Results by title

468 books match the query 'Industries' and 28 start with m

cover of Make the Connection: Improve Your Communication at Work and at Home

Make the Connection

Improve Your Communication at Work and at Home

Adubato, Steve

Rutgers University Press, 2006

In this collection of compelling and practical essays, Emmy Award–winning broadcaster, newspaper columnist, and motivational speaker Steve Adubato shares concrete tips and tools that will help you connect more effectively at work, at home, under pressure, in leadership roles, and in high-tech environments. From avoiding unnecessary arguments with your spouse to coaching a valuable, yet difficult employee, Adubato’s essays delve into the key factors that motivate people to act and respond the way that they do.

You will find answers to some of the most common questions about public speaking as well as advice on overcoming its anxieties. Whether the forum is a PTA meeting or a large professional function, essays explore topics such as:

  • Why even practiced speakers sometimes experience stage fright
  • How to keep your audience awake and  interested in what you are saying

 You will learn essential skills for interacting in the workplace, including:

  • How to negotiate a good deal and still be honest and straight
  • How to keep team projects from falling apart
  • How to conduct yourself in confrontational situations, such as receiving a public insult

Drawing on examples set by public figures, including Bill Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, Mario Cuomo, Martha Stewart, Jack Welch, Joe Torre, and many others, Adubato addresses the unique communication challenges that those in leadership positions face. Essays examine:

·         What ordinary people can learn from leaders in high-profile positions

·         Why so many leaders have difficulty taking responsibility and apologizing for their actions

As technology continues to provide opportunities for quicker and more visual communication, Adubato also lets you know when hi-tech bells and whistles get in the way of making a more personal and human connection. For instance, 

·         Why do we hide behind e-mail messages when we have something very difficult to say?

·         How does communication deteriorate when cell phones and e-mail are competing for our attention?

Finally, Adubato reminds us that communicating at home is no less important or any less difficult than communicating in public or at work. From contemporary challenges to age-old questions, essays explore:

·         How you can more effectively talk with your kids about war and terrorism

·         What forms of persuasion are more effective than nagging

Filled with timely examples and practical suggestions, Make the Connection is a must-read for everyone looking to improve their professional and personal relationships.

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cover of Making Hollywood Happen: Seventy Years of Film Finances

Making Hollywood Happen

Seventy Years of Film Finances

Charles Drazin

University of Wisconsin Press, 2022

Filmmaking is a business—someone has to pay the bills. For much of the industry’s history, that role was shouldered by the studios. The rise of independent filmmakers then led to the rise of independent financiers. But what happens if bad weather closes down a production or a director’s vision pays no heed to the limitations of time and money?
 
Enter Film Finances. The company was founded in London in 1950 to insure against the risk that a film would exceed its original budget or not be completed on time. Its pioneering development of the “completion guarantee”—the financial instrument that provides the essential security for investors to support independent filmmaking—ultimately led to the creation of many thousands of films, including some of the most celebrated ever made: Moulin Rouge (1953), Dr. No (1962), The Outsiders (1982), Pulp Fiction (1994), Slumdog Millionaire (2008), La La Land (2016), and more.
 
Film Finances’s role in filmmaking was little known outside the industry until 2012, when it opened its historical archive to scholars. Drawing on these previously private documents as well as interviews with its executives, Making Hollywood Happen tells the company’s story through seven decades of postwar cinema history and chronicles the growth of the international independent film industry. Focusing on a business that has operated at the meeting point between money and art for more than seventy years, this lavishly illustrated book goes to the heart of how the movie business works.
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cover of Making It: Success in the Commercial Kitchen

Making It

Success in the Commercial Kitchen

Ellen T. Meiser

Rutgers University Press, 2025

The restaurant industry is one of the few places in America where workers from lower-class backgrounds can rise to positions of power and prestige. Yet with over four million cooks and food-preparation workers employed in America’s restaurants, not everyone makes it to the high-status position of chef. What factors determine who rises the ranks in this fiercely competitive pressure-cooker environment? 

Making It explores how the career path of restaurant workers depends on their accumulation of kitchen capital, a cultural asset based not only on their ability to cook but also on how well they can fit into the workplace culture and negotiate its hierarchical structures. After spending 120 hours working in a restaurant kitchen and interviewing fifty chefs and cooks from fine-dining establishments and greasy-spoon diners across the country, sociologist Ellen Meiser discovers many strategies for accumulating kitchen capital. For some, it involves education and the performance of expertise; others climb the ranks by controlling their own emotions or exerting control over coworkers. Making It offers a close and personal look at how knowledge, power, and interpersonal skills come together to determine who succeeds and who fails in the high-pressure world of the restaurant kitchen.  

