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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social groups & communities
A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR A call to action for the
creative class and labour movement to rally against the power of
Big Tech and Big Media. Corporate concentration has breached the
stratosphere, as have corporate profits. An ever-expanding
constellation of industries are now monopolies (where sellers have
excessive power over buyers) or monopsonies (where buyers hold the
whip hand over sellers) - or both. Scholar Rebecca Giblin and
writer and activist Cory Doctorow argue we're in a new era of
'chokepoint capitalism', with exploitative businesses creating
insurmountable barriers to competition that enable them to capture
value that should rightfully go to others. All workers are weakened
by this, but the problem is especially well illustrated by the
plight of creative workers. By analysing book publishing and news,
live music and music streaming, screenwriting, radio, and more,
Giblin and Doctorow deftly show how powerful corporations construct
'anti-competitive flywheels' designed to lock in users and
suppliers, make their markets hostile to new entrants, and then
force workers and suppliers to accept unfairly low prices. In the
book's second half, Giblin and Doctorow explain how to batter
through those chokepoints, with tools ranging from transparency
rights to collective action and ownership, radical
interoperability, contract terminations, job guarantees, and
minimum wages for creative work. Chokepoint Capitalism is a call to
workers of all sectors to unite to help smash these chokepoints and
take back the power and profit that's being heisted away - before
it's too late.
Written in 1954 and published here for the first time, The Social
Background of Delinquency deals with the social climate in which
juvenile delinquency crops up time after time. It examines
‘bad’ behaviour among people who could otherwise be classed as
‘normal’ members of ordinary English society. It attempts to
explore certain aspects of the sub-cultures within respectable
society which appear to breed behaviour officially classed as
‘delinquent’. The research is based on a working-class town in
the Midlands with a high proportion of miners and observes a pair
of similar streets in five areas of the town. Each pair of streets
containing one delinquency-free and one with a history of trouble.
Not content with a mere survey, the research design is multifaceted
and includes ethnographic observations, key informant interviews,
personal history analyses and 'the playroom method' explicitly
designed to ascertain children's views. The findings are reported
here and represent a snapshot of life in the 1950s.
The "New York Times"-bestselling author of "God's Politics"
reinvigorates America's hope for the future, offering a roadmap to
rediscover the nation's moral center and providing the inspiration
and a concrete plan to change today's politics.
"The Richardson boys ganged up with two other big families in their
buildings and, at various ages, had tried out most of the local
youth organisations. Bert Richardson with a suitable set of
brothers and mates, was in the Scouts, but they got ejected. Later,
at thirteen, he joined a boys' club for its boxing and football,
and belonged on and off till he was sixteen. Then he suddenly
dropped out." Why did Bert drop out? Originally published in 1954,
the answer forms the substance of Some Young People, the report of
an inquiry into adolescents' reactions to their local youth groups.
Besides answering the question "Who joins what?" (and two thirds of
these thousand youngsters of 14 to 17 were not members of any youth
organisation) the book describes some of the hopes, pleasures and
difficulties of such people as Frances, the chocolate packer, who
has ambition to marry before long; and John, the carpenter's
apprentice, whose passions are autocycling, pigeons and pigs. It
also throws light on problems such as those presented by gangs; and
suggests the importance of "my friends," the closely-knit set who
mean so much to the adolescent.
Identity politics has been a smear for decades. The right use it to
lament the loss of free speech, while many on the left bemoan it as
the end of class politics. It has been used to dismiss movements
such as Black Lives Matter and brought seemingly progressive people
into the path of fascism. It has emboldened the march of the
transphobes. In Fractured, the authors move away from the
ahistorical temper of the identity politics debate. Instead of
crudely categorising race, gender and sexuality as fixed and
immutable identities, or forcing them under the banner of
'diversity', they argue that these categories are inseparable from
the history of class struggle under British and US capitalism.
Through an appraisal of pivotal historical moments in Britain and
the US, including Black feminist and anticolonial traditions on
both sides of the Atlantic, the authors question the assumptions of
the culture war, offering a refreshing and reasoned way to
understand how historical class struggles were formed and continue
to determine the possibilities for new forms of solidarity in an
increasingly dangerous world.
