Prohibition his competitors lobbied the federal government for his protection. While Samuel Bronfman is a classic rags to riches tale, it is also the story of a Jew who remained in many ways outside business and social establishments even after becoming internationally famous. Commuting every week between his Montreal and New York office, his was a private life centered on his family and their home in Montreal and summer places such as Tarrytown, New York. In the 1950s Sam, under instructions from his daughter Phyllis Lambert, commissioned Mies van der Rohe to design a new corporate headquarters, the Seagram building at 375 Park Avenue, a landmark on the New York City skyline. As a leader of the Jewish community Sam was elected president of the Canadian Jewish Congress in 1939, and went on to organize financial aid to the fledgling state of Israel, beginning decades long involvement in Jewish affairs and support for the Jewish state. Sam was an intuitive leader and manager who knew his industry inside out and set the highest standards for his products and himself. His life makes a fascinating tale of business, power, wealth, and ethnic politics.
[more]

logo for University of Illinois Press
The Samuel Gompers Papers, Volume 13
Cumulative Index
Samuel Gompers, Edited by Peter J. Albert and Grace Palladino
University of Illinois Press, 2013
Samuel Gompers (1850–1924) devoted his life to improving the conditions of American workers through better wages, shorter workdays, and safer workplaces, achieved through common effort, democratic organization, and practical action. His objective was betterment, or, as he often said, "more." His moral vision was grounded in a commitment to social justice and a passion for service. A cigar maker by trade, he became the American Federation of Labor's first president in 1886 and, except for one year, remained its president until his death, guiding it through prosperity and recession, war and peacetime. By the time Gompers died, the AFL was a major force on the national scene and had claimed over four million members.
 
Gompers was a tireless writer and impassioned speaker, and he left behind an immense archive of articles and editorials, addresses and testimony before a variety of audiences, and extensive correspondence with allies and adversaries alike. His correspondents included trade unionists and political leaders, reformers and radicals, captains of industry defending their positions, and workers asking for help or advice.
 
The twelve volumes of The Samuel Gompers Papers, edited by Stuart B. Kaufman, Peter J. Albert, and Grace Palladino, for the first time make Gompers' wide-ranging and complex documentary legacy accessible to scholars, students, historians, and serious readers in the labor movement and among the public at large.
 
This invaluable comprehensive index provides a key to the Gompers volumes. It not only allows quick reference to individual documents but permits scholars to see at a glance the contours and emphases in subject matter and locate the substantive annotations of key individuals and unions, strikes and lockouts, conferences and meetings, and legislation and key concepts in the history of the Gompers era.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Saving in Postwar Japan
Tuvia Blumenthal
Harvard University Press

front cover of Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste
Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste
Heirloom Seed Savers in Appalachia
Bill Best
Ohio University Press, 2013

The Brown Goose, the White Case Knife, Ora’s Speckled Bean, Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter—these are just a few of the heirloom fruits and vegetables you’ll encounter in Bill Best’s remarkable history of seed saving and the people who preserve both unique flavors and the Appalachian culture associated with them. As one of the people at the forefront of seed saving and trading for over fifty years, Best has helped preserve numerous varieties of beans, tomatoes, corn, squashes, and other fruits and vegetables, along with the family stories and experiences that are a fundamental part of this world. While corporate agriculture privileges a few flavorless but hardy varieties of daily vegetables, seed savers have worked tirelessly to preserve genetic diversity and the flavors rooted in the Southern Appalachian Mountains—referred to by plant scientists as one of the vegetative wonders of the world.

Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste will introduce readers to the cultural traditions associated with seed saving, as well as the remarkable people who have used grafting practices and hand-by-hand trading to keep alive varieties that would otherwise have been lost. As local efforts to preserve heirloom seeds have become part of a growing national food movement, Appalachian seed savers play a crucial role in providing alternatives to large-scale agriculture and corporate food culture. Part flavor guide, part people’s history, Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste will introduce you to a world you’ve never known—or perhaps remind you of one you remember well from your childhood.

[more]

logo for Ohio University Press
Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste
Heirloom Seed Savers in Appalachia
Bill Best
Ohio University Press
The Brown Goose, the White Case Knife, Ora’s Speckled Bean, Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter — these are just a few of the heirloom fruits and vegetables you’ll encounter in Bill Best’s remarkable history of seed saving and the people who preserve both unique flavors and the Appalachian culture associated with them. As one of the people at the forefront of seed saving and trading for over fifty years, Best has helped preserve numerous varieties of beans, tomatoes, corn, squashes, and other fruits and vegetables, along with the family stories and experiences that are a fundamental part of this world. While corporate agriculture privileges a few flavorless but hardy varieties of daily vegetables, seed savers have worked tirelessly to preserve genetic diversity and the flavors rooted in the Southern Appalachian Mountains — referred to by plant scientists as one of the vegetative wonders of the world.

Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste will introduce readers to the cultural traditions associated with seed saving, as well as the remarkable people who have used grafting practices and hand-by-hand trading to keep alive varieties that would otherwise have been lost. As local efforts to preserve heirloom seeds have become part of a growing national food movement, Appalachian seed savers play a crucial role in providing alternatives to large-scale agriculture and corporate food culture. Part flavor guide, part people’s history, Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste will introduce you to a world you’ve never known — or perhaps remind you of one you remember well from your childhood.
[more]

front cover of Saving the Media
Saving the Media
Capitalism, Crowdfunding, and Democracy
Julia Cagé
Harvard University Press, 2016

The media are in crisis. Confronted by growing competition and sagging advertising revenue, news operations in print, on radio and TV, and even online are struggling to reinvent themselves. Many have gone under. For too many others, the answer has been to lay off reporters, join conglomerates, and lean more heavily on generic content. The result: in a world awash with information, news organizations provide citizens with less and less in-depth reporting and a narrowing range of viewpoints. If democracy requires an informed citizenry, this trend spells trouble.

Julia Cagé explains the economics and history of the media crisis in Europe and America, and she presents a bold solution. The answer, she says, is a new business model: a nonprofit media organization, midway between a foundation and a joint stock company. Cagé shows how this model would enable the media to operate independent of outside shareholders, advertisers, and government, relying instead on readers, employees, and innovative methods of financing, including crowdfunding.

Cagé’s prototype is designed to offer new ways to share and transmit power. It meets the challenges of the digital revolution and the realities of the twenty-first century, inspired by a central idea: that news, like education, is a public good. Saving the Media will be a key document in a debate whose stakes are nothing less crucial than the vitality of democracy.

[more]

front cover of Saving the Nation
Saving the Nation
Economic Modernity in Republican China
Margherita Zanasi
University of Chicago Press, 2006

Economic modernity is so closely associated with nationhood that it is impossible to imagine a modern state without an equally modern economy. Even so, most people would have difficulty defining a modern economy and its connection to nationhood. In Saving the Nation, Margherita Zanasi explores this connection by examining the first nation-building attempt in China after the fall of the empire in 1911.

Challenging the assumption that nations are products of technological and socioeconomic forces, Zanasi argues that it was notions of what constituted a modern nation that led the Nationalist nation-builders to shape China’s institutions and economy. In their reform effort, they confronted several questions: What characterized a modern economy? What role would a modern economy play in the overall nation-building effort? And how could China pursue economic modernization while maintaining its distinctive identity? Zanasi expertly shows how these questions were negotiated and contested within the Nationalist Party. Silenced in the Mao years, these dilemmas are reemerging today as a new leadership once again redefines the economic foundation of the nation.

[more]

front cover of Saving the World
Saving the World
A Brief History of Communication for Devleopment and Social Change
Emile G. McAnany
University of Illinois Press, 2012
This far-reaching and long overdue chronicle of communication for development from a leading scholar in the field presents in-depth policy analyses to outline a vision for how communication technologies can impact social change and improve human lives. Drawing on the pioneering works of Daniel Lerner, Everett Rogers, and Wilbur Schramm as well as his own personal experiences in the field, Emile G. McAnany builds a new, historically cognizant paradigm for the future that supplements technology with social entrepreneurship.
 
McAnany summarizes the history of the field of communication for development and social change from Truman's Marshall Plan for the Third World to the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals. Part history and part policy analysis, Saving the World argues that the communication field can renew its role in development by recognizing large aid-giving institutions have a difficult time promoting genuine transformation. McAnany suggests an agenda for improving and strengthening the work of academics, policy makers, development funders, and any others who use communication in all of its forms to foster social change.
[more]

logo for University of Minnesota Press
Savings in the Modern Economy
A Symposium
Walter Heller
University of Minnesota Press, 1953
Savings in the Modern Economy was first published in 1953. 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.How will savings affect the future economy of the United States and other parts of the world? Will savings continue to aid economy expansion or will they lead, sooner or later, to difficult problems? What are the motivations that cause people to save? How has the pattern of saving changed in recent times? What is the effect of retirement and pension funds? What is the role of savings in periods of inflation? In economy depression? How can savings foster economy progress in underdeveloped countries?To provide a scholarly yet thoroughly practical basis for answers to questions like these, a group of distinguished economists pool their thinking in this volume. The series of 28 papers bring to the problem varied backgrounds and different viewpoints. Professors, bankers, government officials, and industrialists, representing national and international organizations and business enterprises, contribute papers and related comments. There is not always agreement in the discussion, and no quick and easy solutions are offered, but the resulting analysis is realistic and timely, yet long-range in approach and value.The material covers four broad topics: savings and economic policy; savings concepts, data, and behavior; the savings problem in underdeveloped countries (with specific reference to the Far East and Latin America); and savings and inflation.The volume is based on papers given at a conference on Savings, Inflation, and Economy Progress held at the University of Minnesota through the cooperation of the university’s School of Business Administration and a number of sponsoring business firms.
[more]

front cover of Sawdusted
Sawdusted
Notes from a Post-Boom Mill
Raymond Goodwin
University of Wisconsin Press, 2010
When Raymond Goodwin started work at a Michigan sawmill in 1979, the glory days of lumbering were long gone. But the industry still had a faded glow that, for a while, held him there. In Sawdusted Goodwin wipes the dust off his memories of the rundown, nonunion mill where he toiled for twenty months as a two-time college dropout. Spare, evocative character sketches bring to life the personalities of his fellow millworkers—their raucous pranks, ribbing, complaints about wages and weather, macho posturing, failed romances, and fantasies of escape.
    The result is a mostly funny, sometimes heartbreaking portrait of life in the lumbering industry a century after its heyday. Amidst the intermittent anger and resignation of poorly paid lumbermen in the Great Lakes hinterlands, Goodwin reveals moments of vulnerability, generosity, and pride in craftsmanship. It is a world familiar, in its basic outlines, to anyone who has ever done manual labor.
    At the heart of the book is a coming-of-age story about Goodwin’s relationship with his older brother Randy—a heavy drinker, chain smoker, and expert sawyer. Gruff but kind, Randy tutors Raymond in the ways of the blue-collar world even as he struggles with the demons that mask his own melancholy.
 
 
A Michigan Notable Book, selected by the Library of Michigan
 
Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Association
 
Outstanding Book, selected by the American Association of School Libraries
[more]

front cover of Scale and Scope
Scale and Scope
The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism
Alfred D. Chandler Jr.
Harvard University Press, 1990

Scale and Scope is Alfred Chandler’s first major work since his Pulitzer Prize–winning The Visible Hand. Representing ten years of research into the history of the managerial business system, this book concentrates on patterns of growth and competitiveness in the United States, Germany, and Great Britain, tracing the evolution of large firms into multinational giants and orienting the late twentieth century’s most important developments.

This edition includes the entire hardcover edition with the exception of the Appendix Tables.

[more]

front cover of Scanner Data and Price Indexes
Scanner Data and Price Indexes
Edited by Robert C. Feenstra and Matthew D. Shapiro
University of Chicago Press, 2003
Every time you buy a can of tuna or a new television, its bar code is scanned to record its price and other information. These "scanner data" offer a number of attractive features for economists and statisticians, because they are collected continuously, are available quickly, and record prices for all items sold, not just a statistical sample. But scanner data also present a number of difficulties for current statistical systems.

Scanner Data and Price Indexes assesses both the promise and the challenges of using scanner data to produce economic statistics. Three papers present the results of work in progress at statistical agencies in the U.S., United Kingdom, and Canada, including a project at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to investigate the feasibility of incorporating scanner data into the monthly Consumer Price Index. Other papers demonstrate the enormous potential of using scanner data to test economic theories and estimate the parameters of economic models, and provide solutions for some of the problems that arise when using scanner data, such as dealing with missing data.
[more]

front cover of Scarcity
Scarcity
A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis
Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and Carl Wennerlind
Harvard University Press, 2023

A sweeping intellectual history of the concept of economic scarcity—its development across five hundred years of European thought and its decisive role in fostering the climate crisis.

Modern economics presumes a particular view of scarcity, in which human beings are innately possessed of infinite desires and society must therefore facilitate endless growth and consumption irrespective of nature’s limits. Yet as Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and Carl Wennerlind show, this vision of scarcity is historically novel and was not inevitable even in the age of capitalism. Rather, it reflects the costly triumph of infinite-growth ideologies across centuries of European economic thought—at the expense of traditions that sought to live within nature’s constraints.