 
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cover of Making Local Food Work: The Challenges and Opportunities of Today's Small Farmers

Making Local Food Work

The Challenges and Opportunities of Today's Small Farmers

Brandi Janssen

University of Iowa Press, 2017

When it comes to local food, it takes more than “knowing your farmer.” Brandi Janssen takes on some of the myths about how the local food system works and what it needs to thrive. Advocates claim that small biodiverse farms will fundamentally change farming, rural communities, and the American diet. For many, simply by knowing our farmers we become champions of a new way of eating that revolutionizes our economy and society. But that argument ignores the fact that if local food is to succeed, it requires many of the trappings of conventional food production, including processors, middle men, inspectors, and regulators.

By listening to and working alongside people trying to build a local food system in Iowa, Janssen uncovers the complex realities of making it work. Although the state is better known for its vast fields of conventionally grown corn and soybeans, it has long boasted a robust network of small, diverse farms, community supported agriculture enterprises, and farmers’ markets. As she picks tomatoes, processes wheatgrass, and joins a parents’ committee trying to buy local lettuce for a school lunch, Janssen asks how small farmers and CSA owners deal with farmers’ market regulations, neighbors who spray pesticides on crops or lawns, and sanitary regulations on meat processing and milk production. How can they meet the needs of large buyers like school districts? Who does the hard work of planting, weeding, harvesting, and processing? Is local food production benefitting rural communities as much as advocates claim?

In answering these questions, Janssen displays the pragmatism and level-headedness one would expect of the heartland, much like the farmers and processors profiled here. It’s doable, she states, but we’re going to have to do more than shop at our local farmers’ market to make it happen. This book is an ideal introduction to what local food means today and what it might be tomorrow.
 
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cover of Making Mill City: Flour and Fortune in Minneapolis

Making Mill City

Flour and Fortune in Minneapolis

Robert M. Frame III

University of Minnesota Press, 2026

A richly illustrated history of the flour factories that transformed the milling industry worldwide—and forever changed the culture and architecture of Minneapolis

Among the most consequential advances of the Industrial Revolution was the invention of the modern roller mill, which sent the traditional millstone into obsolescence and fundamentally changed the production of a key ingredient to feeding the world. The culture and landscape of its hometown, Minneapolis, Minnesota, was altered as well, and Making Mill City tells the story of how revolutionary technologies originating at St. Anthony Falls on the Mississippi River put Minneapolis on the map and cemented its global status as “Mill City.”

With deep historical detail and abundant illustrations, Robert M. Frame III charts the dramatic transformation of Minneapolis milling—and urban life—between the early 1870s and 1920s. Two machines propelled this change: the middlings purifier and the modern roller mill. Enabling millers to grind hard Upper Midwestern spring wheat, these innovations gave rise to the “mammoth mills” and ever-expanding flour factories that would soon dominate the Minneapolis riverfront. Prominent entrepreneurs like those who gave their names to the Washburn and Pillsbury A Mills were significant, but Frame foregrounds the crucial roles of the millers, millwrights, and engineers who designed and equipped the massive new factories, as well as the editor of the legendary weekly trade publication Northwestern Miller, to paint a picture of the vibrant and diverse culture that grew around this industrial phenomenon.

A rich narrative describing how Minneapolis became the largest producer and exporter of wheat flour for more than fifty years, Making Mill City captures a critical chapter in the history of the city. Art and architecture inspired by mills and millers stand today as National Historic Landmarks, and the development and success of the current thriving metropolis have strong foundations in its milling history.

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cover of Making Peace with the Earth

Making Peace with the Earth

Vandana Shiva

Pluto Press, 2013

In this compelling and rigorously documented exposition, Vandana Shiva demolishes the myths propagated by corporate globalisation in its pursuit of profit and power and shows its devastating environmental impact.

Shiva argues that consumerism lubricates the war against the earth and that corporate control violates all ethical and ecological limits. She takes the reader on a journey through the world's devastated eco-landscape, one of genetic engineering, industrial development and land-grabs in Africa, Asia and South America. She concludes that exploitation of this order is incurring an ecological and economic debt that is unsustainable.

Making Peace with the Earth outlines how a paradigm shift to earth-centred politics and economics is our only chance of survival and how collective resistance to corporate exploitation can open the way to a new environmentalism.

