Selected by the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment Library University of California, Berkeley

• Date: 01 April 2017
• Published date: 01 April 2017
• Author: Janice Kimball,Terence K. Huwe
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irel.12177

Recent Publications

Selected by the Institute for Research on Labor and

Employment Library University of California, Berkeley

TERENCE K. HUWE, Dir ect or of L ibr ary & I nfo rma tio n Res our ces

JANICE KIMBALL, Library Assistant

Anthropologies of Unemployment: New Perspectives on Work and Its

Absence. Edited by Jung Bum Kwon and Carrie M. Lane. Ithaca,

NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. 978-1-5017-0465-9. 280 pp.

$89.95.

The contributors to this book offer a variety of case studies showing that unemployment is a

pressing global phenomenon, even when free-market ideologies and policies create uneven

results. Economic, social, and cultural marginalization is common in the lives of the unem-

ployed, but their experience and interpretation are shaped by local and national cultural particu-

larities. In exploring those differences, the contributors employ recent theoretical innovations in

contemporary anthropology, such as globalization, migration, youth cultures, bureaucracy,

class, gender, and race. What emerges is a new perspective on global unemployment: It is not a

temporary occurrence, but a chronic condition. In adjusting to persistent, longstanding unem-

ployment, people and groups create new understandings of unemployment as well as of work

and employment. They also improvise new forms of sociality, morality, and personhood.

The Challenge to Change: Reforming Health Care on the Front Line in

the United States and the United Kingdom. By Rebecca Kolins

Givan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. 978-0-8014-5005-

1. 216 pp. $45.00.

There is constant pressure on hospitals to improve health-care delivery and increase cost

effectiveness. New initiatives are the order of the day in the dramatically different health-care

systems of the United States and Great Britain. Despite a broad consensus that change is

urgently needed across the board, these efforts are not successful. The author analyzes the

successes and failures of efforts to improve hospitals and explains what factors make it likely

INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, Vol. 56, No. 2 (April 2017). ©2017 Regents of the University of California

Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington

Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK.

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