David Fasenfest
Biographic Data
| ID | 245397 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David Fasenfest |
| GIVEN NAMES | David |
| FAMILY NAME | Fasenfest |
| SIGNATURE | FASENFEST D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Wayne State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2708-7938 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 72 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 53 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 72 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Safe Spaces in Dangerous Times: The Continued Importance of Critical Sociology
New Challenges in a Changing World
Activist Sociologists Engaging Sociology
Critical Sociology at 50
OriginsIn 1968, with the Vietnam War raging, a range of social movements arrayed in opposition to colonialism, poverty, and racism mobilized during the Democratic Convention in Chicago to protest.At the same time in Boston, a radical group of young faculty and graduate students called the Radical Caucus of Sociology gathered for the American Sociological Association (ASA) meeting, looking to alter the course of the discipline.The social unrest of…
Marx Matters
Choice Award 2022: Outstanding Academic Title Marx Matters is an examination of how Marx remains more relevant than ever in dealing with contemporary crises. This volume explores how technical dimensions of a Marxian analytic frame remains relevant to our understanding of inequality, of exploitation and oppression, and of financialization in the age of global capitalism. Contributors track Marx in promoting emancipatory practices in Latin America…
Spiking the Sociological Canon
The Challenge for Sociology: The Value of the Critique
Navigating a New Decade
Reflections on the Decline of Academia: Large Problems and Small Minds
Understanding the Trajectory of Japanese Capitalism
How can we understand the trajectory of Japanese capitalism? This Afterword situates Japan on a broad canvas stretching across both the region and the globe. East Asia's regional dynamics figure prominently, shaping the trajectory of Japanese capitalism not only in the formative Age of Empire and postwar reconstruction, but also in the emergent Asian Century. An historical examination of geo-politics highlights imperial entanglements and both the…
Power, participation, and protest in Flint, Michigan: Unpacking the policy paradox of municipal takeovers , by Ashley E. Nickels
Ashley Nickels’s work is an analysis of state policy directed at addressing fiscal stress within a city. Through the lens of events in Flint, Michigan, and the usurpation of democratically elected
On the Threshold of a New Era
Rust Belt Cities
Rust Belt cities both large and small, once urban centers of industrial production creating the middle class of America, fell victim to global restructuring, technological change, and international competition. By the late 1970s they became synonymous with poverty, population loss, and urban decay. To reverse this decline, these cities now focus on the arts, urban agrarianism, and repurposing abandoned industrial spaces to house new technologies …
A Neoliberal Response to an Urban Crisis: Emergency Management in Flint, MI
The fiscal crisis faced by municipalities is the product of a range of structural and political factors that leave communities unable to meet their obligations. To deal with this crisis, the State of Michigan turned to a program of Emergency Managers who were given the power to overrule locally elected officials, abrogate existing contracts and arrangements, sell public property, and in short do whatever they wished to address the problem. Emerge…
What to Make of Populism's Resurgence
Is Marx Still Relevant
Towards Just and Sustainable Economies: The social and solidarity economy North and South
Rust Belt Cities
Rust Belt cities, once urban centers in the heartlands of industrial production, fell victim to global restructuring, technological change, and international competition. By the late 1970s they became synonymous with poverty, population loss, and urban decay. To reverse this decline, these cities now focus on the arts, urban agrarianism, and repurposing abandoned industrial spaces to house new technologies and create jobs to attract immigrants an…
Towards Just and Sustainable Economies: The Social and Solidarity Economy North and South
The need to avoid dangerous climate change whilst meeting the needs of millions in the global north and south suggests that a new economic model is required. Social and solidarity economies have been suggested as an alternative to the failed models of both public and private enterprise. What can they contribute in terms of offering the hope of an economy that includes all, in ways that free markets don’t? Can social and solidarity economies meet …
The Downward Healthcare Slide: Tearing the Social Fabric
Checks, (Bank) Balances and Death Panels
The Struggle Continues
Megacities
