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This book draws attention to the impact of flexible scheduling on managerial power and workplace control. When we understand paid work as a power relationship, the book argues, we see how the spread of precarious scheduling constitutes flexible despotism; a novel regime of control within the workplace. The author of the book believes that flexible despotism represents a new domain of inequality, in which the postindustrial working class increasingly suffers a scheduling nightmare. By investigating two of the largest retailers in the world, the book uncovers how control in the contemporary “flexible firm” is achieved through the insidious combination of “flexible discipline” and “schedule gifts.” Flexible discipline provides managers with an arbitrary means by which to punish workers, but flexible scheduling also requires workers to actively win favor with managers in order to receive “schedule gifts”: more or better hours. The book concludes that the centrality of precarious scheduling to control means that for those at the bottom of the postindustrial labor market, the future of work will increasingly be one of flexible despotism.

This book tackles the question of how countries achieve rural development and offers a new way of thinking about East Asia's political economy that challenges the developmental state paradigm. Through a comparison of Taiwan (1950s–1970s), South Korea (1950s–1970s), and China (1980s–2000s), the book shows that different types of development outcomes—improvements in agricultural production, rural living standards, and the village environment—were realized to different degrees, at different times, and in different ways. The book argues that rural modernization campaigns, defined as policies demanding high levels of mobilization to effect dramatic change, played a central role in the region and that divergent development outcomes can be attributed to the interplay between campaigns and institutions. The analysis departs from common portrayals of the developmental state as wholly technocratic and demonstrates that rural development was not just a byproduct of industrialization. The book's research is based on several years of fieldwork in Asia and makes a unique contribution by systematically comparing China's development experience with other countries. Relevant to political science, economic history, rural sociology, and Asian Studies, the book enriches our understanding of state-led development and agrarian change.