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In the southern Maya lowlands, rainfall provided the primary and, in some areas, the only source of water for people and crops. Classic Maya kings sponsored elaborate public rituals that affirmed their close ties to the supernatural world and their ability to intercede with deities and ancestors to ensure an adequate amount of rain, which was then stored to provide water during the four-to-five-month dry season. As long as the rains came, Maya kings supplied their subjects with water and exacted tribute in labor and goods in return. But when the rains failed at the end of the Classic period (AD 850-950), the Maya rulers lost both their claim to supernatural power and their temporal authority. Maya commoners continued to supplicate gods and ancestors for rain in household rituals, but they stopped paying tribute to rulers whom the gods had forsaken.

In this paradigm-shifting book, Lisa Lucero investigates the central role of water and ritual in the rise, dominance, and fall of Classic Maya rulers. She documents commoner, elite, and royal ritual histories in the southern Maya lowlands from the Late Preclassic through the Terminal Classic periods to show how elites and rulers gained political power through the public replication and elaboration of household-level rituals. At the same time, Lucero demonstrates that political power rested equally on material conditions that the Maya rulers could only partially control. Offering a new, more nuanced understanding of these dual bases of power, Lucero makes a compelling case for spiritual and material factors intermingling in the development and demise of Maya political complexity.

One of New York City’s most powerful unions, the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, AFL-CIO, represents almost 40,000 workers. Shaun Richman’s history places the labor organization within the context of American industrial and craft unionism and reveals how it came to influence politics and economic development in the city and beyond.

From the start, New York’s organized hotel workers experimented with and adapted how they organized and governed members and related to other labor unions. Richman follows union fortunes from early IWW activity through the Communist-led affiliates of the American Federation of Labor in the 1920s and 1930s, the shaping of breakthrough negotiating strategies, and the postwar era. As Richman shows, workers adopted a radicalism and militancy seldom associated with an AFL organization while openly negotiating the Communist Party’s power and influence within the union, until the Party’s eclipse in the 1950s.

An inspiring story of action and perseverance, We Always Had a Union profiles a foundational American labor union and offers lessons for today’s workers and organizers.

On a remote island in the South Pacific, the Lavongai have consistently struggled to obtain development through logging and commercial agriculture. Yet many Lavongai still long to move beyond the grind of subsistence work that has seemingly defined their lives on New Hanover, Papua New Guinea, for generations.

Following a long history of smaller-scale and largely unsuccessful resource development efforts, New Hanover became the site of three multinational-controlled special agricultural and business leases (SABLs) that combined to cover over 75 percent of the island for ninety-nine-year lease terms. These agroforestry projects were part of a national effort to encourage “sustainable” rural development by tapping into the growing global demand for agricultural lands and crops like oil palm and biofuels. They were supposed to succeed where the smaller-scale projects of the past had failed. Unfortunately, these SABLs resulted in significant forest loss and livelihood degradation, while doing little to promote the type of economic development that many Lavongai had been hoping for.

It is within this context that We Stay the Same grounds questions of hope for transformative economic change within Lavongai assessments of the inequitable relationships between global processes of resource development and the local lives that have become increasingly defined by the necessities and failures of these processes. Written in a clear and relatable style for students, We Stay the Same combines ethnographic and ecological research to show how the Lavongai continue to survive and make meaningful lives in a situation where their own hopes for a better future have often been used against them as a mechanism of a more distantly profitable dispossession.
 

Jessica Gordon Nembhard is Assistant Professor and Economist, African American Studies Department, and co-founder of the Democracy Collaborative at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her work on the history of black cooperatives is well known in progressive circles.

Ngina Chiteji is Associate Professor of Economics, Skidmore College. She was a Visiting Assistant Research Scholar at The Democracy Collaborative, University of Maryland, College Park.

