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Every day, in every sector of our economy, a business shuts down while another starts up, jobs are created while others are cut, and workers are hired while others are laid off. This constant flux, or turbulence, is a defining characteristic of our free market system, yet it mostly inspires angst about unemployment, loss of earnings, and the overall competitiveness of corporations. But is this endless cycle of fluctuation really so bad for America? Might something positive be going on in the economy as a result of it?

In this penetrating work, three esteemed economists seek to answer these questions by exploring the real impact of volatility on American workers and businesses alike. According to the authors, while any number of events--shifts in consumer demand, changes in technology, mergers and acquisitions, or increased competition--can contribute to economic turbulence, our economy as a whole is, by and large, stronger for it, because these processes of creation and destruction make it more flexible and adaptable. The authors also acknowledge and document the adverse consequences of this turbulence on different groups of workers and firms and discuss the resulting policy challenges. Basing their argument on an up-close look into the dealings and practices of five key industries—financial services, retail food services, trucking, semiconductors, and software—the authors demonstrate the positive effects of turbulence on career paths, employee earnings, and firm performance.

The first substantial attempt to disentangle and make clear the complexities of this phenomenon in the United States, Economic Turbulence will be viewed as a major achievement and the centerpiece of any discussion on the subject for years to come.

Reevaluates early modern poems of praise as, paradoxically, challenging an artistic economy that values exchange and productivity
 
Early modern poems of praise typically insist that they do not have a purpose or enact real labor beyond their effortless listing of laudable qualities. And yet the poets discussed in this study, including Ben Jonson, Andrew Marvell, Anne Bradstreet, Lucy Hutchinson, and John Milton, hint at an alternative aesthetic economy at work in their verse. Poetic praise, it turns out, might show us a social world outside the organizing principle of exchange.
 
In Economies of Praise: Value, Labor, and Form in Seventeenth‑Century English Poetry, Ryan Netzley explores how poems of praise imagine alternatives to market and gift economies and point instead to a self-contained aesthetic economy that works against a more expansive and productivist understanding of literary art. By depicting exchange as inconsequential, unproductive, and redundant rather than a necessary constituent of social order, these poems model for modern readers a world without the imperative to create, appraise, and repeatedly demonstrate one’s own value.

Equality for Contingent Faculty brings together eleven activists from the United States and Canada to describe the problem, share case histories, and offer concrete solutions. The book begins with three accounts of successful organizing efforts within the two-track system. The second part describes how the two-track system divides the faculty into haves and have-nots and leaves the majority without the benefit of academic freedom or the support of their institutions. The third part offers roadmaps for overcoming the deficiencies of the two-track system and providing equality for all professors, regardless of status or rank.

Idiosyncratic essays use their “exploded” forms to examine how inquiry functions

Insect galls, time, memory systems, orgone energy, and a bookstore that doesn’t yet exist. These disparate topics have persistently fascinated scholar Jonathan P. Eburne, yet each defied his previous efforts at classification through scholarly writing, resulting in five essays suspended in process. In Exploded Views, Eburne returns to these essays with the metaphorical tool of the exploded-view diagram, expanding them into entirely new, hybrid forms that unpack their inspirations and trace the wayward paths they followed.

An experiment into the nature of inquiry that spelunks, rather than shies from, the rabbit holes of scholarly curiosity, each essay gives way to sidelights and dilations to reveal the palimpsest of knowledge hiding beneath the surface of the academic form. A book about process—the process of turning ideas into things, and vice versa, as well as the particular tendency for research, scholarly inquiry, and critical writing to come apart and go awry—Exploded Views is a refreshing exploration of how the tools of creative critical thinking work at their most basic level.

Reflecting on the methods of scholarly knowledge production and the contextual factors that shape new ideas, Eburne boldly replaces the seamlessness of the finished manuscript with the friction and even messiness of the incomplete, inviting readers to think in new and invigorating ways.