An analysis that traces the role of digital technology in multiplying precarity.
Technoprecarious advances a new analytic for tracing how precarity unfolds across disparate geographical sites and cultural practices in the digital age. Digital technologies—whether apps like Uber, built on flexible labor, or platforms like Airbnb that shift accountability to users—have assisted in consolidating the wealth and influence of a small number of players. These platforms have also exacerbated increasingly insecure conditions of work and life for racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities; women; indigenous people; migrants; and peoples in the global south. At the same time, precarity has become increasingly generalized, expanding to include even the creative class and digital producers themselves.
This collaboratively authored multigraph analyzes the role of digital technology in multiplying precarity. The authors use the term precarity to characterize those populations disproportionately affected by the forms of inequality and insecurity that digital technologies have generated despite the new affordances and possibilities they offer. The book maps a broad range of digital precarity—from the placement of Palestinian Internet cables to the manufacture of electronics by Navajo women and from the production and deployment of drones on the U.S.–Mexico border to the technocultural productions of Chinese makers. This project contributes to, and helps bridge, ongoing debates on precarity and digital networks in the fields of critical computing, postcolonial studies, visual culture, and information sciences.

In recent political debates there has been a significant change in the valence of the word “experts” from a superlative to a near pejorative, typically accompanied by a recitation of experts’ many failures and misdeeds. In topics as varied as Brexit, climate change and vaccinations there is a palpable mistrust of experts and a tendency to dismiss their advice. Are we witnessing, therefore, the “death of expertise,” or is the handwringing about an “assault on science” merely the hysterical reaction of threatened elites?
In this new book, Gil Eyal argues that what needs to be explained is not a one-sided “mistrust of experts” but the two-headed pushmi-pullyu of unprecedented reliance on science and expertise, on the one hand, coupled with increased suspicion, skepticism and dismissal of scientific findings, expert opinion or even whole branches of investigation, on the other. The current mistrust of experts, Eyal argues, is best understood as one more spiral in an on-going, recursive crisis of legitimacy. The “scientization of politics,” of which critics warned in the 1960s, has brought about a politicization of science, specifically of regulatory and policy science, and the two processes reinforce one another in an unstable, crisis-prone mixture. Eyal demonstrates that the strategies designed to respond to the crisis - from an increased emphasis on inclusion of laypeople and stakeholders in scientific research and regulatory decision-making to approaches seeking to generate trust by relying on objective procedures such as randomized controlled trials (RCTs) – end up exacerbating the crisis, while undermining and contradicting one another.
This timely book will be of great interest to students and scholars in the social sciences and to anyone concerned about the political uses of, and attacks on, scientific knowledge and expertise.

【编辑推荐】
★出身不一定决定命运，但决定了改变命运的难度。
名校毕业、成绩优异，就能顺利获得高薪offer、进入精英阶层吗？这可能只是万里长征的起点。名企选拔的标准对家境优渥的学生更有利，招聘官眼中的“优秀”特质往往需要几年甚至十几年的熏陶和培养。看似公平的竞争，实则成为精英自我复制的助推，以及其他群体向上流动的壁垒。
★深入精英群体内部，揭开名企精英选拔的逻辑。
以美国三个高起薪行业——投行、咨询和律所为例，详细分析了顶尖企业挑选新人的过程。招聘官更看重契合、光鲜、驱动力等主观因素，本质上是在挑选与自己合得来的“同类人”。
★详细呈现普通人跨越阶层要了解的内部知识。
《出身》细致考察了宣讲会、内部推荐、简历投递、面试和评议等招聘的各个环节，通过丰富的案例，披露了大量招聘的内部知识，为普通人打破文化壁垒、突破阶层天花板提供了可能。
★荣获美国社会学会马克斯·韦伯奖、玛丽·道格拉斯奖、法律社会学优秀图书奖、Axiom商业图书奖，《经济学人》《金融时报》《大西洋月刊》《泰晤士高等教育研究》等媒体齐声推荐。
【内容简介】
当我们谈论不平等时，有两个问题无法回避：一是什么阻碍了穷人摆脱贫困，二是什么助力了富人维持富有。在阶层固化日益让人焦虑的今天，对后一个问题的探讨更为重要。为什么在我们的社会中，获得高薪职位的往往是来自富裕家庭的学生？是什么让他们顺利通过选拔？
为了回答这些问题，劳伦·A.里韦拉深入美国起薪最高的行业——投行、咨询和律所，访谈上百位招聘官和求职者，详细考察了宣讲会、内部推荐、简历投递、面试和评议等招聘环节，通过丰富的案例，揭示出看似能力取向的选拔标准如何帮助精英阶层完成了优势地位的代际传递。除对选拔机制的分析外，书中披露的大量招聘内部知识，亦可作为普通人突破阶层天花板的行动指南。