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cover of Manufacturing Independence: Industrial Innovation in the American Revolution

Manufacturing Independence

Industrial Innovation in the American Revolution

Robert F. Smith

Westholme Publishing, 2021

The Untold Story of the Industrial Revolution and the American Victory in the War for Independence
Benjamin Franklin was serious when he suggested the colonists arm themselves with the longbow. The American colonies were not logistically prepared for the revolution and this became painfully obvious in war’s first years. Trade networks were destroyed, inflation undermined the economy, and American artisans could not produce or repair enough weapons to keep the Continental Army in the field. The Continental Congress responded to this crisis by mobilizing the nation’s manufacturing sector for war. With information obtained from Europe through both commercial exchange and French military networks, Congress became familiar with the latest manufacturing techniques and processes of the nascent European industrial revolution. They therefore initiated an innovative program of munitions manufacturing under the Department of the Commissary General of Military Stores. The department gathered craftsmen and workers into three national arsenals where they were trained for the large-scale production of weapons. The department also engaged private manufacturers, providing them with materials and worker training, and instituting a program of inspecting their finished products.
As historian Robert F. Smith relates in Manufacturing Independence: Industrial Innovation in the American Revolution, the colonies were able to provide their military with the arms it needed to fight, survive, and outlast the enemy—supplying weapons for the victory at Saratoga, rearming their armies in the South on three different occasions, and providing munitions to sustain the siege at Yorktown. But this manufacturing system not only successfully supported the Continental Army, it also demonstrated new production ideas to the nation. Through this system, the government went on to promote domestic manufacturing after the war, becoming a model for how the nation could produce goods for its own needs. The War for Independence was not just a political revolution, it was an integral part of the Industrial Revolution in America.
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cover of Mapping Tourism

Mapping Tourism

Stephen P. Hanna

University of Minnesota Press, 2003

Looks at tourism maps to offer new insights into the social construction of place

At first glance, the relationships among tourists, tourism maps, and the spaces of tourism seem straightforward enough: tourists use maps to find their way to and through the sites of history, culture, nature, or recreation represented there. Less apparent is how tourism maps and those using them construct such spaces and identities. As the essays in Mapping Tourism clearly demonstrate, the extraordinary interactions of work with leisure and the everyday with the exotic make tourism maps ideal sites for exploring the contested construction of place and identity.

Construction sites in the “New Berlin,” Alabama’s civil rights trail, Québec City, a California ghost town, and Bangkok’s sex trade are among the spaces the essays examine. Taken together, these essays allow us to see tourist space as it truly is: contested, ever changing, and replete with issues of power.Contributors: Mary Curran, Eastern Connecticut State U; Dydia DeLyser, Louisiana State U; Owen J. Dwyer, Indiana U; John R. Gold, Oxford Brookes U; Margaret M. Gold, U of North London; Rob Shields; Karen E. Till, U of Minnesota.
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cover of Markets and Cultural Voices: Liberty vs. Power in the Lives of Mexican Amate Painters

Markets and Cultural Voices

Liberty vs. Power in the Lives of Mexican Amate Painters

Tyler Cowen

University of Michigan Press, 2005

This intriguing work explores the world of three amate artists. A native tradition, all of their painting is done in Mexico, yet, the finished product is sold almost exclusively to wealthy American art buyers.

Cowen examines this cultural interaction between Mexico and the United States to see how globalization shapes the lives and the work of the artists and their families. The story of these three artists reveals that this exchange simultaneously creates economic opportunities for the artists, but has detrimental effects on the village.

A view of the daily village life of three artists connected to the larger art world, this book should be of particular interest to those in the fields of cultural economics, Latino studies, economic anthropology and globalization.
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cover of Marx and Digital Machines: Alienation, Technology, Capitalism

Marx and Digital Machines

Alienation, Technology, Capitalism

Mike Healy

University of Westminster Press, 2020

“Healy closes his marvellous book by saying that ‘alienation is a constant feature and is experienced as a norm rather than as an aberration’.” - https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/19718_marx-and-digital-machines-alienation-technology-capitalism-by-mike-healy-reviewed-by-thomas-klikauer/

This book explores the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the digital environment: technology offers all manner of promises, yet habitually fails to deliver. This failure often arises from numerous problems: the proficiency of the technology or end-user, policy failure at various levels, or a combination of these. Solutions such as better technology and more effective end-user education are often put into place to solve these failures. 

