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A critical analysis of historical and contemporary discourses around worklessness, economic inactivity, and the factors that contribute to people withdrawing from the conventional labor market. 

How do we define and respond to worklessness? This book combines analysis of media and political narratives around worklessness and factors that limit individuals’ capacity for conventional paid work—from disability and long-term illness to caring responsibilities—with interviews that shed light on the lived experience of so-called economic inactivity.

In dissecting popular portrayals of “the workless” in the present and tracing the historical evolution of discourses around “inactivity”—especially work-limiting disability—James Morrison draws heavily on sociological theories of stigma and symbolic annihilation. Conceptualising the contemporary narrative about the UK's supposed crisis in economic inactivity as the latest in a continuum of periodic moral panics about worklessness, he argues that neoliberal definitions of work and worklessness are too narrow, as they deny—and render invisible—the importance of various forms of unpaid labor performed by many people classified as “inactive,” notably informal caregiving and volunteering. 

The World Bank is a controversial organisation. It is widely viewed with suspicion, as the international economic arm of the US, in thrall to the President who is responsible for appointing the head of the Bank.

Eric Toussaint gives a highly readable account of just why the World Bank has become so powerful. In short, clear chapters he shows how the bank operates, who funds it, and what it sets out to promote.

The Bank's main purpose is to grant loans to all the newly independent states of the developing world, to help them on their journey to recovery after colonial occupation. In reality, the conditions imposed on these states -- including enforced privatisation of all public services, and enforced neo-liberal rules on trade -- mean that the Bank has become the new colonial authority in everything but name.

This is a perfect book for anyone looking for a critical introduction to the history of the Bank and its role in world affairs.

This monumental study is an account of the world economy from the eighteenth century to the twentieth, an analysis and prescription for the future, and a challenge to the neo-Keynesian theories of income determination and growth. It is based on some forty years of research and teaching.

Originally published in 1978, the volume looks back over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It includes an analysis of how the world's population expanded from about 1 billion in 1800 to 4 billion in 1976, with some 6.5 billion in sight for the year 2000; an account of the expansion and distribution of industrial production and trade during this period; and an analysis of price and relative price movements since the eighteenth century. Rostow gives a detailed description of the Kondratieff long cycles in the relative scarcity and abundance of food and raw materials and reasons that the world economy entered the fifth Kondratieff upswing at the close of 1972. He also examines the changing pattern of business cycles over the whole sweep of modern economic growth and the failure of the post-1945 world economy to control inflation. The volume also includes short economic histories of twenty national economies responsible for 80 percent of the world's production, based on a collection of computerized aggregate and sectoral data.

Each historical section leads naturally into one or more of the major problems dealt with in the final portion of the book, which looks to the future of the world economy: food, population, energy, raw materials, the environment, and the tasks of national and international policy. Rostow argued, counter to the Limits to Growth doctrine, that the critical period for industrial civilization lay in the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century, rather than in the twenty-first century, and that what we did or failed to do in that generation would determine the shape of the longer future.

No other economic history of this depth and breadth exists. It is a reference for economists, economic historians, and other social scientists as well as the informed lay reader.

A new history of crisis responses in the central bank’s formative years.

The long-standing description of the Federal Reserve as a “lender of last resort” refers to the central bank’s emergency liquidity provision for financial entities in periods of crisis. As Mark Carlson shows, this function was foundational to how the Fed was designed but has, at times, proven challenging to implement. The Young Fed examines the origins of the Federal Reserve’s emergency liquidity provision which, along with the setting of monetary policy, has become a critical responsibility.

Focusing on the Fed’s response to the financial crises of the 1920s, Carlson documents the formative deliberations of central bank policymakers regarding how to assist banks experiencing distress; the lessons that were learned; and how those lessons shaped subsequent policies. Carlson depicts an early Fed that experimented with a variety of approaches to crises, ranging from bold spectacles featuring cash-filled armored cars to behind-the-scenes interventions to prevent inducing panics or bank runs. The Young Fed weaves previously unpublished material from the Fed archives into a watershed work in American economic history: a deeply sourced account of how the world’s most important central bank became a lender of last resort.

A timely examination of the attachments we form to objects and how they might be used to reduce waste

Rampant consumerism has inundated our planet with pollution and waste. Yet attempts to create environmentally friendly forms of consumption are often co-opted by corporations looking to sell us more stuff. In Things Worth Keeping, Christine Harold investigates the attachments we form to the objects we buy, keep, and discard, and explores how these attachments might be marshaled to create less wasteful practices and balance our consumerist and ecological impulses. 

Although all economies produce waste, no system generates as much or has become so adept at hiding its excesses as today’s mode of global capitalism. This book suggests that managing the material excesses of our lives as consumers requires us to build on, rather than reject, our desire for and attraction to objects. Increasing environmental awareness on its own will be ineffective at reversing ecological devastation, Harold argues, unless it is coupled with a more thorough understanding of how and why we love the things that imbue our lives with pleasure, meaning, and utility. 

