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A Casebook on Corporate Renewal spans a variety of business areas relevant to corporate renewal and turnaround management. Corporate renewal, as a topic taught and discussed in business schools, has surged in the past decade. The cases in this book were selected to cover the knowledge and skills needed by successful turnaround managers, including ethical and legal issues; developing a plan of reorganization; and defining problems and their solutions, including strategic, financial, and operating issues.
 
The cases challenge students to actively engage in the decision-making process in order to learn how corporate renewal is practiced in real business settings. The Casebook is meant to accompany the second edition of Principles of Corporate Renewal by Harlan D. Platt, but it can be adopted separately or used with other management textbooks.
 

This collection celebrates the pathbreaking work in game theory and mathematics of John F. Nash Jr., winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics. Nash’s analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games has had a major impact on modern economic theory. This book, also published as volume 81 of the Duke Mathematical Journal, includes an important, but previously unpublished paper by Nash; the proceedings of the Nobel seminar held in Stockholm on December 8, 1994 in his honor; and papers by distinguished mathematicians and economists written in response to and in honor of Nash’s pioneering contributions to those fields.

In 1950, when he was 22 years old, Nash presented his key idea—the Nash equilibrium—in the Ph.D. thesis he submitted to the Mathematics Department at Princeton University. In that paper, he defined a new concept of equilibrium and used methods from topology to prove the existence of an equilibrium point for n-person, finite, non-cooperative games, that is, for games in which the number of possible strategies are limited, no communication is allowed between the players, and n represents the number of players. The Nash equilibrium point is reached when none of the players can improve their position by changing strategies. By taking into account situations involving more than two players, specifically the general n-player game, Nash built significantly on the previous work of John Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern.

Contributors. Abbas Bahri, Eric A. Carlen, Ennio De Giorgi, Charles Fefferman, Srihari Govidan, John C. Harsanyi, H. Hoffer, Carlos E. Kenig, S. Klainerman, Harold F. Kuhn, Michael Loss, William F. Lucas, M. Machedon, Roger B. Myerson, Raghavan Narasimhan, John F. Nash Jr., Louis Nirenberg, Jill Pipher, Zeév Rudnick, Peter Sarnak, Michael Shub, Steve Smale, Robert Wilson, K. Wysocki, E. Zehnder

Milwaukeeans greeted the advent of World War II with the same determination as other Americans. Everyone felt the effect of the war, whether through concern for loved ones in danger, longer work hours, consumer shortages, or participation in war service organizations and drives. Men and women workers produced the essential goods necessary for victory—the vehicles, weapons, munitions, and components for all the machinery of war. But even in wartime there were labor conflicts, fueled by the sacrifices and tensions of wartime life. A City at War focuses on the experience of working men and women in a community that was not a wartime boom town. It looks at the stands of the CIO and the AFL against low wartime wages, and at women in unionized factories facing the perceptions and goals of male workers, union leaders, and society itself. Here is a social history of wartime Milwaukee and its workers as they laid the groundwork for a secure postwar future.

A civil society is one in which a democratic government and a market economy operate together. The idea of the civil economy--encompassing a democratic government and a market economy--presumes that people can solve social problems within the market itself. This book explores the relationship between the two, examining the civil underpinnings of capitalism and investigating the way a civil economy evolves in history and is developed for the future by careful planning.

Severyn T. Bruyn describes how people in three sectors--government, business, and the Third Sector (nonprofits and civil groups)--can develop an accountable, self-regulating, profitable, humane, and competitive system of markets that could be described as a civil economy. He examines how government officials can organize markets to reduce government costs; how local leaders deal with global corporations that would unfairly exploit their community resources; and how employees can become coparticipants in the development of human values in markets.

A Civil Economy is oriented to interdiciplinary studies of the economy, assisting scholars in diverse fields, such as business management, sociology, political science, and economics, in developing a common language to examine civic problems in the marketplace.

