Vividly documenting the real world of the contemporary hospital, its nurses, and their moral and ethical crises, Dan Chambliss offers a sobering revelation of the forces shaping moral decisions in our hospitals.

Based on more than ten years' field research, Beyond Caring is filled with eyewitness accounts and personal stories demonstrating how nurses turn the awesome into the routine. It shows how patients, many weak and helpless, too often become objects of the bureaucratic machinery of the health care system and how ethics decisions, once the dilemmas of troubled individuals, become the setting for political turf battles between occupational interest groups. The result is a compelling combination of realism and a powerful theoretical argument about moral life in large organizations.

In the early 1970s, Timothy Earle worked with Marshall Sahlins doing archaeological and ethnohistorical research on the Halelea district in Kaua’i, Hawaii. In this volume, Earle reports on his archaeological and historical research on irrigation in this region. He also discusses modern taro agriculture and community organization. Illustrations by Eliza H. Earle.

Housework—often trivialized or simply overlooked in public discourse—contributes in a complex and essential way to the form that families and societies assume. In this innovative study, Marjorie L. DeVault explores the implications of "feeding the family" from the perspective of those who do that work. Along the way, DeVault offers a new vocabulary for discussing nurturance as a basis of group life and sociability.

Drawing from interviews conducted in 1982-83 in a diverse group of American households, DeVault reveals the effort and skill behind the "invisible" work of shopping, cooking, and serving meals. She then shows how this work can become oppressive for women, drawing them into social relations that construct and maintain their subordinate position in household life.

La Consentida explores Early Formative period transitions in residential mobility, subsistence, and social organization at the site of La Consentida in coastal Oaxaca, Mexico. Examining how this site transformed during one of the most fundamental moments of socioeconomic change in the ancient Americas, the book provides a new way of thinking about the social dynamics of Mesoamerican communities of the period.

Guy David Hepp summarizes the results of several seasons of fieldwork and laboratory analysis under the aegis of the La Consentida Archaeological Project, drawing on various forms of evidence—ground stone tools, earthen architecture, faunal remains, human dental pathologies, isotopic indicators, ceramics, and more— to reveal how transitions in settlement, subsistence, and social organization at La Consentida were intimately linked. While Mesoamerica is too diverse for research at a single site to lay to rest ongoing debates about the Early Formative period, evidence from La Consentida should inform those debates because of the site’s unique ecological setting, its relative lack of disturbance by later occupations, and because it represents the only well-documented Early Formative period village in a 300-mile stretch of Mexico’s Pacific coast.

One of the only studies to closely document multiple lines of evidence of the transition toward a sedentary, agricultural society at an individual settlement in Mesoamerica, La Consentida is a key resource for understanding the transition to settled life and social complexity in Mesoamerican societies.

It is almost impossible now to imagine the prestigious position Charles Horton Cooley (1864-1929) held within the founding generation of American sociologists. His seminal work on human communication, social organization, and public opinion stimulated and guided much of early American sociological thought.

Cooley's work relating self and community is now more relevant than ever to the problems of understanding and directing modern democratic societies. Cooley applied the ideas of pragmatism to developing a systematic way of approaching social action, social change, and social order; he used these interrelated theories to analyze the social problems and cultural crises of the age. According to Cooley, social change is a fragile, interactive process that, due to constantly arising problems of action, requires ongoing scrutiny by the public. This collection of Cooley's best work is an important contribution not only to the history of ideas—especially to the origin of modern sociological theory— but also to the current public debate on civil society, community, and democracy.

In the four decades following the end of World War II, Morris Janowitz (1919-88) published major works in macrosociology, urban and political sociology, race and ethnic relations, and the study of armed forces and society. His research was deeply rooted in the traditions of philosophical pragmatism and the Chicago school of sociology, influences which led him to reject grand theories and mechanistic explanations of social life. Yet he remained confident in the capacity of sociological reason to come to grips with central aspects of the human condition. On the basis of his studies, Janowitz came to believe that the transition from early to advanced industrial society radically altered institutional organization to make democratic social control more difficult, though not impossible, to achieve. The task of his "pragmatic sociology" was to identify fundamental trends in the social organization of industrial societies, to indicate their substantive implications for social control, and to clarify realistic alternatives for institution building which would strengthen the prospects for maintaining liberal democratic regimes.

In this volume, James Burk selects from Janowitz's scholarly writings to provide a comprehensive overview of his wide-ranging interests. Organized to demonstrate the common logic of inquiry and substantive unity of Janowitz's contribution to several subfields of sociology, the collection includes analyses of the concept of social control, ethnic intolerance and hostility, citizenship in Western societies, models for urban education, and the professionalization of military elites. Burk provides a richly detailed, critical account of Janowitz's intellectual development, placing his writings in historical context and showing their continuing relevance for sociological research. Useful to both students and specialists, the volume is an important source for the ideas and methods of one of sociology's leading figures.

Schools are complex social settings where students, teachers, administrators, and parents interact to shape a child's educational experience. Any effort to improve educational outcomes for America's children requires a dynamic understanding of the environments in which children learn. In The Social Organization of Schooling, editors Larry Hedges and Barbara Schneider assemble researchers from the fields of education, organizational theory, and sociology to provide a new framework for understanding and analyzing America's schools and the many challenges they face. The Social Organization of Schooling closely examines the varied components that make up a school's social environment. Contributors Adam Gamoran, Ramona Gunter, and Tona Williams focus on the social organization of teaching. Using intensive case studies, they show how positive professional relations among teachers contribute to greater collaboration, the dissemination of effective teaching practices, and ultimately, a better learning environment for children. Children learn more from better teachers, but those best equipped to teach often opt for professions with higher social stature, such as law or medicine. In his chapter, Robert Dreeben calls for the establishment of universal principles and practices to define good teaching, arguing that such standards are necessary to legitimize teaching as a high status profession. The Social Organization of Schooling also looks at how social norms in schools are shaped and reinforced by interactions among teachers and students. Sociologist Maureen Hallinan shows that students who are challenged intellectually and accepted socially are more likely to embrace school norms and accept responsibility for their own actions. Using classroom observations, surveys, and school records, Daniel McFarland finds that group-based classroom activities are effective tools in promoting both social and scholastic development in adolescents. The Social Organization of Schooling also addresses educational reforms and the way they affect a school's social structures. Examining how testing policies affect children's opportunities to learn, Chandra Muller and Kathryn Schiller find that policies which increased school accountability boosted student enrollment in math courses, reflecting a shift in the school culture towards higher standards. Employing a variety of analytical methods, The Social Organization of Schooling provides a sound understanding of the social mechanisms at work in our educational system. This important volume brings a fresh perspective to the many ongoing debates in education policy and is essential reading for anyone concerned with the future of America's children.

The Social Organization of Sexuality reports the complete results of the nation's most comprehensive representative survey of sexual practices in the general adult population of the United States. This highly detailed portrait of sex in America and its social context and implications has established a new and original scientific orientation to the study of sexual behavior.

"The most comprehensive U.S. sex survey ever." —USA Today

"The findings from this survey, the first in decades to provide detailed insights about the sexual behavior of a representative sample of Americans, will have a profound impact on how policy makers tackle a number of pressing health problems." —Alison Bass, The Boston Globe

"A fat, sophisticated, and sperm-freezingly serious volume. . . . This book is not in the business of giving us a good time. It is in the business of asking three thousand four hundred and thirty-two other people whether they had a good time, and exactly what they did to make it so good." —Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year