The world's population is increasingly urban; more people now live in cities than in rural areas. The growth of traditional cities is being eclipsed in Asia, Africa, and Latin America by the rapid population growth, the increase in the number of second‐tier cities, and the appearance of megacities with populations over 10 million people. Megacities pose problems of overcrowding, relegate the poor to living in slums, experience health and ecologic…
Marx, Marxism and Human Rights
We live in strange, almost unbelievable, and certainly scary time. In a scene right out of the 1931 film Frankenstein, 70,000 Poles brandishing torches marched in protest of immigrants in Poland. Demonstrations like this are repeated in Germany, France, and much of Western Europe as rightwing (some say fascist) parties witness increasing support in local and even national elections. One Republican US presidential aspirant urges the use of torture…
Emergency Management in Michigan: Race, Class and the Limits of Liberal Democracy
Emergency Management in Michigan: Race, Class and the Limits of Liberal Democracy
Enforcement Mechanisms Discouraging Black-American Presence in Suburban Detroit
In metropolitan Detroit, scholars have long observed that geographic space is racialized in the sense that black Americans are not welcome in many suburban communities. This extends beyond housing segregation: black drivers are not wanted on many suburban streets. While the existence of racial animosity has been documented, the enforcement mechanisms utilized to 'protect' certain geographic areas from black presence have rarely been quantified an…
A Neoliberal Response to an Urban Crisis: Emergency Management in Flint, MI
The fiscal crisis faced by municipalities is the product of a range of structural and political factors that leave communities unable to meet their obligations. To deal with this crisis, the State of Michigan turned to a program of Emergency Managers who were given the power to overrule locally elected officials, abrogate existing contracts and arrangements, sell public property, and in short do whatever they wished to address the problem. Emerge…
Government, Governing, and Governance
Government: the office, authority or function of governing. Governing: having control or rule over oneself. Governance: the activity of governing. Accordingly, governance is a set of decisions and processes made to reflect social expectations through the management or leadership of the government (by extension, under liberal democratic ideals, the will of ‘the people’ as they rule themselves). There are many issues implicit in this set of relatio…
The Glocal Crisis and the Politics of Change
The term ‘glocal’ seems to have originated in business circles, often attributed to the Japanese business practice of expanding global enterprise by focusing on local conditions. Of late it also comes to mean how local actors can organize activities in the locality to counter the effects of globalization on economic and social vitality. Some may worry that glocalization runs the risk of generalizing the global into the local to defuse local cultu…
A Political Economy of Knowledge Production
In his farewell address on January 17, 1961 outgoing President Eisenhower coined the now well worn phrase “military industrial complex” in his warning that there is a danger in the confluence of the government’s military establishment and a growing industrial based serving those interests. Specifically, he cautioned that “(i)n the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, b…
Reflections on the Decline of Academia: Large Problems and Small Minds
Is Marx Still Relevant
Neoliberalism, Globalization and the Capitalist World Order
We often forget how fast things change; for example, my father was born at a time when a wagon ride to the major city center 50 miles away took half a day and by the time he died almost a century later he could travel across a major ocean and traverse a continent in the same time. Those of us old enough to recall having to literally cut and paste together edits on our work know that the “cut ” and “paste ” features on most word pro-cessing softwa…
Stories Employers Tell: Race, Skill, and Hiring in America
Using Producer Incentives to Achieve Social Objectives: An Assessment of the Marketplace and Public Policies
The purpose of this paper is to recast the light in which we have come to evaluate public policy initiatives and open the door for a more careful examination o f the effects markets have on the course of public policies employing producer incentives to achieve policy goals. Specifically, the paper will review the past experience of urban renewal to show the relationship between policy objectives and outcomes when policy is designed to work throug…
The Challenge for Sociology: The Value of the Critique
The Struggle Continues
Dangerous Times
Critical Sociology after 40 Years: Looking Back, Looking Forward