As an undergraduate text, it evokes a mode of thought about the development of a self-accountable system of markets. Students learn to understand how the market economy becomes socially accountable and self-reliant, while remaining productive, competitive, and profitable.

Sveryn T. Bruyn is Professor of Sociology, Boston College.

A comprehensive historical tracing of how the contemporary finance-poverty-development nexus emerged.

'The definitive account of the history of poverty finance' - Susanne Soederberg

Finance, mobile, and digital technologies - or 'fintech' - are being heralded in the world of development by the likes of the IMF and World Bank as a silver bullet in the fight against poverty. But should we believe the hype?

A Critical History of Poverty Finance demonstrates how newfangled 'digital financial inclusion' efforts suffer from the same essential flaws as earlier iterations of neoliberal 'financial inclusion.' Relying on artificially created markets that simply aren't there among the world's most disadvantaged economic actors, they also reinforce existing patterns of inequality and uneven development, many of which date back to the colonial era.

Bernards offers an astute analysis of the current fintech fad, contextualized through a detailed colonial history of development finance, that ultimately reveals the neoliberal vision of poverty alleviation for the pipe dream it is.

***Winner of an English PEN Award 2021***

In this sharp intervention, authors Lucí Cavallero and Verónica Gago defiantly develop a feminist understanding of debt, showing its impact on women and members of the LGBTQ+ community and examining the relationship between debt and social reproduction.

Exploring the link between financial activity and the rise of conservative forces in Latin America, the book demonstrates that debt is intimately linked to gendered violence and patriarchal notions of the family. Yet, rather than seeing these forces as insurmountable, the authors also show ways in which debt can be resisted, drawing on concrete experiences and practices from Latin America and around the world.

Featuring interviews with women in Argentina and Brazil, the book reveals the real-life impact of debt and how it falls mainly on the shoulders of women, from the household to the wider effects of national debt and austerity. However, through discussions around experiences of work, prisons, domestic labour, agriculture, family, abortion and housing, a narrative of resistance emerges.

Translated by Liz Mason-Deese.

***Winner of an English PEN Award 2021***

"Of great value to those interested in the financialisation of everyday life and social reproduction."—LSE Review of Books
 
In this sharp evaluation and call to action, authors Lucí Cavallero and Verónica Gago defiantly develop a feminist understanding of debt, showing its impact on women and members of the LGBTQ+ community and examining the relationship between debt and social reproduction.
 
Exploring the link between financial activity and the rise of conservative forces in Latin America, the book demonstrates that debt is intimately linked to gendered violence and patriarchal notions of the family. Yet, rather than seeing these forces as insurmountable, the authors also show ways in which debt can be resisted, drawing on concrete experiences and practices from Latin America and around the world.  Chapters include:
 
*Debt and Social Reproduction
*Debt as a “Counter-revolution” of Everyday Life
*The writing on the Body of Women
*Neither Victims not Entrepreneurs
*Feminist Insubordination and Fascist Neoliberalism
*The Patriarchy Has My Missing Contributions
*Hunger and Gender Mandates
*Us Against Debt
 
The authors state in their Introduction, “Our investigations and activism show that there is an urgent need to develop a specifically feminist analysis of finance. Here we do so by bringing together methodological elements, political hypotheses, and narratives of practices elaborated by the feminist movement that are challenging finance.”
 
Featuring interviews with women in Argentina and Brazil, the book reveals the real-life impact of debt and how it falls mainly on the shoulders of women, from the household to the wider effects of national debt and austerity. However, through discussions around experiences of work, prisons, domestic labor, agriculture, family, abortion and housing, a narrative of resistance emerges.
 

This book reports the authors' research on one of the most sophisticated general equilibrium models designed for tax policy analysis. Significantly disaggregated and incorporating the complete array of federal, state, and local taxes, the model represents the U.S. economy and tax system in a large computer package. The authors consider modifications of the tax system, including those being raised in current policy debates, such as consumption-based taxes and integration of the corporate and personal income tax systems. A counterfactual economy associated with each of these alternatives is generated, and the possible outcomes are compared.

