The citrus industry in Belize could be said to exist primarily to satisfy the needs of people in other countries. A business that is highly dependent on global markets and the geopolitics of international trade, it comprises some 500 farmers, many hundreds of wage laborers, and two processing companies that produce frozen juice concentrate for export. This new study examines how those farmers, laborers, and companies define and pursue shared interests, and how they respond differently to the impact of national development strategies and global economic and political forces. Laurie Kroshus Medina analyzes the development of the citrus industry in Belize over fifteen years to explore the relationship between the production of collective identities and the negotiation of development policies at the interface of global and local processes. She shows how citrus farmers and workers, processing companies, and politicians compete to construct shared identities, how they mobilize collective actors, and how their collective action shapes the goals, policies, and practices associated with development. Taking an ethnographic approach, Medina describes how the Belizean citrus industry responds to cycles of boom and bust, and the implications of such cycles for workers and growers. She offers a close look at the major actors—workers, union members, small and large growers, and politicians—as they respond to global changes in the citrus industry. Her analysis is made more compelling through an account of two open struggles in the industry over the formation of a rival union and the attempt to buy the processing company, owned by the multinational corporation Nestlé. She also includes a discussion of the impact of NAFTA on the industry. Medina's research demonstrates how collective agency in Belize has pushed the citrus industry's development in directions that simultaneously conform to and diverge from the trajectories laid out by foreign agencies. Negotiating Economic Development provides a bridge from old to new studies of Latin American social movements as it offers key insights into competing forms of identity for a wide range of social scientists concerned with the human and social aspects of development issues and globalization.

For all the wrong reasons, a national spotlight is shining on Chicago. The city has become known for its violence, police abuse, parent and teacher unrest, population decline, and mounting municipal and pension debt. The underlying problem, contend Ed Bachrach and Austin Berg, is that deliberative democracy is dead in the city. Chicago is home to the last strongman political system in urban America. The mayor holds all the power, and any perceived checks on mayoral control are often proven illusory. Rash decisions have resulted in poor outcomes. The outrageous consequences of unchecked power are evident in government failures in elections, schools, fiscal discipline, corruption, public support for private enterprise, policing, and more.
 
Rather than simply lament the situation, criticize specific leaders, or justify an ideology, Bachrach and Berg compare the decisions about Chicago’s governance and finances with choices made in fourteen other large U.S. cities. The problems that seem unique to Chicago have been encountered elsewhere, and Chicagoans, the authors posit, can learn from the successful solutions other cities have embraced.
 
Chicago government and its citizens must let go of the past to prepare for the future, argue Bachrach and Berg. A future filled with demographic, technological, and economic change requires a government capable of responding and adapting. Reforms can transform the city. The prescriptions for change provided in this book point toward a hopeful future: the New Chicago Way.

While overconsumption by the developed world's roughly one billion inhabitants is an abiding problem, another one billion increasingly affluent "new consumers" in developing countries will place additional strains on the earth's resources, argue authors Norman Myers and Jennifer Kent in this important new book.

The New Consumers examines the environmental impacts of this increased consumption, with particular focus on two commodities -- cars and meat -- that stand to have the most far-reaching effects. It analyzes consumption patterns in a number of different countries, with special emphasis on China and India (whose surging economies, as well as their large populations, are likely to account for exceptional growth in humanity's ecological footprint), and surveys big-picture issues such as the globalization of economies, consumer goods, and lifestyles. Ultimately, according to the orman Myers and Jennifer Kent, the challenge will be for all of humanity to transition to sustainable levels of consumption, for it is unrealistic to expect "new" consumers not to aspire to be like the "old" ones.

Cogent in its analysis, The New Consumers issues a timely warning of a major and developing environmental trend, and suggests valuable strategies for ameliorating its effects.

From the rural agricultural and natural resource based economy and lifestyle of the seventeenth century to today’s postindustrial, suburban-dominated, automobile-dependent economy, the economic drivers which were considered to be an asset are now viewed by many to be the state’s greatest disadvantage. On the brink of yet another transformation, this one driven by a new technology and an internet based global economy, New Jersey will have to adapt itself yet again—this time to a postsuburban digital economy. 

Hughes and Seneca describe the forces that are now propelling the state into yet another economic era. They do this in the context of historical economic transformations of New Jersey, setting out the technological, demographic, and transportation shifts that defined and drove them.