Results by title

Raymond W. Goldsmith has combined his experience, good sense, and flair with figures to construct this groundbreaking comparative study of the balance sheets of twenty of the largest nations. A pioneer in the field of national accounts, Goldsmith now presents a work that will be a valuable tool in tracking the economic progress of and between nations.

The majority of the balance sheets were created especially for this project, their components gleaned from fragmentary and heterogeneous data. There are approximately 3,500 entries, each measuring the value of one type of tangible or financial asset or liability at a given date. Goldsmith's estimates are keyed to fifteen benchmark dates in the economic progress of the cited nations, and for twelve nations he was able to construct balance sheets dating back to the nineteenth century or earlier. Combined, worldwide balance sheet are included for 1950 and 1978.

Comparative National Balance Sheets will provide an essential basis for the quantitative analysis of the long-term financial development of these nations. In addition to national balance sheets for all large countries except Brazil and China, sectoral balance sheets for France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Japan, and the United States in the postwar period are also included.

What can the disciplines of political science and economics learn from one another? Political scientists have recently begun to adapt economic theories of exchange, trade, and competition to the study of legislatures, parties, and voting. At the same time, some of the most innovative and influential thinkers in economics have crossed the boundaries of their discipline to explore the classic questions of political science. Competition and Cooperation features six of these path-breaking scholars, all winners of the Nobel Prize for Economics, in a series of conversations with more than a dozen distinguished political scientists. The discussions analyze, adapt, and extend the Nobelists' seminal work, showing how it has carried over into political science and paved the way for fruitful cooperation between the two disciplines. The exchanges span all of the major conceptual legacies of the Nobel laureates: Arrow's formalization of the problems of collective decisions; Buchanan's work on constitutions and his critique of majority rule; Becker's theory of competition among interest groups; North's focus on insecure property rights and transaction costs; Simon's concern with the limits to rationality; and Selten's experimental work on strategic thinking and behavior. As befits any genuine dialogue, the traffic of ideas and experiences runs both ways. The Nobel economists have had a profound impact upon political science, but, in addressing political questions, they have also had to rethink many settled assumptions of economics. The standard image of economic man as a hyper-rational, self-interested creature, acting by and for for himself, bears only a passing resemblance to man as a political animal. Several of the Nobelists featured in this volume have turned instead to the insights of cognitive science and institutional analysis to provide a more recognizable portrait of political life. The reconsideration of rationality and the role of institutions,in economics as in politics, raises the possibility of a shared approach to individual choice and institutional behavior that gives glimmers of a new unity in the social sciences. Competition and Cooperation demonstrates that the most important work in both economics and political science reflects a marriage of the two disciplines.

Stressing verbal logic rather than mathematics, Israel M. Kirzner provides at once a thorough critique of contemporary price theory, an essay on the theory of entrepreneurship, and an essay on the theory of competition. Competition and Entrepreneurship offers a new appraisal of quality competition, of selling effort, and of the fundamental weaknesses of contemporary welfare economics.

Kirzner's book establishes a theory of the market and the price system which differs from orthodox price theory. He sees orthodox price theory as explaining the configuration of prices and quantities that satisfied the conditions for equilibrium. Mr. Kirzner argues that "it is more useful to look to price theory to help understand how the decisions of individual participants in the market interact to generate the market forces which compel changes in prices, outputs, and methods of production and in the allocation of resources."

Although Competition and Entrepreneurship is primarily concerned with the operation of the market economy, Kirzner's insights can be applied to crucial aspects of centrally planned economic systems as well. In the analysis of these processes, Kirzner clearly shows that the rediscovery of the entrepreneur must emerge as a step of major importance.

