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"We are indebted to David Granick for his thoughtful, careful, empirically documented study of the Chinese state industrial enterprise that not only provides a rarely attained comparative analysis but also possesses an explanatory power in suggesting how this system might evolve in the future."—Jeanne L. Wilson, Business Horizons

At the turn of the twentieth century, Cadbury Bros. Ltd. was a successful, Quaker-owned chocolate manufacturer in Birmingham, England, celebrated for its model village, modern factory, and concern for employees. In 1901 the firm learned that its cocoa beans, purchased from Portuguese plantations on the island of São Tomé off West Africa, were produced by slave labor.

Chocolate on Trial: Cadbury, Slavery and the Economics of Virtue in Imperial Britain gives a lively and highly readable account of the events surrounding the libel trial in which Cadbury Bros. Ltd. sued the London Standard, following the newspaper's accusation that the firm was hypocritical in its use of slave-grown cocoa. As compelling now as at the turn of the previous century, the issues probed by Lowell J. Satre give invaluable historical background to contemporary issues of business ethics, corporate social responsibility, and globalization. The story Satre tells illuminates what a stubbornly persistent institution slavery was and shows how Cadbury, a company with a well-regarded brand name and logo, endured ethical dilemmas and challenges to its record for social responsibility. Chocolate on Trial brings to life the age-old conflict between economic interests and the value of human life.

Satre illuminates the stubborn persistence of the institution of slavery and shows how Cadbury, a company with a well-regarded brand name from the nineteenth century, faced ethical dilemmas and challenges to its record for social responsibility. Chocolate on Trial brings to life the age-old conflict between economic interests and regard for the dignity of human life.

Many of our most urgent national problems suggest a widespread lack of concern for the future. Alarming economic conditions, such as low national savings rates, declining corporate investment in long-term capital projects, and ballooning private and public debt are matched by such social ills as diminished educational achievement, environmental degradation, and high rates of infant mortality, crime, and teenage pregnancy. At the heart of all these troubles lies an important behavioral phenomenon: in the role of consumer, manager, voter, student, or parent, many Americans choose inferior but immediate rewards over greater long-term benefits. Choice Over Time offers a rich sampling of original research on intertemporal choice—how and why people decide between immediate and delayed consequences—from a broad range of theoretical and methodological perspectives in philosophy, political science, psychology, and economics. George Loewenstein, Jon Elster, and their distinguished colleagues review existing theories and forge new approaches to understanding significant questions: Why do people seem to "discount" future benefits? Do individuals use the same decision-making strategy in all aspects of their lives? What part is played by situational factors such as the certainty of delayed consequences? How are decisions affected by personal factors such as willpower and taste? In addressing these issues, the contributors to Choice Over Time address many social, economic, psychological, and personal time problems. Their work demonstrates the predictive power of short-term preferences in behavior as varied as addiction and phobia, the effect of prices on consumption, and the dramatic rise in debt and decline in savings. Choice Over Time provides an essential source for the most recent research and theory on intertemporal choice, offering new models for time preference patterns—and their aberrations—and presenting a diversity of potential solutions to the problem of "temporal myopia."

Rational choice theory has become the basis for much of the recent work done in political science. Yet explanations of many political phenomena elude rational choice theorists. Robert Grafstein offers a modification to rational choice theory that extends its ability to explain social behavior.

Grafstein argues that, instead of basing the analysis on the assumption that an actor will maximise her expected utility or her utility given the probability that the event will happen, we should define rationality as the maximisation of expected utility conditional on the probability that her act will bring the event about. This definition of utility, based on the work of Richard Jeffrey, restores the consequences of an individual's act to rational choice analysis. For example, in making a decision to vote, a conditional expected utility maximiser will compare the likelihood of victory for her preferred candidate given her own participation with the likelihood of a victory given her abstention.

The author shows the theoretical implications of this new definition of rationality and then uses it to explain certain aspects of ethnic identity and mobilization, ideology, and altruism and intertemporal choice. He then explores the implications of this idea for policy analysis and econometrics. This book will provoke a debate about how work based in rational choice theories is done.

Robert Grafstein is Professor of Political Science, University of Georgia.

