New Books List

The untold history of the surprising origins of the "gig economy" --how deliberate decisions made by consultants and CEOs in the 50s and 60s upended the stability of the workplace and the lives of millions of working men and women in postwar America. Every working person in the United States asks the same question, how secure is my job? For a generation, roughly from 1945 to 1970, business and government leaders embraced a vision of an American workforce rooted in stability. But over the last fifty years, job security has cratered as the postwar institutions that insulated us from volatility--big unions, big corporations, powerful regulators--have been swept aside by a fervent belief in "the market." Temp tracks the surprising transformation of an ethos which favored long-term investment in work (and workers) to one promoting short-term returns. A series of deliberate decisions preceded the digital revolution and upended the longstanding understanding of what a corporation, or a factory, or a shop, was meant to do.

Much has been written about Britain¿s trailblazing post-1970s privatisation programme, but the biggest privatisation of them all has until now escaped scrutiny: the privatisation of land. Since Margaret Thatcher took power in 1979, and hidden from the public eye, about 10 per cent of the entire British land mass, including some of its most valuable real estate, has passed from public to private hands. Forest land, defence land, health service land and above all else local authority land¿for farming and school sports, for recreation and housing¿has been sold off en masse. Why? How? And with what social, economic and political consequences? The New Enclosure provides the first ever study of this profoundly significant phenomenon, situating it as a centrepiece of neoliberalism in Britain and as a successor programme to the original eighteenth-century enclosures. With more public land still slated for disposal, the book identifies the stakes and asks what, if anything, can and should be done.

Access to water, and the threat of climate change, are two of the most challenging issues for our planet. A global population now exceeding 7 billion people, together with growing numbers of countries adopting a more water intensive lifestyle, are placing increased demands upon the world's water resources, whilst global climate change promises rising sea levels and increased flooding in some of the world's most densely populated regions. How are we to address the twin challenge of global water sufficiency and future climate change? Existing attempts to improve the management of local water resources, and to alleviate the hazard of flooding, have often fallen short of the desired result: attempts by governments and NGOs to provide modern solutions, for example, have created unforeseen problems adversely affecting future water resources and leading to increased vulnerability to crises. Daanish Mustafa's important new book outlines the need to develop an integrative approach. He introduces the concept of hydro-hazardscape to show how the diverse social groups affected by a hazard may view it differently, with the result that their view of the potential threat may also differ.

More than nine out of every ten working women in India are employed in the informal economy, unprotected by labour laws and excluded from basic forms of social security. They work as daily labourers in the fields, small producers and industrial outworkers in their own homes and as vendors on the streets. These workers typically receive very low wages and experience extreme forms of social, economic and political marginalisation. This book examines what types of interventions¿can improve the well-being of women working in the Indian informal economy. Using the case study of the Self Employed Women¿s Association, Worker Identity, Agency and Economic Development argues that work-life reform for informal women workers has moral and social dimensions, as well as economic. ¿ Drawing on the work of social philosopher Axel Honneth, the book¿argues that worker agency is critical to the process of work-life reform in the informal economy. Using empirical data collected amongst SEWA members the study shows that there is a positive and developmental relationship between a worker¿s identity, or psychological integrity, and her actual capacity to engage in the political economy for constructive change. The study shows that membership based organisations can promote the social foundations of recognition and respect that are critical to identity and agency, as well as provide worker¿s with real opportunities to develop alternative non-exploitative economic institutions that deliver improved wages and social security. But in organizing informal workers for collective action the existing distribution of power and wealth, as well as gender privilege are challenged. The result is social conflict and sometimes violence. Conflict of this nature is endemic to the development process, but is often overlooked in development literature and policy design.

This book builds on cutting-edge scholarship and the author's quarter century of hands-on experience at the World Bank to lay out an innovative with-the-grain approach to integrating governance and growth¿-as a constructive, hopeful way of engaging the challenging governance ambiguities of our early 21st century world. A 'with the grain' perspective directs attention away from a 'good governance' pre-occupation with off-the-shelf blueprints and optimal policies, and towards the challenges of initiating and sustaining forward development momentum. This altered angle of vision has powerful implications for how we understand and address the challenges of governance reform and development policymaking¿-both across countries and over time. The book distinguishes among four broad groups of countries- according to whether their policies are dominant or competitive, and whether their institutions are personalized or impersonal. It also distinguishes among alternative options for governance reform¿-'top down' options which aim to strengthen formal institutions, and options which aim to support the emergence of 'islands of effectiveness'. And it explores the 'goodness of fit' between alternative reform options and divergent country contexts¿-including how narrowly-focused initiatives can achieve results even in a broader sea of institutional dysfunction.