社会学界最高奖项 赖特·米尔斯奖
《洛杉矶时报》年度图书
全球各院校社科课程 阅读书目
《街角社会》作者 威廉·怀特力荐——
“《人行道王国》延续了参与式观察的最佳传统。如果我仍在教书，我会让我所有的学生读读这本书。”
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一部深刻、复杂、感人的纪实作品
猛地将你从自己 的生活经验中拉出来，然后扔向另一个世界。
充满社会道义的关怀、顾虑和尊敬。
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⊹内容简介⊹
人行道的秩序、安全来自何处？怎样的人行道，才能维系个体的尊严，让人们拥有更好的城市生活？
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本书关注在街头讨生活的人。他们在街上摆摊、睡觉、捡垃圾，游走在法律边缘，看似制造了混乱和威胁。但社会学家米切尔通过长达5年的参与式观察，深入街头人的生命世界，解释了人行道生活的社会结构和日常互动的逻辑。他提出，在街头谋生的人，实则借由在人行道上创造性地寻求生存空间，生成了一套非正式社会控制体系，维系着人行道的秩序和安全；而他们也得以“诚实谋生”，扭转自己的人生。米切尔提醒城市治理者，以及任何一位想要理解城市复杂生活的人，非正式经济和社会生活有巨大的、无可替代的价值，同时也不必然在审美上令人不悦。这有助于我们反思社会治理的局限，和城市生活更人性化的可能。
∞
《人行道王国》作为一个关于街道精神生活的重要研究，还包含了
社会学研究方法的详细说明和深刻反思
普利策奖得主奥维·卡特70余幅田调照片
街头书贩，一位研究对象，亲自书写的后记
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这部迷人的研究揭示了今日都市生活的复杂性：它的活力、它的秩序和矛盾，以及它为陌生人提供共情的神奇可能。
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⊹学界和媒体界力荐⊹
一部读起来鼓舞人心，细看之下观点饱满的作品。在民族志被陈词滥调所威胁的当下，《人行道王国》重新燃起我们对民族志的热情，打开崭新的可能。 ——乔治·E.马库斯，美国著名人类学家，《写文化》合著者
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《人行道王国》延续了参与式观察的最佳传统。如果我仍在教书，我会让我所有的学生读读这本书。 ——威廉·怀特，《街角社会》作者，美国艺术和科学研究院院士
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对都市生活问题的探究方式令人激动且深具原创性，信息量以长年累月密集的参与观察和对社会科学的深入理解为支撑。没人能如此成功地融合理论和关于城市街道的私密知识。田野调查中的大师之作。 ——霍华德·S.贝克，美国著名社会学家，符号互动论和标签理论的代表人物
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邓奈尔绝对是这个时代杰出的民族志作家之一：他向我们呈现一个通常不为人所知的街道世界。这是一部深刻的、复杂的、感人的著作，猛地将你从自己的生活经验中拉出来，然后扔向另一个世界。 ——萨斯基雅·萨森，著名人类学家
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人行道将会彻底改变我们对“公共空间”的想法。 ——罗宾·D.G.凯利，美国历史学家
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我认为这部具有示范意义的民族志会成为一代又一代读者的读物。整本书显示出充满社会道义的关怀、顾虑和尊敬。邓奈尔用理论来理解和阐述他的观察，而非为了自己。就像所有经典的田野工作者那样，他心胸开放，会学习，会改变，而这正是民族志经验所带来的。 ——琼·卡塞尔，美国人类学家，执教于华盛顿大学
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《人行道》是一场学识盛宴，会激励每一个学生。我将它用作我都市研究课程的阅读书目，并作为社会学入门的关键阅读材料。——哈维·莫罗奇（Harvey Molotch），美国著名社会学家
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一部关于纽约格林尼治村贫穷街头摊贩的研究著作，细致入微……加深我们对种族、贫穷的理解，以及让我们明白我们都是如何对待他们的。 ——《科克斯书评》
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《人行道王国》在普林斯顿大学、纽约大学等一系列课程中均属优秀的延伸教材：
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社会学入门：这本书能告诉你如何在微观和宏观之间创造重要的联结；如何做一个研究项目；社会学如何能改变常识。
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都市研究：公共空间如何被男人和女人、黑人和白人、富人和穷人利用且争夺，以及街头生活和政治经济结构如何交互发生作用。
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研究方法：民族志如何书写；本书附有一份对方法论的详细说明，并以研究对象之一哈基姆·哈桑的文章作为后记。
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越轨行为：针对无家可归者的处理方式如何成为标签化的过程；质问政策中的“破窗”理论。
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法律和社会：近距离检视正式和非正式社会控制之间的关系。
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文化人类学：《人行道王国》纳入了当下对方法发展中的丰富命题，包括再现、书写和正当性；延续艾略特·列堡的传统，讨论了亘久不衰的问题：不平等的社会和文化经验；一部对美国边缘群体文化的生动研究。
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文化研究：摊贩和拾荒者如何利用文化知识在公共空间中生存。