“Competition. Deregulation. Free market forces. The debate over competition in health care that raged in the 1970s brought with it a new economic jargon, a vocabulary of concepts and issues unheard of in hospitals a decade earlier.
“Competition in health care has developed to a greater degree than most economists predicted ten years ago. That is the conclusion of Warren Greenberg in his introduction to Competition in the Health Care Sector: Ten Years Later, a retrospective of a 1977 Federal Trade Commission conference, which produced the landmark treatise Competition in the Health Care Sector: Past, Present, and Future. Seven of the ten original papers are reexamined; a chapter on the nursing home industry has been added.
“As with the original volume, Greenberg predicts that the retrospective will become a critical element in the health care economic literature.”—Hospitals

This book argues, against the current view, that competitiveness--that is, the competitiveness of the manufacturing sector--matters to the long-term health of the U.S. economy and particularly to its long-term capacity to raise the standard of living of its citizens. The book challenges the arguments popularized most recently by Paul Krugman that

competitiveness is a dangerous obsession that distracts us from the question most central to solving the problem of stagnant real income growth, namely, what causes productivity growth, especially in the service sector.

The central argument is that, if the U.S. economy is to achieve full employment with rising real wages, it is necessary to enhance the competitiveness of its tradable goods sector. The book shows that current account deficits cannot be explained by macroeconomic mismanagement but are rather the consequence of an uncompetitive manufacturing sector. It finds that the long-term health of the manufacturing sector requires not only across-the-board policies to remedy problems of low or inefficient investment, but also sectoral policies to address problems that are strategic to resolving the balance of payments problems. Lessons are drawn from the experience of some European and Asian countries.

This book will be of interest to economists, political scientists, and business researchers concerned with the place of the manufacturing sector in overall health of the U.S. economy, with issues of industrial policy and industrial restructuring, and with the conditions for rising standards of living.

Candace Howes is Associate Professor, Barbara Hogate Ferrin Chair, Connecticut College. Ajit Singh is Professor of Economics, Queens College, Cambridge.

Standard economic models assume that many small investors own firms. This is so in most large U.S. firms, but wealthy individuals or families generally hold controlling blocks in smaller U.S. firms and in all firms in most other countries. Given this, the lack of theoretical and empirical work on tightly held firms is surprising.

What corporate governance problems arise in tightly held firms? How do these differ from corporate governance problems in widely held firms? How do control blocks arise and how are they maintained? How does concentrated ownership affect economic growth? How should we regulate tightly held firms?
Drawing together leading scholars from law, economics, and finance, this volume examines the economic and legal issues of concentrated ownership and their impact on a shifting global economy.

A few centuries ago, capitalism set in motion an explosion of economic productivity. Markets and private property had existed for millennia, but what other key institutions fostered capitalism’s relatively recent emergence? Until now, the conceptual toolkit available to answer this question has been inadequate, and economists and other social scientists have been diverted from identifying these key institutions.          

With Conceptualizing Capitalism, Geoffrey M. Hodgson offers readers a more precise conceptual framework. Drawing on a new theoretical approach called legal institutionalism, Hodgson establishes that the most important factor in the emergence of capitalism—but also among the most often overlooked—is the constitutive role of law and the state. While private property and markets are central to capitalism, they depend upon the development of an effective legal framework. Applying this legally grounded approach to the emergence of capitalism in eighteenth-century Europe, Hodgson identifies the key institutional developments that coincided with its rise. That analysis enables him to counter the widespread view that capitalism is a natural and inevitable outcome of human societies, showing instead that it is a relatively recent phenomenon, contingent upon a special form of state that protects private property and enforces contracts. After establishing the nature of capitalism, the book considers what this more precise conceptual framework can tell us about the possible future of capitalism in the twenty-first century, where some of the most important concerns are the effects of globalization, the continuing growth of inequality, and the challenges to America’s hegemony by China and others.

Awash in a sea of data that seems to have no meaning and bombarded by images and sounds transmitted from around the globe 24/7, people are no longer sure what is real and what is fake. Artists recycle ads in their paintings and businesses use images of artists in their ads; politicians mount campaigns based on hit films; and bankers make billions trading incomprehensible financial products backed by nothing more than abstract figures and signs.

