Featured Publications
Each quarter, the ISERP newsletter features recent publications authored or edited by our faculty, fellows, and affiliates, who regularly produce distinguished journal articles, books, and edited volumes flowing from their research. A complete chronology of these featured publications is available below.
American Vistas: Volume 2: 1877 to the Present
Offering up-to-date coverage of America's social, political and diplomatic past, this anthology of articles by nationally renowned scholars introduces students to the excitement of American history. With seven new selections, the second volume has been substantially revised to examine such topics as law and order in the American West, the role of women in the armed forces, American anti-semitism, and the rise of suburban culture centered around the mall.
2007
A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder—How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place
Ever since Einstein's study of Brownian Motion, scientists have understood that a little disorder can actually make systems more effective. But most people still shun disorder—or suffer guilt over the mess they can't avoid. No longer! With a spectacular array of true stories and case studies of the hidden benefits of mess,A Perfect Mess overturns the accepted wisdom that tight schedules, organization, neatness, and consistency are the keys to success. Drawing on examples from business, parenting, cooking, the war on terrorism, retail, and even the meteoric career of Arnold Schwarzenegger, coauthors Abrahmson and Freedman demonstrate that moderately messy systems use resources more efficiently, yield better solutions, and are harder to break than neat ones. Applying this idea on scales both large (government, society) and small (desktops, garages), A Perfect Mess uncovers all the ways messiness can trump neatness, and will help you assess the right amount of disorder for any system. Whether it's your company's management plan or your hallway closet that bedevils you, this book will show you why to say yes to mess.
2007
Barriers to Reentry?: The Labor Market for Released Prisoners in Post-Industrial America
With the introduction of more aggressive policing, prosecution, and sentencing since the late 1970s, the number of Americans in prison has increased dramatically. While many have credited these "get tough" policies with lowering violent crime rates, we are only just beginning to understand the broader costs of mass incarceration. In Barriers to Reentry? experts on labor markets and the criminal justice system investigate how imprisonment affects ex-offenders' employment prospects, and how the challenge of finding work after prison affects the likelihood that they will break the law again and return to prison.
2007
Democracy
Democracy identifies the general processes causing democratization and de-democratization at a national level across the world over the last few hundred years. It singles out integration of trust networks into public politics, insulation of public politics from categorical inequality, and suppression of autonomous coercive power centers as crucial processes. Through analytic narratives and comparisons of multiple regimes, mostly since World War II, this book makes the case for recasting current theories of democracy, democratization, and de-democratization.
2007
Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory
For outside observers, current events in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank are seldom related to the collective memory of ordinary Palestinians. But for Palestinians themselves, the iniquities of the present are experienced as a continuous replay of the injustice of the past. By focusing on memories of the Nakba, or "catastrophe," of 1948, in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were dispossessed to create the state of Israel, the contributors to this volume illuminate the contemporary Palestinian experience and clarify the moral claims they make for justice and redress. The book's essays consider the ways in which Palestinians have remembered and organized themselves around the Nakba, a central trauma that continues to be refracted through Palestinian personal and collective memory. Analyzing oral histories and written narratives, poetry and cinema, personal testimony and courtroom evidence, the authors show how the continuing experience of violence, displacement, and occupation have transformed the pre-Nakba past and the land of Palestine into symbols of what has been and continues to be lost. Nakba brings to light the different ways in which Palestinians experienced and retain in memory the events of 1948. It is the first book to examine in detail how memories of Palestine's cataclysmic past are shaped by differences of class, gender, generation, and geographical location. In exploring the power of the past, the authors show the urgency of the question of memory for understanding the contested history of the present.
2007
Schools Betrayed: Roots of Failure in Inner-City Education
The problems commonly associated with inner-city schools were not nearly as pervasive a century ago, when black children in most northern cities attended school alongside white children. In Schools Betrayed, her innovative history of race and urban education, Kathryn M. Neckerman tells the story of how and why these schools came to serve black children so much worse than their white counterparts. Focusing on Chicago public schools between 1900 and 1960, Neckerman compares the circumstances of blacks and white immigrants, groups that had similarly little wealth and status yet came to gain vastly different benefits from their education. Their divergent educational outcomes, she contends, stemmed from Chicago officials' decision to deal with rising African American migration by segregating schools and denying black students equal resources. And it deepened, she shows, because of techniques for managing academic failure that only reinforced inequality. Ultimately, these tactics eroded the legitimacy of the schools in Chicago's black community, leaving educators unable to help their most disadvantaged students.
2007
State Death: The Politics and Geography of Conquest, Occupation, and Annexation
If you were to examine an 1816 map of the world, you would discover that half the countries represented there no longer exist. Yet since 1945, the disappearance of states from the world stage has become rare. State Death is the first book to systematically examine the reasons why some states die while others survive and the remarkable decline of state death since the end of World War II. Fazal explores 200 years of military invasion and occupation to derive conclusions that challenge conventional wisdom about state death.