The state is central to social scientific and historical inquiry today, reflecting its importance in domestic and international affairs. States kill, coerce, fight, torture, and incarcerate, yet they also nurture, protect, educate, redistribute, and invest. It is precisely because of the complexity and wide-ranging impacts of states that research on them has proliferated and diversified. Yet, too many scholars inhabit separate academic silos, and theorizing of states has become dispersed and disjointed. This book aims to bridge some of the many gaps between scholarly endeavors, bringing together scholars from a diverse array of disciplines and perspectives who study states and empires. The book offers not only a sample of cutting-edge research that can serve as models and directions for future work, but an original conceptualization and theorization of states, their origins and evolution, and their effects.

At a moment of drastic political upheaval, a shocking investigation into the dangerous, expensive, and dysfunctional American healthcare system, as well as solutions to its myriad of problems
In these troubled times, perhaps no institution has unraveled more quickly and more completely than American medicine. In only a few decades, the medical system has been overrun by organizations seeking to exploit for profit the trust that vulnerable and sick Americans place in their healthcare. Our politicians have proven themselves either unwilling or incapable of reining in the increasingly outrageous costs faced by patients, and market-based solutions only seem to funnel larger and larger sums of our money into the hands of corporations. Impossibly high insurance premiums and inexplicably large bills have become facts of life; fatalism has set in. Very quickly Americans have been made to accept paying more for less. How did things get so bad so fast?
Breaking down this monolithic business into the individual industries—the hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, and drug manufacturers—that together constitute our healthcare system, Rosenthal exposes the recent evolution of American medicine as never before. How did healthcare, the caring endeavor, become healthcare, the highly profitable industry? Hospital systems, which are managed by business executives, behave like predatory lenders, hounding patients and seizing their homes. Research charities are in bed with big pharmaceutical companies, which surreptitiously profit from the donations made by working people. Patients receive bills in code, from entrepreneurial doctors they never even saw.
The system is in tatters, but we can fight back. Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal doesn't just explain the symptoms, she diagnoses and treats the disease itself. In clear and practical terms, she spells out exactly how to decode medical doublespeak, avoid the pitfalls of the pharmaceuticals racket, and get the care you and your family deserve. She takes you inside the doctor-patient relationship and to hospital C-suites, explaining step-by-step the workings of a system badly lacking transparency. This is about what we can do, as individual patients, both to navigate the maze that is American healthcare and also to demand far-reaching reform. An American Sickness is the frontline defense against a healthcare system that no longer has our well-being at heart.