The brand-new instalment in Fenella J. Miller's bestselling
Goodwill House series.August 1940 As Autumn approaches, Lady Joanna
Harcourt is preparing for new guests at Goodwill House - land
girls, Sally, Daphne and Charlie. Sally, a feisty blonde from the
East End, has never seen a cow before, but she's desperate to
escape London and her horrible ex, Dennis. And although the hours
are long and the work hard, Sal quickly becomes good friends with
the other girls Daphne and Charlie and enjoys life at Goodwill
House. Until Dennis reappears threatening to drag her back to
London. Sal fears her life as a land girl is over, just as she
finally felt worthy. But Lady Joanna has other ideas and a plan to
keep Sal safe and doing the job she loves. Don't miss the next
heart-breaking instalment in Fenella J. Miller's beautiful Goodwill
House series. Praise for Fenella J. Miller: 'Curl up in a chair
with Fenella J Miller's characters and lose yourself in another
time and another place.' Lizzie Lane 'Engaging characters and
setting which whisks you back to the home front of wartime Britain.
A fabulous series!' Jean Fullerton
Researchers, higher education administrators, and high school and
university students desire a sourcebook like The Model Minority
Stereotype: Demystifying Asian American Success. This second
edition has updated contents that will assist readers in locating
research and literature on the model minority stereotype. This
sourcebook is composed of an annotated bibliography on the
stereotype that Asian Americans are successful. Each chapter in The
Model Minority Stereotype is thematic and challenges the model
minority stereotype. Consisting of a twelfth and updated chapter,
this book continues to be the most comprehensive book written on
the model minority myth to date.
Most African cities are human settlements that lack the systems
needed for effective land use planning. In fact, the
disorganization that prevails has become so complex that the
concept of urbanism itself has been called into question. This book
highlights the need to restore urban planning in African cities
through sustainable development and interculturality. Furthermore,
it addresses the balance of power between urban planning and
sustainable development and explores the historical and
postcolonial aspects of urban planning in African cities. A case
study focusing on the development of sustainable cities and
neighborhoods in the M'Zab Valley is also included, as well as
topics such as urban greening, climatic threats and the problem of
state agro-industrial land transactions, which compete with
sustainable urban planning. Sustainable Intercultural Urbanism at
the Service of the African City of Tomorrow is a valuable reference
for researchers and practitioners interested in urban issues in
African cities. These cities, in particular sub Saharan cities,
have long been excluded from any discourse on sustainable cities
and urban planning; this book places the focus on these cities and
acknowledges their varied urban realities. The intention is to
spark a new debate on sustainable urban planning in African cities
based on intercultural sustainable urbanism, which is key to
thinking about and building ecological, intercultural, compact,
intelligent and postcolonial cities.
Explores the mother-daughter relationship in the context of
caregiving Across the Unites States, about 34.2 million Americans
have provided unpaid care to an adult age 50 or older in the last
12 months. Much of this caregiving is performed by women and often
for their mothers or mothers-in-law, relationships that may be
warm, fraught, or complicated. Even in the best of circumstances,
caregivers can feel burned out, strained, and exhausted, but add to
the mix the complicated emotions that come from caring for a loved
one and you may have a perfect storm. Here, Jeanne Lord provides
valuable emotional support and information for daughter caregivers
to mother care-receivers during a stressful and uncertain time. It
is unique in that it offers not only personal insights from
caregiving daughters, but the perspectives of their mothers, as
well. Lord followed the women on their journeys over the course of
ten years, so the follow-up interviews give readers an opportunity
to fast forward into the future lives of the caregiving daughters
to read about their perspectives, and gain insights into new
attitudes and ideas for life after caregiving. Through compelling
stories and in-depth interviews, the very complex relationships
between mothers and daughters in a caregiving situation are
explored and revealed in an objective light. Offering comfort and
understanding to the reader, the book also offers suggestions,
ideas, resources, and support for navigating the care of their
loved one.