2007
The Future of the Voting Rights Act
The Voting Rights Act (VRA) stands among the great achievements of American democracy. Originally adopted in 1965, the Act extended full political citizenship to African-American voters in the United States nearly 100 years after the Fifteenth Amendment first gave them the vote. While Section 2 of the VRA is a nationwide, permanent ban on discriminatory election practices, Section 5, which is set to expire in 2007, targets only certain parts of the country, requiring that legislative bodies in these areas—mostly southern states with a history of discriminatory practices—get permission from the federal government before they can implement any change that affects voting. In The Future of the Voting Rights Act, David Epstein, Rodolfo de la Garza, Sharyn O'Halloran, and Richard Pildes bring together leading historians, political scientists, and legal scholars to assess the role Section 5 should play in America's future.
2007
The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, and the Cultivation of Virtue
Amid the unrest, dislocation, and uncertainty of seventeenth-century Europe, readers seeking consolation and assurance turned to philosophical and scientific books that offered ways of conquering fears and training the mind—guidance for living a good life. The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution presents a triptych showing how three key early modern scientists, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, and Gottfried Leibniz, envisioned their new work as useful for cultivating virtue and for pursuing a good life. Their scientific and philosophical innovations stemmed in part from their understanding of mathematics and science as cognitive and spiritual exercises that could create a truer mental and spiritual nobility. In portraying the rich contexts surrounding Descartes' geometry, Pascal's arithmetical triangle, and Leibniz's calculus, Matthew L. Jones argues that this drive for moral therapeutics guided important developments of early modern philosophy and the Scientific Revolution.
2007
The View from Here: Bioethics and Social Science
This book is a comprehensive exploration of the relationship between the social sciences and the appearance and growth of bioethics, and provides new analysis on how ordinary questions become "bioethical" questions. It provides new analysis on the variations between different countries and their health systems and questions why some bioethical issues fail to attract the attention of bioethicists. In addition, the book investigates the effect of the rise of bioethics in the field of medical sociology. The View from Here is an essential text for medical sociologists, medical anthropologists, bioethicists, and to the increasingly large audience of those interested in the relationship between the social sciences and bioethics.
2007
Activism, Inc.
Activism, Inc. introduces America to an increasingly familiar political actor: the canvasser. Dana Fisher tells the true story of outsourcing politics in America. Like the major corporations that outsourced their customer service to companies abroad, the grassroots campaigns of national progressive movements-including Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, Save the Children, and the Human Rights Campaign-have been outsourced at different times to this single organization. Fisher examines the history and rationale behind political outsourcing on the Left and compares all of this to the grassroots efforts on the Right.
2006
Are We Ready?: Public Health since 9/11
A contemporary history of a critical period, Are We Ready? analyzes the impact of 9/11, the anthrax attacks that followed, and preparations for a possible smallpox attack on the nation's public health infrastructure. The authors explore the extent to which these emergencies permanently altered the political, cultural, and organizational life of the country and consider whether the nation is now better prepared to withstand another potentially devastating attack.
University of California Press
2006
Better But Not Well: Mental Health Policy in the United States since 1950
The past half-century has been marked by major changes in the treatment of mental illness: important advances in understanding mental illnesses, increases in spending on mental health care and support of people with mental illnesses, and the availability of new medications that are easier for the patient to tolerate. Although these changes have made things better for those who have mental illness, they are not quite enough. In Better But Not Well, Richard G. Frank and Sherry A. Glied examine the well-being of people with mental illness in the United States over the past fifty years, addressing issues such as economics, treatment, standards of living, rights, and stigma. Marshaling a range of new empirical evidence, they first argue that people with mental illness—severe and persistent disorders as well as less serious mental health conditions—are faring better today than in the past. Improvements have come about for unheralded and unexpected reasons. Rather than being a result of more effective mental health treatments, progress has come from the growth of private health insurance and of mainstream social programs—such as Medicaid, Supplemental Security Income, housing vouchers, and food stamps—and the development of new treatments that are easier for patients to tolerate and for physicians to manage. The authors remind us that, despite the progress that has been made, this disadvantaged group remains worse off than most others in society. The "mainstreaming" of persons with mental illness has left a policy void, where governmental institutions responsible for meeting the needs of mental health patients lack resources and programmatic authority. To fill this void, Frank and Glied suggest that institutional resources be applied systematically and routinely to examine and address how federal and state programs affect the well-being of people with mental illness.
2006
Brazil since 1980
A general survey of Brazilian society, economy, and political system since 1980, this book describes Brazil's transformation from a predominantly rural and closed economy under military rule into a modern democratic, industrial, and urbanized society, with an extraordinary world class commercial agriculture in the past 60 years. The advances and the failures of these changes are examined for the impact on questions of growth and equality.
2006
Conservation Is Our Government Now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea
A significant contribution to political ecology, Conservation Is Our Government Now is an ethnographic examination of the history and social effects of conservation and development efforts in Papua New Guinea. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted over a period of seven years, Paige West focuses on the Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area, the site of a biodiversity conservation project implemented between 1994 and 1999. She describes the interactions between those who ran the program—mostly NGO workers—and the Gimi people who live in the forests surrounding Crater Mountain.
2006
Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models
Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models is a comprehensive manual for the applied researcher who wants to perform data analysis using linear and nonlinear regression and multilevel models. The book introduces a wide variety of models, whilst at the same time instructing the reader in how to fit these models using available software packages. The book illustrates the concepts by working through scores of real data examples that have arisen from the authors' own applied research, with programming codes provided for each one. Topics covered include causal inference, including regression, poststratification, matching, regression discontinuity, and instrumental variables, as well as multilevel logistic regression and missing-data imputation. Practical tips regarding building, fitting, and understanding are provided throughout.
