New Books in Economics

Did Abraham Maslow actually ever draw a pyramid of hierarchy of needs? Did Kurt Lewin devote substantial work on the development of a change management theory? Why do we omit or misrepresent important features of the work of Adam Smith, Max Weber or Frederick Winslow Taylor? What is the forgotten origin of Harvard Business School case method? I was joined by two of the authors—Stephen Cummings and Todd Bridgman— ofA New History of Management (Cambridge University Press, 2016), a great new book that answers those and many more questions. The book is a very important contribution to critical management studies that uncovers the inaccuracies and simplifications (if not actual inventions) that populate management and organization textbooks. A New History of Management is not a conspiracy theory, but rather it is the result of rigorous historical research on how the field of management studies was constructed in the past century. The authors argue that the existing narratives about how we should organize are built upon, and reinforce, a concept of “good management” derived from what is assumed to be a fundamental need to increase efficiency. But this assumption is based on a presentist, monocultural, and generally limited view of management’s past. This book is for both scholars and practitioners, tutors and students. Academics will be able to reflect critically on the nature of business education and on conformism in teaching and research. Practitioners and students will be able to challenge what they have been taught as a scientific rather than ideological artifact. Both students and scholars will be able to discuss alternative approaches for managing and organizing in the twenty-first century. Animated videos on the book are available on here. Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPEs permanent track on Critical Management Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

What role has the World Bank played in influencing health sector reform in Latin America? In her new book, Banking on Health: The World Bank and Health Sector Reform in Latin America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), Shiri Noy explores this question and more using mixed methods, including interviews, quantitative analysis, and review of policy documents and archives. The book starts off by providing readers a history of the World Bank and its role in health reform. Even though it may seem as if the World Bank would have a similar solution across countries, Noy finds that involvement and plans are more variable due to the systems already in place within these countries. Noy then moves on to an analysis of health expenditures, finding surprising results that further drove her research project and curiosity. The book then explores three countries in turn: Argentina, Peru, and Costa Rica. This book provides rich analysis of a complex social issue and set of systems, sending the reader away with both empirical and theoretical findings. This book will be enjoyed by sociologists broadly but particularly by historical sociologists or those studying Latin America specifically. This book will be of interest to political scientists and health scholars as well. Graduate level courses in health and stratification could utilize this book not only for understanding health reform and the role of the World Bank, but also in terms of the fascinating case studies of the three countries contained here. Sarah E. Patterson is a Sociology postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Taisu Zhang ties together cultural history, legal history, and institutional economics in The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Pre-Industrial China and England (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and offers a novel argument as to why Chinese and English pre-industrial economic development went down different paths. Late Imperial and Republican China (1860-1949) was dominated of Neo-Confucian social hierarchies, under which advanced age and generational seniority were the primary determinants of sociopolitical status. This allowed many poor but senior individuals to possess status and political authority highly disproportionate to their wealth. In comparison, in the more individualistic early modern England (1500-1700) landed wealth was a fairly strict prerequisite for high status and authority. This essentially excluded low-income individuals from secular positions of prestige and leadership. Zhang argues that this social difference had major consequences for property institutions and agricultural production. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In the last few weeks, minimum wage workers in 18 states saw their wages go up; in Maine a full dollar increase. Why states have taken the lead on raising the minimum wage is the topic of the new book from Christopher Witko and William Franko, The New Economic Populism: How States Respond to Economic Inequality (Oxford University Press, 2017). Witko is associate professor of political science at the University of South Carolina; Franko is assistant professor of political science at West Virginia University. In the book, they argue, despite rising inequality, the federal government has been unable to muster the will to address the problem. Instead, we are seeing many states actively addressing economic inequality, often through direct democracy. Franko and Witko show that the states that address inequality are not necessarily those with the greatest levels of inequality, but instead are those states where citizens are aware and concerned with growing inequality. They examine how various factors have shaped state policies that boost incomes at the bottom (the minimum wage and the Earned Income Tax Credit) and reduce incomes at the top (with top marginal tax rates) between 1987 and 2010. Heath Brown, associate professor, City University of New York, John Jay College and CUNY Grad Center, hosted this podcast. Please rate the podcast on iTunes and share it on social media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

