National Book Month: The 20th annual Glasscock Humanities Book Prize
October is National Book Month, and the College of Liberal Arts will be celebrating all month long! Last week, we featured this year’s Common Ground book. Next up is this year’s Glasscock Book Prize — Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary by Louis Hyman.
Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary. Photo: www.louishyman.com
October is National Book Month, and the College of Liberal Arts will be celebrating all month long! Last week, we featured this year’s Common Ground book. Next up is this year’s Glasscock Book Prize — Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary by Louis Hyman.
The Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University has awarded the Twentieth Annual Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship to Louis Hyman, for his book Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary, published by Penguin Random House in 2018.
From the publisher’s website, Temp helps us understand the complexities of American business:
The untold history of the surprising origins of the “gig economy”–how deliberate decisions made by consultants and CEOs in the 50s and 60s upended the stability of the workplace and the lives of millions of working men and women in postwar America.
Over the last fifty years, job security has cratered as the institutions that insulated us from volatility have been swept aside by a fervent belief in the market. Now every working person in America today asks the same question: how secure is my job? In Temp, Louis Hyman explains how we got to this precarious position and traces the real origins of the gig economy: it was created not by accident, but by choice through a series of deliberate decisions by consultants and CEOs–long before the digital revolution.
Uber is not the cause of insecurity and inequality in our country, and neither is the rest of the gig economy. The answer to our growing problems goes deeper than apps, further back than outsourcing and downsizing, and contests the most essential assumptions we have about how our businesses should work. As we make choices about the future, we need to understand our past.
But that’s not all the book has to offer beyond a prestigious Glasscock Book Prize honor.
The book is the winner of the William G. Bowen Prize, was named a “Triumph” of 2018 by the New York Times book critics and has been shortlisted for the 800-CEO-READ Business Book Award. The Times writes that Temp is “illuminating and often surprising… a book that encourages us to imagine a future that is inclusive and humane rather than sentimentalize a past that never truly was.”
Publishers Weekly adds, “Hyman’s examination of the evolution of work is thorough, thoughtful, and sympathetic, importantly not excluding the people—immigrants, minorities, women, and youth—largely ignored in the ‘American Dream’ model for employment once all but guaranteed to white men.”
The Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship was endowed in December 2000 by Melbern G. Glasscock, Texas A&M University Class of ‘59, in honor of his wife. Together, among many other generous gifts to Texas A&M University, they provided a naming endowment for the Glasscock Center in 2002.
Dr. Hyman will be visiting Texas A&M on March 4-6, 2020, to receive the award and participate in campus and community events in celebration of the prize. For more information about the Glasscock Book Prize, click here.
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