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An estimated 45 million adults in the U.S. lack a credit score at time when credit invisibility can reduce one’s ability to rent a home, find employment, or secure a mortgage or loan. As a result, individuals without credit—who are disproportionately African American and Latino—often lead separate and unequal financial lives. Yet, as sociologists and public policy experts Frederick Wherry, Kristin Seefeldt, and Anthony Alvarez argue, many people who are not recognized within the financial system engage in behaviors that indicate their credit worthiness. How might institutions acknowledge these practices and help these people emerge from the financial shadows? In Credit Where It’s Due...
Publishes in-depth articles on labor subjects, current labor statistics, information about current labor contracts, and book reviews.
What is it about free-market ideas that give them tenacious staying power in the face of such manifest failures as persistent unemployment, widening inequality, and the severe financial crises that have stressed Western economies over the past forty years? Fred Block and Margaret Somers extend the work of the great political economist Karl Polanyi to explain why these ideas have revived from disrepute in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II, to become the dominant economic ideology of our time. Polanyi contends that the free market championed by market liberals never actually existed. While markets are essential to enable individual choice, they cannot be self-regulating because...
This book examines the social worlds of young Latino street vendors as they navigate the complexities of local and federal laws prohibiting both their presence and their work on street corners. Known as fruteros, they sell fruit salads out of pushcarts throughout Los Angeles and are part of the urban landscape. Drawing on six years of fieldwork, Rocío Rosales offers a compelling portrait of their day-to-day struggles. In the process, she examines how their paisano (hometown compatriot) social networks both help and exploit them. Much of the work on newly arrived Latino immigrants focuses on the ways in which their social networks allow them to survive. Rosales argues that this understanding of ethnic community simplifies the complicated ways in which social networks and social capital work. Fruteros sheds light on those complexities and offers the concept of the “ethnic cage” to explain both the promise and pain of community.
Over the past 500 years westerners have turned into avid consumers of colonial products and various production systems in the Americas, Africa and Asia have adapted to serve the new markets that opened up in the wake of the "European encounter". The effects of these transformations for the long-term development of these societies are fiercely contested. How can we use historical source material to pinpoint this social change? This volume presents six different examples from countries in which commodities were embedded in existing production systems - tobacco, coffee, sugar and indigo in Indonesia, India and Cuba - to shed light on this key process in human history. To demonstrate the effecti...
Introduction: The house of medicine and medical prices -- The enduring influence of the house of medicine over prices -- The science of work and payment reform -- How doctors get paid -- Conflicts of interest and problems of evidence -- Complexity, agency capture, and the game of codes -- Fixing medical prices
Women, and particularly poor women, have become essential cogs in the wheel of financialized capitalism. Globally, women are responsible for managing household debt, and that debt has exploded over the last decade, reaching an all-time high after the COVID-19 pandemic. Across various categories of loans, including subprime lending, microcredit policies, and consumer loans, as well as rent and utilities, women are overrepresented as clients and managers, and are being enfolded into the system. The Indebted Woman discusses the crucial yet invisible roles poor women play in making and consolidating debt and credit markets. Isabelle Guérin, Santosh Kumar, and G. Venkatasubramanian spent over tw...
Elinor C. Ostrom, a Nobel prize winning political economist, made important contributions to common pool resources, economic governance, and polycentricity. Viviana A. Zelizer, a prominent economic sociologist, has done groundbreaking work on how culture shapes our economic lives. Together, the work of Ostrom and Zelizer spans the disciplines of economics, sociology, political science, and public policy by exploring the social relations and community-based organization of everyday life. Both scholars examine the norms, social connections, and cultural impacts of exchange and governance. This volume explores their contributions and builds off of their research programs to explore the social m...
Vacant lots. Historic buildings overgrown with weeds. Walls and alleyways covered with graffiti. These are sights associated with countless inner-city neighborhoods in America, and yet many viewers have trouble getting beyond the surface of such images, whether they are denigrating them as signs of a dangerous ghetto or romanticizing them as traits of a beautiful ruined landscape. The Street: A Field Guide to Inequality provides readers with the critical tools they need to go beyond such superficial interpretations of urban decay. Using MacArthur fellow Camilo José Vergara’s intimate street photographs of Camden, New Jersey as reference points, the essays in this collection analyze these ...