Volta Redonda is a Brazilian steel town founded in the 1940s by dictator Getulio Vargas on an ex-coffee valley as a powerful symbol of Brazilian modernization. The city's economy, and consequently its citizen's lives, revolves around the Companha Siderurgica Nacional (CSN), the biggest...

"Until the 1990s, Northeast China was the cradle of the new China’s industrial base that made the most historic contribution to China’s reform and opening-up program. However, as China’s modernizing reforms deepened, the Northeast’s economic development gradually began to lag behind...

This book offers a rich ethnographic account of blue-collar workers' everyday life in a central Russian industrial town coping with simultaneous decline and the arrival of transnational corporations. 'Everyday Post-Socialism' demonstrates how people manage to remain satisfied, despite the crisis...

"Shannon, Wally, and John built their lives around their place of work. Shannon, a white single mother, became the first woman to run the factory's dangerous furnaces at the Rexnord manufacturing plant in Indianapolis and was proud of producing one of the world's top brands of steel bearings....