The dominant conception of scarcity today holds that, rather than master our desires, humans must master nature to meet those desires. Albritton Jonsson and Wennerlind argue that this idea was developed by thinkers such as Francis Bacon, Samuel Hartlib, Alfred Marshall, and Paul Samuelson, who laid the groundwork for today’s hegemonic politics of growth. Yet proponents of infinite growth have long faced resistance from agrarian radicals, romantic poets, revolutionary socialists, ecofeminists, and others. These critics—including the likes of Gerrard Winstanley, Dorothy Wordsworth, Karl Marx, and Hannah Arendt—embraced conceptions of scarcity in which our desires, rather than nature, must be mastered to achieve the social good. In so doing, they dramatically reenvisioned how humans might interact with both nature and the economy.

Following these conflicts into the twenty-first century, Albritton Jonsson and Wennerlind insist that we need new, sustainable models of economic thinking to address the climate crisis. Scarcity is not only a critique of infinite growth, but also a timely invitation to imagine alternative ways of flourishing on Earth.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Scarcity by Design
The Legacy of New York City’s Housing Policies
Peter Salins and Gerard C. S. Mildner
Harvard University Press, 1992

No American metropolis has intervened in its housing market quite as aggressively as New York since World War II—and yet none is as burdened by the scarcity, poor quality, uneven distribution, and high cost of its rental housing stock. Why, after half a century of rent control, public housing programs, tax abatement, and land use regulation, is it so difficult for thousands of New Yorkers to find, rent, and maintain decent apartments?

Addressing issues that are hotly debated in the Big Apple and other cities across the nation, Peter Salins and Gerard Mildner analyze New York's policies and assess their largely detrimental effects on housing quality and availability. They show how programs that were instituted for the benefit of both investors and the poor—by directly and indirectly subsidizing housing construction and by capping rents—have instead caused misallocation of housing, exacerbated tensions between tenants and landlords, progressively stifled private investment, and resulted in building deterioration and abandonment.

Scarcity by Design is an object lesson in what governments should not do if they wish to improve housing and maintain communities. It also makes a strong case for a highly controversial solution: arguing from a free-market perspective, Salins and Mildner clearly demonstrate how transition to a fully deregulated and subsidized housing market would alleviate the social and economic woes of New York's tenants. They present deregulation as the essential stimulus of housing production, fair pricing, and good maintenance. The authors' crisply written analysis of New York's housing problems and their proposed solutions will enlighten citizens, city managers, investors, builders, and urban planners, and should spark discussions in academic as well as professional circles.

[more]

front cover of Schooling, Democracy, and the Quest for Wisdom
Schooling, Democracy, and the Quest for Wisdom
Partnerships and the Moral Dimensions of Teaching
Robert V. Bullough Jr. and John R. Rosenberg
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Winner of 2019 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award and 2019 Critics Choice Book Award from AESA

In response to growing concern in the 1980s about the quality of public education across the United States, a tremendous amount of energy was expended by organizations such as the Holmes Group and the Carnegie Forum to organize professional development schools (PDS) or “partner schools” for teacher education. On the surface, the concept of partnering is simple; however, the practice is very costly, complex, and difficult. In Schooling, Democracy, and the Quest for Wisdom, Robert V. Bullough, Jr. and John R. Rosenberg examine the concept of partnering through various lenses and they address what they think are the major issues that need to be, but rarely are, discussed by thousands of educators in the U.S. who are involved and invested in university-public school partnerships. Ultimately, they assert that the conversation around partnering needs re-centering (most especially on the purposes of public education), refreshing, and re-theorizing.  
[more]

front cover of Science and Ceremony
Science and Ceremony
The Institutional Economics of C. E. Ayres
Edited by William Breit and William Patton Culbertson, Jr.
University of Texas Press, 1976

Clarence Edwin Ayres was the leading American institutionalist economist in the post–World War II era. His innovative theories concerning the causes and significance of technological change provided the philosophical framework for that school of economics called institutionalism. In his recognition that the critical economic issues of the future would be the realization of the full economic potential of industrial society and the development of the third world, he was at least twenty years ahead of his time. In addition, Ayres's influence as an economics teacher at the University of Texas at Austin went well beyond the discipline of economics to students of anthropology, psychology, philosophy, education, and even music and art.

This book constitutes the first major appraisal of the work and influence of C. E. Ayres. The essays are written from a transatlantic as well as a national viewpoint and do not evince anyone ideological bias. As John Kenneth Galbraith says in his Foreword, the essays are not meant as a monument to Ayres; instead, they critique what he thought and did, showing "his range of interests, his diligence, his originality of mind and method."

Contributions to the volume are "Clarence Edwin Ayres: An Intellectual's Portrait" by editors William Breit and William Patton Culbertson, Jr.; "Clarence Ayres's Place in the History of American Economics: An Interim Assessment" by A. W. Coats; "C. E. Ayres on the Industrial Revolution" by R. M. Hartwell; "Clarence Ayres and the Roots of Economic Progress" by S. Herbert Frankel; "Technology and the Price System" by W. W. Rostow; "Limits to Growth: Biospheric or Institutional?" by Joseph J. Spengler; "Science's Feet of Clay" by Gordon Tullock; "Ayres's Views on Moral Relativism" by Alfred F. Chalk; "Methods and Morals in Economics: The Ayres-Knight Discussion" by James M. Buchanan; " Clarence Ayres's Economics and Sociology" by Talcott Parsons; and "Clarence E. Ayres as a University Teacher" by Marion J. Levy, Jr.

[more]

front cover of Science and Engineering Careers in the United States
Science and Engineering Careers in the United States
An Analysis of Markets and Employment
Edited by Richard B. Freeman and Daniel L. Goroff
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Beginning in the early 2000s, there was an upsurge of national concern over the state of the science and engineering job market that sparked a plethora of studies, commission reports, and a presidential initiative, all stressing the importance of maintaining American competitiveness in these fields. Science and Engineering Careers in the United States is the first major academic study to probe the issues that underlie these concerns.

This volume provides new information on the economics of the postgraduate science and engineering job market, addressing such topics as the factors that determine the supply of PhDs, the career paths they follow after graduation, and the creation and use of knowledge as it is reflected by the amount of papers and patents produced. A distinguished team of contributors also explores the tensions between industry and academe in recruiting graduates, the influx of foreign-born doctorates, and the success of female doctorates. Science and Engineering Careers in the United States will raise new questions about stimulating innovation and growth in the American economy.

[more]

front cover of Science Bought and Sold
Science Bought and Sold
Essays in the Economics of Science
Edited by Philip Mirowski and Esther-Mirjam Sent
University of Chicago Press, 2001
"A serious reconsideration of the 'economics of science' is long overdue," say Philip Mirowski and Esther-Mirjam Sent in the introduction to Science Bought and Sold. Indeed, it is only recently that one could speak of a field of economics of science at all. Although it has long been accepted that economics can provide useful tools with which to understand science, economics has only lately shifted its focus to the economic agent as information processor, making it more broadly applicable to science.
Bringing together central themes in this emerging discipline, the editors have assembled important articles that provide a wider context and background against which the economics of science can be evaluated. Roughly one-third of the essays presented here are original papers, and the rest are critical articles previously published in the field. From essays examining economic welfare to the idea of scientists as agents to the digital aspects of higher education,Science Bought and Sold presents a comprehensive overview of the new directions of this expanding area.


Contributors:
Kenneth J. Arrow
Mario Biagioli
William A. Brock
Michel Callon
Partha Dasgupta
Paul A. David
Steven N. Durlauf
Paul Forman
Steve Fuller
D. Wade Hands
Shaun P. Hargreaves Heap
Philip Kitcher
Sharon G. Levin
Richard R. Nelson
David F. Noble
Michael Polanyi
Gary Rhoades
Charles Sanders Peirce
Sheila Slaughter
Paula E. Stephan
Stephen Turner
James R. Wible
John Ziman
[more]

front cover of Science for Sale
Science for Sale
The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism
Daniel S. Greenberg
University of Chicago Press, 2007
In recent years the news media have been awash in stories about increasingly close ties between college campuses and multimillion-dollar corporations. Our nation’s universities, the story goes, reap enormous windfalls patenting products of scientific research that have been primarily funded by taxpayers. Meanwhile, hoping for new streams of revenue from their innovations, the same universities are allowing their research—and their very principles—to become compromised by quests for profit. But is that really the case? Is money really hopelessly corrupting science?

With Science for Sale, acclaimed journalist Daniel S. Greenberg reveals that campus capitalism is more complicated—and less profitable—than media reports would suggest. While universities seek out corporate funding, news stories rarely note that those industry dollars are dwarfed by government support and other funds. Also, while many universities have set up technology transfer offices to pursue profits through patents, many of those offices have been financial busts. Meanwhile, science is showing signs of providing its own solutions, as highly publicized misdeeds in pursuit of profits have provoked promising countermeasures within the field.

But just because the threat is overhyped, Greenberg argues, doesn’t mean that there’s no danger. From research that has shifted overseas so corporations can avoid regulations to conflicts of interest in scientific publishing, the temptations of money will always be a threat, and they can only be countered through the vigilance of scientists, the press, and the public. 

Based on extensive, candid interviews with scientists and administrators, Science for Sale will be indispensable to anyone who cares about the future of scientific research.
[more]

front cover of Science, Money, and Politics
Science, Money, and Politics
Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion
Daniel S. Greenberg
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Each year, Congress appropriates billions of dollars for scientific research. In this book, veteran science reporter Daniel S. Greenberg takes us behind closed doors to show us who gets it, and why. What he reveals is startling: an overlooked world of false claims, pork, and cronyism, where science, money, and politics all manipulate one another.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Science Policy and Business
The Changing Relation of Europe and the United States
David W. Ewing
Harvard University Press, 1973
International leaders of industry and government here discuss the role of technology in a multi-polar economic world. Harvey Brooks analyzes the continually narrowing technological gap between Europe and the United States. Sohei Nakayama reveals that Japan, not satisfied with the catch-up strategy it has followed in the past, seeks to develop leadership in areas of basic technical theory. Kurt Richebacher covers how European companies can maximize their effectiveness in establishing a U.S. position.
[more]

front cover of Science-Mart
Science-Mart
Privatizing American Science
Philip Mirowski
Harvard University Press, 2011

This trenchant study analyzes the rise and decline in the quality and format of science in America since World War II.

During the Cold War, the U.S. government amply funded basic research in science and medicine. Starting in the 1980s, however, this support began to decline and for-profit corporations became the largest funders of research. Philip Mirowski argues that a powerful neoliberal ideology promoted a radically different view of knowledge and discovery: the fruits of scientific investigation are not a public good that should be freely available to all, but are commodities that could be monetized.

Consequently, patent and intellectual property laws were greatly strengthened, universities demanded patents on the discoveries of their faculty, information sharing among researchers was impeded, and the line between universities and corporations began to blur. At the same time, corporations shed their in-house research laboratories, contracting with independent firms both in the States and abroad to supply new products. Among such firms were AT&T and IBM, whose outstanding research laboratories during much of the twentieth century produced Nobel Prize–winning work in chemistry and physics, ranging from the transistor to superconductivity.

Science-Mart offers a provocative, learned, and timely critique, of interest to anyone concerned that American science—once the envy of the world—must be more than just another way to make money.

[more]

front cover of Scratchin' and Survivin'
Scratchin' and Survivin'
Hustle Economics and the Black Sitcoms of Tandem Productions
Adrien Sebro
Rutgers University Press, 2024

The 1970s was a golden age for representations of African American life on TV sitcoms: Sanford & SonGood TimesThe Jeffersons. Surprisingly, nearly all the decade’s notable Black sitcoms were made by a single company, Tandem Productions. Founded by two white men, the successful team behind All in the Family, writer Norman Lear and director Bud Yorkin, Tandem gave unprecedented opportunities to Black actors, writers, and producers to break into the television industry. However, these Black auteurs also struggled to get the economic privileges and creative autonomy regularly granted to their white counterparts. 
 
Scratchin’ and Survivin’ discovers surprising parallels between the behind-the-scenes drama at Tandem and the plotlines that aired on their sitcoms, as both real and fictional African Americans devised various strategies for getting their fair share out of systems prone to exploiting their labor. The media scholar Adrien Sebro describes these tactics as a form of “hustle economics,” and he pays special attention to the ways that Black women—including actresses like LaWanda Page, Isabel Sanford, and Esther Rolle—had to hustle for recognition. Exploring Tandem’s complex legacy, including its hit racially mixed sitcom Diff’rent Strokes, he showcases the Black talent whose creative agency and labor resilience helped to transform the television industry.
 

[more]

front cover of A Search for Solvency
A Search for Solvency
Bretton Woods and the International Monetary System, 1941-1971
By Alfred E. Eckes, Jr.
University of Texas Press, 1975

Diverted by the dramatic military and political events of July 1944, few Americans realized the significance of an international conference taking place at Bretton Woods, a mountain resort in New Hampshire, far from the battle zones. There United Nations experts were completing plans for a world monetary and financial system that they hoped would create a prosperous, efficient global economy and avert economic tensions that might lead to another world war. Until the dollar crisis of 1971, decisions made at Bretton Woods provided the institutions and rules for international finance. The conference ushered in an era of unprecedented expansion of world trade and prosperity.

