This new edition is a substantial abridgment and update of Randall Collins's 1975 classic, Conflict Sociology. The first edition represented the most powerful and comprehensive statement of conflict theory in its time. Here, Sanderson has retained the core chapters and added discussions on Collins's and others' work in recent years. An afterword summarizes Collins's latest forays into microsociological theorizing and attempts to demonstrate how his newer microsociology and older macrosociology are connected.
The Credential Society is a classic on the role of higher education in American society and an essential text for understanding the reproduction of inequality. Controversial at the time, Randall Collins’s claim that the expansion of American education has not increased social mobility, but rather created a cycle of credential inflation, has proven remarkably prescient. Collins shows how credential inflation stymies mass education’s promises of upward mobility. An unacknowledged spiral of the rising production of credentials and job requirements was brought about by the expansion of high school and then undergraduate education, with consequences including grade inflation, rising educational costs, and misleading job promises dangled by for-profit schools. Collins examines medicine, law, and engineering to show the ways in which credentialing closed these high-status professions to new arrivals. In an era marked by the devaluation of high school diplomas, outcry about the value of expensive undergraduate degrees, and the proliferation of new professional degrees like the MBA, The Credential Society has more than stood the test of time. In a new preface, Collins discusses recent developments, debunks claims that credentialization is driven by technological change, and points to alternative pathways for the future of education.
This sequel to Randall Collins' world-influential micro-sociology of violence introduces the question of time-dynamics: what determines how long conflict lasts and how much damage it does. Inequality and hostility are not enough to explain when and where violence breaks out. Time-dynamics are the time-bubbles when people are most nationalistic; the hours after a protest starts when violence is most likely to happen. Ranging from the three months of nationalism and hysteria after 9/11 to the assault on the Capitol in 2021, Randall Collins shows what makes some protests more violent than others and why some revolutions are swift and non-violent tipping-points while others devolve into lengthy civil wars. Winning or losing are emotional processes, continuing in the era of computerized war, while high-tech spawns terrorist tactics of hiding in the civilian population and using cheap features of the Internet as substitutes for military organization. Nevertheless, Explosive Conflict offers some optimistic discoveries on clues to mass rampages and heading off police atrocities, with practical lessons from time-dynamics of violence.
Explores the accomplishments of the golden age of "macrohistory," the sociologically informed analysis of long-term patterns of political, economic, and social change. The topics range from the Marxian-inspired theory of revolutions to the roots of the Holocaust.
Through network diagrams and sustained narrative, sociologist Randall Collins traces the development of philosophical thought from ancient Greece to modern Europe. Collins provides a self-reflexive sociological philosophy of intellectual life that opens a new path beyond relativism and realism. Illustrated.
What is charisma? And how does it generate influence and power? World-renowned sociologist Randall Collins explores these and many other questions in a highly readable exploration of the various forms of charisma and how charisma elevated Jesus, Cleopatra, Lawrence of Arabia, Queen Elizabeth, Hitler, Churchill, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Madame Mao Zedong, and others. He explores four types of charisma: frontstage, backstage, success-magic, and reputational charisma. Not everyone has the same kind of charisma and Collin's identifies important differences and their relations to power. The book exemplifies Collin's sophisticated micro-sociology in accessible and compelling prose, quietly building subtle matrices of analysis that show how sociology unveils hidden discoveries.
In the popular misconception fostered by blockbuster action movies and best-selling thrillers--not to mention conventional explanations by social scientists--violence is easy under certain conditions, like poverty, racial or ideological hatreds, or family pathologies. Randall Collins challenges this view in Violence, arguing that violent confrontation goes against human physiological hardwiring. It is the exception, not the rule--regardless of the underlying conditions or motivations. Collins gives a comprehensive explanation of violence and its dynamics, drawing upon video footage, cutting-edge forensics, and ethnography to examine violent situations up close as they actually happen--and his conclusions will surprise you. Violence comes neither easily nor automatically. Antagonists are by nature tense and fearful, and their confrontational anxieties put up a powerful emotional barrier against violence. Collins guides readers into the very real and disturbing worlds of human discord--from domestic abuse and schoolyard bullying to muggings, violent sports, and armed conflicts. He reveals how the fog of war pervades all violent encounters, limiting people mostly to bluster and bluff, and making violence, when it does occur, largely incompetent, often injuring someone other than its intended target. Collins shows how violence can be triggered only when pathways around this emotional barrier are presented. He explains why violence typically comes in the form of atrocities against the weak, ritualized exhibitions before audiences, or clandestine acts of terrorism and murder--and why a small number of individuals are competent at violence. Violence overturns standard views about the root causes of violence and offers solutions for confronting it in the future.