Elgar Research Agendas outline the future of research in a given
area. Leading scholars are given the space to explore their subject
in provocative ways, and map out the potential directions of
travel. They are relevant but also visionary. This prescient book
presents the intellectual terrain of shrinking cities while
exploring the key research questions in each of the field?s
sub-domains and reviewing the range of methodologies within these
topics. The book begins with an introduction outlining what
shrinking cities are and how they are researched, highlighting both
the opportunities and challenges that arise in this field,
including the big ideas any researcher must grapple with. The next
six chapters are each devoted to a different sub-domain within
shrinking cities, offering a quick overview of the topics, relevant
problems, paradoxes and key research questions. The book concludes
with a review of the major themes and, most importantly, looks
toward the future, predicting and anticipating the most significant
future research trends related to shrinking cities. This accessible
and compelling Research Agenda will be of interest to researchers
looking to move into this area, urban studies and planning
instructors who are teaching research methods courses, and students
studying or independently researching shrinking cities.
Taking a critical perspective, this book rethinks public space in
the context of contemporary global health and economic crises, as
well as technological, political and cultural change. In order to
do so, Ali Madanipour brings together two often unrelated
discourses: public space and social inclusion, interrogating the
potential for public spaces to contribute to inclusive social
practices. Organized in two parts, the book first highlights
various common meanings and philosophical concepts of public space,
examining them in their constitution and application. Madanipour
runs these concepts past the test of social practice, through the
economic, political and cultural dimensions of social exclusion and
inclusion. Chapters further analyse public space in its different
forms: physical, institutional and technological, offering a
wide-ranging and thought-provoking take on the concept. Timely and
innovative, this book will be an invigorating read for urban
studies, planning and human geography scholars, particularly those
focusing on public space, social inclusion and urban processes.
Tucked into the files of Iowa State University's Cooperative
Extension Service is a small, innocuous looking pamphlet with the
title Lenders: Working through the Farmer-Lender Crisis.
Cooperative Extension Service intended this publication to improve
bankers' empathy and communication skills, especially when facing
farmers showing "Suicide Warning Signs." After all, they were
working with individuals experiencing extreme economic distress,
and each banker needed to learn to "be a good listener." What was
important, too, was what was left unsaid. Iowa State published this
pamphlet in April of 1986. Just four months earlier, farmer Dale
Burr of Lone Tree, Iowa, had killed his wife, and then walked into
the Hills Bank and Trust company and shot a banker to death in the
lobby before taking shots at neighbors, killing one of them, and
then killing himself. The unwritten subtext of this little pamphlet
was "beware." If bankers failed to adapt to changing circumstances,
the next desperate farmer might be shooting.This was Iowa in the
1980s. The state was at the epicenter of a nationwide agricultural
collapse unmatched since the Great Depression. In When a Dream
Dies, Pamela Riney-Kehrberg examines the lives of ordinary Iowa
farmers during this period, as the Midwest experienced the worst of
the crisis. While farms failed and banks foreclosed, rural and
small-town Iowans watched and suffered, struggling to find
effective ways to cope with the crisis. If families and communities
were to endure, they would have to think about themselves, their
farms, and their futures in new ways. For many Iowan families, this
meant restructuring their lives or moving away from agriculture
completely. This book helps to explain how this disaster changed
children, families, communities, and the development of the
nation's heartland in the late twentieth century. Agricultural
crises are not just events that affect farms. When a Dream Dies
explores the Farm Crisis of the 1980s from the perspective of the
two-thirds of the state's agricultural population seriously
affected by a farm debt crisis that rapidly spiraled out of their
control. Riney-Kehrberg treats the Farm Crisis as a family event
while examining the impact of the crisis on mental health and food
insecurity and discussing the long-term implications of the crisis
for the shape and function of agriculture.
Well into the early nineteenth century, Luanda, the administrative
capital of Portuguese Angola, was one of the most influential ports
for the transatlantic slave trade. Between 1801 and 1850, it served
as the point of embarkation for more than 535,000 enslaved
Africans. In the history of this diverse, wealthy city, the
gendered dynamics of the merchant community have frequently been
overlooked. Vanessa S. Oliveira traces how existing commercial
networks adapted to changes in the Atlantic slave trade during the
first half of the nineteenth century. Slave Trade and Abolition
reveals how women known as donas (a term adapted from the title
granted to noble and royal women in the Iberian Peninsula) were
often important cultural brokers. Acting as intermediaries between
foreign and local people, they held high socioeconomic status and
even competed with the male merchants who controlled the trade.
Oliveira provides rich evidence to explore the many ways this
Luso-African community influenced its society. In doing so, she
reveals an unexpectedly nuanced economy with regard to the dynamics
of gender and authority.
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