Browse

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was the beginning of one of the most interesting natural experiments in recent history. The East German transition from a Communist state to part of the Federal Republic of Germany abruptly created a new social order as old institutions were abolished and new counterparts imported. This unique situation provides an exceptional opportunity to examine the central tenets of life-course sociology. The empirical chapters of this book draw a comprehensive picture of life-course transformation, demonstrating how the combination of life-course dynamics coupled with an extraordinary pace of system change affect individual lives. How much turbulence was created by the transition and how much stability was preserved? How did the qualifications and resources acquired before 1989 influence the fortunes in the restructured economy? How did the privatization and reorganization of firms impact individuals? Did the transformation experiences differ by age/cohort and gender? How stable were social networks at work and in the family? Were personality characteristics important mediators of post-1989 success or failure, or were they rather changed by them? How specific were the East German life trajectories in comparison with those of Poland and West Germany?

Why have governments across Western Europe and North America turned to austerity in the wake of the global economic crisis of 2008? This book argues that this turn to austerity, and the resilience of neoliberal economic policies more generally, stems from the growing influence of state monetary agencies—central banks and treasuries—in the management of the global economy. Through a close analysis of historical documents, this book focuses on the critical decade of the 1960s when the acceleration of global financial transactions overwhelmed the existing institutions of international monetary management. As central banks stepped in to support the international monetary system, policy makers became dependent on monetary officials to stabilize and increasingly unstable global economy. Through case studies of economic policy making in the United States, United Kingdom, and Italy during this period, this book shows how this relationship of dependency gave monetary officials leverage to steer economic policy in the direction of austerity. In addition, this book shows that, after the collapse of the Bretton Woods international monetary system in the 1970s, state monetary agencies worked closely together to construct new international institutions to manage an evermore open, and volatile, global capitalism. While these efforts have not prevented global financial crises, they have further strengthened monetary authorities’ position in the international monetary system and increased their influence over national economic policy making.

This book is about the creative work of chefs at elite restaurants in New York City and San Francisco. Based on interviews with chefs and observation of their work in restaurant kitchens, the book examines how and why chefs make choices about the dishes they put on their menus, and how they develop a culinary style. To answer the questions, the book analyzes chefs’ career paths, culinary classifications and categories, how chefs develop their culinary styles and reflectively manage their authorship, cognitive patterns and work processes involved in creating food, and status constraints. Elite chefs face competing pressures to create a distinctive and original culinary style, and conform to tradition as they navigate market forces to run a profitable business. They must make choices, and these limit their autonomy over time, because they constrain the dishes and career moves they can make in the future. Chefs occupy positions in a culinary field through their culinary styles, status, and social networks, and make choices about their food and career moves from such positions. In more general terms, the logic of creation of cultural products is embedded in the positions individuals occupy in a field. This book is about the process of creation, and complements an organizational analysis of the world of high cuisine with a phenomenological examination of chefs’ work. It uses the case study of high cuisine to analyze, more generally, how people in creative occupations navigate a context rife with uncertainty, high pressures, and contradicting forces.

Too frequently, the media and politicians cast Mexican immigrants as a threat to American society. Given America's increasing ethnic diversity and the large size of the Mexican-origin population, an investigation of how Mexican immigrants and their descendants achieve upward mobility and enter the middle class is long overdue. This book offers a new understanding of the Mexican-American experience. It explores the challenges that accompany rapid social mobility and examines a new indicator of incorporation, a familial obligation to “give back” in social and financial support. The book investigates the salience of middle-class Mexican Americans' ethnic identification, and details how relationships with poorer coethnics and affluent whites evolve as immigrants and their descendants move into traditionally white middle-class occupations. Disputing the argument that Mexican communities lack high-quality resources and social capital which can help Mexican Americans incorporate into the middle class, it also examines civic participation in ethnic professional associations embedded in ethnic communities.