“我们来到这个世界时，命运是否早已被宣判？”
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当代著名思想家、《米歇尔·福柯传》作者
迪迪埃·埃里蓬切身之作
出版后即在《世界报》《自由报》等知名报刊引发热议
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一部引发强烈共鸣的自我剖析之作
一部探讨底层民众成长困境的社会批判之作
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著名知识分子如何与原生阶层 和解？
不再将问题归咎于家人与心理创伤
而在教育制度、阶级差异中反思社会对人的塑造
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这是“一场自己改变自己的劳作”
却在为更多贫困者寻找反抗的可能
🐜 编辑推荐
◎享誉国际的当代著名思想家，反思自身出身背景和成长轨迹
作者为法国当代著名哲学家、思想家、社会学家迪迪埃·埃里蓬，已出版十几种著作，多部作品被认可为经典，也包括此书。这本书介于坦白和反思之间，既是一部个性化的学术著作，也是作者结合自己的出身背景和成长经历讲述的故事，在研究者眼中是学术讨论，在普通读者眼中，是深入浅出、令人共鸣的回忆录。目前该书已由德国著名导演托马斯·奥斯玛雅（Thomas Ostermeier）改编为同名戏剧。
◎关注阶级固化问题和边缘群体，以实际案例为依据为努力生活而奋力抗争的人发声
父亲死后，作者回到阔别三十年的家乡兰斯（Reims），并重新反思了自身过往经历、家乡及其周边地区的境况。从家人、家乡工人阶级民众的生活，女性长辈被剥夺的权利，到兰斯这一区域的被边缘化，相对主流文化而存在的“亚文化”……迪迪埃·埃里蓬关注的是阶级壁垒中下平民阶层的生活，是“被侮辱和损害的人”，是使他们获得“启蒙”的可能。
◎反思学校教育在社会对人的塑造中扮演的角色，致力于审视教育系统施加的社会指令
从父辈的教育经历到自己的教育经历，埃里蓬致力于冷静反观学校教育与社会秩序的“合谋”。从大批辍学的孩子，到无法融入校园文化而反叛、加入“亚文化”群体的孩子，埃里蓬说：“教师们已经尽其所能！……他们能改变的东西太少了。”学校是社会的战场之一，阶级的壁垒也存在于校园文化之中，埃里蓬致力于打破隔阂，探寻新的可能。
◎从“小家庭”到“大世界”，剖析了权力与抵抗的多种形式
从因无法完成学业而懊怒一生的母亲，有暴力倾向、总是大喊大叫的父亲，到把孩子们丢给孤儿院的外祖母，作者重新理解了家人的处境和家长在家庭教育中缺失的原因。由此，他也看到了家乡误入犯罪歧途的青少年、在阶层固化中放弃学业的工人们……社会如何塑造着底层民众，底层民众又是如何屈从的？作者试图剖析塑造和屈从的机制，重新理解他曾厌恶和逃离的人。
◎结合现实，深入浅出地消化著名哲学家、社会学家的理论和思想
喜欢让-保罗·萨特、皮埃尔·布尔迪厄、米歇尔·福柯的读者将会深感亲切，因为作者会满怀激情地讲述自己是如何被他们鼓舞的，他们的理论也将与作者所经历的社会现实融合在一起，产生新的生发点。
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🐜 内容简介
《回归故里》是法国哲学家、社会学家迪迪埃·埃里蓬结合自身经历创作的一部反思性社会学著作。父亲去世后，作者迪迪埃·埃里蓬决定回到自己的出生地兰斯，重新了解他最初诞生的社会阶层和那群他已经告别三十年的人。他重返过去，回顾家族的历史，回忆童年时身处的工人阶级阶层，回溯了他如何从工人家庭的穷孩子成为法国著名的知识分子……
在这场极为内在又颠覆的心灵之旅中，作者思考了社会阶层、学校教育、身份建立等一系列主题，通过梳理集体决定论中不同个体的命运轨迹，剖析了不同社会环境下，人的“个人选择”是如何被影响、被决定的。
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🐜 名人和媒体推荐
《回归故里》是一部引人入胜、充满勇气的作品，讲述一位法国著名作家如何使复杂的、时常冲突的社会身份与精神身份交汇在一起。
——利奥·贝尔萨尼（Leo Bersani）
这是一本扣人心弦的书，关于压抑，关于抛弃自己的出身，关于重获平衡。
——《美国艺术》
埃里蓬总是会回到他所说的发现心灵生命的“奇迹”中。“毕竟，”他指出，“人们应该学习，阅读令人愉快，书是你能够热爱的东西——这些态度并不是普遍的，实际上与社会条件以及你的出身背景密切相关。”我们这些足够幸运，从小时候开始就能拥有这些的人只能向他致敬。
——《卫报》
“我曾经以为，”迪迪埃·埃里蓬说，“人们可以远离家庭独自生活，可以忘却个人历史以及那些生养自己的人，重新创造自己”——在回顾了那段逝去的历史，并心怀敬畏地对那些他曾经背离的人们致以敬意之后，作者用这段颇具美感的文字陈述着这样一个事实：背离家庭与过去是永远无法彻底实现的。或许真正的“回归故里”并不存在，但至少让我们努力“与自己，以及那个被我们抛下的世界和解”。
——《世界报》