Mike Healy argues that such approaches are inherently faulty drawing upon qualitative research informed by Marx’s theory of alienation. Using Marx’s theory, he considers participants in three distinct settings: the workplace of information and communications technology (ICT) professionals; university scholars researching the ethical and societal implications of our digital environment; and a group of pensioners living in South London, UK, undertaking ICT training. By delving beneath the surface of how digital technologies are created, researched and experienced, this study illustrates the contradictory nature of our digital lives, as they directly arise from the needs of capitalism. 

The book also places Marx’s theory in contrast to the mainstream approaches derived from Seaman and Blauner. In researching and comprehending ICT, this book reaffirms the superior explanatory power of Marx’s theory of alienation.

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cover of Mastering Iron: The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry, 1800-1868

Mastering Iron

The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry, 1800-1868

Anne Kelly Knowles

University of Chicago Press, 2012

Veins of iron run deep in the history of America. Iron making began almost as soon as European settlement, with the establishment of the first ironworks in colonial Massachusetts. Yet it was Great Britain that became the Atlantic world’s dominant low-cost, high-volume producer of iron, a position it retained throughout the nineteenth century. It was not until after the Civil War that American iron producers began to match the scale and efficiency of the British iron industry.
 
In Mastering Iron, Anne Kelly Knowles argues that the prolonged development of the US iron industry was largely due to geographical problems the British did not face. Pairing exhaustive manuscript research with analysis of a detailed geospatial database that she built of the industry, Knowles reconstructs the American iron industry in unprecedented depth, from locating hundreds of iron companies in their social and environmental contexts to explaining workplace culture and social relations between workers and managers. She demonstrates how ironworks in Alabama, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia struggled to replicate British technologies but, in the attempt, brought about changes in the American industry that set the stage for the subsequent age of steel.
 
Richly illustrated with dozens of original maps and period art work, all in full color, Mastering Iron sheds new light on American ambitions and highlights the challenges a young nation faced as it grappled with its geographic conditions.
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cover of Maya Market Women: Power and Tradition in San Juan Chamelco, Guatemala

Maya Market Women

Power and Tradition in San Juan Chamelco, Guatemala

S. Ashley Kistler

University of Illinois Press, 2014

As cultural mediators, Chamelco's market women offer a model of contemporary Q'eqchi' identity grounded in the strength of the Maya historical legacy. Guatemala's Maya communities have faced nearly five hundred years of constant challenges to their culture, from colonial oppression to the instability of violent military dictatorships and the advent of new global technologies. In spite of this history, the people of San Juan Chamelco, Guatemala, have effectively resisted significant changes to their cultural identities. Chamelco residents embrace new technologies, ideas, and resources to strengthen their indigenous identities and maintain Maya practice in the 21st century, a resilience that sets Chamelco apart from other Maya towns.

Unlike the region's other indigenous women, Chamelco's Q'eqchi' market women achieve both prominence and visibility as vendors, dominating social domains from religion to local politics. These women honor their families' legacies through continuation of the inherited, high-status marketing trade. In Maya Market Women, S. Ashley Kistler describes how market women gain social standing as mediators of sometimes conflicting realities, harnessing the forces of global capitalism to revitalize Chamelco's indigenous identity. Working at the intersections of globalization, kinship, gender, and memory, Kistler presents a firsthand look at Maya markets as a domain in which the values of capitalism and indigenous communities meet.

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cover of Measuring and Modeling Health Care Costs

Measuring and Modeling Health Care Costs

Edited by Ana Aizcorbe, Colin Baker, Ernst R. Berndt, and David M. Cutler

University of Chicago Press, 2018

Health care costs represent a nearly 18% of U.S. gross domestic product and 20% of government spending. While there is detailed information on where these health care dollars are spent, there is much less evidence on how this spending affects health. 
           
The research in Measuring and Modeling Health Care Costs seeks to connect our knowledge of expenditures with what we are able to measure of results, probing questions of methodology, changes in the pharmaceutical industry, and the shifting landscape of physician practice. The research in this volume investigates, for example, obesity’s effect on health care spending, the effect of generic pharmaceutical releases on the market, and the disparity between disease-based and population-based spending measures. This vast and varied volume applies a range of economic tools to the analysis of health care and health outcomes.

