With the ethnic, cultural and religious diversity that is a feature of European societies today, pluralism is experienced in new and challenging ways. In many places, an urban cosmopolitan mix sits side by side with group-based expressions of faith and culture. The debate about the types of 'acceptance' that these situations require tend to follow new patterns. Increasing openness and respect for some may rest upon a reinforced intolerance towards others. This complicates and challenges our understanding of what it means for societies to be accepting, tolerant or respectful of cultural diversity in its various forms. This volume seeks to meet this challenge with perspectives that consider new dynamics towards tolerance, intolerance and respect.

This ground-breaking study of the baby boomer generation, who are now entering old age, breaks new ground in ageing research. This post-war cohort has experienced a range of social, cultural, and medical changes in regard to their notions of body, from the introduction of the Pill and the decoupling of sex and procreation to the H-Bomb and Earthrise. Yet, paradoxically, ageing is also universal. This exciting book reflects the intersection of time, ageing, body and identity to give a more nuanced and enlightened understanding of the ageing process.

This study provides a comprehensive analysis of state-society development in the most volatile region of the world. In the Middle East, various anti-systemic movement and radical Islam often clashed and resisted the political, cultural, economic, and military domination of the region by the world's major imperial powers. Emadi investigates state, revolution, and development in the Middle Eastern states of Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Syria in the immediate post-World War II period. Maintaining that the state is an instrument of class domination, exhibiting a certain degree of autonomy in the creation and design of domestic development programs, he details the role of class in an attempt to provide a better understanding of the diverse factors at work. Politics of the Dispossessed provides an alternative analysis of development in regional politics and its context in world politics, aspects that are generally neglected by most mainstream studies. It examines state formation, internal development strategies, and how class conflict and ideology led to class alliance on an international basis, as well as the external interference in the internal affairs of these societies. It also explores the process of political and ethnic integration of the Middle East into the global economic system and the resulting counter-strategies of the nationalist and Islamic resistance to the increasing superpower domination of the international system.

In this deeply considered meditation on aging in Western culture, Jan Baars argues that, in today's world, living longer does not necessarily mean living better. He contends that there has been an overall loss of respect for aging, to the point that understanding and "dealing with" aging people has become a process focused on the decline of potential and the advance of disease rather than on the accumulation of wisdom and the creation of new skills.

To make his case, Baars compares and contrasts the works of such modern-era thinkers as Foucault, Heidegger, and Husserl with the thought of Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Cicero, and other Ancient and Stoic philosophers. He shows how people in the classical period--less able to control health hazards--had a far better sense of the provisional nature of living, which led to a philosophical and religious emphasis on cultivating the art of living and the idea of wisdom. This is not to say that modern society's assessments of aging are insignificant, but they do need to balance an emphasis on the measuring of age with the concept of "living in time."

Gerontologists, philosophers, and students will find Baars' discussion to be a powerful, perceptive conversation starter.

One of the most significant developments within contemporary American Christianity, especially among younger evangelicals, is a groundswell of interest in the Reformed tradition. In Reformed Resurgence, Brad Vermurlen provides a comprehensive sociological account of this phenomenon - known as New Calvinism - and what it entails for the broader evangelical landscape in the United States. Vermurlen develops a new theory for understanding how conservative religion can be strong and thrive in the hypermodern Western world. His paradigm uses and expands on strategic action field theory, a recent framework proposed for the study of movements and organizations that has rarely been applied to religion. This approach to religion moves beyond market dynamics and cultural happenstance and instead shows how religious strength can be fought for and won as the direct result of religious leaders' strategic actions and conflicts. But the battle comes at a cost. For the same reasons conservative Calvinistic belief is experiencing a resurgence, present-day American evangelicalism has turned in on itself. Vermurlen argues that in the end, evangelicalism in the United States consists of pockets of subcultural and local strength within the "cultural entropy" of secularization, as religious meanings and coherence fall apart.

