Drawing on an assessment of eighty small cities between 1970 and 2000, Norman considers the factors that have altered the physical, social, and economic landscapes of such places. These cities are examined in relation to new patterns of immigration, shifts in the global economy, and changing residential preferences. Small Cities USA presents the first large-scale comparison of smaller cities over time in the United States, showing that small cities that have prospered over time have done so because of diverse populations and economies. These "glocal" cities, as Norman calls them, are doing well without necessarily growing into large metropolises.
Heckman’s narrative stretches from the early-twentieth-century introduction into the home of electric appliances and industrial time-management techniques, through the postwar advent of television and the space-age “house of tomorrow,” to the contemporary automated, networked “smart home.” He considers all these developments in relation to lifestyle and consumer narratives. Building on the tension between agency and control within the walls of homes designed to anticipate and fulfill desires, Heckman engages debates about lifestyle, posthumanism, and rights under the destabilizing influences of consumer technologies, and he considers the utopian and dystopian potential of new media forms. Heckman argues that the achievement of an environment completely attuned to its inhabitants’ specific wants and needs—what he calls the “Perfect Day”—institutionalizes everyday life as the ultimate consumer practice.
Government “of the people, by the people, for the people” expresses an ideal that resonates in all democracies. Yet poll after poll reveals deep distrust of institutions that seem to have left “the people” out of the governing equation. Government bureaucracies that are supposed to solve critical problems on their own are a troublesome outgrowth of the professionalization of public life in the industrial age. They are especially ill-suited to confronting today’s complex challenges.
Offering a far-reaching program for innovation, Smart Citizens, Smarter State suggests that public decisionmaking could be more effective and legitimate if government were smarter—if our institutions knew how to use technology to leverage citizens’ expertise. Just as individuals use only part of their brainpower to solve most problems, governing institutions make far too little use of the skills and experience of those inside and outside of government with scientific credentials, practical skills, and ground-level street smarts. New tools—what Beth Simone Noveck calls technologies of expertise—are making it possible to match the supply of citizen expertise to the demand for it in government.
Drawing on a wide range of academic disciplines and practical examples from her work as an adviser to governments on institutional innovation, Noveck explores how to create more open and collaborative institutions. In so doing, she puts forward a profound new vision for participatory democracy rooted not in the paltry act of occasional voting or the serendipity of crowdsourcing but in people’s knowledge and know-how.
In the wake of globalization, national governments are becoming increasingly interdependent, and knowledge is arguably becoming the most valuable form of capital. Helmut Willke’s Smart Governance offers a new perspective on global governance from the vantage point of a global knowledge society.
Employing a case study of the global financial system and an analysis of several governance regimes, Willke contends that markets, legal systems, and morality must evolve to cope with uncertainty, build capacities, and achieve resilience. Smart Governance will change the way economists, historians, and political scientists view international cooperation.
As Martin shows, access to land in and around steel and pottery towns allowed residents to preserve rural habits and culture. Workers in these places valued place and local community. Because of their belief in localism, an individualistic ethic of "making do," and company loyalty, they often worked to place limits on union influence. At the same time, this localism allowed workers to adapt to the dictates of industrial capitalism and a continually changing world on their own terms--and retain rural ways to a degree unknown among their urbanized peers. Throughout, Martin ties these themes to illuminating discussions of capital mobility, the ways in which changing work experiences defined gender roles, and the persistent myth that modernizing forces bulldozed docile local cultures.
Revealing and incisive, Smokestacks in the Hills reappraises an overlooked stratum of American labor history and contributes to the ongoing dialogue on shifts in national politics in the postwar era.
Smut investigates sex in a way that differes from nearly all previous books on the subject. Drawing on a wide variety of literary forms, including the work of novelists, poets, and even comedians–resources ranging from the most sublime theologians to the most profane pornographers–Murray S. Davis goes beyond those who regard sex merely as a biological instinct or animal behavior. He recaptures sex for the social sciences by reemphasizing the aspects of it that are unique to human beings in all their rich perplexity.
