"Harvesting Coffee, Bargaining Wages offers an insightful scrutiny of rural market behavior and a convincing explanation of why farmers fail sometimes to manage their laborers in ways predicted by market models - and how power imbalances and social conditions can impair the ability of laborers to attain a fair market contract during lax labor market periods.".

"This empirical study, based on interviews with both farmers and laborers, covers a fifteen-year period characterized by the modernization of production. Ortiz compares three localized coffee labor markets and contrasts the strategies used by the coffee farmers in her study areas with those used by farmers in other parts of the world to cope with similar problems.".

"Harvesting Coffee, Bargaining Wages will be of primary interest to anthropologists and to sociologists, geographers, and political scientists interested in explicit and implicit contract formats, and to economists intrigued by the possibility of integrating social variables as contextual aspects of management strategies."--BOOK JACKET.