Explores the origin and evolution of American public finance and shows how the nation’s rise to great-power status in the nineteenth century rested on its ability to go into debt.

Two and a half centuries after the American Revolution the United States stands as one of the greatest powers on earth and the undoubted leader of the western hemisphere. This stupendous evolution was far from a foregone conclusion at independence. The conquest of the North American continent required violence, suffering, and bloodshed. It also required the creation of a national government strong enough to go to war against, and acquire territory from, its North American rivals.

In A Hercules in the Cradle, Max M. Edling argues that the federal government’s abilities to tax and borrow money, developed in the early years of the republic, were critical to the young nation’s ability to wage war and expand its territory. He traces the growth of this capacity from the time of the founding to the aftermath of the Civil War, including the funding of the War of 1812 and the Mexican War. Edling maintains that the Founding Fathers clearly understood the connection between public finance and power: a well-managed public debt was a key part of every modern state. Creating a debt would always be a delicate and contentious matter in the American context, however, and statesmen of all persuasions tried to pay down the national debt in times of peace. 

For many Americans, capitalism is a dynamic engine of prosperity that rewards the bold, the daring, and the hardworking. But to many outside the United States, capitalism seems like an initiative that serves only to concentrate power and wealth in the hands of a few hereditary oligarchies. As A History of Corporate Governance around the World shows, neither conception is wrong.

In this volume, some of the brightest minds in the field of economics present new empirical research that suggests that each side of the debate has something to offer the other. Free enterprise and well-developed financial systems are proven to produce growth in those countries that have them. But research also suggests that in some other capitalist countries, arrangements truly do concentrate corporate ownership in the hands of a few wealthy families.

A History of Corporate Governance around the World provides historical studies of the patterns of corporate governance in several countries-including the large industrial economies of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States; larger developing economies like China and India; and alternative models like those of the Netherlands and Sweden.

An engaging social history of foreign tourists’ dreams, the African tourism industry’s efforts to fulfill them, and how both sides affect each other.

Since the nineteenth century, foreign tourists and resident tourism workers in Africa have mutually relied upon notions of exoticism, but from vastly different perspectives. Many of the countless tourists who have traveled to the African continent fail to acknowledge or even realize that skilled African artists in the tourist industry repeatedly manufacture “authentic” experiences in order to fulfill foreigners’ often delusional, or at least uninformed, expectations. These carefully nurtured and controlled performances typically reinforce tourists’ reductive impressions—formed over centuries—of the continent, its peoples, and even its wildlife. In turn, once back in their respective homelands, tourists’ accounts of their travels often substantiate, and thereby reinforce, prevailing stereotypes of “exotic” Africa. Meanwhile, Africans’ staged performances not only impact their own lives, primarily by generating remunerative opportunities, but also subject the continent’s residents to objectification, exoticization, and myriad forms of exploitation.

The story of how the Utah Construction Company, founded in Ogden, Utah in 1900, became Utah International, a multinational corporation, is known to historians of the American West but perhaps not by the general public. The publication of this book remedies that omission.

During its first decades, the company built railroads and dams and was one of the Six Companies Consortium that built Hoover Dam. Utah Construction was also engaged in numerous war-contract activities during World War II. In the postwar period, the company expanded its activities into mining and land development and moved its headquarters to San Francisco. Changing its name to Utah Construction and Mining, and eventually to Utah International, the corporation became one of the most successful multinational mining companies in the world. In 1976, Utah International and General Electric negotiated the largest yet corporate merger in the United States.

Based on the Utah International archives housed in the Stewart Library at Weber State University, the story of Utah International describes more than projects: it is also the story of how two remarkable entrepreneurs, Marriner Stoddard Eccles and Edmund Wattis Littlefield, transformed the company incorporated in 1900 by the Wattis brothers into the largest and most profitable mining company in the United States.

