Based on extensive archival research, Beyond Market and Hierarchy reconstructs how Fan waged modern China's war of salts. Led by his Jiuda Salt Industries, the nascent refined salt industry battled revenue farmers who, as a group, monopolized the production and distribution of evaporated salt.

Contains papers from an October 1995 conference held in Crakow, focusing on social complexity and interactive governance in the framework of an institutional approach to economic change and economic transformation. Early chapters develop theoretical foundations for dealing with social complexity, ec

Since the early 1980s there has been a surge of interest in both issues of gender and sexuality in work and organizational life, and in the founding and running of co-operatives and collectives. Since hierarchy rests on divisions which are in part gendered and sexualized, and co-operatives for the most part operate with "flat" or non-hierarchical structures, they could be seen as places where gender and sexuality make little difference to the experiences of workers.; This text takes issue with the assumption that where there is an absence of formal hierarchy in work and organizational life, there is likely to be an absence of gender inequalities. It argues that the matter is more complex than the simple equating of less hierarchy with greater gender equality.

Based on extensive archival research, Beyond Market and Hierarchy reconstructs how Fan waged modern China's war of salts. Led by his Jiuda Salt Industries, the nascent refined salt industry battled revenue farmers who, as a group, monopolized the production and distribution of evaporated salt.

The Austrian economic school famously predicted and explained the problems of calculation in a socialist society. With their concept of spontaneous order, they challenged mainstream economists to look beyond simplified static models and consider the dynamic and evolutionary characteristics of social orders. However, many feel that Austrians took their victory too far and became ideologically devoted to laissez-faire. Austrian Theory and Economic Organization is a collection of essays on problems and possibilities in economic organization, written by economists and political scientists with an interest in the dynamic and evolutionary nature of market economies. Each chapter explores areas of potential agreement between Austrian theory, market socialist economics, and other heterodox schools of economic and political science. The collection aims to bridge cultural and political divisions between free market advocates who stress individual rights and left-leaning thinkers who stress social justice and a culture of solidarity.

We are poised between an old world that no longer works and a new one struggling to be born. Surrounded by centralized hierarchies on the one hand and predatory markets on the other, people around the world are searching for alternatives. The Wealth of the Commons explains how millions of commoners have organized to defend their forests and fisheries, reinvent local food systems, organize productive online communities, reclaim public spaces, improve environmental stewardship and re-imagine the very meaning of "progress" and governance. In short, how they've built their commons. In 73 timely essays by a remarkable international roster of activists, academics and project leaders, this book chronicles ongoing struggles against the private com­moditization of shared resources - often known as market enclosures - while docu­menting the immense generative power of the commons. The Wealth of the Commons is about history, political change, public policy and cultural transformation on a global scale - but most of all, it's about individual commoners taking charge of their lives and their endangered resources. "This fine collection makes clear that the idea of the Commons is fully international, and increasingly fully worked-out. If you find yourself wondering what Occupy wants, or if some other world is possible, this pragmatic, down-to-earth, and unsentimental book will provide many of the answers." - Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and The Durable Future

In Gold We Trust is a historical and sociological account of how, by the late 1960s, three small Italian towns had come to lead the world in the production of gold jewelry--even though they had virtually no jewelry industry less than a century before, and even though Italy had western Europe's most restrictive gold laws. It is a distinctive but paradigmatic story of how northern Italy performed its post-World War II economic miracle by creating localized but globally connected informal economies, in which smuggling, tax evasion, and the violation of labor standards coexisted with ongoing deliberation over institutional change and the benefits of political participation. The Italian gold jewelry industry thrived, Dario Gaggio argues, because the citizens of these towns--Valenza Po in Piedmont, Vicenza in the Veneto, and Arezzo in Tuscany--uneasily mixed familial affection, political loyalties, and the instrumental calculation of the market, blurring the distinction between private interests and public good. But through a comparison with the jewelry district of Providence, Rhode Island, Gaggio also shows that these Italian towns weren't unique in the ways they navigated the challenges posed by the embeddedness of economic action in the fabric of social life. By drawing from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, ranging from economic sociology to political theory, Gaggio recasts the meanings of trust, embeddedness, and social capital, and challenges simple dichotomies between northern and southern Italy.