by Kumiko Nemoto

It might be expected that a surge in the number of highly educated women living in an advanced economy and under a democracy should increase gender equality in that society, including the number of women leaders in business. However, despite such a surge in Japan, it remains one of the least gender-equal advanced countries in the world, with women constituting only 11 percent of managers and only 3 percent of board members.

My new book asks why the number of women remains so low in upper management in Japanese companies in Japan.

The absence of women leaders in a workplace hierarchy and a large concentration of women at the bottom is known as vertical sex segregation. The vertical sex segregation of Japanese companies is closely related to corporate management, the employment structure, and institutional features that support corporate customs.

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by Benjamin H. Snyder

The twenty-first century workplace compels Americans to be more flexible. To embrace change, work with unpredictable schedules, be available 24/7, and take charge of one’s own career. What are the wider implications of these pressures for workers’ lives? How do they conceive of good work and a good life amid such incessant change?

In my recently published book, The Disrupted Workplace, I consider these questions in light of three groups of American workers—financial professionals, truck drivers, and unemployed job seekers. I look at how they construct moral order in a capitalist system that demands flexibility.

Based on seventy in-depth interviews and three years of participant observation, I argue that the flexible economy transforms how workers experience time. New scheduling techniques, employment strategies, and technologies disrupt the flow and trajectory of working life, which makes the workplace a site of perplexing moral dilemmas. Work can feel both liberating and terrorizing, engrossing in the short term but unsustainable in the long term.

The book contributes to conversations about the human costs of flexible and precarious work by examining how both high and low status workers construct moral order within workplaces and careers that are chaotic and shifting.

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by Daniel Fridman

Donald Trump’s recent resistance to cutting ties with his personal businesses suggests that he is unconcerned by the appearance that he may benefit financially from being president of the United States. His appeal as a billionaire, and his ability to use his wealth as an asset with voters of vastly different economic means, helps explain his lack of concern.

How did Donald Trump, a billionaire who lives in a Manhattan penthouse full of golden furniture and travels by private jet to his Mar-a-Lago mansion, manage to connect with vast swaths of the U.S. electorate?

One key to understanding Trump’s allure is his experience in the wildly popular financial self-help circuit. As a book author and a well-paid speaker, Trump learned a thing or two about the “common folk” who aspire to financial freedom and who revere the rich people who are “out of the rat race.” It was in this world that Trump perfected his charismatic performance in front of live audiences who were unhappy with their financial lives and sought change.

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by Heather A. Haveman

How did a magazine industry emerge in the United States in the eighteenth century, where there were once only amateur authors, clumsy technologies for production and distribution, and sparse reader demand?  Why would anyone launch a magazine-publishing venture under such circumstances?  What legitimated magazines as they competed with other media, such as newspapers, books, and letters?  And what role did magazines play in the integration or division of American society?

My new book, Magazines and the Making of America, investigates how, over a 120-year period, magazines and groups they connected ushered America into the modern age.  It reveals how magazines fundamentally transformed the nature of community in America.  The signature modernizing talent of magazines, like other media, is to connect people – to literally mediate between them, to facilitate frequent interactions between them even when they are geographically dispersed and would otherwise never meet face to face.

Magazines in this era supported many distinct, cohesive, translocal communities – collections of people with common interests, values, principles, ideas, and identities who were often situated far away from each other.  As America became socially differentiated, magazines engaged and empowered diverse communities of faith (in a burgeoning number of religious groups), communities of purpose (in a wide array of social-reform movements), and communities of practice (in commerce, agriculture, and specialized occupations such as medicine and law).

Religious groups could distinguish themselves from others and demarcate their identities.  Social-reform movements could energize activists across the country to push for change.  People in specialized occupations could meet and learn from one another to improve their practices.  But countering their modernizing effects, magazines also supported many communities of place, which embodied traditional localistic reactions to the rise of modern translocal communities.

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The Lusty Lady peep show in San Francisco (Wikimedia Commons)

by Gregor Gall

The Lusty Lady peepshow, based in San Francisco, was the pinnacle of the achievements of the global sex worker unionisation phenomenon. Between 1997 and 2013, union recognition, collective bargaining and job control existed under conventional management and then under cooperative ownership (when the establishment closed due to financial pressures).  Its peculiarity in comparison to the vast majority of other sex workers highlights the broad and substantial nature challenges for sex worker unionisation.

The exotic dancers at the Lusty Lady were employed, paid a minimum wage and not in direct contact with customers. The imports of these were they could use the certification law to gain union recognition (which self-employed workers cannot), they were not in competition with each other as other dancers usually are for customers and the Service Emlployees International Union was amenable to helping organise them given it did not have to practice ‘open source’ unionism to do so.

Furthermore, the Lusty Lady attracted a certain kind of dancer, namely, politically progressive women, and the establishment was a peepshow and not a lapdancing or strip club where clients have more influence over dancer performances.

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