Allan H. Meltzer's monumental history of the Federal Reserve System tells the story of one of America's most influential but least understood public institutions. This first volume covers the period from the Federal Reserve's founding in 1913 through the Treasury-Federal Reserve Accord of 1951, which marked the beginning of a larger and greatly changed institution.

To understand why the Federal Reserve acted as it did at key points in its history, Meltzer draws on meeting minutes, correspondence, and other internal documents (many made public only during the 1970s) to trace the reasoning behind its policy decisions. He explains, for instance, why the Federal Reserve remained passive throughout most of the economic decline that led to the Great Depression, and how the Board's actions helped to produce the deep recession of 1937 and 1938. He also highlights the impact on the institution of individuals such as Benjamin Strong, governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in the 1920s, who played a key role in the adoption of a more active monetary policy by the Federal Reserve. Meltzer also examines the influence the Federal Reserve has had on international affairs, from attempts to build a new international financial system in the 1920s to the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 that established the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and the failure of the London Economic Conference of 1933.

Written by one of the world's leading economists, this magisterial biography of the Federal Reserve and the people who helped shape it will interest economists, central bankers, historians, political scientists, policymakers, and anyone seeking a deep understanding of the institution that controls America's purse strings.

"It was 'an unprecedented orgy of extravagance, a mania for speculation, overextended business in nearly all lines and in every section of the country.' An Alan Greenspan rumination about the irrational exuberance of the late 1990s? Try the 1920 annual report of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve. . . . To understand why the Fed acted as it did—at these critical moments and many others—would require years of study, poring over letters, the minutes of meetings and internal Fed documents. Such a task would naturally deter most scholars of economic history but not, thank goodness, Allan Meltzer."—Wall Street Journal

"A seminal work that anyone interested in the inner workings of the U. S. central bank should read. A work that scholars will mine for years to come."—John M. Berry, Washington Post

"An exceptionally clear story about why, as the ideas that actually informed policy evolved, things sometimes went well and sometimes went badly. . . . One can only hope that we do not have to wait too long for the second installment."—David Laidler, Journal of Economic Literature

"A thorough narrative history of a high order. Meltzer's analysis is persuasive and acute. His work will stand for a generation as the benchmark history of the world's most powerful economic institution. It is an impressive, even awe-inspiring achievement."—Sir Howard Davies, Times Higher Education Supplement

The stock market is central to the global economy. Tens of millions of people look to it to provide for a comfortable retirement. Central bankers watch it closely as they set monetary policy. Businesses around the world are forced to adjust the way they operate to meet the demands of equity investors. Yet very little has been written about how the modern global stock market came to be. In A History of the Global Stock Market, B. Mark Smith weaves an entertaining tale that ranges from medieval trading companies and nineteenth-century robber barons to modern theorists and international speculators. Here, Smith debunks the popular myth that the market is inevitably subject to recurring speculative bubbles and discredits the notion that the current "globalization" of the market is something radically different from what has occurred in the past.

Informative, entertaining, and written for specialists and non-specialists alike, A History of the Global Stock Market is a worthy read for anyone who wants to understand the role of the stock market in the global economy.

How and why does Denmark have one of the richest, most equal, and happiest societies in the world today? Historians have often pointed to developments from the late nineteenth century, when small peasant farmers worked together through agricultural cooperatives, whose exports of butter and bacon rapidly gained a strong foothold on the British market.

This book presents a radical retelling of this story, placing (largely German-speaking) landed elites—rather than the Danish peasantry—at center stage. After acquiring estates in Denmark, these elites imported and adapted new practices from outside the kingdom, thus embarking on an ambitious program of agricultural reform and sparking a chain of events that eventually led to the emergence of Denmark’s famous peasant cooperatives in 1882. A Land of Milk and Butter presents a new interpretation of the origin of these cooperatives with striking implications for developing countries today.
 

A selection of the History Book Club.