In Confidence Games, Mark C. Taylor considers the implications of these developments for our digital and increasingly virtual economy. According to Taylor, money and markets do not exist in a vacuum but grow in a profoundly cultural medium, reflecting and in turn shaping their world. To understand the recent changes in our economy, it is not enough to analyze the impact of politics and technology—one must consider the influence of art, philosophy, and religion as well.

Bringing John Calvin, G. W. F. Hegel, and Adam Smith to Wall Street by way of Las Vegas, Taylor first explores the historical and psychological origins of money, the importance of religious beliefs and practices for the emergence of markets, and the unexpected role of religion and art in the classical understanding of economics. He then moves to an account of economic developments during the past four decades, exploring the dawn of our new information age, the growing virtuality of money and markets, and the complexity of the networks by which monetary value is now negotiated.

Returning full circle to a version of the market first proposed by Adam Smith when he used theology and aesthetics to rethink economics, Confidence Games closes with a plea for a conception of life that embraces uncertainty and insecurity as signs of the openness of the future. Like religion and economics, life is a confidence game in which the challenge is not to find redemption but to learn to live without it.

"Before the global credit system began its collapse in 2007, Mark Taylor had connected the dots between increasingly complex financial instruments and larger cultural forces. Anyone who wants to understand the disappearing foundation of our financial markets needs to read this book immediately."—Michael Lewitt, editor, The HCM Market Letter

With a groundbreaking, interdisciplinary approach to German political and social theory, Confronting Mass Democracy and Industrial Technology provides fresh insight into the thought of many of the most influential intellectual figures of the twentieth century. Its essays detail the manner in which a wide range of German intellectuals grappled with the ramifications and implications of democracy, technology, knowledge, and control from the late Kaisserreich to the Weimar Republic, from the Third Reich and the Federal Republic through recently unified Germany.
Scholars representing the fields of political science, philosophy, history, law, literature, and cultural studies devote essays to the work of Nietzsche, Weber, Heidegger, Lukács, Schmitt, Marcuse, Adorno, and Habermas. They also discuss the writings of such figures as Brecht and Freud, who are not primarily thought of as political theorists, and explore the thought of Helmut Plessner and reformist theorists from East Germany who have been little studied in the English language. In the process of debating the nature and responsibilities of the modern state in an era of mass politics, unparalleled military technology, capacity for surveillance, and global media presence, the contributors question whether technology is best understood as an instrument of human design and collective control or as an autonomous entity that not only has a will and life of its own but one that forms the very fabric of modern humanity.

Contributors. Seyla Benhabib, Richard J. Bernstein, Peter C. Caldwell, Richard Dienst, David Dyzenhaus, Andrew Feenberg, Nancy S. Love, John P. McCormick, Jan-Werner Müller, Gia Pascarelli, William E. Scheuerman, Steven B. Smith, Tracy B. Strong, Richard Wolin

Congress, the President, and the Federal Reserve is a study of the politics of monetary policy making at the Federal Reserve--widely considered the most important and most powerful federal bureaucracy. Ostensibly, the Federal Reserve is independent of the political branches of government; however, Congress, the President, and the Federal Reserve clearly demonstrates-- from both a theoretical and empirical standpoint--how the preferences of members of Congress and the President impact decisionmaking at the Fed.
Current formal theories of the general policy-making process are utilized to construct an explanatory framework that identifies the mechanisms through which congressional and executive influence is exercised. The theoretical framework presented in the text also helps to explain the political dynamics of several of the most significant policy decisions of the Federal Reserve during the last half-century. In addition, this book provides a unique perspective on the manner in which Fed policymakers attempt to shield themselves from unwelcome political influence.
While the main focus of Congress, the President, and the Federal Reserve is monetary policy-making, it also speaks to the political nature of policy-making in a more general sense and provides a guide for the future study of the political dynamics in a wide variety of substantive policy areas. Thus it will interest not only political scientists and economists interested in monetary policy-making specifically but also those interested in the nature of public policy-making more generally.
Irwin L. Morris is Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Maryland.

