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The 21st century workplace compels Americans to be more flexible. To embrace change, work with unpredictable schedules, be available 24/7, and take charge of one’s own career. What are the wider implications of these pressures for workers’ moral lives? How do they construct conceptions of good work and a good life amid such incessant change? In The Disrupted Workplace, Benjamin Snyder examines how three groups of American workers—financial professionals, truck drivers, and unemployed job seekers—construct moral order in a capitalist system that demands flexibility. Based on 70 in-depth interviews and three years of participant observation, he argues that the flexible economy transforms how workers experience time. New scheduling techniques, employment strategies, and technologies disrupt the rhythms and trajectories of working life, which makes time feel chaotic, accelerated, desynchronized, and unpredictable. Amidst a welter of fragmented temporalities, the workplace becomes a site of perplexing moral dilemmas. Work can feel both liberating and terrorizing, engrossing in the short term but unsustainable in the long term. Through a vivid portrait of real workers’ struggles to adapt their moral lives to constant disruption, Snyder mounts a compelling critique of the cultural costs of the flexible economy.

Finance is an inescapable part of American life. From how one pursues an education, buys a home, runs a business, or saves for retirement, finance orders the lives of ordinary Americans. And as finance continues to expand, inequality soars. This book demonstrates why widening inequality cannot be understood without examining the rise of finance. The growth of the financial sector has dramatically transformed the American economy by redistributing resources from workers and families into the hands of owners, executives, and financial professionals. The average American is now divested from a world driven by the maximization of financial profit. The book provides systematic evidence to document how the ascendance of finance on Wall Street, Main Street, and among households is a fundamental cause of economic inequality. It argues that finance has reshaped the economy in three important ways. First, the financial sector extracts resources from the economy at large without providing commensurate economic benefit to those outside the financial services industry. Second, firms in other economic sectors have become increasingly involved in lending and speculative investing, which weakens the demand for labor and the bargaining power of workers. And third, the shift of risks and uncertainties once shouldered by unions, corporations, and governments onto families escalates the consumption of financial products, which in turns exacerbates wealth inequality.

The Innovation Complex shows how the new urban economy is being shaped by digital technology businesses and organizations, city government, and a tech-financial meritocracy. Looking closely at “innovation” in New York from the city’s fall in the dot-com crash of 2000 to its emergence as the second-largest startup ecosystem of the 2010s, the book examines the emergence of new organizational, geographical, and discursive spaces that literally root digital production in place, molding a tech-competent workforce, public-private-nonprofit partnerships, and a hegemonic, entrepreneurial culture. The Innovation Complex begins by exploring the city’s subculture of hackathons and meetups, describes the careers of New York–based startup founders and venture capitalists, and traces the transformation of the Brooklyn waterfront from industrial wasteland to “innovation coastline.” Analyzing connections between local networks and global capital, it shows how a Silicon Valley model of innovation is urbanized by big cities like New York, where an influential alliance between business, government, and university leaders recalls C. Wright Mills’s potent concept of the power elite. Paradoxically, while the 21st-century economy makes cities more successful, they also become less livable for those who cannot reap tech’s rewards.

The political discourse in India experienced a fundamental shift when the Sachar Committee Report revealed that despite the national and state governments’ minority development policies and programmes, the Muslim community was among the most deprived and backward, worse off than the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, in most of the outcome indicators. Many new pro-poor and inclusive policies were introduced as a response to the recommendations of the report. This book makes a critical assessment of the impact of ‘post-Sachar’ policies, bridging the gaps in empirical measurements and analytical documentation, and making them accessible to the public at large. The book recommends policies and institutions required for ensuring the constitutional right to equal opportunity for all Indian citizens, especially minorities, such as setting up of an Equal Opportunity Commission and systematically computing a diversity index to improve the process of assimilation of the deprived groups, including the minorities, into the national mainstream.

The call center industry is booming in the Philippines. Around the year 2005, the country overtook India as the world’s “voice capital,” while industry revenues are now the second largest contributor to national GDP. This ethnographic study traces the assemblage of a global market for voice over the past two decades. New information technologies developed during the 1990s and 2000s fed Western firms’ appetite for cheap, English-speaking workers in offshore locales. An initial attempt to build a stable labor market for voice in India failed, owing in large part to gendered norms regarding work and mobility. In the Philippines, in contrast, there is a remarkable affinity between workers and firms. Decades of failed development policies have produced for educated Filipinos a dismaying choice: migrate abroad in search of prosperity or stay at home as an impoverished professional. Offshored call centers, in this context, represent a middle path. Drawing upon case studies of sixty Filipino call center workers and two years of fieldwork in Manila, this book shows how call center jobs allow Filipinos to earn a decent living and stay at home. Filipina women and transgender Filipinos in particular use their voices as strategic resources. Call centers are for them lifelines and lifestyles. Taken as a whole, this study advances debates concerning global capitalism, the future of work, and the lives of those who labor in offshored jobs.