A Most Promising Weed examines the work experience, living conditions, and social relations of thousands of African men, women, and children on European-owned tobacco farms in colonial Zimbabwe from 1890 to 1945. Steven C. Rubert provides evidence that Africans were not passive in their responses to the penetration of European capitalism into Zimbabwe but, on the contrary, helped to shape both the work and living conditions they encountered as they entered wage employment. Beginning with a brief history of tobacco growing in Zimbabwe, this study focuses on the organization of workers’ compounds and on the paid and unpaid labor performed by both women and children on those farms.

The Connecticut shoreline is made up of varying landscapes--the sandy coastline at Madison, the rocky shore at Branford, the replenished beach at Greenwich, and the erosion at Old Saybrook. A Moveable Shore offers a general user’s guide to the Connecticut shore. In a town-by-town journey down the 254-mile coastline, Peter C. Patton and James M. Kent explore in detail the history of specific sites, the climatic and geological forces that shape the shore, and regulations regarding land-use development. In addition, they provide a guide to coastal field trips.
Beginning with the hurricane of 1938, the biggest natural disaster to strike Connecticut since its settlement by Europeans, the authors demonstrate the continuing pattern of development of coastal land prone to flooding and high winds. Although the Connecticut coast faces Long Island and Block Island sounds, it is subject to the same natural hazards, land-use risks, and regulations as opean ocean shorelines. Global climatic events--glaciation, global warming, and rising sea levels--influence the shape and composition of the Connecticut shoreline, as do small-scale forces such as wind, waves, and tides.
Patton and Kent seek to instill a respect for the force of natural events and provide a guide for lessening the dangers of construction and development. A practical question-and-answer chapter explains what homeowners need to know to meet land-use regulations along the coast. In a state where the entire population lives within 100 miles of the coast, this important book will serve as a citizens’ guide to living with the Connecticut shore and will be of interest to coastal residents, developers, geologists, policymakers, and vacationers.

The Only Time America Was Free of Debt—and How It Led to the Two-Party Political System
“An engaging treatment of a topic of perennial concern and frequent misunderstanding, this lucid tale of the brief moment when the United States was debt-free should be on every Congress member’s bedside table.”—Peter J.Woolley, Professor of Comparative Politics, Fairleigh Dickinson University
When President James Monroe announced in his 1824 message to Congress that, barring an emergency, the large public debt inherited from the War for Independence, the Louisiana Purchase, and the War of 1812 would be extinguished on January 1, 1835, Congress responded by crafting legislation to transform that prediction into reality. Yet John Quincy Adams,Monroe’s successor, seemed not to share the commitment to debt freedom, resulting in the rise of opposition to his administration and his defeat for reelection in the bitter presidential campaign of 1828. The new president, Andrew Jackson, was thoroughly committed to debt freedom, and when it was achieved, it became the only time in American history when the country carried no national debt. In A Nation Wholly Free: The Elimination of the National Debt in the Age of Jackson, award-winning economic historian Carl Lane shows that the great and disparate issues that confronted Jackson, such as internal improvements, the “war” against the Second Bank of the United States, and the crisis surrounding South Carolina’s refusal to pay federal tariffs, become unified when debt freedom is understood as a core element of Jacksonian Democracy.
The era of debt freedom lasted only two years and ten months. As the government accumulated a surplus, a fully developed opposition party emerged—the beginning of our familiar two-party system—over rancor about how to allocate the newfound money. Not only did government move into an oppositional party system at this time, the debate about the size and role of government distinguished the parties in a pattern that has become familiar to Americans. The partisan debate over national debt and expenditures led to poorly thought out legislation, forcing the government to resume borrowing. As a result, after Jackson left office in 1837, the country fell into a major depression. Today we confront a debt that exceeds $17 trillion. Indeed, we have been borrowing ever since that brief time we freed ourselves from an oversized debt. A thoughtful, engaging account with strong relevance to today, A Nation Wholly Free is the fascinating story of an achievement that now seems fanciful.