Includes never-published, first-hand accounts of how a massive law enforcement agency leverages big data technologies to expand surveillance in the name of objective, predictive policing
Provides a new understanding of the scope of police surveillance in today's digital world
Argues that the use of big data and algorithms by police widens the scope of the criminal justice system, results in massively increased surveillance, and reinforces stereotypes and discrimination
Reveals the collaboration between public law enforcement, private data brokers, and technology companies

It is commonly imagined that in recent years the rampant growth of consumer credit has lured American consumers into a crippling state of indebtedness, a state that has upended old cultural values of Puritan thrift and stimulated a frenzy of consumption. Drawing on the sociological concept of government and informed by a historical perspective, Marron presents a much more complex and nuanced reality. From its early antecedents in nineteenth century salary lending and instalment selling, she shows how the emergence and growth of consumer credit in the United States have always been subject to shifting regimes of control and regulation.

In the United States, we now take our ability to pay with plastic for granted. In other parts of the world, however, the establishment of a "credit-card economy" has not been easy. In countries without a history of economic stability, how can banks decide who should be given a credit card? How do markets convince people to use cards, make their transactions visible to authorities, assume the potential risk of fraud, and pay to use their own money? Why should merchants agree to pay extra if customers use cards instead of cash?
In Plastic Money, Akos Rona-Tas and Alya Guseva tell the story of how banks overcame these and other quandaries as they constructed markets for credit cards in eight postcommunist countries. We know how markets work once they are built, but this book develops a unique framework for understanding how markets are engineered from the ground up—by selecting key players, ensuring cooperation, and providing conditions for the valuation of a product. Drawing on extensive interviews and fieldwork, the authors chronicle how banks overcame these hurdles and generated a desire for their new product in the midst of a transition from communism to capitalism.

We live in the era of Big Data, with storage and transmission capacity measured not just in terabytes but in petabytes (where peta- denotes a quadrillion, or a thousand trillion). Data collection is constant and even insidious, with every click and every "like" stored somewhere for something. This book reminds us that data is anything but "raw," that we shouldn't think of data as a natural resource but as a cultural one that needs to be generated, protected, and interpreted. The book's essays describe eight episodes in the history of data from the predigital to the digital. Together they address such issues as the ways that different kinds of data and different domains of inquiry are mutually defining; how data are variously "cooked" in the processes of their collection and use; and conflicts over what can -- or can't -- be "reduced" to data. Contributors discuss the intellectual history of data as a concept; describe early financial modeling and some unusual sources for astronomical data; discover the prehistory of the database in newspaper clippings and index cards; and consider contemporary "dataveillance" of our online habits as well as the complexity of scientific data curation. Essay authors:Geoffrey C. Bowker, Kevin R. Brine, Ellen Gruber Garvey, Lisa Gitelman, Steven J. Jackson, Virginia Jackson, Markus Krajewski, Mary Poovey, Rita Raley, David Ribes, Daniel Rosenberg, Matthew Stanley, Travis D. Williams

Actor network theory is a powerful approach which combines the insights of post-structuralism with an analysis of the materials of social life. This controversial and path-breaking volume extends ANT beyond studies of technology, power and organisation to the body, subjectivity, politics, and cultural difference, and puts it into cutting-edge dialogue with feminism, anthropology, psychology and economics.

