The southern textile strikes of 1929-1931 were ferocious struggles--thousands of millhands went on strike, the National Guard was deployed, several people were killed and hundreds injured and jailed. The southern press, and for a time the national press, covered the story in enormous detail. In recounting developments, southern reporters and editors found themselves swept up on a painful and sweeping re-examination and reconstruction of southern institutions and values. Whalen explores the largely unknown world of southern journalism and investigates the ways in which the upheaval in textiles triggered profound soul-searching among southerners. The southern textile strikes of 1929-1931 were ferocious struggles--thousands of millhands went on strike, the National Guard was deployed, several people were killed and hundreds injured and jailed. The southern press, and for a time the national press, covered the story in enormous detail. In recounting developments, southern reporters and editors found themselves swept up on a painful and sweeping re-examination and reconstruction of southern institutions and values. Whalen explores the largely unknown world of southern journalism and investigates the ways in which the upheaval in textiles triggered profound soul-searching among southerners.

The worlds of labor, journalism, and the American South collide in this study. That collision, Whalen claims, is the prelude to the stunning social, economic, and cultural transformation of the American South which occurred in the last half of the twentieth century. The textile strikes shocked the mind of the South, a fact that can readily be seen in hometown papers, as reporters and editors ran the gamut from denial and scheming to hoping and dreaming--sometimes even bravely confronting the truth. The reevaluation of southern manners and mores that would culminate in the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s can be dated back to this period of turmoil.

Exploring the issue of foreign ownership of corporate America, a leading economist and the president of the steel producer, Esmark, revisit the sale of that company to a Russian firm. Is it a good idea to allow foreigners to purchase critical and strategic American assets? No, say authors James Koch and Craig Bouchard. In America for Sale: How the Foreign Pack Circled and Devoured Esmark, Koch and Bouchard use the sale of Esmark-a transaction that put over 50 percent of American steel production into foreign hands-to make the case that this trend presents a clear and present danger to the economic future of United States of America. America for Sale recaps the amazing, sometimes incredible events leading up to the sale of Esmark, including intense pressure from the United Steelworkers and the company's major public shareholder to make a decision not in the best interest of all shareholders. It also analyzes the efforts by the Esmark board of directors to observe its fiduciary duty, details the company's "poison pill" effort to raise its sales price, and describes the actions of Leo Gerard and Ron Bloom of the United Steelworkers Union-which led to some surprising alliances. The authors-one Esmark's president and vice chairman of the board, the other an Esmark director, preeminent American economist, and former university president-then provide their own assessment of the Esmark story. They offer legislative and policy prescriptions aimed at making sure U.S. business doesn't devolve into one big garage sale to foreigners seeking to take advantage of the coming decline of the U.S. dollar. Previously unseen documents relating to the hostile reverse tender merger of Esmark, a historic first in unseating the board of directors of a publicly traded company in the United States A chronology of the "America for Sale" phenomenon and of key events in the American steel industry, from the 1970s to 2009 Approximately 25 tables and one dozen graphs that make it easy for readers to interpret data related to the Esmark sale and the overall foreign stake in American companies Text boxes that focus on human interest stories and the amazing quirks attached to the sale of Esmark-for example, one of the Russian bidders also was interested in acquiring the Pittsburgh Penguins hockey team and preventing its star Russian hockey player from leaping from a team in the remote Ural mountains to the NHL; that star subsequently led the NHL in scoring in the 2009 NHL season

Manufacturing Possibilities examines adjustment dynamics in the steel, automobile and machinery industries in Germany, the U.S., and Japan since World War II. As national industrial actors in each sector try to compete in global markets, the book argues that they recompose firm and industry boundaries, stakeholder identities and interests and governance mechanisms at all levels of their political economies. Micro level study of industrial transformation in this way provides a significant window on macro level processes of political economic change in the three societies.
Theoretically, the book marks a departure from both neoliberal economic and historical institutionalist perspectives on change in advanced political economies. It characterizes industrial change as a creative, bottom up process driven by reflective social actors. This alternative view consists of two distinctive claims. The first is that action is social, reflective, and ultimately creative. When their interactive habits are disrupted, industrial actors seek to repair their relations by reconceiving them. Such imaginative interaction redefines interest and causes unforeseen possibilities for action to emerge, enabling actors to trump existing rules and constraints. Second, industrial change driven by creative action is recompositional. In the social process of reflection, actors rearrange, modify, reconceive, and reposition inherited organizational forms and governance mechanisms as they experiment with solutions to the challenges that they face. Continuity in relations is interwoven with continuous reform and change. Most remarkably, creativity in the recomposition process makes the introduction of entirely new practices and relations possible.
Ultimately, the message of Manufacturing Possibilities is that social study of change in advanced political economies should devote itself to the discovery of possibility. Preoccupation with constraint and failure to appreciate the capaciousness of reflective social action has led much of contemporary debate to misrecognize the dynamics of change. As a result, discussion of the range of adjustment possibilities in advanced political economies has been unnecessarily limited.

Several years have passed since the 'store wars' over barriers to foreign products at Japanese distribution firms. Yet among English-speaking readers, how these firms operate remains a puzzle. In this book, the best Japanese scholars in their fields attempt to unravel that puzzle. Avoiding culture-based explanations, they employ a systematic and rigorous economic logic---yet, since they also avoid mathematical notation, the argument remains accessible to generalist readers.