2006
Deadly Dust: Silicosis and the On-Going Struggle to Protect Workers' Health
During the Depression, silicosis, an industrial lung disease, emerged as a national social crisis. Experts estimated that hundreds of thousands of workers were at risk of disease, disability, and death by inhaling silica in mines, foundries, and quarries. By the 1950s, however, silicosis was nearly forgotten by the media and health professionals. Asking what makes a health threat a public issue, Rosner and Markowitz examine how a culture defines disease and how disease itself is understood at different moments in history.
2006
Filibuster: Obstruction and Lawmaking in the U.S. Senate
Parliamentary obstruction, popularly known as the "filibuster," has been a defining feature of the U.S. Senate throughout its history. This book explains how the Senate managed to satisfy its lawmaking role during the 19th and early 20th century, when it lacked seemingly essential formal rules for governing debate. The authors argue that in a system where filibusters played out as wars of attrition, the threat of rule changes prevented the institution from devolving into parliamentary chaos.
2006
Local Contexts of Islamism in Popular Media
After the events of 9/11, media representations of Muslims in the West — never known for their accuracy — became even more stereotypically negative. Few of us realize, however, the profusion of similar sentiments that existed within Arab Muslim media outlets ten or even fifteen years earlier. Lila Abu-Lughod here examines these images of religious extremism in popular Arab media, focusing most closely on such depictions in Egyptian television shows of the 1990s. Concluding with an exploration of the influence of media on religion itself, Local Contexts of Islamism in Popular Media will add new fuel to current debates in media studies and world politics.
2006
Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century
For much of the 20th century, France recruited colonial subjects from sub-Saharan Africa to serve in its military, sending West African soldiers to fight its battles in Europe, Southeast Asia, and North Africa. Gregory Mann argues that this shared military experience between France and Africa was fundamental not only to their colonial relationship but also to the reconfiguration of that relationship in the postcolonial era.
2006
Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor
This book takes us into Maquis Park, a poor black neighborhood on Chicago's Southside, to explore the desperate, dangerous, and remarkable ways in which a community survives. We find there an entire world of unregulated, unreported, and untaxed work, a system of living off the books that is daily life in the ghetto. While showing how members of this community are reliant upon each other, Off the Books offers a critique of the entrenched poverty in America and reveals how the underground economy is a response to the ghetto's isolation from the rest of the country.
2006
Regimes and repertoires
The means by which people protest — that is, their repertoires of contention — vary radically from one political regime to the next. Highly capable undemocratic regimes such as China's show no visible signs of popular social movements, yet produce many citizen protests against arbitrary, predatory government. Less effective and undemocratic governments like the Sudan's, meanwhile, often experience regional insurgencies and even civil wars. In Regimes and Repertoires, Charles Tilly offers a fascinating and wide-ranging case-by-case study of various types of government and the equally various styles of protests they foster. Using examples drawn from many areas—G8 summit and anti-globalization protests, Hindu activism in 1980s India, nineteenth-century English Chartists organizing on behalf of workers' rights, the revolutions of 1848, and civil wars in Angola, Chechnya, and Kosovo—Tilly masterfully shows that such episodes of contentious politics unfold like loosely scripted theater. Along the way, Tilly also brings forth powerful tools to sort out the reasons why certain political regimes vary and change, how the people living under them make claims on their government, and what connections can be drawn between regime change and the character of contentious politics.
2006
Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain
Many have told of the East India Company's plunder of India in the 18th century India, but this is only a fraction of the story. When one of these men—Warren Hastings—was put on trial by Edmund Burke, the Company's exploits became public. Through the trial and after, the British government transformed public understanding of the Company's corrupt actions by creating an image of a vulnerable India that needed British assistance. Intrusive behavior was recast as a civilizing mission. Dirks explains how this substitution of imperial authority for Company rule helped erase the dirty origins of empire and justify the British presence in India.
2006
The Disenchantment of the Orient: Expertise in Arab Affairs and the Israeli State
What role do the experts on Arab affairs play in Israeli society? How do they mediate between Israelis and their neighbors? And what role has expert knowledge and discourse played in bringing Arab and Jew together and in separating them? Gil Eyal argues that before the formation of Israel, Jewish experts participated in constructing the Orient as both a metaphor for the rejuvenation of the Jewish nation and an enchanted space populated by hybrid figures that mixed Jewish and Arab elements. But following the creation of the state, these experts took up a new role: creating boundaries, both external and internal, between Jews and Arabs.
2006
The Invisible Safety Net: Protecting the Nation's Poor Children and Families
The modern social safety net is under attack according to Janet Currie in one of the most provocative books ever published on America's social welfare system. Unlike most books about antipoverty programs, Currie trains her focus not on cash welfare, which accounts for a small and shrinking share of federal expenditures on poor families with children, but on the staples of today's American welfare system: Medicaid, Food Stamps, Head Start, WIC, and public housing. These programs, Currie maintains, form an effective, if largely invisible and haphazard safety net, and yet they are the very programs most vulnerable to political attack and misunderstanding.
