The world was shocked in April 2013 when more than 1100 garment workers lost their lives in the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory complex in Dhaka. It was the worst industrial tragedy in the two-hundred-year history of mass apparel manufacture. This so-called accident was, in fact, just waiting to happen, and not merely because of the corruption and exploitation of workers so common in the garment industry. In Achieving Workers' Rights in the Global Economy, Richard P. Appelbaum and Nelson Lichtenstein argue that such tragic events, as well as the low wages, poor working conditions, and voicelessness endemic to the vast majority of workers who labor in the export industries of the global South arise from the very nature of world trade and production. Given their enormous power to squeeze prices and wages, northern brands and retailers today occupy the commanding heights of global capitalism. Retail-dominated supply chains—such as those with Walmart, Apple, and Nike at their heads—generate at least half of all world trade and include hundreds of millions of workers at thousands of contract manufacturers from Shenzhen and Shanghai to Sao Paulo and San Pedro Sula. This book offers an incisive analysis of this pernicious system along with essays that outline a set of practical guides to its radical reform.

Suicides, excessive overtime, and hostility and violence on the factory floor in China. Drawing on vivid testimonies from rural migrant workers, student interns, managers and trade union staff, Dying for an iPhone is a devastating expose of two of the world’s most powerful companies: Foxconn and Apple. As the leading manufacturer of iPhones, iPads, and Kindles, and employing one million workers in China alone, Taiwanese-invested Foxconn’s drive to dominate global electronics manufacturing has aligned perfectly with China’s goal of becoming the world leader in technology. This book reveals the human cost of that ambition and what our demands for the newest and best technology means for workers. Foxconn workers have repeatedly demonstrated their power to strike at key nodes of transnational production, challenge management and the Chinese state, and confront global tech behemoths. Dying for an iPhone allows us to assess the impact of global capitalism’s deepening crisis on workers.’

Bilingual Figurative Language Processing is the first book of its kind to address how bilinguals learn, store, and comprehend figurative language.

This book revisits the theoretical and psycholinguistic controversies centred around the intriguing nature of idioms and proposes a more systematic cognitive-linguistic model of their grammatical status and use. Whenever speakers vary idioms in actual discourse, they open a linguistic window into idiomatic creativity – the complex cognitive processing and representation of these heterogeneous linguistic constructions. Idiomatic creativity therefore raises two challenging questions: What are the cognitive mechanisms that underlie and shape idiom-representation? How do these mechanisms define the scope and limits of systematic idiom-variation in actual discourse? The book approaches these problems by means of a comprehensive cognitive-linguistic architecture of meaning and language and analyses them on the basis of corpus-data from the British National Corpus (BNC). Therefore, Idiomatic Creativity should be of great interest to cognitive linguists, phraseologists, corpus linguists, advanced students of linguistics, and all readers who are interested in the fascinating interplay of language and cognitive processing.This book has a companion website: www.idiomatic-creativity.ch.

Tells the story of how America’s biggest companies began, operated, and prospered post-World War I This book takes the vantage point of people working within companies as they responded to constant change created by consumers and technology. It focuses on the entrepreneur, the firm, and the industry, by showing—from the inside—how businesses operated after 1920, while offering a good deal of Modern American social and cultural history. The case studies and contextual chapters provide an in-depth understanding of the evolution of American management over nearly 100 years. American Business Since 1920: How It Worked presents historical struggles with decision making and the trend towards relative decentralization through stories of extraordinarily capable entrepreneurs and the organizations they led. It covers: Henry Ford and his competitor Alfred Sloan at General Motors during the 1920s; Neil McElroy at Procter & Gamble in the 1930s; Ferdinand Eberstadt at the government’s Controlled Materials Plan during World War II; David Sarnoff at RCA in the 1950s and 1960s; and Ray Kroc and his McDonald’s franchises in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first; and more. It also delves into such modern success stories as Amazon.com, eBay, and Google. Provides deep analysis of some of the most successful companies of the 20th century Contains topical chapters covering titans of the 2000s Part of Wiley-Blackwell’s highly praised American History Series American Business Since 1920: How It Worked is designed for use in both basic and advanced courses in American history, at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

This important study examines the dynamics of the remarkable economic transformation of South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, which has been based in large measure on the production of manufactured goods for export. The competitive edge of these countries has in turn been rooted in the mobilization of a low-cost, disciplined, and productive workforce. This study seeks therefore to explain how East Asian governments and employers have attempted to manage this workforce. It also explores the extent to which workers are able to challenge management decisions and insert working-class agendas into public policy. Beneath the Miracle moves beyond current explanations for the weakness of East Asian labor movements which emphasize Confucianist culture, material welfare gains, and political repression. It shows that the organizational capacity of workers has been more fundamentally undercut first by the nature of emergent East Asian employment systems, and second by the sequencing of developmental change, with political controls preceding rapid industrialization and preempting political and union organization of the growing industrial workforce. Deyo undertakes an incisive cross-national comparison of employment systems and explores anomalous situations, such as that in Hong Kong, where labor is politically weak even under minimal state controls, and that in South Korea, where labor is in a stronger position despite far stricter regulation. Beneath the Miracle offers a fresh and compelling comparative analysis of Asian labor movements which could lead to a reassessment of many other developmental issues in East Asia. In his probing examination, Deyo provides an important and exciting contribution to the literature in this field. This important study examines the dynamics of the remarkable economic transformation of South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, which has been based in large measure on the production of manufactured goods for export. The competitive edge of these countries has in turn been rooted in the mobilization of a low-cost, disciplined, and productive workforce. This study seeks therefore to explain how East Asian governments and employers have attempted to manage this workforce. It also explores the extent to which workers are able to challenge management decisions and insert working-class agendas into public policy. Beneath the Miracle moves beyond current explanations for the weakness of East Asian labor movements which emphasize Confucianist culture, material welfare gains, and political repression. It shows that the organizational capacity of workers has been more fundamentally undercut first by the nature of emergent East Asian employment systems, and second by the sequencing of developmental change, with political controls preceding rapid industrialization and preempting political and union organization of the growing industrial workforce. Deyo undertakes an incisive cross-national comparison of employment systems and explores anomalous situations, such as that in Hong Kong, where labor is politically weak even under minimal state controls, and that in South Korea, where labor is in a stronger position despite far stricter regulation. Beneath the Miracle offers a fresh and compelling comparative analysis of Asian labor movements which could lead to a reassessment of many other developmental issues in East Asia. In his probing examination, Deyo provides an important and exciting contribution to the literature in this field.

Research concerning structure and processing in the mental lexicon has achieved central prominence within cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics. Historically, however, much of the research on the lexicon focussed not on its role in language comprehension, but as a medium for studying semantic memory. This picture has changed in recent years, with much more research examining the role of lexical processes and output in language comprehension.Gathered together in this volume is the work of some of those researchers who are responsible for this shift of emphasis. Chapters deal with the role of sentence contexts in word recognition, processes involved in the activation and enhancement of lexical information, and the interaction of lexical and syntactic information in sentence processing. A wide range of theoretical and empirical issues relating to language understanding are discussed.