Global capitalism is a precarious system. Relying on the steady flow of goods across the world, trans-national companies such as Wal-Mart and Amazon depend on the work of millions in docks, warehouses and logistics centres to keep their goods moving. 

This is the global supply chain, and, if the chain is broken, capitalism grinds to a halt. This book looks at case studies across the world to uncover a network of resistance by these workers who, despite their importance, often face vast exploitation and economic violence. 

Experiencing first hand wildcat strikes, organised blockades and boycotts, the authors explore a diverse range of case studies, from South China dockworkers to the transformation of the port of Piraeus in Greece, and from the Southern California logistics sector, to dock and logistical workers in Chile and unions in Turkey.

Christmas Trees for Pleasure and Profit is for anyone who enjoys being and working outdoors and is seeking a profitable hobby or small business venture. Robert Wray has updated this fourth edition to include the latest techniques and tools for harvesting trees, new methods of transport, the most recent data on herbicides, and advice on how to run a Christmas-tree business today.

A perennial bestseller, this illustrated guide covers selecting land, choosing species, planting, harvesting, and managing a plantation. Wray provides guidance for choosing species suitable for the grower's situation, where and how to get planting stock, and how to care for it. The planting process is described in detail, including both hand and machine methods. The book presents useful techniques for protecting the growing trees from weeds, animals, fire, insects, and disease, and offers a full description of shearing or shaping trees to improve their form and densityùkeys to a successful crop.

As the grower's job is not done until the trees are sold, issues of grading, harvesting, advertising, and marketing are examined. A chapter on finances deals with costs, profits, and taxes. From novice to experienced grower, there is something in this book for everyone.

Traditional narratives of capitalist change often rely on the myth of the willful entrepreneur from the global North who transforms the economy and delivers modernity—for good or ill—to the rest of the world. With Cigarettes, Inc., Nan Enstad upends this story, revealing the myriad cross-cultural encounters that produced corporate life before World War II.

In this startling account of innovation and expansion, Enstad uncovers a corporate network rooted in Jim Crow segregation that stretched between the United States and China and beyond. Cigarettes, Inc. teems with a global cast—from Egyptian, American, and Chinese entrepreneurs to a multiracial set of farmers, merchants, factory workers, marketers, and even baseball players, jazz musicians, and sex workers. Through their stories, Cigarettes, Inc. accounts for the cigarette’s spectacular rise in popularity and in the process offers nothing less than a sweeping reinterpretation of corporate power itself.

When and how were cities born? Does urbanization foster innovation and economic development? What was the level of urbanization in traditional societies? Did the Industrial Revolution facilitate urbanization? Has the growth of cities in the Third World been a handicap or an asset to economic development?

In this revised translation of De Jéricho à Mexico, Paul Bairoch seeks the answers to these questions and provides a comprehensive study of the evolution of the city and its relation to economic life. Bairoch examines the development of cities from the dawn of urbanization (Jericho) to the explosive growth of the contemporary Third World city. In particular, he defines the roles of agriculture and industrialization in the rise of cities.

"A hefty history, from the Neolithic onward. It's ambitious in scope and rich in subject, detailing urbanization and, of course, the links between cities and economies. Scholarly, accessible, and significant."—Newsday

"This book offers a path-breaking synthesis of the vast literature on the history of urbanization."—John C. Brown, Journal of Economic Literature

"One leaves this volume with the feeling of positions intelligently argued and related to the existing state of theory and knowledge. One also has the pleasure of reading a book unusually well-written. It will long both be a standard and stimulate new thought on the central issue of urban and economic growth."—Thomas A. Reiner, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

Climate change is real, and extreme weather events are its physical manifestations. These extreme events affect how we live and work in cities, and subsequently the way we design, plan, and govern them. Taking action ‘for the environment’ is not only a moral imperative; instead, it is activated by our everyday experience in the city.

Based on the author’s site visits and interviews in Darwin (Australia), Tulsa (Oklahoma), Cleveland (Ohio), and Cape Town (South Africa), this book tells the story of how cities can lead a transformative pro-environment politics.

National governments often fail to make binding agreements that bring about radical actions for the environment. This book shows how cities, as local sites of mobilizing a collective, political agenda, can be frontiers for activating the kind of environmental politics that appreciates the role of ‘nature’ in the everyday functioning of our urban life.