Based on extensive research in previously unavailable sources, A Search for Solvency relates intriguing and often complicated issues of economic analysis and diplomatic history. It offers a succinct and comprehensive survey of international monetary development from the collapse of the pre–World War I gold standard to the devaluation of the dollar in 1971. In effect, it explains the origins of late twentieth-century global inflation and currency problems.

The author details how the ghost of the Great Depression, the failure of monetary reconstruction efforts after World War I, and the memory of the nineteenth-century gold standard guided efforts to construct the Bretton Woods system. This preoccupation with the past, as well as political constraints, produced a monetary system protected against past dangers—fluctuating currencies, controls, and deflation—but dangerously vulnerable to inflationary pressures. The weaknesses of Bretton Woods, a system geared to an era in which economic power was concentrated in the United States, became visible in the 1960s and painfully apparent by the mid-1970s.

[more]

logo for Ohio University Press
Second Economy In Tanzania
Eastern African Studies
T. L. Maliyamkono
Ohio University Press, 1990

Every country has its second, underground, unofficial, irregular or parallel economy. By their nature they are hidden and defy accurate and formal measurement. They provoke conceptual and definitional arguments among analysts. There has recently been a surge of interest; anecdote, newspaper reports and ‘educated guesses’ have increasingly been replaced by serious analysis. However, most of the new generation of studies are of developed economies.

This book examines the effect on a developing economy. It explores the causes, identifies the key sectoral manifestations and reveals the various groups of actors. It attempts to establish the size of the second economy of Tanzania.

Various factors drove the official economy into distress. Tanzanian peasants, wage earners and firms resorted to legitimate and illegitimate activities to overcome state control and shortage of basic necessities.

This pioneering study will be invaluable for policy makers, international funding bodies and for students who are faced with trying to understand the realities of life behind the formal facade of economic theory and official statistics.

[more]

front cover of The Second Information Revolution
The Second Information Revolution
Gerald W. Brock
Harvard University Press, 2003

Thanks to inexpensive computers and data communications, the speed and volume of human communication are exponentially greater than they were even a quarter-century ago. Not since the advent of the telephone and telegraph in the nineteenth century has information technology changed daily life so radically. We are in the midst of what Gerald Brock calls a second information revolution.

Brock traces the complex history of this revolution, from its roots in World War II through the bursting bubble of the Internet economy. As he explains, the revolution sprang from an interdependent series of technological advances, entrepreneurial innovations, and changes to public policy. Innovations in radar, computers, and electronic components for defense projects translated into rapid expansion in the private sector, but some opportunities were blocked by regulatory policies. The contentious political effort to accommodate new technology while protecting beneficiaries of the earlier regulated monopoly eventually resulted in a regulatory structure that facilitated the explosive growth in data communications. Brock synthesizes these complex factors into a readable economic history of the wholesale transformation of the way we exchange and process information.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Secrecy and the Arms Race
A Theory of the Accumulation of Strategic Weapons and How Secrecy Affects It
Martin C. McGuire
Harvard University Press

Martin McGuire has written for the specialist and the concerned layman a highly original and valuable contribution to our understanding of the arms race, based upon economic theory in general and the theory of economic duopoly in particular. He calls attention to the fact that when two world powers face each other with massive allocations of resources for arms, and when each regards the other as the major, if not the sole, threat to its own security, the question of accurate information about the strength and intentions of the adversary arises for each side in many and various ways. As a result, this study is a pioneering, analytic effort to approach the value of keeping secrets from or of obtaining information about an enemy.

The author is concerned with such questions as: what is the loss in being only 50 percent confident rather than certain that the adversary doesn’t have more X missiles or missiles of yield W megatons or of accuracy C thousand feet? Should one insist on being 95 percent sure when bargaining for arms control? How can a side compensate for its uncertainty most efficiently? An understanding of these problems can not only increase our security; it may help as well to contain or control the entire two-sided race.

[more]

logo for University of Chicago Press
Secret Origins of Modern Microeconomics
Dupuit and the Engineers
Robert B. Ekelund Jr. and Robert F. Hébert
University of Chicago Press, 1999
How did contemporary microeconomic theory emerge? Who were its chief architects? Conventional wisdom points largely to the work of Alfred Marshall (1842-1924) and his colleagues in England in the late nineteenth century. In this highly original and important contribution to the history of economic thought, Robert Ekelund and Robert Hébert convincingly argue that the intellectual tradition of microeconomic inquiry was initiated by members of the Corps des Ingénieurs des Ponts et Chaussées (French corps of state civil engineers), most notably Jules Dupuit (1804-66). Using documents previously unavailable in English, the authors present a cohesive and original picture of French economic thought that solidly documents the contributions of Dupuit and his colleagues. This is a seminal work about the foundations of modern microeconomics.

"A very fine piece of work that provides material I have never seen before, is well written, and has undoubtable merits."—William Baumol, C.V. Starr Center for Applied Economics, New York University

"By bringing to the forefront the achievements of French engineer Jules Dupuit, this work changes our view of the history of microeconomics. Secret Origin of Modern Microeconomics is a commentary on our discipline's mythology of origins: it reminds us that, in the construction and maintenance of canonical authority, the recoginition of founding fathers requires simultaneous, often subtle, gestures of exclusion."—Philippe Fontaine, école Normale Supèrieure de Cachan
[more]

front cover of Seeds of Occupation, Seeds of Possibility
Seeds of Occupation, Seeds of Possibility
The Agrochemical-GMO Industry in Hawai‘i
Andrea Noelani Brower
West Virginia University Press, 2022
How Hawaiʻi became the epicenter of the biotech seed industry, and how a resistance movement arose to confront the industry’s power.

Hawaiʻi is a primary site for development of herbicide-resistant corn seed and, until recently, was host to more experimental field trials of genetically engineered crops than anywhere else in the world. It is also a node of powerful resistance. While documentaries and popular news stories have profiled the biotech seed industry in Hawaiʻi, Seeds of Occupation, Seeds of Possibility is the first book to detail the social and historical conditions by which the chemical-seed oligopoly came to occupy the most geographically isolated islands in the world and made the soils of Hawaiʻi the epicenter of agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology testing.

Andrea Brower, an activist-scholar from Hawaiʻi, examines the consequences related to genetically engineered seed development for Hawaiʻi’s people and the social movement that has risen in response. With insights beyond the islands, Seeds of Occupation, Seeds of Possibility illuminates why visions for a radically better world must be expanded by intersectional and systemically oriented movements.
 
[more]

front cover of Seeing Like a Citizen
Seeing Like a Citizen
Decolonization, Development, and the Making of Kenya, 1945–1980
Kara Moskowitz
Ohio University Press, 2019

In Seeing Like a Citizen, Kara Moskowitz approaches Kenya’s late colonial and early postcolonial eras as a single period of political, economic, and social transition. In focusing on rural Kenyans—the vast majority of the populace and the main targets of development interventions—as they actively sought access to aid, she offers new insights into the texture of political life in decolonizing Kenya and the early postcolonial world.

Using multisited archival sources and oral histories focused on the western Rift Valley, Seeing Like a Citizen makes three fundamental contributions to our understanding of African and Kenyan history. First, it challenges the widely accepted idea of the gatekeeper state, revealing that state control remained limited and that the postcolonial state was an internally varied and often dissonant institution. Second, it transforms our understanding of postcolonial citizenship, showing that its balance of rights and duties was neither claimed nor imposed, but negotiated and differentiated. Third, it reorients Kenyan historiography away from central Kenya and elite postcolonial politics. The result is a powerful investigation of experiences of independence, of the meaning and form of development, and of how global political practices were composed and recomposed on the ground in local settings.

[more]

front cover of Seeing the City
Seeing the City
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Study of the Urban
Nanke Verloo
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
The city is a complex object. Some researchers look at its shape, others at its people, animals, ecology, policy, infrastructures, buildings, history, art, or technical networks. Some researchers analyse processes of in- or exclusion, gentrification, or social mobility; others biological evolution, traffic flows, or spatial development. Many combine these topics or add still more topics beyond this list. Some projects cross the boundaries of research and practice and engage in action research, while others pursue knowledge for the sake of curiosity. This volume embraces this variety of perspectives and provides an essential collection of methodologies for studying the city from multiple, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary perspectives. We start by recognizing that the complexity of the urban environment cannot be understood from a single vantage point. We therefore offer multiple methodologies in order to gather and analyse data about the city, and provide ways to connect and integrate these approaches.

The contributors form a talented network of urban scholars and practitioners at the forefront of their fields. They offer hands-on methodological techniques and skills for data collection and analysis. Furthermore, they reveal honest and insightful reflections from behind the scenes. All methodologies are illustrated with examples drawn from the authors own research applying them in the city of Amsterdam. In this way, the volume also offers a rich collection of Amsterdam-based research and outcomes that may inform local urban practitioners and policy makers.

Altogether, the volume offers indispensable tools for and aims to educate a new generation of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary-minded urban scholars and practitioners.
[more]

front cover of Seeking a Premier Economy
Seeking a Premier Economy
The Economic Effects of British Economic Reforms, 1980-2000
Edited by David Card, Richard Blundell, and Richard B. Freeman
University of Chicago Press, 2004
In the 1980s and 1990s successive United Kingdom governments enacted a series of reforms to establish a more market-oriented economy, closer to the American model and further away from its Western European competitors. Today, the United Kingdom is one of the least regulated economies in the world, marked by transformed welfare and industrial relations systems and broad privatization. Virtually every industry and government program has been affected by the reforms, from hospitals and schools to labor unions and jobless benefit programs.

Seeking a Premier Economy focuses on the labor and product market reforms that directly impacted productivity, employment, and inequality. The questions asked are provocative: How did the United Kingdom manage to stave off falling earnings for lower paid workers? What role did the reforms play in rising income inequality and trends in poverty? At the same time, what reforms also contributed to reduced unemployment and the accelerated growth of real wages? The comparative microeconomic approach of this book yields the most credible evaluation possible, focusing on closely associated outcomes of particular reforms for individuals, firms, and sectors.
[more]

logo for University of Chicago Press
Selected Essays by Frank H. Knight, Volume 1
"What is Truth" in Economics?
Frank H. Knight
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Frank H. Knight (1885-1972) was a central figure—many say the dominant influence—in the development of the "Chicago School of Economics" at the University of Chicago in the 1930s and 1940s, where he taught future Nobel laureates Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, George Stigler, and many other notable scholars. It was Knight's embedded skepticism about the reach of economic knowledge that set the stage for the laissez-faire economics that matured at the University in the 1950s and 1960s. But as important as Knight's technical economic contributions were, he never strayed far from his broad philosophical interests and concern for the state of modern liberal democracy.

Ross B. Emmett's selection of Knight's essays is the first to offer a comprehensive picture of the work of this notable social scientist over the span of his career. Included are not only Knight's most influential writings, but also a number of uncollected papers which have not previously been widely accessible. These essays illustrate Knight's views on the central debates regarding economics, social science, ethics, education, and modern liberalism. Volume 1: "What is Truth" in Economics? contains fifteen of Knight's papers up through 1940. Volume 2: Laissez Faire: Pro and Con includes fourteen of Knight's papers from 1940 through 1967, including "Socialism: The Nature of the Problem" and "The Sickness of Liberal Society."

These twenty-nine essays together stand not only as a monument to one of economics' most significant and original thinkers, but will also serve as an invaluable resource for economists, philosophers, and political scientists interested in the development of the western liberal tradition.

[more]

front cover of Selected Essays by Frank H. Knight, Volume 2
Selected Essays by Frank H. Knight, Volume 2
Laissez Faire: Pro and Con
Frank H. Knight
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Frank H. Knight (1885-1972) was a central figure—many say the dominant influence—in the development of the "Chicago School of Economics" at the University of Chicago in the 1930s and 1940s, where he taught future Nobel laureates Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, George Stigler, and many other notable scholars. It was Knight's embedded skepticism about the reach of economic knowledge that set the stage for the laissez-faire economics that matured at the University in the 1950s and 1960s. But as important as Knight's technical economic contributions were, he never strayed far from his broad philosophical interests and concern for the state of modern liberal democracy.

Ross B. Emmett's selection of Knight's essays is the first to offer a comprehensive picture of the work of this notable social scientist over the span of his career. Included are not only Knight's most influential writings, but also a number of uncollected papers which have not previously been widely accessible. These essays illustrate Knight's views on the central debates regarding economics, social science, ethics, education, and modern liberalism. Volume 1: "What is Truth" in Economics? contains fifteen of Knight's papers up through 1940. Volume 2: Laissez Faire: Pro and Con includes fourteen of Knight's papers from 1940 through 1967, including "Socialism: The Nature of the Problem" and "The Sickness of Liberal Society."

These twenty-nine essays together stand not only as a monument to one of economics' most significant and original thinkers, but will also serve as an invaluable resource for economists, philosophers, and political scientists interested in the development of the western liberal tradition.
[more]

front cover of Selected Works of Merton H. Miller
Selected Works of Merton H. Miller
A Celebration of Markets: Volume 1: Finance
Merton H. Miller
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Widely regarded as one of the founders of modern corporate finance, Merton H. Miller was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1990 for his work in the theory of finance and financial economics. Selected Works of Merton H. Miller gathers together in two volumes a selection of Miller's most influential contributions over more than fifty years of active research. A common theme running throughout both volumes is Miller's conviction about the utility of market-based approaches to topics as diverse as dividend policy, bank regulation, the structure of securities markets, and competition between research universities and teaching colleges.