A significant contribution to political ecology, Conservation Is Our Government Now is an ethnographic examination of the history and social effects of conservation and development efforts in Papua New Guinea. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted over a period of seven years, Paige West focuses on the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area, the site of a biodiversity conservation project implemented between 1994 and 1999. She describes the interactions between those who ran the program—mostly NGO workers—and the Gimi people who live in the forests surrounding Crater Mountain. West shows that throughout the project there was a profound disconnect between the goals of the two groups. The NGOgo workers thought that they would encourage conservation and cultivate development by teaching Gimi to value biodiversity as an economic resource. The villagers expected that in exchange for the land, labor, food, and friendship they offered the conservation workers, they would receive benefits, such as medicine and technology. In the end, the divergent nature of each group’s expectations led to disappointment for both.

West reveals how every aspect of the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area—including ideas of space, place, environment, and society—was socially produced, created by changing configurations of ideas, actions, and material relations not only in Papua New Guinea but also in other locations around the world. Complicating many of the assumptions about nature, culture, and development underlying contemporary conservation efforts, Conservation Is Our Government Now demonstrates the unique capacity of ethnography to illuminate the relationship between the global and the local, between transnational processes and individual lives.

In the 1950s, Milwaukee's strong union movement and socialist mayor seemed to embody a dominant liberal consensus that sought to continue and expand the New Deal. Tula Connell explores how business interests and political conservatives arose to undo that consensus, and how the resulting clash both shaped a city and helped redefine postwar American politics. Connell focuses on Frank Zeidler, the city's socialist mayor. Zeidler's broad concept of the public interest at times defied even liberal expectations. At the same time, a resurgence of conservatism with roots presaging twentieth-century politics challenged his initiatives in public housing, integration, and other areas. As Connell shows, conservatives created an anti-progressive game plan that included a well-funded media and PR push; an anti-union assault essential to the larger project of delegitimizing any government action; opposition to civil rights; and support from a suburban silent majority. In the end, the campaign undermined notions of the common good essential to the New Deal order. It also sowed the seeds for grassroots conservatism's more extreme and far-reaching future success.

The contributors to this volume, economists and political scientists from academic institutions, the private sector, and the Ways and Means Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, came together to discuss an important topic in the formation of U.S. international trade policy: the representation of constituent interests. In the resulting volume they address the objectives of groups who participate in the policy process and examine how each group's interests are identified and promoted. They look at what means are used for these purposes, and the extent to which the groups' objectives and behavior conform to how the political economy of trade policy is treated in the economic and political science literature. Further, they discuss how effective each group has been.

Each of the book's five parts offers a coherent view of important components of the topic. Part I provides an overview of the normative and political economy approaches to the modeling of trade policies. Part 2 discusses the context of U.S. trade policies. Part 3 deals with the role of sectoral producing interests, including the relationship of trade policy to auto, steel, textile, semiconductor, aircraft, and financial services. Part 4 examines other constituent interests, including the environment, human rights, and the media. Part 5 provides commentary on such issues as the challenges that trade policy poses for the new administration and the 105th Congress.

The volume ultimately offers important and more finely articulated questions on how trade policy is formed and implemented.

Contributors are Robert E. Baldwin, Jagdish Bhagwati, Douglas A. Brook, Richard O. Cunningham, Jay Culbert, Alan V. Deardorff, I. M. Destler, Daniel Esty, Geza Feketekuty, Harry Freeman, John D. Greenwald, Gene Grossman, Richard L. Hall, Jutta Hennig, John H. Jackson, James A. Levinsohn, Mustafa Mohatarem, Robert Pahre, Richard C. Porter, Gary R. Saxonhouse, Robert E. Scott, T. N. Srinivasan, Robert M. Stern, Joe Stroud, John Sweetland, Raymond Waldmann, Marina v.N. Whitman, and Bruce Wilson.

Alan V. Deardorff and Robert M. Stern are Professors of Economics and Public Policy, University of Michigan.

