A prosperous future for your community is in your hands!Make your community a better place to live, work and play! Why do some communities thrive and grow while others struggle and decline? Smart communities know how to attract and nurture the kinds of businesses and organizations they want to create a vibrant economy and higher quality of life. ......
There is controversy among economists over just what it is that economists should do. The controversy is centered on the question whether what is called "neoclassical" or "mainstream" economics provides the appropriate template for performing economic analysis. Neoclassical economics is based on the principle that economic behavior is guided by ......
The past decade has witnessed a resurgence of interest in Marxism both within and without the academy. Marxian frameworks, concepts and categories continue to be narratively relevant to the features and events of contemporary capitalism. Most crucially, an attention to shifting cultural conditions has lead contemporary researchers to re-confront some classical and essential Marxist concepts, as well as elaborating new critical frameworks for the analysis of capitalism today. The SAGE Handbook of Marxism showcases this cutting-edge of today's Marxism. It advances the debate with essays that rigorously map and renew the concepts that have provided the groundwork and main currents for Marxist theory, and showcases interventions that set the agenda for Marxist research in the 21st century. A rigorous and challenging collection of scholarship, this book contains a stunning range of contributions from contemporary academics, writers and theorists from around the world and across disciplines, invaluable to scholars and graduate students alike. Part 1: Reworking the critique of political economy Part 2: Forms of domination, subjects of struggle Part 3: Political perspectives Part 4: Philosophical dimensions Part 5: Land and existence Part 6: Domains Part 7: Inquiries and debates
How Market-Based Education Reform Fails Our Communities
Evidence shows that the increasing privatization of K-12 education siphons resources away from public schools, resulting in poorer learning conditions, underpaid teachers, and greater inequality. But, as Robert Asen reveals here, the damage that market-based education reform inflicts on society runs much deeper. At their core, these efforts are ......
Workers in distant nations who produce the products we buy frequently suffer from accidents, managerial malfeasance, and injustice. Are consumers who bought the products made by these workers in any way morally responsible for those injustices? And what about the far more frequent, less severe injustices, such as the withholding of wages, the ......
We live in times of economic change and challenges, as reports of theincreasing concentration of wealth with "the 1%" and stagnating wagescompete for headlines with new and contentious politics of austerity.Public discourse has become fractured not only along class lines butideologically, with advocates of "economic freedom" and "sustainability" ......
Society, globally, has entered into what might be called the "service economy." Services now constitute the largest share of GDP in most countries and provide the major source of employment in both developed and developing countries. Services permeate all aspects of peoples' lives and are becoming inseparable from most aspects of economic activity. "Quality management" has been a dominating managerial practice since World War II. With quality management initially associated with manufacturing industries, one might assume the relevance of quality management might decrease with the emergence of the service economy. To the contrary, the emergence of the service economy strengthened the importance of quality issues, which no longer are associated only with manufacturing industries but are increasingly applied in all service sectors, as well. Today, we talk not only about product or service quality but have even expanded the framework of quality to quality of life and quality of environment. Thus, quality and services have emerged in parallel as closely interrelated fields. The Encyclopedia of Quality and the Service Economy explores such relevant questions as: What are the characteristics, nature, and definitions of quality and services? How do we define quality of products, quality of services, or quality of life? How are services distinguished from goods? How do we measure various aspects of quality and services? How can products and service quality be managed most effectively and efficiently? What is the role of customers in creation of values? These questions and more are explored within the pages of this two-volume, A-to-Z reference work.
This widely adopted text starts with the fundamentals--what is economic growth, what is development, and what is the relationship between these two concepts? The authors examine orthodox theories of growth grounded in different schools of economics (classical, neoclassical, Keynesian, neoliberal) before considering critical alternatives (Marxist, ......