This classic work chronicles how New York, London, and Tokyo became command centers for the global economy and in the process underwent a series of massive and parallel changes. What distinguishes Sassen's theoretical framework is the emphasis on the formation of cross-border dynamics through which these cities and the growing number of other global cities begin to form strategic transnational networks. All the core data in this new edition have been updated, while the preface and epilogue discuss the relevant trends in globalization since the book originally came out in 1991.

This study of the problems confronting institutions for the creation of occupational skills in seven advanced industrialized countries contributes to two different areas of debate. The first is the study of the diversity of institutional forms taken by modern capitalism, and the difficulties currently surrounding the survival of that diversity. Most discussions of this theme analyse economic institutions and governance in general. The authors of this book are more specific, focusing on the key area of skill creation. The second theme is that of vocational education and training in its own right. While sharing the consensus that the advanced countries must secure competitive advantage in a global economy by developing highly skilled work-forces, the authors draw attention to certain awkward aspects of this approach that are often glossed over in general debate: The employment-generating power of improvements in skill levels is limited: employment policy cannot depend fully on education policies While the acquisition of skills has become a major public need, there is increasing dependence for their provision on individual firms, which can have no responsibility for general needs, with government action being restricted to residual care for the unemployed rather than contributing at the leading edge of advanced skills policy. The authors argue that public agencies must find new ways of working with the business sector, acquiring expertise and authority through such means as supporting skills standards and taking the lead in the certification of employers as trainers. There must also be reconsideration of the former role of public-service employment as a provider of secure if poorly paid employment for low-productivity workers. The countries covered are France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, the UK and the USA.

“Why are Kazakhstan and Montana the same place?” asks one chapter of Kate Brown’s surprising and unusual journey into the histories of places on the margins, overlooked or erased. It turns out that a ruined mining town in Kazakhstan and Butte, Montana—America’s largest environmental Superfund site—have much more in common than one would think thanks to similarities in climate, hucksterism, and the perseverance of their few hardy inhabitants. Taking readers to these and other unlikely locales, Dispatches from Dystopia delves into the very human and sometimes very fraught ways we come to understand a particular place, its people, and its history. In Dispatches from Dystopia, Brown wanders the Chernobyl Zone of Alienation, first on the Internet and then in person, to figure out which version—the real or the virtual—is the actual forgery. She also takes us to the basement of a hotel in Seattle to examine the personal possessions left in storage by Japanese-Americans on their way to internment camps in 1942. In Uman, Ukraine, we hide with Brown in a tree in order to witness the annual male-only Rosh Hashanah celebration of Hasidic Jews. In the Russian southern Urals, she speaks with the citizens of the small city of Kyshtym, where invisible radioactive pollutants have mysteriously blighted lives. Finally, Brown returns home to Elgin, Illinois, in the midwestern industrial rust belt to investigate the rise of “rustalgia” and the ways her formative experiences have inspired her obsession with modernist wastelands. Dispatches from Dystopia powerfully and movingly narrates the histories of locales that have been silenced, broken, or contaminated. In telling these previously unknown stories, Brown examines the making and unmaking of place, and the lives of the people who remain in the fragile landscapes that are left behind.

Despite increased economic opportunities for women, sexual commerce has not only thrived in the Western world, it has diversified along technological, spatial, and social lines. For example, contemporary sex workers often meet their clinets through the Internet, offering new kinds of encounters that are a far cry from the quick and impersonal contacts that we normally associate with prostitution. For "Temporarily Yours", sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein walked the streets and went behind closed doors, interviewing sex workers, their clients, and the government officials who regulate the business. Along the way, she discovered a significant transformation that is occurring in the urban sex trade. Many middle-class johns are now seeking to fulfill fantasies of intimacy and affection - to purchase an authentic interaction that is gratifying emotionally, not just physically. Drawing on innovative research in San Francisco, Stockholm, and Amsterdam, Bernstein paints a provocative picture of the current state of global sexual commerce and its relationship to a burgeoning consumer culture.

This fascinating book - part ethnography, part memoir - traces Japan's vibrant cafe society over one hundred and thirty years. Merry White traces Japan's coffee craze from the turn of the twentieth century, when Japan helped to launch the Brazilian coffee industry, to the present day, as uniquely Japanese ways with coffee surface in Europe and America. White's book takes up themes as diverse as gender, privacy, perfectionism, and urbanism. She shows how coffee and coffee spaces have been central to the formation of Japanese notions about the uses of public space, social change, modernity, and pleasure. White describes how the cafe in Japan, from its start in 1888, has been a place to encounter new ideas and experiments in thought, behavior, sexuality , dress, and taste. It is where a person can be socially, artistically, or philosophically engaged or politically vocal. It is also, importantly, an urban oasis, where one can be private in public.