In a pathbreaking analysis, Sara Singleton explores the development of schemes for the management of fisheries in the northwestern United States in which native American tribes, and state, federal, and local governments cooperate to manage limited fishing resources. In the policy dispute over the apportionment of scarce resources, some argue that only government control or private ownership will prevent the destruction of limited common resources. The author shows how cooperation among interested parties can produce a workable system for self-management of common resources. Through the detailed study of the management of fisheries in the Northwest the author tests theories explaining the basis of collective action and social cooperation, an area of rich theoretical speculation in political science, law, economics and sociology. At the same time, her findings have important implications for policy makers who are interested in efficient and effective schemes of resource control that avoid the problems caused by regulation by remote government officials or private control.
This book will appeal to policy makers concerned with the management of natural resources as well as to economists, political scientists, and sociologists concerned with collective action problems.
Sara Singleton is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Tulane University.

By 2050, the world population is expected to reach nine billion. And the challenge of feeding this rapidly growing population is being made greater by climate change, which will increasingly wreak havoc on the way we produce our food. At the same time, we have lost touch with the soil—few of us know where our food comes from, let alone how to grow it—and we are at the mercy of multinational corporations who control the crops and give little thought to the damage their methods are inflicting on the planet. Our very future is at risk.

           

In Consumed, Sarah Elton walks fields and farms on three continents, not only investigating the very real threats to our food, but also telling the little-known stories of the people who are working against time to create a new and hopeful future. From the mountains of southern France to the highlands of China, from the crowded streets of Nairobi to the banks of the St. Lawrence River in Quebec, we meet people from all walks of life who are putting together an alternative to the omnipresent industrial food system. In the arid fields of rural India we meet a farmer who has transformed her community by selling organic food directly to her neighbors. We visit a laboratory in Toronto where scientists are breeding a new kind of rice seed that they claim will feed the world. We learn about Italy’s underground food movement; how university grads are returning to the fields in China, Greece, and France; and how in Detroit, plots of vacant land planted with kale and carrots can help us see what’s possible.

           

Food might be the problem, but as Elton shows, it is also the solution. The food system as we know it was assembled in a few decades—and if it can be built that quickly, it can be reassembled and improved in the same amount of time. Elton here lays out the targets we need to meet by the year 2050. The stories she tells give us hope for avoiding a daunting fate and instead help us to believe in a not-too-distant future when we can all sit at the table.

From the novels of Anne Rice to The Lost Boys, from The Terminator to cyberpunk science fiction, vampires and cyborgs have become strikingly visible figures within American popular culture, especially youth culture. In Consuming Youth, Rob Latham explains why, showing how fiction, film, and other media deploy these ambiguous monsters to embody and work through the implications of a capitalist system in which youth both consume and are consumed.

Inspired by Marx's use of the cyborg vampire as a metaphor for the objectification of physical labor in the factory, Latham shows how contemporary images of vampires and cyborgs illuminate the contradictory processes of empowerment and exploitation that characterize the youth-consumer system. While the vampire is a voracious consumer driven by a hunger for perpetual youth, the cyborg has incorporated the machineries of consumption into its own flesh. Powerful fusions of technology and desire, these paired images symbolize the forms of labor and leisure that American society has staked out for contemporary youth.

A startling look at youth in our time, Consuming Youth will interest anyone concerned with film, television, and popular culture.

Quality Control Circles (QCCs) are small groups of workers from the same workshop, which meet, often on their own time, to discuss ways to improve the quality of their work. They are supported by management; the circles and the support structure together are called Quality Control Circle (QCC) activity. The phenomenon is widespread in Japan: as of December 1987, 264,899 circles had been registered with more than two million members. QCC activities have spread to more than fifty countries worldwide and can be considered the most famous Japanese organizational innovation to date. The Japanese QCC, in its contribution to business application and theory, may rival the discovery of the informal organization of Hawthorne Studies frame.

The Japanese QCC movement has achieved quite impressive results, which are well described in the Japanese-language literature. Of concern, however, is what sustains and causes the phenomenon. The existing literature is quite thin on these mechanisms and forces.

