Talking about Machines or Monetary Politics

Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job

Author: Julian E E Orr

This is a story of how work gets done. It is also a study of how field service technicians talk about their work and how that talk is instrumental in their success. In his innovative ethnography, Julian E. Orr studies the people who repair photocopiers and shares vignettes from their daily lives. He characterizes their work as a continuous highly skilled improvisation within a triangular relationship of technician, customer, and machine.

Read also Your Miraculous Back or Arthritis of the Hip and Knee

Monetary Politics: The Federal Reserve and the Politics of Monetary Policy

Author: John T T Woolley

This is the first book to describe and analyze the relationships between the Federal Reserve and the president, Congress, bankers, and economists. Far from being politically independent, the Federal Reserve is shown to be sensitive to a wide range of political influences.

Table of Contents:

	Preface	ix
1.	The Federal Reserve and the Politics of Monetary Policy: Introduction and Overview	1
	What is at stake?	3
	Relationships with external actors	10
	A framework for examining issues and relationships in monetary politics	15
	The political position of the Federal Reserve	22
	Conclusion and overview	27
2.	A Capsule History of the Federal Reserve System	30
	Defining the role of government in financial matters	31
	The Federal Reserve: proximate sources	35
	The conception of the role of the Federal Reserve	39
	Resolving the question of the location of power over monetary policy	41
	Conclusion	46
3.	Recruitment and Selection of Federal Reserve Personnel	48
	Recruitment processes	49
	Occupational backgrounds of successful candidates	55
	Background and behavior	61
	Movement out of the System	64
	Conclusion	67
4.	Bankers and the Federal Reserve	69
	The question of capture	69
	Bankers' interests	71
	Bankers' political resources	74
	What have the bankers received?	80
	Conclusion	85
5.	Economists and the Federal Reserve	88
	Non-issues	88
	Monetarists and the issues in monetary politics	90
	Mainstream economists and control of the Federal Reserve	96
	The monetarist counterthrust	99
	Economists' conflicts and Federal Reserve behavior	101
	Conclusion	105
6.	The President and the Federal Reserve	108
	Presidential relations with the Federal Reserve	109
	Conflicts	119
	Elections	125
	Conclusion	129
7.	Congress and the Federal Reserve	131
	Congress: capabilities and incentives	132
	The banking committees	133
	Patterns of interaction with the Federal Reserve	138
	The congressional challenge of 1975	144
	Conclusion	152
8.	Making Monetary Policy in a Political Environment: The Election of 1972	154
	The plausibility of the charge of election-year misbehavior	155
	Discordant notes: Burns versus the White House, 1970-1971	157
	The alternative view: the pressure of controls	158
	Inside the FOMC in 1972	161
	1972 in retrospect	168
	Conclusion	179
9.	Monetary Politics: A Summary	181
	Political economy approaches	185
	Patterns of mobilization and monetary politics	190
Appendix A	A Note on Data Sources	195
Appendix B	Legislation Included in Table 7.1	203
Appendix C	Academic Backgrounds and Career Experiences of Notable Monetarists	208
	Notes	211
	Bibliographic Note	271
	Index	275