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Addresses structural violence through history and archaeology of immigrant workers

Dangerous Occupations: Archaeologies of Structural Violence, Immigrants, and Resilience in Early California is an impactful work of historical archaeology combined with social history that addresses structural violence in key California industries from the Gold Rush in 1849 until 1920. Monopolistic industries, such as railroading, mining, timbering, explosive manufacturing, lime production, meatpacking, textile milling, and fishing/whaling, relied on immigrant laborers who were recruited and perceived as expendable. Restrictive laws and lack of employment opportunities based on bigotry often forced immigrants into the most dangerous occupations. In the days before workmen’s compensation insurance and strict labor safety laws, laborers often risked their health and even their lives for employment. 

Marco G. Meniketti’s analysis comes from examining excavation of labor camps and housing, landscape studies, bioarchaeological data, architectural footprints, and archival sources. Each chapter offers a case study of industries to exemplify structural violence and its broader consequences among various immigrant labor groups, such as Chinese, Scandinavian, Irish, Italian, Chilean, Cornish, and Portuguese. The narrative includes a historical overview of the industries, identifies who the immigrant laborers were and how they came to be there, examines the dangers and health risks of their jobs, and details their living conditions and daily life, including foodways, leisure, and efforts to treat their job-inflicted maladies. Dangerous Occupations introduces a new generation of readers to how immigrants built the West Coast and at what great cost.
 

Of paramount importance to the natural sciences, the principles of Darwinism, which involve variation, inheritance, and selection, are increasingly of interest to social scientists as well. But no one has provided a truly rigorous account of how the principles apply to the evolution of human society—until now.

In Darwin’s Conjecture, Geoffrey Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudsen reveal how the British naturalist’s core concepts apply to a wide range of phenomena, including business practices, legal systems, technology, and even science itself. They also critique some prominent objections to applying Darwin to social science, arguing that ultimately Darwinism functions as a general theoretical framework for stimulating further inquiry. Social scientists who adopt a Darwinian approach, they contend, can then use it to frame and help develop new explanatory theories and predictive models.

This truly pathbreaking workat long last makes the powerful conceptual tools of Darwin available to the social sciences and will be welcomed by scholars and students from a range of disciplines.

A necessary exploration into the mechanics of data privacy protections within empirical social science research.

The explosion of computational power and data availability has revolutionized empirical social science research, but it has also created unprecedented challenges for protecting the privacy of individuals and businesses. As computational tools make it increasingly possible to breach data anonymity in government surveys by combining the survey data with additional information from external sources, statistical agencies face mounting pressure to develop new privacy protection methods while maintaining data quality essential for research and policymaking. This volume explores how innovations in data privacy protection, including differential privacy and synthetic data methods, affect the conduct of empirical analysis in economics, computer science, and statistics. Contributors explore critical questions about the trade-offs between privacy and data usability: How do new protection methods impact statistical inference and parameter estimation? What standards should data providers adopt? The chapters examine frameworks for characterizing privacy protection, disclosure limitation challenges for survey data, methodological innovations for privacy-preserving statistical analysis, regulatory considerations in modern data governance, and strategies for balancing confidentiality with research access.

This volume provides researchers, statistical agencies, and policymakers with essential guidance for navigating the complex landscape where data protection meets scientific inquiry.

The Federal Reserve—the central bank of the United States—is the most powerful peacetime bureaucracy in the federal government. Under the chairmanship of Alan Greenspan (1987-2006), the Fed achieved near mythical status for its part in managing the economy, and Greenspan was lauded as a genius. Few seemed to notice or care that Fed officials operated secretly with almost no public accountability. There was a courageous exception to this lack of oversight, however: Henry B. Gonzalez (D-TX)—chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services (banking) Committee.

In Deception and Abuse at the Fed, Robert Auerbach, a former banking committee investigator, recounts major instances of Fed mismanagement and abuse of power that were exposed by Rep. Gonzalez, including:

• Blocking Congress and the public from holding powerful Fed officials accountable by falsely declaring—for 17 years—it had no transcripts of its meetings;
• Manipulating the stock and bond markets in 1994 under cover of a preemptive strike against inflation;
• Allowing $5.5 billion to be sent to Saddam Hussein from a small Atlanta branch of a foreign bank—the result of faulty bank examination practices by the Fed;
• Stonewalling Congressional investigations and misleading the Washington Post about the $6,300 found on the Watergate burglars.

Auerbach provides documentation of these and other abuses at the Fed, which confirms Rep. Gonzalez's belief that no government agency should be allowed to operate with the secrecy and independence in which the Federal Reserve has shrouded itself. Auerbach concludes with recommendations for specific, broad-ranging reforms that will make the Fed accountable to the government and the people of the United States.

