Results by title

135 books match the query 'Sociological aspects' and 4 start with n

cover of Naturalizing Inequality: Water, Race, and Biopolitics in South Africa

Naturalizing Inequality

Water, Race, and Biopolitics in South Africa

Michela Marcatelli

University of Arizona Press, 2021

More than twenty-five years after the end of apartheid, water access remains a striking reminder of racial inequality in South Africa. This book compellingly argues that in the post-apartheid period inequality has not only been continuously reproduced but also legitimized.

Michela Marcatelli unravels this inequality paradox through an ethnography of water in a rural region of the country. The Waterberg Plateau is a space where agriculture, conservation, and extraction coexist and intersect. Marcatelli examines the connections between neoliberalism, race, and the environment by showing that racialized property relations around water and land are still recognized and protected by the post-apartheid state to sustain green growth. She argues that the government depicts growth as the best, if not only, solution to inequality. While white landowners maintain access to water, however, black ex-farmworkers are dispossessed once again of this essential-to-life resource.

If the promise of growth serves to normalize inequality, the call to save nature has the effect of naturalizing it even further.

 
[more]
cover of Networks and Markets

Networks and Markets

James E. Rauch

Russell Sage Foundation, 2001

Networks and Markets argues that economists' knowledge of markets and sociologists' rich understanding of networks can and should be combined. Together they can help us achieve a more coherent view of economic life, where transactions follow both the logic of economic incentives and the established channels of personal relationships. Market exchange is impersonal, episodic, and carried out at arm's length. All that matters is how much the seller is asking, and how much the buyer is offering. An economic network, by contrast, is based upon more personalized and enduring relationships between people tied together by more than just price. Networks and Markets focuses on how the two concepts relate to each other: Are social networks an essential precondition for successful markets, or do networks arise naturally out of markets, as faceless traders build reputations and gain confidence in each other? The book includes contributions by both sociologists and economists, applying the concepts of markets and networks to concrete empirical phenomena. Among the topics analyzed, the book explains how, in Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, firms combine into tightly-knit business blocs, how wholesalers in a Marseille fish market earn the loyalty of customers, and how ethnic retailers in the U.S. share valuable market information with other shopkeepers from their ethnic group. A response to each chapter discusses the issue from the standpoint of the other discipline. Sociologists are challenged to go beyond small-scale economic exchange and to integrate their concept of networks into a broader understanding of the economic system as a whole, while economists are challenged to consider the economic implications of network ties, which can be strong or weak, unconditional or highly contingent. This book proves that both economics and sociology provide stronger insights when they study markets and networks as parallel forms of exchange. But it also clarifies the healthy division of labor that remains between the two disciplines. Sociologists are adept at showing how markets are framed by social institutions; economists specialize in explaining how markets perform, taking the social context as a given. Networks and Markets showcases what each discipline does best and reveals where each discipline would do better by borrowing from the other.
[more]
cover of Nothing Happened: Charlotte Salomon and an Archive of Suicide

Nothing Happened

Charlotte Salomon and an Archive of Suicide

Darcy C. Buerkle

University of Michigan Press, 2013

Charlotte Salomon's (1917-43) fantastical autobiography, Life? or Theater?, consists of 769 sequenced gouache paintings, through which the artist imagined the circumstances of the eight suicides in her family, all but one of them women. But Salomon's focus on suicide was not merely a familial idiosyncrasy. Nothing Happened argues that the social history of early-twentieth-century Germany has elided an important cultural and social phenomenon by not including the story of German Jewish women and suicide. This absence in social history mirrors an even larger gap in the intellectual history of deeply gendered suicide studies that have reproduced the notion of women's suicide as a rarity in history. Nothing Happened is a historiographic intervention that operates in conversation and in tension with contemporary theory about trauma and the reconstruction of emotion in history.

[more]
cover of Nursing Wounds: Nurse Practitioners, Doctors, Women Patients, and the Negotiation of Meaning

Nursing Wounds

Nurse Practitioners, Doctors, Women Patients, and the Negotiation of Meaning

Fisher, Sue

Rutgers University Press, 1995

The rise of the nurse practitioner as a new kind of health care professional has blurred the traditional distinction between physicians and nurses. Nurse practitioners argue that they combine both the traditionally male health care delivery of the M.D. and the traditionally female caring attention of the R.N. In her previous work Sue Fisher has analyzed the difficulties that women patients have in getting doctors to listen to their medical concerns. Now she asks whether women fare any better with nurse practitioners. 

Nursing Wounds takes us into the examining rooms of nurse practitioners and doctors to listen to how health care professionals and women patients communicate. The nurse practitioners, unlike the doctors, go beyond the medical problem to ask about the social context of the patients' lives. In these exchanges the doctors insist on reinforcing both their professional status and dominant cultural assumptions about women. While the nurse practitioners sometimes do this, they also distance themselves from their professional identities, respond to their patients woman to woman, and undermine traditional understandings about gender arrangements.These differences have important consequences for the delivery of health care.       

This compelling and complex analysis employs a range of theoretical perspectives–-from sociolinguistic to postmodern and materialist. Fisher concludes by urging a health care policy that capitalizes on the special strengths of nurse practitioners as providers of primary care who pay real attention to what their patients are saying and who support an alternative, even oppositional, understanding of women's lives.

[more]