Based on an extensive ethnography of the emergence of commercial life insurance in China, this book examines how culture impacts economic practice. It details how a Chinese life insurance market is created in the presence of an ingrained Chinese cultural taboo on the topic of death. It documents how transnational insurance firms, led by AIG’s subsidiary AIA, introduced commercial life insurance to Chinese urbanites, and how they were confronted with local resistance to the risk management concept of life insurance. It compares the organizational strategies of the transnational and the newly emerged domestic insurance firms, analyzing why they adopted disparate strategies to deal with the same local cultural resistance. It further compares the management styles of individual firms headed by executives of different origins, explaining why some were more effective in managing and motivating the local sales agents. It describes how sales agents mobilized various cultural tool-kits to prompt sales, and how potential buyers negotiated with life insurers regarding the meaning of life insurance, and the kinds of products they preferred. The book argues that these dynamics and micro-politics produced a Chinese life insurance market with a specific developmental trajectory. The market first emerged with a money management, instead of risk management, character. As the local cultural tool-kit enabled insurance practitioners to circumvent local resistance to achieve sales, local cultural values shaped the characteristics of the emergent market. This analysis sheds light on the dynamics through which modern capitalist enterprises are diffused to regions with different cultural traditions.

This book reviews the rapid rise of crime and violence in Latin America over the last few decades and offers an explanation to a striking paradox: In the midst of decreasing poverty, economic growth, and democratization crime has risen throughout the region. Drawing from large data sets, I argue that this is because crime has become a profitable industry in weak states with outdated criminal justice systems unable to withstand the challenge posed by new criminal enterprises. Prosperity has enhanced consumer demand for illicit goods, fueling the growth of secondary and illegal markets, including markets for stolen goods and narcotics that can provide an income for millions of youngsters willing to take the risk of arrest and loss of life. While some countries have experienced moderate increases in criminality others have experienced catastrophic rates of violence, resulting in two types of stable equilibria: Low- and high-crime countries. I explain why different equilibria, between the profit opportunities provided by criminality and a weak criminal justice system, have triggered a rapid upward spiral of crime and a sharp increase in the intensity of violence in some states but a moderate upward trend in others, and why certain countries have transitioned from low- to high-crime environments with vicious cycles of high criminality that are very difficult to reverse. The resulting severe, undesired outcomes are studied in this book: serious predatory crime diversification, consolidation of organized crime, ineffective justice reforms, weak policing, and overcrowded prisons.

Pauperism and pauperization are widespread phenomena in India both in present and past. While a fierce debate continues on how to draw the line separating the poor from the non-poor, there is hardly any discussion on the huge mass, not less than one-fifth of the population, living in destitution. Rural and urban case studies conducted in the state of Gujarat highlight the ordeal of these paupers: the non-labouring poor who never had or have lost their ability to take care of themselves; the footloose labour driven away from the village for lack of work but also driven back ‘home’ again when they are thrown out of their casual employment; and, finally, an urban underclass redundant to demand, experienced by the better-off as a nuisance and brutally evicted from their slum habitat. A deeply ingrained mindset of social inequality propped up by an economic doctrine which puts a premium on those who have capital and victimizes those without the means required for bare survival. The book is set in a comparative frame that relates today’s politics and policies in India to the past condition of the ultra-poor in Victorian England. Rather than generating steady and decently paid jobs, which would redeem the misery of the down and out, the mood of the upper classes resembles the spirit of social Darwinism during the latter half of the 19th century in the global North, when this transition to an urban-industrial future first took place. A residuum identified as the ‘undeserving poor’, existed then and was said to be unable as well as unwilling to participate in the trajectory of generalized welfare and progress. The author claims that this ideology of discrimination and exclusion is back with a vengeance the world over and not the least in India.