Frankenstein's monster was born of human endeavour and 19th-century ignominious end but provided many lessons during his 24 years of plans and prototypes. Aramis, the guided-transportation system intended for Paris, represented a major advance in "personal rapid transit" - a system that combined the efficiency of a subway with the flexibility of the private automobile. But in the end, the system of electronic couplings proved too complex and expensive, the political will failed, and the plans were jettisoned in 1987. The story of Aramis, of its birth and death, is told here by several different parties, none of which is given precedence over any other: an engineer and his professor, who together act as "detectives" to ferret out the reasons for the project's failure; company executives and elected officials; a sociologist; and finally Aramis itself, who delivers a passionate plea on behalf of technological innovations that risk being abandoned by their makers. Technology has needs and desires, especially a desire to be born, but cannot function without the sustained commitment of those who have created it. Part novel and part sociological study, Bruno Latour has written a tale of a technological dream gone wrong. As the young engineer and professor follow Aramis's trail - conducting interviews, analyzing documents, assessing the evidence - perspectives keep shifting: the truth is revealed as multilayered, unascertainable, comprising an array of possibilities worthy of "Rasbomon". The reader is eventually led to see the project from the point of view of Aramis, and along the way gains insight into the relationship between human beings and their technological creations.

When the news moved online, journalists suddenly learned what their audiences actually liked, through algorithmic technologies that scrutinize web traffic and activity. Has this advent of audience metrics changed journalists’ work practices and professional identities? In Metrics at Work, Angèle Christin documents the ways that journalists grapple with audience data in the form of clicks, and analyzes how new forms of clickbait journalism travel across national borders.
Drawing on four years of fieldwork in web newsrooms in the United States and France, including more than one hundred interviews with journalists, Christin reveals many similarities among the media groups examined—their editorial goals, technological tools, and even office furniture. Yet she uncovers crucial and paradoxical differences in how American and French journalists understand audience analytics and how these affect the news produced in each country. American journalists routinely disregard traffic numbers and primarily rely on the opinion of their peers to define journalistic quality. Meanwhile, French journalists fixate on internet traffic and view these numbers as a sign of their resonance in the public sphere. Christin offers cultural and historical explanations for these disparities, arguing that distinct journalistic traditions structure how journalists make sense of digital measurements in the two countries.
Contrary to the popular belief that analytics and algorithms are globally homogenizing forces, Metrics at Work shows that computational technologies can have surprisingly divergent ramifications for work and organizations worldwide.

Often lost in the debate over the validity of social construction is the question of what is being constructed. Particularly troublesome in this area is the status of the natural sciences, where there is conflict between biological and social approaches to mental illness, and in other areas. Ian Hacking looks at the issue of child abuse, and examines the ways in which advanced research on new weapons influences not the content but the form of science. In conclusion, Hacking comments on the "culture wars" in anthropology, in particular the spat between leading enthnographers over Hawaii and Captain Cook.

In the context of the recent financial crisis, the extent to which the U.S. economy has become dependent on financial activities has been made abundantly clear. In "Capitalizing on Crisis", Greta Krippner traces the longer-term historical evolution that made the rise of finance possible, arguing that this development rested on a broader transformation of the U.S. economy than is suggested by the current preoccupation with financial speculation. Krippner argues that state policies that created conditions conducive to financialization allowed the state to avoid a series of economic, social, and political dilemmas that confronted policymakers as postwar prosperity stalled beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s. In this regard, the financialization of the economy was not a deliberate outcome sought by policymakers, but rather an inadvertent result of the state's attempts to solve other problems. The book focuses on deregulation of financial markets during the 1970s and 1980s, encouragement of foreign capital into the U.S. economy in the context of large fiscal imbalances in the early 1980s, and changes in monetary policy following the shift to high interest rates in 1979. Exhaustively researched, the book brings extensive new empirical evidence to bear on debates regarding recent developments in financial markets and the broader turn to the market that has characterized U.S. society over the last several decades.

In An Engine, Not a Camera, Donald MacKenzie argues that the emergence of modern economic theories of finance affected financial markets in fundamental ways. These new, Nobel Prize-winning theories, based on elegant mathematical models of markets, were not simply external analyses but intrinsic parts of economic processes. <br /> <br /> Paraphrasing Milton Friedman, MacKenzie says that economic models are an engine of inquiry rather than a camera to reproduce empirical facts. More than that, the emergence of an authoritative theory of financial markets altered those markets fundamentally. For example, in 1970, there was almost no trading in financial derivatives such as "futures." By June of 2004, derivatives contracts totaling $273 trillion were outstanding worldwide. MacKenzie suggests that this growth could never have happened without the development of theories that gave derivatives legitimacy and explained their complexities. <br /> <br /> MacKenzie examines the role played by finance theory in the two most serious crises to hit the world&rsquo;s financial markets in recent years: the stock market crash of 1987 and the market turmoil that engulfed the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998. He also looks at finance theory that is somewhat beyond the mainstream--chaos theorist Benoit Mandelbrot&rsquo;s model of “wild” randomness. MacKenzie&rsquo;s pioneering work in the social studies of finance will interest anyone who wants to understand how America&rsquo;s financial markets have grown into their current form.

