You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
2007 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Sociologists have too often discounted the role of space in inequality. This book showcases a recent generation of inquiry that attends to poverty, prosperity, and power across a range of territories and their populations within the United States, addressing spatial inequality as a thematically distinct body of work that spans sociological research traditions. The contributors' various perspectives offer an agenda for future action to bridge sociology's diverse and often narrowly focused spatial and inequality traditions.
The book incorporates three alternative conceptions of class. Erik Olin Wright's structural Marxist account is set alongside John Goldthorpe's occupational class schema, and the Registrar-General's prestige and skill-related categories. The authors use their unique data on inequality and conflict in contemporary Britain to provide, for the first time, a rigourous comparison of Marxist, sociological and official class frameworks. The book ranges widely across such topics as sectionalism in the workforce; privatism of families and individuals; fatalism; gender and class processes; sectoral production and consumption cleavages. The authors conclude that class is still crucial in structuring economic, political and social life.
Work occupies a pivotal role in the daily activities and over the course of a lifetime of members of modern societies. In anticipation, work influ ences education and training; it has much to do with shaping current earned income and status in the community; and in retrospect, it influ ences retirement income and activities. It is a powerful force affecting personal associations. In our society work is deeply encased in moral and religious values: As Poor Richard says, A Life of Leisure and a Life of Laziness are two Things. Do you imagine that Sloth will afford you more Comfort than Labour? No, for as Poor Richard says: ... Industry gives Comfort, and Plenty and Respect. Study to show thyself approved unto God a workman that needeth not to be ashamed. But few words have as many different meanings and nuances as "work": to forge or to shape, to stir or to knead, to solve, to exploit, to practice trickery for some end, to excite or to provoke, to persuade or to influence, to toil, and the like. A need for precision in meaning is requisite with respect to work, not only in common discourse, but, even more so, in scholarly communication.
A Debtor World contains a collection of contributions about the societal implications of private debt. The essays comprising this volume are authored by dozens of leading U.S. and international academics who have written about debt or issues related to debt in a wide range of disciplines including law, sociology, psychology, history, economics, and more. The goal of this collection is to explore debt neither as a problem nor a solution but as a phenomenon and to promote the exchange of knowledge to better comprehend why consumers and businesses decide to borrow money. It asks what happens to businesses and consumers under a heavy debt load, and what legal norms and institutions societies need to encourage the efficient use of debt while promoting a greater understanding of the global phenomenon of increased indebtedness and societal dependence.
Class analysis and class struggle are central concepts in Marx’s social theory yet, notoriously, Marx never wrote a systematic exposition of these terms during his lifetime, and succeeding generations have had to piece together interpretations from his many scattered references and discussions. The problem of trying to develop a Marxist class analysis on this basis has been made all the more acute by changes in the class structure of advanced capitalism, for these have thrown up a bewildering range of new social strata which seem to be difficult to reconcile with the many traditional understandings of class. In Classes, Erik Olin Wright, one of the foremost Marxist sociologists and class t...
In this empirical study, Saskia Sassen offers a fresh understanding of the processes of international migration. Focusing on immigration into the US from 1960 to 1985 and the part played by American economic activities abroad, as well as foreign investment in the US, she examines the various ways in which the internationalization of production contributes to the formation and direction of labor migration.
This book contains the latest research on social and economic trends occurring in rural America. It provides a unique focus on rural demography and the interaction between population dynamics and local social and economic change. It is also the first volume on rural population that exploits data from Census 2000 The book highlights major themes transforming contemporary rural areas and each is examined with an expanded overview and case study.
In 1991, Columbia University's one thousand clerical workers launched a successful campaign for justice in their workplace. This diverse union -- two-thirds black and Latina, three-fourths women -- was committed to creating an inclusive movement organization and to fighting for all kinds of justice. How could they address the many race and gender injustices members faced, avoid schism, and maintain the unity needed to win? Sharon Kurtz, an experienced union activist and former clerical worker herself, was welcomed into the union and pursued these questions. Using this case study and secondary studies of sister clerical unions at Yale and Harvard, she examines the challenges and potential of ...
"A well crafted, carefully researched study that will add a new dimension to the ongoing discussion about the impact of economic restructuring on families and communities. This well written, carefully researched book challenges the conventional notion of the formal and informal economy as polarized alternatives. The working-class households Nelson and Smith studied rely simultaneously on both sectors, and inequality among these households is shaped not by dependence on one rather than the other but by access to desirable positions in both. Their gender analysis exposes the distinctive economic contributions of men and women to the working-class household and the ways in which gender inequality shapes survival strategies."—Ruth Milkman, author of Farewell to the Factory
Grounded in historical essays, this volume provides context for the growing field of curriculum studies, reflecting on dominant trends in the field & sampling the best of current scholarship.