For her new book Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence (Princeton University Press, 2017), Rachel Sherman conducted in-depth interviews with fifty wealthy New Yorkers—including hedge fund financiers, corporate lawyers, professors, artists, and stay at home mothers—to try to understand their lifestyle choices as consumers in society and their perception of privilege. In the media and popular imagination, the wealthy are often presented as self-serving people who single-mindedly accrue and display social advantages for themselves and their children. Sherman’s findings destroy this stereotype. Instead, she found that the wealthy believed in diversity and meritocracy. They were often reluctant to talk about their wealth and were conflicted about their position in a class-based society. The rich wanted to see themselves as hard working people who give back and raise children with good values. They longed to be considered morally worthy and generally depicted themselves as productive and prudent. Michael O. Johnston is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He earned his doctoral degree in Public Policy and Public Administration from Walden University. His most recent paper, to be presented at the upcoming American Society for Environmental History conference, is titled “Down Lovers Lane: A Brief History of Necking in Cars.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In Freedom From Work: Embracing Financial Self-Help in the United States and Argentina (Stanford University Press, 2017), Daniel Fridman explores what it means to be an economic subject in what different people call the new economy, the post-industrial economy, or neoliberal capitalism. Fridman begins his investigation by looking into a best-selling book in what he calls financial self-help, an ascendant genre of self-help that tries to teach its readers how they should think about the economy today and what their goals and ethics ought to be as actors in that new economy. Using ethnographic and interview methods, Fridman gets to know the people who practice the advice of these books, participating in their various seminars and fascinating financially-focused board-game meet-ups. Fridman unpacks the core ideas that animate this world and shows that, far from being an isolated ideology, the worldview posited by financial self-help can teach us a lot about how people are remaking themselves as economic actors in the world today. Adding another level of analysis, the book also has a comparative component as Fridman tracks these groups and ideas as they play out across different cultures in the United States and in Argentina. This book will excite anyone interesting in making sense of the profound human changes that come attendant with our rapidly changing economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Like many cities, Cleveland has gone through periods of decline and renewal, yet the process there has followed a process where these periods were not always obvious and often failed because of a lack of cohesiveness among civic leaders, both public and private. In his new book Believing in Cleveland: Managing Decline in ‘The Best Location in the Nation’ (Temple University Press, 2017), J. Mark Souther, a professor of history at Cleveland State University, reviews the city’s attempts to revitalize from post-World War II into the 1970s. He shows that many of the plans developed had issues that almost doomed them to failure before they were even completed. Mark’s book is a great study of a Rust Belt city and its attempts to believe in itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In this interview, Carlo D’Ippoliti and Andrea Bernardi interview Franklin Obeng-Odoom who teaches urban economics and political economy in the School of Built Environment at the University of Technology, Sydney. In 2016, Dr Obeng-Odoom won the Patrick Welch Prize awarded by the Association for Social Economics. He also won the EAEPE-Kapp Prize 2017 for “Marketising the commons in Africa: the case of Ghana” Review of Social Economy 74 (4), 390-419. He has recently published Reconstructing Urban Economics: Towards a Political Economy of the Built Environment (Zed Books, 2016) The shift of world populations into cities and the increasing concentration of activities in urban areas have generated new debates about cities as well as rejuvenating old debates, turning them into global concerns. The economics of cities and regions has, therefore, attained a particularly important status in the twenty-first century. Yet many writers on urban economic issues have never formally studied the subject. Many are mainstream economists who apply their general (equilibrium) economics to cities, but most of them have very little appreciation of the political economy of cities and much less understanding of the built environment, its history, complexities, and peculiarities. The result is the rise of a highly mathematical, mystical urban economics abstracted from critical political, institutional, and social processes at a time when real-world urban economics is urgently needed. This book seeks to offer a corrective to this state of affairs, and to generate further interest in critical real-world urban economics. Through the analysis, exposition, and critique of the urban world in which we live, the book shows fundamental contradictions in the wisdom that more mainstream urban economists have offered over the years. It offers clear alternatives that show that another urban world is possible. Carlo D’Ippoliti is associate professor of political economy at Sapienza University of Rome, and editor of the open access economics journals PSL Quarterly Review and Moneta e Credito. Within EAEPE he is the research area coordinator of History of Political Economy; more info at his website www.carlodippoliti.eu. Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPEs permanent track on Critical Management Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Are iPhones or homes bankrupting Americans? Joe Cohen‘s new book, Financial Crisis in American Households: The Basic Expenses That Bankrupt the Middle Class (Praeger, 2017), presents data and discussion on the financial status of American households. The book considers whether capitalism or government policies are to blame. Cohen considers the historical changes that have taken place in America, including the post WWII economy, globalization, and technological advances. Rather than focus on individual spending, Cohen argues that we need to take a structural approach and also do some cross-country comparison to truly understand the financial reality of American households. This book also provides interesting discussion around how we even measure financial well-being and hardship, for instance the distinction between officially poor according to federal government limits versus relative poverty. Overall, using clear examples and data illustrations, Cohen presents a comprehensive and historical overview of the financial states of American households and provides readers with some important takeaways and questions that we must ask ourselves if we want to build a better America. This book will be enjoyed by sociologists, but also those interested in economics and public policy. It would be good for any social inequality or stratification class. It provides clear examples and typologies, which would be useful for any higher level undergraduate sociology class. Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at The University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Emily C. Nacol has written a fascinating interrogation of the idea of risk, the concept of vulnerability, and the evolution of probabilistic thinking as conceived of and explored by four of the preeminent British thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nacol’s book, An Age of Risk: Politics and Economy in Early Modern Britain (Princeton University Press, 2016) examines the political, economic, and epistemological works of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith. Each thinker’s ideas are explored in regard to the way they consider risk, which itself was a fairly new concept and had grown out of maritime concerns. An Age of Risk traces the concept itself within political thinking, and why it grows into an important dimension of the works by these theorists. Nacol explains that Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Smith thought differently about risk and, as a result, structured their theories in distinct ways. She examines how Hobbes and Locke are generally concerned with minimizing risk, and their thinking is designed to more directly try to limit risk or alleviate the potential within political society and the economy. In the analysis of Hume’s work and of Smith’s work, Nacol finds a different approach to risk especially in Hume’s estimation that humans will inevitably have to contend with risk and uncertainty, and this leads to the consideration of political emotions like anxiety and fear. Smith, Nacol notes, moves into the realm of probabilistic thinking in his work as he integrates considerations of risk and uncertainty into his political and economic thought. All four thinkers provide lenses through which to consider this concept of vulnerability and what it means to an individual, and to political and economic orders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Every young generation inspires a host of comparisons—usually negative ones—with older generations. Whether preceding a criticism or punctuating one, “kids these days” is a common utterance. Perhaps because of the ubiquity of the internet and their heavy presence on it, Millennials have been the most parsed and monitored generation as its members are still in the process of coming of age in history. Stereotypes abound in the media and popular culture: Millennials are lazy, entitled, narcissistic, and immature. Synthesizing an array of social science research that has been conducted not just on this cohort but on the society they find themselves struggling to navigate, writer Malcolm Harris in Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials (Little, Brown and Company, 2017) aims to get readers to question these stereotypes and myths and instead think about how Millennials are trying to survive within today’s shifting social structures and conditions. More than any other generation, Millennials have been raised to think of everything they do as a way to build human capital and invest in their own future. And they do so at time in American history when higher education is becoming increasingly expensive as wages are declining, work is becoming more precarious and less stable, and the future of the social safety net is showing signs of either eroding or at least completely transforming in the future. In short, the book refreshingly considers the forces that have helped shape who Millennials are and why they behave and think as they do. With luck, it will encourage a discussion of the root causes behind serious problems that this young cohort confronts (precarity, youth poverty, over-medication, and over-work) and their possible solutions instead of the same tired stereotypes. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale mens barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012) and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Alice Echols is a professor of history and the Barbra Streisand Chair of Contemporary Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. In her book Shortfall: Family Secrets, Financial Collapse and a Hidden History of American Banking (New Press, 2017) Echols offers a narrative and social history of American capitalism in the years of and preceding the Great Depression by focusing not on Wall Street but on Main Street and the men who ran hundreds of small-town building and loan associations across the nation. Situated in Colorado Springs she reconstructs the life of her shrewd and ambitious grandfather Walter Davis, who emerged from virtually nowhere to become a small town finance man running the City Savings Building and Loan Association. He gained and betrayed the trust of hundreds of depositors who invested their life savings to secure the American dream of homeownership and financial security. They found their lives destroyed by an unregulated industry and Davis’s dishonest practices. Shortfall is both the story of American capitalism told from the bottom up and of Echols uncovering her own family secrets of ill-gotten gain, decadence, scandal, loss, and ultimate despair that reflected the lives of millions across the nation. Shortfall offers lessons in the dangers associated with small-town finance men, land speculators, depositors in denial, ill-equipped investigators, inexperienced judges and an unregulated financial marketplace. Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology is forthcoming in 2018 from Oxford University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In his new book, The Broken Decade: Prosperity, Depression and Recovery in New Zealand, 1928-39 (Otago University Press, 2016), historian Malcolm McKinnon, adjunct associate professor at Victoria University, explores the critical decade of the 1930s in New Zealand’s history and national memory. Utilizing archival records, statistics, and artistic representations, McKinnon details the efforts of New Zealand’s government and people to cope with the unprecedented conditions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

