Here are 100 books that Flexible Citizenship fans have personally recommended if you like
Flexible Citizenship.
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I'm an economic anthropologist and teach classes and conduct research in this area. Economic anthropology is different from economics in that it questions many of the things that economics takes for granted. For example, most economists assume that allocating goods through the market by buying and selling is the best way to organize human communities. Economic anthropologists have shown, in contrast, that many societies have been organized according to other exchange principles. In fact, some of the oldest communities in the world, such as Sumer and Babylon, based their economies around elaborate systems of redistribution, in which every citizen was guaranteed food shares.
Money is often thought of as a valuable thing, like gold or silver.
This leads us to presume that it must be finite in quality due to its scarcity. Drawing on anthropological studies of objects such as Yap stones, massive stone disks found on a far-flung island in the Pacific Ocean.
Martin shows instead that money is not so much a thing but an abstract system for tracking who has what and who is entitled to what, similar to what the anthropologist Keith Hart has called a “memory bank.” By rethinking money along these lines, we might be able to rethink how we decide who gets what and who doesn’t get what in our communities.
From ancient currency to Adam Smith, from the gold standard to shadow banking and the Great Recession: a sweeping historical epic that traces the development and evolution of one of humankind’s greatest inventions.
What is money, and how does it work? In this tour de force of political, cultural and economic history, Felix Martin challenges nothing less than our conventional understanding of money. He describes how the Western idea of money emerged from interactions between Mesopotamia and ancient Greece and was shaped over the centuries by tensions between sovereigns and the emerging middle classes. He explores the extraordinary diversity of…
I'm an economic anthropologist and teach classes and conduct research in this area. Economic anthropology is different from economics in that it questions many of the things that economics takes for granted. For example, most economists assume that allocating goods through the market by buying and selling is the best way to organize human communities. Economic anthropologists have shown, in contrast, that many societies have been organized according to other exchange principles. In fact, some of the oldest communities in the world, such as Sumer and Babylon, based their economies around elaborate systems of redistribution, in which every citizen was guaranteed food shares.
Most of us think of economics and economic policy making the same way that we do about other scientific fields, such as physics or engineering. Like those sciences, economics uses numerical models and mathematical analysis to explain how the world works.
In contrast, this book reveals how economics is a very different kind of science from physics or engineering. Holmes shows how economists and economic policy-makers rely on language as much as, or even more than, numbers to achieve their desired policy goals.
Markets are artifacts of language - so Douglas R. Holmes argues in this deeply researched look at central banks and the people who run them. Working at the intersection of anthropology, linguistics, and economics, he shows how central bankers have been engaging in communicative experiments that predate the financial crisis and continue to be refined amid its unfolding turmoil - experiments that do not merely describe the economy, but actually create its distinctive features. Holmes examines the New York District Branch of the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, Deutsche Bundesbank, and the Bank of England, among others, and shows…
I'm an economic anthropologist and teach classes and conduct research in this area. Economic anthropology is different from economics in that it questions many of the things that economics takes for granted. For example, most economists assume that allocating goods through the market by buying and selling is the best way to organize human communities. Economic anthropologists have shown, in contrast, that many societies have been organized according to other exchange principles. In fact, some of the oldest communities in the world, such as Sumer and Babylon, based their economies around elaborate systems of redistribution, in which every citizen was guaranteed food shares.
We often think that unemployed people are lazy or lack ambition.
Ferguson shows how in certain parts of the world the problem is not indolence but the fact that there are simply not enough jobs for all those who need employment or would like to work. With the acceleration of automation, offshoring, and artificial intelligence this situation could become far worse and ultimately create a great deal of social and political instability.
Ferguson documents how a number of states around the world have adopted universal basic income programs, in which poor people are provided funds by the government with no work requirements or other strings attached. The book shows how changing our thinking about the morality attached to work might actually create more stable societies.
In Give a Man a Fish James Ferguson examines the rise of social welfare programs in southern Africa, in which states make cash payments to their low income citizens. More than thirty percent of South Africa's population receive such payments, even as pundits elsewhere proclaim the neoliberal death of the welfare state. These programs' successes at reducing poverty under conditions of mass unemployment, Ferguson argues, provide an opportunity for rethinking contemporary capitalism and for developing new forms of political mobilization. Interested in an emerging "politics of distribution," Ferguson shows how new demands for direct income payments (including so-called "basic income")…
I'm an economic anthropologist and teach classes and conduct research in this area. Economic anthropology is different from economics in that it questions many of the things that economics takes for granted. For example, most economists assume that allocating goods through the market by buying and selling is the best way to organize human communities. Economic anthropologists have shown, in contrast, that many societies have been organized according to other exchange principles. In fact, some of the oldest communities in the world, such as Sumer and Babylon, based their economies around elaborate systems of redistribution, in which every citizen was guaranteed food shares.
China is often represented as very different from North Atlantic countries, such as the US or the UK.
Some have argued that China’s phenomenal economic growth over the past three decades has often been attributed to its distinctive economic and labour practices. Kimberly Chong shows how instead Chinese corporations have made extensive use of techniques introduced by Western management consultants, firms like KPMG, Booz, Allen & Hamilton, Inc., or McKinsey & Company.
In so doing, she shows how local workplace norms and China’s national project of modernization have been reformed by management consulting firms. She also reveals some of the critical but unrecognized techniques that have enabled the remaking of society, such as the iPhone revolution.
In Best Practice Kimberly Chong provides an ethnography of a global management consultancy that has been hired by Chinese companies, including Chinese state-owned enterprises. She shows how consulting emerges as a crucial site for considering how corporate organization, employee performance, business ethics, and labor have been transformed under financialization. To date financialization has been examined using top-down approaches that portray the rise of finance as a new logic of economic accumulation. Best Practice, by contrast, focuses on the everyday practices and narratives through which companies become financialized. Effective management consultants, Chong finds, incorporate local workplace norms and assert their expertise…
James M. Jasper has written a number of books and articles on politics and social movements since the 1980s, trying to get inside them to see what participants feel and think. In recent years he has examined the many emotions, good and bad, involved in political engagement. He summarizes what he has learned in this short book, The Emotions of Protest, taking the reader step by step through the emotions that generate actions, to those that link us to groups, down to the emotional and moral impacts of social movements. The book is hopeful and inspiring but at the same time also clear-eyed about the limitations of protest politics.
Meetings are one of the main activities of social movements, and plenty of misunderstandings occur based on the way people talk due to different backgrounds. This amusing book focuses on the effects of social class, which both activists and scholars have tended to forget about in recent years. If nothing else, it will give you something to think about during your next meeting.
Many activists worry about the same few problems in their groups: low turnout, inactive members, conflicting views on racism, overtalking, and offensive violations of group norms. But in searching for solutions to these predictable and intractable troubles, progressive social movement groups overlook class culture differences. Missing Class looks through a class lens and discovers that members with different class life experiences tend to approach these problems differently. Using this class lens enables readers to envision new solutions, solutions that draw on the strengths of all class cultures to form the basis of stronger cross-class and multiracial movements.
I don’t have a passion for the diversity, equity, and inclusion topic. I have an obligation. When I didn’t see or understand the horrific injustice of systemic oppression, I couldn’t do anything about it. Now that I see it, I cannot ignore it. I’ve become an expert through my work in organizational development. I work with technology, healthcare, financial services and educational services clients around the globe, and in 2016 I founded GAR (Gender, Age, Race) Diversity Consulting. Prior to GAR, I was a director in the National Diversity and Inclusion office at Kaiser Permanente, and I worked for many years as a global management and technology consultant with American Management Systems, Inc (now CGI).
Workplaces are increasing in diversity, making it essential for workers to understand the nuances of cross-cultural relationships. This book delves into those nuances in a way that is practical, insightful, and fun. The author begins by introducing the four stages of cultural awareness, then builds by providing workbook opportunities for the reader to develop often profound insight. The author remarkably shows no bias toward one culture over another, which heightens the book's value. It’s also a terrific read for global travelers to gain an understanding and appreciation of places and people visited.
Here is the ultimate, self-instructional cross-cultural training manual. Craig Storti, author of The Art of Crossing Cultures, The Art of Coming Home, Incident at Bitter Creek and Cross-Cultural Dialogues, brings his wealth of knowledge and his creative mind to this exceptional new resource.
Figuring Foreigners Out is designed for anyone who wants to help in "figuring out" the behavior of someone from another culture. Educators, trainers and individuals will profit from this user-friendly workbook. readers can work through exercises which are vintage Storti - on their own, or in a training group.
Concepts at the heart of intercultural communication are…
As an enthusiastic and eclectic reader, one of my great joys is recommending books to others. I was able to indulge this joy consistently while teaching at a university, introducing students to authors and books and topics they otherwise might never have encountered. I find this same excitement in my own writing, searching for ways to reveal to others the magnificent wealth I find in modern poetry and in the brilliant concepts of poetic thinking.
A renowned teacher of expository writing, Perl is invited to Austria to offer a course on how to teach the Holocaust. Although her mother warned her that as a Jew she should never enter a German-speaking country, Perl decides to accept.
She writes with brutal honesty about the troubled and often profound relationships she establishes with her Austrian students. Her explorations of difficult and sometimes excruciating issues are conducted with a spirit of love and openness toward her students and herself. This is the most ethically engaged book I have read about the profession of teaching.
An award-winning teacher takes a journey into alien territory: Austria, Hitler's birthplace, and the territory of her own hatred. A teaching memoir that offers a pedagogy of hope.
As a rebellious woman who is passionate about words and the revolutionary force of books, I know the power of stories. Stories are the seeds that give life to your purpose. Stories give you a reason to fight the good fight, care about something bigger than yourself, and want to be a part of social justice and positive change. The daily grind can kick you down, but a good story can remind you that there's still time to rise up, speak truth to power, help others less fortunate, and commit to what you value most. The books that I’m recommending are meant to be your personal guide to what really matters most in life to you.
If you seriously care about racial healing, you have to read this book. White people are so damn afraid to say the wrong thing or to offend anyone when it comes to the topic of race, that we end up not saying anything at all. And silence is death to a movement. If you care about Black and Brown lives, then this book will shake you up in a good way, and remind you of the importance of being a good listener to the concerns of people of color. When you listen, you can have empathy. When you have empathy, you can start to be a part of the racial reckoning and healing that’s starting to take place in our nation.
n So You Want to Talk About Race, editor-at-large of The Establishment Ijeoma Oluo offers a contemporary, accessible take on the racial landscape in America, addressing head-on such issues as privilege, police brutality, intersectionality, micro-aggressions, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the "N" word. Perfectly positioned to bridge the gap between people of color and white Americans struggling with race complexities, Oluo answers the questions readers don't dare ask, and explains the concepts that continue to elude everyday Americans.
Oluo is an exceptional writer with a rare ability to be straightforward, funny, and effective in her coverage of sensitive, hyper-charged…
My plan to write my book clicked after I bought an apple grown in New Zealand, 10,000 miles away from my home in Ohio. How did it make sense that we could buy apples so cheaply from so far away? What was the carbon footprint of that one transaction? Growing up in Michigan in the 1970s and 1980s, I had seen our industrial cities decay as trade globalized. Later I watched with horror as global financial markets crashed in 2008. With these experiences in mind, I wanted to write about both the benefits and the costs of globalization—and about its ethics—for religious communities like mine. So I did.
Friedman, a longtime New York Times foreign affairs columnist, was one of the first to show me what I should love and hate about globalization, circa 1999, at the peak of Western support for neoliberal globalization.
Although his gee-whiz, gung-ho enthusiasm for the world of the Lexus (high-tech globalization with global supply chains and integrated financial markets) sometimes wears thin, he also covers the problems caused by globalization. He even appeals to the need for the “olive trees” of community, family, and religion to make globalization ethical.
Even when the breezy tone annoys me, this book is still my go-to guide for mapping the effects of globalization on business, economics, politics, culture, and the environment.
A brilliant investigation of globalization, the most significant socioeconomic trend in the world today, and how it is affecting everything we do-economically, politically, and culturally-abroad and at home.
As foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman crisscrosses the globe talking with the world's economic and political leaders, and reporting, as only he can, on what he sees. Now he has used his years of experience as a reporter and columnist to produce a pithy, trenchant, riveting look at the worldwide market forces that are driving today's economies and how they are playing out both internationally and…
I have been writing books about France and the French for two decades. The adventure began when I moved to Quebec in my early 20s and married a Quebecker. He became my life partner and co-author. I learned his language, immersed myself in Canada’s French-language culture and began writing articles in French. In 1999 we moved to France for three years to study the French. Three books later, we returned to Paris with our daughters to try to demystify French conversation. The result is The Bonjour Effect. I am grateful to the authors on my list for helping me refine my understanding of France, the French and their language.
Polly Platt was the first author to write about the frustrating features of French in a way that would help foreigners deal with them. In this classic, first published in 1994, she delves into their intense relationship to food, explains how to handle rudeness in stores, how to deal with the French bureaucracy, how their idea of time can drive foreigners crazy and much more. Platt’s observations were eye-opening for me when I first moved to France and are still relevant 25 years later.
