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The Meritocracy Myth challenges the widely held American belief in meritocracyOCothat people get out of the system what they put into it based on individual merit. Fully revised and updated throughout, the second edition includes compelling new case studies, such as the impact of social and cultural capital in the cases of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and new material on current topics such as the impact of the financial and credit crisis, intergenerational mobility, and the impact of racism and sexism. The Meritocracy Myth examines talent, attitude, work ethic, and character as elements of merit and evaluates the effect of non-merit factors such as social status, race, heritage, and wealth on meritocracy. A compelling book on an often-overlooked topic, first edition was highly regarded and proved a useful examination of this classic American ideal.
Winner, Tullis Prize, Texas State Historical Association, 2004 Private First Class Felix Longoria earned a Bronze Service Star, a Purple Heart, a Good Conduct Medal, and a Combat Infantryman's badge for service in the Philippines during World War II. Yet the only funeral parlor in his hometown of Three Rivers, Texas, refused to hold a wake for the slain soldier because "the whites would not like it." Almost overnight, this act of discrimination became a defining moment in the rise of Mexican American activism. It launched Dr. Héctor P. García and his newly formed American G.I. Forum into the vanguard of the Mexican civil rights movement, while simultaneously endangering and advancing the c...
Combining political philosophy with a study of political behavior, Richard T. Longoria examines the contradictory nature of public opinion on policy issues. He argues that public opinion is often characterized by dialetheial paradoxes—when a statement and the contradiction of that statement are both held to be true. For example, a voter may express a desire for a balanced federal budget but also be against reducing entitlement programs, increasing taxes, or any other solution to achieve that goal. Longoria focuses on various social issues and domestic and foreign policies to explore these types of contradictory and incompatible preferences, arguing that they stem from the pragmatic nature ...
Rose Summerfield: Australian Radical outlines the largely forgotten achievements of this overlooked labor union activist and socialist sympathetic to anarchist, feminist, and secularist ideas: a dynamic speaker, who eventually emigrated to Paraguay to live on a utopian commune called Cosme. In this first book-length study of Summerfield, Shone supplements existing scholarship with new information, revealing to a much fuller extent Summerfield’s contributions to radical thought, documenting the substantial scope of her contributions to women’s rights activism in New South Wales in the 1890s, a topic that has previously been almost completely ignored.
Campus diversity is a contentious topic, but this book shows far more consensus than conflict in student attitudes toward diversity.
The experience of shifting from one social class to another—from a dominated group to a dominant group—raises the question of how the upwardly mobile person relates to his/her group of origin. Stepping into the Elite traces the particular ways in which upwardly mobile people in India, France, and the United States—countries embodying three distinct stratification systems—make sense of this change. Given that people draw upon specific cultural tools or repertoires to analyse their world and situate themselves in it, Naudet identifies the extent to which narratives of ‘success’ vary from one country to another. For instance, he explains that while stories in a caste-ridden society ...
This book analyses public sector reform comprehensively in all parts of China’s public sector – government bureaucracy, public service units and state-owned enterprises. It argues that reform of the public sector has become an issue of great concern to the Chinese leaders, who realize that efficient public administration is key to securing the regime’s governing capacity and its future survival. The book shows how thinking about public sector reform has shifted in recent decades from a quantitative emphasis on 'small government', which involved the reduction in size of what was perceived as a bloated bureaucracy, to an emphasis on the quality of governance, which may result in an incre...
The "Neverland Valley-Welcome" sign depicts a little boy, bending over to talk to a troll. Peter Pan was playing at the packed eighty-seat, 7,000 square-foot theatre. Popcorn and drinks were dished up gratis to the mobs at the concession stand. On-screen, Captain Hook had ten wide-eyed children bound and gagged, about to be fed to the crocodile. Nearby, amid the rides, a band was taking a break. Beat It thumped loudly from hidden speakers. A circus-like tent houses the bumper cars, where jubilant lads, faces flushed with excitement, rammed each other with enthusiasm. ...I freely admitted, there was no doubt that allegations of child molestation had hurt Jackson in this community. Where would...