During the 1980s the news media were filled with reports of soaring unemployment as 'downsizing' and 'restructuring' became the new buzzwords. Firms managed their workforce reduction by increasing the attractiveness of their pension plans-especially their early-retirement plans. In this volume, the authors examine the U.S. auto industry and present a full-scale analysis of the work and retirement decisions of its workers. They address organizational context and the logic of financial incentives in employer-provided early retirement plans. The impact of pension provisions, layoffs, plant closures, attitudes about 'generational equity', and other factors influencing the workers' evaluation of the optimum time to end their careers in the auto industry are explored.

While it was evident to the classics of social theory that modern societies are highly dynamic forms of social organization, and that this dynamic nature must be reflected explicitly and confronted directly in modes of analysis across the social sciences, over the course of the twentieth century, the acknowledgement of this fact has been weakening. As the social sciences became increasingly concerned with issues of professionalization and standards of validity inspired by more established disciplines, especially the natural sciences and economics, the focus on dynamic processes gave way to efforts to illuminate structural (i.e., static) features of modern social life. In recent decades, however, this preoccupation with structure has begun to give way to more process-oriented research orientations. In part, this renewed interest in dynamics rather than statics is reflective of the growing influence of Continental European traditions, especially in Germany and France. In this follow-up volume to "Theorizing the Dynamics of Social Processes (vol. 27)", the emphasis is placed on recent trends in Continental European social theory, and on the importance of political analyses to theorizing modern societies.

The chapters in this volume represent steps in the direction of demonstrating the importance of efforts to theorize the dynamics of specific social, cultural, political, and/or economic processes to the social sciences in general. They aim to clarify how those efforts are central to the core mission of each of the social sciences, and how social theory is both especially well positioned to tackle this challenge and to accept responsibility for illuminating related possibilities. The papers address the nature and importance of 'process' in studying modern (industrialized, post-industrial, capitalist, postmodern, globalizing, etc.) societies - at macro, meso, or micro-scale. The volume's overall purpose is to assemble a set of essays that invent, develop, and/or demonstrate strategies for theorizing one or several dynamic processes, so as to identify, illustrate by example, and analyze specific problems as well as connect theorizations of process across different disciplines of inquiry.

What are the possible future worlds of social science? How do these prospects compare with recent conclusions that social science "is generally a non-factor in policy debates and irrelevant to the lives of a host of real-world people," as a well-known sociologist reported in the centennial volume of the American Sociological Association? This substantial study covers history, art and aesthetics, identity and the self, in seeking an answer to the question of 'Future Worlds'.

"Philosophically challenging. . . . Hazelrigg's thesis seems to catch everyone short."--Steve Fuller, executive editor, Social Epistemology "A quality piece of work; the central problematic is clearly articulated and important; the theoretical analyses are sophisticated and subtle; and the narrative is well crafted. . . . The focus of this work is at the heart of core issues now being discussed by much larger circles of interdisciplinary social theorists and cultural studies scholars."--Robert Antonio, University of Kansas Lawrence Hazelrigg's thesis, argued in this concluding work of his trilogy, is that "nature, under any description whatsoever, is thoroughly a humanly made existence." Nature is a cultural production, he says, and any distinction between nature and culture is drawn from the relations of power that characterize a particular culture. In this innovative vision of the very foundation of social theory, he sets out some of the terms and relationships of the nature-culture polarity and offers a map of the "circuits and relays" that exist between "that which counts as knowledge and that which counts as power." He extends the mapping to issues of philosophical anthropology and the "production" of human nature (and the Marxian roots of this production) and then examines three situations in which the circuits and relays operate in European and Euroamerican cultures: the sixteenth-century invention of culture; modern inventions of primitiveness; and "a long sequence of practices of sexing nature's body." In conclusion, he addresses the question of an ecologism that begins to glimpse the artificiality of nature (the new "crisis of nature") and which must work anew to understand what counts as knowledge. This work will be an important source for students in the growing area of sociology of culture as well as for scholars in philosophy, social and political theory, ethnography, and feminism and others interested in the social construction of nature and the politics of environmentalism. Lawrence Hazelrigg is professor of sociology at Florida State University. He is the author of A Wilderness of Mirrors and Claims of Knowledge (both UPF, 1989), the first two books of this trilogy, and of Class, Conflict, and Mobility and Prison within Society. "