From the perspective of the 1990s, it is possible to see the road to the Bonn Republic and West Germany's "social market economy" as the "correct" postwar German path. But unified Germany continues to confront enormous problems of social inequality and widespread resistance to the acceptance of a truly multi-cultural society. By exploring how West Germans confronted -- or failed to confront -- similar problems in the early history of the Federal Republic, this collection makes a crucial contribution to understanding the present. Moving beyond accounts of high politics and international relations, the essays brought together here focus on the intersections between the politics of daily life and the politics of the nation-state. Building on the approaches of women's history, social history, and cultural studies, they emphasize that the process of defining West Germany in the 1950s took place not only in the geopolitical arena of the Cold War but also in dance halls and at the movies, in worker-training programs, and in patterns of consumption. West Germany under Construction not only expands our understanding of the early formation of West German society, it also outlines ways to continue the excavation of that past. It will be mandatory reading for students and scholars alike.

In When Women Have Wings, Donna F. Murdock provides an insightful and detailed look at the tensions, contradictions, and positive moments apparent in a women's development project in Medellín, Colombia. Based on sixteen months of ethnographic field research in a working-class women's community center run by a local feminist NGO, this in-depth account illuminates both working- and middle-class women's perspectives on the professionalization of feminist NGOs and provides an unusual ethnographic lens on the process as it unfolds. Using detailed descriptions of the encounters between working- and middle-class women to highlight how the women's center attempts to negotiate the pressures of feminism and professionalization, Murdock depicts the frailty and complexity of cross-class organizing and the ways that this process may be threatened by professionalized NGO styles. Poignant accounts of women's attempts to navigate these challenges amid poverty and civil war show how changing political and economic demands may ultimately compromise feminist NGOs' long-held commitments to sustainable development practice focused on grassroots empowerment. With its clear and vivid style, When Women Have Wings fills a gap for scholars of feminist development, professionalized feminist NGOs, grassroots democracy, and Latin American women's movements and will contribute much-needed insight into the everyday workings of the problems of professionalization and democratic development. "By offering a fine-grained, engaging and provocative account of the workings of feminist nongovernmental organizations and their working-class women constituencies, When Women Have Wings fills a gaping lacuna in the now expansive literature on women's movements in the Global South." -- Sonia E. Alvarez, Department of Political Sciences, University of Massachusetts-Amherst "Donna Murdock's in-depth ethnographic account will be an important contribution to the literature on women's movements, Latin American feminisms, and gender identity politics in the context of neoliberalism and political violence." -- Amy Lind, Department of Women's Studies, University of Cincinnati "This remarkable book, full of ethnographic detail and lucid analysis, tells a compelling story of feminist struggles with neoliberalism in Latin America. Murdock takes us into the lives and struggles of working-class women and their feminist allies, illustrating how class divides are painfully exacerbated by shrinking state budgets, rising requirements for citizenship, and the professionalization of social movements. She nonetheless leaves us with the 'fragile wings of hope,' grounded in women's ongoing efforts to confront violence and make their voices heard in the face of difficult odds. This is important reading for feminists, scholars of development, and those concerned with global justice." -- Millie Thayer, Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

Substantial gaps exist between Black Americans and other racial and ethnic groups in the U.S., most glaringly Whites, across virtually all quality-of-life indicators. Despite strong evidence that neighborhood residence affects life outcomes, we lack a comprehensive picture of Black neighborhood conditions and how they have changed over time. In Where the Hood At? urban planning and public policy scholar Michael C. Lens examines the characteristics and trajectories of Black neighborhoods across the U.S. over the fifty years since the Fair Housing Act.
 
Hip hop music was born out of Black neighborhoods in the 1970s and has evolved alongside them. In Where the Hood At? Lens uses rap’s growth and influence across the country to frame discussions about the development and conditions of Black neighborhoods. Lens finds that social and economic improvement in Black neighborhoods since the 1970s has been slow. However, how well Black neighborhoods are doing varies substantially by region. Overall, Black neighborhoods in the South are doing well and growing quickly. Washington D.C. and Atlanta, in particular, stand out as centers of Black affluence. Black neighborhoods in the Midwest and the Rust Belt, on the other hand, are particularly disadvantaged. The welfare of Black neighborhoods is related not only to factors within neighborhoods, such as the unemployment rate, but also to characteristics of the larger metropolitan area, such as overall income inequality. Lens finds that while gentrification is increasingly prevalent, it is growing slowly, and is not as pressing an issue as public discourse would make it seem. Instead, concentrated disadvantage is by far the most common and pressing problem in Black neighborhoods.
 