Two MacArthur Prize Fellows argue that to get out of its current economic crisis industry should abandon its attachment to standardized mass production for a system of flexible specialization.

A history of the project of world government, from the first post-Napoleonic visions of the brotherhood of man to the current crisis of global finance. The Napoleonic Wars showed Europe what sort of damage warring states could do. But how could sovereign nations be made to share power and learn to look beyond their own narrow interests? The old monarchs had one idea. Mazzini and the partisans of nationalist democracy had another, and so did Marx and the radical Left. It is an argument that has raged for two hundred years now, and Mark Mazower tells its history enthrallingly in Governing the World . With each era, the stakes have grown higher as the world has grown smaller and the potential rewards to cooperation and damage from conflict have increased. As Mark Mazower shows us, each age’s dominant power has set the tune, and for nearly a century that tune has been sung in English. He begins with Napoleon’s defeat, in 1815, when England, Russia, Austria, and Prussia formed the Concert of Europe. Against this, there emerged many of the ideas that would shape the international institutions of the twentieth century–liberal nationalism, communism, the expertise of the scientist and the professional international lawyers. Mazower traces these ideas into the Great War through to the League of Nations. He explains how the League collapsed when confronted by the atrocities of the Third Reich, and how a more hard-nosed approach to international governance emerged in its wake. The United Nations appeared in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, and a war-fighting alliance led by Great Britain and the United States was ultimately what transformed into an international peacetime organization. Mazower examines the ideas that shaped the UN, the compromises and constraints imposed by the Cold War and its transformation in the high noon of decolonization. The 1970s ushered in a sea change in attitudes to international government through the emergence of a vision of globalized capitalism in the 1970s that marginalized the UN itself and utilized bodies like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization—the final acts of Anglo- American institution-building. But the sun is setting on Anglo-American dominance of the world’s great international institutions. We are at the end of an era, Mazower explains, and we are passing into a new age of global power relations, a shift whose outcome is still very much in question.

Million-dollar birthday parties, megayachts on the French Riviera, and $40,000 bottles of champagne. In today’s New Gilded Age, the world’s moneyed classes have taken conspicuous consumption to new extremes. In Very Important People, sociologist, author, and former fashion model Ashley Mears takes readers inside the exclusive global nightclub and party circuit—from New York City and the Hamptons to Miami and Saint-Tropez—to reveal the intricate economy of beauty, status, and money that lies behind these spectacular displays of wealth and leisure. Mears spent eighteen months in this world of “models and bottles” to write this captivating, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking narrative. She describes how clubs and restaurants pay promoters to recruit beautiful young women to their venues in order to attract men and get them to spend huge sums in the ritual of bottle service. These “girls” enhance the status of the men and enrich club owners, exchanging their bodily capital for as little as free drinks and a chance to party with men who are rich or aspire to be. Though they are priceless assets in the party circuit, these women are regarded as worthless as long-term relationship prospects, and their bodies are constantly assessed against men’s money. A story of extreme gender inequality in a seductive world, Very Important People unveils troubling realities behind moneyed leisure in an age of record economic disparity.

現代人熱愛速度，執著於用更少的時間做更多的事，要追趕得上就必須不斷加快腳步。我們因此罹患了「時間病」，快速無疑成了一個癮頭、一種崇拜。唯有透過回溯人們被時間搞得筋疲力竭的歷史，探討該如何應因應那讓全人類著魔沉淪的快速文化，釐清為追求速度所付出的代價，我們才能在這個沉迷於快還要更快的世界裡找到放慢腳步的前景。「慢活」運動於焉成型，但它並不是將每件事牛步化，而只是希望活在一個更美好而現代化的世界。一言以蔽之：慢活便是平衡──該快則快，能慢則慢，盡量以音樂家所謂的tempo giusto(正確的速度)生活。放慢速度沒有一成不變的的公式，正確速度也沒有萬用守則。每個人都有權利選擇自己的步調，如果騰出空間容納各種不同速度，這個世界會變得更加豐富。這裡不僅遊說讀者採取一種全新的生活方式，更報導了一場正在全世界實實在在發生著的運動。