Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2024 -

This fascinating work focuses on the coalfields of West Virginia through a social-technical lens that traces the connections between industrial rural spaces and the larger culture. As part of a series on urban-rural dynamics, Big Rural supports the theme of "rural places, resources, and people being exploited--at a distance--for urban benefit." This work is valuable for examining the "cultural meaning of industry," deconstructing the equation of rural with white male workers, and using an empirical approach that incorporates field research and interviews with miners and energy engineers in the Pocahontas Coalfield. Cook Marshall (North Carolina A&T Univ.) includes interlude sections with words from the individuals living in these communities, who are often absent or excluded from research and representation. The biggest conclusion she draws is how "fossil fuel and other natural resource extraction industries" shape regional culture and space through the mechanisms of science and technology. She posits that the absent capitalists create systems that transform rural places and spaces and result in "severe social, cultural, economic, and environmental consequences, which can be highly damaging and detrimental." Highly informative and well written, this work finds gaps in the research, describes coalfield realities, and offers strategies for correcting damage to rural communities.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; two-year technical program students.

Everybody knew that the goal of creating a fit-for-purpose financial architecture to cover EU member countries would pose unprecedented economic and political challenges. The outcome would have to be efficient in terms of capital allocation and transaction costs. It would have to be competitive, not only internally but also within the global network of financial marketplaces. It would have to be innovative, allowing new financial products and processes to penetrate the market when they added real and sustainable value. And it would have to be stable, with the ability to return to equilibria when subjected to real and financial shocks and in ways consistent with the policy objectives of multiple sovereign states. All this had to be built in a highly diverse political environment. What looked improbable was actually done, and has demonstrated a level of robustness that reinforces the EU's underlying political mandate. This excellent book chronicles the repeated pressures and outright crises that were overcome to make it happen. It has a nice focus on the crises that left behind systemic improvements in the financial ecosystem (compared to those that led back to the status quo ante). People say financial crises are too valuable to waste. True. In the end, Europe wasted very few and isn't quite done yet.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals.

Braw (European Leadership Network) brings a talented journalist's eye and a trained analytical approach to a critical topic of the past 50 years--globalization. While Braw's approach seems rather negative, particularly given the title, her skepticism is well documented and accessibly written. Businesses, governments, and ordinary people clearly oversold globalization: the growing economic integration of the world. Should more people have been more skeptical of the trade-offs globalization would bring? Why didn't the clear and active collaboration between growing national government interventions and multinational (often government-controlled) corporations send danger signals to supposed free international traders? While Chinese companies (all government-controlled by Chinese law) stole intellectual property openly and brazenly from Western companies, the World Trade Organization did not speak out. Short-term thinking dominated the public mind. Braw's personal interviews and research in public records thoroughly illustrates the zeitgeist of the 2020s. The rollback of globalization for national industrial policy and friendshoring seems like a credible and necessary corrective. Readers at every level can gain valuable insight into globalization over the past half-century. This reviewer cannot recommend Goodbye Globalization more highly.Summing Up: Essential. General readers and undergraduates.

Shocks, Crises, and False Alarms takes the assumptions of macroeconomics and refutes their street wisdom. Examining the models used in much of macroeconomic thought, the authors challenge the practice of predicting economic outcomes based on those models. Economic models help economists and others understand how countries interact with one another in a highly globalized environment. The problem with relying on them as predictive rather than informative tools rests in the necessity of simplifying the complex interactions of individuals and countries. The idea that any one model can be predictive flies in the face of sound scientific reasoning. The authors do not dismiss the use of models; rather, they suggest that the models be used to explain the events instead of predicting outcomes. As the authors weave their narrative through various recent economic shocks and crises, they continue to draw the reader back to the evidence supported by history and case studies. This volume provides a challenging read as it undermines and challenges many economic presuppositions and long-held beliefs. Because this book challenges these ideas, beliefs, and values, it is well worth the investment and time.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and professionals.

In writing on key issues of political economy, timing can be critical. If the publication is too early in the history of major events, nobody cares. If it's too late, nobody cares either, because everybody knows what happened and turns into an armchair guru for why. So, for example, the key messages of this outstanding book would have been leveraged to great advantage if the 2023 California banking crisis had been integrated into the narrative. For those who accept much of the author's arguments, the fate of Silicon Valley Bank and certainly First Republic Bank--and the tech-driven contagion mechanisms and flight to systemic banks--would have fit nicely into the narrative, especially since the risks were there for all to see, including regulators. By building a political-economic narrative that is empirically authoritative, well written, superimposed on successive events, and linked to policy responses in a world of big stakes and powerful interests, the author has made a welcome contribution. Those who were active in the 1980s battles over US banking deregulation sometimes wonder whether winning the policy debates of the time actually turned out to be in the public interest some 40 years later. Who knows? But this book is a great place to start.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals.

Lei (sociology, Harvard Univ.) explores the intricate interplay between technology, development, and state intervention in China's economic evolution. She provides invaluable insights into the paradoxical nature of China's economic model and coins the term "gilded cage," symbolizing the constraints and opportunities inherent within China's state-driven economy. The Chinese state is shifting away from labor-intensive manufacturing toward socioeconomic development based on science and technology. Labor and capital are routinely labeled "high-end" and "low-end," with the former encouraged by the Chinese state. The resulting techno-state capitalism produces winners and losers. While the tech sector is generally considered the winner in this process, the government tries to put such "birds" in the "cage." Lei draws interesting comparisons of different techno-developmental regimes in South Korea, Taiwan, United States, and China in terms of developmental state, political regime, ideas and beliefs about S&T, and techno-development. This is a provocative title with painstaking efforts by the author. It should be accessible to most audiences and is suitable as an undergraduate textbook in political economy and sociology.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels.

This volume explores economic geography and current debates in political economy. Peck (geography, Univ. of British Columbia, Canada) rejects static frameworks and opts for a dialogical approach that intersects with the fields of critical political economy and heterodox studies. He punctuates his narrative with transformative encounters with neoliberalism and various heterodox theories. Peck writes against the backdrop of neoliberal ascent, particularly Thatcherism; the resurgence of globalization in the 1990s; and the 2008 financial crisis. He explores enduring inequalities between the Global North and South, accentuating the upheaval in Western dominance brought on by China's meteoric rise. The book scrutinizes the geographical-political-economic patterns that have facilitated the North's resource extraction from the South and challenges the stasis in political-economic paradigms through this lens. As Peck asserts, neoliberalism's persistence is not permanent. He positions neoliberalism as a critical analytical entry point, emphasizing the need for specification of causal mechanisms and interventions based on real-world observations. Variegated Economies is a testament to Peck's call to action for greater insight and challenge in economic discourse, suggesting that the path to change lies in embracing the heterodoxy's intrinsic pluralism to effectively counter and reshape the conversation around global governance.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels.