Results by title

This book, based on original research in Melbourne, Australia, explores the spatial politics of urban expansion both upwards and outwards as the city continues to colonize non-urban areas around its fringes. The everyday decisions and tools bound up in urban growth accelerate a malign colonization of land, resources, air and water, thereby exacerbating a broad variety of social and environmental harms. In addition to the quotidian nature of urban growth, this book also explores the ‘crisis’ in the form of extreme fire events in urban areas. Moving between local planning and national and international climate change mitigation policies and approaches, this book highlights various 'necropolicies’ - policies causing harm and death to more-than-human populations. Such death-bound policies are the result of neoliberal urban development, fueled by state-corporate relations and prosperity concerns. In sum, this book connects green and urban criminology, urban studies and planning to reveal how ordinary and extraordinary challenges are entangled in urban design, harm and, most importantly, imagining alternative futures and cities.

Bryan Roberts’ study of two poor neighborhoods of Guatemala City is an important contribution to the understanding of the urban social and power organization of underdeveloped countries. It is the first major study of any Central American urban population.

Organizing Strangers gives an account of how poor people cope with an unstable and mobile urban environment, and case material is provided on the emergence of collective action among them. Several themes that are crucial to understanding the significance of urban growth in the underdeveloped world are explored: the impact of city life on rural migrants, the relationship between living in cities and the development of class consciousness, and the changing significance of personal relationships as a means of organizing social and economic life.

Guatemala City’s rapid growth and low level of industrialization created a keen competition for jobs and available living space and inhibited the development of cohesive residential groupings. Thus the poor found themselves living and working with people who were mostly strangers. Trust is difficult to create in such an environment, and the absence of trust affected the capacity of the poor to organize themselves.

While the poor were integrated into city life, the manner of their integration exposed them to greater exploitation than if they were truly socially isolated or marginal. Bryan Roberts analyzes a variety of formally organized voluntary associations involving the poor and concludes that such associations are essentially means by which middle- and upper-status groups seek to negotiate order among the poor.

The problems faced by these poor families are due less to their own incapacities or inactivity than to the effects of economic and political relationships that exploit them locally, nationally, and even internationally. A major conclusion of this study is that the uncertainties in the relationships among poor people and between them and other social groups are the underlying causes of a general political and economic instability.

Culture jamming is so twentieth century! What’s next?

When reporters asked about the Bush administration’s timing in making their case for the Iraq war, then Chief of Staff Andrew Card responded that “from a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” While surprising only in its candor, this statement signified the extent to which consumer culture has pervaded every aspect of life. For those troubled by the long reach of the marketplace, resistance can seem futile. However, a new generation of progressive activists has begun to combat the media supremacy of multinational corporations by using the very tools and techniques employed by their adversaries.

Since Vatican Council II, convent walls have crumbled. and the structures that once separated nuns from the world are gone. Out of the Cloister is an organizational analysis of the structural and ideological changes that took place in Catholic religious orders of women in the United States. Many nuns today dress in street clothes, choose their own jobs, have a degree of financial independence from the larger order, and may not be recognized by their coworkers as nuns. What might once have been defined as a "total institution" has become, within the span of a few years, a type of voluntary organization where members join together loosely to achieve a common purpose.

Helen Rose Fuchs Ebaugh approaches religious orders as utopian communities and examines how contact with the larger society has affected the distinctiveness and solidarity that hold such groups together. She analyzes the patterns occurring within orders with particular focus on the relationship between organizational change and membership loss. Since changes have been introduced into religious orders at different rates, and since orders vary in such characteristics as size and educational level of members, it is possible to analyze relationships between exit rates and other organizational variables. The complex interplay of education and membership loss is one of the organizational dilemmas the author examines.

Although she is no longer a part of organized religious life, Ebaugh spent ten years as a nun and during that time collected much of the data presented in this book. As a nun she also helped conduct a number of self-studies and evaluations involved with the post-Vatican II reform and renewal efforts. She is therefore in the unique position of a researcher who collected data as an insider and analyzed it as an outsider.

This book is one of the first systematic, empirical studies of religious orders in the United States and one of the few sociological investigations of convents and the changes occurring within them.

From the Grand Ole Opry to the National Barn Dance, how radio changed life in rural America

Out of the Dark: A History of Radio and Rural America shows how radio—especially clear channel network stations—brought news, markets, weather, religion, and entertainment into isolated farm homes between the 1920s and 1950s, narrowing rural–urban divides while also sustaining distinctly rural tastes (e.g., barn dance music). Craig argues that battery “farm radios,” high power stations, and national networking transformed daily life, work rhythms, consumer habits, and political participation, making radio the central domestic technology of the Depression era and beyond. 

Craig blends regulatory and industry milestones, such as the Radio Act of 1927, with sociological studies, USDA extension records, FCC surveys, census tables, and rich case studies including WLS Chicago’s “National Barn Dance,” WSM Nashville’s “Grand Ole Opry,” and others. He mines audience research, diaries, program schedules, and tables that track the spread of radio. The book’s distinctive contributions include detailed charts (ownership by region; clear channel assignments) and vivid narratives of stations, formats, and personalities that connected farm families to national culture while preserving local identity. 

The book is ideal for scholars and students of US social, rural, and media history; communication policy and political communication; country and bluegrass music history; agricultural extension; and American studies. It will also engage librarians, curators, and public historians seeking context for rural collections; journalists and podcasters tracing the roots of today’s information ecosystems; and general readers interested in how radio re made community life long before the internet.

From New York to Singapore, from Chicago to London, the trading floors of the world’s financial markets are icons of global capitalism. Images of them are used on the news all the time—traders burying their heads in their hands when the market is down, their arms flailing in a frenzy when fortunes are rising—to convey the current state of the economy. But these marketplaces, and the cultural life that sustains them, are dissolving into the ether of the digital age: powerful financial institutions are shutting down the trading pits, replacing face-to-face exchanges with an electronic network where traders sit, face to screen, finger to mouse, and compete in a global arena made up of digits and charts. 

Out of the Pits considers the implications of this sea change for everyone involved, from the traders and brokers to the market as a whole. Caitlin Zaloom takes us down to the floor at the Chicago Board of Trade and into a digital dealing room in the City of London. Drawing on her own firsthand experiences as a clerk and a trader and on her unusual access to these key sites of global finance, she explainshow changes at the world’s leading financial exchanges have transformed economic cultures and the craft of speculation; how people and places are responding to the digital transition; how traders are remaking themselves to compete in the contemporary marketplace; and how brokers, business managers, and software designers are collaborating to build new financial markets. 

A penetrating and richly detailed account of how cities, culture, and technology shape everyday life in the new global economy, Out of the Pits will be must reading for business buffs or anyone who has ever wondered how financial markets work.

A calm but unflinching realist, Catton suggests that we cannot stop this wave - for we have already overshot the Earth's capacity to support so huge a load. He contradicts those scientists, engineers, and technocrats who continue to write optimistically about energy alternatives. Catton asserts that the technological panaceas proposed by those who would harvest from the seas, harness the winds, and farm the deserts are ignoring the fundamental premise that "the principals of ecology apply to all living things." These principles tell us that, within a finite system, economic expansion is not irreversible and population growth cannot continue indefinitely. If we disregard these facts, our sagging American Dream will soon shatter completely.