2006
The Legitimacy of Philanthropic Foundations: United States And European Perspectives
Though privately controlled, foundations perform essential roles that serve society at large. They spearhead some of the world's largest and most innovative initiatives in science, health, education, and the arts, fulfilling important needs that could not be addressed adequately in the marketplace or the public sector. Still, many people have little understanding of what foundations do and how they continue to earn public endorsement. The Legitimacy of Philanthropic Foundations provides a thorough examination of why foundations exist and the varied purposes they serve in contemporary democratic societies. The Legitimacy of Philanthropic Foundations looks at foundations in the United States and Europe to examine their relationship to the state, the market, and civil society. Peter Frumkin argues that unlike elected officials, who must often shy away from topics that could spark political opposition, and corporate officers, who must meet bottom-line priorities, foundations can independently tackle sensitive issues of public importance. Kenneth Prewitt argues that foundations embody elements of classical liberalism, such as individual autonomy and limited government interference in private matters and achieve legitimacy by putting private wealth to work for the public good. Others argue that foundations achieve legitimacy by redistributing wealth from the pockets of rich philanthropists to the poor. But Julian Wolpert finds that foundations do not redistribute money directly to the poor as much as many people believe. Instead, many foundations focus their efforts on education, health, and scientific research, making investments that benefit society in the long-term, and focusing on farsighted issues that a myopic electorate would not have patience to permit its government to address. Originating from private fortunes but working for the public good, independently managed but subject to legal prescriptions, philanthropic foundations occupy a unique space somewhere between the public and private sectors. The Legitimacy of Philanthropic Foundations places foundations in a broad social and historical context, improving our understanding of one of society's most influential—and least understood—organizational forms.
2006
The Macro Polity
The Macro Polity provides the first comprehensive model of American politics at the system level. Focusing on the interactions between citizen evaluations and preferences, government activity and policy, and how the combined acts of citizens and governments influence one another over time, it integrates understandings of matters such as economic outcomes, presidential approval, partisanship, elections, and government policy-making into a single model. Borrowing from the perspective of macroeconomics, it treats electorates, politicians, and governments as unitary actors, making decisions in response to the behavior of other actors. The macro and longitudinal focus makes it possible to directly connect the behaviors of electorate and government. The surprise of macro-level analysis, emerging anew in every chapter, is that order and rationality dominate explanations. This book argues that the electorates and governments that emerge from these analyses respond to one another in orderly and predictable ways.
2006
The Merchants of Zigong: Industrial Entrepreneurship in Early Modern China
At the periphery of the Chinese empire, a group of innovative entrepreneurs built vertically and horizontally integrated companies that dominated the Chinese salt trade and created thousands of jobs in the Sichuan region. From its dramatic expansion in the early nineteenth century to its decline on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War in the late 1930s, salt production in Zigong was one of the largest and one of the only indigenous large-scale industries in China. Through a narrative of this industry's rise and fall, The Merchants of Zigong challenges long-held beliefs about pre-PRC legal and economic institutions. Zelin's exploration of the role of contract in capital formation, business organization and resource distribution is just one of the ways in which she exposes new ways to understand China's early modern economic development.
2006
There Goes the Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up
How does gentrification actually affect residents of neighborhoods in transition? To find out, Freeman interviews the indigenous residents of two predominantly black neighborhoods that are in the process of gentrification: Harlem and Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. By listening closely to what people tell him, he creates a more nuanced picture of the impacts of gentrification on the perceptions, attitudes and behaviors of the people who stay in their neighborhoods.
2006
Trust Is Not Enough: Bringing Human Rights to Medicine
A number of international declarations have proclaimed that health care is a fundamental human right. But if we accept this broad commitment, how should we concretely define the state's responsibility for the health of its citizens? Although there is growing debate over this issue, this is one of the rare books that provide engaging accounts of critical incidents, practices, and ideas in the field of human rights, health care, and medicine.
2006
Youth, Globalization, and the Law
This book addresses the impact of globalization on the lives of youth, focusing on the role of legal institutions and discourses. As practices and ideas travel the globe—such as the promotion and transmission of zero tolerance and retributive justice programs, the near ubiquitous acceptance of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the transnational migration of street gangs—the legal arena is being transformed. The essays in this book offer case studies and in-depth analyses, spanning diverse settings including courts and prisons, inner-city streets, international human rights initiatives, newspaper offices, local youth organizations, and the United Nations. Drawing on everyday social practices, each chapter adds clarity to our current understanding of the ways in which ideas and practices in different parts of the world can affect youth in one particular locale.
2006
American Public Opinion: Its Origins, Content, and Impact
American Public Opinion explores the origins of public opinion in political socialization; the impact of the media on public opinion; the relevance of public opinion to democratic values; political trust and social capital; and the role of public opinion for elections, political parties and interest groups.
2005
Argentine Democracy: The Politics of Institutional Weakness
During the 1990s, Argentina was the only country in Latin America to combine radical economic reform and full democracy. In 2001, however, the country fell into a deep political and economic crisis. This book explores both developments, examining the links between the real and apparent successes of the 1990s and the 2001 collapse. Topics include economic policymaking and reform, executive-legislative relations, the judiciary, federalism, political parties and the party system, and new patterns of social protest.
