The first international history of the emergence of economic sanctions during the interwar period and the legacy of this development
Economic sanctions dominate the landscape of world politics today. First developed in the early twentieth century as a way to use the flows of globalization to defend liberal internationalism, their continuing appeal is that they function as an alternative to war. This view, however, ignores the dark paradox at their core: designed to prevent war, economic sanctions are modeled on devastating techniques of warfare.
Tracing the use of economic sanctions from the blockades of World War I to the policing of colonial empires and the interwar confrontation with fascism, Nicholas Mulder combines extensive archival research with political, economic, legal, and military history to reveal how a coercive wartime tool was adopted as an instrument of peacekeeping by the League of Nations. This timely study casts an overdue light on why sanctions are widely considered a form of war, and why their unintended consequences are so tremendous.

Students and the public routinely consult various published college rankings to assess the quality of colleges and universities and easily compare different schools. However, many institutions have responded to the rankings in ways that benefit neither the schools nor their students. In Engines of Anxiety, sociologists Wendy Espeland and Michael Sauder delve deep into the mechanisms of law school rankings, which have become a top priority within legal education. Based on a wealth of observational data and over 200 in-depth interviews with law students, university deans, and other administrators, they show how the scramble for high rankings has affected the missions and practices of many law schools.
Engines of Anxiety tracks how rankings, such as those published annually by the U.S. News & World Report, permeate every aspect of legal education, beginning with the admissions process. The authors find that prospective law students not only rely heavily on such rankings to evaluate school quality, but also internalize rankings as expressions of their own abilities and flaws. For example, they often view rejections from “first-tier” schools as a sign of personal failure. The rankings also affect the decisions of admissions officers, who try to balance admitting diverse classes with preserving the school’s ranking, which is dependent on factors such as the median LSAT score of the entering class. Espeland and Sauder find that law schools face pressure to admit applicants with high test scores over lower-scoring candidates who possess other favorable credentials.
Engines of Anxiety also reveals how rankings have influenced law schools’ career service departments. Because graduates’ job placements play a major role in the rankings, many institutions have shifted their career-services resources toward tracking placements, and away from counseling and network-building. In turn, law firms regularly use school rankings to recruit and screen job candidates, perpetuating a cycle in which highly ranked schools enjoy increasing prestige. As a result, the rankings create and reinforce a rigid hierarchy that penalizes lower-tier schools that do not conform to the restrictive standards used in the rankings. The authors show that as law schools compete to improve their rankings, their programs become more homogenized and less accessible to non-traditional students.
The ranking system is considered a valuable resource for learning about more than 200 law schools. Yet, Engines of Anxiety shows that the drive to increase a school’s rankings has negative consequences for students, educators, and administrators and has implications for all educational programs that are quantified in similar ways.

In the context of the recent financial crisis, the extent to which the U.S. economy has become dependent on financial activities has been made abundantly clear. In "Capitalizing on Crisis", Greta Krippner traces the longer-term historical evolution that made the rise of finance possible, arguing that this development rested on a broader transformation of the U.S. economy than is suggested by the current preoccupation with financial speculation. Krippner argues that state policies that created conditions conducive to financialization allowed the state to avoid a series of economic, social, and political dilemmas that confronted policymakers as postwar prosperity stalled beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s. In this regard, the financialization of the economy was not a deliberate outcome sought by policymakers, but rather an inadvertent result of the state's attempts to solve other problems. The book focuses on deregulation of financial markets during the 1970s and 1980s, encouragement of foreign capital into the U.S. economy in the context of large fiscal imbalances in the early 1980s, and changes in monetary policy following the shift to high interest rates in 1979. Exhaustively researched, the book brings extensive new empirical evidence to bear on debates regarding recent developments in financial markets and the broader turn to the market that has characterized U.S. society over the last several decades.

How do companies sell life insurance in a country where death is a taboo subject? In Marketing Death, Cheris S.C. Chan explores both how and why the life insurance industry has managed to emerge in China, a country with an entrenched cultural stigma against the very topic of death. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and engaging with current scholarship, Chan explores the processes and micro-politics by which foreign and domestic companies have negotiated local cultural resistance and created a market in spite of it. In doing so, she asks larger questions about how different societies view and value life and death, what is meant by "cultural values," how they interact with a set of fragmented cultural tools to compellingly organize individuals' practical daily lives, and how the market is influenced by them. Chan tells a story not just of the emergence of the Chinese life insurance industry, but of the dynamic relationships between culture and markets, local norms and foreign influences in one of the world's fastest-growing economies.
Marketing Death is the first book to offer a sociological analysis of the emergence of a life insurance market outside of a European or American context. Through in-depth study of the expansion of an industry whose unique "product" - gambling on one's own sudden death - has always met with a measure of resistance, but never more so than in China, Chan provides a new lens for understanding how modern capitalist enterprises are diffused to regions with disparate cultural traditions.

★ 美国社会学会2013年度“亚洲研究最佳著作奖”
★ 社会研究协会2012年度“全球化研究最佳著作奖”
★ “玛丽·道格拉斯图书奖”提名
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作者通过在上海等地进行的深入细致的民族志访谈，记录了中国人寿保险市场在避谈死亡的文化禁忌下的发展历程及其背后的微观政治。书中提出的“文化多重互动模型”，对市场起源进行了具体而微的文化解释，呈现了作为共享价值观的文化和作为工具箱的文化的精彩交互。本书同样面对学术圈外的读者，包括人寿保险公司、经理和代理人，计划在中国开展业务的跨国公司，想要拓展海外业务的中国公司员工，以及希望了解中国文化是如何影响我们思想和行为的读者。
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陈纯菁教授的这部著作始于田野（field work），却又超越了田野（field site），为我们精湛呈现了中国寿险市场上传统文化因素与现代经济理性的碰撞交织、全球化与本土化力量的纵横博弈、历史形塑的当下现状与未来趋势之间的内在关联，堪称新兴市场形成史的一幅优美画卷，也为我们如何进行中西学界之间的建设性对话提供了一个优秀范本。
——符平教授，华中师范大学社会学系
可以有把握地说，《生老病死的生意：文化与中国人寿保险市场的形成》中译本的出版会给中国社会学，尤其给初创期的中国文化社会学，带来一缕清风。作者用其扎实而丰富的田野调查资料，简洁规范的行文方式，探讨了中国人寿保险业形成和发展过程中的文化作用。这一基于“工具箱”视角的经验发现，拓展了我们对于文化的认识，也为解释中国社会的关系特征注入了不少新解。同时，作为一本精良的社会学定性研究范本，相信在研究生及学者中一定能寻获知音、捕获佳碑。
——周怡教授，复旦大学社会学系
陈纯菁这部精彩的民族志研究，把文化与经济是否具有兼容性的重要性提到一个新的高度，并精辟地剖析了与国际营销模式不兼容的中国本土文化（“死亡话题禁忌”）如何形塑了新营销模式的过程。《生老病死的生意》是一部富有理论创见的著作，选题新颖，资料详实，论证严密，从一个独特的视角为经济社会学的发展做出了重量级贡献。我相信，这将成为经济社会学领域的一本经典著作。
——王宁教授，中山大学社会学与人类学学院