From Marie Kondo’s method for decluttering that asks whether the things in our lives “spark joy” to the advent of emotionally durable design, which seeks to reduce consumption and waste by increasing the meaningfulness of the relationship between user and product, Harold explores how consumer psychology and empathetic design can transform our perception of consumer products from disposable to interconnected. An urgent call for rethinking consumerism, Things Worth Keeping shows that by recognizing our responsibility for the things we produce, we can become better stewards of the planet.

A personal account by a war historian and adoptee who discovers his biological father was a famous Marine combat photographer in Vietnam. 
 
Robert K. Brigham has had a substantial career as a historian of the Vietnam War, with a hand in nine books, a documentary, public history projects, and more. While many a historian has felt compelled at some point to write about a subject close to them personally, Brigham did not think he was doing that. But, at age 58, Brigham, who had long known he was adopted, discovered that he’d improbably and unknowingly been studying and talking about his real father for decades. That man, Bruce Atwell, was a Marine Corps photographer who took some of that war’s most indelible and widely reproduced pictures. Brigham had used those images over and over again in decades’ worth of classes and public lectures, never knowing the truth.
 
Both Brigham and Atwell were products of the American foster care and adoption system, and both were defined professionally by Vietnam. In a story shot through with echoes and shadows, Brigham not only reveals his own history as an adoptee but opens a startlingly fresh vantage on the fragility of American families; the power of social norms and taboos to shape lives; and the forces that inequitably disrupt families, not least of them war. The result is an accessible and moving book that is at once both a powerful personal story and an illuminating social critique.

This book investigates the way that corporations are strategically shaping children to be under-aged hyperconsumers as well as the submissive employees and uncritical citizens of the future.

Sharon Beder shows how marketers and advertisers are targeting ever younger children in a relentless campaign, transforming children's play into a commercial opportunity and taking advantage of childish anxieties. 

Beder investigates the corporate relations and ideals that infiltrate every aspect of our lives. She presents an alarming picture of how a child's social development -- through education, health care and nutrition -- has become an ordered conveyor belt of consumerist conditioning. Focusing on education in particular, Beder explains how businesses are taking control of more and more aspects of schooling, not only for profit but to erode state schooling and promote business values. Similarly, she shows how 'difficult' children are taught from an early age that pharmaceuticals can be used to discipline them or to make them 'happy'.

In one of the most current and comprehensive textbooks on the topic of ticket operations and sales management, James T. Reese and a collection of academicians and practitioners provide insight, practical tips, and first-hand accounts of what it takes to excel in this growing and ever-changing industry. Chapters cover topics such as customer service, sales, pricing, dis­tribution, the secondary ticket market, and new ticketing technology.

"This book is the 'how to' book on ticket operations and sales management. Students utilizing this book will be prepared to sell and operate one of the most important revenue streams in sport ticketing."
—From the foreword by Rick Nichols, owner of Admissions Sport Consulting

From its inception in 1966, the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) has grown to employ approximately 20,000 workers annually, the majority from Mexico. The program has been hailed as a model that alleviates human rights concerns because, under contract, SAWP workers travel legally, receive health benefits, contribute to pensions, are represented by Canadian consular officials, and rate the program favorably. Tomorrow We’re All Going to the Harvest takes us behind the ideology and examines the daily lives of SAWP workers from Tlaxcala, Mexico (one of the leading sending states), observing the great personal and family price paid in order to experience a temporary rise in a standard of living. The book also observes the disparities of a gutted Mexican countryside versus the flourishing agriculture in Canada, where farm labor demand remains high.

Drawn from extensive surveys and nearly two hundred interviews, ethnographic work in Ontario (destination of over 77 percent of migrants in the author’s sample), and quantitative data, this is much more than a case study; it situates the Tlaxcala-Canada exchange within the broader issues of migration, economics, and cultural currents. Bringing to light the historical genesis of “complementary” labor markets and the contradictory positioning of Mexican government representatives, Leigh Binford also explores the language barriers and nonexistent worker networks in Canada, as well as the physical realities of the work itself, making this book a complete portrait of a provocative segment of migrant labor.

A groundbreaking study of commerce, conflict, and survival in colonial Spanish Florida.

Trade and Privateering examines the illegal yet highly profitable and mutually beneficial trade between Spanish Florida and the English colonies on the eastern seaboard in the mid-18th century. In St. Augustine, the arrival of subsidies from Spain was erratic, causing shortages of food and supplies, so authorities ignored the restrictions on trade with foreign colonies and welcomed British goods. Likewise, the British colonists sought Spanish products from Florida, especially oranges.
But when England and Spain became declared enemies in the War of Jenkins’ Ear and the French and Indian Wars, this tacit trade arrangement was threatened, and the result was a rise of privateering in the region. Rather than do without Spanish goods, the English began to attack and capture Spanish vessels with their cargoes at sea. Likewise, the Spaniards resorted to privateering as a means of steadily supplying the Florida colony. Harman concludes that, both willingly and unwillingly, the English colonies helped their Spanish neighbor to sustain its position in the Southeast.