Practical and descriptive, this new volume in the Studies in Income and Wealth series is full of insights relevant to health policy students and specialists alike.
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cover of Media Backends: Digital Infrastructures and Sociotechnical Relations

Media Backends

Digital Infrastructures and Sociotechnical Relations

Edited by Lisa Parks, Julia Velkova, and Sander de Ridder

University of Illinois Press, 2023

Exploring how we make, distribute, and consume today’s media systems

Media backends--the electronics, labor, and operations behind our screens--significantly influence our understanding of the sociotechnical relations, economies, and operations of media. Lisa Parks, Julia Velkova, and Sander De Ridder assemble essays that delve into the evolving politics of the media infrastructural landscape. Throughout, the contributors draw on feminist, queer, and intersectional criticism to engage with infrastructural and industrial issues. This focus reflects a concern about the systemic inequalities that emerge when tech companies and designers fail to address workplace discrimination and algorithmic violence and exclusions. Moving from smart phones to smart dust, the essayists examine topics like artificial intelligence, human-machine communication, and links between digital infrastructures and public service media alongside investigations into the algorithmic backends at Netflix and Spotify, Google’s hyperscale data centers, and video-on-demand services in India.

A fascinating foray into an expanding landscape of media studies, Media Backends illuminates the behind-the-screen processes influencing our digital lives. 

Contributors: Mark Andrejevic, Philippe Bouquillion, Jonathan Cohn, Faithe J. Day, Sander De Ridder, Fatima Gaw, Christine Ithurbide, Anne Kaun, Amanda Lagerkvist, Alexis Logsdon, Stine Lomborg, Tim Markham, Vicki Mayer, Rahul Mukherjee, Kaarina Nikunen, Lisa Parks, Vibodh Parthasarathi, Philipp Seuferling, Ranjit Singh, Jacek Smolicki, Fredrik Stiernstedt, Matilda Tudor, Julia Velkova, and Zala Volcic

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cover of Media Culture in Transnational Asia: Convergences and Divergences

Media Culture in Transnational Asia

Convergences and Divergences

Hyesu Park

Rutgers University Press, 2020

Media Culture in Transnational Asia: Convergences and Divergences examines contemporary media use within Asia, where over half of the world’s population resides. The book addresses media use and practices by looking at the transnational exchanges of ideas, narratives, images, techniques, and values and how they influence media consumption and production throughout Asia, including Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, South Korea, Singapore, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iran and many others. The book’s contributors are especially interested in investigating media and their intersections with narrative, medium, technologies, and culture through the lenses that are particularly Asian by turning to Asian sociopolitical and cultural milieus as the meaningful interpretive framework to understand media. This timely and cutting-edge research is essential reading for those interested in transnational and global media studies.


 
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cover of Media Relations in Sport: Fifth Edition

Media Relations in Sport

Fifth Edition

Craig Esherick

FiT Publishing, 2020

As sport media communication has become intertwined with the frenetic pace of technology, the bywords have become global interconnectivity and versatility. Media Relations in Sport 5th edition examines the intersection and trajectory of emerging technology, platforms and trends with foundational principles of communication to prepare students and industry professionals alike with a nuanced understanding of the communication tools at their disposal that will allow them to keep pace with and succeed in a kinetic, competitive industry.

Any student interested in a career in sports media must possess a distinct set of essential skills—how to interview, how to effectively create and distribute content, and how to deal with communications problems that, given the frenetic pace and global reach of web-based media, now seem amplified. Discussions of event management, publicity campaigns, ethics, regulations, and the law are still not only relevant, but essential for today’s sports media professionals, where news travels the world at the speed of a tweet. For undergraduate and graduate level students, the 5th edition of Media Relations in Sport blends and balances how sport media communication has traditionally been crafted, and molds it to ever-evolving strategies for remaining ahead of the game.

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cover of Media and the Global Cold War

Media and the Global Cold War

Edited by Rossen Djagalov and Arvind Rajagopal

University of Illinois Press, 2027

In the Cold War era, media became a central force in the shaping of political life, cultural exchange, and ideas of global order. A rivalry between political systems expanded into a worldwide struggle over who could shape information, control communication infrastructures, and define reality.

Arvind Rajagopal and Rossen Djagalov present essays on the uses of Cold War media. Focusing on the Global South, the contributors illuminate how postcolonial nations and others defied superpower pressure to use media for nation-building and international cooperation. At the same time, communication infrastructures linked global regions in unequal ways that often reinforced the power of the United States. Throughout, the essays show how Cold War media practices like secrecy, propaganda, and cultural diplomacy cemented patterns that still influence global communication systems and international politics today.

Cutting-edge and timely, Media and the Global Cold War reveals the workings of media beyond the superpower rivalry.
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cover of Medical Care Output and Productivity

Medical Care Output and Productivity

Edited by David M. Cutler and Ernst R. Berndt

University of Chicago Press, 2001

With the United States and other developed nations spending as much as 14 percent of their GDP on medical care, economists and policy analysts are asking what these countries are getting in return. Yet it remains frustrating and difficult to measure the productivity of the medical care service industries.