How is it that in the twentieth century virtually all Americans came to think of themselves as “middle class”? In this cultural history of real estate brokerage, Jeffrey M. Hornstein argues that the rise of the Realtors as dealers in both domestic space and the ideology of home ownership provides tremendous insight into this critical question. At the dawn of the twentieth century, a group of prominent real estate brokers attempted to transform their occupation into a profession. Drawing on traditional notions of the learned professions, they developed a new identity—the professional entrepreneur—and a brand name, “Realtor.” The Realtors worked doggedly to make home ownership a central element of what became known as the “American dream.” Hornstein analyzes the internal evolution of the occupation, particularly the gender dynamics culminating in the rise of women brokers to predominance after the Second World War. At the same time, he examines the ways organized real estate brokers influenced American housing policy throughout the century.

Hornstein draws on trade journals, government documents on housing policy, material from the archives of the National Association of Realtors and local real estate boards, demographic data, and fictional accounts of real estate agents. He chronicles the early efforts of real estate brokers to establish their profession by creating local and national boards, business practices, ethical codes, and educational programs and by working to influence laws from local zoning ordinances to national housing policy. A rich and original work of American history, A Nation of Realtors® illuminates class, gender, and business through a look at the development of a profession and its enormously successful effort to make the owner-occupied, single-family home a key element of twentieth-century American identity.
 

A New Architecture for the U.S. National Accounts brings together a distinguished group of contributors to initiate the development of a comprehensive and fully integrated set of United States national accounts. The purpose of the new architecture is not only to integrate the existing systems of accounts, but also to identify gaps and inconsistencies and expand and incorporate systems of nonmarket accounts with the core system. 

Since the United States economy accounts for almost thirty percent of the world economy, it is not surprising that accounting for this huge and diverse set of economic activities requires a decentralized statistical system. This volume outlines the major assignments among institutions that include the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Department of Labor, the Census Bureau, and the Governors of the Federal Reserve System. 

An important part of the motivation for the new architecture is to integrate the different components and make them consistent. This volume is the first step toward achieving that goal.

Charles Coolidge Parlin was considered by many to be the founder of market research. Working for the dominant Curtis Publishing Company, he revolutionized the industry by providing added value to advertisers through information about the racial, ethnic, and regional biases of readers and consumers. By maintaining contact with both businesses and customers, Parlin and Curtis publications were able to turn consumer wants into corporate profits.

In A New Brand of Business, Douglas Ward provides an intriguing business history that explains how and why Curtis developed its market research division. He reveals the evolution and impact of Parlin’s work, which understood how readers and advertisers in the emerging consumer economy looked at magazines and advertisements. Ward also examines the cultural and social reasons for the development and use of market research—particularly in regard to Curtis' readership of upper-income elites. The result weaves the stories of Parlin and Curtis into the changes taking place in American business and advertising in the early twentieth century.

'Hands-down the best book yet on the Green New Deal' - Jason Hickel

The idea of a Green New Deal was launched into popular consciousness by US Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018. It has become a watchword in the current era of global climate crisis. But what - and for whom - is the Green New Deal?

In this concise and urgent book, Max Ajl provides an overview of the various mainstream Green New Deals. Critically engaging with their proponents, ideological underpinnings and limitations, he goes on to sketch out a radical alternative: a 'People's Green New Deal' committed to decommodification, working-class power, anti-imperialism and agro-ecology.

Ajl diagnoses the roots of the current socio-ecological crisis as emerging from a world-system dominated by the logics of capitalism and imperialism. Resolving this crisis, he argues, requires nothing less than an infrastructural and agricultural transformation in the Global North, and the industrial convergence between North and South. As the climate crisis deepens and the literature on the subject grows, A People's Green New Deal contributes a distinctive perspective to the debate.

Is there life after capitalism? In this creatively argued follow-up to their book The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), J. K. Gibson-Graham offer already existing alternatives to a global capitalist order and outline strategies for building alternative economies.