Why has median income stopped rising in the US?
Why is the share of population that is working falling so rapidly?
Why are our economy and society are becoming more unequal?
A popular explanation right now is that the root cause underlying these symptoms is technological stagnation-- a slowdown in the kinds of ideas and inventions that bring progress and prosperity.
In Race Against the Machine, MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee present a very different explanation. Drawing on research by their team at the Center for Digital Business, they show that there's been no stagnation in technology -- in fact, the digital revolution is accelerating. Recent advances are the stuff of science fiction: computers now drive cars in traffic, translate between human languages effectively, and beat the best human Jeopardy! players.
As these examples show, digital technologies are rapidly encroaching on skills that used to belong to humans alone. This phenomenon is both broad and deep, and has profound economic implications. Many of these implications are positive; digital innovation increases productivity, reduces prices (sometimes to zero), and grows the overall economic pie.
But digital innovation has also changed how the economic pie is distributed, and here the news is not good for the median worker. As technology races ahead, it can leave many people behind. Workers whose skills have been mastered by computers have less to offer the job market, and see their wages and prospects shrink. Entrepreneurial business models, new organizational structures and different institutions are needed to ensure that the average worker is not left behind by cutting-edge machines.
In Race Against the Machine Brynjolfsson and McAfee bring together a range of statistics, examples, and arguments to show that technological progress is accelerating, and that this trend has deep consequences for skills, wages, and jobs. The book makes the case that employment prospects are grim for many today not because there's been technology has stagnated, but instead because we humans and our organizations aren't keeping up.

Around the globe, economists affect markets by saying what markets are doing, what they should do, and what they will do. Increasingly, experimental economists are even designing real-world markets. But, despite these facts, economists are still largely thought of as scientists who merely observe markets from the outside, like astronomers look at the stars. Do Economists Make Markets? boldly challenges this view. It is the first book dedicated to the controversial question of whether economics is performative--of whether, in some cases, economics actually produces the phenomena it analyzes. The book's case studies--including financial derivatives markets, telecommunications-frequency auctions, and individual transferable quotas in fisheries--give substance to the notion of the performativity of economics in an accessible, nontechnical way. Some chapters defend the notion; others attack it vigorously. The book ends with an extended chapter in which Michel Callon, the idea's main formulator, reflects upon the debate and asks what it means to say economics is performative. The book's insights and strong claims about the ways economics is entangled with the markets it studies should interest--and provoke--economic sociologists, economists, and other social scientists. In addition to the editors and Callon, the contributors include Marie-France Garcia-Parpet, Francesco Guala, Emmanuel Didier, Philip Mirowski, Edward Nik-Khah, Petter Holm, Vincent-Antonin Lpinay, and Timothy Mitchell.

"Economists and Societies" is the first book to systematically compare the profession of economics in the United States, Britain, and France, and to explain why economics, far from being a uniform science, differs in important ways among these three countries. Drawing on in-depth interviews with economists, institutional analysis, and a wealth of scholarly evidence, Marion Fourcade traces the history of economics in each country from the late nineteenth century to the present, demonstrating how each political, cultural, and institutional context gave rise to a distinct professional and disciplinary configuration. She argues that because the substance of political life varied from country to country, people's experience and understanding of the economy, and their political and intellectual battles over it, crystallized in different ways - through scientific and mercantile professionalism in the United States, public-minded elitism in Britain, and statist divisions in France. Fourcade moves past old debates about the relationship between culture and institutions in the production of expert knowledge to show that scientific and practical claims over the economy in these three societies arose from different elites with different intellectual orientations, institutional entanglements, and social purposes. Much more than a history of the economics profession, "Economists and Societies" is a revealing exploration of American, French, and British society and culture as seen through the lens of their respective economic institutions and the distinctive character of their economic experts.