This book crafts an insider's look at international trade disputes at one of the most important institutions in the global economy: the World Trade Organization (WTO). The WTO regulates the global rules for trade, and—unique among international organizations—provides a legalized process for litigation between countries over trade grievances. Drawing on interviews with trade lawyers, ambassadors, trade delegations, and trade jurists, this book details how trade has become increasingly legalized and the implications of that for power relations between rich and poor countries. The author looks closely at who uses the system to initiate and pursue disputes, who settles and on what terms, and the relative disconnect between pursuing a dispute and what a country gains through efforts to gain compliance with WTO dictates. Through this inside look at the process of disputing, the author provides fresh perspective on how and why the law authorizes the use of specific resources and tactics in the ever-unfolding struggle for control in the global economy.

This pathbreaking book examines the strategies, successes, and challenges of youth advocacy organizations, highlighting the importance of local contexts for these efforts. Working between social movements and the political establishment, these organizations, which occupy a special niche in American politics and civil society, use their position to change local agendas for youth and public perceptions of youth, and work to strengthen local community support systems. The book describes how youth advocacy organizations affect change in a fragmented urban policy environment. It considers the different constituencies that organizations target, including public officials and policies, specific service sectors, and community members, and looks at the multiple tactics advocates employ to advance their reform agendas, such as political campaigns, accountability measures, building civic capacity, research, and policy formation. This work further examines the importance of historical, organizational, and political contexts in explaining the strategies, actions, and consequences of advocacy organizations' efforts at the local level, bringing to light what is effective and why.

This book argues that analyzing emigration, immigration, and re-migration under the framework of contemporaneous migration directs attention to the citizenship formations that interconnect migration sites, shaping the lives of citizens in motion. It departs from conventional approaches that study migration sites in isolation or as snapshots in time. Taking Chinese emigration as the starting point, the analysis becomes deepened by incorporating insights from migrant-receiving countries, namely Canada and Singapore, which are facing new emigration or re-migration trends among their own citizens. By analyzing shifts in migration patterns over time, we also come to understand how China is becoming an immigration country. The arguments offer new insights for researchers studying Chinese migration and diaspora. As an analytical approach, contemporaneous migration contributes to our theorization of citizenship and territory, fraternity and alterity, ethnicity, and the co-constitution of time and space.

Hong Kong is one of the very few places in the world where the common law can be practiced in a language other than English. Introduced into the courtroom over a decade ago, Cantonese has significantly altered the everyday working of the common law in China's most Westernized city. This book explores how English and Cantonese respectively reinforce and undermine the practice of legal formalism. This first-ever ethnographic study of Hong Kong's unique legal system in the midst of social and political transition, this book provides important insights into the social nature of language and the work of institutions. The author contends that the dilemma of legal bilingualism in Hong Kong is emblematic of the inherent tensions of postcolonial Hong Kong. Through the legal dramas presented in the book, readers will get a fresh look at the former British colony that is now searching for its identity within a powerful China.

In today's schools the number of students who receive additional resources to access the curriculum is growing rapidly, and the ongoing expansion of special education is among the most significant worldwide educational developments of the past century. Yet even among developed democracies the range of access varies hugely, from one student in twenty to one student in three. In contemporary conflicts about educational standards and accountability, special education plays a key role as it draws the boundaries between exclusion and inclusion. This book unites in-depth comparative and historical studies with analyses of global trends, with a particular focus on special and inclusive education in the United States, England, France, and Germany. The authors examine the causes and consequences of various institutional and organizational developments, illustrate differences in forms of educational governance and social policy priorities, and highlight the evolution of social logics from segregation of students with special educational needs to their inclusion in local schools.

Common understandings of money, credit, and banking, rely on notions of efficiency--how well they work in allocating resources and coordinating economic activities. This book, by contrast, focuses on how money, credit, and banking are implicated in conflict. It examines how financial elites in general, and certain bankers in particular, create new financial instruments in order to consolidate and reproduce their wealth over time, turning money into an instrument of exclusion, and couching their practices in ideologies of sound banking. Yet, since the boundaries thus erected create resistance, the book also traces the emergence of rival elites (wildcats) who, by increasing the circulation of existing currencies, or incorporating new actors in financial markets through the production of altogether new instruments, attempt to transgress these boundaries.