The Future of Chinese Manufacturing: Employment and Labour Challenges gives context and analysis on employment and labor issues in contemporary China, specifically relating to manufacturing industries. With one fifth of the world's workforce, China has taken advantage of its cheap labor to serve as the world's factory, achieving stunning growth for two decades. This book covers the appreciation of RMB, constant increases in minimum wage, shortages of skilled workers in China's labor-intensive manufacturing sector, and the fact that many large multinational corporations (MNCs) must cut costs, and are thus shifting their main production bases to other developing countries. Under such a tough situation, and coupled with the global economic slowdown, manufacturing employment in China confronts severe labor-related challenges, such as high turnover rates, recruitment difficulties for workers, and a series of high profile labor strikes and publicity concerning working conditions.

This book presents a number of efficient techniques for solving large-scale production scheduling and planning problems in process industries. The main content is supplemented by a wealth of illustrations, while case studies on large-scale industrial applications, ranging from continuous to semicontinuous and batch processes, round out the coverage. The book examines a variety of complex, real-world problems, and demonstrates solutions that are applicable to scenarios and countries around the world. Specifically, these case studies include: • the production planning of the bottling stage of a major brewery at the Cervecería     Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma (Heineken Int) in Mexico;• the production scheduling for multi-stage semicontinuous processes at an ice-cream   production facility of Unilever in the Netherlands;• the resource-constrained production planning for the yogurt production line at the KRI KRI dairy production facility in Greece; and• the production scheduling for large-scale, multi-stage batch processes at a pharmaceutical batch plant   in Germany. In addition, the book includes industrial-inspired case studies of: • the simultaneous planning of production and logistics operations considering multi-site  facilities for semicontinuous processes; and• the integrated planning of production and utility systems in process industries under uncertainty. Solving Large-scale Production Scheduling and Planning in the Process Industries offers a valuable reference guide for researchers and decision-makers alike, as it shows readers how to evaluate and improve existing installations, and how to design new ones. It is also well suited as a textbook for advanced courses on production scheduling and planning in industry, as it addresses the optimization of production and logistics operations in real-world process industries.

This book includes every aspect of the cotton trade, starting with the history and background, its growth and production patterns. It goes on to examine the international trade itself, the key players, recent trends, and a look at cotton prices, forecasting, and the factors that affect the cotton price. The author looks at end uses for cotton by analyzing the garment industry as a whole and the competition for cotton. This is related to cotton consumption and the global economics of this commodity. The final chapter looks to the future and attempts to forecast trends for the industry over the coming years.

Overall, this first volume in the series should render business research in manufacturing a good deal easier by bringing together insightful industry histories and detailed critical bibliographies. This series has much to recommend it. Future volumes will be eagerly awaited. Reference Books Bulletin This historical and bibliographical reference work is the first volume of Greenwood Press's Handbook of American Business History, a series intended to supplement current bibliographic materials pertaining to business history. Devoted to manufacturing, this work uses the Enterprise Standard Industrial Classification (ESIC) to divide the subject into distinct segments, from which contributors have developed histories and bibliographies of the different types of manufacturing. Though authors were given sets of guidelines to follow, they were also allowed the flexibility to work in a format that best suited the material. Each contribution in this volume contains three important elements: a concise history of the manufacturing sector, a bibliographic essay, and a bibliography. Some contributions appear in three distinct parts, while others are combined into one or two segments; all build on currently available material for students and scholars doing research on business and industry. The contributors, who include business, economic, and social historians, as well as engineers and lawyers, have covered such topics as bakery products, industrial chemicals and synthetics, engines and turbines, and household appliances. Also included are an introductory essay that covers general works and a comprehensive index. This book should be a useful tool for courses in business and industry, and a valuable resource for college, university, and public libraries.

The future for all the nations of the world, whether diverse- or single-commodity countries, is bound up in effective economic development. In particular, an understanding of the relationship between a government and its private business sector is becoming an increasingly important factor in the management of economic growth. This work presents the results of a study that focuses on efforts to stimulate private industrial investment in the manufacturing sector of the Saudi Arabian economy. The conclusions help to shed light on the interplay of government-business relationships not only in Saudi Arabia, but in other developing countries as well.

The study, conducted in 1986, included a series of interviews with manufacturing executives, government officials, and chamber of commerce members. Wahib Soufi and Richard Mayer begin their analysis with an overview of government and business in Saudi Arabia, assessing the role played by Islamic law and the need for diversification. They follow this by sketching a conceptual framework for examining government-business relationships, and outlining issues relevant to promoting industrial development. A set of three chapters explore the results of the survey data, detailing the perceptions of the Saudi private business sector, comparing business and government perceptions, and finally, evaluating the effect of communications, expectations, and perceptions on the government-business relationship. The concluding chapter reexamines these conclusions on the basis of information available three years after the initial study, and is followed by a selective bibliography. This important study will be a valuable resource for corporate managers and government officials involved in economic planning, and a useful reference tool for college courses in business and economic policy and for public and academic libraries.