Climate change is real, and extreme weather events are its physical manifestations. These extreme events affect how we live and work in cities, and subsequently the way we design, plan, and govern them. Taking action ‘for the environment’ is not only a moral imperative; instead, it is activated by our everyday experience in the city.

Based on the author’s site visits and interviews in Darwin (Australia), Tulsa (Oklahoma), Cleveland (Ohio), and Cape Town (South Africa), this book tells the story of how cities can lead a transformative pro-environment politics.

National governments often fail to make binding agreements that bring about radical actions for the environment. This book shows how cities, as local sites of mobilizing a collective, political agenda, can be frontiers for activating the kind of environmental politics that appreciates the role of ‘nature’ in the everyday functioning of our urban life.

We live in a self-proclaimed Urban Age, where we celebrate the city as the source of economic prosperity, a nurturer of social and cultural diversity, and a place primed for democracy. We proclaim the city as the fertile ground from which progress will arise. Without cities, we tell ourselves, human civilization would falter and decay. In Cities in the Urban Age, Robert A. Beauregard argues that this line of thinking is not only hyperbolic—it is too celebratory by half.

For Beauregard, the city is a cauldron for four haunting contradictions. First, cities are equally defined by both their wealth and their poverty. Second, cities are simultaneously environmentally destructive and yet promise sustainability. Third, cities encourage rule by political machines and oligarchies, even as they are essentially democratic and at least nominally open to all. And fourth, city life promotes tolerance among disparate groups, even as the friction among them often erupts into violence. Beauregard offers no simple solutions or proposed remedies for these contradictions; indeed, he doesn’t necessarily hold that they need to be resolved, since they are generative of city life. Without these four tensions, cities wouldn’t be cities. Rather, Beauregard argues that only by recognizing these ambiguities and contradictions can we even begin to understand our moral obligations, as well as the clearest paths toward equality, justice, and peace in urban settings.

Below the middle class managers and professionals yet above the skilled blue-collar workers, sales and office workers occupied an intermediate position in urban America's social structure as the nation industrialized. Jerome P. Bjelopera traces the shifting occupational structures and work choices that facilitated the emergence of a white-collar workforce. His fascinating portrait reveals the lives led by Philadelphia's male and female clerks, both inside and outside the workplace, as they formed their own clubs, affirmed their "whiteness," and challenged sexual norms. 

A vivid look at an overlooked but recognizable workforce, City of Clerks reveals how the notion of "white collar" shifted over half a century.

While the American agricultural and food systems follow a decades-old path of industrialization and globalization, a counter trend has appeared toward localizing some agricultural and food production. Thomas A. Lyson, a scholar-practitioner in the field of community-based food systems, calls this rebirth of locally based agriculture and food production civic agriculture because these activities are tightly linked to a community’s social and economic development. Civic agriculture embraces innovative ways to produce, process, and distribute food, and it represents a sustainable alternative to the socially, economically, and environmentally destructive practices associated with conventional large-scale agriculture. Farmers’ markets, community gardens, and community-supported agriculture are all forms of civic agriculture. Lyson describes how, in the course of a hundred years, a small-scale, diversified system of farming became an industrialized system of production and also how this industrialized system has gone global. He argues that farming in the United States was modernized by employing the same techniques and strategies that transformed the manufacturing sector from a system of craft production to one of mass production. Viewing agriculture as just another industrial sector led to transformations in both the production and the processing of food. As small farmers and food processors were forced to expand, merge with larger operations, or go out of business, they became increasingly disconnected from the surrounding communities. Lyson enumerates the shortcomings of the current agriculture and food systems as they relate to social, economic, and environmental sustainability. He then introduces the concept of community problem solving and offers empirical evidence and concrete examples to show that a re-localization of the food production system is underway.