Using psychological theory and the author's direct experience working with at-risk youth, this book answers the questions on the minds of anyone shocked and appalled by the events of the Boston Marathon bombings. The shock of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings was soon followed by a revelation initially disturbing and mystifying: two apparently unremarkable brothers-one a teenager, the other a young adult; both well-liked immigrants and longtime U.S. residents-had allegedly triggered the bombs. Why were these two seemingly "normal" individuals driven to commit such acts of coldblooded violence? This book examines not only the lives, motivations, and key influences of these infamous brothers, but those of other young, unexpected terrorists worldwide, comparing factors that contributed to their decisions to become terrorists and identifying methods used to recruit them into that deadly fold. The chapters teach readers warning signs that youths are being drawn in to terrorism and serve to spur meaningful conversations among citizens, politicians, and policymakers about what we can do to prevent such recruitment of youths and young adults, including other U.S. residents who might consider emulating the Tsarnaev brothers. The book also addresses larger, related questions, such as whether humans are naturally violent, who benefits when young individuals engage in terrorism, and why minors are recruited to become killers. Identifies the various factors and influences that drove two young men who were described by many who knew them to be "nice, normal people" to commit premeditated acts of violence Addresses recent events in other countries with similarly aged and seemingly unthreatening young adults and teens as perpetrators of attacks Provides an appendix containing sources for further research, including books, news articles, links to journal articles, and websites of research organizations Includes a foreword by Michael Lamport Commons, PhD, Harvard Medical School

This book explores what becomes of faiths when seen as social capital. In the grip of the current debt crisis, where the social and capital seem increasingly unbalanced, this book examines whether faiths can help rebalance society through drawing communities together.

Contrary to the stereotype which depicts them as economic successes, Asian workers have a high incidence of underemployment when compared to white workers. This book integrates immigration and labor market trends into an analysis of the economic assimilation of Asians in the U.S. It examines four forms of underemployment (unemployment, part-time employment, working poverty, and job mismatch) for Asian Indian, Filipino, and Vietnamese men and women. This study shows that Asian underemployment rates are consistently higher than for non-Hispanic whites, with Asian Indians having the highest rate. Each Asian group displayed varied effects of human capital, family and household, industry, and assimilation variables on the different underemployment categories. Important implications of the findings show that ethnic group variation in underemployment appears stronger than differences by gender.
(Ph.D. dissertation, Pennsylvania State University, 1994; revised with new preface and index)

This volume develops a comprehensive multivariate paradigm of the process of aging, delineating the factors underlying age-related degeneration. The model is aimed at understanding the conditions under which age sets into motion a process of degeneration. Accumulating evidence suggests that age per se is not the decisive factor in age-related regression--leading scholars to distinguish between chronological and functional age. The process of degeneration is evidently due to the combined impact of deleterious biophysiological, psychological, and socio-cultural factors and the interaction among them.

Based on this evidence, Zeev Ben-Sira shows how age-related degeneration can be viewed as a product of a damaging cycle of reciprocally activating stimuli from the person's internal and external environment. Consequently, aging is conceptualized as a process of bio-psychosocial regression. The paradigm outlined in this volume identifies factors that are likely to accelerate or decelerate the process of aging.

Western society has become increasingly diverse, but stereotypes still persist in the public discourse. This volume explores how people who have a marked status in society - among them Travellers, teenage mothers, homeless people - manage their identity in response to these stereotypes.

Walter analyzes the history of American radicals of the left (socialists, communists, and radical liberals) from their emergence as an opinion-shaping force during the Great Depression to the present, and concludes that theirs is a fundamentally negative view of American social and political history. Walter argues that radical leftists have blunted reasonable political policy and prevented the achievement of desirable social goals, and that their dissidence combines a naive faith in revolutionary leaders, an unrealistic hope for perfect social justice, and an implacable hatred of free enterprise. According to Walter, radical leftists, despite often noble intentions, have been a destructive force in American history.

"The Rise and Fall of Leftist Radicalism in America" attempts to understand left-wing radicalism by viewing the movement as a whole, as it reacted to the central national and international events of the last sixty years. In particular, Walter discusses labor agitation in the 1930s and 1940s; radical leftist support of the Soviet Union, Cuba, and China; McCarthyism; opposition to the war in Vietnam; and today's pre-eminent radical cause, environmentalism. This volume is recommended for political scientists, historians, and political philosophers.