Pennsylvania State University Press
2005
Doormen
Little fascinates New Yorkers more than doormen, who know far more about tenants than tenants know about them. Doormen know what their tenants eat, what kind of movies they watch, whom they spend time with, whether they drink too much, and whether they have kinky sex. But if doormen are unusually familiar with their tenants, they are also socially very distant. In Doormen, Peter Bearman untangles this unusual dynamic to reveal the many ways that tenants and doormen negotiate their complex relationship. Combining observation, interviews, and survey information, Doormen provides a deep and enduring ethnography of the occupational role of doormen, the dynamics of the residential lobby, and the mundane features of highly consequential social exchanges between doormen and tenants. Here, Bearman explains why doormen find their jobs both boring and stressful, why tenants feel anxious about how much of a holiday bonus their neighbors give, and how everyday transactions small and large affect tenants' professional and informal relationships with doormen. In the daily life of the doorman resides the profound, and this book provides a brilliant account of how tenants and doormen interact within the complex world of the lobby.
2005
Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt
How do people come to think of themselves as part of a nation? Dramas of Nationhood identifies a fantastic cultural form that binds together the Egyptian nation-television serials. These melodramatic programs-like soap operas but more closely tied to political and social issues than their Western counterparts-have been shown on television in Egypt for more than thirty years. This book examines the shifting politics of these serials and the way their contents both reflect and seek to direct the changing course of Islam, gender relations, and everyday life in this Middle Eastern nation.
2005
Economic and Political Contention In Comparative Perspective
European and American specialists in economic and political processes move beyond earlier debates to look seriously, systematically, and innovatively at social change and protest, with particular attention to the influence of economic change and variation on contentious politics. The essays take up two widely recognized but much contested questions in contentious politics: how threats and opportunities faced by potential participants in joint political action affect the likelihood, character, and consequences of that action; and, how economic change and variation either a) constitute significant political threats and opportunities or b) shape responses to political threats and opportunities. The volume appeals especially to sociologists, political scientists, and students of public policy and international relations.
2005
Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War
Does the spread of democracy really contribute to international peace? Successive U.S. administrations have justified various policies intended to promote democracy not only by arguing that democracy is intrinsically good but by pointing to a wide range of research concluding that democracies rarely, if ever, go to war with one another. To promote democracy, the United States has provided economic assistance, political support, and technical advice to emerging democracies in Eastern and Central Europe, and it has attempted to remove undemocratic regimes through political pressure, economic sanctions, and military force. In Electing to Fight, Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder challenge the widely accepted basis of these policies by arguing that states in the early phases of transitions to democracy are more likely than other states to become involved in war.
2005
Fair Trade for All: How Trade Can Promote Development
How can the poorer countries of the world be helped to help themselves through freer, fairer trade? In this challenging and controversial book Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and his co-author Andrew Charlton address one of the key issues facing world leaders today. They put forward a radical and realistic new model for managing trading relationships between the richest and the poorest countries. Their approach is designed to open up markets in the interests of all and not just the most powerful economies, to ensure that trade promotes development, and to minimise the costs of adjustments. Beginning with a brief history of the World Trade Organisation and its agreements, the authors explore the issues and events which led to the failure of Cancun and the obstacles that face the successful completion of the Doha Round of negotiations. Finally they spell out the reforms and principles upon which a successful agreement must be based. Accessibly written and packed full of empirical evidence and analysis, this book is a must read for anyone interested in world trade and development.
2005
Gender and Planning
Increasingly, experts recognize that gender has affected urban planning and the design of the spaces where we live and work. Too often, urban and suburban spaces support stereotypically male activities and planning methodologies reflect a male-dominated society. To document and analyze the connection between gender and planning, the editors of this volume have assembled an interdisciplinary collection of influential essays by leading scholars. Contributors point to the ubiquitous single-family home, which prevents women from sharing tasks or pooling services. Similarly, they argue that public transportation routes are usually designed for the (male) worker's commute from home to the central city, and do not help the suburban dweller running errands. In addition to these practical considerations, many contributors offer theoretical perspectives on issues such as planning discourse and the construction of concepts of rationality.
2005
Home in the City
More than 900 million people currently live in urban slums and the number is growing as rapid urbanization continues in the developing world. A Home in the City urges countries to strengthen their focus on the growing urban crisis and improving the lives of slum dwellers. Proposed are specific investments and policy changes required at local and national levels to create a vibrant, equitable and productive urban environment. The book offers valuable methods to prevent future slum formation and to improve the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020.
2005
Limits of Market Organization
The last quarter century has seen a broad, but qualified, belief in the efficacy of market organization slide into an unyielding dogma that the market, as unconstrained as possible, is the best way to govern virtually all economic activity. In The Limits of Market Organization, editor Richard Nelson and a group of economic experts take a more sophisticated look at the public/private debate, noting where markets are useful, where they can be effective only if augmented by non-market mechanisms, and where they are simply inappropriate.