A thought-provoking investigation of an urgent issue facing American communities today, Edward C. Lorenz’s book examines the intersection of corporate irresponsibility and civic engagement. At the heart of this case study is a group of firms responsible for seven of the most contaminated Superfund sites in the United States, the largest food contamination accident in U.S. history, stunning stock and financial manipulations, and a massive shift of jobs off shore. In the face of these egregious environmental, employee, and investor abuses, several communities impacted by these firms organized to confront and combat failures in corporate and bureaucratic leadership, winning notable victories over major financiers, lobbyists, and indifferent or ineffective government agencies. A critical analysis of public and private leadership, business and economic ethics, and civic life, this book concludes with a stirring blueprint for other communities facing similarly overwhelming opposition.

Labor studies scholars and working-class historians have long worked at the crossroads of academia and activism. The essays in this collection examine the challenges and opportunities for engaged scholarship in the United States and abroad. A diverse roster of contributors discuss how participation in current labor and social struggles guides their campus and community organizing, public history initiatives, teaching, mentoring, and other activities. They also explore the role of research and scholarship in social change, while acknowledging that intellectual labor complements but never replaces collective action and movement building. Contributors: Kristen Anderson, Daniel E. Atkinson, James R. Barrett, Susan Roth Breitzer, Susan Chandler, Sam Davies, Dennis Deslippe, Eric Fure-Slocum, Colin Gordon, Michael Innis-Jiménez, Stephanie Luce, Joseph A. McCartin, John W. McKerley, Matthew M. Mettler, Stephen Meyer, David Montgomery, Kim E. Nielsen, Peter Rachleff, Ralph Scharnau, Jennifer Sherer, Shelton Stromquist, Emily E. LB. Twarog, and John Williams-Searle.

Taking the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume as its subject, this book breaks new ground in focusing its lens on a little-studied aspect of Hume’s thinking: his understanding of money.

George Caffentzis makes both an intervention in the field of monetary philosophy and into Marxian conceptions of the relation between philosophy and capitalist development. He vividly charts the ways in which Hume’s philosophy directly informed the project of ‘civilizing’ the people of the Scottish Highlands and pacifying the English proletariat in response to the revolts of both groups at the heart of the empire.

Built on careful historical and philosophical detective work, Civilizing Money offers a stimulating and radical political reading of the ways in which Hume’s fundamental philosophical claims performed concrete political functions.

Should the United States be open to commerce with other countries, or should it protect domestic industries from foreign competition? This question has been the source of bitter political conflict throughout American history. Such conflict was inevitable, James Madison argued in The Federalist Papers, because trade policy involves clashing economic interests. The struggle between the winners and losers from trade has always been fierce because dollars and jobs are at stake: depending on what policy is chosen, some industries, farmers, and workers will prosper, while others will suffer.
           
Douglas A. Irwin’s Clashing over Commerce is the most authoritative and comprehensive history of US trade policy to date, offering a clear picture of the various economic and political forces that have shaped it. From the start, trade policy divided the nation—first when Thomas Jefferson declared an embargo on all foreign trade and then when South Carolina threatened to secede from the Union over excessive taxes on imports. The Civil War saw a shift toward protectionism, which then came under constant political attack. Then, controversy over the Smoot-Hawley tariff during the Great Depression led to a policy shift toward freer trade, involving trade agreements that eventually produced the World Trade Organization. Irwin makes sense of this turbulent history by showing how different economic interests tend to be grouped geographically, meaning that every proposed policy change found ready champions and opponents in Congress.

As the Trump administration considers making major changes to US trade policy, Irwin’s sweeping historical perspective helps illuminate the current debate. Deeply researched and rich with insight and detail, Clashing over Commerce provides valuable and enduring insights into US trade policy past and present.
 

Pioneering contributions to social choice and voting from Pliny to Lewis Carroll

Winner of the 1990 Best Book Award from the New England Council on Latin American Studies

