Japanese society is often referred to as an example of a homogeneous culture moderated by an ethos of groupism. Yet, often enough, homogeneity is its own worst enemy as norms are required and enforced at the centre of power to the detriment of individual and human rights. In a similar way, groupism generates many contexts of exclusivity which can also result in debilitating environments of second class citizens.

Sustaining the rural and urban populations of the developing world has been identified as a key global challenge for the 21st Century. Rural-Urban Interaction in the Developing World is an introduction to the relationships between rural and urban places in the developing world and shows that not all their aspects are as obvious as migration from country to city. There is now a growing realisation that rural-urban relations are far more complex.
Using a wealth of student friendly features including boxed case studies, discussion questions and annotated guides to further reading, the book places rural-urban interactions within a broader context, thus promoting a clearer understanding of the opportunities, as well as the challenges, that rural-urban interactions represent.

The third revolution in human history--after the neolithic agrarian revolution and the modern industrial one--is the revolution of the professionals. Harold Perkin's brilliant new book examines the world's leading professional societies since World War II--the free market economies of the United States, Britain, France, West Germany, and Japan, and the defunct command economies of the Soviet Union and East Germany--and their domination by professional elites, notably state bureaucrats and corporate executives.
Perkins highlights their extraordinary achievements--the highest living standards and the longest, healthiest, most rewarding lives in human history--but warns of the self-destructive greed and corruption which threaten the future of us all.

This is a detailed study of understanding in a second language, related to the actual lives of minority workers. The focus is on everyday interactions between these workers and the bureaucrats of the society in which they are now resident. It provides an important contribution to the debate about the function of language as a social practice, adding a new perspective to the psycholinguistic and experimental paradigms, currently existing in second language acquisition research.

This collection of previously unpublished articles addresses in a comprehensive fashion the 1990s' question of whether the industrial model of human progress can be sustained in the long run. It analyzes the social, political. economic, and environmental implications as well as potential solutions to the problem of resource-intensive growth. Twenty experts consider matters on a global scale, focusing on institutional and value issues, international issues such as Global North vs. Global South, and the debate between growth and development.

With growing affluence in the developed world, food has become an increasing focus for attention. In this text, the authors argue that in order to understand the extensive and dramatic developments in the world of food, a new interdisciplinary approach is necessary. "The Age of Affluence" addresses food consumption in this way. The volume argues the importance of socio-economic and cultural factors over diet, in influencing the production, marketing and consumption of different groups of foods. It places food systems theory on sound analytical foundations and draws critically upon food systems literature. The text includes case studies from the sugar, dairy and meat systems and employs statistical techniques to identify and explain distinct patterns of food consumption. The book aims to help to revitalize the discipline of food studies and point the way forward for the continuing study of food consumption. As such, it should be useful to students, researchers and policymakers engaged in the world of food.

With growing affluence in the developed world, food has become an increasing focus for attention. Here, the authors argue that in order to understand the extensive and dramatic developments in the world of food, a new interdisciplinary approach is necessary. The Age of Affluence successfully addresses food consumption in this way. The volume:
* argues the importance of socioeconomic and cultural factors over diet, in influencing the production, marketing and consumption of different groups of foods;
* places food systems theory on sound analytical foundations;
* draws critically upon food systems literature;
* includes case studies from the sugar, dairy and meat systems;
* employs novel statistical techniques to identify and explain distinct patterns of food consumption;
The book will help to revitalize the discipline of food studies and points the way forward for the continuing study of food consumption. As such, it will be invaluable to students, researchers and policymakers engaged in the world of food.

The western, one of Hollywood s great film genres, has, surprisingly, enjoyed a revival recently in Asia and in other parts of the world, whilst at the same time declining in America. Although the western is often seen as an example of American cultural dominance, this book challenges this view. It considers the western from an Asian perspective, exploring why the rise of Asian westerns has come about, and examining how its aesthetics, styles and politics have evolved as a result. It analyses specific Asian westerns, to show how these employ Asian philosophical ideas and value systems, and includes discussion of westerns made elsewhere, including in Australia, Latin America and even in Hollywood but not made in traditional Hollywood style. The book concludes that the western is a genre which is truly global, and not one that that is purely intrinsic to America."

Based on the biographies of some three hundred people in each city, this book shows how such distinguished Boston families as the Adamses, Cabots, Lowells, and Peabodys have produced many generations of men and women who have made major contributions to the intellectual, educational, and political life of their state and nation. At the same time, comparable Philadelphia families such as the Biddles, Cadwaladers, Ingersolls, and Drexels have contributed far fewer leaders to their state and nation. From the days of Benjamin Franklin and Stephen Girard down to the present, what leadership there has been in Philadelphia has largely been provided by self-made men, often, like Franklin, born outside Pennsylvania.

