Meanings of Work examines interconnected cultural, social, and economic dimensions of human work. It provides an innovating interdisciplinary basis for understanding the fast changing patterns of work in a now globally unitary market, increasingly beset with problems such as contingent employment and decline of the middle class. In concentrating on sociocultural considerations of work, the book includes essays from Herbert Applebaum, Marietta L. Baba, Ivar Berg, Judith R. Blau, Amitai Etzioni, Frederick C. Gamst, Walter Goldschmidt, June Nash, and Robert Weiss.

The authors discuss the...

This is the first English translation of a monumental account of American railroads (and canals) in the years 1838-1839. Its author, Franz Anton Ritter von Gerstner, was Europe's leading authority on railroad construction, and he conducted his study at the behest of the Russian government, which rightly felt that the United States would provide a more suitable model for the construction of a Russian railroad system than England. For a century and a half, Gerstner's Die innern Communicationen has been recognized as by far the most comprehensive and detailed work on the development,...