2005
Navigating the Future: Social Identity, Coping, and Life Tasks
Psychologists now understand that identity is not fixed, but fluid and highly dependent on environment. In times of stress, conflict, or change, people often adapt by presenting themselves in different ways and emphasizing different social affiliations. With changing demographics creating more complex social groupings, it is important to understand the costs and benefits of the way social groups are categorized, and the way individuals understand, cope with, and employ their varied social identities. Navigating the Future focuses on the roles that social identities play in stressful, challenging, and transitional situations.
2005
Preferences and Situations: Points of Intersections between Historical and Rational Choice Institutionalism
A scholarly gulf has divided historians, political scientists, and social movement theorists on how people develop and act on their preferences. In Preferences and Situations, editors Ira Katznelson and Barry Weingast bring together an esteemed group of contributors to address the ways in which institutions, in their wider historical setting, induce people to behave in certain ways and steer the course of history.
2005
Shaping Race Policy: The United States in Comparative Perspective
Shaping Race Policy investigates one of the most serious policy challenges facing the United States today—the stubborn persistence of racial inequality in the post-civil rights era. The book has two innovative features that distinguish it from other works in the area. First, it is comparative, examining American developments alongside those of Great Britain and France. Second, its argument merges ideas and institutions, which are usually considered separate and competing factors, into a comprehensive and integrated explanatory approach. The book highlights the importance of two factors—America's distinctive political instiutions and the characteristic American tension between race consciousness and color blindness—in accounting for the curious pattern of success and failure in American race policy.
2005
Street Science: Community Knowledge and Environmental Health Justice
When environmental health problems arise in a community, policymakers must be able to reconcile the first-hand experience of local residents with recommendations by scientists. In this highly original look at environmental health policymaking, Jason Corburn shows the ways that local knowledge can be combined with professional techniques to achieve better solutions for environmental health problems. He traces the efforts of a low-income community in Brooklyn to deal with health problems in its midst and offers a framework for understanding "street science"—decision making that draws on community knowledge and contributes to environmental justice. Like many other low-income urban communities, the Greenpoint/Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn suffers more than its share of environmental problems, with a concentration of polluting facilities and elevated levels of localized air pollutants. Corburn looks at four instances of street science in Greenpoint/Williamsburg, where community members and professionals combined forces to address the risks from subsistence fishing from the polluted East River, the asthma epidemic in the Latino community, childhood lead poisoning, and local sources of air pollution. These episodes highlight both the successes and the limits of street science and demonstrate ways residents can establish their own credibility when working with scientists. Street science, Corburn argues, does not devalue science; it revalues other kinds of information and democratizes the inquiry and decision-making processes.
2005
Technology, Institutions, and Economic Growth
This volume mounts an attack on the standard neo-classical theory of economic growth. Nelson presents an alternative theory that highlights how economic growth driven by technological advance involves disequilibrium in a fundamental and continuing way. He sees the process as involving the co-evolution of technologies, institutions, and industry structure.
2005
The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time
He has been cited by The New York Times Magazine as "probably the most important economist in the world" and by Time as "the world's best-known economist." He has advised an extraordinary range of world leaders and international institutions on the full range of issues related to creating economic success and reducing the world's poverty and misery. Now, at last, he draws on his entire twenty-five-year body of experience to offer a thrilling and inspiring big-picture vision of the keys to economic success in the world today and the steps that are necessary to achieve prosperity for all.
2005
The Politics of Power: A Critical Introduction to American Government
The Politics of Power provides a lively, comprehensive, critical perspective of the American political system by highlighting how political conflicts, institutions, and processes are influenced by deep inequalities generated by the country's political economy. Building on the coverage of all of the major topics typical of an American Government course the critical analysis in this text is based on the theme that American democracy is limited by fundamental inequalities in power and economic resources.
2005
Trust and Rule
Rightly fearing that unscrupulous rulers would break them up, seize their resources, or submit them to damaging forms of intervention, strong networks of trust such as kinship groups, clandestine religious sects, and trade diasporas have historically insulated themselves from political control by a variety of strategies. Drawing on a vast range of comparisons over time and space, Charles Tilly asks and answers how, and with what consequences, members of trust networks have evaded, compromised with, or even sought connections with political regimes.
2005
When Affirmative Action Was White
This book demonstrates that all the key programs passed during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s were created in a deeply discriminatory manner. With the United States still in an era of legal segregation, the powerful southern wing of the Democratic Party provided the framework for Social Security, the GI Bill, and landmark labor laws that helped create the foundations of the modern middle class. Through mechanisms that specifically excluded maids and farmworkers and through laws that kept administration in local hands, the gap between blacks and whites actually widened despite postwar prosperity. The publication of this deeply disturbing work promises to create a national debate on the meaning of affirmative action and the responsibility of government.
2005
A Population History of the United States
A Population History of the United States is the first full-scale one volume survey of the demographic history of this country. It starts with the arrival of humans in the Western Hemisphere and ends with the current century. The basic trends in the growth of the national population are analyzed over centuries, including the changing nature of births, deaths, and migration of this population and the various factors which influenced these basic trends. The origin and distribution of pre-European American Indians is outlined, and the free and servile nature of European and African immigration is explained. Regional patterns of marriage and fertility and disease and morality in the pre-1800 European and African population are examined and compared with contemporary European developments. The decline of fertility and the rising rates of mortality are surveyed in the 19th century along with the mobility of population across the continent and into the cities. The decline of disease and mortality in the 20th century is explained and the late 20th century changes in family structure and fertility detailed. The rise of suburbs and the creation of inner city ghettos form a vital part of recent trends as do the return of new waves of foreign immigrants in the face of declining native births.