Miller was perhaps best known for a series of highly influential papers he cowrote in the 1950s and 1960s with fellow Nobel laureate Franco Modigliani that advanced a set of capital structure theorems later dubbed the "M and M propositions." In brief, the M and M propositions state that the actions of investors, firms, and capital markets will cause the market value of a firm to be independent of its capital structure. In other words, a corporation's value depends on its investments in people, ideas, and physical capital goods and not on the mix of bonds, stocks, and other securities used to finance the investments. Four of these papers are reprinted here, together with important later work by Miller in macroeconomics, corporate capital structure, management science, asset pricing, and the economic and regulatory problems of the financial services industry.

Diverse and innovative, the papers in Selected Works of Merton H. Miller will interest students and practitioners of economics, finance, and business, as well as policymakers responsible for market regulation.
[more]

front cover of Selected Works of Merton H. Miller
Selected Works of Merton H. Miller
A Celebration of Markets: Volume 2: Economics
Merton H. Miller
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Widely regarded as one of the founders of modern corporate finance, Merton H. Miller was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1990 for his work in the theory of finance and financial economics. Selected Works of Merton H. Miller gathers together in two volumes a selection of Miller's most influential contributions over more than fifty years of active research. A common theme running throughout both volumes is Miller's conviction about the utility of market-based approaches to topics as diverse as dividend policy, bank regulation, the structure of securities markets, and competition between research universities and teaching colleges.

Miller was perhaps best known for a series of highly influential papers he cowrote in the 1950s and 1960s with fellow Nobel laureate Franco Modigliani that advanced a set of capital structure theorems later dubbed the "M and M propositions." In brief, the M and M propositions state that the actions of investors, firms, and capital markets will cause the market value of a firm to be independent of its capital structure. In other words, a corporation's value depends on its investments in people, ideas, and physical capital goods and not on the mix of bonds, stocks, and other securities used to finance the investments. Four of these papers are reprinted here, together with important later work by Miller in macroeconomics, corporate capital structure, management science, asset pricing, and the economic and regulatory problems of the financial services industry.

Diverse and innovative, the papers in Selected Works of Merton H. Miller will interest students and practitioners of economics, finance, and business, as well as policymakers responsible for market regulation.
[more]

logo for University of Illinois Press
Selling Free Enterprise
The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-60
Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf
University of Illinois Press, 1994

The post-World War II years in the United States were marked by the business community's efforts to discredit New Deal liberalism and undermine the power and legitimacy of organized labor. In Selling Free Enterprise, Elizabeth Fones-Wolf describes how conservative business leaders strove to reorient workers away from their loyalties to organized labor and government, teaching that prosperity could be achieved through reliance on individual initiative, increased productivity, and the protection of personal liberty. 

Based on research in a wide variety of business and labor sources, this detailed account shows how business permeated every aspect of American life, including factories, schools, churches, and community institutions.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Selling Hope
State Lotteries in America
Charles Clotfelter and Philip J. Cook
Harvard University Press
With its huge jackpots and heartwarming rags-to-riches stories, the lottery has become the hope and dream of millions of Americans—and the fastest-growing source of state revenue. Despite its popularity, however, there remains much controversy over whether this is an appropriate business for state government and, if so, how this business should be conducted.
[more]

logo for University of Illinois Press
SELLING OF THE SOUTH
The Southern Crusade for Industrial Development, 1936-90
James C. Cobb
University of Illinois Press, 1993
From the Great Depression to the Sunbelt Era the South has pursued industrial development as the remedy for its economic ills. The mixed results of  this ongoing crusade are chronicled in this path-breaking study, updated to 1990, in which James Cobb examines the expectations, achievements, and side effects of the dive for southern industrialization.
 
[more]

front cover of Selling Paris
Selling Paris
Property and Commercial Culture in the Fin-de-siècle Capital
Alexia M. Yates
Harvard University Press, 2015

In 1871 Paris was a city in crisis. Besieged during the Franco-Prussian War, its buildings and boulevards were damaged, its finances mired in debt, and its new government untested. But if Parisian authorities balked at the challenges facing them, entrepreneurs and businessmen did not. Selling Paris chronicles the people, practices, and politics that spurred the largest building boom of the nineteenth century, turning city-making into big business in the French capital.

Alexia Yates traces the emergence of a commercial Parisian housing market, as private property owners, architects, speculative developers, and credit-lending institutions combined to finance, build, and sell apartments and buildings. Real estate agents and their innovative advertising strategies fed these new residential spaces into a burgeoning marketplace. Corporations built empires with tens of thousands of apartments under management for the benefit of shareholders. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Parisian housing market caught the attention of the wider public as newspapers began reporting its ups and downs.

The forces that underwrote Paris’s creation as the quintessentially modern metropolis were not only state-centered or state-directed but also grew out of the uncoordinated efforts of private actors and networks. Revealing the ways housing and property became commodities during a crucial period of urbanization, Selling Paris is an urban history of business and a business history of a city that transforms our understanding of both.

[more]

front cover of Selling Power
Selling Power
Economics, Policy, and Electric Utilities Before 1940
John L. Neufeld
University of Chicago Press, 2016
We remember Thomas Edison as the inventor of the incandescent light bulb, but he deserves credit for something much larger, an even more singular invention that profoundly changed the way the world works: the modern electric utility industry. Edison’s light bulb was the first to work within a system where a utility generated electricity and distributed it to customers for lighting. The story of how electric utilities went within one generation from prototype to an indispensable part of most Americans’ lives is a story about the relationships between political and technological change.
           
John L. Neufeld offers a comprehensive historical treatment of the economics that shaped electric utilities. Compared with most industries, the organization of the electric utility industry is not—and cannot be—economically efficient. Most industries are kept by law in a state of fair competition, but the capital necessary to start an electric company—generators, transmission and distribution systems, and land and buildings—is so substantial that few companies can enter the market and compete. Therefore, the natural state of the electric utility industry since its inception has been a monopoly subject to government oversight. These characteristics of electric utilities—and electricity’s importance—have created over time sharp political controversies, and changing public policies have dramatically changed the industry’s structure to an extent matched by few other industries. Neufeld outlines the struggles that shaped the industry’s development, and shows how the experience of electric utilities provides insight into the design of economic institutions, including today’s new large-scale markets.
 
[more]

front cover of Selling Sounds
Selling Sounds
The Commercial Revolution in American Music
David Suisman
Harvard University Press, 2009

From Tin Pan Alley to grand opera, player-pianos to phonograph records, David Suisman’s Selling Sounds explores the rise of music as big business and the creation of a radically new musical culture. Around the turn of the twentieth century, music entrepreneurs laid the foundation for today’s vast industry, with new products, technologies, and commercial strategies to incorporate music into the daily rhythm of modern life. Popular songs filled the air with a new kind of musical pleasure, phonographs brought opera into the parlor, and celebrity performers like Enrico Caruso captivated the imagination of consumers from coast to coast.

Selling Sounds uncovers the origins of the culture industry in music and chronicles how music ignited an auditory explosion that penetrated all aspects of society. It maps the growth of the music business across the social landscape—in homes, theaters, department stores, schools—and analyzes the effect of this development on everything from copyright law to the sensory environment. While music came to resemble other consumer goods, its distinct properties as sound ensured that its commercial growth and social impact would remain unique.

Today, the music that surrounds us—from iPods to ring tones to Muzak—accompanies us everywhere from airports to grocery stores. The roots of this modern culture lie in the business of popular song, player-pianos, and phonographs of a century ago. Provocative, original, and lucidly written, Selling Sounds reveals the commercial architecture of America’s musical life.

[more]

front cover of Selling The Dream
Selling The Dream
The Gulf American Corporation and the Building of Cape Coral, Florida
David Dodrill
University of Alabama Press, 1993
Gulf American Corporation’s heavy influence on the migration of people to Florida
 
The Gulf American Corporation played a significant role in the development and urbanization of the state of Florida, especially southwest Florida, during the late 1950s and 1960s. The Miami-based company promoted living in Florida to people residing throughout North America and in several foreign countries. It also enabled people of average incomes to purchase home sites in Florida on an installment basis. As a result, Gulf American had a heavy influence on the migration of people to Florida as early as 1957.
 
Leonard and Julius J. Rosen of Baltimore, Maryland, founded and controlled the corporation during its 12-year existence from 1957 to 1969. The sale and promotion of Florida real estate was an extension of their marketing style developed in previous years when they sold mail-order cosmetics and other products. Their innovative sales strategies ultimately resulted in conflicts with state and federal regulatory agencies in the mid 1960s over the firm’s aggressive sales methods. The struggle with the state of Florida over regulation, which degenerated into a personal conflict between Governor Claude Kirk and the Rosens, resulted in the Rosens’ selling the business to GAC Corporation of Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 1969. After a series of business setbacks and continuing accusations of misrepresentations by salespeople, GAC declared bankruptcy in 1975 and was eventually resurrected as Avatar Holding, Inc., in 1980.
    Gulf American left a mixed legacy to the state of Florida by building several growing cities like Cape Coral and Golden Gate, while at the same time selling worthless underwater swampland near the Everglades. The building of their first development was planned by the company. In that sense, Cape Coral was designed to be the Rosens’ most elaborate sales tool.
 
Based on 31 personal interviews with former Gulf American Corporation, GAC/Avatar Holding company officials and supplemented by articles from 25 different newspapers, this book provides a comprehensive and fascinating look at the Gulf American Corporation—the largest land sales firm in the United States in the 1960s. In many ways the story of Gulf American is a rags-to-riches tale of Leonard and Julius (Jack) Rosen, complete with intrigue and the fluctuations of fortune that matched the rising tides that covered much of the land they sold.
 
 
[more]

front cover of The Sensory Order and Other Writings on the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology
The Sensory Order and Other Writings on the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology
F. A. Hayek
University of Chicago Press, 2017
F. A. Hayek (1899–1992) was one of the leading voices in economic and social theory, but he also wrote on theoretical psychology, including in the landmark book The Sensory Order. Although The Sensory Order was not widely engaged with by either psychologists or social scientists at the time of publication, it is seen today as essential for fully understanding Hayek’s more well-known work.

The latest addition to the University of Chicago Press’s Collected Works of F. A. Hayek series, The Sensory Order and Other Writings on the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology pairs the book, originally published in 1952, with additional essays related to The Sensory Order’s key themes, including a student paper from 1920 in which Hayek outlined the basic ideas he fully developed in the 1952 book. Rounding out the volume is an insightful introduction by editor Viktor Vanberg that sketches out the central problems Hayek was grappling with when he wrote The Sensory Order and the influential role this early thinking on theoretical psychology would play over the next six decades of his career. The book also features ample footnotes and citations for further reading, making this an essential contribution to the series.
 
[more]

front cover of Sentimental Materialism
Sentimental Materialism
Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Lori Merish
Duke University Press, 2000
In Sentimental Materialism Lori Merish considers the intricate relationship between consumption and womanhood in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Taking as her starting point a diversity of cultural artifacts—from domestic fiction and philosophical treatises to advice literature and cigars—Merish explores the symbolic functions they served and finds that consumption evolved into a form of personal expressiveness that indicated not only a woman’s wealth and taste but also her race, class, morality, and civic values. The discursive production of this new subjectivity—the feminine consumer—was remarkably influential, helping to shape American capitalism, culture, and nation building.

The phenomenon of female consumption was capitalism’s complement to male production: It created what Merish calls the “Other Protestant Ethic,”a feminine and sentimental counterpart to Max Weber’s ethic of hard work, economic rationality, and self-control. In addition, driven by the culture’s effort to civilize the “cannibalistic” practices of ethnic, class, and national otherness, appropriate female consumerism, marked by taste and refinement, identified certain women and their families as proper citizens of the United States. The public nature of consumption, however, had curiously conflicting effects: While the achievement of cultured material circumstances facilitated women’s civic agency, it also reinforced stereotypes of domestic womanhood.

Sentimental Materialism’s inquiry into middle-class consumption and accompanying ideals of womanhood will appeal to readers in a variety of disciplines, including American studies, cultural studies, feminist theory, and cultural history.

[more]

front cover of The Servant Leader
The Servant Leader
Unleashing the Power of Your People
Robert P. Neuschel
Northwestern University Press, 2005
In The Servant Leader, Robert P. Neuschel makes the case that our leadership is experiencing a diminution in ethics and a loss of enduring values. These weakening factors are exacerbated by a preoccupation with the short term. As Neuschel puts it, "We are more concerned about achieving quick shareholder value than building an enduring organization that can increase its capacity to produce useful products or services more competitively and more effectively on an enduring basis." He lays the blame at the feet of our corporate leadership.