"Philosophically challenging. . . . Hazelrigg's thesis seems to catch everyone short."--Steve Fuller, executive editor, Social Epistemology "A quality piece of work; the central problematic is clearly articulated and important; the theoretical analyses are sophisticated and subtle; and the narrative is well crafted. . . . The focus of this work is at the heart of core issues now being discussed by much larger circles of interdisciplinary social theorists and cultural studies scholars."--Robert Antonio, University of Kansas Lawrence Hazelrigg's thesis, argued in this concluding work of his trilogy, is that "nature, under any description whatsoever, is thoroughly a humanly made existence." Nature is a cultural production, he says, and any distinction between nature and culture is drawn from the relations of power that characterize a particular culture. In this innovative vision of the very foundation of social theory, he sets out some of the terms and relationships of the nature-culture polarity and offers a map of the "circuits and relays" that exist between "that which counts as knowledge and that which counts as power." He extends the mapping to issues of philosophical anthropology and the "production" of human nature (and the Marxian roots of this production) and then examines three situations in which the circuits and relays operate in European and Euroamerican cultures: the sixteenth-century invention of culture; modern inventions of primitiveness; and "a long sequence of practices of sexing nature's body." In conclusion, he addresses the question of an ecologism that begins to glimpse the artificiality of nature (the new "crisis of nature") and which must work anew to understand what counts as knowledge. This work will be an important source for students in the growing area of sociology of culture as well as for scholars in philosophy, social and political theory, ethnography, and feminism and others interested in the social construction of nature and the politics of environmentalism. Lawrence Hazelrigg is professor of sociology at Florida State University. He is the author of A Wilderness of Mirrors and Claims of Knowledge (both UPF, 1989), the first two books of this trilogy, and of Class, Conflict, and Mobility and Prison within Society.

The rancorous debate over the future of Social Security reached a fever pitch in 2005 when President Bush unsuccessfully proposed a plan for private retirement accounts. Although efforts to reform Social Security seem to have reached an impasse, the long-term problem the projected Social Security deficit remains. In Pension Puzzles, sociologists Melissa Hardy and Lawrence Hazelrigg explain for a general audience the fiscal challenges facing Social Security and explore the larger political context of the Social Security debate. Pension Puzzles cuts through the sloganeering of politicians in both parties, presenting Social Security s technical problems evenhandedly and showing how the Social Security debate is one piece of a larger political struggle. Hardy and Hazelrigg strip away the ideological baggage to explicate the basic terms and concepts needed to understand the predicament of Social Security. They compare the cases for privatizing Social Security and for preserving the program in its current form with adjustments to taxes and benefits, and they examine the different economic projections assumed by proponents of each approach. In pursuit of its privatization agenda, Hardy and Hazelrigg argue, the Bush administration has misled the public on an issue that was already widely misunderstood. The authors show how privatization proponents have relied on dubious assumptions about future rates of return to stock market investments and about the average citizen s ability to make informed investment decisions. In addition, the administration has painted the real but manageable shortfalls in Social Security revenue as a fiscal crisis. Projections of Social Security revenues and benefits by the Social Security Administration have treated revenues as fixed, when in fact they are determined by choices made by Congress. Ultimately, as Hardy and Hazelrigg point out, the clash over Social Security is about more than technical fiscal issues: it is part of the larger culture wars and the ideological struggle over what kind of social responsibilities and rights American citizens should have. This rancorous partisan wrangling, the alarmist talk about a crisis in Social Security, and the outright deception employed in this debate have all undermined the trust between citizens and government that is needed to restore the solvency of Social Security for future generations of retirees. Drawing together economic analyses, public opinion data, and historical narratives, Pension Puzzles is a lucid and engaging guide to the major proposals for Social Security reform. It is also an insightful exploration of what that debate reveals about American political culture in the twenty-first century."