2004
Applied Bayesian Modeling and Causal Inference from Incomplete-Data Perspectives
Statistical techniques that take account of missing data in a clinical trial, census, or other experiments, observational studies, and surveys are of increasing importance. The use of increasingly powerful computers and algorithms has made it possible to study statistical problems from a Bayesian perspective. This book is a collection of articles from leading researchers on statistical methods relating to missing data analysis, causal inference, and statistical modeling, including multiple imputation, propensity scores, instrumental variables, and Bayesian inference.
2004
Common Waters, Diverging Streams: Linking Institutions and Water Management in Arizona, California, and Colorado
Common Waters, Diverging Streams is a first hand investigation into water management in a fast-growing region of the arid American West. It presents three states—Arizona, California, and Colorado—that adopted the conjunctive management (CJM) of groundwater and surface water to make resources go further in serving people and the environment. CJM has followed a different history, been practiced differently, and produced different outcomes in each state. The authors question why different results have emerged from neighbors trying to solve similar problems with the same policy reform.
2004
Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000
Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000 is an analysis of the relationship between democratization and contentious politics that builds upon the model set forth in the pathbreaking book, Dynamics of Contention. Using a sustained comparison of French and British histories since 1650 or so as a springboard for more general comparison within Europe, Contention and Democracy goes on to demonstrate that democratization occurred as result of struggles during which (as in 19th century Britain and France) few, if any, of the participants were self-consciously trying to create democratic institutions. Consequently, circumstances for democratization vary from era to era, region to region as functions of previous history, international environments, available models of political organization, and predominant patterns of social relations.
2004
Contract and Property in Early Modern China
The role of contract in early modern Chinese economic life, when acknowledged at all, is usually presented as a minor one. This volume demonstrates that contract actually played a critical role in the everyday structure of many kinds of relationships and transactions; contracts are, moreover, of enormous value to present-day scholars as transcriptions of the fine details of day-to-day economic activity.
2004
Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge After Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust
During and especially after the Second World War, a group of leading scholars who had been perilously close to the war's devastation joined others fortunate enough to have been protected by distance in an effort to redefine and reinvigorate Western liberal ideals for a radically new age. Treating evil as an analytical category, they sought to discover the sources of twentieth-century horror and the potentialities of the modern state in the wake of western desolation. In the process, they devised strikingly new ways to understand politics, sociology and history that reverberate still. In this major intellectual history, Ira Katznelson examines the works of Hannah Arendt, Robert Dahl, Richard Hofstadter, Harold Lasswell, Charles Lindblom, Karl Polanyi, and David Truman, detailing their engagement with the larger project of reclaiming the West's moral bearing. In light of their epoch's calamities these intellectuals insisted that the tradition of Enlightenment thought required a new realism, a good deal of renovation, and much recommitment. This array of historians, political philosophers, and social scientists understood that a simple reassertion of liberal modernism had been made radically insufficient by the enormities and moral catastrophes of war, totalitarianism, and holocaust. Confronting their period's dashed hopes for reason and knowledge, they asked not just whether the Enlightenment should define modernity, but which Enlightenment we should wish to have. Decades later, in the midst of a new type of war and reanimated discussions of the concept of evil, we share no small stake in assessing their successes and limitations.
2004
Good Muslim, Bad Muslim : America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror
Mamdani dispels the idea of "good" (secular, westernized) and "bad" (premodern, fanatical) Muslims, pointing out that these judgments refer to political rather than cultural or religious identities. The presumption that there are "good" Muslims readily available to be split off from "bad" Muslims masks a failure to make a political analysis of our times. This book argues that political Islam emerged as the result of a modern encounter with Western power, and that the terrorist movement at the center of Islamist politics is an even more recent phenomenon, one that followed America's embrace of proxy war after its defeat in Vietnam.
2004
Imprisoning America: The Social Effects of Mass Incarceration
Over the last 30 years, the U.S. penal population increased from around 300,000 to more than two million, with more than half a million prisoners returning to their home communities each year. What are the social costs to the communities from which this vast incarcerated population comes? And what happens to these communities when former prisoners return as free men and women in need of social and economic support? In Imprisoning America, an interdisciplinary group of leading researchers in economics, criminal justice, psychology, sociology, and social work goes beyond a narrow focus on crime to examine the connections between incarceration and family formation, labor markets, political participation, and community well-being.
2004
Muted Voices: Latinos and the 2000 Elections
The 2000 presidential election was one of the closest in history, yet this book shows that the Latino vote and voice in the election were limited in impact. In time for election year 2004, Muted Voices explores general themes and trends in American politics and Latino voter participation, while focusing on key state electoral results including Florida, Texas, and most important, California. Since 1988, de la Garza and DeSipio have led the way in interpreting the role of Latinos in U.S. elections. This new installment in their series of electoral studies is chock full of data and thematic suggestions about the future of Latino politics. An introduction by public opinion specialist Robert Y. Shapiro puts Latino voter potential in context with U.S. politics and policy.