Our aim in this research is to develop a systematic model of the organizational nature and management of Japanese QCC activities. Quality engineering and group dynamics are not part of this study; the focus is on the supporting arrangements, not on what happens within a circle. [1]

The post-Cold War era was marked by the emergence of unprecedented new networks of international private trade, cooperation, and circulation of goods that promised to render the state nearly obsolete—at least in theory. The essays collected in this book dissect the notions of this so-called “smart economy,” revealing the crucial role that government interventions still play in facilitating the production and the global flow of goods. The contributors focus particularly on the role played by the United States, often incorrectly assumed to be the most liberal and least interventionist in the global order. More than a mere market fixer, the United States has long assumed an outsized position in expediting the global circulation of goods through its supply chains and communication channels. Drawing from such diverse fields as political science, urban sociology, and cultural studies, Contours of the Illiberal State takes a broad interdisciplinary look at how nations became active market enablers.

In 1931, when the young F. A. Hayek challenged the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes, sixteen years his senior, and one of the world's leading economists, he sparked a spirited debate that would influence economic policy in democratic countries for decades. Their extensive exchange lasted until Keynes's death in 1946, and is reprinted in its entirety in this latest volume of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek.

When the journal Economica published a review of Keynes's Treatise on Money by Hayek in 1931, Keynes's response consisted principlally of an attack on Hayek's own work on monetary theory, Prices and Production. Conducted almost entirely in economics journals, the battle that followed revealed two very different responses to a world in economic crisis. Keynes sought a revision of the liberal political order—arguing for greater government intervention in the hope of protecting against the painful fluctuations of the business cycle. Hayek instead warned that state involvement would cause irreparable damage to the economy.

This volume begins with Hayek's 1963 reminiscence "The Economics of the 1930s as Seen from London," which has never been published before. The articles, letters, and reviews from journals published in the 1930s are followed by Hayek's later reflections on Keynes's work and influence. The Introduction by Bruce Caldwell puts the debate in context, providing detailed information about the economists in Keynes's circle at Cambridge, their role in the acceptance of his ideas, and the ways in which theory affected policy during the interwar period.

Caldwell calls the debate between Hayek and Keynes "a battle for the minds of the rising generation of British-trained economists." There is no doubt that Keynes won the battle during his lifetime. Now, when many of Hayek's ideas have been vindicated by the collapse of collectivist economies and the revival of the free market around the world, this book clarifies Hayek's work on monetary theory—formed in heated opposition to Keynes—and illuminates his efforts to fight protectionism in an age of economic crisis.

F. A. Hayek (1899-1992), recipient of the Medal of Freedom in 1991 and co-winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1974, was a pioneer in monetary theory and the principal proponent of classical liberal thought in the twentieth century. He taught at the University of London, the University of Chicago, and the University of Freiburg.

Since World War II, China has had a command economy administered under a dictatorship, while India's democracy has introduced a highly regulated economy. Despite obvious differences in their political systems, each country endured remarkably similar economic problems with respect to industry during the 1960s and 1970s. Both embarked in the 1980s on a series of industrial reforms designed to improve technology and efficiency in the use of resources, as well as to stimulate industrial growth in the face of declining productivity.

For economists, the two countries offer an interesting test case for examining similar reform programs launched from disparate political and economic systems. For policymakers concerned with the region's stability, a clear view of the economic futures of these two major powers is paramount.

Examining and comparing the reform experiences of China and India up to the present, George Rosen shows that although China enacted more sweeping reform measures and produced more impressive local growth, it also experienced more significant inflationary spurts. Two-thirds of each nation's population was involved in agriculture at the start of the reform period and nearly that many at the conclusion. Ultimately, the effects of the past industrial reforms in both countries in terms of significantly greater industrial employment or well-being of their populations were limited. An important lesson in these findings, argues Rosen, is that they actually reveal more about the political factors that limit and shape economic policy reforms in a dictatorship or democracy than they confirm the virtues of either capitalism or communism.