With these opening sentences, the founders of The Insurgent Sociologist, which later became Critical Sociology,1 gave notice to the academy writ large, and the sociology profession in particular, that a new era had begun, a challenge to orthodoxy had emerged, that would call into question business as usual within academe. Heretofore ‘scholarship’ that did little to really interrogate the world as it was, that more often than not served as apologi…
The Politics of Economic Change: Are We in a Brave New World
The Assault on Workers' Rights
The November 2010 election in the USA resulted in a wave of conservative candidates winning in local and national contests, and taking office in January 2011. Most analysts argued that this election result was due to a combination of typically small voter turnout for by-elections, a strong turnout by zealous advocates of the now well known Tea Party, and general voter dissatisfaction with the sluggish state of the economy and relatively high unem…
Terrorism, Neo-Liberalism and Political Rhetoric
Value, Exchange and the Social Economy: Framework and Paradigm Shift in Urban Policy
A market paradigm has been dominant in the field of community development, defining how governmental officials, development professionals and even academics view the world, and influencing the way problems are identified, the kind of questions asked, the solutions considered, the criteria for 'success' and even the evaluative methodologies employed. This article maintains that the market paradigm has not succeeded from the micro-social perspectiv…
Community Politics and Urban Redevelopment: Poletown, Detroit, and General Motors
Faced with the imminent loss of its industrial base, Detroit undertook the Central Industrial Park Project to prepare a site for a proposed General Motors assembly plant. By recalculating the benefits and costs involved in that project, this article raises questions concerning the appropriateness of using benefit cost analysis as the sole determinant of local redevelopment policy, and offers a framework for understanding community power in the li…
Using Producer Incentives to Achieve Social Objectives: An Assessment of the Marketplace and Public Policies
The purpose of this paper is to recast the light in which we have come to evaluate public policy initiatives and open the door for a more careful examination o f the effects markets have on the course of public policies employing producer incentives to achieve policy goals. Specifically, the paper will review the past experience of urban renewal to show the relationship between policy objectives and outcomes when policy is designed to work throug…
Public Costs, Private Benefits: The Pitfalls of Capital Budgeting for Reindustrialization
For the past two decades industrial cities have pursued a wide range of programs to reinvigorate and revitalize their industrial and job base. These programs, however, have called into questions the form and extent of costs incurred and benefits accrued to various sectors within the community. Traditionally this process of reindustrialization has been evaluated on the basis of an analysis that attempts to compare the overall costs of the project …
The Comparative Politics of Local Economic Development: Introduction to the Symposium
Comparative Local Economic Development: A Framework for Further Research
Recent research on local economic development does not provide an adequate framework for anticipating the consequences of cross national policy transfer and emulation. The research focuses on case specific analysis of one or another program within specific national or economic situations, but such analyses are not structured by a common understanding of the forces which shape policy formation or implementation. This article argues that we must re…
Community Economic Development: Policy Formation in the US and UK
Part 1 The potential for cross-national learning: local economic policy formation - setting an agenda for development research, David Fasenfest cross-national comparisons of urban economic programs - is policy transfer possible, H. Wolman. Part 2 Policy formation - what kind and for whom: the concept of local economic development policy - some fundamental questions, K. Cox turning the tide? the impact of urban and regional regeneration initiative…
Value, Exchange and the Social Economy: Framework and Paradigm Shift in Urban Policy
A market paradigm has been dominant in the field of community development, defining how governmental officials, development professionals and even academics view the world, and influencing the way problems are identified, the kind of questions asked, the solutions considered, the criteria for 'success' and even the evaluative methodologies employed. This article maintains that the market paradigm has not succeeded from the micro-social perspectiv…
Stories Employers Tell: Race, Skill, and Hiring in America
New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America's Global Cities
An Anatomy of Change and Transition: The Automobile Industry of Southeast Michigan
