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3027 books match the query 'Sociology' and 115 start with e

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Expanding Class

Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, The Netherlands 1850–1950

Don Kalb

Duke University Press, 1998

Expanding Class is the study and story of industrial class relations in North Brabant, a Catholic province of The Netherlands, over a hundred-year period. In examining the lives of workers in one of Europe’s more idiosyncratic industrial regions, Don Kalb affirms the utility of class analysis while responding to the cultural critics who have encouraged a movement away from this focus in labor history. In so doing, Expanding Class advances an interdisciplinary historical anthropology of working-class formation. Basing his analysis on oral as well as archival sources, Kalb reveals a dynamic relationship between capitalist industrialization, locality, and cultural class identities.
Expanding Class compares Brabant’s quaint central shoemaking district to its electrical boomtown Eindhoven, home of the enormous Philips Corporation. It introduces the concept of "flexible familism," a sociological phenomenon in which family daughters were employed to facilitate a cheap and ample labor force. Industrialists manipulated and fostered flexible familism to ensure the discipline and loyalty of the working-class community. By using the industrial Netherlands as a paradigm, Kalb reveals new and productive ways to examine class construction and the development of labor history in other countries over the past thirty years, steering a path between the two schools of thought—cultural and economic—that have dominated labor history discussions in recent years.

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Expelling Public Schools

How Antiracist Politics Enable School Privatization in Newark

John Arena

University of Minnesota Press, 2023

Exploring the role of identitarian politics in the privatization of Newark’s public school system

In Expelling Public Schools, John Arena explores the more than two-decade struggle to privatize public schools in Newark, New Jersey—a conflict that is raging in cities across the country—from the vantage point of elites advancing the pro-privatization agenda and their grassroots challengers.

Analyzing the unsuccessful effort of Cory Booker—Newark’s leading pro-privatization activist and mayor—to generate popular support for the agenda, and Booker’s rival and ultimate successor Ras Baraka’s eventual galvanization of the charter movement, Arena argues that Baraka’s black radical politics cloaked a revanchist agenda of privatization.

Expelling Public Schools reveals the political rise of Booker and Baraka, their one-time rivalry and subsequent alliance, and what this particular case study illuminates about contemporary post–civil rights Black politics. Ultimately, Expelling Public Schools is a critique of Black urban regime politics and the way in which antiracist messaging obscures real class divisions, interests, and ideological diversity.

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Experienced Life and Narrated Life Story

Gestalt and Structure of Biographical Self-Presentations

Gabriele Rosenthal

Campus Verlag, 2024

A new edition of sociologist Gabriele Rosenthal’s classic 1995 work on phenomenology and Gestalt theory.

How do people narrate events in their life stories and the history of their family or families? How are narratives and experiences in the present related to experiences and narratives in the past? In this foundational work by sociologist Gabriele Rosenthal, he answers these questions with a theoretical and empirical study of the interconnections between remembering, experiencing, and presenting what was experienced at different points of the life course and of the associated collective histories. He also discusses rules for conducting interviews that support processes of remembering and for carrying out an analysis that does justice to this dialectic.

This edition contains a new introduction and a new chapter that explores the later expansion of Rosenthal’s approach to sociological biographical research, reflecting the inspiration she took from the figurational sociology of Norbert Elias. With its analysis of the complex relationships between experiencing, remembering, and presenting, Experienced Life and Narrated Life Story makes an important contribution to the theoretical foundations of biographical research.

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Experimental Americans

Celo and Utopian Community in the Twentieth Century

George L. Hicks

University of Illinois Press, 2001

From colonial times to the present, the United States has been home to a steady stream of utopian experimental communities. In Experimental Americans, George L. Hicks takes us inside one of the longer-lived of such communities, Celo Community in western North Carolina, to explore the dynamics of intentional communities in America.

Founded in 1937 by Arthur Morgan, first chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, Celo (pronounced see-lo) established its own rules of land tenure and taxation, conducted its internal business by consensus, and did not require its members to accept any particular ideology or religious creed. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Celo and among its local neighbors, consultation of Celo's documentary records, and interviews with ex-members, Hicks traces the Community's ups and downs. Attacked for its opposition to World War II, Celo was revived by pacifists released from prisons and Civilian Public Service camps after the war; debilitated in the 1950s by bitter feuds with ex-members, it was buoyed up in the 1960s by the radical enthusiasm of new currents in the nation.

Hicks assesses the Community's success in creating alternatives to mainstream social relations and examines the interactions between Celo and its neighboring community. He considers variations in paths taken by utopian communities, with a look at a close cousin of Celo, the Macedonia Community in Georgia. He also discusses the Community's "post-utopian" phase, marked by a shift in the late 1970s from social goals to straightforward land management.

While utopian communities might hope to secede from American society in varying degrees and to institute new and improved cultural models, nonetheless they express in many ways the attempt--characteristic of the nation itself--to balance individualism and egalitarianism. By providing the context, utopian and conventional, within which Celo and other experimental communities emerge and change, Experimental Americans illuminates an ongoing encounter with persistent tensions and contradictions in America's cultural postulates.