Controlling Crime considers alternative ways to reduce crime that do not sacrifice public safety. Among the topics considered here are criminal justice system reform, social policy, and government policies affecting alcohol abuse, drugs, and private crime prevention. Particular attention is paid to the respective roles of both the private sector and government agencies. Through a broad conceptual framework and a careful review of the relevant literature, this volume provides insight into the important trends and patterns of some of the interventions that may be effective in reducing crime.

Western efforts to control trade and technological relations with communist countries affect many interests and political groups in both Eastern and Western blocs. Although there is general agreement within the Western alliance that government-imposed controls are necessary to prevent material having military importance from falling in the hands of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies, there is considerable controversy over the specifics: the exact definition of "militarily significant" material, how the Western nations should administer controls, the implications of glasnost, and other matters.

Case studies that examine how firms coordinate economic activity in the face of asymmetric information—information not equally available to all parties—are the focus of this volume.

In an ideal world, the market would be the optimal provider of coordination, but in the real world of incomplete information, some activities are better coordinated in other ways. Divided into three parts, this book addresses coordination within firms, at the borders of firms, and outside firms, providing a picture of the overall incidence and logic of economic coordination. The case studies—drawn from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when the modern business enterprise was evolving, address such issues as the relationship between coordination mechanisms and production techniques, the logic of coordination in industrial districts, and the consequences of regulation for coordination.

Continuing the work on information and organization presented in the influential Inside the Business Enterprise, this book provides material for business historians and economists who want to study the development of the dissemination of information and the coordination of economic activity within and between firms.

Conservatives often condemn the poor, particularly African-Americans, for having children out of wedlock, joblessness, dropping out of school, or tolerating crime. Liberals counter that, with more economic opportunity, the poor differ little from the nonpoor in these areas. In answer to both, Coping with Poverty points to the survival strategies of the poor and their multiple roles as parents, neighbors, relatives, and workers. Their attempts to balance multiple obligations occur within a context of limited information, social support, and resources. Their decisions may not always be the wisest, but they "make sense" in context.

Contributors use qualitative research methods to explore the influence of community, workplace, and family upon strategies for dealing with poverty. Promising young scholars delve into poor black inner-city neighborhoods and suburbs and middle-income black urban communities, exploring experiences at all stages of life, including high-school students, young parents, employed older men, and unemployed mothers. Two chapters discuss the role of qualitative research in poverty studies, specifically examining how this research can be used to improve policymaking.

The volume's contribution is in the diversity of experiences it highlights and in how the general themes it illustrates are similar across different age/gender groups. The book also suggests an approach to policymaking that seeks to incorporate the experiences and the needs of the poor themselves, in the hope of creating more successful and more relevant poverty policy. It is especially useful for undergraduate and graduate courses in sociology, public policy, urban studies, and African-American Studies, as its scope makes it THE basic reader of qualitative studies of poverty.

Sheldon Danziger is Director of the Poverty Research and Tranining Center and Professor of Social Work and Public Policy, University of Michigan. Ann Chih Lin is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, University of Michigan.

The research reported in this volume represents the second stage of a wide-ranging National Bureau of Economic Research effort to investigate "The Changing Role of Debt and Equity in Financing U.S. Capital Formation." The first group of studies sponsored under this project, which have been published individually and summarized in a 1982 volume bearing the same title (Friedman 1982), addressed several key issues relevant to corporate sector behavior along with such other aspects of the evolving financial underpinnings of U.S. capital formation as household saving incentives, international capital flows, and government debt management. In the project's second series of studies, presented at the National Bureau of Economic Research conference in January 1983 and published here for the first time along with commentaries from that conference, the central focus is the financial side of capital formation undertaken by the U.S. corporate business sector. At the same time, because corporations' securities must be held, a parallel focus is on the behavior of the markets that price these claims.

Public trust in corporations plummeted in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, when “Lehman Brothers” and “General Motors” became dirty words for many Americans. In Corporate Dreams, James Hoopes argues that Americans still place too much faith in corporations and, especially, in the idea of “values-based leadership” favored by most CEOs. The danger of corporations, he suggests, lies not just in their economic power, but also in how their confused and undemocratic values are infecting Americans’ visions of good governance. 

Corporate Dreams proposes that Americans need to radically rethink their relationships with big business and the government. Rather than buying into the corporate notion of “values-based leadership,” we should view corporate leaders with the same healthy suspicion that our democratic political tradition teaches us to view our political leaders. Unfortunately, the trend is moving the other way. Corporate notions of leadership are invading our democratic political culture when it should be the reverse.

To diagnose the cause and find a cure for our toxic attachment to corporate models of leadership, Hoopes goes back to the root of the problem, offering a comprehensive history of corporate culture inAmerica, from the Great Depression to today’s Great Recession. Combining a historian’s careful eye with an insider’s perspective on the business world, this provocative volume tracks changes in government economic policy, changes in public attitudes toward big business, and changes in how corporate executives view themselves.

Whether examining the rise of Leadership Development programs or recounting JFK’s Pyrrhic victory over U.S. Steel, Hoopes tells a compelling story of how America lost its way, ceding authority to the policies and values of corporate culture. But he also shows us how it’s not too late to return to our democratic ideals—and that it’s not too late to restore the American dream.

As we approach the end of the century, cultural, institutional, and even geopolitical change becomes the norm rather than the exception. Late Editions, edited by George E. Marcus, is a series of annuals designed to probe these changes not through the familiar academic conventions of analysis but instead through in-depth, informed conversations and interviews with individuals at the sites of these transformations. The casts of other volumes in the series include artists, oncologists, Siberian medical leaders, warhead designers, and computer junkies, all of whom take the opportunity presented by Late Editions to reflect upon the great and often puzzling shifts occurring in the cultural landscape.

Late Editions 5, Corporate Futures, questions this idea of a "cultural landscape" by focusing on the the marked investment of corporations in the concept of culture, long the purview of anthropologists and, more recently, those involved in the humanistic disciplines. Emerging in the discourse of the workplace—and traveling beyond it to traditionally alternative associations—is the idea of a "corporate culture" with its own organization, management policies and practices, and ethos. How can we understand this culture of corporations, and to what extent does it reflect self-contained communities or fragmented human existence in groups under conditions of postmodernity? Corporate Futures tackles these issues and questions through conversations with managers, financial and risk analysts, and other participants in national and international organizations.

The results—engaging, intriguing, speculative, current—continue the work begun in earlier volumes to map the terrain of the present and navigate the uncertain future.

Praise for Late Editions: "If the succeeding volumes are as compassionate and informed as the first, this series could become an essential postmodern guidebook to the world's changing cultural terrain. I plan on letting it ease me into the next century."—Catherine Gysin, Utne Reader

Refinery explosions. Accounting scandals. Bank meltdowns. All of these catastrophes—and many more—might rightfully be blamed on corporations. In response, advocates have suggested reforms ranging from increased government regulation to corporate codes of conduct to stop corporate abuses. Joshua Barkan writes that these reactions, which view law as a limit on corporations, misunderstand the role of law in fostering corporate power.

In Corporate Sovereignty, Barkan argues that corporate power should be rethought as a mode of political sovereignty. Rather than treating the economic power of corporations as a threat to the political sovereignty of states, Barkan shows that the two are ontologically linked. Situating analysis of U.S., British, and international corporate law alongside careful readings in political and social theory, he demonstrates that the Anglo-American corporation and modern political sovereignty are founded in and bound together through a principle of legally sanctioned immunity from law. The problems that corporate-led globalization present for governments result not from regulatory failures as much as from corporate immunity that is being exported across the globe.

For Barkan, there is a paradox in that corporations, which are legal creations, are given such power that they undermine the sovereignty of states. He notes that while the relationship between states and corporations may appear adversarial, it is in fact a kind of doubling in which state sovereignty and corporate power are both conjoined and in conflict. Our refusal to grapple with the peculiar nature of this doubling means that some of our best efforts to control corporations unwittingly reinvest the sovereign powers they oppose.