André Gorz argues that changes in the role of the work and labour process in the closing decades of the twentieth century have, once and for all, weakened the power of skilled industrial workers. Their place has been taken, says Gorz, by social movements such as the womenʹs movement and the green movement, and all those who refuse to accept the work ethic so fundamental to early capitalist societies. Provocative and heretical, Farewell to the Working Class is a classic study of labour and unemployment in the post-industrial world.

This book offers a rich ethnographic account of blue-collar workers’ everyday life in a central Russian industrial town coping with simultaneous decline and the arrival of transnational corporations. Everyday Post-Socialism demonstrates how people manage to remain satisfied, despite the crisis and relative poverty they faced after the fall of socialist projects and the social trends associated with neoliberal transformation. Morris shows the ‘other life’ in today’s Russia which is not present in mainstream academic discourse or even in the media in Russia itself. This book offers co-presence and a direct understanding of how the local community lives a life which is not only bearable, but also preferable and attractive when framed in the categories of ‘habitability’, commitment and engagement, and seen in the light of alternative ideas of worth and specific values. Topics covered include working-class identity, informal economy, gender relations and transnational corporations.

Post-Industrial Socialism provides critical analysis of recent developments in leftist political thought. Adrian Little charts new directions in the economy and the effects they have had on traditional models of social welfare and orthodox approaches to social policy. In demonstrating the limitations of the welfare state and the associated concept of citizenship, this book suggests that we need to renew socialist welfare theory through the evaluation of universal welfare provision and a policy of breaking the link between work and income.

The post-communist states of Central and Eastern Europe have gone from being among the world's most closed, autarkic economies to being some of the most export-oriented and globally integrated. While previous accounts have attributed this shift to post-1989 market reform policies, Besnik Pula sees the root causes differently. Reaching deeper into the region's history and comparatively examining its long-run industrial development, he locates critical junctures that forced the hands of Central and Eastern European elites and made them look at options beyond the domestic economy and the socialist bloc. In the 1970s, Central and Eastern European socialist leaders intensified engagements with the capitalist West in order to expand access to markets, technology, and capital. This shift began to challenge the Stalinist developmental model in favor of exports and transnational integration. A new reliance on exports launched the integration of Eastern European industry into value chains that cut across the East-West political divide. After 1989, these chains proved to be critical gateways to foreign direct investment and circuits of global capitalism. This book enriches our understanding of a regional shift that began well before the fall of the wall, while also explaining the distinct international roles that Central and Eastern European states have assumed in the globalized twenty-first century.

Why socialism has failed to play a significant role in the United States - the most developed capitalist industrial society and hence, ostensibly, fertile ground for socialism - has been a critical question of American history and political development. This study surveys the various explanations for this phenomenon of American political exceptionalism.

In 1976, Daniel Bell's historical work predicted a vastly different society developing—one that will rely on the “economics of information” rather than the “economics of goods.” Bell argued that the new society would not displace the older one but rather overlie some of the previous layers just as the industrial society did not completely eradicate the agrarian sectors of our society. The post-industrial society's dimensions would include the spread of a knowledge class, the change from goods to services and the role of women. All of these would be dependent on the expansion of services in the economic sector and an increasing dependence on science as the means of innovating and organizing technological change.Bell prophetically stated in The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society that we should expect “… new premises and new powers, new constraints and new questions—with the difference that these are now on a scale that had never been previously imagined in world history.”

The re-emergence of China as an economic superpower during its systemic transition is an astonishing phenomenon. China and Post-Socialist Development is the first comprehensive attempt to frame China’s advancements within the context of the East Asian developmental miracle, against the background of post-socialist transformation, asking how has it happened and where does China go from here? In this book the author argues that as China transits from central planning to market, it tries to imitate the institutions and policies of Japan and South Korea during their high growth periods of the second half of the twentieth century. China’s approach – broadly in opposition to the neo-liberal doctrine – has brought impressive results, leading the author to make important predictions about the future. This book is for everybody who is interested in China, development and post-socialist transformation.

In this major new book, Andre Gorz expands on the political implications of his prescient and influential Paths to Paradise and Critique of Economic Reason. Against the background of technological developments which have transformed the nature of work and the structure of the workforce, Gorz explores the new political agendas facing both left and right. Each is in disarray: the right, torn between the demands of capital and the 'traditional values' of its supporters, can only offer illusory solutions, while the left either capitulates to these or remains tempted by regressive, 'fundamentalist' projects inappropriate to complex modern societies. Identifying the grave risks posed by a dual society with a hyperactive minority of full-time workers confronting a silenced majority who are, at best, precariously employed, Gorz proposes a new definition of a key social conflict within Western societies in terms of the distribution of work and the form and content of non-working time. Taking into account changing cultural attitudes to work, he re-examines socialism's historical project-which, he contends, has always properly been to lay down the rules and limits within which economic raitonality may be permitted to function, not to create some statist, productivist countersystem. Above all, he offers a vital fresh perspective for the left, whose objective, in his view, must be to extend the sphere to autonomous human activity, and increase the possibilities for individual self-fulfilment.

How does an urban community come to terms with the loss of its future? The former socialist model city of Hoyerswerda is an extreme case of a declining postindustrial city. Built to serve the GDR coal industry, it lost over half its population to outmigration after German reunification and the coal industry crisis, leading to the large-scale deconstruction of its cityscape. This book tells the story of its inhabitants, now forced to reconsider their futures. Building on recent theoretical work, it advances a new anthropological approach to time, allowing us to investigate the postindustrial era and the futures it has supposedly lost.

This book presents multidimensional socio-economic transformations taking place in the post-socialist cities located in selected countries of the Central European region. The analysis includes case studies from the Eastern part of Germany (Chemnitz, Leipzig), Poland (Łódź, Kielce, Katowice conurbation, and peripheral urban centres from Eastern Poland), Slovakia (Bratislava, Nitra), the Czech Republic (Olomouc, Brno), and from Hungary (Pécs). The analysed urban areas have undergone far-reaching political and socio-economic changes in the last 30 years. These changes began with the collapse of communism and the centrally planned economy system in the region of Central Europe. The beginning of this period, often referred to as post-socialist transformation, dates back to 1989. The consequence of the aforementioned political processes was the multifaceted socio-economic and demographic changes that significantly affected urban areas in Central Europe. This book presents an attempt to summarize the main long-term processes of changes taking place in these urban areas and to identify contemporary and future trends in their socio-economic development. The book will be valuable to undergraduate and postgraduate students in human geography, urban studies, economy, and city marketing, especially with an interest in Central Europe.