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Experimental Practice

Technoscience, Alterontologies, and More-Than-Social Movements

Dimitris Papadopoulos

Duke University Press, 2018

In Experimental Practice Dimitris Papadopoulos explores the potential for building new forms of political and social movements through the reconfiguration of the material conditions of existence. Rather than targeting existing institutions in demands for social justice, Papadopoulos calls for the creation of alternative ontologies of everyday life that would transform the meanings of politics and justice. Inextricably linked to technoscience, these “alterontologies”—which Papadopoulos examines in a variety of contexts, from AIDS activism and the financialization of life to hacker communities and neuroscience—form the basis of ways of life that would embrace the more-than-social interdependence of the human and nonhuman worlds. Speaking to a matrix of concerns about politics and justice, social movements, matter and ontology, everyday practice, technoscience, the production of knowledge, and the human and nonhuman, Papadopoulos suggests that the development of alterontologies would create more efficacious political and social organizing.

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Experimenting with Ethnography

A Companion to Analysis

Andrea Ballestero and Brit Ross Winthereik, editors

Duke University Press, 2021

Experimenting with Ethnography collects twenty-one essays that open new paths for doing ethnographic analysis. The contributors—who come from a variety of intellectual and methodological traditions—enliven analysis by refusing to take it as an abstract, disembodied exercise. Rather, they frame it as a concrete mode of action and a creative practice. Encompassing topics ranging from language and the body to technology and modes of collaboration, the essays invite readers to focus on the imaginative work that needs to be performed prior to completing an argument. Whether exchanging objects, showing how to use drawn images as a way to analyze data, or working with smartphones, sound recordings, and social media as analytic devices, the contributors explore the deliberate processes for pursuing experimental thinking through ethnography. Practical and broad in theoretical scope, Experimenting with Ethnography is an indispensable companion for all ethnographers.

Contributors. Patricia Alvarez Astacio, Andrea Ballestero, Ivan da Costa Marques, Steffen Dalsgaard, Endre Dányi, Marisol de la Cadena, Marianne de Laet, Carolina Domínguez Guzmán, Rachel Douglas-Jones, Clément Dréano, Joseph Dumit, Melanie Ford Lemus, Elaine Gan, Oliver Human, Alberto Corsín Jiménez, Graham M. Jones, Trine Mygind Korsby, Justine Laurent, James Maguire, George E. Marcus, Annemarie Mol, Sarah Pink, Els Roding, Markus Rudolfi, Ulrike Scholtes, Anthony Stavrianakis, Lucy Suchman, Katie Ulrich, Helen Verran, Else Vogel, Antonia Walford, Karen Waltorp, Laura Watts, Brit Ross Winthereik

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Experimenting with Social Norms

Fairness and Punishment in Cross-Cultural Perspective

Jean Ensminger

Russell Sage Foundation, 2014

Questions about the origins of human cooperation have long puzzled and divided scientists. Social norms that foster fair-minded behavior, altruism and collective action undergird the foundations of large-scale human societies, but we know little about how these norms develop or spread, or why the intensity and breadth of human cooperation varies among different populations. What is the connection between social norms that encourage fair dealing and economic growth? How are these social norms related to the emergence of centralized institutions? Informed by a pioneering set of cross-cultural data, Experimenting with Social Norms advances our understanding of the evolution of human cooperation and the expansion of complex societies. Editors Jean Ensminger and Joseph Henrich present evidence from an exciting collaboration between anthropologists and economists. Using experimental economics games, researchers examined levels of fairness, cooperation, and norms for punishing those who violate expectations of equality across a diverse swath of societies, from hunter-gatherers in Tanzania to a small town in rural Missouri. These experiments tested individuals’ willingness to conduct mutually beneficial transactions with strangers that reap rewards only at the expense of taking a risk on the cooperation of others. The results show a robust relationship between exposure to market economies and social norms that benefit the group over narrow economic self-interest. Levels of fairness and generosity are generally higher among individuals in communities with more integrated markets. Religion also plays a powerful role. Individuals practicing either Islam or Christianity exhibited a stronger sense of fairness, possibly because religions with high moralizing deities, equipped with ample powers to reward and punish, encourage greater prosociality. The size of the settlement also had an impact. People in larger communities were more willing to punish unfairness compared to those in smaller societies. Taken together, the volume supports the hypothesis that social norms evolved over thousands of years to allow strangers in more complex and large settlements to coexist, trade and prosper. Innovative and ambitious, Experimenting with Social Norms synthesizes an unprecedented analysis of social behavior from an immense range of human societies. The fifteen case studies analyzed in this volume, which include field experiments in Africa, South America, New Guinea, Siberia and the United States, are available for free download on the Foundation’s website:www.russellsage.org.