I was joined by Eli Cook from Israel to talk about his amazing new book The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life (Harvard University Press, 2017). While economists and politicians are busy discussing alternative measures of progress, Eli Cook traces the long history that brought us to use the GDP as a measure of growth, success, power, wellbeing. This is not only the history of technical metrics, this is the history of ideas and of a dominant paradigm. According to the author the invention of GDP was the final step not only in the pricing of progress but also the capitalization of American life. How did Americans come to quantify their society’s progress and well-being in units of money? In today’s GDP-run world, prices are the standard measure of not only our goods and commodities but our environment, our communities, our nation, even our self-worth.The Pricing of Progress traces the long history of how and why we moderns adopted the monetizing values and valuations of capitalism as an indicator of human prosperity while losing sight of earlier social and moral metrics that did not put a price on everyday life. Eli Cook roots the rise of economic indicators in the emergence of modern capitalism and the contested history of English enclosure, Caribbean slavery, American industrialization, economic thought, and corporate power. He explores how the maximization of market production became the chief objective of American economic and social policy. As economic elites quantified the nation as a for-profit, capitalized investment, the progress of its inhabitants, free or enslaved, came to be valued according to their moneymaking abilities. The book is a beautiful and enjoyable account of how capitalism shaped our societies: not only introducing a new social order of production and consumption but also through a new way of measuring the value of our economies, of our societies and, eventually, of ourselves. Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Tommie Shelby is Caldwell Titcomb Professor of African and African-American Studies, and Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. His research focuses on political equality and problems of economic, social, and criminal justice. His most recent book is Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform, which is published by Harvard University Press. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

I was joined by Pasquale Tridico, Professor of Political Economy at Roma Tre University in Italy. His latest book, Inequality in Financial Capitalism, was published by Routledge in 2017. The issue of inequality has regained attention in the economic and political debate. This is due to both an increase in income inequality, in particular among rich countries but not only, and an increasing interest in this topic by researchers, policy makers and political movements. In this book, the author presents figures and insights on several possible causes of inequality but focuses on the role of financial capitalism, characterised by the strong dependency of economies on the financial sector, by the intensification of international trade and capital mobility, and by the flexibilisation of labour markets, the reduction of wage shares and a declining welfare redistribution. A conversation on such a complex topic was also the opportunity to briefly mention collateral issues such as the financial crisis, the failure of the Occupy Wall Street protests, and Brexit. Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In The Economization of Life (Duke University Press, 2017), Michelle Murphy pulls apart the late modern concept of “population” to show the lives this concept has produced and continues to produce, and, importantly, the lives it has failed to allow under the banner of postwar development projects. In the post-WWII period of decolonization, experts and state planners in the Global North tested in the real-world the hypotheses of Demographic Transition Theory (industrialization leads to few births which leads to “better” lives). In doing so, they repackaged the racist logic of earlier eugenicist definitions of population in the postwar period by harnessing the concept of population, not to environmental limits, but to economic optimization. Murphy show how this postwar “regime of valuation” played out on the ground through an extended study of population management and family planning projects in Bangladesh. Murphy’s work—which combines a new history of the population concept with an original study of lives lived (and not lived) in Bangladesh—demonstrates her broader point: namely that seemingly abstract, large scale elements of late-capitalist infrastructures of industrial production depend upon emotional, affective sensibilities about sex and reproduction. By telling a history of expert concepts of population, the infrastructures that perform it, the affects that pulse through it, and forms of life it continues to produce and prevent, Michelle Murphy invites readers to speculate towards other worlds—and other words. Murphy teaches us why population is an “intolerable concept” and she does the work of imagining other, more just, more apt words we might use in place of “population.” She suggests that her term “distributed reproduction” might help shift our attention, our thinking, and our practices towards more emancipatory collective responses and responsibilities—given our own existence as part of infrastructures of racism and violence. Laura Stark is Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University and is Associate Editor of the journal History & Theory. Laura’s first book, Behind Closed Doors: IRBs and the Making of Ethical Research, was published in 2012 by University of Chicago Press. Her current research explores how a market for healthy civilian “human subjects” emerged in law, science, and popular imagination in the post-World War Two period. It is based on a vernacular archive she created with more than 100 “normal control” research subjects and scientists who took part in postwar experiments at the US National Institutes of Health, now archived at Countway Library for the History of Medicine. Overall, Stark’s work uses social theory to map the intersections of science, morality and the modern state in a global context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In 1898, a new metropolis emerged from the consolidation of New York City with East Bronx, Brooklyn, Staten Island and the western part of Queens County. In Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919 (Oxford University Press, 2017), Mike Wallace describes the first two decades of this city’s expanded history, a period in which it led and embodied the developments that were taking place nationally. As he explains, consolidation was a trend throughout America during this era. Big business was at the forefront of this, as Wall Street provided the financing necessary for numerous industries to form dominant corporate combinations through mergers and takeovers. The enormous wealth controlled by these titans was prominent throughout the city, both in the new skyscrapers rising to dominate the city’s skyline and in the cultural and educational institutions that flourished with infusions of their capital. Similar mergers took place in many sectors and aspects of city life, from entertainment to labor, with even the criminal underworld consolidating in a reflection of the times. Wallace’s book chronicles all of this, as well as the developments in the many communities of a richly diverse city that during these years experienced dramatic growth and changes wrought by a global war. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