In part one, Davis employs a phenomenlogical approach to examine the differrence between sexual arousal and ordinary experience: sexual arousal, he argues, alters a person's experience of the world, resulting in an "erotic reality" that contratsts strikingly to our everyday reality; different perceptions of time, space, human bodies, and other social types occur in each realm. Davis describes in detail the movement from everyday into erotic reality from the first subtle castings-off to the shocking post-orgasmic return.
In part two the author employs a structuralist approach to determine why some people find this alternation between realities "dirty." He begins with a meditation on the similarity between sex and dirt and then asks, "How must somone view the world for him to find sex dirty?" Normal sex can be disliked, Davis concludes, only if it violates a certain conception of the individual; perverted sex can be despised only if it further violates certain conceptions of social relations and social organization. Davis ends part two with a "periodic table of perversions" that systematically summarizes the fundamental social elements out of which those who find sex dirty construct their world.
Finally, in part three Davis considers other conceptual grids affected by the alternation between everyday and erotic realities: the "pornographic," which concieves of the individual, social relations, and social organizations as deserving to disrupted by sex; and the "naturalistic," which concieves of them in a way that cannot be disrupted by sex. Throughout history these ideologies have contested for control over Western society, and, in his conlusion, Davis ofers a prognosis for the future of sex based on these historical ideological cycles.
Social Change in Contemporary China offers a wide-ranging examination of Chinese institutional change in areas of education, religion, health care, economics, labor, family, and local communities in the post-Mao era. Based on the pioneering work of sociologist C. K. Yang (1911–1999), and his institutional diffusion theory, the essays analyze and develop the theory as it applies to both public and private institutions. The interrelationship of these institutions composes what Yang termed the Chinese “system,” and affects nearly every aspect of life. Yang examined the influence of external factors on each institution, such as the influence of Westernization and Communism on family, and the impact of industrialization on rural markets. He also analyzed the impact of public opinion and past culture on institutions, therein revealing the circular nature of diffusion. Perhaps most significant are Yang’s insights on the role of religion in Chinese society. Despite the common perception that China had no religion, he uncovers the influence of classical Confucianism as the basis for many ethical value systems, and follows its diffusion into state and kinship systems, as well as Taoism and Buddhism.
Writing in the early years of Communism, Yang had little hard data with which to test his theories. The contributors to this volume expand upon Yang’s groundbreaking approach and apply the model of diffusion to a rapidly evolving contemporary China, providing a window into an increasingly modern Chinese society and its institutions.
Why do we eat sardines, but never goldfish; ducks, but never parrots? Why does adding cheese make a hamburger a "cheeseburger" whereas adding ketchup does not make it a "ketchupburger"? By the same token, how do we determine which things said at a meeting should be included in the minutes and which ought to be considered "off the record" and officially disregarded?
In this wide-ranging and provocative book, Eviatar Zerubavel argues that cognitive science cannot answer these questions, since it addresses cognition on only two levels: the individual and the universal. To fill the gap between the Romantic vision of the solitary thinker whose thoughts are the product of unique experience, and the cognitive-psychological view, which revolves around the search for the universal foundations of human cognition, Zerubavel charts an expansive social realm of mind--a domain that focuses on the conventional, normative aspects of the way we think.
With witty anecdote and revealing analogy, Zerubavel illuminates the social foundation of mental actions such as perceiving, attending, classifying, remembering, assigning meaning, and reckoning the time. What takes place inside our heads, he reminds us, is deeply affected by our social environments, which are typically groups that are larger than the individual yet considerably smaller than the human race. Thus, we develop a nonuniversal software for thinking as Americans or Chinese, lawyers or teachers, Catholics or Jews, Baby Boomers or Gen-Xers. Zerubavel explores the fascinating ways in which thought communities carve up and classify reality, assign meanings, and perceive things, "defamiliarizing" in the process many taken-for-granted assumptions.
Human beings evolved in the company of others and flourish in proportion to their positive social ties. To understand the human brain, we must situate its biology in the wider context of society. To understand society, we must also consider how the brains and minds of individuals shape interactions with other human beings. Social Neuroscience offers a comprehensive new framework for studying the brain, human development, and human behavior.