Lens argues that Black neighborhoods represent urban America’s greatest policy failures, and that recent housing policies have only had mild success. He provides several suggestions for policies with the goal of uplifting Black neighborhoods. One radical proposal is enacting policies and programs, such as tax breaks for entrepreneurs or other small business owners, that would encourage Black Americans to move back to the South. Black Americans migrating South would have a better chance at moving to an advantaged Black neighborhood as improving neighborhood location is higher when moving across regions. It would also help Black Americans expand their political and economic power. He also suggests a regional focus for economic development policies, particularly in the Midwest where Black neighborhoods are struggling the most. One way to boost economic development would be to move federal agencies to the area. He also calls for building more affordable housing in Black suburbs. Black poverty is lower in suburbs than in central cities, so increasing housing in Black suburbs would allow Black households to relocate to more advantaged neighborhoods, which research has shown leads to improved life outcomes.
 
Where the Hood At? is a remarkable and comprehensive account of Black neighborhoods that helps us to better understand the places and conditions that allow them flourish or impedes their advancement.
 
 

Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing examines the ways in which the Akimel O’odham (“River People”) and their ancestors, the Huhugam, adapted to economic, political, and environmental constraints imposed by federal Indian policy, the Indian Bureau, and an encroaching settler population in Arizona’s Gila River Valley. Fundamental to O’odham resilience was their connection to their sense of peoplehood and their himdag (“lifeway”), which culminated in the restoration of their water rights and a revitalization of their Indigenous culture.
 
Author Jennifer Bess examines the Akimel O’odham’s worldview, which links their origins with a responsibility to farm the Gila River Valley and to honor their history of adaptation and obligations as “world-builders”—co-creators of an evermore life-sustaining environment and participants in flexible networks of economic exchange. Bess considers this worldview in context of the Huhugam–Akimel O’odham agricultural economy over more than a thousand years. Drawing directly on Akimel O’odham traditional ecological knowledge, innovations, and interpretive strategies in archives and interviews, Bess shows how the Akimel O’odham engaged in agricultural economy for the sake of their lifeways, collective identity, enduring future, and actualization of the values modeled in their sacred stories.
 
Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing highlights the values of adaptation, innovation, and co-creation fundamental to Akimel O’odham lifeways and chronicles the contributions the Akimel O’odham have made to American history and to the history of agriculture. The book will be of interest to scholars of Indigenous, American Southwestern, and agricultural history.
 

In this title, a well-known academic economist and former finance minister gives a lucid and well balanced overview of the current financial turbulences that have hit the developed economies. Strongly criticizing the excesses of neoliberal capitalism, Daianu calls for implementing necessary regulatory reforms in the financial sector and for restoration of a proper balance between the functions of the state and the market. Daianu goes back to some of the roots of the current crisis and the flaws or weaknesses of the global financial system. In doing so, he extensively discusses the monetary union of the Euro, and the critical question whether, how and when additional countries can and should join the club. This is a timely volume with a very strong and important warning.

What might a sensible community choose to do if its economy has fallen apart and becoming a ghost town is not an acceptable option? Unfortunately, answers to this question have long been measured against an implicit standard: the postwar economy of the 1950s. After showing why that economy provides an implausible standard—made possible by the lack of economic competition from the European and Asian countries, winners or losers, touched by the war—John Henry Schlegel attempts to answer the question of what to do.

While Waiting for Rain first examines the economic history of the United States as well as that of Buffalo, New York: an appropriate stand-in for any city that may have seen its economy start to fall apart in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. It makes clear that neither Buffalo nor the United States as a whole has had an economy in the sense of “a persistent market structure that is the fusion of an understanding of economic life with the patterns of behavior within the economic, political, and social institutions that enact that understanding” since both economies collapsed. Next, this book builds a plausible theory of how economic growth might take place by examining the work of the famous urbanist, Jane Jacobs, especially her book Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Her work, like that of many others, emphasizes the importance of innovation for economic growth, but is singular in its insistence that such innovation has to come from local resources. It can neither be bought nor given, even by well-intentioned political actors. As a result Americans generally, as well as locally, are like farmers in the midst of a drought, left to review their resources and wait. Finally, it returns to both the local Buffalo and the national economies to consider what these political units might plausibly do while waiting for an economy to emerge.

