The Predatory Society or Just Another Car Factory

The Predatory Society: Deception in the American Marketplace

Author: Paul Blumberg

Who knows more about a business's shady practices than the people who work there? In this pioneering study, Paul Blumberg examines a wide variety of evidence, including over 600 accounts written by workers who disclose in elaborate detail the deceptions their employers practiced on the public.
Employed in a wide variety of business enterprises--supermarkets, restaurants, fish markets, department stores, gas stations, drug stores, pet stores, and many more--these workers pull back the curtain and reveal the hidden recesses of the American marketplace.
Blumberg documents these deceptions in numerous vivid stories, providing readers with a trenchant handbook on survival in America. He tells of stores that routinely mark prices up before a sale; gas stations that sell regular gas as high test; auto mechanics who spray-paint customers' old car parts and then charge them for new parts (in one gas stations, the workers claimed that the mechanic's best tool was his paint can); and pharmacists who sell generic drugs and charge name-brand prices.
But equally important, he provides an insightful analysis of why deception pervades the American marketplace. Though at times amusing, The Predatory Society is also frequently disturbing for what it says about private capitalism: how dishonesty is all but built into the American marketplace, and how this dishonesty has potentially disastrous effects on trust and community in our society.

Book review: CDMA Internetworking or Advertising

Just Another Car Factory?: Lean Production and Its Discontents

Author: James Rinehart

This Study of CAMI Automotive, a unionized joint venture between General Motors and Suzuki, is the most comprehensive ever undertaken of a lean production plant. James Rinehart, Christopher Huxley, and David Robertson address a topic that has inspired fierce debate in industrial relations, sociology, labor studies, and a human resource management.

Table of Contents:

	Author Recognition
	Acknowledgments
	Introduction	1
Ch. 1	The Strike That Was Not Supposed to Happen	3
Ch. 2	Touring the Plant	11
Ch. 3	Lean Production: The Essentials and CAMI's Version	25
Ch. 4	Recruitment and Training	33
Ch. 5	Working at CAMI: Multiskilling or Multitasking?	44
Ch. 6	Working Lean	65
Ch. 7	Team Concept and Working in Teams	85
Ch. 8	Gender on the Line	108
Ch. 9	The Kaizen Agenda	124
Ch. 10	Kaizen: Shop Floor Responses and Outcomes	137
Ch. 11	Commitment	157
Ch. 12	The Union	180
Ch. 13	Is CAMI Exceptional?	194
Ch. 14	Just Another Car Factory?	201
	App. I: Methodology	207
	App. II: Questionnaire Items Referred to in the Text	221
	References	231
	Index	243