In this book, leading researchers in the fields of neurobiology, psychiatry, psychology, and sociology elucidate the connections between brain biology and the brain’s functioning in the social world, providing a state-of-the-art interdisciplinary explanation of how humans think and act, as well as the ways we define and treat pathological behavior. Synthesizing the insights and perspectives of these experts, Social Neuroscience examines how neural processes make the brain sensitive to social experience, how cognition shapes social behavior, and how social networks create a range of responses among different individuals to the same environmental stimuli.
The mutually reinforcing connections between brain, mind, and society have profound implications for human health, from the emotionally damaging effects of severe social deprivation to the neurological impact of parental abuse and neighborhood violence. The authors explore these connections, with special focus on mental illnesses, including schizophrenia—a disorder characterized by marked social deficits in which a neurological basis is now well established.
Although there has been a resurgence of scholarly interest in Jane Addams, much of the recent literature has dwelt more on her extraordinary and pioneering life than on the philosophical contribution of her twelve books and hundreds of published articles. This study is the first book-length work to focus entirely on Addams as a philosopher, a moral and political theorist who was steeped in the classic American Pragmatist tradition but who transcended that tradition to emphasize the significance of gender, race, and class.
Exploring Addams's contribution to epistemology, ethics, and feminist theory, Maurice Hamington sets the intellectual framework for Addams's social philosophy by discussing her influences, her particular brand of feminism, and finally her unique analytical perspective, which she described as "sympathetic knowledge." The book also investigates how Addams applied her social philosophy to issues of politics, women's rights, prostitution, business ethics, education, and religion.
Addams's philosophical work remains relevant to current feminist ethical discourse, and The Social Philosophy of Jane Addams leads to an understanding of a cosmopolitan theorist who eschewed ideological stances in favor of intermediary steps toward social progress.
From reviews of the first edition:
"This is perhaps the best theoretically oriented book by a United States urban sociologist since the work of Firey, Hawley, and Sjoberg in the 1940s and 1950s.... Gottdiener is on the cutting edge of urban theoretical work today." —Joe R. Feagin, Contemporary Sociology
Since its first publication in 1985, The Social Production of Urban Space has become a landmark work in urban studies. In this second edition, M. Gottdiener assesses important new theoretical models of urban space—and their shortcomings—including the global perspective, the flexible accumulation school, postmodernism, the new international division of labor, and the "growth machine" perspective.
Going beyond the limitations of these and older theories, Gottdiener proposes a model of urban growth that accounts for the deconcentration away from the central city that began in the United States in the 1920s and continues today. Sociologists, political scientists, economists, geographers, and urban planners will find his interdisciplinary approach to urban science invaluable, as it is currently the most comprehensive treatment of European and American work in these related fields.
More than thirty years after the collapse of the USSR, the critique of state socialism is still used to deny alternatives to capitalism, irrespective of global capitalist ecological and social devastation. There is seemingly nothing worthwhile salvaging from decades of state socialist experiences.
As the climate crisis deepens, Engel-Di Mauro argues that we need to re-evaluate the environmental practices and policies of state socialism, especially as they had more environmentally beneficial than destructive effects. Rather than dismissing state socialism’s heritage out of hand, we should reclaim it for contemporary eco-socialist ends.
By means of a comparative and multiple-scaled approach, Engel-Di Mauro points to highly diverse and environmentally constructive state socialist experiences. Taking the reader from the USSR to China and Cuba, this is a fiery and contentious look at what worked, what didn’t, and how we can move towards an eco-socialist future.
Society and Economy—a work of exceptional ambition by the founder of modern economic sociology—is the first full account of Mark Granovetter’s ideas about the diverse ways in which society and economy are intertwined.
The economy is not a sphere separate from other human activities, Granovetter writes. It is deeply embedded in social relations and subject to the same emotions, ideas, and constraints as religion, science, politics, or law. While some actions can be understood in traditional economic terms as people working rationally toward well-defined ends, much human behavior is harder to fit into that simple framework. Actors sometimes follow social norms with a passionate faith in their appropriateness, and at other times they conform without conscious thought. They also trust others when there is no obvious reason to do so. The power individuals wield over one another can have a major impact on economic outcomes, even when that power arises from noneconomic sources.
Although people depend on social norms, culture, trust, and power to solve problems, the guidance these offer is often murky and complicated. Granovetter explores how problem solvers improvise to assemble pragmatic solutions from this multitude of principles. He draws throughout on arguments from psychology, social network studies, and long-term historical and political analysis and suggests ways to maneuver back and forth among these approaches. Underlying Granovetter’s arguments is an attempt to move beyond such simple dualisms as agency/structure to a more complex and subtle appreciation of the nuances and dynamics that drive social and economic life.
In this first U.S. edition of a classic work of comparative legal scholarship, Alan Watson argues that law fails to keep step with social change, even when that change is massive. To illustrate the ways in which law is dysfunctional, he draws on the two most innovative western systems, of Rome and England, to show that harmful rules continue for centuries. To make his case, he uses examples where, in the main, "the law benefits no recognizable group or class within the society (except possibly lawyers who benefit from confusion) and is generally inconvenient or positively harmful to society as a whole or to large or powerful groups within the society."
Widely respected for his "fearless challenge of the accepted or dominant view and his own encyclopedic knowledge of Roman law" (The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing), Watson considers the development of law in global terms and across the centuries. His arguments centering on how societies borrow from other legal systems and the continuity of legal systems are particularly instructive for those interested in legal development and the development of a common law for the European Union.
postamble();This book is a reprint of the original edited volume first published in 2004. In thirty-one chapters, the edited volume documents the exciting period of the emerging interdisciplinary field of society and natural resource scholarship from 1986 to 2004. It was published in part to commemorate the tenth International Symposium on Society and Resources Management (ISSRM) in Keystone, Colorado. ISSRM has brought together natural resource professionals, social science researchers, non-government agencies, private sector organizations, and students on a biennial basis since 1986. The book presents the most significant contributions to the symposia hosted by Pennsylvania State University, Colorado State University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Texas A&M University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Oregon State University, University of Missouri at Columbia, Western Washington University, and Indiana University. The first International ISSRM was held in Belize, Australia, and Italy and started a fruitful cross-continental exchange on society and natural resources showcased in this book.
Contributors: Jim Absher, Kathleen Andereck, Jill Belsky, John Bergstrom, Carter Betz, Alan Bright, Perry J. Brown, Tommy Brown, Mark Brunson, Rabel Burdge, Fred Buttel, KristinCheek, Chia-Kuen Cheng, Tony Cheng, David Cole, H Ken Cordell, Terry Daniel, Steven Daniels, Dan Decker, Robert Ditton, John Dwyer, Alan Ewert, Don Field, Myron Floyd, R Bruce Gill, Alan Graefe, Gary Green, Doug Jackson-Smith, Rebecca Johnson, Richard Knopf, Rick Krannich, Jessica Leahy, Xinran You Lehto, John Loomas, Al Luloff, Mike Manfredo, Robert Manning, Sarah McCaffrey, Stephen McCool, Yoon-Jung Oh, Joseph O'Leary, Carol Saunders, Steve Selin, Bruce Shindler, George Stankey, Bill Stewart, Vicky Sturtevant, Jonathan Taylor, Suzanne Taylor, Tara Teel, Brijesh Thapa, Gene Theodori, Carla Koons Trentelman, Jerry Vaske, Joanne Vining, Doug Whittaker, Dan Williams
The collection has a threefold agenda: to trace an intellectual history of sociology as it pertains to empire; to offer empirical studies based around colonies and empires, both past and present; and to provide a theoretical basis for future sociological analyses that may take empire more fully into account. In the 1940s, the British Colonial Office began employing sociologists in its African colonies. In Nazi Germany, sociologists played a leading role in organizing the occupation of Eastern Europe. In the United States, sociology contributed to modernization theory, which served as an informal blueprint for the postwar American empire. This comprehensive anthology critiques sociology's disciplinary engagement with colonialism in varied settings while also highlighting the lasting contributions that sociologists have made to the theory and history of imperialism.
