New Books in Economics

In the developing world, political turmoil often brings an end to promising economic growth stories. During its period of rapid economic growth in the 1990s and 2000s, China experienced a remarkable surge in the number of public protests. Yet these protests did not destabilize the regime. Yao Li’s book, Playing by the Informal Rules: Why the Chinese Regime Remains Stable despite Rising Protests (Cambridge UP, 2018), combines quantitative research on a nationwide dataset of protests with in-depth qualitative fieldwork to investigate why. Li argues that a clear set of informal rules, followed by both protesters and government agencies, helped keep protests within bounds. If protesters engaged the regime rather than challenging it, limiting their demands and their protest strategies, they could expect a moderate response and some redress for their grievances. This helped stabilize rather than undermine China’s political system.Author Yao Li is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law at the University of Florida. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Johns Hopkins University. Before coming to the University of Florida, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and was a lecturer at the University of Kansas. Her research combines quantitative and qualitative methods to address debates in the fields of social movements, environmental studies, political sociology, and development.Recommendations from Professor Li: Plastic China, a 2016 documentary about the business of sorting and recycling imported plastic waste and the life of a young girl growing up in a small-scale household-recycling workshop. Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment, a 2019 book arguing that a centuries-old alliance between religious officials and military authorities caused and perpetuates the economic and political stagnation of the Muslim world.Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics. His research examines the political economy of governance and development in China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In 2013, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey started a movement with Conscious Capitalism, a New York Times bestseller that taught the power of the heroic spirit of business. Since then, readers and fans have been asking Mackey for a follow-up on leadership. Now he's answered their call, to inspire entrepreneurs and trailblazers to take the next step: as leaders who see beyond the bottom line. Conscious Leadership: Elevating Humanity Through Business (Portfolio, 2020) by John Mackey, Steve McIntosh and Carter Phipps pulls back the veil on the strategies that have helped Mackey shepherd Whole Foods through four decades of incredible growth and innovation, including its recent sale to Amazon. Through time-tested virtues, from Passion for Purpose to Seek Win-Win-Win Solutions, each chapter will challenge you to rethink conventional business wisdom. The book weaves together anecdotes and case studies, profiles of other conscious leaders and innovative techniques for self-development -- culminating in an empowering call to action.In this episode host Mark McKergow talks to Carter Phipps about Conscious Leadership, how being 'conscious' (aware, learning, flexible, not asleep!) is ever more important for leaders in businesses and elsewhere. The book is a rich collection of ideas and examples - a few well-known, others less familiar - which take forward the ideas of purpose-driven businesses with wider ambitions than simply making money. Carter is also refreshingly up-front about the need for businesses to make money as well!  In the conversation Carter explores how purpose and effectively co-exist for successful businesses, how leadership has become a crucial factor in talent engagement and retention, and how long-term thinking becomes ever more important as the range of stakeholders grows. He also mentions 'Cultural Intelligence', a way to look at different world views and seek to help people understand where others are coming from so they can work together and not simply slug it out. Mark McKergow is an author, speaker, facilitator and coach specialising in solution-focused and post-heroic leadership approaches in organisations. He is the author of six books including The Solution Focus (Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2007) and Host: Six new roles of engagement (Solutions Books, 2014), and is currently building the Village In The City project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Why do many startups fail? Tom Eisenmann, Professor of Entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School realised that even he didn’t really know the answer, despite a lifetime teaching entrepreneurship, and decided to write a book to answer exactly that question. You can hear him go into detail on the NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership Channel interviewed by experienced entrepreneurs Richard Lucas and Kimon Fountoukidis. Whether you want to start a business one day, or just have better conversations with people who are in business, don’t miss this “book of the day” podcast. He draws attention to a critical gap in the Lean Startup methodology which can save both dollars and time if correctly applied. This idea alone makes the podcast worth listening to.The NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership podcast aims to educate and entertain, sharing insights based on the personal story of our carefully selected guests aiming for the atmosphere of an informal conversation in a bar or over a cup of coffee.In this episode we do go a little further into Tom’s background that normal, and give an entrepreneurial take on his ideas.He does a great job of explaining his ideas, and there is much for any entrepreneur to learn.If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn't answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success (Currency, 2021), Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures.* Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder's talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly.* False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to "fail fast" and to "launch before you're ready," founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions.* False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand.* Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to "get big fast," hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures.* Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both.* Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong.About our guestTom Eisenmann is the Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (HBS) and the faculty co-chair of the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship. Since joining the HBS faculty in 1997, he’s led The Entrepreneurial Manager, an introductory course taught to all first-year MBAs, and launched fourteen electives on all aspects of entrepreneurship, including one on startup failure. Eisenmann has authored more than one hundred HBS case studies and his writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and Forbes.About Kimon Fountoukidis Twitter LinkedinKimon is the founder of both Argos Multilingual and PMR. Both companies were founded in the mid 90s with zero capital and both have gone on to become market leaders in their respective sectors. Kimon was born in New York and moved to Krakow, Poland in 1993. Listen to his story here,About Richard Lucas Twitter LinkedinRichard is a business and social entrepreneur who founded or invested in more than 30 businesses, including investments in Argos Multilingual, PMR and, in 2020, the New Books Network. Richard has been a TEDx event organiser, supports the pro-entrepreneurship ecosystem, and leads entrepreneurship workshops at all levels: from pre- to business schools. Richard was born in Oxford and moved to Poland in 1991. Read more here. Listen to his story in an autobiographical TEDx talk here, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Turns out "objectivity" has a not-so clear-cut definition across time. In this podcast, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison to discuss their work, Objectivity (Zone Books, 2010). This work traces the historical and cultural developments of the word “objective” as it acquired different meanings and associated practices. Similarly, they consider the changing relationship of objectivity as it relates to the subjectivity of the researcher, as the “scientific self.” This deep philosophical work, diving into the cultural and historical shifts of epistemology within the past few centuries, is told through atlas making and image generation.In this conversation, we discuss the evolving processes of research and atlas making and how they co-evolved with the fears, virtues, and ideals of the time of their emergence. Additionally, we talk about the role of the self and aesthetics in categorizing and publishing the collections of working objects in atlases. We end looking at the current trajectories of image production as they try to pragmatically predict what's to come. Sarah Kearns (@annotated_sci) is an acquisition editor for an open scholarship publishing platform, a freelance science writer, and loves baking bread. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Francine Tremblay's book Organizing for Sex Workers’ Rights in Montréal: Resistance and Advocacy (Lexington Books, 2020) is based on a case study about Stella, l’amie de Maimie a Montréal sex workers' rights organization, founded by and for sex workers. It explores how a group of ostracized female-identified sex workers transformed themselves into a collective to promote the health and well-being of women working in the sex industry. Weighed down by the old and tenacious whore symbol, the sex workers at Stella had to find a way to navigate the criminality of sex work and sex workers, in order to do advocacy and support work, and create safer spaces for sex workers to engage in such advocacy. This book focuses on sex workers, but the advocacy challenges and strategies it outlines can also apply to the lives of other marginalized groups who are often ignored, pitied, or reviled, but who are seldom seen as fully human. Listeners may also be interested in this article by Tromblay and a report for The Doctors of The World.Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In recent years the phrase “revisionist history” has emerged as a label for politically-correct reexaminations of an unalterable understanding of our past. As James M. Banner, Jr. demonstrates in his book The Ever-Changing Past: Why All History Is Revisionist History (Yale UP, 2021), such a definition ignores how historical knowledge in the West has always been fluid and subject to reinterpretation by scholars. As Banner illustrates, such revisionism occurs in a variety of ways and can reflect everything from the discovery of new information to the reconsideration of the past from different perspectives the present. These approaches are evident even in the earliest works of history, and reflect the changes that have taken place in civilization over time. By addressing recent public controversies at which revisionism was at the heart, Banner shows that It is through this process that we better understand who we are today and the course we will take as a society going forward. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Today I talked to Carla Diana about her new book My Robot Gets Me: How Social Design Can Make New Products More Human (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021).Carla Diana is a robot designer responsible for the creative aspects of Diligent Robotics’ new hospital service robot named Moxi. She created and leads the 4D Design masters program at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, wrote the world’s first children’s book on 3D printing, LEO the Maker Prince, and she cohosts the Robopsych Podcast.The author is intrigued by where technology is headed—the “electronic guts” of high-tech offerings--at the same time that she never loses focus on what kind of gut reaction a user will have in interacting with a product. This episode therefore ranges from discussing modalities central to Diana’s work (sound, movement, and lighting) to addressing how important it is for designers and engineers alike to engage in “bodystorming” exercises that align everyone around what the user’s experience will be like. Delight and ease of use are both key criteria in achieving success. If there’s a Frankenstein aspect to helping bring robots “alive,” fortunately Diana is somebody concerned with all the ethical challenges that arise.Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Every porn scene is a record of people at work. But on-camera labor is only the beginning of the story. Porn Work takes readers behind the scenes to explore what porn performers think of their work and how they intervene to hack it. Blending extensive fieldwork with feminist and antiwork theorizing, Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism (UNC Press, 2021) details entrepreneurial labor on the boundaries between pleasure and tedium. Rejecting any notion that sex work is an aberration from straight work, it reveals porn workers' creative strategies as prophetic of a working landscape in crisis. In the end, it looks to what porn has to tell us about what's wrong with work, and what it might look like to build something better.Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

A Collective Pursuit: Teachers' Unions and Education Reform (Temple UP, 2020) focuses on the idea that individuals, in this case, teachers, are multifaceted and multidimensional actors who pursue goals for a variety of reasons and those reasons are connected to their capacity to do their jobs, to the best of their abilities, as well as their interests as citizens and community members. According to Lesley Lavery’s research, the data indicate that teachers are the most important in-school predictors of student success. This suggests that in thinking about educational structure and reform, the focus should always include the individual teacher in a classroom and their capacity to do their job well. Thus, Lavery’s analysis in A Collective Pursuit is both to understand the capacity and role of the individual teacher in the classroom and in the American educational system, and to understand the role that organized labor has played in working on behalf of teachers but within a changing educational landscape. This landscape, in recent decades, has seen the advent and expansion of the charter school movement, and various teachers’ strikes in expected places (Chicago public schools) and in unexpected places (West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and elsewhere). Lavery peels apart the various dimensions of these dynamics, examining the establishment of the two largest teachers’ unions in the United States (the AFT and the NEA) and how their origins impact both the way they approach their missions and how they work on behalf of educators. Into this dynamic, of public schools, teachers’ unions, state regulations of funding streams and the perpetual reform of education, we see the advent of charter schools, which are also public schools, but are allowed to operate a bit differently, in a number of states, from the traditional public-school model. Lavery’s analysis examines how charter schools have been integrated into the public-school arena, and now, how the teachers at some of these schools are moving towards unionization efforts and why they are inclined to do so. Lavery explores the important connection between organized labor, the individual teacher, and educational reform efforts. These connections are complex, but they are also at the heart of the American educational system and they need to be considered in context of reform, new approaches, and, as so many have experienced in the midst of the COVID pandemic, home schooling efforts and parent involvement in their children’s education.Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

In spite of Karl Marx's proclamation that money would become obsolete under Communism, the ruble remained a key feature of Soviet life. In fact, although Western economists typically concluded that money ultimately played a limited role in the Soviet Union, Kristy Ironside argues that money was both more important and more powerful than most histories have recognized. After the Second World War, money was resurrected as an essential tool of Soviet governance. Certainly, its importance was not lost on Soviet leaders, despite official Communist Party dogma. Money, Ironside demonstrates, mediated the relationship between the Soviet state and its citizens and was at the center of both the government's and the people's visions for the maturing Communist project. A strong ruble--one that held real value in workers' hands and served as an effective labor incentive--was seen as essential to the economic growth that would rebuild society and realize Communism's promised future of abundance.In A Full-Value Ruble: The Promise of Prosperity in the Postwar Soviet Union (Harvard UP, 2021), Ironside shows how Soviet citizens turned to the state to remedy the damage that the ravages of the Second World War had inflicted upon their household economies. From the late 1940s through the early 1960s, progress toward Communism was increasingly measured by the health of its citizens' personal finances, such as greater purchasing power, higher wages, better pensions, and growing savings. However, the increasing importance of money in Soviet life did not necessarily correlate to improved living standards for Soviet citizens. The Soviet government's achievements in "raising the people's material welfare" continued to lag behind the West's advances during a period of unprecedented affluence. These factors combined to undermine popular support for Soviet power and confidence in the Communist project.Kristy Ironside is an Assistant Professor of Russian history at McGill University. She focuses on the economic, social, and political history of the Soviet Union. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics