The New Class Society introduces students to the sociology of class structure and inequalities as it asks whether or not the American dream has faded. The fourth edition of this powerful book demonstrates how and why class inequalities in the United States have been widened, hardened, and become more entrenched than ever. The fourth edition has been extensively revised and reorganized throughout, including a new introduction that offers an overview of key themes and shorter chapters that cover a wider range of topics. New material for the fourth edition includes a discussion of "The Great Recession" and its ongoing impact, the demise of the middle class, rising costs of college and increasing student debt, the role of electronic media in shaping people's perceptions of class, and more.
Forbes reports that the richest 1 percent of the world’s population owns nearly half the world’s wealth, and the gap between the richest and poorest of the world only continues to increase. Deep Inequality looks behind these stark statistics to understand not only wealth inequality but also rising disparities in other elements of life—from education to the media. The authors argue that inequality has become so pervasive that it is the new normal. When we do recognize troubling inequality, we look at individual or small-scale problems without understanding the broader structural issues that shape the economy, the global political system, and more. Only by understanding the structural forces at play can we recognize the deep divisions in our society and work for meaningful change. Deep Inequality explains the changing landscape of inequality to help readers see society in a new way.
In America at Risk: The Crisis of Hope, Trust, and Caring, Robert Perrucci and Carolyn C. Perrucci identify the broad economic and technological changes that have led to the loss of high wage jobs, declining opportunity, and increased income and wealth inequality. These changes have altered the way that Americans think about themselves, their future, and the lives of their children and neighbors. Focusing on the erosion of trust, hope, and caring between and among Americans and their social institutions, the authors confront the challenge by proposing policies that will build hope (through jobs and wages) in order to promote greater trust of institutions and more caring for the less fortunate. Examining data from the past thirty-year period, Perrucci and Perrucci apply a critical sociological lens to view the dominant economic, political, and cultural institutions that have shaped the main social problems facing Americans. They challenge Americans to act on behalf of their individual and collective interests by becoming informed and involved in developing new solutions to improve their lives.
This book explores how class-based resources and interests embedded in large organizations are linked to powerful structures and processes which in turn are rapidly polarizing the U.S. into a highly unequal, 'double diamond' class structure. The authors show how and why American class membership in the 21st century is based on an organizationally-based distribution of critical resources including income, investment capital, credentialed skills verified by elite schools, and social connections to organizational leaders.
Extensively revised, the second edition of The New Class Society includes innovative new sections and concepts throughout the book that identify and explore how complex organizational structures and actions create and perpetuate class, gender, and racial inequalities. The authors describe how 'inequality scripts' shape the hiring and promotion practices of organizations in ways that provide differential opportunities to people based on class, gender, and racial memberships. The authors also illustrate how privileged class members benefit from organizationally-based and perpetuated forms of inequality. The second edition retains its provocative argument for of an emerging 'double-diamond' social structure and its focus on class interests that are rapidly polarizing American society. New figures, tables, and references incorporate the latest information and research findings to document and illustrate key topics, such as the distribution of wealth and income, globalization, downsizing, contingent labor, the role of money in politics, media content and consolidation, the transformation of education, and the erosion of democracy. The second edition combines scholarship with an engaging style and flashes of comic relief-with several cartoons by some of the best satirists today. The book, accessibly written for undergraduate students, has been widely adopted in courses on stratification, economic sociology, and American society.
The combative metaphor of Oscience warsO has taken on a predominant position within the collective conscious, from being featured on the programs of scientific meetings to being splashed across the pages of leading national magazines and newspapers. Some in the scientific community perceive their profession to be under siege by members of the academic left, radical environmentalists, religious fundamentalists, eco-feminists, and others. This book, based on in-depth interviews with sixty members of groups with alleged Oanti-scienceO attitudes, examines how pervasive and uniform these critiques are. The research is designed to examine two conflicting hypotheses: 1) that anti-science attitudes reflect a general cynicism about all major social institutions, and 2) that anti-science views are not broadly based but are reflective, instead , of the particular interests of a given social grouping. In the final analysis, Perrucci and Trachtman dig at the root of the so-called Oscience warsO by presenting evidence that the wars are not the product of an overarching suspicion of the institutions at the core of our society, but are instead the product of organized interest groups, which shape the attitudes and beliefs of their respective members.
This study provides a detailed, in-depth analysis of a single incident rooted in the effort of a group of professional employees to serve the public welfare. It reveals in microcosm the interplay of political forces, economic interests, personal ambition, organizational structure, and professional ethics that culminated in an act of whistle-blowing. The incident took place during the final construction phase of the Bay Area Rapid Transit System (BART), designed to be America's first attempt at space-age mass transportation. Three BART engineers, convinced of the lack of responsiveness of management to their concerns about the system's safety, were fired for insubordination and other organizational sins. Based upon repeated interviews with the engineers, with BART managers and directors, and with the professional societies involved, as well as upon an extensive body of documents and court depositions, legislative reports, media reports, and institutional memoranda. Divided Loyalties sets a theoretical context for the issues, traces the incident from its beginning, examines the aftermath of the engineers' dismissal, and concludes with a set of recommendations that should be considered by public and private organizations, professional associations, agencies of government, and individual professional employees.
Large organizations, particularly corporations, possess considerable resources, and with that comes considerable power, often extending beyond a single community or nation-state. Networks among large corporations enhance that power to the point that they exert a major impact on national and multinational economies and policies, influencing decision-making to achieve their own goals. Networks of Power applies interorganizational analysis to the study of power in three main areas: national policy domains, community influence structures, and national corporate structures. The main body of the text is comprised of original research by the leading authorities in the field and covers such areas as national policy decisions in health and energy, corporate structure, innovative theoretical and methodological approaches, and a critical review of network analysis of interorganizational relations and power. Also presented is an agenda for future research.
Jean Piaget, renowned Swiss developmental psychologist and epistemologist, is best known for his groundbreaking studies with children, which led him to develop a landmark theory of cognitive development. Geldolph A. Kohnstamm's Jean Piaget: Children and the Inclusion Problem is a critical study of a cornerstone of Piaget's theory. This theory holds that a child's ability to solve problems of class inclusion marks the beginning of the period of concrete (logical) operations at about seven or eight years of age.Kohnstamm's experiments show, however, that with directive teaching methods, most children of five can already learn to solve inclusion problems. His results make him question the basic assumption of Piaget's theory that logical operations can only develop in firmly connected groupings of operations, not in isolation. The author argues that experimenters must therefore show that children who come to master one kind of operation should also show transference to other operations of the same grouping. As a result, he questions the real existence in brain functioning of the hypothesized groupings of operations in Piaget's theory.This book is a revised edition of the 1967 original and includes a new introduction and epilogue. The original book was published in the Netherlands, not in the United States. Therefore it has reached only a negligible US audience and has sadly escaped the attention of many interested in Piaget's developmental theory. This challenge to Piaget's theory is an invaluable resource for cognitive, developmental, and educational psychologists."--Provided by publisher.
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