This volume takes aim at that problem, while taking stock of where we are in our attempts to solve it. Much of this analysis focuses on the capacity to measure the value of technological change and other health care innovations. A key finding suggests that growth in health care spending has coincided with an increase in products and services that together reduce mortality rates and promote additional health gains. Concerns over the apparent increase in unit prices of medical care may thus understate positive impacts on consumer welfare. When appropriately adjusted for such quality improvements, health care prices may actually have fallen. Provocative and compelling, this volume not only clarifies one of the more nebulous issues in health care analysis, but in so doing addresses an area of pressing public policy concern.
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cover of Merchants of Medicines: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century

Merchants of Medicines

The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century

Zachary Dorner

University of Chicago Press, 2020

The period from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century—the so-called long eighteenth century of English history—was a time of profound global change, marked by the expansion of intercontinental empires, long-distance trade, and human enslavement. It was also the moment when medicines, previously produced locally and in small batches, became global products. As greater numbers of British subjects struggled to survive overseas, more medicines than ever were manufactured and exported to help them. Most historical accounts, however, obscure the medicine trade’s dependence on slave labor, plantation agriculture, and colonial warfare.

In Merchants of Medicines, Zachary Dorner follows the earliest industrial pharmaceuticals from their manufacture in the United Kingdom, across trade routes, and to the edges of empire, telling a story of what medicines were, what they did, and what they meant. He brings to life business, medical, and government records to evoke a vibrant early modern world of London laboratories, Caribbean estates, South Asian factories, New England timber camps, and ships at sea. In these settings, medicines were produced, distributed, and consumed in new ways to help confront challenges of distance, labor, and authority in colonial territories. Merchants of Medicines offers a new history of economic and medical development across early America, Britain, and South Asia, revealing the unsettlingly close ties among medicine, finance, warfare, and slavery that changed people’s expectations of their health and their bodies.
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cover of Merger Games: The Medical College of Pennsylvania, Hahnemann University, and the Rise and Fall of the Allegheny Healthcare System

Merger Games

The Medical College of Pennsylvania, Hahnemann University, and the Rise and Fall of the Allegheny Healthcare System

Judith P. Swazey

Temple University Press, 2011

With deepening financial problems, Allegheny Heath, Education and Research Foundation filed for bankruptcy in 1998—in the midst of its landmark merger of The Medical College of Pennsylvania and Hahnemann University. What resulted was another dire event in an escalating disaster. As civil and criminal investigations probed Allegheny's collapse, the survival of the medical school and other health sciences university schools, and the operation of the hospitals hung in the balance. Fortunately, a savior arrived in the form of Drexel University who used this opportunity to create its own medical school.

Merger Games is Judith Swazey's gripping account of this historic transaction. Based on extraordinarily detailed first-hand research and continuous inside access to the developments, this book clearly delineates who the players were and what this merger means for the future of medical education and institutional healthcare.

Merger Games is a definitive history of one of the most important academic medicine mergers in Philadelphia and the country, which happened at a time when medical care was becoming commodified in almost every state.

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cover of Mergers and Productivity

Mergers and Productivity

Edited by Steven N. Kaplan

University of Chicago Press, 2000

Mergers and Productivity offers probing analyses of high-profile mergers in a variety of industries. Focusing on specific acquisitions, it illustrates the remarkable range of contingencies involved in any merger attempt. The authors clearly establish each merger's presumed objectives and the potential costs and benefits of the acquisition, and place it within the context of the broader industry. Striking conclusions that emerge from these case studies are that merger and acquisition activities were associated with technological or regulatory shocks, and that a merger's success or failure was dependent upon the acquirer's thorough understanding of the target, its corporate culture, and its workforce and wage structures prior to acquisition.

Sifting through a wealth of carefully gathered evidence, these papers capture the richness, the complexity, and the economic intangibles inherent in contemporary merger activity in a way that large-scale studies of mergers cannot.
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cover of Milk Money: Cash, Cows, and the Death of the American Dairy Farm

Milk Money

Cash, Cows, and the Death of the American Dairy Farm

Kirk Kardashian

Brandeis University Press, 2025

A gripping and witty exploration of the economic forces that make it challenging for small dairy farms to survive.
 
