Introduction – Orvar Löfgren and Barbara Czarniawska
1 Consumer and consumerism under state socialism: demand-side abundance and its discontents in Hungary during the long 1960s – György Péteri
2 Metamorphoses, or how self-storage turned from homes into hotels – Helene Brembeck
3 Moving in a sea of strangers: handling urban overflows – Orvar Löfgren
4 Too much happens in the workplace – Karolina J. Dudek
5 Just like any other business or a special case? Framing excess in a Swedish newspaper group – Elena Raviola
6 Overflowing with uncertainty: controversies regarding epistemic wagers in climate-economy models – Jonathan Metzger
7 More means less: managing overflow in science publishing – Sabina Siebert, Robert Insall, and Laura M. Machesky
8 Guides and an overflow of choices – Lars Norén and Agneta Ranerup
9 Virtual red tape, or digital v. paper bureaucracy – Barbara Czarniawska
Afterword: a surplus of ideas – Richard Wilk
References
Index

To understand the emergence of overflows it is first necessary to frame and define them. Who does this, how, and why? Answering these questions requires a historical and comparative approach, since what one culture defines as necessity, another may see as excess, and these differences can exist even between different levels of the same hierarchy. The management of overflows has a double sense: as controlling and as coping. Contributors to the volume show management taking place in various social settings, periods, and political contexts, from state attempts to manage future consumption in postwar Eastern Europe to contemporary economies of sharing.

With further chapters on healthcare administration, mass travel and migration, digital services, and the overflow that scholars face in dealing with an abundance of research information and publications, Overwhelmed by overflows? is a transdisciplinary volume that will appeal to sociologists, management scholars, economists, historians, anthropologists, and cultural studies scholars.