Creating a Mentoring Culture or Credit Card Nation

Creating a Mentoring Culture: The Organization's Guide

Author: Lois J Zachary

In order to succeed in today’s competitive environment, corporate and nonprofit institutions must create a workplace climate that encourages employees to continue to learn and grow. From the author of the best-selling The Mentor’s Guide comes the next-step mentoring resource to ensure personnel at all levels of an organization will teach and learn from each other. Written for anyone who wants to embed mentoring within their organization, Creating a Mentoring Culture is filled with step-by-step guidance, practical advice, engaging stories, and includes a wealth of reproducible forms and tools. 

Interesting textbook: Herbs and Spices or Man a Can a Microwave

Credit Card Nation: The Consequences of America's Addiction to Credit

Author: Robert D Manning

Credit-card debt is choking American prosperity off at the neck. In Credit Card Nation, Robert D. Manning tells a fascinating story about the present and future consequences of credit dependence across all strata of U.S. society. Through extensive interviews with consumers, Manning talks to debtors, and to average Americans, affected by what Manning describes as our "credit card nation": an American juggernaut of indebtedness that spans personal, corporate, and governmental debt.

Washington Monthly

While Robert Manning acknowledges in Credit Card Nation that over consumption plays a role in the mounting piles of debt consumers are shouldering, he doesn't just fault individuals. Manning's comprehensive appraoch to the causes of credit-card debt is far more compelling than the simple notion that aggressive marketing campaigns and solicitations alone have propelled the trend of credit-card-based lifestyles.

The story of unsustainable spending, paltry savings, and mounting debt is not a simple one. Manning does justice to the intracacies of the causes. But after reading 300 pages on the topic, one is left feeling that the reader deserves at least the suggestion of a comprehensive solution.

Business 2.0

In Credit Card nation: The Consequences of America's Addition to Credit, Robert D. Manning lays out a compelling and comprehensive history of credit and consumption in the United States that conveys the danger of being an "indebted society".

Washington Monthly

Manning's comprehensive approach to the causes of credit-card debt is far more compelling than the simple notion that aggressive marketing campaigns and solicitations alone have propelled the trend of credit-card-based lifestyles.... Manning does justice to the intricacies of the causes.

Publishers Weekly

A sociology professor whose specialty is the effect of credit card debt on college students, Manning expands his focus here to encompass social attitudes toward all types of debt. Suggesting that debt leads not only to financial ruin but also to moral and social degradation, this dense, technical work is filled with jargon (chapter four, for example, is subtitled "Convenience Users and the Ideological Construction of the Moral Divide"). In the first-person interviews with college students, the subjects are rarely allowed to complete a sentence. Instead, Manning embeds phrases from the interviews into his own argument. Since we never learn more than a few facts about each interviewee (not even a last name or college affiliation), they serve as chorus to the monologue rather than adding weight or complexity to Manning's thesis. When relating facts, Manning puts quotation marks around the many terms he disagrees with, conveying his opinion without supporting evidence for his views. Loaded words substitute for exposition: people do not choose to borrow, they are "addicted to credit"; he does not deem them "borrowers," but "users"; no one simply owes money--instead, everyone is "burdened," "oppressed" or "overwhelmed" by debt, even when the debt seems small relative to their assets and income. (Feb. 2) Forecast: Manning's book may interest professional sociologists, but general readers will find it difficult to understand in some places, dogmatic and unsubstantiated elsewhere. However, given its timely topic, the book is likely to receive serious review attention, and will pick up some sales due to Manning's media appearances (he's been featured on ABC World News Tonight, CNN and elsewhere. But the book's academic gloss will keep sales from rising high, despite the millions of Americans suffering from debt overload. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Booknews

Through extensive interviews with consumers, Manning (economic sociology, U. of Houston) describes the real-life consequences of indebtedness across all strata of US society, including the failure of many people to take part in the recent economic upswing due to credit card interest rates that outpace even the recent increases in annual household income. As so often, he says, the system is set up so that the poor pay exorbitant interest to subsidize lower rates for the better off. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)