A Postcapitalist Politics reveals a prolific landscape of economic diversity—one that is not exclusively or predominantly capitalist—and examines the challenges and successes of alternative economic interventions. Gibson-Graham bring together political economy, feminist poststructuralism, and economic activism to foreground the ethical decisions, as opposed to structural imperatives, that construct economic “development” pathways. Marshalling empirical evidence from local economic projects and action research in the United States, Australia, and Asia, they produce a distinctive political imaginary with three intersecting moments: a politics of language, of the subject, and of collective action. In the face of an almost universal sense of surrender to capitalist globalization, this book demonstrates that postcapitalist subjects, economies, and communities can be fostered. The authors describe a politics of possibility that can build different economies in place and over space. They urge us to confront the forces that stand in the way of economic experimentation and to explore different ways of moving from theory to action.

J. K. Gibson-Graham is the pen name of Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham, feminist economic geographers who work, respectively, at the Australian National University in Canberra and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The 1980s were one of the most turbulent decades in Central America’s history, a history that has been marked by more than its share of strife and upheaval. The wars, economic hardship, and political unrest and instability that have dominated news of the region have been years in the making, the products of flawed and inequitable economic, social, and political structures.
The International Commission for Central American Recovery and Development (ICCARD) was formed to provide a thorough diagnosis and analysis of Central America’s problems and to draft a comprehensive long-term strategy to move the region from decline to development. In this report ICCARD—through forty-five international experts in economics, public policy, management, and development it assembled for this purpose—attempts to rise above rhetoric and simplistic remedies to focus on well-reasoned, thorough, and realistic approaches to economic and social development.
This volume reviews the unequal access of marginal groups to political and economic participation, the precarious situation of Central American financial institutions, the international debt situation, the prospects for regional political and economic integration, and other aspects of regional development. Each of these challenges is addressed by specific recommendations to the Central American governments, the governments of the industrialized nations, and international organizations.

At the close of the Second World War, when industrialized nations faced serious trade and financial imbalances, delegates from forty-four countries met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in order to reconstruct the international monetary system. In this volume, three generations of scholars and policy makers, some of whom participated in the 1944 conference, consider how the Bretton Woods System contributed to unprecedented economic stability and rapid growth for 25 years and discuss the problems that plagued the system and led to its eventual collapse in 1971.

The contributors explore adjustment, liquidity, and transmission under the System; the way it affected developing countries; and the role of the International Monetary Fund in maintaining a stable rate. The authors examine the reasons for the System's success and eventual collapse, compare it to subsequent monetary regimes, such as the European Monetary System, and address the possibility of a new fixed exchange rate for today's world.

This is a timely review of the gold standard covering the 110 years of its operation until 1931, when Britain abandoned it in the midst of the Depression. Current dissatisfaction with floating rates of exchange has spurred interest in a return to a commodity standard. The studies in this volume were designed to gain a better understanding of the historical gold standard, but they also throw light on the question of whether restoring it today could help cure inflation, high interest rates, and low productivity growth.

The volume includes a review of the literature on the classical gold standard; studies the experience with gold in England, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and Canada; and perspectives on international linkages and the stability of price-level trends under the gold standard. The articles and commentaries reflect strong, conflicting views among hte participants on issues of central bank behavior, purchasing-power an interest-rate parity, independent monetary policies, economic growth, the "Atlantic economy," and trends in commodity prices and long-term interest rates. This is a thoughtful and provocative book.

An original theory of contemporary capitalist growth and its socio-ecological contradictions

Capital is pushing into motion ever larger global material flows. In doing so it has come to depend on massive expenditures of energy, putting to work fossil fuels and the machines they animate to transform the world, accumulate power and grow the economy. The ecological relations and crises of today’s societies are driven by the processes of extraction of the elements that come together as a throughput of material and energy flows controlled by capital and shaped by its imperative of valorization.

In A Social Ecology of Capital, Éric Pineault proposes an original model of the fossil social metabolism that has sustained the growth of advanced capitalism in the last century.