He asks: what steps might we take to revitalize the quality and strength of our leadership? He then forcefully and straightforwardly gives an outline of what he believes are the major changes in leadership we must bring about. As a professor of management and strategy, and earlier, as a director and senior partner at a major consulting firm, and as a captain in the U. S. Army, Neuschel observed the best of leadership, and practiced it. He shares his insights with us in The Servant Leader.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Service Sector in Soviet Economic Growth
A Comparative Study
Gur Ofer
Harvard University Press, 1973
The service sector represents a smaller share of the national economy in the Soviet Union than in other countries at similar levels. This gap is found in trade, in private and business services, and, surprisingly, in public administration. Gur Ofer provides a twofold examination of this phenomenon. He uses cross country comparisons to study the “normal” relationships between the size of the service institutions and economic development. At the same time he investigates specific factors operating in Socialist and Soviet countries, thus uniting the special Soviet case with general development theory.
[more]

front cover of Settling the Frontier
Settling the Frontier
Urban Development in America's Borderlands, 1600–1830
Joseph P. Alessi
Westholme Publishing, 2020
The Role of Indigenous People in the Founding of America's First Major Border Towns
In 1811, while escorting members of John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company up the Columbia River, their Chinookan guide refused to advance beyond a particular point that marked a boundary between his people and another indigenous group. Long before European contact, Native Americans created and maintained recognized borders, ranging from family hunting and fishing properties to larger tribal territories to vast river valley regions. Within the confines of these respective borders, the native population often established permanent settlements that acted as the venues for the major political, economic, and social activities that took place in virtually every part of precolonial North America. It was the location of these native settlements that played a major role in the establishment of the first European, and later, American frontier towns.
In Settling the Frontier: Urban Development in America’s Borderlands, 1600–1830, historian Joseph P. Alessi examines how the Pecos, Mohawk, Ohioan, and Chinook tribal communities aided Europeans and Americans in the founding of five of America’s earliest border towns—Santa Fe (New Mexico), Fort Amsterdam (New York City), Fort Orange (Albany, New York), Fort Pitt (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), and Fort Astoria (Portland, Oregon). Filling a void in scholarship about the role of Native American communities in  the settlement of North America, Alessi reveals that, although often resistant to European and American progress or abused by it, Indians played an integral role in motivating and assisting Europeans with the establishment of frontier towns. In addition to the location of these towns, the native population was often crucial to the survival of the settlers in unfamiliar and unforgiving environments. As a result, these new towns became the logistical and economic vanguards for even greater development and exploitation of North America. 
[more]

front cover of The Seven Keys to Communicating in Brazil
The Seven Keys to Communicating in Brazil
An Intercultural Approach
Orlando R. Kelm and David A. Victor
Georgetown University Press, 2016

The key to professional success in Brazil is understanding Brazilians. But how do you understand an unfamiliar culture? Seasoned cross-cultural trainers Orlando R. Kelm and David A. Victor use Victor’s groundbreaking approach of evaluating a culture’s language, environment, social organization, context, authority, nonverbal communication, and time conception to provide a framework for understanding Brazilians and show effective strategies to overcome these communication barriers. The method, referred to as the LESCANT approach makes you the expert evaluator of the culture and helps you easily navigate hurdles that can challenge business relationships.

Each chapter of The Seven Keys to Communicating in Brazil employs memorable anecdotes, business cases on each topic from business professionals, and photographs to address key topics. The authors demonstrate how to evaluate the cultural differences between Brazil and North America and include examples of common communication mistakes. Engaging and accessible, the book helps North Americans master the nuances of the Brazilian language and achieve a real experience of the Brasil dos brasileiros.

[more]

logo for Georgetown University Press
The Seven Keys to Communicating in Japan
An Intercultural Approach
Haru Yamada, Orlando R. Kelm, and David A. Victor
Georgetown University Press

The key to professional success in Japan is understanding Japanese people. The authors, seasoned cross-cultural trainers for businesspeople, provide a practical set of guidelines for understanding Japanese people and culture through David A. Victor's LESCANT approach of evaluating a culture's language, environment, social organization, context, authority, nonverbal communication, and time conception. Each chapter addresses one of these topics and shows effective strategies to overcoming cultural barriers and demonstrates how to evaluate the differences between Japan and North America to help avoid common communication mistakes. The book is generously peppered with photographs to provide visual examples. Exploring language and communication topics, international relations, and the business community, this book is an excellent intercultural overview for anyone traveling to or working in Japan.

[more]

logo for Georgetown University Press
The Seven Keys to Communicating in Mexico
An Intercultural Approach
Orlando R. Kelm, Olivia Hernandez-Pozas, and David A. Victor
Georgetown University Press, 2020

How do you build successful professional connections with colleagues from Mexico? While most books focus simply on how to avoid common communication mistakes, this book leads its readers to an understanding of how to succeed and thrive within the three cultures, Mexico, the US, and Canada. Kelm, Hernandez-Pozas and Victor present a set of practical guidelines for communicating professionally with Mexicans, both in Mexico and abroad, providing many photographs as examples. The Seven Keys to Communicating in Mexico follows the model of presenting key cultural concepts used in the earlier books by Kelm and Victor on Brazil and (with Haru Yamada) on Japan. Olivia Hernandez-Pozas, Orlando Kelm, and David Victor, well-respected research professors and seasoned cross-cultural trainers for businesspeople, guide readers through Mexican culture using Victor's LESCANT Model (an acronym representing seven key cross-cultural communication areas: Language, Environment, Social Organization, Contexting, Authority, Nonverbal Behavior, and Time). Each chapter addresses one of these topics and demonstrates how to evaluate the differences among Mexican, US, and Canadian cultures. In the final chapter the authors bring all of these cultural interactions together with a sample case study about business interactions between Mexicans and North Americans. The case study includes additional observations from North American and Mexican business professionals who offer related suggestions and recommendations.

[more]

front cover of Sewing the Fabric of Statehood
Sewing the Fabric of Statehood
Garment Unions, American Labor, and the Establishment of the State of Israel
Adam Howard
University of Illinois Press, 2017
Long a bastion of Jewish labor power, garment unions provided financial and political aid essential to founding and building the nation of Israel. Throughout the project, Jewish labor often operated outside of official channels as non-governmental organizations. Adam Howard explores the untold story of how three influential garment unions worked alone and with other Jewish labor organizations in support of a new Jewish state. Sewing the Fabric of Statehood reveals a coalition at work on multiple fronts. Sustained efforts convinced the AFL and CIO to support Jewish development in Palestine through land purchases for Jewish workers and encouraged the construction of trade schools and cultural centers. Other activists, meanwhile, directed massive economic aid to Histadrut, the General Federation of Jewish Workers in Palestine, or pressured the British and American governments to recognize Israel's independence. What emerges is a powerful account of the motivations and ideals that led American labor to forge its own foreign policy and reshape both the postwar world and Jewish history.
[more]

front cover of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment in the U.S. Military
Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment in the U.S. Military
Volume 4. Investigations of Potential Bias in Estimates from the 2014 RAND Military Workplace Study
Andrew R. Morral
RAND Corporation, 2016
The Department of Defense Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office asked the RAND Corporation to independently assess rates of sexual assault, sexual harassment, and gender discrimination in the military. This volume presents the results of methodological investigations into sources of potential bias in estimates produced from the 2014 RAND Military Workplace Study for active- and reserve-component members in the U.S. military.
[more]

front cover of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment in the U.S. Military
Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment in the U.S. Military
Volume 5. Estimates for Installation- and Command-Level Risk of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment from the 2014 RAND Military Workplace Study
Andrew R. Morral
RAND Corporation, 2018
The Department of Defense Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office asked the RAND Corporation to conduct an assessment of the rates of sexual assault, sexual harassment, and gender discrimination in the U.S. military. This volume presents survey estimates of how risk of sexual assault and sexual harassment varies across military installations and major commands using data from the 2014 RAND Military Workplace Study.
[more]

front cover of Shaded Lives
Shaded Lives
African American Women and Television
Beretta E Smith-Shomade
Rutgers University Press, 2002
Since its invention, television has been one of the biggest influences on American culture. Through this medium, multiple visions and disparate voices have attempted to stake a place in viewer consumption. Yet even as this programming supposedly reflects characteristics of the general American populace, television-generated images are manipulated and contradictory, predicated by the various economic, political, and cultural forces placed upon it.

In Shaded Lives, Beretta Smith-Shomade sets out to dissect images of the African American woman in television from the 1980s. She calls their depiction "binaristic," or split. African American women, although an essential part of television programming today, are still presented as distorted and deviant. By closely examining the television texts of African-American women in comedy, music video, television news and talk shows (Oprah Winfrey is highlighted), Smith-Shomade shows how these voices are represented, what forces may be at work in influencing these images, and what alternate ways of viewing might be available.

Smith-Shomade offers critical examples of where the sexist and racist legacy of this country collide with the cultural strength of Black women in visual and real-lived culture. As the nation's climate of heightened racial divisiveness continues to relegate the representation of Black women to depravity and display, her study is not only useful, it is critical.

[more]

front cover of Shadow Exchanges along the New Silk Roads
Shadow Exchanges along the New Silk Roads
Eva P. W. Hung
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
Long before China promulgated the official One Belt One Road initiatives, vast networks of cross-border exchanges already existed across Asia and Eurasia. The dynamics of such trade and resource flows have largely been outside state control, and are pushed to the realm of the shadow economy. The official initiative is a state-driven attempt to enhance the orderly flow of resources across countries along the Belt and Road, hence extending the reach of the states to the shadow economies. This volume offers a bottom-up view of the transborder informal exchanges across Asia and Eurasia, and analyses its clash and mesh with the state-orchestrated Belt and Road cooperation. By undertaking a comparative study of country cases along the new silk roads, the book underlines the intended and unintended consequences of such competing routes of connectivity on the socio-economic conditions of local communities.
[more]

front cover of Shadows of Doubt
Shadows of Doubt
Stereotypes, Crime, and the Pursuit of Justice
Brendan O'Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi
Harvard University Press, 2019

Shadows of Doubt reveals how deeply stereotypes distort our interactions, shape crime, and deform the criminal justice system.

If you’re a robber, how do you choose your victims? As a police officer, how afraid are you of the young man you’re about to arrest? As a judge, do you think the suspect in front of you will show up in court if released from pretrial detention? As a juror, does the defendant seem guilty to you? Your answers may depend on the stereotypes you hold, and the stereotypes you believe others hold. In this provocative, pioneering book, economists Brendan O’Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi explore how stereotypes can shape the ways crimes unfold and how they contaminate the justice system through far more insidious, pervasive, and surprising paths than we have previously imagined.

Crime and punishment occur under extreme uncertainty. Offenders, victims, police officers, judges, and jurors make high-stakes decisions with limited information, under severe time pressure. With compelling stories and extensive data on how people act as they try to commit, prevent, or punish crimes, O’Flaherty and Sethi reveal the extent to which we rely on stereotypes as shortcuts in our decision making. Sometimes it’s simple: Robbers tend to target those they stereotype as being more compliant. Other interactions display a complex and sometimes tragic interplay of assumptions: “If he thinks I’m dangerous, he might shoot. I’ll shoot first.”

Shadows of Doubt shows how deeply stereotypes are implicated in the most controversial criminal justice issues of our time, and how a clearer understanding of their effects can guide us toward a more just society.

[more]

front cover of Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line
Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line
The Marketing of Higher Education
David L. Kirp
Harvard University Press, 2003

How can you turn an English department into a revenue center? How do you grade students if they are "customers" you must please? How do you keep industry from dictating a university's research agenda? What happens when the life of the mind meets the bottom line? Wry and insightful, Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line takes us on a cross-country tour of the most powerful trend in academic life today--the rise of business values and the belief that efficiency, immediate practical usefulness, and marketplace triumph are the best measures of a university's success.

With a shrewd eye for the telling example, David Kirp relates stories of marketing incursions into places as diverse as New York University's philosophy department and the University of Virginia's business school, the high-minded University of Chicago and for-profit DeVry University. He describes how universities "brand" themselves for greater appeal in the competition for top students; how academic super-stars are wooed at outsized salaries to boost an institution's visibility and prestige; how taxpayer-supported academic research gets turned into profitable patents and ideas get sold to the highest bidder; and how the liberal arts shrink under the pressure to be self-supporting.

Far from doctrinaire, Kirp believes there's a place for the market--but the market must be kept in its place. While skewering Philistinism, he admires the entrepreneurial energy that has invigorated academe's dreary precincts. And finally, he issues a challenge to those who decry the ascent of market values: given the plight of higher education, what is the alternative?

[more]

front cover of Shaping the Industrial Century
Shaping the Industrial Century
The Remarkable Story of the Evolution of the Modern Chemical and Pharmaceutical Industries
Alfred D. Chandler Jr.
Harvard University Press, 2009

The dean of business historians continues his masterful chronicle of the transforming revolutions of the twentieth century begun in Inventing the Electronic Century.

Alfred Chandler argues that only with consistent attention to research and development and an emphasis on long-term corporate strategies could firms remain successful over time. He details these processes for nearly every major chemical and pharmaceutical firm, demonstrating why some companies forged ahead while others failed.