This study of Bolivia uses Cochabamba as a laboratory to examine the long-term transformation of native Andean society into a vibrant Quechua-Spanish-mestizo region of haciendas and smallholdings, towns and villages, peasant markets and migratory networks caught in the web of Spanish imperial politics and economics. Combining economic, social, and ethnohistory, Brooke Larson shows how the contradictions of class and colonialism eventually gave rise to new peasant, artisan, and laboring groups that challenged the evolving structures of colonial domination. Originally published in 1988, this expanded edition includes a new final chapter that explores the book’s implications for understanding the formation of a distinctive peasant political culture in the Cochabamba valleys over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Despite ongoing efforts to maintain ethical standards, highly publicized episodes of corporate misconduct occur with disturbing frequency. Firms produce defective products, release toxic substances into the environment, or permit dangerous conditions to existin their workplaces. The propensity for irresponsible acts is not confined to rogue companies, but crops up in even the most respectable firms. Codes of Conduct is the first comprehensive attempt to understand these problems by applying the principles of modern behavioral science to the study of organizational behavior. Codes of Conduct probes the psychological and social processes through which companies and their managers respond to a wide array of ethical dilemmas, from risk and safety management to the treatment of employees. The contributors employ a wide range of case studies to illustrate the effects of social influence and group persuasion, organizational authority and communication, fragmented responsibility, and the process of rationalization. John Darley investigates how unethical acts are unintentionally assembled within organizations as a result of cascading pressures and social processes. Essays by Roderick Kramer and David Messick and by George Loewenstein focus on irrational decision making among managers. Willem Wagenaar examines how worker safety is endangered by management decisions that focus too narrowly on cost cutting and short time horizons. Essays by Baruch Fischhoff and by Robyn Dawes review the role of the expert in assessing environmental risk. Robert Bies reviews evidence that employees are more willing to provide personal information and to accept affirmative action programs if they are consulted on the intended procedures and goals. Stephanie Goodwin and Susan Fiske discuss how employees can be educated to base office judgments on personal qualities rather than on generalizations of gender, race, and ethnicity. Codes of Conduct makes an important scientific contribution to the understanding of decisionmaking and social processes in business, and offers clear insights into the design of effective policies to improve ethical conduct.

The growing number of immigrants living and working in America has become a controversial topic from classrooms to corporations and from kitchen tables to Capitol Hill. Many native-born Americans fear that competition from new arrivals will undermine the economic standing of low-skilled American workers, and that immigrants may not successfully integrate into the U.S. economy. In Color Lines, Country Lines, sociologist Lingxin Hao argues that the current influx of immigrants is changing America's class structure, but not in the ways commonly believed. Drawing on twenty years of national survey data, Color Lines, Country Lines investigates how immigrants are faring as they try to accumulate enough wealth to join the American middle class, and how, in the process, they are transforming historic links between race and socioeconomic status. Hao finds that disparities in wealth among immigrants are large and growing, including disparities among immigrants of the same race or ethnicity. Cuban immigrants have made substantially more progress than arrivals from the Dominican Republic, Chinese immigrants have had more success than Vietnamese or Korean immigrants, and Jamaicans have fared better than Haitians and immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa. Indeed, many of these immigrant groups have acquired more wealth than native-born Americans of the same race or ethnicity. Hao traces these diverging paths to differences in the political and educational systems of the immigrants' home countries, as well as to preferential treatment of some groups by U.S. immigration authorities and the U.S. labor market. As a result, individuals' country of origin increasingly matters more than their race in determining their prospects for acquiring wealth. In a novel analysis, Hao predicts that as large numbers of immigrants arrive in the United States every year, the variation in wealth within racial groups will continue to grow, reducing wealth inequalities between racial groups. If upward mobility remains restricted to only some groups, then the old divisions of wealth by race will gradually become secondary to new disparities based on country of origin. However, if the labor market and the government are receptive to all immigrant groups, then the assimilation of immigrants into the middle class will help diminish wealth inequality in society as a whole. Immigrants' assimilation into the American mainstream and the impact of immigration on the American economy are inextricably linked, and each issue can only be understood in light of the other. Color Lines, Country Lines shows why some immigrant groups are struggling to get by while others have managed to achieve the American dream and reveals the surprising ways in which immigration is reshaping American society.

From the 1860s through the early twentieth century, Great Britain saw the rise of the department store and the institutionalization of a gendered sphere of consumption. Come Buy, Come Buy considers representations of the female shopper in British women’s writing and demonstrates how women’s shopping practices are materialized as forms of narrative, poetic, and cultural inscription, showing how women writers emphasize consumerism as productive of pleasure rather than the condition of seduction or loss. Krista Lysack examines works by Christina Rossetti, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, George Eliot, and Michael Field, as well as the suffragette newspaper Votes for Women, in order to challenge the dominant construction of Victorian femininity as characterized by self-renunciation and the regulation of appetite.