The long and pernicious relationship between fast food restaurants and the African American community

• James Beard Foundation: James Beard Media Award for Reference, History, and Scholarship — Winner
• Urban Affairs Association Best Book in Urban Affairs — Winner
• Association for Humanist Sociology Betty and McClung Lee Book Award — Winner
• Black Caucus of the American Library Association — Honor, Nonfiction category
• Museum of African American History Stone Book Award — Shortlist
• Business History Conference: Hagley Prize — Finalist
• Association for the Study of Food and Society: ASFS Book Award — Winner
• Society for the Study of Social Problems: Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Outstanding Book Award — Winner
• Foreword: INDIES — Silver winner, History category

Today, fast food is disproportionately located in Black neighborhoods and marketed to Black Americans through trgeted advertising. But throughout much of the twentieth century, fast food was developed specifically for White urban and suburban customers, purposefully avoiding Black spaces. In White Burgers, Black Cash, Naa Oyo A. Kwate traces the evolution in fast food from the early 1900s to the present, from its long history of racist exclusion to its current damaging embrace of urban Black communities.

Fast food has historically been tied to the country’s self-image as the land of opportunity and is marketed as one of life’s simple pleasures, but a more insidious history lies at the industry’s core. White Burgers, Black Cash investigates the complex trajectory of restaurant locations from a decided commitment to Whiteness to the disproportionate densities that characterize Black communities today. Kwate expansively charts fast food’s racial and spatial transformation and centers the cities of Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C., in a national examination of the biggest brands of today, including White Castle, KFC, Burger King, McDonald’s, and more.

Deeply researched, compellingly told, and brimming with surprising details, White Burgers, Black Cash reveals the inequalities embedded in America’s popular national food tradition.

In Wild Tides, Patrick Brodie maps the shifting fortunes of the Irish economy before the 2008 financial crisis up to 2020, outlining how the Irish state moved from rampant and irresponsible financialized development to incentivizing private media infrastructure and policy as instruments for economic recovery. Brodie contends that, while the Irish state’s investment in creative and technological sectors of media was supposed to bring resources back into the country and stabilize the economy, it instead rendered the country even more vulnerable to future instability and transferred wealth into the hands of multinational corporations. Through ethnographic work and close engagement with the Irish state’s policy and planning across a number of key media infrastructure sites, Brodie unfolds the very real environmental and social impacts of Ireland’s naturalized model of financialized, foreign direct investment-led infrastructural development. Richly researched and comprehensively argued, Wild Tides reveals the multifarious, unexpected ways that financialization reaches into the daily life of a nation.

The "glorious house" of the senatorial family of the Flavii Apiones is the best documented economic entity of the Roman Empire during the fifth through seventh centuries, that critical period of transition between the classical world and the Middle Ages. For decades, the rich but fragmentary manuscript evidence that this large agricultural estate left behind, preserved for 1,400 years by the desiccating sands of Egypt, has been central to arguments concerning the agrarian and fiscal history of Late Antiquity, including the rise of feudalism.

Wine, Wealth, and the State in Late Antique Egypt is the most authoritative synthesis concerning the economy of the Apion estate to appear to date. T. M. Hickey examines the records of the family's wine production in the sixth century in order to shed light on ancient economic practices and economic theory, as well as on the wine industry and on estate management. Based on careful study of the original manuscripts, including unpublished documents from the estate archive, he presents controversial conclusions, much at odds with the "top down" models currently dominating the scholarship.

The essays in this collection focus primarily on six major business sectors in India: airlines, pharmaceuticals, automobiles, hospitality, food, and telecommunications. An essay on each sector describes the market structure, the current state of the sector, the main players, the key economic forces, and selected business strategies.

The authors describe how the sector might evolve during the next five to ten years, within the broad canvas of the deeper economic and demographic transitions that are taking place in India, and in turn, what this evolution implies for the challenges and opportunities that companies, both domestic and multinational, may face in India. Essays on the emergence of the Indian consumer, the effect of credit cards on India’s consumer culture, and entrepreneurship and India’s poor the emergence of the Indian Consumer round out this profile of India’s market.