By the end of World War II, the chemical and pharmaceutical industries were transformed by the commercializing of new learning, the petrochemical and the antibiotic revolutions. But by the 1970s, chemical science was no longer providing the new learning necessary to commercialize more products, although new directions flourished in the pharmaceutical industries. In the 1980s, major drug companies, including Eli Lilly, Merck, and Schering Plough, commercialized the first biotechnology products, and as the twenty-first century began, the infrastructure of this biotechnology revolution was comparable to that of the second industrial revolution just before World War I and the information revolution of the 1960s. Shaping the Industrial Century is a major contribution to our understanding of the most dynamic industries of the modern era.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The Share Economy
Conquering Stagflation
Martin L. Weitzman
Harvard University Press, 1984

In the pages of this intriguing volume, a cure to stagflation seems to be at hand. Martin L. Weitzman, one of America’s leading economic theorists, has hit upon a central feature of our economic life as the cause of this chronic malady: the standard practice of paying workers a fixed wage, regardless of whether a company is doing well or poorly. Weitzman shows in a clear straightforward way that an alternative labor payment system, in which a significant number of firms share profits or revenues with their employees (like the Japanese bonus system), provides immunity against stagflation; an economy of such firms automatically soaks up unemployed labor and resists inflation.

Under the Weitzman system, firms always have an incentive to take on more workers because the additional worker is paid only a fraction or share of the revenue he brings into the firm. General Motors and Eastern Airlines have already taken steps to implement profit and revenue sharing. Here, for the first time, is a lucid explanation and justification of share systems. Eschewing theoretically unsound schemes such as supply-side tax cuts and industrial policy on the one hand and macroeconomic sledgehammer “cures” on the other, The Share Economy provides a powerful and hopeful account of what may become the most important economic innovation of our time.

[more]

front cover of Shared Capitalism at Work
Shared Capitalism at Work
Employee Ownership, Profit and Gain Sharing, and Broad-Based Stock Options
Edited by Douglas L. Kruse, Richard B. Freeman, and Joseph R. Blasi
University of Chicago Press, 2010

The historical relationship between capital and labor has evolved in the past few decades. One particularly noteworthy development is the rise of shared capitalism, a system in which workers have become partial owners of their firms and thus, in effect, both employees and stockholders. Profit sharing arrangements and gain-sharing bonuses, which tie compensation directly to a firm’s performance, also reflect this new attitude toward labor.

Shared Capitalism at Work
analyzes the effects of this trend on workers and firms. The contributors focus on four main areas: the fraction of firms that participate in shared capitalism programs in the United States and abroad, the factors that enable these firms to overcome classic free rider and risk problems, the effect of shared capitalism on firm performance, and the impact of shared capitalism on worker well-being. This volume provides essential studies for understanding the increasingly important role of shared capitalism in the modern workplace.

[more]

front cover of Shareholder Democracies?
Shareholder Democracies?
Corporate Governance in Britain and Ireland before 1850
Mark Freeman, Robin Pearson, and James Taylor
University of Chicago Press, 2011

Understanding the challenges of corporate governance is central to our comprehension of the economic dynamics driving corporations today. Among the most important institutions in capitalism today, corporations and joint-stock companies had their origins in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And as they became more prevalent, the issue of internal governance became more pressing. At stake—and very much contested—was the allocation of rights and obligations among shareholders, directors, and managers.

This comprehensive account of the development of corporate governance in Britain and Ireland during its earliest stages highlights the role of political factors in shaping the evolution of corporate governance as well as the important debates that arose about the division of authority and responsibility. Political and economic institutions confronted similar issues, including the need for transparency and accountability in decision making and the roles of electors and the elected, and this book emphasizes how political institutions—from election procedures to assemblies to annual reporting—therefore provided apt models upon which companies drew readily. Filling a gap in the literature on early corporate economy, this book provides insight into the origins of many ongoing modern debates.

[more]

front cover of Sharing
Sharing
Culture and the Economy in the Internet Age
Philippe Aigrain
Amsterdam University Press, 2012

An in-depth exploration of digital culture and its dissemination, Sharing offers a counterpoint to the dominant view that file sharing is piracy. Instead, Philippe Aigrain looks at the benefits of file sharing, which allows unknown writers and artists to be appreciated more easily. Concentrating not only on the cultural enrichment caused by widely shared digital media, Sharing also discusses new financing models that would allow works to be shared freely by individuals without aim at profit. Aigrain carefully balances the needs to support and reward creative activity with a suitable respect for the cultural common good and proposes a new interpretation of the digital landscape.

[more]

front cover of Sharing the Prize
Sharing the Prize
The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South
Gavin Wright
Harvard University Press, 2013

Winner of the Alice Hanson Jones Prize, Economic History Association
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year

The civil rights movement was also a struggle for economic justice, one that until now has not had its own history. Sharing the Prize demonstrates the significant material gains black southerners made—in improved job opportunities, quality of education, and health care—from the 1960s to the 1970s and beyond. Because black advances did not come at the expense of southern whites, Gavin Wright argues, the civil rights struggle was that rarest of social revolutions: one that benefits both sides.

“Wright argues that government action spurred by the civil-rights movement corrected a misfiring market, generating large economic gains that private companies had been unable to seize on their own.”
The Economist

“Written…with the care and imagination [Wright] displayed in his superb work on slavery and the southern economy since the Civil War, this excellent economic history offers the best empirical account to date of the effects the civil rights revolution had on southern labor markets, schools, and other important institutions…With much of the nation persuaded that a post-racial age has begun, Wright’s analytical history…takes on fresh urgency.”
—Ira Katznelson, New York Review of Books

[more]

front cover of The Sheep Industry of Territorial New Mexico
The Sheep Industry of Territorial New Mexico
Livestock, Land, and Dollars
Jon M. Wallace
University Press of Colorado, 2023
The Sheep Industry of Territorial New Mexico offers a detailed account of the New Mexico sheep industry during the territorial period (1846–1912) when it flourished. As a mainstay of the New Mexico economy, this industry was essential to the integration of New Mexico (and the Southwest more broadly) into the national economy of the expanding United States.
 
Author Jon Wallace tells the story of evolving living conditions as the sheep industry came to encompass innumerable families of modest means. The transformation improved many New Mexicans’ lives and helped establish the territory as a productive part of the United States. There was a cost, however, with widespread ecological changes to the lands—brought about in large part by heavy grazing. Following the US annexation of New Mexico, new markets for mutton and wool opened. Well-connected, well-financed Anglo merchants and growers who had recently arrived in the territory took advantage of the new opportunity and joined their Hispanic counterparts in entering the sheep industry.
 
The Sheep Industry of Territorial New Mexico situates this socially imbued economic story within the larger context of the environmental consequences of open-range grazing while examining the relationships among Hispanic, Anglo, and Indigenous people in the region. Historians, students, general readers, and specialists interested in the history of agriculture, labor, capitalism, and the US Southwest will find Wallace’s analysis useful and engaging.
 
[more]

front cover of Shepherd of the Hills Country
Shepherd of the Hills Country
Tourism Transforms the Ozarks, 1880s-1930s
Lynn Morrow
University of Arkansas Press, 1999

Modern tourism in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri and Arkansas is concentrated around the area’s glistening man-made lakes, its fish-filled streams and rivers, and the entertainment mecca of Branson. But recreational excursions into this part of the country began over one hundred years ago as urban Midwesterners, many of them captivated by Harold Bell Wright’s novel The Shepherd of the Hills, sought the outdoors for spiritual and physical regeneration.

Morrow and Myers-Phinney excavate the beginnings of commercial tourism in the region and follow it through six decades as the influx of visitors who became familiar with the Ozarks and its investment opportunities brought capital, new commerce, and additional residents to the hills. Chapters focus on float fishing, game parks, cave exploration, the influence of the railroad, and the men who were instrumental in the region’s transformation. The authors discuss traditional lifestyles rooted in “living off the land,” with stock raising and lumbering providing basic subsistence, and changes wrought by tourism, which affected all classes of people across the White River landscape. They describe the flowering of “Ozarks folklore”—how stories told around gravel-bar fishing camps and retold by newspaper journalists translated the hills’ oral tradition for mass audiences.

While the main theme of this study is the development of tourism, it is also a social history of the interior highlands of the Ozarks. We see how the residents and their way of life were discovered, exploited, and changed by new opportunities and the demands of tourism and increasing trade. As such, this book is a valuable new addition to the University of Arkansas Press’s Ozarks Collection.

[more]

front cover of Shifting the Burden
Shifting the Burden
The Struggle over Growth and Corporate Taxation
Cathie J. Martin
University of Chicago Press, 1991
Since World War II, the corporate tax burden has, overall, decreased enormously as a percentage of the government's total revenue. Until now, however, no explanation of this phenomenon has accounted for the periodic reforms—such as the dramatic 1986 Tax Reform Act—which significantly increase some corporate taxes.

Remarkably accessible and rich in historical evidence, Shifting the Burden is the most compelling explanation to date of how our nation's tax policy is formulated. Cathie J. Martin shows how presidents' cultivation of allies within the business community and struggles within that community itself combine to shape tax policy.
[more]

front cover of The Shock of the Global
The Shock of the Global
The 1970s in Perspective
Edited by Niall Ferguson, Charles S. Maier, Erez Manela, and Daniel Sargent
Harvard University Press, 2010

From the vantage point of the United States or Western Europe, the 1970s was a time of troubles: economic “stagflation,” political scandal, and global turmoil. Yet from an international perspective it was a seminal decade, one that brought the reintegration of the world after the great divisions of the mid-twentieth century. It was the 1970s that introduced the world to the phenomenon of “globalization,” as networks of interdependence bound peoples and societies in new and original ways.

The 1970s saw the breakdown of the postwar economic order and the advent of floating currencies and free capital movements. Non-state actors rose to prominence while the authority of the superpowers diminished. Transnational issues such as environmental protection, population control, and human rights attracted unprecedented attention. The decade transformed international politics, ending the era of bipolarity and launching two great revolutions that would have repercussions in the twenty-first century: the Iranian theocratic revolution and the Chinese market revolution.

The Shock of the Global examines the large-scale structural upheaval of the 1970s by transcending the standard frameworks of national borders and superpower relations. It reveals for the first time an international system in the throes of enduring transformations.

[more]

front cover of Shock Values
Shock Values
Prices and Inflation in American Democracy
Carola Binder
University of Chicago Press, 2024

How inflation and deflation fears shape American democracy.

Many foundational moments in American economic history—the establishment of paper money, wartime price controls, the rise of the modern Federal Reserve—occurred during financial panics as prices either inflated or deflated sharply. The government’s decisions in these moments, intended to control price fluctuations, have produced both lasting effects and some of the most contentious debates in the nation’s history.

A sweeping history of the United States’ economy and politics, Shock Values reveals how the American state has been shaped by a massive, ever-evolving effort to insulate its economy from the real and perceived dangers of price fluctuations. Carola Binder narrates how the pains of rising and falling prices have brought lasting changes for every generation of Americans. And with each brush with price instability, the United States has been reinvented—not as a more perfect union, but as a reflection of its most recent failures.

Shock Values tells the untold story of prices and price stabilization in the United States. Expansive and enlightening, Binder recounts the interest-group politics, legal battles, and economic ideas that have shaped a nation from the dawn of the republic to the present.

[more]

front cover of Shoddy
Shoddy
From Devil’s Dust to the Renaissance of Rags
Hanna Rose Shell
University of Chicago Press, 2020
The history of modern-day old clothes recycling begins with a thing called shoddy. Starting in the early 1800s, shoddy was the name given to a new material made from reclaimed wool, and to one of the earliest forms of industrial recycling. Old rags and leftover fabric clippings were ground to bits by a machine known as “the devil” and then re-used. Usually undisclosed, shoddy–also known as reworked wool–became suit jackets, army blankets, mattress stuffing, and much more. Shoddy is the afterlife of rags. And Shoddy, the book, reveals hidden worlds of textile intrigue.
 
In Shoddy: From Devil’s Dust to the Renaissance of Rags, Hanna Rose Shell takes readers on a journey to discover shoddy, from Haiti to the “shoddy towns” of West Yorkshire in England, to the United States, back in time to the British cholera epidemics and the American Civil War, and into agricultural fields, textile labs, and rag-shredding factories. Shell’s narrative is both literary and historical, drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, from court cases to military uniforms, mattress labels to medical textbooks, political cartoons to high art. Shoddy moves between genres, bringing richly drawn characters and unexpected objects to life. Along the way, shoddy becomes equally an evocative object and a portal into another world.
 
Almost since the time it first appeared, shoddy was both ubiquitous and controversial. In part because it was often so hard to detect, it was inherently suspicious. Public health experts worried about sanitation and disease—how could old clothes be disinfected? As well, the idea of wearing someone else’s old clothes so close to your own skin was discomforting in and of itself. Could you sleep peacefully knowing that your mattress was very likely to be stuffed with dead soldiers’ overcoats? The use of the term “virgin” wool, the idea of virginity in relation to clothes, in fact emerged as an effort by the wool industry to counter shoddy’s appeal: to make shoddy seem shoddy. Over time, shoddy would capture a host of personal, ethical, commercial, and societal failings. And yet, there was always, within shoddy, the alluring concept of regeneration, of what we today think of as conscious clothing, eco-fashion, sustainable textiles.
 
Shell exposes an interwoven tale of industrial espionage, political infighting, scientific inquiry, ethnic prejudices, and war profiteering. Discarded clothes may make many journeys over the course of several lifetimes. Not only in your garments, but under your rug, in your mattress pads, piano blankets, in the peculiar confetti-like stuffing in your mailing envelopes, even in the insulation in your walls. Though it began with wool, over the past century the shredding “devil” has turned to synthetics from nylon stockings to Kevlar. Shoddy is likely connected to something you are wearing right now. After reading, you will never use the word shoddy or think about your clothes, the environment, sustainability, or the intermingled world around you the same way again.
 
