First published in 1983, Recapitalizing America (now with a new preface by Donald Tomaskovic-Devey) identifies, criticizes, and offers alternatives to the accepted wisdoms of recapitalization, whose variants include not only Reaganomics and Thatcherism but also the less rigid neo-liberal and even liberal policy proposals likely to supplant them. The authors do not want simply to restore the Keynesian welfare state liberalism of the past, but to change and build beyond it.
If the economic ideology of pro-business recapitalization is productivity, the social ideology is the deliberate widening of inequalities and the legitimation of the inegalitarian trends. In opposition to this erosion of support for greater equality, Miller and Tomaskovic-Devey first expose the faulty economic analysis of recapitalization and then propose an alternative economics and politics which are grounded in a commitment to social justice. More specifically, they argue that high-technology jobs cannot solve the problem of unemployment, that the U.S. does not suffer from low investment but from the inappropriate use of capital funds, and that higher productivity is no panacea for the complex problems of the American economy. Their prescriptions include a more effective allocation of capital coupled with a realistic assessment of the difficulties faced by democratic planning, advocacy of employment as the social policy, and the recognition that a more caring society depends not only on legislation and administration but more fundamentally on the concern of one citizen for another.
S.M. Miller was Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Boston University, USA. He received many honors and awards throughout his career, including Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships and the 2009 American Sociological Association's Distinguished Career Award for the Practice of Sociology.
Donald Tomaskovic-Devey is currently Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he directs the Center for Employment Equity. He is also the convener of the Comparative Organizational Inequality Network (COIN). His work has won numerous awards, and he has held visiting faculty appointments in Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Sweden. In addition to 100 or so social science articles, he has published four monographs, including Recapitalizing America: Alternatives to the Corporate Distortion of National Policy (Routledge, 1983), Gender and Racial Inequality at Work: The Sources and Consequences of Job Segregation (Cornell, 1993), and Documenting Desegregation: Racial and Gender Segregation in Private Sector Employment since the Civil Rights Act (Russell Sage Foundation, 2012). His most recent monograph, Relational Inequalities: An Organizational Approach (Oxford, 2019) won the best book awards from two sections of the American Sociological Association. He has served as President of the Southern Sociological Society and Secretary of the American Sociological Association, as well as Chair of both the Economic Sociology and Organizations, Occupations, and Work sections of the American Sociological Association.