Scholars regard the March on Washington Movement (MOWM) as a forerunner of the postwar Civil Rights movement. Led by the charismatic A. Philip Randolph, MOWM scored an early victory when it forced the Roosevelt administration to issue a landmark executive order that prohibited defense contractors from practicing racial discrimination.

Winning the War for Democracy: The March on Washington Movement, 1941-1946 recalls that triumph, but also looks beyond Randolph and the MOWM's national leadership to focus on the organization's evolution and actions at the local level. Using the personal papers of previously unheralded MOWM members such as T.D. McNeal, internal government documents from the Roosevelt administration, and other primary sources, David Lucander highlights how local affiliates fighting for a double victory against fascism and racism helped the national MOWM accrue the political capital it needed to effect change.

Lucander details the efforts of grassroots organizers to implement MOWM's program of empowering African Americans via meetings and marches at defense plants and government buildings and, in particular, focuses on the contributions of women activists like Layle Lane, E. Pauline Myers, and Anna Arnold Hedgeman. Throughout he shows how local activities often diverged from policies laid out at MOWM's national office, and how grassroots participants on both sides ignored the rivalry between Randolph and the leadership of the NAACP to align with one another on the ground.

In the late eighteenth century, decentralized and chaotic government in Egypt allowed women a freedom of action that has not been equaled until recent times. Delving extensively into archival sources, Afaf Marsot presents the first comprehensive picture of women's status and opportunities in this period.

Marsot makes important connections between forms of government, economic possibilities, and gender relations, showing how political instability allowed women to acquire property, independent of males, as a hedge against political uncertainty. She traces the linkages that women formed among themselves and with the ulama (non-Ottoman native elites) who aided and supported them. The book concludes with a comparison of women's status in the nineteenth century, when the introduction of European institutions that did not recognize their legal existence marginalized women, causing them to have to rely on men as major breadwinners. These important findings about the relationship between forms of government and the status of women will be of interest to a wide audience.

This interdisciplinary volume provides a historical and international framework for understanding the changing role of women in the political economy of Latin America and the Caribbean. The contributors challenge the traditional policies, goals, and effects of development, and examine such topics as colonialism and women's subordination; the links to economic, social, and political trends in North America; the gendered division of paid and unpaid work; differing economic structures, cultural and class patterns; women's organized resistance; and the relationship of gender to class, race, and ethnicity/nationality.

Can women succeed? Is women's work appreciated equally to men's? Do women's salaries reflect the quality and quantity of work they do? Does gender make a difference? These questions, which often emerge even in democratic societies and free-market economies, are much more acute in the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe. Gender has been an issue thus far neglected in transition economies. Drawing on official statistics, an international multidisciplinary team of sociologists, economists, demographers and geographers examines how women have been affected by the labor market reforms in Poland in the transition period of the 1990s. The issues discussed include occupational segregation, the social mobility of women, demographic change, the power and participation of women in public life, women's organizations, and labor market reform.

What did it mean to be a woman in colonial Spanish America? Given the many advances in women's rights since the nineteenth century, we might assume that colonial women had few rights and were fully subordinated to male authority in the family and in society—but we'd be wrong. In this provocative study, Kimberly Gauderman undermines the long-accepted patriarchal model of colonial society by uncovering the active participation of indigenous, mestiza, and Spanish women of all social classes in many aspects of civil life in seventeenth-century Quito.

Gauderman draws on records of criminal and civil proceedings, notarial records, and city council records to reveal women's use of legal and extra-legal means to achieve personal and economic goals; their often successful attempts to confront men's physical violence, adultery, lack of financial support, and broken promises of marriage; women's control over property; and their participation in the local, interregional, and international economies. This research clearly demonstrates that authority in colonial society was less hierarchical and more decentralized than the patriarchal model suggests, which gave women substantial control over economic and social resources.

Women, Power, and Dissent in the Hills of Carolina is a unique and impassioned exploration of gender, labor, and resistance in western North Carolina. Based on eight months of field research in a mica manufacturing plant and the surrounding rural community, as well as oral histories of women who worked in mica houses in the early twentieth century, this landmark study canvasses the history of the mica industry and the ways it came to be organized around women's labor.

