A quick glance along bookstore shelves will likely yield an abundance of books with titles like Guerrilla Marketing or Machiavelli on Modern Leadership – old school, hardcore, businessman-as-savvy corporate marauder books. Or perhaps a more recent development in tactical publishing, such as Awakening Corporate Soul and The Zen of Management: prepackaged business-as-spiritual-undertaking codices, ready to be plucked off the shelf and contemplated over a decaf latté at the in-store café. This is a world of proven practice and easy solution. There’s no Marx for Managers or Michael Harrington for Dummies. Of late, however, there’s been a new sort of business book, nicely exemplified by The Horizontal Organization.

Ostroff’s "Horizontal Organization" is structurally opposed to the classic "Vertical Organization," the backbone of corporate America. The central premise: the inflexibility and fragmentation inherent to the vertical system can be avoided by collapsing middle- and lower- managers into problem-oriented, synergistic teams.

Claiming that most companies are not ready for horizontalization, Ostroff suggests a transition period, during which a steering committee is in constant assessment of objectives met and missed (shades of five year plans?). Far from advocating an opportunity for labor-level action, Ostroff clearly states that the task is a strictly top-bottom, not bottom-top process.

This new approach implies that workers, like managers, will need to become more flexible, tackling shifting responsibilities and undertaking a certain amount of re-education and retraining. Perhaps the shift brings a certain amount of empowerment, but workers should understand that malleability, not flexibility, is required. There is still an insistence on "teamwork," but Ostroff never clarifies the immediate relationship between the middle management teams and the worker teams. Ostroff’s horizontal world is populated by satisfied customers, fulfilled middle managers, and happy workers, his thesis made self-evident by his (mildly generalist) case studies. The reader would have difficulty arguing that a horizontal system isn’t more "humane" (Ostroff’s descriptor) than a vertical one; perhaps any system would be, and some of Ostroff’s ideas do have a vaguely Ben-and-Jerry’s socialist flavor. But the reader is left wondering how success is measured in the horizontal organization. By its feel-good humanity or its bottom-line profitability? The answer can probably be found by looking at the target audience: upper-level executives.

Christopher Moisan

This pair of books describe from two angles, what I think is one of the biggest problems with our economic system today- aside from the delusional, millionaire-worshipping cult that is the stock market- the fact that women's labor has traditionally been unpaid labor.

Under Attack provides a useful documentation of the history of the welfare state in the U.S. in relation to women's rights, laying out the background history and theory – both of feminism and of welfare reforms from a variety of perspectives – academic, legislative, ideological etc. The book combines feminist theory and welfare policy more explicitly than anything I could find in a month of web searching. It outlines how the aforementioned economic system of values has been institutionalized in the welfare system to women's disadvantage – especially those of single mothers and their children.

Unfortunately the book's publication date makes parts of it obsolete, since Clinton’s welfare reform in 1996 radically changed the systems that Abramowitz was describing. Welfare-related activism has been on the rise since reform was instituted, and Abramowitz is currently working on a second edition of the book due out this fall.

Personal accounts and children's art for a cover design make The War Against Parents a tear-jerker of a book.

Its premise: both liberal and conservative agendas are undermining the role of parents by insisting on the all-American right to be individualist, no matter the cost. For the liberals, this individualism is located in the right to choose what kind of life you live, finding its strength mostly in the feminist agendas, and in the transgression of the constraining boundaries imposed by 1950s style definitions of the family (i.e. one male breadwinner, one female home-maker, two children). The book also reminds us that much of that idyllic 1950s life was a post-war, state-enabled phenomenon – not the self-made man's utopia that some would have us believe in. For the conservatives, individualism lies in their faith in the free market's ability to somehow act in the public's best interest.