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The author of this book asks us to prepare for the inevitable. Our society is going to die. What are you going to do about it? But the author also wants us to know that there's still reason for hope. In an immersive and mesmerizing discussion, this book considers what makes societies (throughout history) collapse. It points us to the historical examples of the Byzantine empire, the collapse of Somalia, the rise of Middle Eastern terrorism, the rise of drug cartels in Latin America, and the French Revolution, to explain how societal decline has common features and themes. While unveiling the past, the message to us about the present is searing. Through an assessment of past and current societies, the book offers us a new way of looking at societal growth and decline. With a broad panorama of bloody stories, unexpected historical riches, crime waves, corruption, and disasters, the reader is shown that although our society will, inevitably, die at some point, there's still a lot we can do to make it better and live a little longer. This inventive approach to an “end-of-the-world” scenario should be a warning. We're not there yet. The book concludes with a strategy of preserving and rebuilding so that we don't have to give a eulogy anytime soon.

This book weaves together historical narrative and quantitative bibliometric data to detail the path financial economists took in order to form one of the central theories of financial economics—the influential efficient-market hypothesis—which states that the behavior of financial markets is unpredictable. As the notorious quip goes, a blindfolded monkey would do better than a group of experts in selecting a portfolio of securities, simply by throwing darts at the financial pages of a newspaper. How did such a hypothesis come to be so influential in the field of financial economics? How did financial economists turn a lack of evidence about systematic patterns in the behavior of financial markets into a foundational approach to the study of finance? Each chapter focuses on these questions, as well as on collaborative academic networks, and on the values and affects that kept the networks together as they struggled to define what the new field of financial economics should be about. In doing so, the book introduces a new dimension—data analysis—to our understanding of the ways knowledge advances.

This book reveals how social contexts at various levels combine and interact to shape the experiences of transitional housing program users in two of the most prosperous cities of the global economy, Los Angeles and Tokyo. This is the first book to directly focus on exits from homelessness in American or Japanese cities, and it is the first targeted comparison of homelessness in two global cities. The book argues that homelessness should be understood primarily as a socially generated, traumatic, and stigmatizing predicament, rather than as a stable condition, identity, or culture. It pushes for movement away from the study of “homeless people” and “homeless culture” toward an understanding of homelessness as a condition that can be transcended at individual and societal levels. The book prescribes policy changes to end homelessness that include expanding subsidized housing to persons without disabilities and experiencing homelessness chronically, as well as taking broader measures to address vulnerabilities produced by labor markets, housing markets, and the rapid deterioration of social safety nets that often results from neoliberal globalization.

This book attempts to determine the differences between working-class and middle-class cultures in the United States. The book's author writes as a now middle-class professional with a working-class upbringing, explaining the various ways the two cultures conflict and complement each other, illustrated by his own lived experiences. Set in a historical framework that reflects on how both class cultures developed, adapted, and survived through decades of historical circumstances, the book challenges professional middle-class views of both the working-class and themselves. In the end, the author argues for the creation of a cross-class coalition of what he calls “standard-issue professionals” with both hard-living and settled-living working people and outlines some policies that could help promote such a unification if the two groups had a better understanding of their differences and how to use those differences to their advantage. The book mixes personal stories and theoretical concepts to give us a compelling look inside the current complex position of the working-class in American culture and a view of what it could be in the future.

Building Power from Below analyzes the success of Walmart workers in Chile. Retail and warehouse workers have achieved the seemingly unachievable. They have organized Walmart. How do we explain workers’ success in Chile, the cradle of neoliberalism, in challenging the world’s largest and most antiunion corporation? Chilean workers have spent years building grass roots organizations committed to principles of union democracy. While both retail and warehouse workers have successful unions, they have built different organizations due to their industry, workforce, and political histories. The independent retail worker unions are best characterized by what I call flexible militancy. These unions have less structural power, but have significant associational and symbolic power. While they have made notable bread and butter gains, their most notable successes have been in fighting for respect and dignity on the job. Warehouse workers by contrast have significant structural power. Their unions are best characterized by what I call strategic democracy. Their structural power has offered them the opportunity to “map production” and build strategic capacity. They have been especially successful in economic gains. While the model in Chile cannot necessarily be reproduced in different countries, we can certainly gain insights from their approaches, tactics, and strategies.