The welfare state is a trademark of the European social model. An extensive set of social and institutional actors provides protection against common risks, offering economic support in periods of hardship and ensuring access to care and services. Welfare policies define a set of social rights and address common vulnerabilities to protect citizens from market uncertainties. But over recent decades, European welfare states have undergone profound restructuring and recalibration. This book analyzes people's attitudes toward welfare policies across Europe, and offers a novel comparison with the United States. Occupied with normative orientations toward the redistribution of resources and public policies aimed at ameliorating adverse conditions, the book focuses on the interplay between individual welfare attitudes and behavior, institutional contexts, and structural variables. It provides essential input into the comparative study of welfare state attitudes and offers critical insights into the public legitimacy of welfare state reform.

In many countries, concern about socio-economic inequalities in educational attainment has focused on inequalities in test scores and grades. The presumption has been that the best way to reduce inequalities in educational outcomes is to reduce inequalities in performance, but is this presumption correct? This book offers a comprehensive cross-national examination of the roles of performance and choice in generating inequalities in educational attainment. It combines in-depth studies by country specialists, with chapters discussing general empirical, methodological, and theoretical aspects of educational inequality. The aim is to investigate the extent to which inequalities in educational attainment can be attributed to differences in academic performance between socio-economic groups, and how far they can be attributed to differences in the choices made by students from these groups. The contributors focus predominantly on inequalities related to parental class and parental education.

In this book, leading international scholars roll up their sleeves to investigate how culture and country characteristics permeate our households and our private lives. The book introduces novel frameworks for understanding why the household remains a bastion of traditional gender relations—even when employed full-time, women everywhere still do most of the work around the house, and poor women spend more time on housework than affluent women. Education systems, tax codes, labor laws, public polices, and cultural beliefs about motherhood and marriage all make a difference. Any accounting of “who does what” needs to consider the complicity of trade unions, state arrangements for children's schooling, and new cultural prescriptions for a happy marriage. With its cross-national perspective, this pioneering volume speaks not only to sociologists concerned with gender and family, but also to those interested in scholarship on states, public policy, culture, and social inequality.

What happens when social movement ideals meet market principles? Based on a three-year ethnography of a technology movement, this book shows how social movements make and shape markets. To illustrate how movements shape markets this book tells the story of the “Circuit Riders,” a group of social justice activists dedicated to sparking a technology revolution among grassroots and nonprofit organizations. The movement enrolled and mobilized many activists, growing 10,000 strong in just a few years. But market forces soon derailed the revolution. With the support of multinational corporations, a new organization recognized a nascent market in the wake of the Circuit Rider movement. Called NPower, this social enterprise combined social values, like helping nonprofit organizations and market practices, like charging fees for service and developing complex performance metrics. NPower experienced nearly instant success tapping foundation funding and corporate support to forge a market for technology services in the nonprofit sector. Even in decline, the Circuit Riders continued to shape the market they inadvertently created. By mobilizing open source technologies and offering low-cost technology to those in need, the Circuit Riders became a necessary check on otherwise unfettered market forces.

This book explores why industrial societies vary in the pace at which they reduce gender inequality and compares changes in women's employment opportunities in Japan and Taiwan over the last half-century. Japan has undergone much less improvement in women's economic status than Taiwan, despite its more advanced economy and greater welfare provisions. The difference is particularly puzzling because the two countries share many institutional practices and values. Drawing on historical trends, survey statistics, and personal interviews with people in both countries, the author shows how country-specific organizational arrangements and industrial policies affect women's employment. In particular, the conditions faced by Japanese and Taiwanese women in the workplace have a profound effect on their labor force participation at critical points in their lives. Women's lifetime employment decisions in turn shape the divergent trajectories in gender equality. Few studies documenting the development of women's economic lives are based on non-Western societies and even fewer adopt a comparative perspective. This perceptive work demonstrates and underscores the importance of understanding gender inequality as a long-term, dynamic social process.