This interview is a conversation with the author, Marc Lavoie, and his colleague Dany Lang. We discuss Post-Keynesian Economics: New Foundations (Edward Elgar, 2014) and Marc’s contribution to the heterodox-mainstream debate in economics. The book provides an exhaustive account of post-Keynesian economics and of the developments that have occurred in post-Keynesian theory and in the world economy over the last twenty years. Topics covered include open-economy issues, the methodological foundations of heterodox economics, consumer theory, firms and pricing, money and credit, effective demand and employment, inflation theory, and growth theories. The interview focuses on the introductory chapter, making the conversation accessible also to an audience of non-economists. The book has been awarded the 2017 Myrdal Prize by EAEPE, the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy, ex aequo with Wolfram Elsner, Torsten Heinrich, Henning Schwardt, The Microeconomics of Complex Economies, Evolutionary, Institutional, Neoclassical, and Complexity Perspectives. Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on Critical Management Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Volatility. Instability. Insecurity. Precarity. There’s a burgeoning lexicon seeking to capture the grim economic state of more and more Americans. Join us as Jonathan Morduch describes what he and Rachel Schneider discovered when they got 253 households to track their every bit of income and their every expense over the course of a year. The results—showcased in The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty (Princeton University Press, 2017)—are sobering, and should cause us to reevaluate what we think we know about poverty and inequality in postindustrial America. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford University Press, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In the twenty first century, violence at work is often described in the context of a lone employee “snapping” and harming coworkers or management. In his new book, Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Violence at Work in the North American Auto Industry, 1960-1980 (University of Illinois Press/UBC Press, 2017), Jeremy Milloy argues that violence in the workplace has a much deeper and more complicated history, and that the stereotype of the quiet loner suddenly deciding to commit violence against their peers conceals much more than it reveals. In short, violence on the job has a history. The shift from violence committed by management against striking workers to individualized violence in the form of shootings and assaults among workers occurred as labor unions lost power and splintered into radical and more mainstream factions. By examining the often hyper-masculine heyday of the mid-twentieth-century auto industry, Milloy makes a strong case for a broader definition of what constitutes violence at work under capitalism. In the words of one attorney reflecting on a workplace shooting in a Detroit Chrysler factory, “Chrysler pulled the trigger.” The structure of auto manufacturing work itself bred a culture of violence on the factory floor. In both Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario, race, gender, and labor dynamics mediated the relationships between employees in the sprawling auto factories that straddled the Canadian-American border. Blood, Sweat, and Fear tells the stark story of life and death within those plants as the nature of work and labor changed in the late twentieth century. Jeremy Milloy earned his PhD at Simon Fraser University and is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at Trent University. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In this interview, two of the three authors (Wolfram Elsner and Torsten Heinrich) of The Microeconomics of Complex Economies: Evolutionary, Institutional, Neoclassical, and Complexity Perspectives (Elsevier, 2014) discuss their new book of Microeconomics and position it in the heterodox-orthodox debate. This formal, accessible treatment of complexity goes beyond the scopes of neoclassical and mainstream economics. The Microeconomics of Complex Economies uses game theory, modeling approaches, formal techniques, and computer simulations to teach useful, accessible approaches to real modern economies. It covers topics of information and innovation, including national and regional systems of innovation; clustered and networked firms; and open-source/open-innovation production and use. This interview, as the final chapter on policy perspectives and decisions, explains the value of the toolset as the highly interdependent economy of the 21st century demands a reconsideration of economic theories. The book has been awarded the 2017 Myrdal Prize by EAEPE, the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy, Ex aequo with Marc Lavoie for his book on Post-Keynesian Economics: New Foundations (Edward Elgar, 2014). Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPEs permanent track on Critical Management Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In her new book, Selling under the Swastika: Advertising and Commercial Culture in Nazi Germany (Stanford University Press, 2013), Pamela Swett, Professor of History at McMaster University is the first comprehensive examination of commercial advertising in the Third Reich. Swett argues that advertisements played a much greater role in normalizing the Third Reich then previously thought. She highlights how advertisers at all levels enjoyed a great deal of freedom to sell their products, while using the National Socialist message not because they were forced, but because consumers were attuned to it. Swett’s book is a fascinating look at the advertising and consumer industries during the Third Reich. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

“Marriage is the foundation of a successful society,” proclaimed the Clinton-era welfare reform bill. Since then, national and state governments have spent nearly a billion dollars on programs designed to encourage poor and low-income Americans to get married and to remain married. But do any of these initiatives achieve their stated goals? To find out, listen to our interview with Jennifer Randles, author of Proposing Prosperity?: Marriage Education Policy and Inequality in America (Columbia University Press, 2016), who knows first-hand what happens in such programs, bringing important new insight into evaluating claims that there is a “success sequence” that will bring people out of poverty. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford University Press, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