Mary K. Anglin's investigation of working women's lives in the plant she calls "Moth Hill Mica Company" reveals the ways women have contributed to household and regional economies for more than a century. Without union support or recognition as skilled laborers, these women developed alternate strategies for challenging the poor working conditions, paltry wages, and corporate rhetoric of Moth Hill. Utilizing the power of memory and strong family and community ties, as well as their own interpretations of gender and culture, the women have found ways to "boss themselves."

The ability to achieve economic security through hard work is a central tenet of the American Dream, but significant shifts in today’s economy have fractured this connection. While economic insecurity has always been a reality for some Americans, Black Americans have historically long experienced worse economic outcomes than Whites. In Work in Black and White, sociologists Enobong Hannah Branch and Caroline Hanley draw on interviews with 80 middle-aged Black and White Americans to explore how their attitudes and perceptions of success are influenced by the stories American culture has told about the American Dream – and about who should have access to it and who should not.

Branch and Hanley find that Black and White workers draw on racially distinct histories to make sense of today’s rising economic insecurity. White Americans have grown increasingly pessimistic and feel that the American Dream is now out of reach, mourning the loss of a sense of economic security which they took for granted. But Black Americans tend to negotiate their present insecurity with more optimism, since they cannot mourn something they never had. All educated workers bemoaned the fact that their credentials no longer guarantee job security, but Black workers lamented the reality that even with an education, racial inequality continues to block access to good jobs for many.

The authors interject a provocative observation into the ongoing debate over opportunity, security, and the American Dream: Among policymakers and the public alike, Americans talk too much about education. The ways people navigate insecurity, inequality, and uncertainty rests on more than educational attainment. The authors call for a public policy that ensures dignity in working conditions and pay while accounting for the legacies of historical inequality.

Americans want the game of life to be fair. While the survey respondents expressed common ground on the ideal of meritocracy, opinions about to achieve economic security for all diverge along racial lines, with the recognition – or not – of differences in current and past access to opportunity in America.

Work in Black and White is a call to action for meaningful policies to make the premise of the American Dream a reality.

A damning portrait of the dire realities of retirement in the United States—and how we can fix it.

While the French went on strike in 2023 to protest the increase in the national retirement age, workers in the United States have all but given up on the notion of dignified retirement for all. Instead, Americans—whose elders face the highest risk of poverty compared to workers in peer nations—are fed feel-good stories about Walmart clerks who can finally retire because a customer raised the necessary funds through a GoFundMe campaign.

Many argue that the solution to the financial straits of American retirement is simple: people need to just work longer. Yet this call to work longer is misleading in a multitude of ways, including its endangering of the health of workers and its discrimination against people who work in lower-wage occupations. In Work, Retire, Repeat, Teresa Ghilarducci tells the stories of elders locked into jobs—not because they love to work but because they must.

But this doesn’t need to be the reality. Work, Retire, Repeat shows how relatively low-cost changes to how we finance and manage retirement will allow people to truly choose how they spend their golden years.

In Working Musicians Timothy D. Taylor offers a behind-the-scenes look at the labor of the mostly unknown composers, music editors, orchestrators, recording engineers, and other workers involved in producing music for films, television, and video games. Drawing on dozens of interviews with music workers in Los Angeles, Taylor explores the nature of their work and how they understand their roles in the entertainment business. Taylor traces how these cultural laborers have adapted to and cope with the conditions of neoliberalism as, over the last decade, their working conditions have become increasingly precarious. Digital technologies have accelerated production timelines and changed how content is delivered, while new pay schemes have emerged that have transformed composers from artists into managers and paymasters. Taylor demonstrates that as bureaucratization and commercialization affect every aspect of media, the composers, musicians, music editors, engineers, and others whose soundtracks excite, inspire, and touch millions face the same structural economic challenges that have transformed American society, concentrating wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands.

A surprising look at the meaningful social changes in Jordan as lived and navigated by educated women.
 