This book explores the legitimacy of government involvement in private economic actions by presenting a study of property takings. It explores which properties Philadelphia pursued for private redevelopment and how stakeholders decided that government actions were either a use or abuse of power. A quantitative overview of citywide practice combines originally collected data on eminent domain with City of Philadelphia and US Census data on properties and neighborhoods, showing that eminent domain has been largely uncontroversial though fairly common (approximately 7,000 properties and 400 development projects pursued from 1992 to 2007). Case studies of two controversial development projects probe more deeply into the porous and shifting boundary between desirable and undesirable government action. Readers follow these projects through planning and implementation, with evidence from public records, documents on file in offices of the Mayor and the Redevelopment Authority, and interviews with residents, business owners, community leaders, government representatives, attorneys, and appraisers. This study of eminent domain exposes a social meaning of private property—as investment—that American citizens often deploy but that has yet to be described in sociological, legal, political, or economic scholarship. The conception of property as investment implies that government ought to protect property as value committed over time—whether that value is financial, emotional, labor, or cognitive—and thus contrasts commonly accepted notions of property advanced by libertarian and left-leaning activists and academics.

Reengineering India explores India’s post-liberalization transformation through the lens of the software industry. It is an anthropological study of work, capital, and class in the software industry, viewed as a key site where novel forms of work and worker-subjects, dispositions, and social identities are being fashioned, and new aspirations and social imaginaries are introduced, worked out, contested, and often transformed. It traces the multiple genealogies of software capital and its modes of value generation and explores the production, shaping, and circulation of Indian information technology (IT) labour. Drawing on ethnographic research in Bangalore’s software companies, the book examines the organizational practices of these companies to unravel the conjunctions of work, power, culture, and subjectivity in these global workspaces. It also maps the interconnections between IT labour and capital, social mobility, and the reconstitution of the middle class, and explores the diverse lives of ‘Indian culture’ and ‘middle class’ identity as mobile IT professionals pursue their projects of self-fashioning and social mobility within a transnational social field. Highlighting the agency of IT workers, organizations, and entrepreneurs in India’s post-liberalization reconfiguration, the author argues that the forms and modalities of capital, work, identity, sociality, and subjectivity that have been forged in IT workspaces are not just by-products of globalization, but have been deeply shaped by the social and historical conditions of their making. Although the software industry has been central to the fashioning of a ‘new India’, it remains deeply embedded in older structures of inequality and modes of accumulation.

Land is a subject of great conflict and debate in India. Over the past decade, the debate has focused on land acquisition, which some have called India’s ‘biggest problem’. Land and the issues related to its acquisition have heavily influenced electoral verdicts and political fortunes in various parts of India. At the core of the debate are serious issues of justice and history intertwined with politics and economics. These debates over land are already prominent in contemporary India and are expected to become even more so in the coming decade given the anxieties over rural distress and the problem of livelihoods. Social, economic, and political turmoil over land will become more visible as India struggles to address the serious challenges of satisfying the aspirations of a burgeoning young population with growing lack of work. As land-based incomes stagnate or dwindle for rural communities and alternative earning options remain vague and limited, while changing land use from agriculture to more productive alternatives remains fraught with conflict, popular politics and public policies in India will have to stay engaged with the debate on land at their core.

This book goes into the realm of villagers who depend on a combination of private farms and common grazing lands for a livelihood. It concentrates on the social framing of village commons and its coexistence with divergent practices and constructions. It then describes how village commons were constituted and reconstituted by the statutory acts and juridical and administrative practices in the state of Rajasthan. The making and remaking of village grazing lands that arose out of the practices of land settlement and redistribution of land that were instituted in the post-colonial period are then evaluated, It assesses the ownership of livestock and arable land in the households of two villages in the years 1966 and 1985. Furthermore, the villagers' perceptions of diminishing vegetation are explained.

Globalization is a much talked about subject in academic and non-academic circles; hence plenty has been written to understand it, describe it, and find conceptual tools to explain it. However, academic work on globalization often tends to segment it into either economic globalization in the form of flows of capital, investment, commodities, or cultural globalization in the form of fast food, Barbie dolls, and migrant landscapes, or political globalization in the form of hollowing out of the nation state and the emergence of region states. This book explores spectacular landscapes of the Akshardham temples in Gandhinagar and Delhi in India, and Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston in the U.S. to understand globalization as it unfolds in a culture economy synthesis. It critiques analysis as an approach, because of its tendency to segment and sequence reality in such simplistic ways that the very essence of reality is lost. Instead, the book adopts Marxian dialectics and attempts to understand the everyday reality of globalization as it is synthesized in the city. In this approach, culture, economy, and the city are not discrete worlds, but work in tandem to produce globalization through migrant narratives, migrant temple complexes, Vedic boat rides, sound and light laser shows, and theme park religious complexes. The book therefore is as much an exploration of the dialectical stance in social theory and geography as it is a Marxist feminist critique of the ‘spectacular’ commodification of the urban.