There may not be a more ubiquitous presence on American highways than the truck. The images are iconic: eighteen-wheelers with muddy steel and chrome, and a driver in aviator sunglasses and a mesh hat. But as Steve Viscelli, political sociologist and lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, shows in his new book, The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream (University of California Press, 2016), the romantic idea of the hardworking, solitary truck driver making a decent, honest living for his family must be laid to rest. Once among the best blue-collar jobs in the country with one of the strongest labor unions, the deregulation and subsequent greedy practices of the trucking industry turned it into a “bad” one, with very low pay, very long and unpredictable hours, and awful work conditions. Aware of these realities, the trucking industry does a masterful job of creating and maintaining the illusion that being a truck driver is still a path toward upward mobility, an honest and true working-class version of the American Dream. They structure work so that workers play a “miles game” of always trying to maximize time for a little extra pay, and push the allure of becoming an independent contractor, which only indebts them to their company. Becoming a trucker himself, Viscelli vividly shows his own frustrations in training and out on the road, caught up in the game and hearing stories of workers who haven’t seen their families in weeks and are still struggling to make ends meet. Through an illuminating case, Viscelli addresses the timeless questions: “Why do people work bad jobs?” and “Why do they stay in them for as long as they do?” His answers get at the heart not just of a single occupation and industry, but also of work in today’s economy. Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale mens barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012) and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The Routledge Handbook of Heterodox Economics: Theorizing, Analyzing, and Transforming Capitalism (Routledge, 2017), a new handbook of economics has been published; it is a very special one. In this interview, Carlo D’Ippoliti, one of the three co-editors, discusses with us why a handbook of heterodox economics was needed. Contributions throughout the handbook explore different theoretical perspectives including: Marxian-radical political economics; Post Keynesian-Sraffian economics; institutionalist-evolutionary economics; feminist economics; social economics; Regulation theory; the Social Structure of Accumulation approach; and ecological economics. Several contributions explain the structural properties and dynamics of capitalism, as well as propose economic and social policies for the benefit of the majority of the population. This book aims, firstly, to provide realistic and coherent theoretical frameworks to understand the capitalist economy in a constructive and forward-looking manner. Secondly, it delineates the future directions, as well as the current state, of heterodox economics. Both graduate students and academics will enjoy reading it. The interview ends with Carlo D’Ippoliti arguing in favour of a more pluralist approach to economics in research, teaching and policymaking. Andrea Bernardi is Senior Lecturer in Employment and Organization Studies at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. He holds a doctorate in Organization Theory from the University of Milan, Bicocca. He has held teaching and research positions in Italy, China and the UK. Among his research interests are the use of history in management studies, the co-operative sector, and Chinese co-operatives. His latest project is looking at health care in rural China. He is the co-convener of the EAEPE’s permanent track on ‘Critical Management Studies.’ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In From Head Shops to Whole Foods: The Rise and Fall of Activist Entrepreneurs (Columbia University Press, 2017), historian Joshua Clark Davis offers an unconventional history of the 1960s and 1970s by uncovering the work of activist entrepreneurs. These activists offered alternatives to conventional profit-driven corporate business models by opening up their own small businesses. It’s a fascinating account that challenges the mistaken idea that activism and political dissent are inherently antithetical to participation in the marketplace. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Beer has been a part of human civilization dating back to its beginnings. In summarizing the role it has played over the millennia, Johan Swinnen and Devin Briski’s book Beeronomics: How Beer Explains the World (Oxford University Press, 2017) reveals how the evolving roles the beverage has played exposes broader trends in the economy and society. As Briski explains in this podcast, while beer has been consumed since at least as early as Sumerian times, it wasn’t until the addition of hops as a preservative by brewers in Europe during the Middle Ages that beer became commercially viable. The development of the industry reflected more general trends, from the economies of scale that took place during the Industrial Revolution to the impact of television on small brewers in the United States in the mid-20th century. Today the industry is characterized both by a few multinational conglomerates and numerous craft brewers whose products provide a diverse counterpoint from the mass-produced lagers of the large companies. Briski reveals how these products reflect the different trends of consumption throughout the world, from the increased focus upon quality consumption in the United States and western Europe to the rapid expansion of beer consumption in places like Russia, China, and Brazil. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The government of the Philippines has for decades encouraged its citizens to seek work abroad and send money back to the country in remittances. But in recent years it has increasingly sought to entice Filipinos who have settled abroad to come home, not only for tourism but also for retirement. In Migrant Returns: Manila, Development, and Transnational Connectivity (Duke University Press, 2017), Eric J. Pido travels with Filipino Americans as they try to reimagine their lives and lifestyles in the gated communities and malls of Manila, and beyond. Along the way he encounters real estate agents, bureaucrats, investors and family members of returnees, or balikbayan, all in one way or another participating in attempts at selling an idea of home, one that for balikbayan from the US in particular evokes feelings both of homecoming and of a homeliness that they associate with their years spent on the other side of the Pacific. Eric J. Pido joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about histories of departing from and returning to the Philippines, segregated suburbs and walled megacities, the balikbayan economy, returning migrants’ anxieties and hopes, medical tourism, and 1950s nostalgia. You may also be interested in: Megha Amrith, Caring for Strangers: Filipino Medical Workers in Asia Ulla Berg, Mobile Selves: Race, Migration, and Belonging in Peru and the US Nick Cheesman is a fellow at the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Claudia Leeb’s new book, Power and Feminist Agency in Capitalism: Toward a New Theory of the Political Subject (Oxford University Press, 2017), takes up pressing issues within contemporary political and feminist theory, especially as we consider the point of action and the instance of movement. This book marries together important questions within political theory, feminist theory, and economics with specific focus on the idea of subject and how an individual subject may be poised towards action, particularly in context of moving towards a more equitable political and economic system. Leeb’s book, which theorizes about the contested nature of the political subject, explores the concept of the political subject in outline as she has titled this theory. This reinterpretation of the political subject is as an incomplete political subject, given the contested interpretations of this concept in political theory, feminist theory, and psychological theory. The text goes on to examine key political and feminist theorists in framing the positioning of the political subject, putting Marx, Adorno, and Lacan and other Frankfurt School theorists into conversation with feminist theorists. Leeb, as a result of theorizing the capacity for action by the political subject in outline, explores the tension between theory and practice, noting this mediated relationship, and delving into why there is such tension between theory and practice, especially within the academe. The issue of transformative agency, especially a kind of intersectional transformative agency that integrates both feminist and economic impulses, is at the center of Leeb’s analysis and presses on some of the limits of theory as disconnected from the practice of politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, there has been a widespread affirmation of economic ideologies that conceive the market as an autonomous sphere of human practice. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, this idea has been countered by calls for reforms of financial markets and for the consideration of moral values in economic practice. Religion and the Morality of the Market: Anthropological Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2017) intervenes in these debates by showing how neoliberal market practices engender new forms of religiosity, and how religiosity shapes economic actions. Daromir Rudnyckyj, one of the volumes editors, is Associate Professor of anthropology at the University of Victoria. Hillary Kaell co-hosts NBIR and is Associate Professor of Religion at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Tore C. Olsson‘s Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside (Princeton University Press, 2017) tells a remarkable and under-appreciated story. It’s about how, in the 1930s and 40s, a group of reformers in the US and in Mexico undertook projects to transform the rural worlds of their respective countries in the name of social justice and agrarian productivity. Olsson demonstrates how closely the histories of Mexico and the American South in particular paralleled one another, and how parallel histories yielded parallel problems, including mass rural poverty, landlessness, and economic deprivation. Whether in Mississippi or Michoacan, Tennessee or Tabasco, the rural masses saw few tangible benefits in the economic miracle heralded by boosters in Atlanta and Mexico City, Professor Olsson writes. And so in that decade historians sometimes like to call the long 1930s, Mexican and US reformers crossed the border again and again, to share models and ideas, and to undertake projects of rural revitalization through varying methods and with varying results. Olsson’s book recovers a world in which like-minded Mexicans and Americans worked together, toward what they hoped would be a more just world, in concert and in solidarity. Tore C. Olsson is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Monica Black is Lindsay Young Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In 2017 half of the world’s wealth belongs to the top 1% of the population. In his new book, The Great Leveler Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2017), Walter Scheidel explores economic inequality and sets forth the provocative thesis that only violence and catastrophes have truly reduced it throughout history. Scheidel delves in what he labels as the “Four Horsemen” of leveling—mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues—and how they have persisted in history and proved the most efficient ways in reducing what seems to be an inevitable trend in human history. Walter Scheidel teaches at Stanford University. The interview is part of a series produced by the Crisis, Extremes, and Apocalypse Research Network and the New Books Network. Audrey Borowski is a historian of ideas and a doctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. She is also the founder and lead convener of the ‘Crisis, extremes and Apocalypse’ Research Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