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Explaining Modern Social Reality

The Basic Concepts in Norbert Elias’s Figurational Sociology

Kire Sharlamanov

Central European University Press, 2026

Few thinkers have shaped our understanding of modern civilization as profoundly as Norbert Elias. This book offers an accessible introduction to his major ideas, presenting his complex concepts in a clear and engaging way. Through a biographical account of Elias’s life (1897–1990), the book situates his thought within the historical and intellectual context that shaped it.
At the center of the discussion is Elias’s landmark work, The Civilizing Process, with particular attention to class structures, changing patterns of behavior, and the development of the modern state. The book also explores figurational sociology, one of Elias’s most influential contributions to social theory.
An innovative and original thinker, Elias challenged established concepts and introduced new analytical tools, including the influential notion of habitus. The chapters examine his theory of knowledge, his reflections on violence and de-civilization, his analyses of nations and nationalism, and his work on emotions and shame. The book further traces Elias’s dialogue with major thinkers such as Edmund Husserl, Karl Mannheim, Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, and Talcott Parsons, showing how he reinterpreted their ideas in distinctive ways. The book concludes with an overview of the most important critiques of Elias’s work and its continuing relevance today.

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Explaining Social Institutions

Jack Knight and Itai Sened, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 1998

How is it that people with different and often conflicting interests can band together, overcome coordination problems, and create stable institutions that regulate the interactions among members of the group? Explaining Social Institutions leads us significantly closer to understanding how such institutions come to be.
Much of the work being done under the rubric of "new institutionalism" focuses on how institutions shape social, economic, and political outcomes. This emphasis on influence has provided students of economics, political science, and political economy with surprisingly little theory to account for the origins of such institutions. Yet without understanding how institutions form and consequently develop influence, much of the other work lacks context. The contributors fill this void by utilizing a variety of perspectives and theoretical approaches. The twin focus of these articles on the origins of institutions and the development of institutional influence yield innovative and suggestive outcomes. Topics range from the framing of the United States Constitution to debate over the Senate at the Federal Convention; from equilibrium and social institutions to democratic stability.
Contributors include Randall Calvert, Jon Elster, Avner Greif, Jack Knight, Paul Milgrom, Douglass North, William Riker, Norman Schofield, Itai Sened, and Barry Weingast.
Jack Knight is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Washington University, St. Louis. Itai Sened is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Tel Aviv University.

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Explorations in Economic Sociology

Richard Swedberg

Russell Sage Foundation, 1993

Since the mid-1980s, as public discourse has focused increasingly on the troubled economy, many social scientists have argued the need for more analysis of the social relationships that undergird economic life. The original essays in Explorations in Economic Sociology represent the most important work in this renewed field and employ a rich variety of research methods—theoretical, ethnographic, and historical—to illustrate its key concerns. Explorations in Economic Sociology forges innovative social theories of such economic institutions as money, markets, and industry. Although traditional economists have identified markets as driven solely by the forces of supply and demand, social factors frequently intervene. Sales at auction are determined not simply by a seller's personal knowledge of customers. Shareholder attitudes and employee organization influence everything from the way firms borrow money to the way corporate performance is measured. Firms themselves operate in social networks in which trust is a crucial factor in settling the terms for cooperation or competition. Throughout the essays in this volume, the contributors point the way to developing a more healthy economy by fostering productive industrial networks, avoiding disintegration at management levels, and anticipating the consequences of the shift from manufacturing to service industries. Explorations in Economic Sociology is a pioneering work that bridges the gap between social theory and economic analysis and demonstrates the importance of this union in achieving an effective understanding of economic issues. The book should stimulate new interest in economic sociology by bringing together many of its most fundamental voices.

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Exploring The Beloved Country

American Society And Culture

Wilbur Zelinsky

University of Iowa Press, 1994

For fifty years geographer Wilbur Zelinsky has charted the social, cultural, and historical map of the American experience. A self-confessed incurable landscape voyeur, he has produced order and pattern from massive amounts of data, zestfully finding societal meaning in the terra incognita of our postmodern existence. Now he has gathered his most original and exciting explorations into a volume that captures the nature and dynamics of this remarkable phenomenon we call the United States of America. Each the product of Zelinsky's joyous curiosity, these energetic essays trace the innermost contours of our bewildering American reality.

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Explosivity

Following What Remains

Javier Arbona-Homar

University of Minnesota Press, 2025

How explosions across history reveal the violence embedded in San Francisco’s landscape

Offering a novel approach to contemporary landscape studies, Explosivity unearths the hidden legacies of violence that have shaped the physical and cultural environment of the San Francisco Bay area. As he sifts through the historical debris of previous centuries, Javier Arbona-Homar analyzes a series of explosions that took place between 1866 and 2011 to call attention to the scattered remnants of militarism and racialized capitalism embedded in the region’s geography.

From incidents involving nineteenth-century explosives manufacturing and World War II munitions loading to radical activism and contemporary television productions, Arbona-Homar locates a pattern of historical violence that refocuses the broader racial and colonial context. Citing the material, social, and political conditions that gave rise to these disparate episodes, he reviews the historic erasure of those driving forces and puts forth alternative possibilities for how such disasters might be memorialized.

Synthesizing a diverse set of field research methods, including oral histories and site visits, and supplemented by specially commissioned landscape photographs by Andrea Gaffney, Explosivity presents a radical exercise in the exposition of public memory.

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