Contributors. Albert Bergesen, Ou-Byung Chae, Andy Clarno, Raewyn Connell, Ilya Gerasimov, Julian Go, Daniel Goh, Chandan Gowda, Krishan Kumar, Fuyuki Kurasawa, Michael Mann, Marina Mogilner, Besnik Pula, Anne Raffin, Emmanuelle Saada, Marco Santoro, Kim Scheppele, George Steinmetz, Alexander Semyonov, Andrew Zimmerman
Contributors explore diasporic Jewish identities in the post-Holocaust years; the use of sociohistorical analysis in studying the genocide; immigration and transnationalism; and collective action, collective guilt, and collective memory. In so doing, they illuminate various facets of the Holocaust, and especially post-Holocaust, experience. They investigate topics including heritage tours that take young American Jews to Israel and Eastern Europe, the politics of memory in Steven Spielberg’s collection of Shoah testimonies, and the ways that Jews who immigrated to the United States after the collapse of the Soviet Union understood nationality, religion, and identity. Contributors examine the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 in light of collective action research and investigate the various ways that the Holocaust has been imagined and recalled in Germany, Israel, and the United States. Included in the commentaries about sociology and Holocaust studies is an essay reflecting on how to study the Holocaust (and other atrocities) ethically, without exploiting violence and suffering.
Contributors. Richard Alba, Caryn Aviv, Ethel Brooks, Rachel L. Einwohner, Yen Le Espiritu, Leela Fernandes, Kathie Friedman, Judith M. Gerson, Steven J. Gold , Debra R. Kaufman, Rhonda F. Levine , Daniel Levy, Jeffrey K. Olick, Martin Oppenheimer, David Shneer, Irina Carlota Silber, Arlene Stein, Natan Sznaider, Suzanne Vromen, Chaim Waxman, Richard Williams, Diane L. Wolf
Contributors. Kenneth Barkin, Nahum Chandler, Ronald Judy, David Krell, Charles Lemert, Sieglinde D. Lemke, Tommy Lott, Kevin Miles, Abdulkarim Mustapha, Ken Warren
Though the word “sociology” was coined in Europe, the field of sociology grew most dramatically in America. Despite that disproportionate influence, American sociology has never been the subject of an extended historical examination. To remedy that situation—and to celebrate the centennial of the American Sociological Association—Craig Calhoun assembled a team of leading sociologists to produce Sociology in America.
Rather than a story of great sociologists or departments, Sociology in America is a true history of an often disparate field—and a deeply considered look at the ways sociology developed intellectually and institutionally. It explores the growth of American sociology as it addressed changes and challenges throughout the twentieth century, covering topics ranging from the discipline’s intellectual roots to understandings (and misunderstandings) of race and gender to the impact of the Depression and the 1960s.
Sociology in America will stand as the definitive treatment of the contribution of twentieth-century American sociology and will be required reading for all sociologists.
Contributors:
Andrew Abbott, Daniel Breslau, Craig Calhoun, Charles Camic, Miguel A. Centeno, Patricia Hill Collins, Marjorie L. DeVault, Myra Marx Ferree, Neil Gross, Lorine A. Hughes, Michael D. Kennedy, Shamus Khan, Barbara Laslett, Patricia Lengermann, Doug McAdam, Shauna A. Morimoto, Aldon Morris, Gillian Niebrugge, Alton Phillips, James F. Short Jr., Alan Sica, James T. Sparrow, George Steinmetz, Stephen Turner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, Immanuel Wallerstein, Pamela Barnhouse Walters, Howard Winant
The Sociology of Work was first published in 1954. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
What are the effects of working conditions, rewards, and habits upon the institution of the family? What are the typical forms of occupational segregation, and what are the effects of such segregation upon the general society? How are the social roles appropriate to each occupation created and sustained? What social processes determine the evolution of occupational groupings and the distribution of population among them?
This work, a basic study in occupational sociology, throws light on such questions as these. Professor Caplow describes the occupational system with reference to specialization, occupational status, the formation of professions, mobility, the patterning of individual careers, the occupations of women, and the prospects for continued improvement of working conditions. He draws upon hundreds of empirical studies for his discussions.
The book has been warmly received by reviewers and readers. Robert Dublin commented in the American Journal of Sociology: "This volume will long stand as a sourcebook of hypotheses and thesis topics for students of industrial sociology." Writing in the American Sociological Review, George Caspar Homans called it "a wide-ranging and hard-headed study of American jobs, their place and nature." Robert C. Stone said in Social Forces: "The work is a major contribution to the study of social structure."