On September 3, 1991, a fire erupted at the Imperial Foods factory in the small town of Hamlet, North Carolina. Twenty-five people died behind the factory’s locked doors that morning. Most of the victims were women, and about half of them were black. In The Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives (The New Press, 2017), Temple University history professor Bryant Simon lays out the structural failures in the American and global economic systems which killed those workers. As economic growth slowed and inflation rose in the 1970s, many Americans grew disillusioned with the New Deal era promise of high wages and a robust regulatory state. Instead, Simon argues, Americans began to embrace a culture of cheap, ready-made, products and government policies which benefitted business owners, rather than employees. Food sat high atop the list of cheap items Americans craved, particularly chicken which, just before the Hamlet fire, surpassed beef as the meat most commonly consumed by American diners. It was no coincidence that the Imperial plant in Hamlet processed chicken strips and tenders for sale at national chain grocery stores. Nor was it a coincidence that Imperial relocated to North Carolina in the 1980s, as the state defunded regulatory systems and opened its doors to businesses looking for any edge in a hyper competitive market. The Hamlet Fire is a remarkable and ultimately sad story about the hidden costs of American consumption and global systems of production at the end of the twentieth century. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In his new book, The Pilbara: From the Deserts Profits Come (UWA Publishing, 2017), Bradon Ellem, Professor of Employment Relations at the University of Sydney Business School, explores the Pilbara region of Western Australia, a mining region central to the Australian economy and the Australian imagination, but one that few Australians truly know in depth. Focusing on the workers of the Pilbara, Ellem argues that despite the region’s history of unionism, the significant power-grab by companies in the 1980s meant that the great mining boom of the early 21st century favored company profits over union prophets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In the decades following the end of the Second World War, the British economy evolved from a manufacturing-based economy to one driven by service industries, most notably finance. As Aled Davies explains in his book The City of London and Social Democracy: The Political Economy of Finance in Post-war Britain (Oxford University Press, 2017), this shift posed a challenge to the prevailing concept of social democracy in Britain, one to which politicians, particularly those on the left, struggled to respond. With British industry facing growing competition abroad, successive governments in the 1960s and 1970s sought investment capital in order to maintain that sector’s viability. Efforts were made to encourage institutional investors such as pension and insurance funds to devote more of their industrial investment to long-term development rather than short-term profit, while many on the left of the Labour Party in the 1970s advocated nationalizing the banks as a means of channeling resources into the sector. Such proposals, however, were countered with calls to liberalize and deregulate the financial sector, many of which were advanced by trade associations and other bodies within the financial sector whose growing influence reflected the increasing importance of the City both as a part of the economy and within national politics. Their success in resisting intervention, Davies concludes, presaged the market-driven approach pursued by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government after 1979, one which continues to define British policy down to the present day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Analyzing land policy, labor, and legal history, Masterless Men: Poor Whites in the Antebellum South (Cambridge University Press, 2017) reveals what happens to excess workers when a capitalist system is predicated on slave labor. With the rising global demand for cotton – and thus, slaves – in the 1840s and 1850s, the need for white laborers in the American South was drastically reduced, creating a large underclass who were unemployed or underemployed. These poor whites could not compete – for jobs or living wages – with profitable slave labor. Though impoverished whites were never subjected to the daily violence and degrading humiliations of racial slavery, they did suffer tangible socio-economic consequences as a result of living in a slave society. The author examines how these ‘masterless’ men and women threatened the existing Southern hierarchy and ultimately helped push Southern slaveholders toward secession and civil war. Keri Leigh Merritt is an independent scholar from Atlanta, Georgia. She received her B.A. in History and Political Science from Emory University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in History from the University of Georgia. Her research generally focuses on race and class in American history. Merritt’s work on poverty and inequality has garnered multiple awards, and she also writes historical pieces for the public, with letters and essays appearing in Aeon, on BillMoyers.com, and in The New York Times. In addition to Masterless Men, Merritt has a forthcoming co-edited book on southern labor history with University of West Georgia historian Matthew Hild tentatively titled Reviving Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power. She is also currently conducting research for two additional book-length projects; the first is on black resistance in the vastly understudied Reconstruction era, and the second project examines the changing role of law enforcement in the mid-nineteenth century south. Masterless Men: Poor Whites in the Antebellum South is her first book. James P. Stancil II is an educator, multimedia journalist, and writer. He is also the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area NGO dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. He can be reached most easily through his LinkedIn page or at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Religion is big business nowadays. Within the global context of Muslim consumers Islamic commodities have become increasingly popular over the past few decades. Faegheh Shirazi, Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, explores the industrial and discursive production of halal products in Brand Islam: The Marketing and Commodification of Piety (University of Texas Press, 2016). In the wake of increased insecurity due to the rise of anti-Muslim sentiments and policy, Islamic-branded products have become an essential means for shaping and expressing social identities. The commodification of a religious orientation has produced a halal consumerism that pervades the branding and marketing logic of several industries. In our conversation we discuss the corporatization of the halal food industry, Islamic products and non-Muslim publics, the politics of slaughtering animals, Islamic branded toys, such as hijabi dolls, cosmetic and toiletry products, and the Muslim fashion industry. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The relationship between religion and economic activity has attracted generations of scholars working in myriad settings. In recent years, many have turned to questions of how Islamic ideas are generative of economic activity, to Islamic finance and capital, and to the relationship between contemporary Islam and capitalism more broadly. In Corporate Islam: Sharia and the Modern Workplace (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Patricia Sloane-White builds on this work by asking “not only how the spread of global capitalism transforms the lives of Muslims… but how capitalism empowers the spread of Islam.” Drawing from interviews and ethnographic fieldwork over a seven-year period, and a wealth of knowledge from over two decades of research in Malaysia, Sloane-White argues that the “sharia space” of the today’s corporate Islamic workplace is a third domain between the public and the private in which employees must submit to the guidance of their professional and personal lives by men who insist that their businesses can and must be both profitable and pious. Patricia Sloane-White joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to talk about Malaysia’s self-styled men of the mosque and the market; the new nexus between Islamic scholars and CEOs; the decline of the bumiputera generation; sexuality, gendered divisions of labour, and the problem of patriarchy in the capitalist workplace everywhere. Listeners of this episode may also be interested in: Iza Hussin, The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority and the Making of the Muslim State Meredith Weiss, Student Activism in Malaysia: Crucible, Mirror, Sideshow Nick Cheesman is a fellow in the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He can be reached at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