What is a city? How does it come into being? Who are the people involved? How are decisions made and what happens next? Realising the city provides multiple insider perspectives on this northern English city. Drawing on extensive fieldwork into the city's football clubs, annual civic parade and Gay Village, airport and infrastructure, parks and housing estates, these ethnographic accounts trace the multiple dynamics of a vibrant and rapidly changing post-industrial city. This book provides essential reading for researchers interested in contemporary urban dynamics. Its accessible style and material will also interest community activists, city administrators, political analysts and elected officials. The book is suitable for undergraduate reading lists for courses teaching ethnographic methods and on urban studies courses within sociology, anthropology, geography and the built environment. -- .

Cities have emerged as the epicentres for many of today's ethno-national and religious conflicts. In twelve multidisciplinary essays, Locating Urban Conflicts: Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Everyday brings together key themes that dominate our current political, social and cultural attention: emerging areas of contestation in rapidly changing and modernising cities, the resulting forms of habitation and spatial practice, and the effects of extreme and/or enduring conflicts upon ordinary civilian life. Such problems may be generated by larger state and regional issues to do with national identity, borders and territory, but in all cases, everyday life is regularly affected, with strong consequences for the urban arena. Section themes on Spatial Horizons, Reassessing Divisions, and Being Modern, cross-cut the research on cities in Europe and the Middle East, identifying common concerns against which the examples in this volume can be considered. Together the chapters reveal critical issues affecting ethno-national conflict in cities today.

The monograph disseminates the very topical issue of retirement and its timing as the key to one of the greatest challenges facing ageing societies. Postponing retirement is now almost universally regarded as indispensable in order to relieve European welfare states from the demography-related financial pressures. This seminal study, derived from a statistical analysis of a large-scale survey data, provides a thorough understanding of the micro- and macro-level determinants of retirement timing in contemporary Western Europe. The book is the first monograph to combine the analysis of the retirement attitudes with the analysis of the retirement behaviour within one research. It tackles the question as to whether early retirement can be explained by "early exit culture", triangulating life course theory with a social stratification approach. The author used a novel and innovative approach to obtain the results. The methodology includes: tobit models of proscriptive age norms; simulations of the impact of class structure on a country's average retirement age; competing risks models of different work-exit modalities; duration selection models of retirement timing.

This definitive study concentrates on one fundamental aspect of complex organizations, the organization-environment relationship. Numerous theoretical frameworks are described and evaluated which are directly or indirectly relevant to this focus, and included are several chapters that deal with various aspects of this complex relationship.

An investigation into farming practices throughout a period of seismic change. WINNER of the British Agricultural History Society's 2022 Thirsk Prize "This meticulously researched book gives a detailed and authoritative history of agricultural change in the second half of the twentieth century. The book skilfully weaves together the hitherto underexplored individual returns of the Farm Management Survey with oral histories of the farmers who enacted change on the ground to offer an incisive account of the complex technological, political and cultural developments which gave rise to some of the greatest changes in English farming history. It will stand as the key reference point for those with an interest in the history of agricultural change in Britain." Professor Mark Riley, University of Liverpool At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 British agriculture was largely powered by the muscles of men, women, and horses, and used mostly nineteenth-century technology to produce less than half of the country's temperate food. By 1985, less land and far fewer people were involved in farming, the power sources and technologies had been completely transformed, and the output of the country's agriculture had more than doubled. This is the story of the national farm, reflecting the efforts and experiences of 200,000 or so farmers and their families, together with the people they employed. But it is not the story of any individual one of them. We know too little about change at the individual farm level, although what happened varied considerably between farms and between different technologies. Based on an improbably-surviving archive of Farm Management Survey accounts, supported by oral histories from some of the farmers involved, this book explores the links between the production of new technologies, their transmission through knowledge networks, and their reception on individual farms. It contests the idea that rapid adoption of technology was inevitable, and reveals the unevenness, variability and complexity that lay beneath the smooth surface of the official statistics.