This book is about the seminal importance of thrift to American culture and history. Underpinning the diversity of disciplinary perspectives presented in this volume are two overarching claims. First, far from the narrow rendering of thrift as a synonym of saving and scrimping, thrift possesses a surprising capaciousness and dynamism. Second, the idiom of thrift has, in one form or another, served as the primary language for articulating the normative dimensions of economic life throughout much of American history. This book puts thrift in this more expansive light where it reveals its rich and compelling etymology: thrift originally referred to the condition of “thriving.” This deeper meaning has always operated as the subtext of thrift and at times has even been invoked to critique more restricted notions of thrift. So understood, thrift moves beyond the instrumentalities of “more or less” and begs the question: what does it mean and take to thrive? Examining how Americans have answered this question not only provides insight into evolving meanings of material well-being, but also into the changing understandings of the good life and the good society more generally. In the chapters here, thrift becomes a powerful, but evolving moral idea and practice that has indelibly marked the character of American life since its earliest days. Thrift remains, if perhaps in unexpected and counter-intuitive ways, a key to the complex issues of contemporary and economic life.

The Euro-crisis of 2009–2012 and the UK’s 2016 vote to leave the EU vividly demonstrated that EU policies matter for the distribution of resources within and between European nation-states. Throughout these events, distributive conflicts between the European Union’s winners and losers intensified, and continue today. This book places these events into a broader historical, sociological, and economic perspective by analyzing how European integration has reshaped the distribution of income across the households of Europe. The motivating question is: who wins and who loses from European integration? Using individual- and household-level income survey data, combined with macro-level data on social policies, and case studies of welfare reforms in EU and non-EU states, this book shows how European integration has restratified Europe by simultaneously drawing national economies closer together and increasing inequality among households. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that the Single European Act of 1985 had an array of intended and unintended consequences for inequality in Europe. With the Single European Act, EU policymakers revived the integration project by elevating the single market to the top priority of European law and by constitutionalizing the idea that markets solve social and political problems.

Media concentration has been an issue around the world. To some observers the power of large corporations has never been higher. To others, the Internet has brought openness and diversity. What perspective is correct? The answer has significant implications for politics, business, culture, regulation, and innovation. It addresses a highly contentious subject of public debate in many countries around the world. In this discussion, one side fears the emergence of media empires that can sway public opinion and endanger democracy. The other side believes the Internet has opened media to unprecedented diversity and worries about excessive regulation by government. Strong opinions and policy advocates abound on each side, yet a lack of quantitative research across time, media industries, and countries undermines these positions. This book moves beyond the rhetoric of free media and free markets to provide a dispassionate and data-driven analysis of global media ownership trends and their drivers. The book covers thirteen media industries, including television, newspapers, book publishing, film, search engines, ISPs, wireless telecommunication, and others across a 10- to 25-year period in thirty countries. After examining these countries, this book offers comparisons and analysis across industries, regions, companies, and development levels. It calculates overall national concentration trends beyond specific media industries, the market share of individual companies in the overall national media sector, and the size and trends of transnational companies in overall global media.

This book confronts the persistent issues of youth unemployment and worsening socioeconomic precarity in the United States. While overall unemployment has declined, the unemployment rate remains nearly twice as high for young people 16–19 years of age and nearly three times as high for those aged 20–24. Millions of youth are neither in school nor working, and rates of unemployment and underemployment are nearly two to three times higher for black and Latino youth. Despite these glaring statistics, far more attention has been given to diminished social prospects facing young people in Europe than in America, and this is what makes this book so important. The volume’s Introduction places the issue in a global and national context, while suggesting a range of solutions and discussing the distinctive cultural ideology of the American dream as it intersects with young people's diverse experiences. Chapters in each of the book’s four sections explore structural and cultural causes of youth unemployment, their ramifications for both native and immigrant youth, and how both middle- and working-class youth across diverse races and ethnicities are affected within and outside the legal economy. Overall, the book insists that because the youth of today face greater insecurity than earlier generations, the time has come to address factors like technological changes, the rise of the 24/7 and “gig” economy, and the polarization between “good” and “bad” jobs; thus, the book features chapters on potential solutions including effective school-to-work models, shorter and shared hours, full employment, and basic income.