To remember Nathaniel Bowditch today primarily for his famous navigational textbook is to acknowledge only one of his many achievements. As Tamara Plakins Thornton demonstrates in her book Nathaniel Bowditch and the Power of Numbers: How a Nineteenth-Century Man of Business, Science, and the Sea Changed American Life (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), Bowditch’s legacy is one that endures in a surprising range of fields. The son of a luckless merchant captain, Bowditch grew up in the early years of the new republic. At an early age he was apprenticed at a young age to a ship’s chandler, which introduced him to the world of maritime commerce. His aptitude for mathematics led him to identify numerous errors in the standard navigational text he used while on commercial voyages, and his revisions established the book colloquially known by his name today. Yet this was only at the beginning of a long and prosperous career in business, as he moved from commerce to insurance and banking. As Thornton explains, Bowditch’s mathematically-honed passion for order and precision was employed to systematize traditionally irregular business practices in ways that are reflected in the modern workplace, while his use of trusts to preserve family fortunes ensured the perpetuation of an entire New England social class. Such was his success that Bowditch became one of the Brahmin elite of nineteenth-century Boston society, while his achievements in mathematics and astronomy helped to make him a national icon by the time of his death. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

The new German Democratic Republic, known as East Germany, faced many challenges when it was founded in 1949. Not least of which was convincing its citizens that they should be loyal to the new state and mobilizing the population towards its ideological goals. In The People’s Own Landscape: Nature, Tourism and Dictatorship in East Germany (University of Michigan Press, 2014), Scott Moranda explores how the Socialist Unity Party (SED) attempted to use tourism and landscape planning to reshape East Germans’ definition of their homeland. He also demonstrates the messy boundaries between state and society, in which East Germans refused to change patterns of pre-World War II nature activities such as hiking and camping; conservationists and the regime found common ground on concepts of landscape management; and environmentalism resulted in a fundamental break between society and the state. The People’s Landscape contributes to our understanding of East Germany’s environmental history as well as to our understanding of the nuances of the relationship between state and society under dictatorships. Scott Moranda is Associate Director of History at SUNY Cortland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

What is life like in the aspirational economy? In (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media and Aspirational Work (Yale University Press, 2017) Brooke Erin Duffy, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University, explores the working life of bloggers, social media stars, and online influencers (not) making a living in and around the fashion industry. The core of the book is the idea of aspirational labour, which captures the demands of trying to get in and get on in this precarious form of work. Aspirational labour is theorised in conjunction with gender and the broader inequalities of production and consumption in consumer culture. The book then uses this frame to explore the big winners of the social media economy, alongside detailing the hidden costs to being authentic and effortless online, as well as reflecting on the impact of aspirational labour on many other areas of economy and society. The book is packed with rich and detailed interview data, and is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand contemporary consumer culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Is Marx still relevant? Any social scientist will answer with a resounding yes! In what he refers to as a thought experiment, Ivan Ascher uses Marx to understand the financial market. In Portfolio Society: A Capitalist Mode of Prediction (Zone Books, 2016), Ascher focuses on the arc and narratives found in Capital, using them to analyze risk, credit, and the financial market downfall of 2008. Ascher encourages the reader to explore how we might be able to understand what is going on today by looking back at Marx’s understanding of capitalism. The reader will come across familiar characters, like moneybags and vampires, and familiar concepts from Marx, like fetishism and co-dependence within the market. The nice thing about this book is that you do not need prior knowledge of Marx or financial markets, though those who have knowledge of either or both will still find great pleasure in this thought experiment. This book would be enjoyed by sociologists or political scientists in general, alongside those interested in financial markets. It would be especially useful in a theory course where students could make connections between Marx and Ascher’s narratives. Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can follow and tweet her at @spattersearch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Dominant social norms and expectations shape how individuals and their public activities are understood. In Roman antiquity, various shifts influenced the production and dissolution of prejudices towards certain types of occupations. In Trade and Taboo: Disreputable Professions in the Roman Mediterranean (University of Michigan Press, 2016), Sarah Bond, Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Iowa, explores the legal, social, and literary modes of persecution and stigmatization of unseemly occupations and voluntary associations. One’s membership in Roman society was often regulated through reputation and social position. Criers, funerary workers, and tanners were among the many trades that were viewed as unwholesome, marginalizing these individuals from the broader community. Over time there were shifts in social perceptions of certain types of work, often catalyzed by religious communities. In our discussion we talked about taboos as an analytical category, reading soundscapes in ancient texts, views of death, corpses, and pollution, the social context of tanners and their odors, mint workers and state labor, bakers and sensual trades, gladiators, archeological topography, the role of Christian and Jewish communities in shaping social norms, and maybe surprisingly, rednecks, the field of Classics, blogging, how to do good public scholarship, the Women of Ancient History database, and how walls embody emotions of fear. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Labor markets are not what they used to be, as Ilana Gershon argues in Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Job seekers are increasingly being taught that they need to sell themselves as if they were their own business, and what will set them apart from other applicants is not their skills or their experience, but the distinctiveness of their brand. Join us for a provocative discussion about how workers are being taught to position themselves to employers, and how modern labor markets, as a consequence, differ from those in the past — and why that matters. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford University Press, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