Over the past few decades, shrimp has transformed from a luxury food to a kitchen staple. While shrimp-loving consumers have benefited from the lower cost of shrimp, domestic shrimp fishers have suffered, particularly in Louisiana. Most of the shrimp that we eat today is imported from shrimp farms in China, Vietnam, and Thailand. The flood of imported shrimp has sent dockside prices plummeting, and rising fuel costs have destroyed the profit margin for shrimp fishing as a domestic industry. This book portrays the struggles that Louisiana shrimp fishers endure to remain afloat in an industry beset by globalization. The book offers a portrait of shrimp fishers' lives just before the BP oil spill in 2010, which helps us better understand what has happened since the Deepwater Horizon disaster. It shows that shrimp fishers go through a careful calculation of noneconomic costs and benefits as they grapple to figure out what their next move will be. Many willingly forgo opportunities in other industries to fulfill what they perceive as their cultural calling. Others reluctantly leave fishing behind for more lucrative work, but they mourn the loss of a livelihood upon which community and family structures are built. In this account of the struggle to survive amid the waves of globalization, the book focuses the analysis at the intersection of livelihood, family, and community and casts a bright light upon the cultural importance of the work that we do.

The number of elderly and disabled Americans in need of home health care is increasing annually, even as the pool of people — almost always women — willing to do this job gets smaller and smaller. This book takes readers inside the reality of home health care by following the lives of women training and working as home health aides in the South Bronx. The book examines home health care in detail, focusing on the women who tend to our elderly and disabled loved ones and how we fail to value their work. They are paid minimum wage so that we might be absent, getting on with our own lives. The book calls for a rethinking of home health care and explains why changes are urgent: the current system offers neither a good way to live nor a good way to die. By improving the job of home health aide, we can reduce income inequality and create a pool of qualified, competent home health care providers who would contribute to the well-being of us all. The book also serves as a guide into the world of our home health care system. Nearly 50 million US families look after an elderly or disabled loved one. The book explains the issues and choices they face. It explores the narratives, histories, and people behind home health care in the United States, examining how we might improve the lives of both those who receive care and those who provide it.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were approximately 1.7 million home health aides and personal and home care aides in the United States as of 2008. These home care aides are rapidly becoming the backbone of America's system of long-term care, and their numbers continue to grow. Often referred to as frontline care providers or direct care workers, home care aides—disproportionately women of color—bathe, feed, and offer companionship to the elderly and disabled in the context of the home. This book draws on observations of and interviews with aides working in Ohio and California to explore the physical and emotional labor associated with the care of others. Aides experience material hardships and find themselves negotiating social norms and affective rules associated with both family and work. This has negative implications for workers who struggle to establish clear limits on their emotional labor in the intimate space of the home. Aides often find themselves giving more, staying longer, even paying out of pocket for patient medications or incidentals; in other words, they feel emotional obligations expected more often of family members than of employees. However, there are also positive outcomes: some aides form meaningful ties to elderly and disabled patients. This sense of connection allows them to establish a sense of dignity and social worth in a socially devalued job. The case of home care allows us to see the ways in which emotional labor can simultaneously have deleterious and empowering consequences for workers.

This is a pioneering look at the female face of corporate gaming. The book describes a world whose enormous profitability is dependent on the labor of women assigned stereotypically female occupations. But behind the neon lies another world, peopled by thousands of remarkable women who assert their humanity in the face of gaming empires' relentless quest for profits. The casino women profiled here generally fall into two groups. Geoconda Arguello Kline, typical of the first, arrived in the United States in the 1980s fleeing the war in Nicaragua. Finding work as a Las Vegas hotel maid, she overcame her initial fear of organizing and joined with others to build the preeminent grassroots union in the nation—the 60,000-member Culinary Union—becoming in time its president. In Las Vegas, “the hottest union city in America,” the collective actions of union activists have won economic and political power for tens of thousands of working Nevadans and their families. The story of these women's transformation and their success in creating a union able to face off against global gaming giants forms the centerpiece of this book. Another group of women, dealers and middle managers among them, did not act. Fearful of losing their jobs, they remained silent, declining to speak out when others were abused, and in the case of middle managers, taking on the corporations' goals as their own. The book appraises the cost of their silence and examines the factors that pushed some women into activism and led others to accept the status quo.

There is constant pressure on hospitals to improve health care delivery and increase cost effectiveness. New initiatives are the order of the day in the dramatically different health care systems of the United States and Great Britain. Often these efforts are not successful. This book analyzes the successes and failures of efforts to improve hospitals and explains what factors make it likely that the implementation of reforms will be rewarded by positive transformation in a particular institution's day-to-day operation. The book's in-depth qualitative case studies of both top-down initiatives and changes first suggested by staff on the front lines of care point clearly to the importance of all hospital workers in effecting change and even influencing national policy. The book illuminates the critical role of workers, managers, and unions in enabling or constraining changes in policies and procedures and ensuring their implementation. It spotlights an Anglo-American model of hospital care and work organization, even while these countries retain their differences in access and payment. Entrenched professional roles, hierarchical workplace organization, and the sometimes-detached view of policymakers all shape the prospects for change in hospitals. The book provides important examples of how the dedication and imagination of the people who work in hospitals can make all the difference when it comes to providing quality health care even in a challenging economic environment.

