Rules for radicals, with a solid vision of a self-directed future that labor activists will find promising.
A provocative call for a third path, somewhere between capitalism and socialism, for the workers of today.
The founder of the Freelance Union and former board chair of the New York Federal Reserve, Horowitz opens with an evocation of Charlie Chaplin’s harried assembly-line worker in Modern Times. However, the factory is not the arena of the modern labor struggle. Instead, it’s a workplace populated by “independent workers engaged in nontraditional employment relationships,” whether life coaches or editors or Lyft drivers. Within this decade, writes the author, half of the American workforce will be made up of these independent workers, who lack the social safety net that traditional workplaces and the government used to provide. The collapse of that net, she writes evenhandedly, is the result of hostility from the political right and neglect from a left that abandoned its labor base. Building on the union-building ideals of the early labor movements and French syndicalist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s notions of mutual aid, Horowitz proposes that if such a safety net is to be woven anew, it will have to be done by the workers themselves through building “mutualism” via organizations that “have a social purpose: to solve a social problem for a community,” but that at the same time have a well-formed business model and structures of governance that will outlast individual founders. The author’s grandmother, an immigrant labor rights activist, was vice president of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union a century ago. That organization, Horowitz writes, founded health care clinics, built cooperative housing centers, organized credit unions, and accomplished many other projects that later fell into the hands of the state and, now nonexistent or in disrepair, have to be remade or “built from scratch.” Government has a role in supporting mutualist organizations through reforms in the tax code and other regulations, but the institutions themselves must be worker-built—and built to last.
Rules for radicals, with a solid vision of a self-directed future that labor activists will find promising.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13352-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
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
BOOK REVIEW
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IN THE NEWS
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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