Lawyer, doctor, scientist--these are the jobs Americans commonly cite when asked to list the most prestigious occupations. The word "professional" today implies expertise, authority, and excellence. To do a job professionally is to do it well. Yet in a society in which knowledge has become a prized asset and an advanced degree the ticket to wealth and power, the rise of professionalism has a darker, more ominous side.
Power in the Highest Degree, one of the most comprehensive studies of professionals ever undertaken, exposes professionalism as a double-edged sword; it illustrates how experts have come to "own" and control knowledge, much like the wealthy control capital, thereby transforming capitalist and socialist society, both for better and for worse. Knowledge long predates money as a source of power and wealth in human society, and professionals are only the most recent in a long succession of powerful knowledge classes that have included shaman, witchdoctors, and the Confucian mandarins who ruled China for over a thousand years.
Drawing on interviews with over 1,000 practicing professionals, the authors show how, by dispensing self-interested and morally colored judgements as scientific truth, modern professionals are consolidating a monopoly over what passes for objective knowledge. Experts discredit the ordinary knowledge of the general public to generate a vast market of dependent clients. The result is a powerful professional class that creates vital new knowledge and life-saving services, but also wields growing influence over a population deeply insecure about its ability to manage private and public affairs without "expert" guidance.
This sweeping study also reveals that more and more experts are abandoning private practice to work for corporations, becoming junior partners in a new "Mandarin capitalism." While often outspoken advocates of a more socially responsible business world, professionals have joined big business to produce one of the most pronounced divisions of mental and manual work in history, creating a new dispossessed majority, the uncredentialed. We learn of an experiment at Polaroid to give machine operators more responsibility which is cancelled when managers and engineers decided that they "just didn't want operators that qualified." The authors argue that, as this new "mandarin" class radically transforms the social order, it helps to reform some of the traditional scourges of the business world, but also poses a new threat to equality in America. To reverse this trend, they propose a post-professional society that de-emphasizes skill hierarchies and substantially democratizes knowledge.
A bold and incisive new work of social criticism, this book provides a fascinating look at the modern professional and provokes Americans to think in a new way about democracy in the age of experts.

How does an urban community come to terms with the loss of its future? The former socialist model city of Hoyerswerda is an extreme case of a declining postindustrial city. Built to serve the GDR coal industry, it lost over half its population to outmigration after German reunification and the coal industry crisis, leading to the large-scale deconstruction of its cityscape. This book tells the story of its inhabitants, now forced to reconsider their futures. Building on recent theoretical work, it advances a new anthropological approach to time, allowing us to investigate the postindustrial era and the futures it has supposedly lost.

Politicians, business leaders and citizens look with hope to the Latin American middle class for political stability and purchasing power, but the economic position of the middle class remains vulnerable. The contributors document the remarkable emergence of this middle group in Latin America, whose measurement turns out not to be an easy task.

Alive with movement and excitement, cities transmit a rapid flow of exchange facilitated by a meshwork of infrastructure connections. In this environment, the Internet has advanced to become the prime communication medium, creating a vibrant and increasingly researched field of study in urban informatics.""The Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City"" brings together an international selection of 66 esteemed scholars presenting their research and development on urban technology, digital cities, locative media, and mobile and wireless applications. A truly global resource, this one-of-a-kind reference collection contains significant and timely research covering a diverse range of current issues in the urban informatics field, making it an essential addition to technology and social science collections in academic libraries that will benefit scholars and practitioners in an array of fields ranging from computer science to urban studies.

Michael Grimes looks at the voluminous scholarly literature published by American social scientists in the twentieth century and provides an overview and critique of the major theories, conceptualizations, and measurements of class inequality. No book published since the late fifties has had such scope. This volume assembles a framework for interpreting and understanding the changing character of the theories and methodologies used by scholars to study class inequality based on two schools of social theory--order and conflict--each with different assumptions about human nature and society, and about the unique role(s) that class plays in society. Grimes contends that theoretical perspectives result from the interaction of the unique biographies of theorists with the sociohistorical, ideological, and disciplinary settings within which they work, and that the relative popularity of perspectives on the subject within the discipline has varied over time as the setting has changed.

Part I of the book assesses the diverse perspectives on class inequality of early American sociologists. Part II examines the rise of functionalism within American sociology and its subsequent application to the issue of class inequality. Two conflict perspectives on inequality--labeled neo-Weberian and neo-Marxist theories--are discussed in Part III, while Part IV provides a summary and concludes that there is evidence of a convergence of sorts among contemporary perspectives on class inequality within the discipline. The colume is organized to facilitate use by graduate students and advanced undergraduate students as well as by professional social scientists--particularly sociologists.