On Converting Customer Service to a Higher Calling

Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service Work (Princeton UP, 2026) retheorizes capitalism from the perspective of the service economy, challenging conventional assumptions about how work is waged, regulated, managed, and automated Today, 80 percent of U.S. workers do service work, from delivering takeout to mopping floors to teaching. Each time we are handed a bag of groceries or a cup of coffee, call for a cab or have our homework graded, we confront both the enormity and the intimacy of the contemporary service sector. Do these jobs have anything in common? Who is doing this work? And what kind of labor politics does it generate? If service work has often been treated as a footnote to modern capitalism, Beneath the Wage reveals it as crucial to understanding how exploitation functions today. Uncovering a history that runs from eighteenth-century servants to present-day gig workers, Annie McClanahan retheorizes capitalism from the perspective of the service economy, challenging conventional assumptions about how work is waged, regulated, managed, and automated. Assembling a diverse set of sources for understanding and reimagining service work—from reality television and conceptual poetry to novels and workers’ own descriptions of what they do—McClanahan explores three paradigmatic types of contemporary service labor: superexploited tipwork, deskilled clerical microwork, and informalized gigwork. She shows how work done “beneath the wage” depends on racialized and gendered forms of economic domination, is often excluded from labor organizing and regulation, and yet has begun to generate a new politics of social reproduction and solidarity.

Making Sense of China's Economy (Routledge, 2023) untangles China’s complex economic structure, evolving issues and curious contradictions, and explains some key features of this most puzzling of global economic powerhouses. This book reveals how factors such as demographics, the initial stage of development in 1978, the transition away from full state ownership and central planning, the dual urban-rural society, and a decentralised governance structure have combined to shape the economy, its development and its reforms.

In our increasingly distrusting and polarized world, accusations of hypocrisy are everywhere. But our attempts to stamp out hypocrisy may backfire, creating what Michael Hallsworth calls The Hypocrisy Trap. In his book The Hypocrisy Trap: How Changing What We Criticize Can Improve Our Lives (MIT Press, 2026) Hallsworth shows how our relentless drive to expose inconsistency between words and deeds can actually breed more hypocrisy and cynicism that corrodes our institutions. Through engaging stories and original research, he argues that while some forms of hypocrisy destroy trust and create harm, others reflect the inevitable compromises of human nature and complex societies. This book offers practical solutions for increasing consistency, navigating accusations wisely, and changing how we judge others’ actions.

The Kurdish-populated Wan/Van Province is a major smuggling hub between Turkey and Iran. Kurdish smugglers cross this 180-mile-long land border, transporting everyday consumer goods—fuel, tobacco, sugar, and tea—as well as more illicit goods, and the province supports the financial, technical, and labor capacities that sustain these smuggling economies. As the Turkish state has enacted increasingly punitive anti-smuggling laws, smuggling has also become a site of contentious politics. Smuggling Law: Unsettled Sovereignties in Turkey’s Kurdish Borderlands (Stanford UP, 2025) explores anti-smuggling law enforcement and criminal prosecutions to reveal a key site—the criminal court—where borders and claims of sovereignty are simultaneously remade and disrupted.

A provocative examination of the ways our economy has been rigged by financialization, and the importance of games to our dangerous political moment. In an age when capitalism feels like an unwinnable game, extreme reactionary ideas and politics are on the rise. The Hunger Games, Game of Thrones, Squid Game and much of reality TV are cultural reflections of a society of relentless, lonely competition, where each of us must become a player: a savvy risk-taker, a miniature corporation of one. But in a gamed economy we players feel played, and new forms of fascism promise harsh justice and revenge. This book theorizes the connections between the financialization of the capitalist economy, the gamification of our lives, and the rising threat of a uniquely twenty-first century form of fascistic politics. From vicious online swarmings to the QAnon conspiracy fantasy, from the siege of the US Capitol to the abuse of “free speech,” The Player and the Played: From Gamed Capitalism to 21st-Century Fascism with Max Haiven (MIT Press, 2026) analyzes the “playgrom” as a new form of extremist violence. Max Haiven explores how “derivative fascisms” both repeat and reinvent the terrors of the past in a financialized form. How have we learned to love the cheats who have power but loathe the cheats without it? It unpacks the worldbuilding (and world-destroying) urge of Silicon Valley. And it poses the urgent question: what is the antifascist game?