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Regional Advantage in a Global Economy
A new perspective on globalization, The New Argonauts tells the story of the foreign-born, technically skilled investors and entrepreneurs who return home to start new companies while remaining tied to powerful economic and professional communities in the United States. AnnaLee Saxenian's research brings a fresh perspective to the way that technology entrepreneurs build regional advantage in order to compete in global markets. This pathbreaking book illuminates profound transformations in the global economy.
Technology and Obsolescence in America
Made to Break is a history of twentieth-century technology as seen through the prism of obsolescence. Giles Slade explains how disposability was a necessary condition for America's rejection of tradition and our acceptance of change and impermanence. This book gives us a detailed and harrowing picture of how, by choosing to support ever-shorter product lives, we may well be shortening the future of our way of life as well.
Wendels, Haniels, Falcks, and the Continental European Model
In Family Capitalism, Harold James tells how "iron masters" of a classical industrial cast were succeeded by new generations who wanted to shift to information-age systems technologies, and how families and firms wrestled with social and economic changes that occasionally tore them apart. Finally, the author shows how the trajectories of the firms were influenced by political, military, economic, and social events and how these firms illuminate a European model of "relationship capitalism."
All of the essays in this new collection by Thomas Schelling convey his unique perspective on individuals and society. Schelling, a 2005 Nobel Prize winner, has been one of the four or five most important social scientists of the past fifty years, and this collection shows why.
Emphasizing the importance of parental choice, quality of care, and work opportunities, economist Jane Waldfogel guides readers through a maze of social science research evidence to offer comprehensive answers and a vision for change. Drawing on the evidence, Waldfogel proposes a bold new plan to better meet the needs of children in working families, from birth through adolescence, while respecting the core values of choice, quality, and work.
Consumer Culture in China and Southeast Asia
In this book, Sherman Cochran reconsiders the nature and role of consumer culture in the spread of cultural globalization. Cochran brings to light enduring features of the Chinese experience with consumer culture. The history of Chinese medicine men in pre-socialist China, he suggests, has relevance for the twenty-first century because they achieved goals that their successors in contemporary China are currently seeking to attain.
A History of Failure in America
This is a pioneering work of American cultural history, which connects everyday attitudes and anxieties about failure to lofty ideals of individualism and salesmanship of self. Sandage's storytelling will resonate with all of us as it brings to life forgotten men and women who wrestled with The Loser--the label and the experience--in the days when American capitalism was building a nation of winners.
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Amid mounting concern over the loss of jobs to low-wage economies, one fact is clear: America's prosperity hinges on the ability of its businesses to continually introduce new products and services. But what makes for a creative economy? For an answer, Lester and Piore examine innovation strategies in some of the economy's most dynamic sectors, including cell phones, medical devices, and blue jeans.
How We Got Into It and What It Will Take To Get Out
In this important new book, Julius Richmond and Rashi Fein recount the fraught history of health care in America since the 1960s, showing how the promises of medical advances have not been matched either by financing or by delivery of care. As a new crisis looms, and the existing patchwork of insurance is poised to unravel, American leaders must again take up the question of health care. This book brings the voice of reason and the promise of compromise to that debate.
Combining historical and economic analysis, this book shows how, beginning in the 1950s, a largely predictable business has been transformed into a volatile and complex multimedia enterprise now commanding over 80 percent of the world's film business. At the same time, the book asks how the economic forces leading to this success--the forces of audience demand, technology, and high risk--have combined to change the kinds of movies Hollywood produces.
Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value
This is a book about one of the great untold stories of modern cultural life: the remarkable ascendancy of prizes in literature and the arts. James F. English documents the dramatic rise of the awards industry and its complex role within what he describes as an economy of cultural prestige.
When Business Takes On Public Schools
In the 1990s, some failing school systems turned to private education management organizations to manage their schools. In Learning on the Job, industry insider Steven Wilson, the founder and CEO of Advantage Schools, looks back on the first tumultuous decade of this social experiment. Digging deep into the academic, financial, logistic, and political records of seven leading EMOs, he reveals the potential and pitfalls of their business and educational models, and their actual successes in the classrooms and the boardrooms.
