Benjamin H. Snyder
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780190203498
- eISBN:
- 9780190203535
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190203498.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Culture, Economic Sociology
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Abusaleh Shariff
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- June 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780199461158
- eISBN:
- 9780199086788
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199461158.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Economic Sociology
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Cheris Shun-ching Chan
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780195394078
- eISBN:
- 9780199951154
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195394078.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Economic Sociology
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Marcelo Bergman
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780190608774
- eISBN:
- 9780190608804
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190608774.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Law, Crime and Deviance, Economic Sociology
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, ...
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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.Less
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.
Jan Breman
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- April 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780199464814
- eISBN:
- 9780199086481
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199464814.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Economic Sociology
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Debbie Becher
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- December 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199322541
- eISBN:
- 9780199394746
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199322541.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Economic Sociology, Politics, Social Movements and Social Change
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Carol Upadhya
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- October 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780199461486
- eISBN:
- 9780199087495
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199461486.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Economic Sociology, Social Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility
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, ...
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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.Less
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.
Rita Brara
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780195673012
- eISBN:
- 9780199081813
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195673012.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Economic Sociology
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Ipsita Chatterjee
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- June 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780199465132
- eISBN:
- 9780199086825
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199465132.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Urban and Rural Studies, Economic Sociology
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, ...
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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.Less
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.
Joshua Yates and James Davison Hunter (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199769063
- eISBN:
- 9780199896851
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199769063.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Economic Sociology
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. ...
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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.Less
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.