Come Buy, Come Buy considers not only literary works, but also a variety of archival sources (shopping guides, women’s fashion magazines, household management guides, newspapers, and advertisements) and cultural practices (department store shopping, shoplifting and kleptomania, domestic economy, and suffragette shopkeeping). With this wealth of sources, Lysack traces a genealogy of the woman shopper from dissident domestic spender to aesthetic connoisseur, from curious shop-gazer to political radical.

The modern comic book shop was born in the early 1970s. Its rise was due in large part to Phil Seuling, the entrepreneur whose direct market model allowed shops to get comics straight from the publishers. Stores could then better customize their offerings and independent publishers could access national distribution. Shops opened up a space for quirky ideas to gain an audience and helped transform small-press series, from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Bone, into media giants.

Comic Shop is the first book to trace the history of these cultural icons. Dan Gearino brings us from their origins to the present-day, when the rise of digital platforms and a changing retail landscape have the industry at a crossroads. When the book was first published in 2017, Gearino had spent a year with stores around the country, following how they navigated the business. For this updated and expanded paperback edition, he covers the wild retail landscape of 2017 and 2018, a time that was brutal for stores and rich for comics as an art form.

Along the way he interviews pioneers of comics retailing and other important players, including many women; top creators; and those who continue to push the business in new directions. A revised guide to dozens of the most interesting shops around the United States and Canada is a bonus for fans.

The full dimensions of the medieval Chinese economic revolution are still almost unknown to economic historians in the Western world, and the manifold problems that it raises for accepted theories of economic development have hardly begun to be systematically considered. Japanese scholars have been the pioneers in opening up this field, and Professor Shiba’s Commerce and Society in Sung China is among the most recent and most impressive fruits of their labors. For the first time it is possible to be relatively confident, as the result of the author’s systematic exploitation of an enormous range of source materials, about the parts played by transport, trade, business organization and urbanization in this revolution. It is hardly necessary to labor the significance of the advance. China’s was beyond any reasonable doubt the most developed economy in the medieval world, and the investigation both of the causes that made this possible and of those that subsequently prevented a take-off into sustained growth is among the most pressing tasks waiting to be accomplished before any general theory of economic development, solidly grounded in comparative historical analysis, becomes possible.

Film audiences resisted blatant ads since cinema’s earliest days. The advertising film arose as a movie that masqueraded as entertainment or instruction to achieve its goals. Martin L. Johnson reveals the evasive history of advertising films through the actions of individuals, corporate sponsors and producers, and government agencies and non-profits that made, circulated, and showed them.

An advertising film placed promotional content into movies presented as travelogues, educational shorts, industrial films, or scenes of daily life. Business and government, meanwhile, built systems to distribute the films to unsuspecting audiences in schools, churches, civic groups, and universities. Through experimentation, corporations honed sophisticated tools of persuasion that used moving images to influence the public. What they learned reshaped notions of storytelling, technology, and corporate communication while setting the stage for advertising’s symbiotic relationship with television.

Persuasive and expert, Commercial Cinema illuminates the changing fortunes and eventual fate of a film genre in disguise.

Most people understand property as something that is owned, a means of creating individual wealth. But in Commodity and Propriety, the first full-length history of the meaning of property, Gregory Alexander uncovers in American legal writing a competing vision of property that has existed alongside the traditional conception. Property, Alexander argues, has also been understood as proprietary, a mechanism for creating and maintaining a properly ordered society. This view of property has even operated in periods—such as the second half of the nineteenth century—when market forces seemed to dominate social and legal relationships.

In demonstrating how the understanding of property as a private basis for the public good has competed with the better-known market-oriented conception, Alexander radically rewrites the history of property, with significant implications for current political debates and recent Supreme Court decisions.

Los Angeles's Japanese American National Museum, established in 1992, remains the only museum in the United States expressly dedicated to sharing the story of Americans of Japanese ancestry. The National Museum is a unique institution that operates in collaboration with other institutions, museums, researchers, audiences, and funders. In this collection of seventeen essays, anthropologists, art historians, museum curators, writers, designers, and historians provide case studies exploring collaboration with community-oriented partners in order to document, interpret, and present their histories and experiences and provide a new understanding of what museums can and should be in the United States.