What is charisma? And how does it generate influence and power? World-renowned sociologist Randall Collins explores these questions in a highly readable exploration of charisma and how charisma elevated Jesus, Cleopatra, Lawrence of Arabia, Hitler, Churchill, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Madame Mao Zedong"--
The US Army has developed a secret base in the outback of Australia with the aim of controlling time travel. When a young Australian man, Matthew Fraser, inadvertently interferes with the Army’s latest experiment, he is ruthlessly hunted down and captured. After exhibiting the ability to bounce back a few minutes in time, Matthew is used as a pawn by the Army while they try to replicate his power of time travel. Meanwhile, terrorists hatch a plot to explode three nuclear bombs within the United States. Now Matthew and his new-found colleagues hope to use his abilities in a race against time to thwart the terrorists in their desire to unleash a nuclear nightmare.
In Max Weber: A Skeleton Key Randall Collins gives a concise overview of the work of one of sociology's greatest classic thinkers. The many strands of Weber's theorizing and the breadth and scope of his historical comparisons are here brought clearly into focus. This is an ideal text for students in sociology.
This classic text explores the lives and ideas of the social thinkers who have shaped and continue to forge traditions in sociology. Focusing on the great names in the field, it weaves biographical and conceptual details into a tapestry of the history of social thought of the 19th and 20th centuries. Written in a narrative style that is accessible and exciting, this text serves as an excellent supplement for courses in social and sociological theory, the history of social thought, the history of sociology, and introduction to sociology. Instructors and students can now access their course content through the Connect digital learning platform by purchasing either standalone Connect access or a bundle of print and Connect access. McGraw-Hill Connect® is a subscription-based learning service accessible online through your personal computer or tablet. Choose this option if your instructor will require Connect to be used in the course. Your subscription to Connect includes the following: • SmartBook® - an adaptive digital version of the course textbook that personalizes your reading experience based on how well you are learning the content. • Access to your instructor’s homework assignments, quizzes, syllabus, notes, reminders, and other important files for the course. • Progress dashboards that quickly show how you are performing on your assignments and tips for improvement. • The option to purchase (for a small fee) a print version of the book. This binder-ready, loose-leaf version includes free shipping. Complete system requirements to use Connect can be found here: http://www.mheducation.com/highered/platforms/connect/training-support-students.html
Randall Collins traces the movement of philosophical thought in ancient Greece, China, Japan, India, the medieval Islamic and Jewish world, medieval Christendom, and modern Europe. What emerges from this history is a social theory of intellectual change, one that avoids both the reduction of ideas to the influences of society at large and the purely contingent local construction of meanings. Instead, Collins focuses on the social locations where sophisticated ideas are formed: the patterns of intellectual networks and their inner divisions and conflicts.
The Great Recession has prompted many reassessments of the finance-driven economic order that achieved world dominance in the era of globalization. Yet just about every observer has focused on only two issues: why things went wrong, and what we need to do in order to return the system to stability. Virtually no one has questioned whether the system as such can continue. In Does Capitalism Have a Future?, a quintet of globally eminent scholars - Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian, and Craig Calhoun - survey the current global landscape and cut their way through to the most crucial issue of all: whether our capitalist system can survive in the medium run. Despite all its current gloom, conventional wisdom still assumes that capitalism cannot break down permanently because there is no alternative. The authors shatter this assumption, arguing that this generalization is not supported by theory, but is rather an outgrowth of the optimistic nineteenth-century claim that human history ascends through stages to an enlightened equilibrium of liberal capitalism. Yet as they point out, all major historical systems - from the Roman Empire to the Qing dynasty in China - have broken down in the end. In the modern epoch there have been several cataclysmic events - notably the French revolution, World War I, and the collapse of the Soviet bloc - that came to pass mainly because contemporary political elites had spectacularly failed to calculate the consequences of the processes they presumed to govern. At present, none of our governing elites and very few intellectuals can fathom an ending to our current reigning system. How possible is a systemic collapse in the medium-run of coming decades is the central question of this debate. While the contributors arrive at different conclusions, they are in constant dialogue with one another and therefore able to construct a relatively seamless - if open-ended - whole. Written by five of world's most eminent scholars of global historical trends, this ambitious book asks the biggest of questions: are we on the cusp of a radical world historical shift or not?
The United States of America are united no more. CIVIL WAR TWO is a what-if story: What if the USA splits in two? How might a new Civil War play out? Are we facing the end of America? 2018's CIVIL WAR TWO was an epic of over 700 pages presented in two volumes. Now for the first time, the meat and bones of America's future have been distilled into a single volume of concentrated force: CIVIL WAR TWO: The Condensed One-Volume Edition.
The revised and updated third edition of The Making of Urban America includes seven new articles and a richly detailed historiographical essay that discusses the vast urban history literature added to the canon since the publication of the second edition. The authors’ extensively revised introductions and the fifteen reprinted articles trace urban development from the preindustrial city to the twentieth-century city. With emphasis on the social, economic, political, commercial, and cultural aspects of urban history, these essays illustrate the growth and change that created modern-day urban life. Dynamic topics such as technology, immigration and ethnicity, suburbanization, sunbelt cities, urban political history, and planning and housing are examined. The Making of Urban America is the only reader available that covers all of U.S. urban history and that also includes the most recent interpretive scholarship on the subject.
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