The many specialist workers who are concerned with occupational problems—industrial and applied psychologists, personnel and guidance workers, wage economists, labor relations experts, and others—will find this a valuable reference work. It is, of course, pertinent to the interests of general sociologists and anthropologists, and is used as a text in a number of courses in occupational sociology.
Popular conceptions hold that capitalism is driven almost entirely by the pursuit of profit and self-interest. Challenging that assumption, this major new study of American business associations shows how market and non-market relations are actually profoundly entwined at the heart of capitalism.
In Solidarity in Strategy, Lyn Spillman draws on rich documentary archives and a comprehensive data set of more than four thousand trade associations from diverse and obscure corners of commercial life to reveal a busy and often surprising arena of American economic activity. From the Intelligent Transportation Society to the American Gem Trade Association, Spillman explains how business associations are more collegial than cutthroat, and how they make capitalist action meaningful not only by developing shared ideas about collective interests but also by articulating a disinterested solidarity that transcends those interests.
Deeply grounded in both economic and cultural sociology, Solidarity in Strategy provides rich, lively, and often surprising insights into the world of business, and leads us to question some of our most fundamental assumptions about economic life and how cultural context influences economic.
One linchpin of China’s expansion has been township and village enterprises (TVEs), a vast group of firms with diverse modes of ownership and structure. Based on the author’s fieldwork in Zhejiang, this book explores the emergence and success of rural enterprises.
This study also examines how ordinary rural residents have made sense of and participated in the industrialization engulfing them in recent decades. How much does TVE success depend on the ruthless exploitation of workers? How did peasants-turned-workers develop such impressive skills so quickly? To what extent do employees’ values affect the cohesion and operations of companies? And how long can peasant workers sustain these efforts in the face of increasing market competition?
The author argues that the resilience of these factories has as much to do with how authority is defined and how people interact as it does with the ability to generate profits. How social capital was deployed and replenished at critical moments was central to the eventual rise and consolidation of these enterprises as effective, robust institutions. Without mutual respect, company leaders would have found it impossible to improve their firms’ productivity, workplace stability, and long-term viability.
The dramatic expansion of transracial and transnational adoption since the 1950s, Briggs argues, was the result of specific and profound political and social changes, including the large-scale removal of Native children from their parents, the condemnation of single African American mothers in the context of the civil rights struggle, and the largely invented "crack babies" scare that inaugurated the dramatic withdrawal of benefits to poor mothers in the United States. In Guatemala, El Salvador, and Argentina, governments disappeared children during the Cold War and then imposed neoliberal economic regimes with U.S. support, making the circulation of children across national borders easy and often profitable. Concluding with an assessment of present-day controversies surrounding gay and lesbian adoptions and the struggles of immigrants fearful of losing their children to foster care, Briggs challenges celebratory or otherwise simplistic accounts of transracial and transnational adoption by revealing some of their unacknowledged causes and costs.
We all hope that we will be cared for as we age. But the details of that care, for caretaker and recipient alike, raise some of life’s most vexing questions. From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, as an explosive economy and shifting social opportunities drew the young away from home, the elderly used promises of inheritance to keep children at their side. Hendrik Hartog tells the riveting, heartbreaking stories of how families fought over the work of care and its compensation.
Someday All This Will Be Yours narrates the legal and emotional strategies mobilized by older people, and explores the ambivalences of family members as they struggled with expectations of love and duty. Court cases offer an extraordinary glimpse of the mundane, painful, and intimate predicaments of family life. They reveal what it meant to be old without the pensions, Social Security, and nursing homes that now do much of the work of serving the elderly. From demented grandparents to fickle fathers, from litigious sons to grateful daughters, Hartog guides us into a world of disputed promises and broken hearts, and helps us feel the terrible tangle of love and commitments and money.
From one of the bedrocks of the human condition—the tension between the infirmities of the elderly and the longings of the young—emerges a pioneering work of exploration into the darker recesses of family life. Ultimately, Hartog forces us to reflect on what we owe and are owed as members of a family.