Drawing on ecological economics and critical political economy, the book analyses how the social structures of accumulation, production, consumption and waste determine and regulate the material flow and the accumulation of material artifacts. Showing how social relations shape the ecology of capital, the book highlights the contradictions humanity now faces.

A Society for International Development: Prospectus 1984 is a collection of studies that examines the current problems of world development in light of the past twenty-five years but goes beyond an examination of that experience to project practical and workable plans for the future. In this book the authors ask the question "what is development?" and they invite the people of the world to respond. Is development economic growth, or is it the creation of a new basis for preserving cultural identity? Who should determine developmental policies? On whom should we rely to see these policies through? Combining broad questions with specific case studies, the authors suggest that a new world order is both attainable and desirable.

As the twentieth century draws to a close, it is time to look back on an epoch of widespread turmoil, including two world wars, the end of the colonial era in world history, and a large number of international crises and conflicts. This book is designed to shed light on the causes and consequences of military-security crises since the end of World War I, in every region, across diverse economic and political regimes, and cultures. The primary aim of this volume is to uncover patterns of crises, conflicts and wars and thereby to contribute to the advancement of international peace and world order.
The culmination of more than twenty years of research by Michael Brecher and Jonathan Wilkenfeld, the book analyzes crucial themes about crisis, conflict, and war and presents systematic knowledge about more than 400 crises, thirty-one protracted conflicts and almost 900 state participants. The authors explore many aspects of conflict, including the ethnic dimension, the effect of different kinds of political regimes--notably the question whether democracies are more peaceful than authoritarian regimes, and the role of violence in crisis management. They employ both case studies and aggregate data analysis in a Unified Model of Crisis to focus on two levels of analysis--hostile interactions among states, and the behavior of decision-makers who must cope with the challenge posed by a threat to values, time pressure, and the increased likelihood that military hostilities will engulf them.
This book will appeal to scholars in history, political science, sociology, and economics as well as policy makers interested in the causes and effects of crises in international relations. The rich data sets will serve researchers for years to come as they probe additional aspects of crisis, conflict and war in international relations.
Michael Brecher is R. B. Angus Professor of Political Science, McGill University. Jonathan Wilkenfeld is Professor and Chair of the Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland. They are the coauthors of Crises in the Twentieth Century: A Handbook of International Crisis, among other books and articles.

 

 

 

A Telescope on Society seeks to convey the development of social science in the twentieth century through its interaction with a major new instrument for gathering data about society-survey research. The story of survey research and social science is largely told by social scientists affiliated with the Survey Research Center (SRC) and Institute for Social Research (IRS) at the University of Michigan about work done there. But the book also places this story in the broader context of survey-based social science in the United States and the world, to which many individuals and institutions beyond SRC, ISR, and Michigan have also contributed.

The chapters of this volume illustrate the impact that developments in survey research have had and continue to have on a broad range of social science disciplines and interdisciplinary areas ranging from political behavior and electoral systems to macroeconomics and individual income dynamics, mental and physical health, human development and aging, and racial/ethnic diversity and relationships.

The volume will speak to a wide audience of social science and survey research professionals and students interested in learning more about the broad history of survey-based social science and its contributions to understanding ourselves as social beings. It also seeks to convey how crucial institutional and public support are to the development of social science and survey research, as they have been to development in the natural, biomedical, and life sciences.

The five editors of this book are longtime research professors and colleagues in the Survey Research Center of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. James S. House is also Professor in the Department of Sociology; F. Thomas Juster is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Economics; Robert L. Kahn is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology and Department of Health Management and Policy; and Howard Schuman is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology; Eleanor Singer is Research Professor in the Survey Research Center, all at the University of Michigan. Professors House (1991-2001), Kahn (1970-76), and Schuman (1982-90) have each served as Director of the Survey Research Center; Professor Juster served (1976-86) as Director of the Institute for Social Research; and Professor Singer served (1999-2002) as Associate Director of the Survey Research Center.