The complexity of the American economy and polity has grown at an explosive rate in our era of globalization. Yet as the 2008 financial crisis revealed, the evolution of the American state has not proceeded apace. The crisis exposed the system's manifold political and economic dysfunctionalities.
Featuring a cast of leading scholars working at the intersection of political science and American history, The Unsustainable American State is a historically informed account of the American state's development from the nineteenth century to the present. It focuses in particular on the state-produced inequalities and administrative incoherence that became so apparent in the post-1970s era. Collectively, the book offers an unsettling account of the growth of racial and economic inequality, the ossification of the state, the gradual erosion of democracy, and the problems deriving from imperial overreach. Utilizing the framework of sustainability, a concept that is currently informing some of the best work on governance and development, the contributors show how the USA's current trajectory does not imply an impending collapse, but rather a gradual erosion of capacity and legitimacy. That is a more appropriate theoretical framework, they contend, because for all of its manifest flaws, the American state is durable. That durability, however, does not preclude a long relative decline.

From the boardrooms to the court rooms, this is the gripping story of how Apple became the world's most valuable company, and of the lawmakers and entrepreneurs determined to knock it off its pedestal.

Since the invention of the iPhone and App Store, Apple has built a near unassailable market power, controlling not only commerce, but also culture, and - increasingly - the flow of ideas.

In response, a loose rebel alliance of tech entrepreneurs has formed to lay siege to Apple, bringing together Epic Games' Tim Sweeney, Spotify's Daniel Ek, X's Elon Musk and WeChat's Pony Ma. In the trenches of popular opinion and now in the courtrooms of Europe and the United States, this rebellion aims to tear down Apple's walls and dismantle its alleged monopoly.

iWar weaves together the story of Apple's rise and reign with the political and international forces arrayed against it in the fight over control of the global digital economy. The stakes couldn't be higher.

Elgar Advanced Introductions are stimulating and thoughtful introductions to major fields in the social sciences, business and law, expertly written by the world's leading scholars. Designed to be accessible yet rigorous, they offer concise and lucid surveys of the substantive and policy issues associated with discrete subject areas. Professor Fikret Berkes provides a unique introduction to the social and interdisciplinary dimensions of biodiversity conservation. Examining a range of approaches, new ideas, controversies and debates, he demonstrates that biodiversity loss is not primarily a technical issue, but a social problem that operates in an economic, political and cultural context. Berkes concludes that conservation must be democratized in order to broaden its support base and build more inclusive constituencies for conservation. Key features include: focus on Indigenous peoples' rights, knowledge and practices discussion of commons governance, co-management and responsibility exploration of the history of conservation and the nature stewardship traditions a broad view of conservation that encompasses the well-being of humans as well as ecosystems Taking an interdisciplinary social science approach that includes conservation science concepts, this Advanced Introduction will benefit students of environmental studies, geography, ecology and conservation. It will also be a useful resource for conservation organizations.

John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) is perhaps the foremost economic thinker of the twentieth century. On economic theory, he ranks with Adam Smith and Karl Marx; and his impact on how economics was practiced, from the Great Depression to the 1970s, was unmatched. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was first published in 1936. But its ideas had been forming for decades ? as a student at Cambridge, Keynes had written to a friend of his love for 'Free Trade and free thought'. Keynes's limpid style, concise prose, and vivid descriptions have helped to keep his ideas alive - as have the novelty and clarity, at times even the ambiguity, of his macroeconomic vision. He was troubled, above all, by high unemployment rates and large disparities in wealth and income. Only by curbing both, he thought, could individualism, 'the most powerful instrument to better the future', be safeguarded. The twenty-first century may yet prove him right. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Keynes elegantly and acutely exposes the folly of imposing austerity on a defeated and struggling nation.

The Business Environment provides a flexible and comprehensive learning experience for modern PESTLE-driven courses by using a two-tier approach. The book offers an accessible introduction to the business environment model, taking into account curriculum and blended learning developments. For those new to business and business economics it introduces the key concepts, theory and examples (covering marketing, human resource management, operations management, finance), whilst also maintaining the depth and rigour needed for both undergraduate and postgraduate level study. The accompanying CourseMate offers a host of practical material mapped specifically to each chapter, and provides the overall product with unrivalled depth and coverage for the levels targeted.

With a GDP that just reached $2.6 trillion, India is poised to become the world's third largest economy in less than a decade. In doing so, it will have moved one step closer to reclaiming its pre-industrial glory when it accounted for one-sixth of the global output and ranked second in economic size. This rapid movement in the absolute size of the economy will be insufficient, however, to bring prosperity to India's vast population. Today, 44% of the country's workforce remains in agriculture and another 42% in small enterprises with fewer than twenty workers. Labor productivity of both sets of workers remains low and they live overwhelmingly on subsistence-level incomes. In New India: Reclaiming the Lost Glory, Arvind Panagariya outlines a concise strategy to transform India from a primarily rural and agricultural economy to an urban and industrial economy with well-paid jobs for those with limited skills. Panagariya argues that the creation of good jobs requires the emergence of medium and large enterprises in industry and services, especially labor-intensive sectors such as apparel, footwear, and other light manufactures. He explains that India needs policies conducive to the growth of firms from small to medium, medium to large, and large to larger still. Such policies include greater outward orientation; more flexible land, labor, and capital markets; concerted effort to improve the quality of higher education; faster urbanization; and improved governance at all levels. Written by a preeminent authority on the Indian economy, New India: Reclaiming the Lost Glory provides a data-driven and persuasive roadmap for India to eliminate abject poverty, accelerate economic growth, and return to its historically prominent position in the global economy.

Over the past century, new farming methods, feed additives, and social and economic structures have radically transformed agriculture around the globe, often at the expense of human health. In Chickenizing Farms and Food, Ellen K. Silbergeld reveals the unsafe world of chickenization-big agriculture's top-down, contract-based factory farming system-and its negative consequences for workers, consumers, and the environment. Drawing on her deep knowledge of and experience in environmental engineering and toxicology, Silbergeld examines the complex history of the modern industrial food animal production industry and describes the widespread effects of Arthur Perdue's remarkable agricultural innovations, which were so important that the US Department of Agriculture uses the term chickenization to cover the transformation of all farm animal production. Silbergeld tells the real story of how antibiotics were first introduced into animal feeds in the 1940s, which has led to the emergence of multi-drug-resistant pathogens, such as MRSA. Along the way, she talks with poultry growers, farmers, and slaughterhouse workers on the front lines of exposure, moving from the Chesapeake Bay peninsula that gave birth to the modern livestock and poultry industry to North Carolina, Brazil, and China. Arguing that the agricultural industry is in desperate need of reform, the book searches through the fog of illusion that obscures most of what has happened to agriculture in the twentieth century and untangles the history of how laws, regulations, and policies have stripped government agencies of the power to protect workers and consumers alike from occupational and food-borne hazards. Chickenizing Farms and Food also explores the limits of some popular alternatives to industrial farming, including organic production, nonmeat diets, locavorism, and small-scale agriculture. Silbergeld's provocative but pragmatic call to action is tempered by real challenges: how can we ensure a safe and accessible food system that can feed everyone, including consumers in developing countries with new tastes for western diets, without hurting workers, sickening consumers, and undermining some of our most powerful medicines?

Despite the rhetoric, the people of Sub-Saharan Africa are becoming poorer. From Tony Blair's Africa Commission, the G7 finance ministers' debt relief, the Live 8 concerts, the Make Poverty History campaign and the G8 Gleneagles promises, to the United Nations 2005 summit and the Hong Kong WTO meeting, Africa's gains have been mainly limited to public relations. The central problems remain exploitative debt and financial relationships with the North, phantom aid, unfair trade, distorted investment and the continent's brain/skills drain. Moreover, capitalism in most African countries has witnessed the emergence of excessively powerful ruling elites with incomes derived from financial-parasitical accumulation. Without overstressing the 'mistakes' of such elites, this title contextualises Africa's wealth outflow within a stagnant but volatile world economy.