Recommending Books for Purchase (Bulletin 8 - January 2018) - Choice Review: Industries

Chile, Colombia, Peru, and Mexico are four of the most market-oriented countries in Latin America. Rejecting the leftward shift of Venezuela and other countries, they encourage foreign trade and market-based policies that make them among the world's most active negotiators of free trade agreements (FTA) and that led, in 2011, to a four-country FTA, the Pacific Alliance. This edited volume is an introduction to the agreement, business conditions in each country, and the prospects for extending the agreement to countries in Central America. The authors touch on trade theory before turning to a brief comparative history of Latin American and East Asian trade policies. This is followed by individual chapters on the Pacific Alliance countries that examine strengths, weaknesses, and contributions to the alliance. Chapter 8's focus on Central America is primarily descriptive, as are the individual country chapters. Chapter 9, the core of the analysis, briefly considers the challenges posed by the election of Donald Trump, institutional weaknesses, and Brexit. The central idea is that the Pacific Alliance "represents the future of business and commercial leadership in Latin America.”

Editors John (Columbia) and Phillips-Fein (NYU) have put together a very useful, wide-ranging collection of business history essays by new, mid-level, and senior scholars. Taken together, the chapters highlight the underappreciated diversity of business-state relations throughout the 20th century. We learn much, including the various ways business leaders and their organizations shaped education policies, responded to military needs, and confronted civil rights issues. The contributors teach us about divisions between conservative and moderate business leaders in groups like the National Association of Manufacturers, and we discover that some businessmen joined the anti-Vietnam war movement. Graduate students preparing for comprehensive exams will find Phillips-Fein's short preface and John’s introduction especially helpful, since both situate the chapters in the broader historiography. Indeed, John is one of the profession’s shrewdest chroniclers of business and political history, and his introduction is mostly a delight to read. But he unfairly dismisses Marxist scholarship, and approvingly cites a truly jaw-dropping quotation from a forthcoming book by Louis Hyman: "Marxists [simply] believed that capitalism was just about the money." Decades of scholarship demonstrate the untruthfulness of this claim. Yet this is an excellent collection that deserves attention.

As communication has become more immediate, definitions of community have grown more inclusive, intimate, and global. Leadership and problem solving skills once would have been considered only at a micro-local level, but now they must be considered globally through a series of best practices. Examples of this phenomenon are the rise of the “urban statesman” and the proliferation of CEOs as modern-day doges in global “city states." With increasing global political gridlock in place, the modern CEO acting at a municipal level can project national and global best practices as problem solvers. One of the nation's leading experts in urban competitiveness, Williams compiled a series of case studies from which he hypothesized some basic rules of urban statesmanship. Interestingly, he eschews the obvious examples (e.g., Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York City) and focuses on examples set in the smaller cities of Atlanta, Houston, and Salt Lake City. Within these environments, Williams examines the interaction of urban statesmen and their performance levels while positing a new definition of urban leadership. None of this narrative is particularly new, but it is extremely useful to have all this material so well organized in one place and presented in a handbook/primer-like fashion.

As a democratically sanctioned social institution, should a corporation operate primarily toward profit accumulation or should its proper goal be to provide society with needed goods and services? Urban (Univ. of Pennsylvania) has compiled a collection of essays addressing this essential question. Following the editor's introductory chapter, the book is divided into two parts. Part 1 includes seven chapters on the topic of whether or not for-profit corporations are in the public interest, while part 2 comprises eight chapters revolving around the question of whether the government regulation of corporations promotes well-being in a democratic society. Spanning the human sciences, the majority of contributions are from scholars of anthropology, history, and legal studies; most of these contributors adopt an anti-business, pro-regulation tone in regard to the corporation. For example, one author points to the 2010 ban of the McDonald's "Happy Meal" by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors as a law that could be seen as "freeing parents from the grip of their kids' marketing-stoked appetites" and an example and approach that might shed light on broader debates around marketing to children. Overall, the book offers a perspective that will appeal primarily to proponents of corporate social responsibility.

Part labor history, part family history, this biography looks at the life of IWW (Industrial Workers of the World, or “Wobbly”) martyr Frank Little, who was brutally murdered in Butte, MT, in 1917, during a copper miners’ strike and the nationwide WW I–era antiradical crackdown. Little’s rambling life is revived, as readers follow him from free-speech fight to strikes across the American West—and, along the way, many beatings and stays in prison at the hands of ruthless police, detectives, and thugs in the service of powerful corporations. The author, a retired schoolteacher, offers glimpses of the labor struggles, mining locations, and industries where Little left his mark, interwoven with a family history stretching forward and back generations. The book makes good use of scholarly literature as well as original primary research, joining previous biographies written on IWW figures, including “Big Bill” Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Joe Hill, and James P. Cannon; many monographs and articles dealing with the “One Big Union” in various locations in the US, Canada, and beyond; and the well-known general histories written by Philip Foner and Melvyn Dubofsky.

This volume contains a collection of essays on global corporations and their role in the world economy. The content is organized around themes that explore the definitions of a "global company," the power of those entities, their relationship to governments, their place relative to other international groups and to society, and the limitations on private companies and governance systems. Mikler (Univ. of Sydney, Australia) argues that the proper framework of analysis is not only the power of markets versus the power of states, but also the power of capital and corporate interests versus democratic governments. Global companies are actors in a political process extending across national boundaries, and they play an active role in shaping international governance systems. Following this theme, the book's first section discusses theories of corporate power and the extent to which it is mediated by governments. Two following sections examine the scope and impacts of global companies on states and international organizations. The final two chapters analyze social impacts of global companies from the perspective of globalizing social systems and the constraints on private governance. The volume offers a detailed treatment of key elements of global enterprise.

Every day in China, workers--often migrant--protest low wages, poor working conditions, and managerial misconduct. Sometimes their grievances are widely known and satisfactorily addressed, but usually they are not. Friedman (Cornell Univ.) explores the nexus of the state-party and All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) at the national and local levels and the inability of workers to achieve their protest goals. Based largely on fieldwork in Guangdong and Zhejiang provinces, where unions are experimenting with new initiatives, leadership models, and organizational forms, the book discusses the disconnect between the interests of workers and those of factory managers, the local ACFTU leaders, and the state-party. Managers and union leaders are nearly always party members, and union leaders are typically chosen by the factory managers; workers often have no knowledge of their putative union, and rarely have voice in selecting leaders or determining the goals and methods of the local union. Will workers gain a voice within unions and power to negotiate with firms? Will the party-state act on behalf of workers or provide a framework within which worker rights are established and enforced? These are the central questions posed throughout the book.

Big data is, arguably, the most important and transformational decision-making tool for such disparate areas as business, government, security, politics, and research. Massive data sets describing human behavior can be aggregated for use by these various, and other, constituencies, and this access has raised important issues regarding the use of these data. Consequently, this volume of collected papers is an important summary and examination of both the positive opportunities and potential negatives of big data. The book presents an array of contributors who set out to examine and address these issues and arrive at some rough balance weighing the public good against various ethical, legal, and privacy concerns. This well-organized, well-articulated examination is structured into three buckets: a conceptual framework; a practical framework; and, of course, a statistical framework utilizing big data to buttress the frameworks. All of the papers are well chosen and collectively provide a concise, comprehensive, and current view of this complex, important landscape. This essential volume should be required reading for all those interested in developing a thorough understanding of the opportunities and potential costs of the utilization of big data.