Private money, public good, and the original fight for control of America’s energy industry.

Until the 1930s, financial interests dominated electrical power in the United States. That changed with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which restructured the industry. The government expanded public ownership, famously through the Tennessee Valley Authority, and promoted a new kind of utility: the rural electric cooperative that brought light and power to millions in the countryside. Since then, public and cooperative utilities have persisted as an alternative to shareholder control. Democracy in Power traces the rise of publicly governed utilities in the twentieth-century electrification of America.

Sandeep Vaheesan shows that the path to accountability in America’s power sector was beset by bureaucratic challenges and fierce private resistance. Through a detailed and critical examination of this evolution, Vaheesan offers a blueprint for a publicly led and managed path to decarbonization. Democracy in Power is at once an essential history, a deeply relevant accounting of successes and failures, and a guide on how to avoid repeating past mistakes.

This is an auto-narrated audiobook version of this book.

Private money, public good, and the original fight for control of America’s energy industry.

Until the 1930s, financial interests dominated electrical power in the United States. That changed with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal which restructured the industry. The government expanded public ownership, famously through the Tennessee Valley Authority, and promoted a new kind of utility: the rural electric cooperative that brought light and power to millions in the countryside. Since then, public and cooperative utilities have persisted as an alternative to shareholder control. Democracy in Power traces the rise of publicly governed utilities in the twentieth-century electrification of America.

Sandeep Vaheesan shows that the path to accountability in America’s power sector was beset by bureaucratic challenges and fierce private resistance. Through a detailed and critical examination of this evolution, Vaheesan offers a blueprint for a publicly led and managed path to decarbonization. Democracy in Power is at once an essential history, a deeply relevant accounting of successes and failures, and a guide on how to avoid repeating past mistakes.

Demographics is a vital field of study for understanding social and economic change and it has attracted attention in recent years as concerns have grown over the aging populations of developed nations. Demographic studies help make sense of key aspects of the economy, offering insight into trends in fertility, mortality, immigration, and labor force participation, as well as age, gender, and race specific trends in health and disability.

Demography and the Economy explores the connections between demography and economics, paying special attention to what demographic trends can reveal about the sustainability of traditional social security programs and the larger implications for economic growth. The volume brings together some of the leading scholars working at the border between the two disciplines, and it provides an eclectic overview of both fields. Contributors also offer deeper analysis of a variety of issues such as the impact of greater wealth on choices about marriage and childbearing and the effects of aging populations on housing prices, Social Security, and Medicare.

Seeking answers to the question, “Who benefits from homelessness?” this book takes the reader on a sweeping tour of Cleveland's history from the late nineteenth-century through the early twenty-first. Daniel Kerr shows that homelessness has deep roots in the shifting ground of urban labor markets, social policy, downtown development, the criminal justice system, and corporate power. Rather than being attributable to the illnesses and inadequacies of the unhoused themselves, it is a product of both structural and political dynamics shaping the city. Kerr locates the origins of today's shelter system in the era that followed the massive railroad rebellions of 1877. From that period through the Great Depression, business and political leaders sought to transform downtown Cleveland to their own advantage. As they focused on bringing business travelers and tourists to the city and beckoned upper-income residents to return to its center, they demolished two downtown working-class neighborhoods and institutionalized a shelter system to contain and control the unhoused and unemployed. The precedents from this period informed the strategies of the post–World War II urban renewal era as the "new urbanism" of the late twentieth century. The efforts of the city's elites have not gone uncontested. Kerr documents a rich history of opposition by people at the margins of whose organized resistance and everyday survival strategies have undermined the grand plans crafted by the powerful and transformed the institutions designed to constrain the lives of the homeless.

The devastation of local news organizations has left rural areas of the US marooned in information deserts. Nick Mathews offers a boots-on-the-ground examination of the human toll of local news’s erosion by the winds of de-localization and corporate indifference.

It is no secret that ownership transfers, corporate mergers, and hedge fund takeovers have relentlessly consolidated and closed local news organizations. Mathews exposes the impact of that process on journalism, journalists, and news consumers hungry for outlets that tell their stories. A fundamental breakdown within journalism itself, the abandonment of community news has left disgruntled and disconnected locals to piece together news and information themselves. Mathews draws on the personal experiences of news gatherers and consumers to illuminate why local news cannot be scaled. Mass-produced content inevitably severs ties to communities while distant ownership is indifferent to local concerns.

Nuanced and sympathetic, <i>Deserted</i> provides a vivid portrait of the people and places forsaken by journalism’s corporate owners.

For more than thirty-five years, Thomas W. Dichter has worked in the field of international development, managing and evaluating projects for nongovernmental organizations, directing a Peace Corps country program, and serving as a consultant for such agencies as USAID, UNDP, and the World Bank. On the basis of this extensive and varied experience, he has become an outspoken critic of what he terms the “international poverty alleviation industry.” He believes that efforts to reduce world poverty have been well-intentioned but largely ineffective. On the whole, the development industry has failed to serve the needs of the people it has sought to help. 

To make his case, Dichter reviews the major trends in development assistance from the 1960s through the 1990s, illustrating his analysis with eighteen short stories based on his own experiences in the field. The analytic chapters are thus grounded in the daily life of development workers as described in the stories. 

Dichter shows how development organizations have often become caught up in their own self-perpetuation and in public relations efforts designed to create an illusion of effectiveness. Tracing the evolution of the role of money (as opposed to ideas) in development assistance, he suggests how financial imperatives have reinforced the tendency to sponsor time-bound projects, creating a dependency among aid recipients. He also examines the rise of careerism and increased bureaucratization in the industry, arguing that assistance efforts have become disconnected from important lessons learned on the ground, and often lessons of world history. 

In the end, Dichter calls for a more light-handed and artful approach to development assistance, with fewer agencies and experts involved. His stance is pragmatic, rather than ideological or political. What matters, he says, is what works, and the current practices of the development industry are simply not effective.

With an abundance of goods and services available to consumers in the sport industry, it can be difficult for products or organizations to stand out from the competition. Combining theoretical foundation with real-world examples, the updated fifth edition of Developing Successful Sport Marketing Plans guides readers through the sequential process of creating and implementing a winning marketing strategy—including understanding the market environment, defining target markets, developing marketing objectives and strategies, and evaluating the plan.

Esteemed scholar and author Mark S. Nagel joins internationally recognized academician David Stotlar in writing the revised fifth edition that includes updated information and examples, interviews with sport marketing professionals to provide insight into the industry, and worksheets to provide a hands-on guide to assist students in crafting a sport marketing plan.

Signed into law in 2014, the Marco Civil da Internet (Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet) appeared to offer pioneering legislation for a digital bill of rights that addressed issues like network neutrality and privacy. Guy T. Hoskins chronicles the Marco Civil’s development and its failure to confront the greatest concentration of power in the digital age: informational capitalism. Combining interviews with discourse and political-economic analysis, Hoskins reveals why the legislation fell short while examining the implications of its emergence in Brazil, which remains on the margins of the global system of informational capitalism. Hoskins places collectivist and public service principles at the core of any framework’s effectiveness. He also shows why we must create systems sensitive to the sociocultural and political-economic contexts that will shape digital rights and their usefulness.

Compelling and contrarian, Digital Rights at the Periphery looks at communications policy and internet governance in the Global South and the lessons they provide for the rest of the world.

Call center employees once blended skill and emotional intelligence to solve customer problems while the workplace itself encouraged camaraderie and job satisfaction. Ten years after telecom industry deregulation, management had isolated the largely female workforce in cubicles, imposed quotas to sell products, and installed surveillance systems that tracked every call and keystroke.

Debbie J. Goldman explores how call center employees and their union fought for good, humane jobs in the face of degraded working conditions and lowered wages. As the workforce coalesced to resist the changes, it demanded the Communications Workers of America (CWA) fight for safe and secure good-paying jobs. But trends in technology, capitalism, and corporate governance--combined with the decline of unions--narrowed the negotiating options for workers. Goldman describes how the actions of workers, management, and policymakers shaped the social impact of the new digital technologies and gave new form to the telecommunications industry in a time of momentous change.

Perceptive and nuanced, Disconnected tells an overlooked story of service workers in a time of change.

Back when SOS or Adam and Eve on a raft were things to order if you were hungry but a little short on time and money, nearly one-fourth of all waitresses belonged to unions. By the time their movement peaked in the 1940s and 1950s, the women had developed a distinctive form of working-class feminism, simultaneously pushing for equal rights and pay and affirming their need for special protections.

Dorothy Sue Cobble shows how sexual and racial segregation persisted in wait work, but she rejects the idea that this was caused by employers' actions or the exclusionary policies of male trade unionists. Dishing It Out contends that the success of waitress unionism was due to several factors: waitresses, for the most part, had nontraditional family backgrounds, and most were primary wage-earners. Their close-knit occupational community and sex-separate union encouraged female assertiveness and a decidedly unromantic view of men and marriage. Cobble skillfully combines oral interviews and extensive archival records to show how waitresses adopted the basic tenets of male-dominated craft unions but rejected other aspects of male union culture. The result is a book that will expand our understanding of feminism and unionism by including the gender conscious perspectives of working women.