The dairy business is at the heart of the culture and economy of Vermont, just as it is in many other states. That fact meant little to Kirk Kardashian until he started taking his daughter to daycare at a dairy farm a few miles from his Vermont home. The farm had been owned by the same family for generations but struggled to make ends meet in a market where retail milk prices have held steady for decades while the prices paid to farmers have plummeted. Suddenly, the abstractions of economics and commodities markets were replaced by the flesh and blood of a farm family whom he greeted every day.
 
In the tradition of Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, Kardashian asks whether it is right that family farmers in America should toil so hard, produce a food so wholesome and so popular, and still lose money. His investigation uncovers the hidden forces behind dairy farm consolidation and explains why milk—a staple subject to both government oversight and industry collusion—has proven so tricky to stabilize, even as scores of small dairy farms close. This new edition brings the story up to date, as farmers grapple with an ever-changing landscape that includes shifting consumer preferences, immigration issues, climate change, and bird flu.
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cover of Milk Shake: Abundance and Loss in America’s Dairyland

Milk Shake

Abundance and Loss in America’s Dairyland

Garbo Wedde

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2027

The story of how today’s dairy farmers are navigating a historic crossroads of agriculture and rural life in a rapidly changing world.
For generations, the dairy farmer has embodied the character, resilience, and values of the Midwest. Yet between 2005 and 2020, Wisconsin—known as America’s Dairyland—lost half of its dairy farms, marking one of the most profound economic and cultural transformations in its history. In Milk Shake: Abundance and Loss in America’s Dairyland, journalist Garbo Wedde delivers a thorough and emotionally resonant portrait of the farm families living through this time of change in rural life.
Drawing on extensive research and candid conversations with dozens of dairy farmers and industry stakeholders, Wedde looks beyond statistics to reveal the human stories behind the decline of the small family dairy farm. At the heart of the book are four Wisconsin farm families grappling with an uncertain future and how to respond: one leaves the industry, one embraces automation, one finds hope in a new generation willing to carry on the work, and one faces mounting financial strain that culminates in tragedy.
Interwoven among these narratives is a penetrating examination of the rise of large-scale industrial farms, their economic and environmental impacts, and the ways communities are responding. Wedde also explores the political, economic, demographic, and cultural forces reshaping dairy farming, from environmental regulation and labor shortages to gerrymandering, changing consumer preferences, and growing consolidation of small farms into agribusiness.
Richly observed scenes—from dairy breakfasts and farm auctions to public hearings on concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs)—bring readers inside a world that is both quintessentially American and increasingly endangered. Part social history and part elegy, Milk Shake captures a pivotal moment in America’s Dairyland while exploring questions that reach far beyond Wisconsin: What is lost when family farms disappear, and what does that loss mean for the communities, traditions, and values they sustain?

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cover of Mind and Labor on the Farm in Black-Earth Russia, 1861-1914

Mind and Labor on the Farm in Black-Earth Russia, 1861-1914

David Kerans

Central European University Press, 2001

Did Tsarist Russia's political and industrial backwardness result from its rigid and archaic agrarian structure? Did the Russian revolution stem in large part from a parasitical elite's exploitation of an enormous peasant class? Was the Russian peasantry itself backward and 'dark' as a result? The attention contemporaries and historians have lavished on these questions has enshrined them as fundamental issues in Russian history. This text endeavours to recast our understanding of the agrarian problem by uncovering the history of both the physical and mental dimensions of agriculture. Employing literary, agronomic and statistical information on peasant labour and culture, this book also offers new perspectives on the limitations of traditional agriculture to adapt to a rapidly changing economic geography, such as that of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Russia. By taking a ground level view of the evolution of Russian agricultural technique, the author arrives at a very different understanding of the agrarian problem. The book identifies both the achievements and limitations of peasant farmers in adapting farming practices to the economic and technological challenges of the half century preceding the revolution. Most importantly, the book delves deeply into peasant life and culture to demonstrate how and why farming imrovements did not pass determinable levels.
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cover of Miniature Crafts and Their Makers: Palm Weaving in a Mexican Town