Enforcement Mechanisms Discouraging Black-American Presence in Suburban Detroit
In metropolitan Detroit, scholars have long observed that geographic space is racialized in the sense that black Americans are not welcome in many suburban communities. This extends beyond housing segregation: black drivers are not wanted on many suburban streets. While the existence of racial animosity has been documented, the enforcement mechanisms utilized to 'protect' certain geographic areas from black presence have rarely been quantified an…
Critical Sociology
An Expression of Appreciation
Chapter Three. Scholarship From A Critical Perspective
Mainstream sociology currently takes for granted two very central concerns rooted in the tradition of Critical Sociology. The first is the emergence of class as a research concept that informs any understanding of how and why individuals find themselves in structural positions that constrain and mediate social outcomes. The second major contribution of critical sociology is how to understand economic development and the relationship between advan…
Government, Governing, and Governance
Government: the office, authority or function of governing. Governing: having control or rule over oneself. Governance: the activity of governing. Accordingly, governance is a set of decisions and processes made to reflect social expectations through the management or leadership of the government (by extension, under liberal democratic ideals, the will of ‘the people’ as they rule themselves). There are many issues implicit in this set of relatio…
Neoliberalism, Globalization and the Capitalist World Order
We often forget how fast things change; for example, my father was born at a time when a wagon ride to the major city center 50 miles away took half a day and by the time he died almost a century later he could travel across a major ocean and traverse a continent in the same time. Those of us old enough to recall having to literally cut and paste together edits on our work know that the “cut ” and “paste ” features on most word pro-cessing softwa…
The Glocal Crisis and the Politics of Change
The term ‘glocal’ seems to have originated in business circles, often attributed to the Japanese business practice of expanding global enterprise by focusing on local conditions. Of late it also comes to mean how local actors can organize activities in the locality to counter the effects of globalization on economic and social vitality. Some may worry that glocalization runs the risk of generalizing the global into the local to defuse local cultu…
Global Economy, Local Calamity
A Touch of Class, with Layers of Race and a Sprinkling of Gender
A Political Economy of Knowledge Production
In his farewell address on January 17, 1961 outgoing President Eisenhower coined the now well worn phrase “military industrial complex” in his warning that there is a danger in the confluence of the government’s military establishment and a growing industrial based serving those interests. Specifically, he cautioned that “(i)n the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, b…
The Politics of Economic Change: Are We in a Brave New World
The Assault on Workers' Rights
The November 2010 election in the USA resulted in a wave of conservative candidates winning in local and national contests, and taking office in January 2011. Most analysts argued that this election result was due to a combination of typically small voter turnout for by-elections, a strong turnout by zealous advocates of the now well known Tea Party, and general voter dissatisfaction with the sluggish state of the economy and relatively high unem…
Terrorism, Neo-Liberalism and Political Rhetoric
Good for Capitalists, Not So Much for Capitalism
We live in truly bizarre times. In the midst of what everyone routinely refers to as a major economic crisis, with the unemployment rate hovering near 10 percent and ever more people leave the ranks of the unemployed discouraged and resigned to never finding another job, and when fiscal austerity is the word of the day because governments at all levels are reeling under the burden of declining revenues, we receive startling news. Quarterly profit…
Return to Culture Wars and the Politics of Culture
The last century ended in a decade of relative prosperity, a generally strong economy, and the ability of the working classes (indeed most people) to mask the fact that real wages had remained more or less stagnant for almost 30 years through access to seemingly unlimited credit sustaining ever growing levels of consumption. Consumption is important in a capitalist economy because, to put it in perhaps simple terms, capitalists cannot realize pro…
Political science (54 works) · Sociology (53 works) · Economics (44 works) · Political economy (31 works) · Politics (25 works) · Law (24 works) · Economic growth (13 works) · Economic geography (11 works) · Economy (11 works) · Epistemology (11 works)