Jordan has witnessed tremendous societal transformation in its relatively short history. Today it has one of the most highly educated populations in the region, and women have outnumbered and outperformed their male counterparts for more than a decade. Yet, despite their education and professional status, many women still struggle to build a secure future and a life befitting of their aspirations.
 
In Working Women in Jordan anthropologist Fida J. Adely turns to college-educated women in Jordan who migrate from rural provinces to Amman for employment opportunities. Building on twelve years of ethnographic research and extensive interviews with dozens of women, as well as some of their family members, Adely analyzes the effects of developments such as expanded educational opportunities, urbanization, privatization, and the restructuring of the labor market on women’s life trajectories, gender roles, the institution of marriage, and kinship relations. Through these rich narrative accounts and the analysis of broader socio-economic shifts, Adely explains how educational structures can act as both facilitators and obstacles to workforce entry—along with cascading consequences for family and social life. Deeply thorough and compelling, Working Women in Jordan asks readers to think more critically about what counts as development, and for whom.
 

While music as labor feeds into the capitalist cultural industries, this book proves that in this sector informality greatly permeates and governs power relations and the allocations of resources. The significant level of informal involvement of the household in the creative and reproductive processes is also explored. It is particularly in the semiperipheral context that the relationship between home-based work and paid work is unbalanced: Emília Barna's field data are from Hungary and range from 2018 to 2021. The same context also implies considerable involvement of the state and its subsidies, as well as the important role of gatekeepers’ political capital.

This book embraces the widest possible range of workers in the music industry. It deals with all music genres from high-flying to commercial and observes various workers in the production chain beyond musicians. Niche segments of the sector, such as YouTube-based commercial hip hop, are given special treatment. Using a variety of empirical research methods, the study examines the trends as workers are pushed towards digital entrepreneurship and platform work, on the one hand, and live performance, on the other. The focus on domestic work and informality offers a feminist analysis of work in music. This approach sheds light on gendered divisions of labor and forms of (self-)exploitation that usually remain invisible. The book proposes a new model of cultural autonomy that takes account of the semiperipheral relationship of music industry workers and institutions to both the market and the state.

"Water, water, everywhere . . ." Working with Water, the latest in the popular New Badger History series, teaches young readers about the many ways water has shaped Wisconsin’s history, from glaciers to stewardship. It touches on geography and hydrography; transportation networks of Indians and fur traders; the Erie Canal; shipwrecks, lighthouses, shipping, and shipbuilding; fishing, ricing, "pearling" (clamming), and cranberry cultivation; lumbering, milling, and papermaking; recreation, resorts, tourism, and environmentalism.

The companion Teacher’s Guide and Student Materials engages students in hands-on exploration. It highlights historical processes and encourages multiple learning styles.

Do the structures of the world economy invariably work against the interests of the Third World? What is the impact of industrialisation? How does it affect people and their livelihoods, gender relations, the environment, movements for social justice and democracy?

World Development offers answers to these questions. A comprehensive introductory guide for students, teachers, volunteers and NGO workers in development, World Development examines the substantive issues surrounding development, industrialisation and globalization and places them within a historic context. It outlines the historical development of the world economy and assesses the current prospects for developing countries. The book contains in-depth analyses of how particular industries operate at local and global levels, drawing from case studies on textiles, tourism and copper. There are also case studies of specific countries, including South Korea, Cyprus, Mexico, China and Spain.
 

Wrecked links the story of America’s most infamous shipwreck to the story of an even larger disaster—the wreck of the American industrial economy. When the Edmund Fitzgerald went down in a Lake Superior storm on November 10, 1975, more was lost than the ship and the twenty-nine lives on board. The disaster was a human tragedy as well as an indictment of the American industrial policies that eventually cost the nation thousands of jobs and marooned hundreds of communities. Written with a passionate yet factually grounded intensity, Wrecked shows that the reasons for the decline of industrial manufacturing in the upper Midwest are linked to why the Edmund Fitzgerald sank, and to the legal turmoil that followed for the victims’ families. The book conveys the sense of loss that still is felt by those affected, along with the outrage over the disappearance of manufacturing jobs and the inadequate maintenance and legal maneuvering over liability for the sinking of the ship. What follows is a fascinating critique of what went wrong and why.