We are accustomed to the thought that individuals facing dire circumstances may rightfully take use of others’ property in order to save their own lives. For example, one thinks it obvious that in order to avoid freezing to death, a lost mountain hiker may rightfully break into and make use of a heated cabin that is not his property. But what justifies this idea? And what are its implications for a world where millions are subjected to sustained and systematic depravation? In The Right of Necessity: Moral Cosmopolitanism and Global Poverty (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) Alejandra Mancilla defends the idea that under the current global order, those who are subject to such systematic depravation have a right to take, use, seize, and occupy what is needed in order to satisfy requirements for basic subsistence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In The Space of Boredom: Homelessness in the Slowing Global Order (Duke University Press, 2017) Bruce O’Neill explores how people cast aside by globalism deal with an intractable symptom of downward mobility: an unshakeable and immense boredom. Focusing on Bucharest, Romania, where the 2008 financial crisis compounded the failures of the postsocialist state to deliver on the promises of liberalism, O’Neill shows how the city’s homeless are unable to fully participate in a society that is increasingly organized around practices of consumption. Without a job to work, a home to make, or money to spend, the homeless—who include pensioners abandoned by their families and the state—struggle daily with the slow deterioration of their lives. O’Neill moves between homeless shelters and squatter camps, black labor markets and transit stations, detailing the lives of men and women who manage boredom by seeking stimulation, from conversation and coffee to sex in public restrooms or going to the mall or IKEA. Showing how boredom correlates with the downward mobility of Bucharest’s homeless, O’Neill theorizes boredom as an enduring affect of globalization in order to provide a foundation from which to rethink the politics of alienation and displacement. Nivedita Kar is a student at the University of Southern California, having graduated from UCLA with a double major in Anthropology and Statistics and a masters degree for Northwestern University in biostatistics and epidemiology. She is immersed in the realm of academia and medicine, she hopes to be one of the rare few who aim to bridge the gap between clinical literacy and statistical methods. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

We are nearly a decade removed from the start of the Great Recession, and many indicators show that the economy is doing relatively well. But during this economic catastrophe, a significant number of people faced long-term unemployment, especially in the manufacturing sector. Jobs that were once the picture of stability and security, and that helped form a vibrant post-war middle class in the United States, disappeared as companies downsized, outsourced, and retooled. In his book, Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy (University of California Press, 2015), Assistant Professor of Sociology Victor Tan Chen examines former autoworkers—perhaps the most iconic of blue-collar American jobs—and their experiences with long-term unemployment. Upon getting laid off from their jobs, these workers confront a completely different labor market from what they were used to. No longer can they succeed based solely on hard work—the idea of meritocracy that they have all embraced as an ideal. They learn about the higher education they need, the soft skills many jobs require, the social networks they lack, and the constant self-branding workers must now do. Believing in meritocracy, and in society’s widespread culture of judgment, these workers come to blame themselves for their shortcomings and failure to adapt to the realities of today’s economy. Their lives spiral downward as they cope with strained familial relationships, personal mental illness, and a society that has tossed them aside while simultaneously saying they are to blame for their own problems. Fascinatingly, Chen finds that these conditions and consequences mostly hold true for autoworkers in Canada, which is often lauded for its stronger and broader social safety net, as it does in the United States. With great empathy and astute analysis, Cut Loose shows the human side of economic transformations bereft of sound public policies and collectivist strategies Richard E. Ocejo is associate professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017), about the transformation of low-status occupations into cool, cultural taste-making jobs (cocktail bartenders, craft distillers, upscale mens barbers, and whole animal butchers), and of Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014), about growth policies, nightlife, and conflict in gentrified neighborhoods. His work has appeared in such journals as City & Community, Poetics, Ethnography, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. He is also the editor of Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork (Routledge, 2012) and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Metropolitics, Work and Occupations, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In his book, A Powerful Influence on Australian Affairs: A New History of the AWU (Melbourne University Publishing, 2017), Nick Dyrenfurth, Executive Director of the John Curtin Research Centre, explores the history of the nation’s oldest and most influential trade union, the AWU. Over 131 years, the Australian Workers Union has had a significant impact on Australia’s national identity and its center-left politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

How should we understand markets? In Markets and the Arts of Attachment (Routledge, 2017) Franck Cochoy, Liz McFall, and Joe Deville (from University Toulouse- Jean Jaures,Open University and Lancaster University respectively) bring together essays engaging with the contemporary economic sociology to better explain how markets function. The book is published as part of the Culture, Economy, and the Social (CRESC) book series, and contains a wide range of examples and case studies on how people become ‘attached’ to, and in, markets, and how markets are deeply intertwined with sentiments and emotions. Brands, consumer finance, classic cars, call centres, advertising, dating, watches, and social media are amongst the varied, yet complimentary, set of subjects for this important new collection. The book is essential reading for anyone seeking to better understand the sociology of markets, in particular seeking to move beyond both one dimensional critiques of consumerism and purely economic narratives of market attachments. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics