Monographs & Edited Collections (5,097 posts)

Condemned as shirkers for not being in uniform, rejected volunteers faced severe ostracism. Their own sense of nagging guilt, coupled with self-doubt about their social and physical worth, was often crippling. Faced with external and internal assaults, some rejected volunteers exiled themselves from society … others chose to end their lives.

In the early years of the Great Depression, thousands of unemployed homeless transients settled into Vancouver’s “hobo jungle.” The jungle operated as a distinct community, in which goods were exchanged and shared directly, without benefit of currency. The organization of life was immediate and consensual, conducted in the absence of capital accumulation. But as the transients moved from the jungles to the city, they made innumerable demands on Vancouver’s Relief Department, consuming financial resources at a rate that threatened the city with bankruptcy. In response, the municipality instituted a card-control system—no longer offering relief recipients currency to do with as they chose. It also implemented new investigative and assessment procedures, including office spies, to weed out organizational inefficiencies. McCallum argues that, threatened by this “ungovernable society,” Vancouver’s Relief Department employed Fordist management methods that ultimately stripped the transients of their individuality.

Stuart A. Kirk recently retired as a distinguished professor of social welfare at the University of California, Los Angeles, where his academic research focused on the interplay of science, social values, and professional politics in the helping professions. He is the coauthor or author of nine books, many chapters, and over one hundred articles published in social welfare, psychology, psychiatry, and other journals. Among his books are Science and Social Work, The Selling of DSM, Making Us Crazy, and Mad Science. In thirteen engaging essays in his new book, Prof. Kirk takes you with him as he plunges into the world of motorcycling. As a midcareer professor, he recounts his discovery of the complexities and pleasures of the moto life—the escape, adventure, and mastery. He also shares intimate moments of coping with the dangers and exhilarations of learning to ride well.

In The Mythology of Work, Peter Fleming examines how neoliberal society uses the ritual of work (and the threat of its denial) to maintain the late capitalist class order. As our society is transformed into a factory that never sleeps, work becomes a universal reference point for everything else, devoid of any moral or political worth. Blending critical theory with recent accounts of job related suicides, office-induced paranoia, fear of relaxation, managerial sadism and cynical corporate social responsibility campaigns, Fleming paints a bleak picture of neoliberal capitalism in which the economic and emotional dysfunctions of a society of wage slaves greatly outweigh its professed benefits.