This book examines the nature of totalitarianism as interpreted by some of the finest minds of the twentieth century, focusing on Hannah Arendt's claim that totalitarianism was an entirely unprecedented regime and that the social sciences had integrally misconstrued it. A sociologist who is a critical admirer of Arendt, the author looks sympathetically at Arendt's objections to social science and shows that her complaints were in many respects justified. Avoiding broad disciplinary endorsements or dismissals, he reconstructs the theoretical and political stakes of Arendt's encounters with prominent social scientists such as David Riesman, Raymond Aron, and Jules Monnerot. In presenting a systematic appraisal of Arendt's critique of the social sciences, the author examines what it means to see an event as unprecedented. Furthermore, he adapts Arendt and Aron's philosophies to shed light on modern Islamist terrorism, and to ask whether it should be categorized alongside Stalinism and National Socialism as totalitarian.

This book brings to light the value-centered nature of the social sciences. The work challenges the supposed separation of fact and value, and argues that human values belong to the world of fact and are the source of the ideals which govern social and political institutions. By demonstrating the close connection between the social sciences and the humanities, the author reveals how the methods of the social sciences highlight and enrich the study of such values as well-being, prosperity, rationality, and self-government. The book moves from the animating principles that make up the humanist tradition to the values which are central to the social sciences, analyzing the core teachings of these disciplines with respect to the moral issues at stake. Throughout the work, the author calls attention to the conditions that affect the emergence, realization, and decline of human values.

This book provides the first systematic comparative cross-national study of school disciplinary climates. In it, leading international social science researchers explore nine national case studies to identify the institutional determinants of variation in school discipline, the possible links between school environments and student achievement, and the implications of these findings for understanding social inequality. As the book demonstrates, a better understanding of school discipline is essential to the formation of effective educational policies. Ultimately, to improve a school's ability to contribute to youth socialization and student internalization of positive social norms and values, any changes in school discipline must not only be responsive to behavior problems but should also work to enhance the legitimacy and moral authority of school actors.

This book presents original empirical research on economic inequality in affluent countries, using comparable data from two widely-recognized, high quality, data sources: the Luxembourg Income Study Database and the Luxembourg Wealth Study Database. Both of these publicly-accessible databases are housed at LIS, a cross-national data archive that is directed by the book's two Editors. The volume's seventeen empirical chapters explore change over time in income inequality; the ways in which politics affects and is affected by economic inequality; the extent to which women's work, paid and unpaid, affects inequality; and cross-national comparisons of the distribution of various measures of household wealth. This book is exceptional in its inclusion of patterns of work within households, and politics, as sources of inequality. A key strength of the book is its emphasis on the economic position of the middle class; most studies of inequality include a secondary focus on either poverty or top incomes, leaving aside careful assessments of the middle of the income distribution. In addition to its thirteen comparative chapters, the book closes with a section that assesses inequality in four selected cases - Japan, Iceland, India, and South Africa. These countries, each with a unique pattern of inequality, have rarely appeared in cross-national texts on economic inequality, largely due to the lack of comparable data.

After the breakdown of socialism in Central and Eastern Europe, the role of education systems in preparing students for the “real world” changed. Though young people were freed from coercive state institutions, the shift to capitalism made the transition from school to work much more precarious and increased inequality in early career outcomes. This volume provides the first large-scale analysis of the impact social transformation has had on young people in their transition from school to work in Central and Eastern European countries. Written by local experts, the book examines the process for those entering the workforce under socialism, during the turbulent transformation years, in the early 2000s, and today. It considers both the risks and opportunities that have emerged, and reveals how they are distributed across social groups. Only by studying these changes can we better understand the long-term impact of socialism and post-socialist transformation on the problems young people in this part of the world are facing today.