[more]

front cover of A Shoppers’ Paradise
A Shoppers’ Paradise
How the Ladies of Chicago Claimed Power and Pleasure in the New Downtown
Emily Remus
Harvard University Press, 2019

How women in turn-of-the-century Chicago used their consumer power to challenge male domination of public spaces and stake their own claim to downtown.

Popular culture assumes that women are born to shop and that cities welcome their trade. But for a long time America’s downtowns were hardly welcoming to women. Emily Remus turns to Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century to chronicle a largely unheralded revolution in women’s rights that took place not at the ballot box but in the streets and stores of the business district.

After the city’s Great Fire, Chicago’s downtown rose like a phoenix to become a center of urban capitalism. Moneyed women explored the newly built department stores, theaters, and restaurants that invited their patronage and encouraged them to indulge their fancies. Yet their presence and purchasing power were not universally appreciated. City officials, clergymen, and influential industrialists condemned these women’s conspicuous new habits as they took their place on crowded streets in a business district once dominated by men.

A Shoppers’ Paradise reveals crucial points of conflict as consuming women accessed the city center: the nature of urban commerce, the place of women, the morality of consumer pleasure. The social, economic, and legal clashes that ensued, and their outcome, reshaped the downtown environment for everyone and established women’s new rights to consumption, mobility, and freedom.

[more]

front cover of Shopping
Shopping
Material Culture Perspectives
Deborah C. Andrews
University of Delaware Press, 2015
The degree to which shopping, or, more broadly, consumerism, is both critiqued and defended in American society confirms the role that commercial goods play in our daily lives. This collection of essays provides case studies depicting selected aspects of this engaging activity. The authors include several historians with diverging specialties: an art historian, an anthropologist, an environmental journalist, a geographer and urban planner, and practicing artists. Each author demonstrates how a material culture perspective—a focus on the relationship between people and their things—can illuminate a specific corner of consumption. Connecting the essays are concerns about the spaces in which shopping occurs; about the experience of shopping itself, both individual and social; and about its economic, environmental, and personal downsides. Collectively, these essays demonstrate how a material culture perspective on shopping yields insights into multiple aspects of American culture.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 
[more]

front cover of Shopping Spaces and the Urban Landscape in Early Modern Amsterdam, 1550-1850
Shopping Spaces and the Urban Landscape in Early Modern Amsterdam, 1550-1850
Clé Lesger
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
In this study, the appearance and location of shops in Amsterdam during the early modern period is linked to major changes in the urban economy, the size and socio-spatial distribution of its population, and the structure of the urban grid. Not only is there ample attention for the spatial distribution of shops across the urban landscape, but for the first time it is also accurately charted what the exterior and interior of Amsterdam shops looked like and how they changed in the course of the centuries. Partly as a result of this, it has proved possible to give an impression of the ways in which retailers and customers interacted.
[more]

front cover of Shoveling Smoke
Shoveling Smoke
Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India
William Mazzarella
Duke University Press, 2003
A leading Bombay advertising agency justifies as traditionally Indian the highly eroticized images it produces to promote the KamaSutra condom brand. Another agency struggles to reconcile the global ambitions of a cellular-phone service provider with the ambivalently local connotations of the client’s corporate brand. When the dream of the 250 million-strong “Indian middle class” goes sour, Indian advertising and marketing professionals search for new ways to market “the Indian consumer”—now with added cultural difference—to multinational clients.

An examination of the complex cultural politics of mass consumerism in a globalized marketplace, Shoveling Smoke is a pathbreaking and detailed ethnography of the contemporary Indian advertising industry. It is also a critical and innovative intervention into current theoretical debates on the intersection of consumerist globalization, aesthetic politics, and visual culture. William Mazzarella traces the rise in India during the 1980s of mass consumption as a self-consciously sensuous challenge to the austerities of state-led developmentalism. He shows how the decisive opening of Indian markets to foreign brands in the 1990s refigured established models of the relationship between the local and the global and, ironically, turned advertising professionals into custodians of cultural integrity.

[more]

front cover of Shut Down the Business School
Shut Down the Business School
What's Wrong with Management Education
Martin Parker
Pluto Press, 2018
Even as higher education is under attack, one area is thriving: business schools. Shut Down the Business School explains why—and builds a convincing case that they are pernicious and should be closed. Martin Parker writes his polemic from the inside, drawing on his experience as a professor of management, and showing us that business schools are little more than loudspeakers for neoliberal capitalism, designed to produce unreflective managers whose primary focus is on their own personal rewards. If we believe that universities have responsibilities to society, Parker argues, then we must challenge the very foundation of the business school and its emphasis on the market above all else.
[more]

front cover of The Sicilian Mafia
The Sicilian Mafia
The Business of Private Protection
Diego Gambetta
Harvard University Press, 1993
In a society where trust is in short supply and democracy weak, the Mafia sells protection, a guarantee of safe conduct for parties to commercial transactions. Drawing on the confessions of eight Mafiosi, Diego Gambetta develops an elegant analysis of the economic and political role of the Sicilian Mafia.
[more]

logo for Pluto Press
Sick Planet
Corporate Food and Medicine
Stan Cox
Pluto Press, 2008

Neoliberals often point to improvements in public health and nutrition as examples of globalisation's success, but this book argues that the corporate food and medicine industries are destroying environments and ruining living conditions across the world.

Scientist Stan Cox expertly draws out the strong link between Western big business and environmental destruction. This is a shocking account of the huge damage that drug manufacturers and large food corporations are inflicting on the health of people and crops worldwide. Companies discussed include Wal-Mart, GlaxoSmithKline, Tyson Foods and Monsanto. On issues ranging from the poisoning of water supplies in South Asia to natural gas depletion and how it threatens global food supplies, Cox shows how the demand for profits is always put above the public interest.

While individual efforts to "shop for a better world" and conserve energy are laudable, Cox explains that they need to be accompanied by an economic system that is grounded in ecological sustainability if we are to find a cure for our Sick Planet.

[more]

front cover of Side Effects and Complications
Side Effects and Complications
The Economic Consequences of Health-Care Reform
Casey B. Mulligan
University of Chicago Press, 2015
The Affordable Care Act will have a dangerous effect on the American economy. That may sound like a political stance, but it’s a conclusion directly borne out by economic forecasts.  In Side Effects and Complications, preeminent labor economist Casey B. Mulligan brings to light the dire economic realities that have been lost in the ideological debate over the ACA, and he offers an eye-opening, accessible look at the price American citizens will pay because of it.

Looking specifically at the labor market, Mulligan reveals how the costs of health care under the ACA actually create implicit taxes on individuals, and how increased costs to employers will be passed on to their employees. Mulligan shows how, as a result, millions of workers will find themselves in a situation in which full-time work, adjusted for the expense of health care, will actually pay less than part-time work or even not working at all. Analyzing the incentives—or lack thereof—for people to earn more by working more, Mulligan offers projections on how many hours people will work and how productively they will work, as well as how much they will spend in general. Using the powerful tools of economics, he then illustrates the detrimental consequences on overall employment in the near future.

Drawing on extensive knowledge of the labor market and the economic theories at its foundation, Side Effects and Complications offers a crucial wake-up call about the risks the ACA poses for the economy. Plainly laying out the true costs of the ACA, Mulligan’s grounded and thorough predictions are something that workers and policy makers cannot afford to ignore.
[more]

front cover of Signal Traffic
Signal Traffic
Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures
Edited by Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski
University of Illinois Press, 2015
The contributors to Signal Traffic investigate how the material artifacts of media infrastructure--transoceanic cables, mobile telephone towers, Internet data centers, and the like--intersect with everyday life. Essayists confront the multiple and hybrid forms networks take, the different ways networks are imagined and engaged with by publics around the world, their local effects, and what human beings experience when a network fails.

Some contributors explore the physical objects and industrial relations that make up an infrastructure. Others venture into the marginalized communities orphaned from the knowledge economies, technological literacies, and epistemological questions linked to infrastructural formation and use. The wide-ranging insights delineate the oft-ignored contrasts between industrialized and developing regions, rich and poor areas, and urban and rural settings, bringing technological differences into focus.

Contributors include Charles R. Acland, Paul Dourish, Sarah Harris, Jennifer Holt and Patrick Vonderau, Shannon Mattern, Toby Miller, Lisa Parks, Christian Sandvig, Nicole Starosielski, Jonathan Sterne, and Helga Tawil-Souri.

[more]

front cover of Signaling Goodness
Signaling Goodness
Social Rules and Public Choice
Phillip J. Nelson and Kenneth V. Greene
University of Michigan Press, 2003
Political, intellectual, and academic discourse in the United States has been awash in political correctness, which has itself been berated and defended -- yet little understood. As a corrective, Nelson and Greene look at a more general process: adopting political positions to enhance one's reputation for trustworthiness both to others and to oneself.
Phillip Nelson and Kenneth Greene are Professors of Economics in the Department of Economics at the State University of New York, Binghamton.
[more]

front cover of Signs in America's Auto Age
Signs in America's Auto Age
Signatures of Landscape and Place
John A. & Keith A. Jakle & Sculle
University of Iowa Press, 2004
Signs orient, inform, persuade, and regulate. They help give meaning to our natural and human-built environment, to landscape and place. In Signs in America’s Auto Age, cultural geographer John Jakle and historian Keith Sculle explore the ways in which we take meaning from outdoor signs and assign meaning to our surroundings—the ways we “read” landscape. With an emphasis on how the use of signs changed as the nation’s geography reorganized around the coming of the automobile, Jakle and Sculle consider the vast array of signs that have evolved since the beginning of the twentieth century.
[more]

front cover of Silent Looms
Silent Looms
Women and Production in a Guatemalan Town
By Tracy Bachrach Ehlers
University of Texas Press, 2000

Based on new fieldwork in 1997, Tracy Bachrach Ehlers has updated her classic study of the effects of economic development on the women weavers of San Pedro Sacatepéquez. Revisiting many of the women she interviewed in the 1970s and 1980s and revising her earlier hopeful assessment of women's entrepreneurial opportunities, Ehlers convincingly demonstrates that development and commercial growth in the region have benefited men at the expense of women.

[more]

front cover of Silicon Valley, Planet Startup
Silicon Valley, Planet Startup
Disruptive Innovation, Passionate Entrepreneurship and Hightech Startups
Peter Ester and Arne Maas
Amsterdam University Press, 2016
For decades now, Silicon Valley has been the home of the future. It’s the birthplace of the world’s most successful high-tech companies—including Apple, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and many more. So what’s the secret? What is it about Silicon Valley that fosters entrepreneurship and innovation?

With Silicon Valley: Planet Startup, Peter Ester and Arne Maas argue that the answer lies in Silicon Valley’s culture—a corporate culture that values risk-taking, creativity, invention, and sharing. Through extensive interviews with Dutch entrepreneurs working in the area, Ester and Maas show that Silicon Valley is above all a mindset: a belief in thinking, with passion and ambition, far beyond the here and now. Scholars and business and budding entrepreneurs alike are sure to find both inspiration and illumination in the stories and analysis Ester and Maas have assembled here.
[more]

front cover of Sit-Down
Sit-Down
The General Motors Strike of 1936-1937
Sidney Fine
University of Michigan Press, 2020
In this classic study, Sidney Fine portrays the dramatic events of the 1936–37 Flint Sit-down Strike against General Motors, which catapulted the UAW into prominence and touched off a wave of sit-down strikes across the United States. Basing his account on an impressive variety of manuscript sources, Fine analyzes the strategy and tactics of GM and the UAW, describes the life of the workers in the occupied plants, and examines the troubled governmental and public reaction to the alleged breakdown of law and order in the strikes. In addition, Fine provides vivid portraits of the major figures on both sides of the conflict: Governor Frank Murphy; Alfred Sloan, Jr.; William Knudsen; Robert Travis; Roy, Victor, and Walter Reuther; Homer Martin; and Wyndham Mortimer. The GM sit-down strike marks the close of one era of labor-management relations in the United States and the beginning of another. A half century after its initial publication, Fine’s work remains the definitive account of that momentous conflict. A new foreword by Kim Moody’s revisits Sit-Down in order to demonstrate its continued relevance to today’s unions, workers, and activists.
[more]

front cover of Six Faces of Globalization
Six Faces of Globalization
Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why It Matters
Anthea Roberts and Nicolas Lamp
Harvard University Press, 2021

A Financial Times Best Book of the Year
A Fortune Best Book of the Year
A ProMarket Best Political Economy Book of the Year


An essential guide to the intractable public debates about the virtues and vices of economic globalization, cutting through the complexity to reveal the fault lines that divide us and the points of agreement that might bring us together.

Globalization has lifted millions out of poverty. Globalization is a weapon the rich use to exploit the poor. Globalization builds bridges across national boundaries. Globalization fuels the populism and great-power competition that is tearing the world apart.

