You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
In Incorporating Texts into Institutional Ethnographies, Dorothy E. Smith and Susan Marie Turner present a selection of essays highlighting perhaps the single most distinctive feature of the sociological approach known as Institutional Ethnography (IE) – the ethnographic investigation of how texts coordinate and organize people’s activities across space and time. The chapters, written by scholars who are relatively new to IE as well as IE veterans, illustrate the wide variety of ways in which IE investigations can be done, as well as the breadth of topics IE has been used to study. Both a collection of examples that can be used in teaching and research project design and an excellent introduction to IE methods and techniques, Incorporating Texts into Institutional Ethnographies is an essential contribution to the subject.
This first hand report on the work of nurses and other caregivers in a nursing home is set powerfully in the context of wider political, economic, and cultural forces that shape and constrain the quality of care for America's elderly. Diamond demonstrates in a compelling way the price that business-as-usual policies extract from the elderly as well as those whose work it is to care for them. In a society in which some two million people live in 16,000 nursing homes, with their numbers escalating daily, this thought-provoking work demands immediate and widespread attention. "[An] unnerving portrait of what it's like to work and live in a nursing home. . . . By giving voice to so many unheard residents and workers Diamond has performed an important service for us all."—Diane Cole, New York Newsday "With Making Gray Gold, Timothy Diamond describes the commodification of long-term care in the most vivid representation in a decade of round-the-clock institutional life. . . . A personal addition to the troublingly impersonal national debate over healthcare reform."—Madonna Harrington Meyer, Contemporary Sociology
Understanding the processes and policies of urbanization and suburbanization in American Indian communities Nearly seven out of ten American Indians live in urban areas, yet studies of urban Indian experiences remain scant. Studies of suburban Natives are even more rare. Today’s suburban Natives, the fastest-growing American Indian demographic, highlight the tensions within federal policies working in tandem to move and house differing groups of people in very different residential locations. In American Indians and the American Dream, Kasey R. Keeler examines the long history of urbanization and suburbanization of Indian communities in Minnesota. At the intersection of federal Indian poli...
How the American government has long used financial credit programs to create economic opportunities Federal housing finance policy and mortgage-backed securities have gained widespread attention in recent years because of the 2008 financial crisis, but issues of government credit have been part of American life since the nation’s founding. From the 1780s, when a watershed national land credit policy was established, to the postwar foundations of our current housing finance system, American Bonds examines the evolution of securitization and federal credit programs. Sarah Quinn shows that since the Westward expansion, the U.S. government has used financial markets to manage America’s comp...
This book examines posters produced by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a federal relief program designed to create jobs in the United States during the Great Depression. Cory Pillen focuses on several issues addressed repeatedly in the roughly 2,200 extant WPA posters created between 1935 and 1943: recreation and leisure, conservation, health and disease, and public housing. As the book shows, the posters promote specific forms of knowledge and literacy as solutions to contemporary social concerns. The varied issues these works engage and the ideals they endorse, however, would have resonated in complex ways with the posters’ diverse viewing public, working both for and against the rhetoric of consensus employed by New Deal agencies in defining and managing the relationship between self and society in modern America. This book will be of interest to scholars in design history, art history, and American studies.
Social problems affect everyone. Because so many actual and potential problems confront us, it is often difficult to decide which ones affect us most severely. Is it the threat of death or injury during a terrorist attack? Is it the threat caused by industrial pollution that may poison us or destroy our physical environment? Or does quiet but viciously damaging gender, age, class, racial, or ethnic discrimination have the most far-reaching effect? Do the problems of cities affect us if we live in the suburbs? Do poorer nations′ problems with overpopulation affect our quality of life? The Encyclopedia of Social Problems offers an interdisciplinary perspective into many social issues that ar...
In No Place Like Home, Brian McCabe challenges the ideology of homeownership as a tool for building stronger communities and crafting better citizens. McCabe argues that homeowners often engage in their communities as a way to protect their property values, and this participation leads to the politics of exclusion.
What is it in human nature that leads us to label some as insiders and stigmatize others as outsiders? Sociologist Gerhard Falk examines the social psychology that motivates this process of exclusion, focusing on the outcasts in contemporary American society and comparing current experience with examples from the past. Referring to the work of Emile Durkheim and Erving Goffman, Falk reviews the whole range of stigmatized people from the mentally ill to ordinary people with unpopular occupations, like undertakers and trash collectors. Amid the wide diversity of stigmatized persons, he finds two basic types of outsiders: the "existential" and the "achieved." The first group comprises those who...