Networking and Success since Benjamin Franklin
In retelling success stories from Benjamin Franklin to Andrew Carnegie to Bill Gates, Laird goes beyond personality, upbringing, and social skills to reveal the critical common key--access to circles that control and distribute opportunity and information. She contrasts how Americans have prospered--or not--with how we have talked about prospering.
In this magisterial study, Michael Smith explains how France left behind small-scale merchant capitalism for the large corporate enterprises that would eventually dominate its domestic economy and project French influence throughout the world. Arguing against the long-standing view that French economic and business development was crippled by missed opportunities and entrepreneurial failures, Smith presents a story of considerable achievement.
Principle and Execution
The Antitrust Enterprise confronts not only the problems of poorly designed, overly complex, and inconsistent antitrust rules but also the current disarray of antitrust's rule of reason, offering a coherent and workable set of solutions. The result is an antitrust policy that is faithful to the consumer welfare principle but that is also more readily manageable by the federal courts and other antitrust tribunals.
Effects of a Decade of Change
In Welfare Reform, Jeffrey Grogger and Lynn Karoly assemble evidence from numerous studies to assess how welfare reform has affected behavior. To broaden our understanding of this wide-ranging policy reform, the authors evaluate the evidence in relation to an economic model of behavior.
Organization and Change in TV Broadcasting
Media critics invariably disparage the quality of programming produced by the U.S. television industry. But why the industry produces what it does is a question largely unasked. It is this question, at the crux of American popular culture, that Switching Channels explores.
This volume mounts a full-blown attack on the standard neo-classical theory of economic growth, which Richard Nelson sees as hopelessly inadequate to explain the phenomenon of economic growth. He presents an alternative theory which highlights that economic growth driven by technological advance involves disequilibrium in a fundamental and continuing way.
This introductory but innovative textbook on the economics of cities is aimed at students of urban and regional policy as well as of undergraduate economics. It deals with standard topics, including automobiles, mass transit, pollution, housing, and education but it also discusses non-standard topics such as segregation, water supply, sewers, garbage, fire prevention, housing codes, homelessness, crime, illicit drugs, and economic development.
In spite of the conventional wisdom that innovation is driven by the promise of individual and corporate wealth, Steven Weber argues, ensuring the free distribution of code among computer programmers can create a more effective process for developing intellectual products. Weber argues that the success of open source is not a freakish exception to economic principles and explains the political and economic dynamics of this critical market development.
new in paperback
The Transformation of Selling in America
In this entertaining and informative book, Walter Friedman chronicles the remarkable metamorphosis of the American salesman from itinerant amateur to trained expert. From the mid-nineteenth century to the eve of World War II, the development of sales management transformed an economy populated by peddlers and canvassers to one driven by professional salesmen and executives.
new in paperback
A Conceptual and Policy Primer
Peter Frumkin clarifies the debate over the nonprofit sector's privileged position in America by examining how nonprofits deliver needed services, promote civic engagement, express values and faith, and channel entrepreneurial impulses. He argues that the long-term challenges facing nonprofit organizations will only be solved when they achieve greater balance among these four central functions.
new in paperback
Critics of globalization and others maintain that the spread of consumer capitalism is dramatically polarizing the worldwide distribution of income. But as the demographer Glenn Firebaugh carefully shows, income inequality for the world peaked in the late twentieth century and is now heading downward because of declining income inequality across nations. Furthermore, as income inequality declines across nations, it is rising within nations (though not as rapidly as it is declining across nations).
How It Flourished and What It Cost
American agriculture in the twentieth century has given the world one of its great success stories, a paradigm of productivity and plenty. Yet the story has its dark side, from the plight of the Okies in the 1930s to the farm crisis of the 1980s to today's concerns about low crop prices and the impact of biotechnology. Looking at U.S. farming over the past century, Bruce Gardner searches out explanations for both the remarkable progress and the persistent social problems that have marked the history of American agriculture.