What do we really want from schools? Only everything, in all its contradictions. Most of all, we want access and opportunity for all children—but all possible advantages for our own. So argues historian David Labaree in this provocative look at the way “this archetype of dysfunction works so well at what we want it to do even as it evades what we explicitly ask it to do.”
Ever since the common school movement of the nineteenth century, mass schooling has been seen as an essential solution to great social problems. Yet as wave after wave of reform movements have shown, schools are extremely difficult to change. Labaree shows how the very organization of the locally controlled, administratively limited school system makes reform difficult.
At the same time, he argues, the choices of educational consumers have always overwhelmed top-down efforts at school reform. Individual families seek to use schools for their own purposes—to pursue social opportunity, if they need it, and to preserve social advantage, if they have it. In principle, we want the best for all children. In practice, we want the best for our own.
Provocative, unflinching, wry, Someone Has to Fail looks at the way that unintended consequences of consumer choices have created an extraordinarily resilient educational system, perpetually expanding, perpetually unequal, constantly being reformed, and never changing much.
Weddings in the United States are often extravagant, highly ritualized, and costly affairs. In this book, Beth Montemurro takes a fresh look at the wedding process, offering a perspective not likely to be found in the many planning books and magazines readily available to the modern bride. Montemurro draws upon years of ethnographic research to explore what prenuptial events mean to women participants and what they tell us about the complexity and ambiguity of gender roles. Through the bachelorette party and the bridal shower, the bride-to-be is initiated into the role of wife by her friends and family, who present elaborate scenarios that demonstrate both what she is sacrificing and what she is gaining.
Montemurro argues that American society at the turn of the twenty-first century is still married to traditional conceptions of masculinity and femininity and that prenuptial rituals contribute to the stabilization of gender inequalitiesDrawing on her experience during the crisis as an employee in a public works program in Seoul, Song provides an ethnographic assessment of the efforts of the state and civilians to regulate social insecurity, instability, and inequality through assistance programs. She focuses specifically on efforts to help two populations deemed worthy of state subsidies: the “IMF homeless,” people temporarily homeless but considered employable, and the “new intellectuals,” young adults who had become professionally redundant during the crisis but had the high-tech skills necessary to lead a transformed post-crisis South Korea.
The coal mining photographs of C. William Horrell, taken across the southern Illinois Coal Belt over a twenty-year period from 1966 to 1986, are extraordinary examples of documentary photography—so stark and striking that captions often seem superfluous.
Horrell’s photographs capture the varied phenomena of twentieth-century coal mining technology: the awesome scale of surface mining machines and their impact on the land; massive machines forced into narrow passageways with inches to spare as they carry coal from the face to conveyer belts; and, more significant, the advent of continuous miners, machines that can handle four previously separate processes and which have been a fixture in underground or “deep” mines since the mid-1960s.
Horrell was also intrigued by the related activities of mining, including coal’s processing, cleaning, and transportation, as well as the daily, behind-the-scenes operations that keep mines and miners working. His photographs reflect the beauty of the commonplace—the clothes of the miners, their dinner pails, and their tools—and reveal the picturesque remnants of closed mines: the weathered boards of company houses, the imposing iron beauty of an ancient tipple, and an abandoned building against the lowering sky of an approaching storm. Finally, his portraits of coal minersshow the strength, dignity, and enduring spirit of the men and women who work the southern Illinois coal mines.
Southern out-migration drew millions of southern workers to the steel mills, automobile factories, and even agricultural fields and orchards of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois. Through vivid oral histories, Chad Berry explores the conflict between migrants' economic success and their "spiritual exile" in the North. He documents the tension between factory owners who welcomed cheap, naive southern laborers and local "native" workers who greeted migrants with suspicion and hostility. He examines the phenomenon of "shuttle migration," in which migrants came north to work during the winter and returned home to plant spring crops on their southern farms. He also explores the impact of southern traditions--especially the southern evangelical church and "hillbilly" music--brought north by migrants.
Berry argues that in spite of being scorned by midwesterners for violence, fecundity, intoxication, laziness, and squalor, the vast majority of southern whites who moved to the Midwest found the economic prosperity they were seeking. By allowing southern migrants to assess their own experiences and tell their own stories, Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles refutes persistent stereotypes about migrants' clannishness, life-style, work ethic, and success in the North.
This wide-ranging collection addresses the political possibilities of Western law and the international meanings of sovereignty and Indigeneity. One essay analyzes the autonomous government through which local citizens in Indigenous Zapatista communities in Mexico hope to dissolve systems of top-down sovereignty altogether. Another explores narratives of Native American law and the treatment of sovereignty in contemporary Mohawk visual culture. Several essays discuss the legal and political implications of the field’s pivotal public documents, including the 2007 U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Eric Cheyfitz is the Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters in the Department of English at Cornell University. N. Bruce Duthu is the Samson Occom Professor of Native American Studies and Chair of the Native American Studies Program at Dartmouth College. Shari M. Huhndorf is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oregon.
Contributors: Christine Black, Eric Cheyfitz, Gordon Christie, Chris Cunneen, Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller, Lorie M. Graham, Roy M. Huhndorf, Shari M. Huhndorf, Forrest Hylton, Mara Kaufman, Alvaro Reyes, Jolene Rickard, Carlos Salinas, Noenoe K. Silva, Cheryl Suzack, Siegfried Wiessner
From 1840 to 1900, midwestern Americans experienced firsthand the profound economic, cultural, and structural changes that transformed the nation from a premodern, agrarian state to one that was urban, industrial, and economically interdependent. Midwestern commercial farmers found themselves at the heart of these changes. Their actions and reactions led to the formation of a distinctive and particularly democratic consumer ethos, which is still being played out today.
By focusing on the consumer behavior of midwestern farmers, Sowing the American Dream provides illustrative examples of how Americans came to terms with the economic and ideological changes that swirled around them. From the formation of the Grange to the advent of mail-order catalogs, the buying patterns of rural midwesterners set the stage for the coming century.
Carefully documenting the rise and fall of the powerful purchasing cooperatives, David Blanke explains the shifting trends in collective consumerism, which ultimately resulted in a significant change in the way that midwestern consumers pursued their own regional identity, community, and independence.
Embodying Cold War political and gendered tensions, Brazil's increasingly violent military government mounted fierce challenges to student political activity just as students were beginning to see themselves as representing an otherwise demobilized civil society. By challenging the students' political legitimacy at a pivotal moment, the dictatorship helped to ignite the student protests that exploded in 1968. In her attentive exploration of the years after 1968, Langland analyzes what the demonstrations of that year meant to later generations of Brazilian students, revealing how student activists mobilized collective memories in their subsequent political struggles.
Winner, Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize, Modern Language Association, 2010
The Spectacular City, Mexico, and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture tracks the three spectacular forces of New World literary culture—cities, festivals, and wonder—from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, from the Old World to the New, and from Mexico to Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. It treats a multitude of imperialist and anti-imperialist texts in depth, including poetry, drama, protofiction, historiography, and journalism. While several of the landmark authors studied, including Hernán Cortés and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, are familiar, others have received remarkably little critical attention. Similarly, in spotlighting creole writers, Merrim reveals an intertextual tradition in Mexico that spans two centuries. Because the spectacular city reaches its peak in the seventeenth century, Merrim's book also theorizes and details the spirited work of the New World Baroque. The result is the rich examination of a trajectory that leads from the Renaissance ordered city to the energetic revolts of the spectacular city and the New World Baroque.
During the period of Goldstein’s fieldwork in Villa Pagador in the mid-1990s, residents attempted to lynch several thieves and attacked the police who tried to intervene. Since that time, there have been hundreds of lynchings in the poor barrios surrounding Cochabamba. Goldstein presents the lynchings of thieves as a form of horrific performance, with elements of critique and political action that echo those of local festivals. He explores the consequences and implications of extralegal violence for human rights and the rule of law in the contemporary Andes. In rich detail, he provides an in-depth look at the development of Villa Pagador and of the larger metropolitan area of Cochabamba, illuminating a contemporary Andean city from both microethnographic and macrohistorical perspectives. Focusing on indigenous peoples’ experiences of urban life and their attempts to manage their sociopolitical status within the broader context of neoliberal capitalism and political decentralization, The Spectacular City highlights the deep connections between performance, law, violence, and the state.
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