An insightful, often alarming look at modern surveillance culture in the retail industry.
A report on widespread exploitation and resistance in the world of clothing retailers.
Van Oort examines the transformation of mass-market clothing sales during a time when the processes of gauging and serving customer preferences have changed dramatically due to modern data collection. “Fast-fashion retailers have benefited from, and pushed forward, a so-called global logistics revolution,” she writes, “in which the production and circulation of goods across the supply chain occur faster and more cheaply than ever before.” Drawing on interviews with employees and managers who toil in the retail sector, along with her own firsthand experiences as a part-time sales clerk, the author documents how large stores have sought to maximize profitability at the expense of the well-being of their workers. In a suggestively totalitarian environment of hypersurveillance, “an array of digital technologies—which workers may or may not be aware of—track employee attendance, performance, and, to a certain extent, their lives outside work.” Van Oort capably sketches the technological, economic, and social forces driving changes in this industry, and she argues persuasively that the specific kinds of dehumanization within it are broadly representative of contemporary trends in other retail operations. A benefit of the author’s insider knowledge is her clear understanding of the human impact of these forms of hyperefficient capitalism. As she clearly shows, those who have labored in the industry are treated as commodities as disposable as the clothes they sell. In the conclusion, Van Oort speculates on how such exploitation might continue to evolve and how resistance to it has already taken shape. In such efforts as the Retail Action Project, collectives of activists have begun to defend workers’ rights, define a more equitable set of relations between employees and employers, and augment possibilities for reform.
An insightful, often alarming look at modern surveillance culture in the retail industry.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780262544931
Page Count: 192
Publisher: MIT Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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