Implementing City Sustainability examines the structures and processes that city governments employ to pursue environmental, social, and economic well-being within their communities. As American cities adopt sustainability objectives, they are faced with the need to overcome fuzzy-boundary, coordination, and collective action challenges to achieve successful implementation.

Sustainability goals often do not fit neatly into traditional city government structures, which tend to be organized around specific functional responsibilities, such as planning, public works, parks and recreation, and community development. The authors advance a theory of Functional Collective Action and apply it to local sustainability to explain how cities can—and in some cases do—organize to successfully administer changes to achieve complex objectives that transcend these organizational separations. Implementing City Sustainability uses a mixed-method research design and original data to provide a national overview of cities’ sustainability arrangements, as well as eight city case studies highlighting different means of organizing to achieve functional collective action.

By focusing not just on what cities are doing to further sustainability, but also on how they are doing it, the authors show how administrative structure enables—or inhibits—cities to overcome functional divides and achieve successful outcomes.

Winner of the William M. LeoGrande Prize

For over a century, the United States has sought to improve the behavior of the peoples of Latin America. Perceiving their neighbors to the south as underdeveloped and unable to govern themselves, U.S. policy makers have promoted everything from representative democracy and economic development to oral hygiene. But is improvement a progressive impulse to help others, or realpolitik in pursuit of a superpower’s interests?

“In this subtle and searing critique of U.S. efforts to ‘uplift’ Latin America, Lars Schoultz challenges us to question the fundamental tenets of the development industry that became entrenched in the U.S. foreign policy bureaucracy over the last century.”
—Piero Gleijeses, author of Visions of Freedom

“In this masterful work, Lars Schoultz provides a companion and follow-up to his classic Beneath the United States…A necessary and rewarding read for scholars and students of U.S. foreign policy and inter-American relations.”
—Renata Keller, The Americas

In the early 1990s, South Korea was showcased as a country that had combined extraordinary economic growth with a narrowing of income distribution, achieving remarkably low rates of unemployment and poverty. In the years following the financial crisis of 1997–1998, however, these rates ballooned to pre-crisis levels, giving rise to the perception that the gap between the rich and the poor in Korea had once again widened.

Income Inequality in Korea explores the relationship between economic growth and social developments in Korea over the last three decades. Analyzing the forces behind the equalizing trends in the 1980s and early 1990s, and the deterioration evident in the post-crisis years, Chong-Bum An and Barry Bosworth investigate the macroeconomic conditions, gains in educational attainment, demographic changes and conditions in labor markets, and social welfare policies that have contributed to the evolution of income inequality over time.

The authors also raise fundamental questions about whether the pre-crisis pattern of combining strong economic growth with improving equality can be restored, as well as how government policies might be designed to promote that objective. The book concludes with a discussion of some proposals for improving the efficacy of redistributive policies in Korea.

The Mexican Revolution has long been considered a revolution of peasants. But Aurora Gómez-Galvarriato’s investigation of the mill towns of the Orizaba Valley reveals that industrial workers played a neglected but essential role in shaping the Revolution. By tracing the introduction of mechanized industry into the valley, she connects the social and economic upheaval unleashed by new communication, transportation, and production technologies to the political unrest of the revolutionary decade. Industry and Revolution makes a convincing argument that the Mexican Revolution cannot be understood apart from the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution, and thus provides a fresh perspective on both transformations.

By organizing collectively on a wide scale, the spinners and weavers of the Orizaba Valley, along with other factory workers throughout Mexico, substantially improved their living and working conditions and fought to secure social and civil rights and reforms. Their campaigns fed the imaginations of the masses. The Constitution of 1917, which embodied the core ideals of the Mexican Revolution, bore the stamp of the industrial workers’ influence. Their organizations grew powerful enough to recast the relationship between labor and capital, not only in the towns of the valley, but throughout the entire nation.

The story of the Orizaba Valley offers insight into the interconnections between the social, political, and economic history of modern Mexico. The forces unleashed by the Mexican and the Industrial revolutions remade the face of the nation and, as Gómez-Galvarriato shows, their consequences proved to be enduring.

What do infants know? What do they feel, and how do they come to understand what’s happening around them? How do they begin to construe others as persons with feelings and intentions? These questions inspire this remarkable new look at the infant’s world. The short answer? Infants are much more sophisticated perceivers, feelers, and thinkers of their world than we may think.

In this lively book, Philippe Rochat makes a case for an ecological approach to human development. Looking at the ecological niche infants occupy, he describes how infants develop capabilities and conceptual understanding in relation to three interconnected domains: the self, objects, and other people. Drawing on the great body of contemporary “competent infant” research, Rochat offers a thoughtful overview of many current, controversial topics, from neonatal imitation to early numeracy, to the development of self-awareness. In a provocative conclusion, he describes infancy as a series of key transitions—so dramatic that they are sometimes called “revolutions”—and maps out the processes that impel development.

Offering a unifying theoretical vision of the vast research of recent years, The Infant’s World is an inspiring introduction to the liveliest area of modern psychology.

Amid mounting concern over the loss of jobs to low-wage economies, one fact is clear: America's prosperity hinges on the ability of its businesses to continually introduce new products and services. But what makes for a creative economy? How can the remarkable surge of innovation that fueled the boom of the 1990s be sustained?

For an answer, Richard K. Lester and Michael J. Piore examine innovation strategies in some of the economy's most dynamic sectors. Through eye-opening case studies of new product development in fields such as cell phones, medical devices, and blue jeans, two fundamental processes emerge.

One of these processes, analysis--rational problem solving--dominates management and engineering practice. The other, interpretation, is not widely understood, or even recognized--although, as the authors make clear, it is absolutely crucial to innovation. Unlike problem solving, interpretation embraces and exploits ambiguity, the wellspring of creativity in the economy. By emphasizing interpretation, and showing how these two radically different processes can be combined, Lester and Piore's book gives managers and designers the concepts and tools to keep new products flowing.

But the authors also offer an unsettling critique of national policy. By ignoring the role of interpretation, economic policymakers are drawing the wrong lessons from the 1990s boom. The current emphasis on expanding the reach of market competition will help the analytical processes needed to implement innovation. But if unchecked it risks choking off the economy's vital interpretive spaces. Unless a more balanced policy approach is adopted, warn Lester and Piore, America's capacity to innovate--its greatest economic asset--will erode.

Where Latin American government leaders once looked at free trade agreements as solely about trade and trading policies, they are increasingly viewing them as the next beacon of hope in the long and arduous road of economic reform.

Integrating the Americas: FTAA and Beyond discusses how these governments have become embroiled in a larger set of issues affecting both institutions. This work, based on a conference sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, examines how this free trade process is surging ahead, while at the same time taking on a broader set of issues including institutional reform, transparency, the environment, labor, and social cohesion. The payoffs to the strategy of liberalization, privatization, and openness have been meager and disappointing to date. Will the FTAA be able to reverse this and allow Latin America to reap the benefits of globalization?

Often considered one of the major forces behind economic growth and development, the entrepreneurial firm can accelerate the speed of innovation and dissemination of new technologies, thus increasing a country's competitive edge in the global market. As a result, cultivating a strong culture of entrepreneurial thinking has become a primary goal throughout the world.

Surprisingly, there has been little systematic research or comparative analysis to show how the growth of entrepreneurship differs among countries in various stages of development. International Differences in Entrepreneurship fills this void by explaining how a country's institutional differences, cultural considerations, and personal characteristics can affect the role that entrepreneurs play in its economy. Developing an understanding of the origins of entrepreneurs as well as the choices they make and the complexity of their activities across countries and industries are of central importance to this volume. In addition, contributors consider how environmental factors of individual economies, such as market regulation, government subsidies for banks, and support for entrepreneurial culture affect the industry and the impact that entrepreneurs have on growth in developing nations.

Dr. W. B. Castle (1897–1990), who played a major role in the emergence of hematology as a scientific discipline in the first half of this century, was instrumental in establishing the worldwide reputation of the Thorndike Memorial Laboratory and the Harvard Medical Unit at Boston City Hospital. In the first comprehensive biography of Castle, Anand Karnad highlights the golden age of medicine and hematology in Boston. Castle’s early experiments solved the puzzle of pernicious anemia and were the building blocks for a series of experiments on that disease that stand as one of the finest examples of clinical research ever conducted.

Castle and his group also made pioneering contributions to hemoglobin physiology, mechanisms of hemolysis, splenic function, and sickle cell anemia. Under his leadership, the Thorndike Memorial Laboratory attracted the best and the brightest talent, many of whom are present-day leaders in the world of medicine and science. Intrinsic Factors is the story of Castle’s life and work.

Investing Japan demonstrates that foreign investment is a vital and misunderstood aspect of Japan’s modern economic development. The drive to become a modern industrial power from the 1860s to the 1930s necessitated the adoption and internalization of foreign knowledge. This goal could only be achieved by working within the overarching financial and technological frameworks of Western capitalism. Foreign borrowing, supported by the gold standard, was the crux of Japan’s pre-war capital formation. It simultaneously financed domestic industrial development, the conduct of war, and territorial expansion on the Asian continent. Foreign borrowing also financed the establishment of infrastructure in Japan’s largest cities, the nationalization of railways, the interlinked capital-raising programs of “special banks” and parastatal companies, and the rapid electrification of Japanese industry in the 1920s.

Simon James Bytheway investigates the role played by foreign companies in the Japanese experience of modernization while highlighting their identity as key agents in the processes of industrialization and technology transfer. Investing Japan delivers a complex, multifaceted analysis, intersecting with the histories of formal and informal economic imperialism, diplomacy, war financing, domestic and international financial markets, parastatal and multinational enterprise, and Japan’s “internationalization” vis-à-vis the emerging global market.

With clarity and depth, Gerard McCann explores the complex developments that have shaped Ireland’s economic development, north and south, and led to recurring crises and instability.

The Irish economy has been traditionally portrayed as a product of its political divisions and the colonial legacy, divided and analysed in terms of the hegemonic tensions that exist on the island. Influenced by these divisions, academics have tended to look at a two-region approach to economic development, without adequately acknowledging the interactive nature of the island economy as a source of the crises or as a solution to systemic divergence.

McCann's definitive and dynamic history of the Irish economy circumvents conventional analyses and investigates the economic development of the island economy as a whole, highlighting where aggressive differentiation has been divisive and destabilising. He concludes by considering an alternative integrated and cohesive process of economic development.