Welcome!

There are several things going on here. This site serves as a blog for rants, comments and possibly longer pieces and a place to archive work.  For the origins of Ztangi Press go here .

It has been some years since I last reviewed a book, recently however I reviewed Bernard Harcourt’s Cooperation: A Political, Economic, and Social Theory .  Afterwards I reviewed  – After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time and you will find that review here. GEOGrassroots Economic Organizing  posted an audio version. Next I plan to review Hannes  Gerhardt’s From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism.

I have posted the Prelude and the Introduction from a long essay (47,000 wds) on the Jobs, Jive, and Joy page. The essay will be published as a book Jobs, Jive, and Joy: An Argument for the Utopian Spirit. It is a joint publication of Ztangi Press and C.H. Kerr Publishing and will be available November, 2024.

There are seven sections to the book. The first section was completed in the Summer 2019. It focused on Western Electric’s massive Hawthorne Works near Chicago and the early forms of worker-focused leisure that the company provided. It was called The Club. The second section on Time was finished a year later. It was followed by Play, The Work Ethic, Beyond Work and concludes with a Coda on strategy all written during the early years of the pandemic. The substance of the strategy section, and the theme running throughout the book, relies on my knowledge of the international movement for a cooperative society.

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Essays

UCB – a public university or a corporate innovation center?

A recent Chronicle article featuring Richard Lyons (class of ’79), the university’s 12th chancellor depicts the university as a study in juxtapositions, or maybe, better, to use that antiquarian notion, contradictions.

On the one hand we have the former “chief innovation officer in 2020” at UCB, who banks almost a milliondollar paycheck for his services, who, before his academic career with the Haas Business School is 1993, was the “chief learning officer” at Goldman Sachs for a few years.