This book examines the impact of globalization—and of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in particular—on the North American poultry industry, focusing on the displacement of African American workers in the southeast United States and workers in Mexico. The book documents how the transformation of U.S. poultry production in the 1980s increased its export capacity and changed the nature and consequences of labor conflict. It documents how globalization, and especially NAFTA, forced Mexico to open its commodity and capital markets, and eliminate state support of corporations and rural smallholders. As a consequence, many Mexicans were forced to abandon their no-longer-sustainable small farms, with some seeking work in industrialized poultry factories north of the border. By following this trail, the book breaks through the deadlocked immigration debate, highlighting the broader economic and political contexts of immigration flows. The narrative that undocumented workers take jobs that Americans don't want to do is too simplistic. The book argues instead that illegal immigration is better understood as a labor story in which the hiring of undocumented workers is part of a management response to the crises of profit making and labor-management conflict. The book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the implications of globalization for labor and how the externalities of free trade and neoliberalism become the social problems of nations and the tragedies of individuals.

In the past three decades, urban real estate megaprojects—massive, master planned, for profit urban developments—have captured the imagination of politicians and policy-makers across Asia. This book argues that state actors have been major drivers of these transformative projects, and have realized them through increasingly aggressive efforts to reclaim or acquire land, and to transfer land rights to corporate developers. State actors have specifically sought to monetize land as a strategy of state empowerment, a means to generate budget revenue, distribute patronage, and drive economic growth. This newly assertive state role in land markets constitutes the real estate turn in urban politics in the subtitle of the book. This real estate turn has significant implications for social, political, and ecological change in these societies. The book explores the varied spatial impacts of this real estate turn in three cities—Jakarta, Kolkata, and Chongqing—that differ in their systems of property rights and urban governance.

To cut costs and maximize profits, hospitals in the United States and many other countries are outsourcing such tasks as cleaning and food preparation to private contractors. To examine this transformation in the healthcare industry, this book looks at the consequences of outsourcing from two perspectives: its impact on patient safety and its role in increasing socioeconomic inequality. The book argues that outsourcing has been disastrous for the cleanliness of hospitals—leading to an increased risk of hospital-acquired infections, a leading cause of severe illness and death—as well as for the effective delivery of other hospital services and the workers themselves. Interviews with the low-wage workers who keep hospitals running uncover claims of exposure to near-constant risk of injury and illness. Many report serious concerns about the quality of the work due to understaffing, high turnover, poor training and experience, inadequate cleaning supplies, and on-the-job injuries. The book also presents policy recommendations for improving patient safety by reducing the risk of hospital-acquired infection and ameliorating the work conditions and quality of life of hospital support workers. It makes the case that hospital outsourcing exemplifies the trend towards “low-road” service-sector jobs that threatens to undermine society's social health, as well as the physical health and well-being of patients in health care settings globally.

Being laid off can be a traumatic event. The unemployed worry about how they will pay their bills and find a new job. In the American economy's boom-and-bust business cycle since the 1980s, repeated layoffs have become part of working life. This book finds that the new culture of corporate employment, changes to the job search process, and dual-income marriage have reshaped how today's skilled workers view unemployment. Through interviews with seventy-five unemployed and underemployed high-tech white-collar workers in the Dallas area over the course of the 2000s, the book shows that they have embraced a new definition of employment in which all jobs are temporary and all workers are, or should be, independent “companies of one.” Following the experiences of individual jobseekers over time, the book explores the central role that organized networking events, working spouses, and neoliberal ideology play in forging and reinforcing a new individualist, pro-market response to the increasingly insecure nature of contemporary employment. It also explores how this new perspective is transforming traditional ideas about masculinity and the role of men as breadwinners. Sympathetic to the benefits that this “company of one” ideology can hold for its adherents, the book also details how it hides the true costs of an insecure workforce and makes collective and political responses to job loss and downward mobility unlikely.

This book goes beyond the debate over federal immigration policy to examine the complicated terrain of immigrant worker rights. Federal law requires that basic labor standards apply to all workers, yet this principle clashes with increasingly restrictive immigration laws and creates a confusing bureaucratic terrain for local policymakers and labor advocates. The book examines this issue in two of the largest immigrant gateways in the country: San Jose, California, and Houston, Texas. The book reveals two cities with very different approaches to addressing the exploitation of immigrant workers—both involving the strategic coordination of a range of bureaucratic brokers, but in strikingly different ways. Drawing on the real-life accounts of ordinary workers, federal, state, and local government officials, community organizers, and consular staff, the book argues that local political contexts matter for protecting undocumented workers in particular. Providing a rich description of the bureaucratic minefields of labor law, and the explosive politics of immigrant rights, the book shows how the lessons learned from San Jose and Houston can inform models for upholding labor and human rights in the United States.

