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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social institutions > General
The Paleolithic Paradigm takes us one step further in the
nature/nurture debate. Certainly a certain percentage of our
behaviors are biologically based. However, culture has the power to
override much in genetic commands. The Amish exemplify this, no
matter how much "we" qualify them as "quaint." Painting with a wide
post-modern paint brush, Stocker takes on a journey through four
cultures to show how different people can be. He offers the
analogy: our genetic structure is the framework of any house. How
we cover and decorate that frame is often the product of ancient
traditions. However, we are all products of the same cognitive
processes, thus explaining why we take ideas put into our heads as
children to the grave whether we accept them, reject them, or alter
them. It is this commonality the author examines. Accordingly, he
wants to know, if we understand our cognition processes, can we
change out behavior at will?
In Migration and Membership Regimes editors Ulbe Bosma, Gijs
Kessler and Leo Lucassen bring together ten essays in an analytical
framework which looks beyond the Transatlantic migration of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a deliberate attempt to
incorporate the experience of earlier periods and other continents
into historical migration studies. The focus of analysis is on the
mechanisms of interaction between polities, from city-states and
emerging statehoods to empires, and migrants joining or taking over
these polities, by force, choice or co-optation. It
reconceptualises the migrant-state relationship as an engagement
over the terms of membership and explores the variety of different
outcomes this has had across time and space. Contributors include:
Nicholas Breyfogle, Derek Heng, Ralph W. Mathisen, Christel Muller,
Mu-chou Poo, Susan Elizabeth Ramirez, Ibrahima Thiaw, Maartje van
Gelder, Mark D. Varien.
For social studies teachers reeling from the buffeting of top-down
educational reforms, this volume offers answers to questions about
dealing with the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Each chapter
presents and reviews pertinent standards that relate to the social
studies. Each chapter also deals with significant topics in the
social studies from various social sciences to processes such as
inquiry to key skills needed for success in social studies such as
analysis and literacy. The most important aspect of these chapters
though is the array of adaptable activities that is included in
each chapter. Teachers can find practical approaches to dealing
with CCSS across the social studies panorama. The multiple
authorships of the various chapters mean a variety of perspectives
and viewpoints are presented. All of the authors have fought in the
trenches of K-12 public education. Their activities reflect this in
a way that will be useful to novice or veteran teachers.
This book aims to describe and demystify what makes criminal gangs
so culturally powerful. It examines their codes of conduct,
initiation rites, secret communications methods, origin myths,
symbols, and the like that imbue the gangsters with the pride and
nonchalance that goes hand in hand with their criminal activities.
Mobsters are everywhere in the movies, on television, and on
websites. Contemporary societies are clearly fascinated by them.
Why is this so? What feature and constituents of organized criminal
gangs make them so emotionally powerful-to themselves and others?
These are the questions that have guided the writing of this
textbook, which is intended as an introduction to organized crime
from the angle of cultural analysis. Key topics include: * An
historic overview of organized crime, including the social,
economic, and cultural conditions that favour its development; * A
review of the type of people who make up organized gangs and the
activities in which they engage; * The symbols, rituals, codes and
languages that characterize criminal institutions; * The
relationship between organized crime and cybercrime; * The role of
women in organized crime; * Drugs and narco-terrorism; * Media
portrayals of organized crime. Organized Crime includes case
studies and offers an accessible, interdisciplinary approach to the
subject of organized crime. It is essential reading for students
engaged with organized crime across criminology, sociology,
anthropology and psychology.
Weaving Women's Spheres in Vietnam offers an in-depth study of the
status of women in Vietnamese society through an examination of
their roles in the context of family, religious and local community
life from anthropological, historical and sociological
perspectives. Unlike previous works on gender issues relating to
Vietnam which focus on women as passive subjects and are restricted
to specific spheres such as family, this book, through a series of
case studies and life stories, not only examines the suppressive
gender structure of the Vietnamese family, but also demonstrates
Vietnamese women's agency in appropriating that structure and
creating alternative spheres for women which they have interwoven
in between the dominant realms of public and private spheres in the
areas of family, religious practice, community organizations, and
politics, including their participation in the (re)construction of
national identity. Accordingly, this volume is expected to become
an important new benchmark relating to gender issues in Asian
societies, especially in the context of so-called 'transitional'
societies, such as China and Vietnam. Contributors include: Kirsten
W. Endres, Ito Mariko, Ito Miho, Kato Atsufumi , Hy V. Luong,
Miyazawa Chihiro, Thien-Huong T. Ninh, Tran Thi Minh Thi.
From 1924 to 1946 the Republic of Turkey was in effect ruled as an
authoritarian single-party regime. During these years the state
embarked upon an extensive reform programme of modernisation and
nation-building. Alexandros Lamprou here offers an alternative
understanding of social change and state-society relations in
Turkey, shifting the focus from the state as the prime instigator
of change to the population's participation in the process of
reform. Through the study of the 'People's Houses', the community
centres opened and operated by the Republican People's Party in
most cities and towns of Turkey, and using previously unpublished
archival material, Lamprou analyses how ordinary people
experienced, negotiated and resisted the reforms in the 1930s and
1940s and how this process contributed to the shaping of social
identities. This book will be essential reading for students and
scholars of nation-building, socio-cultural change and
state-society relations in modern Turkey.