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
2004
National Governance and the Global Climate Change Regime
How do domestic interests affect international policymaking? What is the role of the nation-state within multilateral regimes? How can we understand the diversity of state responses to the internationalization of environmental regulation? National Governance and the Global Climate Change Regime compares the roles of different actors and institutions in international environmental policymaking. It focuses on the formation of a legally binding treaty to reduce greenhouse gases, the Kyoto Protocol, to show how domestic interests affect international treaty negotiations. Using analyses of both quantitative and qualitative data, Dana Fisher argues that domestic debates within states and subsequent national policy formation have a significantly larger role in international environmental regime formation than many scholars recognize.
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
2004
Object Worlds in Ancient Egypt: Material Biographies Past and Present
Object Worlds in Ancient Egypt takes New Kingdom Egypt (1539-1070 BC) as its starting point and considers how excavated objects reveal the complex ways that ancient Egyptians experienced their material world. From life to death, the material world instantiated, reflected, and influenced social life and existence for ancient Egyptians. Thus, in Meskell's unique approach to the materiality and sensuousness of subjects and objects, we uncover the philosophical, spiritual and human meanings embedded in these cultural artefacts. In the final analysis, Meskell moves forward through time and examines the consumption and appreciation of these Egyptian material objects in the contemporary world.
2004
Peace Time: Cease-Fire Agreements and the Durability of Peace
Virginia Page Fortna's new book analyzes why cease-fire agreements between states succeed or fail. How to maintain peace in the aftermath of war is arguably one of the most important questions of the post-Cold War era, and one of the least explored issues in the study of war and peace. Fortna argues that belligerents and the international community can draft cease-fire agreements that foster peace by altering the incentives to attack, by reducing uncertainty about compliance with the cease-fire, and by preventing and controlling accidents that might otherwise escalate back to war.
2004
Social Inequality
Inequality in income, earnings, and wealth has risen dramatically in the United States over the past three decades. Most research into this issue has focused on the causes—global trade, new technology, and economic policy—rather than the consequences of inequality. In Social Inequality, a group of the nation's leading social scientists opens a wide-ranging inquiry into the social implications of rising economic inequality. Beginning with a critical evaluation of the existing research, they assess whether the recent run-up in economic inequality has been accompanied by rising inequality in social domains such as the quality of family and neighborhood life, equal access to education and health care, job satisfaction, and political participation.
2004
Social Movements, 1768-2004
Tilly's seminal writings sparked the study of social movements and historical social change. Both domains are vividly explored in his newest book. Westerners invented social movements during the eighteenth century, but after that social movements became vehicles of popular politics across the world. By locating social movements in history, Tilly provides rich and often surprising insights into the origins of contemporary social movements practices, relations of social movements to democratization, and likely futures for social movements.
2004
The American Presidency
Coupling high-quality scholarship with accessibility, The American Presidency is an indispensable resource for the curious reader and the serious historian alike. It showcases some of the most provocative interpretive history being written today. Shedding light on the hubris, struggles, and brilliance of our nation's leaders, this revised and updated edition includes a new essay on George W. Bush.
2004
Twentieth-Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape
Twentieth-Century Sprawl explains important—and largely unexplained—changes in the American landscape. The author takes a "follow the money" approach to show how government policies subsidized the spread of cities and fueled a chronic nationwide dependence on cars and roadbuilding, with little regard for expense, efficiency, ecological damage, or social equity. He tells the story via case studies of three communities—Denver, Colorado; Middlebury, Vermont; and Smyrna, Tennessee. Different as these places are, they all show the ways that government-sponsored highway development radically transformed America's cities and towns.
2004
Change without Pain: How Managers Can Overcome Initiative Overload, Organizational Chaos, and Employee Burnout
For more than two decades, businesses have been warned to "change or perish." Yet a growing number of companies are perishing because of change. What's going on? Columbia Business School professor Eric Abrahamson argues that while change is necessary for companies to grow and prosper, many organizations have blindly taken the mandate too far. The "creative destruction" advocated by change champions has resulted in a painful cycle of initiative overload, change-related chaos, and widespread employee cynicism. To reverse this cycle, Abrahamson says, companies must learn to change how they change. Drawing on a decade of research and dozens of company examples, this book offers a positive new approach to change called "creative recombination." Rather than obliterating and then reinventing anew, creative recombination seeks sustainable, repeatable transformation by reconfiguring the people, structures, culture, processes, and networks the company already has. Abrahamson offers a broad toolkit of techniques for achieving smoother, more cost-efficient, less painful organizational change-and helpful guidance for how and when to implement each tool.
2003
Heaven's Kitchen: Living Religion at God's Love We Deliver
How do people practice religion in their everyday lives? How do our daily encounters with people who hold different religious beliefs shape the way we understand our own moral and spiritual selves? In Heaven's Kitchen, Courtney Bender takes a highly original approach to answering these questions. For more than a year she worked in New York City as a volunteer for a nonprofit, nonreligious organization called God's Love We Deliver, helping to prepare home-cooked meals for people with AIDS. Paying close attention to what was said and not said, Bender traces how the volunteers gave voice to their moral positions and religious values. She also examines how they invested their conversations, and mundane activities such as cooking, with personal meaning that in turn affected how they saw th