When it comes to the politics of free trade and open borders, the camps are dug in, producing a kaleidoscope of claims and counterclaims, unlikely alliances, and unexpected foes. But what exactly are we fighting about? And how might we approach these issues more productively? Anthea Roberts and Nicolas Lamp cut through the confusion with an indispensable survey of the interests, logics, and ideologies driving these intractable debates, which lie at the heart of so much political dispute and decision making. The authors expertly guide us through six competing narratives about the virtues and vices of globalization: the old establishment view that globalization benefits everyone (win-win), the pessimistic belief that it threatens us all with pandemics and climate change (lose-lose), along with various rival accounts that focus on specific winners and losers, from China to America’s Rust Belt.

Instead of picking sides, Six Faces of Globalization gives all these positions their due, showing how each deploys sophisticated arguments and compelling evidence. Both globalization’s boosters and detractors will come away with their eyes opened. By isolating the fundamental value conflicts—growth versus sustainability, efficiency versus social stability—driving disagreement and showing where rival narratives converge, Roberts and Lamp provide a holistic framework for understanding current debates. In doing so, they showcase a more integrative way of thinking about complex problems.

[more]

front cover of Six Faces of Globalization
Six Faces of Globalization
Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why It Matters
Anthea Roberts and Nicolas Lamp
Harvard University Press

A Financial Times Book of the Year
A Fortune Book of the Year


“This book compels us to change our position, move out of our comfort zone, and see the world differently.”—Branko Milanovic, author of Capitalism, Alone

“A very smart book…not just about globalization, but also about the power and importance of narrative…Highly recommended.”—Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO, New America

“An indispensable guide to how and why many people have abandoned the old, time-tested ways of thinking about politics and the economy. This is the book the world needs to read now.”—Richard Baldwin, author of The Great Convergence

When it comes to the politics of free trade and open borders, the camps are clear, producing a kaleidoscope of claims and counterclaims. But what exactly are we fighting about? Anthea Roberts and Nicolas Lamp cut through the confusion and mudslinging with an indispensable survey of the interests, logics, and ideologies driving these seemingly intractable arguments.

Instead of picking sides, Six Faces of Globalization guides us through six competing narratives about the virtues and vices of globalization, giving each position its due and showing how each deploys sophisticated arguments and compelling evidence. Both globalization’s boosters and detractors will come away with their eyes opened. By isolating the fundamental value conflicts driving disagreement—growth versus sustainability, efficiency versus social stability—and showing where rival narratives converge, this book provides an invaluable framework for understanding ongoing debates and finding a way forward.

[more]

front cover of Slaughterhouse
Slaughterhouse
Chicago's Union Stock Yard and the World It Made
Dominic A. Pacyga
University of Chicago Press, 2015
From the minute it opened—on Christmas Day in 1865—it was Chicago’s must-see tourist attraction, drawing more than half a million visitors each year. Families, visiting dignitaries, even school groups all made trips to the South Side to tour the Union Stock Yard. There they got a firsthand look at the city’s industrial prowess as they witnessed cattle, hogs, and sheep disassembled with breathtaking efficiency. At their height, the kill floors employed 50,000 workers and processed six hundred animals an hour, an astonishing spectacle of industrialized death.
Slaughterhouse tells the story of the Union Stock Yard, chronicling the rise and fall of an industrial district that, for better or worse, served as the public face of Chicago for decades. Dominic A. Pacyga is a guide like no other—he grew up in the shadow of the stockyards, spent summers in their hog house and cattle yards, and maintains a long-standing connection with the working-class neighborhoods around them. Pacyga takes readers through the packinghouses as only an insider can, covering the rough and toxic life inside the plants and their lasting effects on the world outside. He shows how the yards shaped the surrounding neighborhoods and controlled the livelihoods of thousands of families. He looks at the Union Stock Yard’s political and economic power and its sometimes volatile role in the city’s race and labor relations. And he traces its decades of mechanized innovations, which introduced millions of consumers across the country to an industrialized food system.
Once the pride and signature stench of a city, the neighborhood is now home to Chicago’s most successful green agriculture companies. Slaughterhouse is the engrossing story of the creation and transformation of one of the most important—and deadliest—square miles in American history.
[more]

front cover of Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar
Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar
Integration of an East African Commercial Empire into the World Economy, 1770–1873
Abdul Sheriff
Ohio University Press, 1987

The rise of Zanzibar was based on two major economic transformations. Firstly slaves became used for producing cloves and grains for export. Previously the slaves themselves were exported.

Secondly, there was an increased international demand for luxuries such as ivory. At the same time the price of imported manufactured gods was falling. Zanzibar took advantage of its strategic position to trade as far as the Great Lakes.

However this very economic success increasingly subordinated Zanzibar to Britain, with its anti-slavery crusade and its control over the Indian merchant class.

Professor Sheriff analyses the early stages of the underdevelopment of East Africa and provides a corrective to the dominance of political and diplomatic factors in the history of the area.

[more]

front cover of Slaves to Fashion
Slaves to Fashion
Poverty and Abuse in the New Sweatshops
Robert J. S. Ross
University of Michigan Press, 2004
"A brilliant and beautiful book, the mature work of a lifetime, must reading for students of the globalization debate."
---Tom Hayden

"Slaves to Fashion is a remarkable achievement, several books in one: a gripping history of sweatshops, explaining their decline, fall, and return; a study of how the media portray them; an analysis of the fortunes of the current anti-sweatshop movement; an anatomy of the global traffic in apparel, in particular the South-South competition that sends wages and working conditions plummeting toward the bottom; and not least, a passionate declaration of faith that humanity can find a way to get its work done without sweatshops. This is engaged sociology at its most stimulating."
---Todd Gitlin

". . . unflinchingly portrays the reemergence of the sweatshop in our dog-eat-dog economy."
---Los Angeles Times


Just as Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed uncovered the plight of the working poor in America, Robert J. S. Ross's Slaves to Fashion exposes the dark side of the apparel industry and its exploited workers at home and abroad. It's both a lesson in American business history and a warning about one of the most important issues facing the global capital economy-the reappearance of the sweatshop.

Vividly detailing the decline and tragic rebirth of sweatshop conditions in the American apparel industry of the twentieth century, Ross explains the new sweatshops as a product of unregulated global capitalism and associated deregulation, union erosion, and exploitation of undocumented workers. Using historical material and economic and social data, the author shows that after a brief thirty-five years of fair practices, the U.S. apparel business has once again sunk to shameful abuse and exploitation.

Refreshingly jargon-free but documented in depth, Slaves to Fashion is the only work to estimate the size of the sweatshop problem and to systematically show its impact on apparel workers' wages. It is also unique in its analysis of the budgets and personnel used in enforcing the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Anyone who is concerned about this urgent social and economic topic and wants to go beyond the headlines should read this important and timely contribution to the rising debate on low-wage factory labor.
Robert J.S. Ross is Professor of Sociology, Clark University. He is an expert in the area of sweatshops and globalization. He is an activist academic who travels and lectures extensively and has published numerous related articles.


[more]

front cover of Sleep in the Military
Sleep in the Military
Promoting Healthy Sleep Among U.S. Servicemembers
Wendy M. Troxel
RAND Corporation, 2015
Given the unprecedented demands on the U.S. military since 2001 and the risks posed by stress and trauma, there has been growing concern about the prevalence and consequences of sleep problems. This first-ever comprehensive review of military sleep-related policies and programs, evidence-based interventions, and barriers to achieving healthy sleep offers a detailed set of actionable recommendations for improving sleep across the force.
[more]

front cover of Sloan Rules
Sloan Rules
Alfred P. Sloan and the Triumph of General Motors
David Farber
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Alfred P. Sloan Jr. became the president of General Motors in 1923 and stepped down as its CEO in 1946. During this time, he led GM past the Ford Motor Company and on to international business triumph by virtue of his brilliant managerial practices and his insights into the new consumer economy he and GM helped to produce. Bill Gates has said that Sloan's 1964 management tome, My Years with General Motors, "is probably the best book to read if you want to read only one book about business." And if you want to read only one book about Sloan, that book should be historian David Farber's Sloan Rules.

Here, for the first time, is a study of both the difficult man and the pathbreaking executive. Sloan Rules reveals the GM genius as not only a driven manager of men, machines, money, and markets but also a passionate and not always wise participant in the great events of his day. Sloan, for example, reviled Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal; he firmly believed that politicians, government bureaucrats, and union leaders knew next to nothing about the workings of the new consumer economy, and he did his best to stop them from intervening in the private enterprise system. He was instrumental in transforming GM from the country's largest producer of cars into the mainstay of America's "Arsenal of Democracy" during World War II; after the war, he bet GM's future on renewed American prosperity and helped lead the country into a period of economic abundance. Through his business genius, his sometimes myopic social vision, and his vast fortune, Sloan was an architect of the corporate-dominated global society we live in today.

David Farber's story of America's first corporate genius is biography of the highest order, a portrait of an extraordinarily compelling and skillful man who shaped his era and ours.
[more]

front cover of Sloss Furnaces and the Rise of the Birmingham District
Sloss Furnaces and the Rise of the Birmingham District
An Industrial Epic
W. David Lewis
University of Alabama Press, 1994
This pathbreaking book tells the dramatic story of a unique manufacturing complex and the city that it helped to create. The events recounted and  interpreted by W. David Lewis are of more than local or regional significance. The rise of Sloss furnaces and Birmingham epitomized the emergence of the United States as the world's foremost economic power.  Similarly, the closing of a once-profitable ironmaking installation amid social and technological changes that convulsed Birmingham nine decades after the city's founding typified challenges that were facing America at the dawn of the postindustrial age.
 
Above all,  Sloss Furnaces resonates with the class of competition and the frenetic energy with which southerners joined other Americans in a rush to transform a continent after a fratricidal drive for independence had failed. The sweeping narrative that Lewis has produced amply justifies its subtitle, An Industrial Epic.
[more]

logo for Pluto Press
The Slow Food Story
Politics and Pleasure
Geoff Andrews
Pluto Press, 2008

The Slow Food movement was set up in Italy as a response to the dominance of fast food chains, supermarkets and large-scale agribusiness. It seeks to defend what it calls 'the universal right to pleasure' and promotes an alternative approach to food production and consumption based on the promotion of 'good, clean and fair' local products.

This is the first in-depth study of the fascinating politics of Slow Food, which in twenty years has grown into an international organisation with more than 80,000 members in over 100 countries. With its roots in the 1960s and 1970s counter-culture, Slow Food's distinctive politics lie in the unity between gastronomic pleasure and environmental responsibility. The movement crosses the left-right divide to embrace both the conservative desire to preserve traditional rural communities and an alternative 'virtuous' idea of globalisation.

Geoff Andrews shows that the alternative future embodied in Slow Food extends to all aspects of modern life. The Slow Food Story presents an extensive new critique of fast-moving, work-obsessed contemporary capitalist culture.

[more]

front cover of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises in the Global Economy
Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises in the Global Economy
Zoltan J. Acs and Bernard Yeung, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1999
Entrepreneurship and globalization are two much-examined forces as we enter the new millennium--yet very little has been published on the intersection of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and the global economy. To close the gap, this volume delves into the intricate roles and consequences of such businesses on both global and domestic economies.
The first part of the volume provides an overview of the phenomenon of globalization, arguing that entrepreneurial discovery and technological change lead to globalization, which in turn leads to further opportunity for entrepreneurial discovery--no less for SMEs than for multinational corporations. In part two, the essays examine the role of SMEs in the global economy and why they are thriving. Part three reviews the roles of SMEs and innovators and examines their roles in direct foreign investment. Part four explores the role of technological diversity and knowledge spillovers as a way to explain the superior innovative performance of SMEs. Part five looks at the role of SMEs in technology transfer. Finally, part six examines the theoretical and policy implications of the international activities of SMEs, suggesting that policies should aim to reduce the costs in international expansion for SMEs.
This volume will provide the foundation for further study in SMEs and globalization. It will appeal to scholars and students in both international business and economics.
Zoltan J. Acs is Professor of Economics and Finance, University of Baltimore. Bernard Yin Yeung is Professor of International Business, University of Michigan.
[more]

front cover of Small Business and Strategic Sourcing
Small Business and Strategic Sourcing
Lessons from Past Research and Current Data
Nancy Y. Moore
RAND Corporation, 2014
The Department of Defense (DoD) may face challenges as it attempts to maintain its goal of spending about 23 percent of prime-contract dollars for goods and services with small businesses and at the same time apply strategic-sourcing practices to reduce total costs and improve performance and efficiency and in ways that will not conflict with small-business goals.
[more]

front cover of Small Differences That Matter
Small Differences That Matter
Labor Markets and Income Maintenance in Canada and the United States
Edited by David Card and Richard B. Freeman
University of Chicago Press, 1993
This volume, the first in a new series by the National Bureau of Economic Research that compares labor markets in different countries, examines social and labor market policies in Canada and the United States during the 1980s. It shows that subtle differences in unemployment compensation, unionization, immigration policies, and income maintenance programs have significantly affected economic outcomes in the two countries.

For example:

-Canada's social safety net, more generous than the American one, produced markedly lower poverty rates in the 1980s.
 
-Canada saw a smaller increase in earnings inequality than the United States did, in part because of the strength of Canadian unions, which have twice the participation that U.S. unions do.

-Canada's unemployment figures were much higher than those in the United States, not because the Canadian economy failed to create jobs but because a higher percentage of nonworking time was reported as unemployment.

These disparities have become noteworthy as policy makers cite the experiences of the other country to support or oppose particular initiatives.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter