Cuvi, Jacinto. 2025. The Edge of the Law: Street Vendors and the Erosion of Citizenship in São Paulo: University of Chicago Press.
With a little initiative and very little startup money, an outgoing individual might sell you a number of delights and conveniences familiar to city dwellers—from cold water bottles while you’re sitting in traffic to a popsicle from a cart on a summer afternoon in the park. Such vendors form a significant share of the workforce in São Paulo, Brazil, but their ubiquity belies perpetual struggle. Some have the right to practice their trade; others do not. All of them strive to make it—or stay afloat.
Bereni, Laure. 2025. Managing Corporate Virtue: The Politics of Workplace Diversity in New York and Paris: Oxford University Press.
A major tenet of contemporary capitalism holds that what is good for business can align with what is good for society. Efforts toward more diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplaces epitomize this rising ideology, termed responsible capitalism. An increasingly common managerial mantra is “diversity means business.” But how does it play out in the daily life of organizations? Drawing on interviews with diversity managers, a historical review of practitioner literature, and observations from organizations in New York City and Paris, Managing Corporate Virtue goes beyond the rhetoric of diversity initiatives to uncover the concrete challenges faced by those tasked with implementing them. This book reveals the persistent fragility of diversity efforts, which are often sidelined; subject to the variations of the legal, social, and political environment; and require constant efforts to sustain managerial support. Practitioners must prove their programs are neither merely virtue signaling nor the Trojan horse of political, legal, or moral pressures that would unsettle the corporate order. Ultimately, by exploring the day-to-day work of diversity managers in the United States and France, the book exposes the contradictions lurking beneath the neoliberal promise of harmony between profit and virtue.
There is a growing consensus that the discipline of sociology and the social sciences broadly need to engage more thoroughly with the legacy and the present day of colonialism, Indigenous/settler colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism in the United States and globally. In Disciplinary Futures, a cross-section of scholars comes together to engage sociology and the social sciences by way of these paradigms, particularly from the influence of disciplines of American, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies.
The book is a comparative and historical analysis of the factors that helped or hindered workers in their attempts to build unions in the U.S.’s 11 basic industries, 1900-2015. For each industry, we analyze shifts in union power (union density), as affected by the state and macro context, replacement costs of workers, union and employer strategies, and the impact of employment, race, gender, and occupation.
The EU has pursued many trade pacts across the world. This is part of its foreign policy: as the third largest economy in the world and lacking hard power, the EU relies on trade agreements to project its interests. These are often complex and far-reaching initiatives that have the potential to shape not only economic but also political and social life in the EU and its trading partners.