Distinguished Austrian sociologist Reinhold Knoll's letters to his
grandchildren, written daily during the Covid-19 pandemic, evolved
into an obituary of European culture, politics, and society. They
also embody a gesture of thanks to the United States, which took a
different path from Europe and then saved it in World War I and
World War II. Like Beethoven's piano sonatas, some of Professor
Knoll's letters are light and humorous while others plumb the
depths of the human psyche. But each brings the past into the
present, often enhanced by Viennese ironic wit, with recondite and
penetrating observations on enlightenment and revolution, art and
music, social thought, the devolution of the museum, the status of
the church, migration, fashions in pedagogy, and the role of
technology in society. This is the remarkable work of a balanced
conscience in troubled times. America owes most of its cultural and
spiritual traditions to the erstwhile European stewardship of a
legacy that goes back to Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome - the subject,
verb, and predicate of our human story, - though Europe now finds
itself in a crisis of confidence with profound warnings for the
American reader.
Winner of the 2021 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award In
contrast to analyses that view systemic violence in Mexico as
simply the result of drugs and criminality, a deviation of a
well-functioning market economy and/or a failing and corrupt state,
Munoz Martinez argues in Uneven Landscapes of Violence that the
nexus of criminality, illegality and violence is integral to
neoliberal state formation. It was through this nexus that
dispossession took place after 2000 in the form of forced
displacement, extorsion and private appropriation of public funds
along with widespread violence by state forces and criminal groups.
The emphasis of the neoliberal agenda on the rule of law to protect
private property and contracts further reshaped the boundaries
between legality and illegality, concealing the criminal and
violent origins of economic gain.
Neighbours are a lively topic of everyday conversation and
interest. Neighbours Around the World takes a comparative look
around the world at our relationships and interactions with the
people who live next door, analysing the ways in which these
relationships are changing in the face of large-scale macro social
and urban processes. Understanding that there is considerable
variation in the relative importance that we place on neighbours -
the extent to which we interact with them or rely on them for local
support, and the likelihood that our relationships with them are
characterised by friendliness, indifference or conflict - this
edited collection examines how neighbouring is shaped by our
individual characteristics, but also by the structural features of
where we live and the forces reshaping our local neighbourhoods.
Casting a conceptual and empirical gaze on neighbours as a
constituent feature of urban life in diverse cities, neighbourhoods
and local streets around the world, the authors take us from
Singapore's public housing estates to mobile home parks in Florida,
and from one of the most famous tourist spots in Shanghai to
new-build estates on the edge of Moscow and St Petersburg.
Neighbours Around the World uncovers the diversity and
commonalities in the meanings, experiences and practices of living
with neighbours-the people next door.
Max Weber believed that discipline underpins modern rationalized
society. For Weber, modern discipline is the quality that gives a
population the capacity to coordinate action across vast expanses.
But modern discipline also requires individuals to shape their very
psychobiological being to fit the larger socioeconomic system, be
it a military unit, factory, bureaucracy, or other unit of modern
society. Max Weber and the Modern Problem of Discipline explores
how Weber developed his ideas using examples from Ancient Egypt to
the modern world and asks how his description of a habitus of
discipline informs understanding of modernity not just in Europe
but in places that continue to befuddle well-educated and well-paid
modern economists, strategists, and politicians in places like the
Democratic Republic of the Congo and Myanmar/Burma. These are the
areas that, as Weber would have said, are still governed by
traditional authority rather than the legal- disciplined habitus of
rational authority brought by the modernizing outsiders. This book
challenges development economists, foreign service officers,
government officials, administrators, and development workers to
rethink modern discipline and the costs that modern legal-rational
rule imposes on traditional societies. By doing so, this book goes
beyond standard prescriptions for good governance, free markets,
and property rights, which underpin modern development planning. To
describe modern discipline, Tony Waters also draws on more the
contemporary work of Karl Polanyi, James Scott, Goran Hyden, Teodor
Shanin, and James Ferguson, among others. Each describes how and
why independent peasantries ignored and even resisted the
blandishments and trinkets proffered by development bureaucracies
to sell their traditional rights in the modern marketplace. Waters
agrees with them about farmer resilience, but he takes the argument
a step further by pointing out that Weber was proposing a general
theory of a disciplined modernity, not one focused on just a
particular society.
Sentencing matters. Life, liberty, and property are at stake.
Convicted offenders and victims care about it for obvious reasons,
while judges and prosecutors also have a moral stake in the
process. Never-the-less, the current system of sentencing criminal
offenders is in a shambles, with a crazy quilt of incompatible and
conflicting laws, policies, and practices in each state, not to
mention an entirely different process at the federal level. In
Sentencing Fragments, Michael Tonry traces four decades of American
sentencing policy and practice to illuminate the convoluted
sentencing system, from early reforms in the mid-1970's to the
transition towards harsher sentences in the mid-1980's. The book
combines a history of policy with an examination of current
research findings regarding the consequences of the sentencing
system, calling attention to the devastatingly unjust effects on
the lives of the poor and disadvantaged. Tonry concludes with a set
of proposals for creating better policies and practices for the
future, with the hope of ultimately creating a more just legal
system. Lucid and engaging, Sentencing Fragments sheds a
much-needed light on the historical foundation for the current
dynamic of the American criminal justice system, while
simultaneously offering a useful tool for potential reform.
