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The concept of social roles highlights sociology's distinctive approach to understanding human behavior. Social roles link behavior to structural positions and social expectations. They are important connecting rods between the individual and large-scale societal analysis. Consequently, role theory is an essential tool for understanding social institutions, the nature of interpersonal influence, socialization, and the ways in which individuals define no less than are defined by structural change. Bennett M. Berger provides a rich informal context for understanding how this has come about in American social science.
In the wake of World War I, a diverse group of women emigrated from Europe to the United States under austere conditions and adapted in different ways to life in the new country. Based on a major new study that includes in-depth interviews with 100 Italian and Jewish women who immigrated to the New York City area in the early 1900s, this volume explores family and work lives led by these women and the relative importance of cultural factors to the two groups' adjustment to American life. The interviews trace the process of adapting to life in the U.S., paying special attention to the specific experiences of women immigrants and the challenges they faced in surmounting gender and cultural barriers both within their families and in their new communities. This innovative, interdisciplinary study uses feminist approaches to explore immigrant women's lives from childhood to old age. The result is a nuanced view of the similarities and differences between the two groups, whose distinct family structures and cultural backgrounds led to different responses to the same pressures and difficulties.
Originally published in 1981, this book is composed of papers that describe and analyse women’s careers in government, business, and the professions. It examines women’s access to and participation in elite careers in the US, and in selected countries of western and eastern Europe – Britain, France, West Germany, Austria, Norway, Finland, Poland, and Yugoslavia – as well as in international organizations. This book was an outgrowth of a conference on ‘Women in decision-making elites in cross-national perspective,’ held at King’s College, Cambridge University, in July 1976. The countries represented were chosen because, although they were at similar stages of economic development, they exhibited differences in political structure, ideology, and tradition.
This selection of essays by one of the most eminent sociologists of our time represents a selection of his analytical and moral or political writing over a lifetime of work. The book is organized thematically rather than chronologièally, and is divided into four parts: paè¨ers on the uses of sociology, on ideas and ideologies, on sociological analysis, and a final section entitled professing sociology. While the collection demonè²trates maturation, the author's central preoccupations have remained constant over the years. A reflective autoèiographical introduction places the auè² hors choice of problems and the development of his ideas in the social and cultural context of his life and his work. He confesses to .having experiènced, in his life and his work, being a "stranger within the gate," and believes that this sense of marginality has both informed and influenced his thinking. And he sees the social conflicts that shook the world during his young adulthood as having creative as well as destructive consequences.
A Stanford University Press classic.
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