Current scholarship in museum studies is generally limited to interpretations by scholars and curators. Common Ground brings descriptive data to the intellectual canon and illustrates how museum institutions must be transformed and recreated to suit the needs of the twenty-first century.

The image of rural America portrayed in this illuminating study is one that is vibrant, regionally varied, and sometimes heroic. Communities of Work focuses on the ways in which rural people and places are affected by political, social, and economic forces far outside their control and how they sustain themselves and their communities in response.

Bringing together the two fundamental concepts of community—where the relationships and practices of daily life occur—and work, in which an elementary exchange occurs, Communities of Work bridges several fields of study. Presented here is the contextual and embedded nature of social relations and the complexity involved in understanding them. Through the use of multiple case studies, the authors apply diverse theories and methods in seeking an integrated outcome, one captured by “communities of work.”

Beginning with a description of the broad changes in work and economic activities across the United States, ranging from the Ohio River Valley to a western boomtown, the book shifts its focus to the interplay of work, family, and local networks in time and place. Activities range from fishing in the Mississippi Delta to farming and family life in the Midwest. The authors then highlight how rural people and places respond to extra-local, increasingly global forces in settings as diverse as rural South Carolina and Wisconsin.

A certain communitarian theme runs through Communities of Work. It is about people and communities not merely reacting, but instead responding in ways that reflect their local culture, while being cognizant of the larger world within which they live.

This ecology of ethics seeks to balance the needs of the individual and those of the various levels of community.

As James A. Mackin, Jr., shows, both modernism and postmodernism have undermined the traditional foundations for ethics. Using an ecological model, however, Community over Chaos develops a common ground for ethical judgments about communication, thus countering the current theoretical climate of pessimistic cynicism toward the very possibility of ethics.

This theoretical pessimism is not merely an academic problem. The general public is becoming more and more disillusioned about the possibility of ethical communication. We are unable to teach principles of communicative ethics in our primary and secondary schools because we cannot agree on a common ground for those principles. Instead, we teach a narrow form of competence that is concerned primarily with short-term, individual success. Because our communities are built on our communicative practices, our inability to justify communicative ethics must ultimately lead to the disintegration of our communities.

Mackin's ecological model assumes that each of us is a communicative system operating within larger communicative systems that together form our communicative ecosystem. Virtues of the ecological approach are practical wisdom, based in fuzzy logic, and communicative openness and honesty.

Mackin recognizes the importance of both chaos and community in our communicative ecosystems. Chaos, as the source of originality and creativity, can contribute to growth and development; community provides the source of regularity and nurture that makes chaos endurable.

 

The comparative study of law and the institutions of law have enriched our understanding of the role law plays in our society by comparing law and legal institutions in different countries, but we have lacked a strong theoretical structure. Scholars studying the role of law in society by applying economic theories have offered a parsimonious theoretical structure with which to understand the relationship between law and society but have tended to focus only on American legal issues. Ugo Mattei joins insights from both areas of scholarship in a productive relationship that furthers our understanding of why societies adopt different laws and why some societies share similar laws.
Mattei shows how concepts from economics can be applied to the study of comparative law. He then applies the concepts to several significant problems in comparative law, including the history and sources of law, differences between civil and common law systems, and the reasons for legal change and the movement of law from one country to another. He looks at specific problems in property, contracts, and trust law. Finally he uses the insights he has developed to understand the issues involved in changing law in developing countries and in formerly socialist countries.
This book will be of interest to scholars of law, economics, and development, as well as those interested in transformation in formerly communist states.
Ugo Mattei is Alfred and Hanna Fromm Professor of International and Comparative Law, Hastings College of Law, University of California; and Professor of Civil Law, University of Trento.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the current European media in a period of disruptive transformation. It maps the full scope of contemporary media policy and industry activities while also assessing the impact of new technologies and radical changes in distribution and consumption on media practices, organizations, and strategies. Combining a critical assessment of media systems with a thematic approach, it can serve as a resource for scholars or as a textbook, as well as a source of good practices for steering media policy, international communication, and the media landscape across Europe.