The book analyses two different forms of economic adversity faced by urban regions – external shocks and chronic economic distress. It then examines whether and why some regions are resilient to these different forms of adversity while others are not. The study includes quantitative analyses of the experience of all metropolitan areas from 1978-2014, including a special analysis of the Great Recession. It also includes intensive case studies of six regions. The case studies focus on the problems faced by each of the regions and the public policies adopted to deal with these problems. Two chapters are then devoted to an in depth discussion of whether the most common policies and/or practices employed were likely to have been successful. The final chapter asks what we can expect of explicit economic development policies as contributors to resilience and what are the lessons for economic development policy makers and practitioners?

This book draws attention to the impact of flexible scheduling on managerial power and workplace control. When we understand paid work as a power relationship, the book argues, we see how the spread of precarious scheduling constitutes flexible despotism; a novel regime of control within the workplace. The author of the book believes that flexible despotism represents a new domain of inequality, in which the postindustrial working class increasingly suffers a scheduling nightmare. By investigating two of the largest retailers in the world, the book uncovers how control in the contemporary “flexible firm” is achieved through the insidious combination of “flexible discipline” and “schedule gifts.” Flexible discipline provides managers with an arbitrary means by which to punish workers, but flexible scheduling also requires workers to actively win favor with managers in order to receive “schedule gifts”: more or better hours. The book concludes that the centrality of precarious scheduling to control means that for those at the bottom of the postindustrial labor market, the future of work will increasingly be one of flexible despotism.

The shift from manufacturing- to service-based economies has often been accompanied by the expansion of low-wage and insecure employment. Many consider the effects of this shift inevitable. This book contends that high pay and good working conditions are possible even for marginal service jobs. This outcome, however, depends on strong labor unions and encompassing collective bargaining institutions, which are necessary to give workers a voice in the decisions that affect the design of their jobs and the distribution of productivity gains. The book's conclusions are based on a comparative study of the changes that occurred in the organization of call center jobs in the United States and Germany following the liberalization of telecommunications markets. The research found that German managers more often took the “high road” than those in the United States, investing in skills and giving employees more control over their work. The book traces the difference to stronger institutional supports for workplace democracy in Germany. However, these democratic structures were increasingly precarious, as managers in both countries used outsourcing strategies to move jobs to workplaces with lower pay and weaker or no union representation. The book's findings show the importance of policy choices in closing off these escape routes, promoting broad access to good jobs in expanding service industries.

Why has old-age security become less solidaristic and increasingly tied to risky capitalist markets? Drawing on rich archival data that covers more than fifty years of American history, this book argues that the critical driver was policymakers' reactions to capitalist crises and their political imperative to promote capitalist growth. Pension development has followed three paths of marketization in America since the New Deal, each distinct but converging: occupational pension plans were adopted as an alternative to real increases in Social Security benefits after World War II; private pension assets were then financialized and invested into the stock market; and, since the 1970s, traditional pension plans have come to be replaced with riskier retirement plans. Comparing each episode of change, the book mounts a forceful challenge to common understandings of America's private pension system and offers an alternative political economy of the welfare state. The book weaves together a theoretical framework that helps to explain pension marketization with structural mechanisms that push policymakers to intervene to promote capitalist growth and avoid capitalist crises and contingent historical factors that both drive them to intervene in the particular ways they do and shape how their interventions bear on welfare change. By emphasizing the capitalist context in which policymaking occurs, the book turns our attention to the structural factors that drive policy change. The book urges the reader to reconsider how capitalism itself constrains policymaking.

Infectious disease is the most common cause of illness and death in Africa, yet health practitioners routinely fail to identify causative microorganisms in most patients. As a result, patients often do not receive the right medicine in time to cure them promptly even when such medicine is available, outbreaks are larger and more devastating than they should be, and the impact of control interventions is difficult to measure. Wrong prescriptions and prolonged infections amount to needless costs for patients and for health systems. This book argues that laboratory diagnostics are essential to the effective practice of medicine in Africa. The diversity of endemic life-threatening infections and limited public health resources in tropical Africa make the need for basic laboratory diagnostic support even more acute than in other parts of the world. This book gathers compelling case studies of inadequate diagnoses of diseases ranging from fevers to respiratory infections and sexually transmitted diseases. The inherited and widely prevalent health clinic model, which excludes or diminishes the hospital laboratory, is flawed, to often devastating effect. Fortunately, there are new technologies that make it possible to inexpensively implement testing at the primary care level. The book makes clear that routine use of appropriate diagnostic support should be part of every drug-delivery plan in Africa and that diagnostic development should be given high priority.