This book is about new forms of religiosity and religious activity
emerging in the context of their dialectic relations with
contemporary multicultural realities. World religions are
effectively a major agent of the multiculturalization of
contemporary societies. However, multiculturalism pushes them not
only toward change and reforms, but also toward new conflicts
between and within them. This process should remind us of the
Jewish legend of the Golem an animated being created by man which
finally challenges the latter s control over it - a dialectic
relation, indeed. World religions today greatly contribute to a
world (dis)order that is multicultural both when viewed as a whole,
and from within most societies that compose it. It is a development
that contrasts both with the assumption that globalization implies
one-way homogenization and convergence to Western modernity, and
the expectation that globalization would be bound to polarize
homogeneous civilizations.
In Asia and the Pacific, climate change is now a well-recognised
risk to water security but responses to this risk are either under
reported, or continue to be guided by the incremental or business
as usual approaches. Water policy still tends to remain too narrow
and fragmented, compared to the multi-sectoral and cross-scalar
nature of risks to water security. What's more, current water
security debates tend to be framed in discipline specific or
academic ways, failing to understand decision making and
problem-solving contexts within which policy actors and
partitioners have to operate on a daily basis. Much of the efforts
to date has focussed on assessing and predicting the risks in the
context of increasing levels of uncertainty. There is still limited
analysis of emerging practices of risks assessment and mitigation
in different contexts in Asia and the Pacific. Going beyond the
national scales and focussing on several socio-ecological zones,
this book captures stories written by engaged scholars on recent
attempts to develop cross-sectoral and cross-scaler solutions to
assess and mitigate risks to water security across Asia and the
Pacific. Identifying lessons from successes and failures, it
highlights management and strategic lessons that water and climate
leaders of Asia and the Pacific need to consider. This book
showcases reflective and analytical thought pieces written by key
actors in the climate and water spaces. Several critical
socio-ecological zones are covered - from Pakistan in the west to
pacific islands in the east. The chapters clearly identify
strategies for improvement based on the analysis of emerging
responses to climate risks to water security and gaps in current
practices. The book will include an editorial introduction and a
final synthesis chapter to ensure clear articulation of common
themes and to highlight the overall messages of the book.
The social sciences have mostly ignored the role of physical
buildings in shaping the social fabric of communities and groups.
Although the emerging field of the sociology of architecture has
started to pay attention to physical structures, Brenneman and
Miller are the first to combine the light of sociological theory
and the empirical method in order to understand the impact of
physical structures on religious groups that build, transform, and
maintain them. Religious buildings not only reflect the groups that
build them or use them; these physical structures actually shape
and change those who gather and worship there. Religious buildings
are all around us. From Wall Street to Main Street, from sublime
and historic cathedrals to humble converted storefronts, these
buildings shape the global religious landscape, "building faith"
among those who worship in them while providing a testament to the
shape and duration of the faith of those who built them and those
who maintain them. Building Faith explores the social impact of
religious buildings in places as diverse as a Chicago suburb and a
Guatemalan indigenous Mayan village, all the while asking the
questions, "How does space shape community?" and "How do
communities shape the spaces that speak for them?"
Publisher's Weekly Top 10 Fall Release in Business and Economics A
consumer credit industry insider-turned-outsider explains how banks
lure Americans deep into debt, and how to break the cycle.
Delinquent takes readers on a journey from Capital One's
headquarters to street corners in Detroit, kitchen tables in
Sacramento, and other places where debt affects people's everyday
lives. Uncovering the true costs of consumer credit to American
families in addition to the benefits, investigative journalist
Elena Botella-formerly an industry insider who helped set credit
policy at Capital One-reveals the underhanded and often predatory
ways that banks induce American borrowers into debt they can't pay
back. Combining Botella's insights from the banking industry,
quantitative data, and research findings as well as personal
stories from interviews with indebted families around the country,
Delinquent provides a relatable and humane entry into understanding
debt. Botella exposes the ways that bank marketing, product design,
and customer management strategies exploit our common weaknesses
and fantasies in how we think about money, and she also
demonstrates why competition between banks has failed to make life
better for Americans in debt. Delinquent asks: How can we make
credit available to those who need it, responsibly and without
causing harm? Looking to the future, Botella presents a thorough
and incisive plan for reckoning with and reforming the industry.
DAVID DUKES was born and raised in Madison, Florida. At the age of
seventeen, in 1963, he led the civil rights movement in Madison. He
did voter-registration work, sit-ins at restaurants, and
recreational facilities, conducted training seminars, and
demonstrated in support for freedom, equality, justice, and human
rights for blacks in the American South.
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