Miniature Crafts and Their Makers

Palm Weaving in a Mexican Town

Katrin Flechsig

University of Arizona Press, 2004

Picture a throng of tiny devils and angels, or a marching band so small it can fit in the palm of your hand. In a Mixtec town in the Mexican state of Puebla, craftspeople have been weaving palm since before the Spanish Conquest, but over the past forty years that art has become more finely tuned and has won national acceptance in a market nostalgic for an authentic Indian past. In this book, Katrin Flechsig offers the first in-depth ethnographic and historical examination of the miniature palm craft industry, taking readers behind the scenes of craft production in order to explain how and why these folk arts have undergone miniaturization over the past several decades. In describing this "Lilliputization of Mexico," she discusses the appeal of miniaturization, revealing how such factors as tourism and the construction of national identity have contributed to an ongoing demand for the tiny creations. She also contrasts the playfulness of the crafts with the often harsh economic and political realities of life in the community. Flechsig places the crafts of Chigmecatitlán within the contexts of manufacturing, local history, religion, design and technique, and selling. She tells how innovation is introduced into the craft, such as through the modification of foreign designs in response to market demands. She also offers insights into capitalist penetration of folk traditions, the marketing of folk arts, and economic changes in modern Mexico. And despite the fact that the designations "folk" and "Indian" help create a romantic fiction surrounding the craft, Flechsig dispels common misperceptions of the simplicity of this folk art by revealing the complexities involved in its creation. More than thirty illustrations depict not only finished miniatures but also the artists and their milieu. Today miniatures serve not only the tourist market; middle-class Mexicans also collect miniatures to such an extent that it has been termed a national pastime. Flechsig’s work opens up this miniature world and shows us the extent to which it has become a lasting and important facet of contemporary Mexican culture.
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cover of Mining in Africa: Regulation and Development

Mining in Africa

Regulation and Development

Bonnie Campbell

Pluto Press, 2009

The continent of Africa is rich in minerals needed by Western economies, but rather than forming the basis for economic growth the mining industry contributes very little to African development

Investigating the impact of the 2003 Extractive Industries Review on a number of African countries, the contributors find that a key dimension of the problem lies in the regulatory frameworks imposed on the African countries by the IMF and World Bank. They aim to convince academics, governments and industry that regulation needs to be reformed to create a mining industry favourable to social and economic development and environmental protection.

The book takes a multidisciplinary approach and provides a historical perspective of each country, making it ideal for students of development studies and development organisations.

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cover of Mining the Borderlands: Industry, Capital, and the Emergence of Engineers in the Southwest Territories, 1855-1910

Mining the Borderlands

Industry, Capital, and the Emergence of Engineers in the Southwest Territories, 1855-1910

Sarah E. M. Grossman

University of Nevada Press, 2018

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the US-Mexico border was home to some of the largest and most technologically advanced industrial copper mines. This despite being geographically, culturally, and financially far-removed from traditional urban centers of power. Mining the Borderlands argues that this was only possible because of the emergence of mining engineers—a distinct technocratic class of professionals who connected capital, labor, and expertise. 

Mining engineers moved easily between remote mining camps and the upscale parlors of east coast investors. Working as labor managers and technical experts, they were involved in the daily negotiations, which brought private US capital to the southwestern border. The success of the massive capital-intensive mining ventures in the region depended on their ability to construct different networks, serving as intermediaries to groups that rarely coincided. 

Grossman argues that this didn’t just lead to bigger and more efficient mines, but served as part of the ongoing project of American territorial and economic expansion. By integrating the history of technical expertise into the history of the transnational mining industry, this in-depth look at borderlands mining explains how American economic hegemony was established in a border region peripheral to the federal governments of both Washington, D.C. and Mexico City.

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cover of Miracle Road: The Story of Research Triangle Park

Miracle Road

The Story of Research Triangle Park

Allen Paul and Mack Paul

Duke University Press, 2026

Miracle Road is a comprehensive account of the origins and rise of Research Triangle Park, which has transformed one of the poorest states in the nation into an economic powerhouse, detailing a fascinating and important case study of urban development in the twenty-first century.

Research Triangle Park in North Carolina (RTP) emerged under the unique circumstances of a poor Southern state that needed to find a way to offset the declining industries of tobacco, furniture, and textiles in the 1950s. Through the sustained commitment of nearby universities, business leaders, and local and state officials, state leaders established the largest science and research park in the United States in an area that was nothing but “possums and pines.” Miracle Road tells this story through the eyes of those at the center of it, like the local black leaders who convinced white officials to desegregate public schools with the justification that it would make the area more appealing to tech companies, or how a chance meeting between the governor and a Danish executive led to North Carolina becoming an epicenter for weight loss drugmakers decades later. Allen Paul and Mack Paul organize the story around major periods in RTP’s growth, showing how RTP came to define the region and the state by the 1990s as well as the major setbacks it encountered in the early 2000s. Breaking down the strategies that led to RTP’s success, like creating new institutions in targeted tech areas to spur activity and factoring quality of life into the regional planning of the area, Miracle Road demonstrates how the story of Research Triangle Park is a fascinating and important case study of urban development in the twenty-first century.
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