Baltzell traces the differences in class authority and leadership in these two cites to the contrasting values of the Puritan founders of the Bay Colony and the Quaker founders of the City of Brotherly Love. While Puritans placed great value on the "calling" or devotion to one's chosen vocation, Quakers have always placed more emphasis on being a good person than on being a good judge or statesman. Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia presents a provocative view of two contrasting upper classes and also reflects the author's larger concern with the conflicting values of hierarchy and egalitarianism in American history.

Despite the rhetoric of "unification" and of a "single Europe", Europe is still marked by sharp social and regional disparities. More acutley than ever, Europe faces the dual problem of how to ensure sustained growth and how to combine it with social equity. "Cohesion" is the term coined by the European Community for its aim of reducing the social and regional gap in the European Union. This book explores the potential for cohesion in Europe, assessing the difficulties facing "less favoured" regions in the context of the Community's policies on economic integration and social cohesion, and looking at the wider processes of industrial change in Europe. It argues that current measures which purport to facilitate cohesion will not be adequate, suggesting that the Community's measure for promoting growth and productivity are biased towards the interests of the advanced regions and the major corporations.

This book examines discourses of rights and practices of resistance in post-conflict societies, exploring the interaction between the international human rights framework and different actors seeking political and social change. Presenting detailed new case studies from Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka and Kosovo, it reveals the necessity of social scientific interventions in the field of human rights. The author shows how a shift away from the realm of normative political or legal theory towards a more sociological analysis promises a better understanding of both the limits of current human rights approaches and possible sites of potential. Considering the diverse ways in which human rights are enacted and mobilised, The Socio-Political Practice of Human Rights engages with major sites of tension and debate, examining the question of whether human rights are universal or culturally relative; their relationship to forms of economic and political domination; the role of law as a mechanism for social change and the ways in which the language of human rights facilitates or closes sites of radical resistance. By situating these debates in specific contexts, this book concludes by proposing new ways of theorizing human rights. Empirically grounded and offering an alternate framework for understanding the fluid and ambiguous operation of power within the theory and practice of human rights, this volume will appeal to scholars of sociology, law and politics with interests in gender, resistance, international law, human rights and socio-legal discourse.

Architecture of Resistance investigates the relationship between architecture, politics and power, and how these factors interplay in light of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. It takes Palestine as the key ground of spatial exploration, looking at the spaces between people, boundary lines, documents and maps in a search for the meaning of architecture of resistance. Stemming from the need for an alternative discourse that can nourish the Palestinian spaces of imagination, the author reinterprets the land from a new perspective, by stripping it of the dominant power of lines to expose the hidden dynamic topography born out of everyday Palestine. It applies a hybrid approach of research through design and visual documentary, through text, illustrations, mapping techniques and collages, to capture the absent local narrative as an essential component of spatial investigation.

This volume is the result of a symposium titled "Constructivist Approaches to Atypical Development and Developmental Psychopathology." What emerges from the work included here is a record of innovative extensions, refinements, and applications of the concept of constructivism. The chapters not only demonstrate the compatibility of constructivism with investigations of atypicality, but also the generation of a constructivist perspective for a wide array of problems in developmental psychology.

In this text, the editors analyze the diverse situations that police forces operate under and the challenges that they face in different kinds of democracies. This cross-cultural comparison of various systems highlights the universal observation that police are a anomaly in a democracy and explores how various influences-for example, large-scale social violence, a zeal for crime fighting, and vulnerability to temptation-often find police incapable of behaving in a democratic manner. Challenges of Policing Democracies goes beyond just showing the similarities and differences of the policing challenges democratic societies face, it also examines the responses and remedies adopted by police in various countries at different levels of democratic achievement and how every society struggles with the challenges of preserving democratic values without sacrificing the effectiveness of policing.

The notion of identification, especially in the discourse of feminist theory, has come sharply and dramatically into focus with the recent interest in such topics as queer performativity, cross-dressing, and racial passing. "Identification Papers" is the first book to track the evolution of identification's emergence in psychoanalytic theory. Diana Fuss seeks to understand where this notion of identification has come from, and why it has emerged as one of the most difficult problems in contemporary theory and politics.
"Identification Papers" situates the recent critical interest in identification in the intellectual tradition that first gave the idea its theoretical relevance: psychoanalysis. Fuss begins from the assumption that identification has a history, and that the term carries with it a host of theoretical problems, conceptual difficulties, and ideological complications. By tracking the evolution of identificationin Freud's work over a forty year period, Fuss demonstrates how the concept of identification is neither a theoretically neutral notion nor a politically innocent one.
"Identification Papers" closely examines the three principal figures -- gravity, ingestion, and infection -- that psychoanalysis invokes to theorize identification. Fuss then deconstructs the psychoanalytic theory of identification in order to open up the possibility of more innovative rethinkings of the political.
Drawing on literature, film, and Freud's own case histories, and engaging with a wide range of disciplines -- including critical theory, philosophy, film theory, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and feminism -- "Identification Papers" will be a necessary starting point in anyfuture theoretical project that seeks to mobilize the concept of identification for a feminist politics.

First published in 2000. This book aims to study the shifting identity of Japanese returnees(kikokushijo) within a migrational context. The core findings, based on literature and fieldwork in Brussels and Japan.

This is a study of the ways in which changing social expectations among Indian Catholics confronted the Roman Church with new questions, as well as giving fresh urgency to the old problem of the persistence of caste among Christians. Low-caste restiveness prompted different reactions among European missionaries and high-caste Indian priests, and the socio-economic significance of religious conversion became a problem that reached the level of the Apostolic Delegate, and eventually of the Pope. The English brought their social attitudes to India, where they became racial attitudes while retaining their triple functions of supporting authority structures, protecting vested interests and providing psychological reinforcement, Roman Catholic missionaries came from different European countries and brought with them different national attitudes to social mores. A major question asked in this book is how far such national differences were reflected in attitudes to caste, class and sexual behaviour, how similar were the attitudes of Indian Christians, and how far the functions of such attitudes remained constant.

Considers the problems of uneven development in Latin America where some areas have become very industrialised and urbanised with high rates of economic growth. This growth has brought prosperity to a minority, but for the mass of people, poverty and unemployment remain and inequality seems to be greater than ever.

A comprehensive analysis of the Japanese occupation of Java. The book explores the human drama that cannot be simply explained in terms of nationalism and fascism. The totality of Indonesian society is addressed, including the politics and daily lives of peasants.

A comprehensive analysis of the Japanese occupation of Java. The book explores the human drama that cannot be simply explained in terms of nationalism and fascism. The totality of Indonesian society is addressed, including the politics and daily lives of peasants.

Seeking to understand youth culture through its visual and musical expression, "In Garageland" presents a pioneering ethnographc study of rock bands and their fans.
The authors explore the functions of rock playing within three socially different peer groups, investigating how their activities relate to the external demands and resources of a postmodern world. Presented in the "dialogic" format--the authorial text juxtaposed on the page with the remarks of those interviewed--the authors analyze the objective, social, symbolic and subjective sources and meanings of rock playing, relating these to theories on modernity, social groups and the production and reception of cultural symbols.
Topics include class as well as sexual conflicts; mainstream and deviant subcultures, and the complex social, psychological and ethical relationships which exist within youth culture. "In Garageland" develops the notion of youth culture research as a way of mirroring our grown-up identities and of staking out the limits of late modern culture in general.

This collection of essays examines the formation of leaders on Java: how they rise to power, stay in power, and pass this on. Approaching the subject from varied academic disciplines, most of the essays deal with rural power but a few address more general issues of leadership.

In Visual Culture the 'visual' character of contemporary culture is explored in original and lively essays. The contributors look at advertising, film, painting and fine art journalism, photography, television and propaganda. They argue that there is only a social, not a formal relation between vision and truth. A major preoccupation of modernity and central to an understadning of the postmodern, 'vision' and the 'visual' are emergent themes across sociology, cultural studies and critical theory in the visual arts. Visual Culture will prove an indispensable guide to the field.

Are Americans as well-off as they used to be? The answer affects everything from product markets and housing sales to social tranquility and presidential (and local) elections. This volume examines what is happening to the American middle class. In a detailed and comprehensive analysis, Nancey Green Leigh tracks changes in the pattern of income distribution over a twenty-year period. While earnings have increased, there is a widening gap between what middle-level earnings can purchase and the cost of a middle standard of living. Due to the fact that this decline has not been experienced equally in all regions, separate analyses are reported for urban and rural locations, major census regions, and the largest states. To identify which workers have been most affected, Leigh compares earning trends by race, gender, educational level, industry of employment, part- or full-time status, and fringe benefit recipiency. Rejecting short-term and demographic explanations, Leigh links the decline of the middle class to economic change and industrial restructuring.

Leigh concludes her work by examining planning and policy prescriptions to improve the prospects of members--and aspiring members--of the middle economic class. She documents the decreasing ability of middle-level earners to purchase a middle standard of living and attributes the decline in part to failures in planning. Failures of planning, she observes, have contributed to the growing divergence between middle-level earnings and the middle standard of living. "Stemming Middle-Class Decline" provides comprehensive data and trends on workers, communities, regions, and the nation that all policymakers and government officials should read and examine with care.

The area of missionary activity and conversion, the exchange of one religious identity for another has, the author argues, been much neglected in the scholarly debate in spite of being one of the areas where religion as a dynamic factor in Indian society is most apparent. This work provides an analysis of religion as a dynamic factor in Indian society. Not only is the ritual, economic and power status of the missionaries examined but the effects of conversion to the individual, most notably a change insocial status and mobility.