The Essential William H. Whyte offers the core writings of a great observer of the postwar American scene. Included are selections from The Organization Man (1956), Securing Space for Urban America: Conservation Easements (1959), The Last Landscape (1968), The Social Life of Urban Spaces (1980), and City: Rediscovering the Center (1988), as well as many of Whyte's articles from Fortune magazine.
Whyte's fascination with cities led to the creation of the Street Life Project, a ten-year study of the dynamics of how people interact with the urban environment. The crowning achievement of Whyte's career came with the publication of City: Rediscovering the Center (1988). In these pages Whyte distilled the results of his extensive empirical research into a celebration of why people are naturally drawn to the vibrant center of a city and what planners can do to encourage a healthy relationship between citizen and city." "The Essential William H. Whyte offers the core writings of a great observer of the postwar American scene."--BOOK JACKET.
Regarded as one of the most important sociological and business commentaries of modern times, The Organization Man developed the first thorough description of the impact of mass organization on American society. During the height of the Eisenhower administration, corporations appeared to provide a blissful answer to postwar life with the marketing of new technologies—television, affordable cars, space travel, fast food—and lifestyles, such as carefully planned suburban communities centered around the nuclear family. William H. Whyte found this phenomenon alarming. As an editor for Fortune magazine, Whyte was well placed to observe corporate America; it became clear to him that the American belief in the perfectibility of society was shifting from one of individual initiative to one that could be achieved at the expense of the individual. With its clear analysis of contemporary working and living arrangements, The Organization Man rapidly achieved bestseller status. Since the time of the book's original publication, the American workplace has undergone massive changes. In the 1990s, the rule of large corporations seemed less relevant as small entrepreneurs made fortunes from new technologies, in the process bucking old corporate trends. In fact this "new economy" appeared to have doomed Whyte's original analysis as an artifact from a bygone day. But the recent collapse of so many startup businesses, gigantic mergers of international conglomerates, and the reality of economic globalization make The Organization Man all the more essential as background for understanding today's global market. This edition contains a new foreword by noted journalist and author Joseph Nocera. In an afterword Jenny Bell Whyte describes how The Organization Man was written.
The Essential William H. Whyte offers the core writings of a great observer of the postwar American scene. Included are selections from The Organization Man (1956), Securing Space for Urban America: Conservation Easements (1959), The Last Landscape (1968), The Social Life of Urban Spaces (1980), and City: Rediscovering the Center (1988), as well as many of Whyte's articles from Fortune magazine.
Named by Newsweek magazine to its list of "Fifty Books for Our Time." For sixteen years William Whyte walked the streets of New York and other major cities. With a group of young observers, camera and notebook in hand, he conducted pioneering studies of street life, pedestrian behavior, and city dynamics. City: Rediscovering the Center is the result of that research, a humane, often amusing view of what is staggeringly obvious about the urban environment but seemingly invisible to those responsible for planning it. Whyte uses time-lapse photography to chart the anatomy of metropolitan congestion. Why is traffic so badly distributed on city streets? Why do New Yorkers walk so fast—and jaywalk so incorrigibly? Why aren't there more collisions on the busiest walkways? Why do people who stop to talk gravitate to the center of the pedestrian traffic stream? Why do places designed primarily for security actually worsen it? Why are public restrooms disappearing? "The city is full of vexations," Whyte avers: "Steps too steep; doors too tough to open; ledges you cannot sit on. . . . It is difficult to design an urban space so maladroitly that people will not use it, but there are many such spaces." Yet Whyte finds encouragement in the widespread rediscovery of the city center. The future is not in the suburbs, he believes, but in that center. Like a Greek agora, the city must reassert its most ancient function as a place where people come together face-to-face.
The remaining corner of an old farm, unclaimed by developers. The brook squeezed between housing plans. Abandoned railroad lines. The stand of woods along an expanded highway. These are the outposts of what was once a larger pattern of forests and farms, the "last landscape." According to William H. Whyte, the place to work out the problems of our metropolitan areas is within those areas, not outside them. The age of unchecked expansion without consequence is over, but where there is waste and neglect there is opportunity. Our cities and suburbs are not jammed; they just look that way. There are in fact plenty of ways to use this existing space to the benefit of the community, and The Last Landscape provides a practical and timeless framework for making informed decisions about its use. Called "the best study available on the problems of open space" by the New York Times when it first appeared in 1968, The Last Landscape introduced many cornerstone ideas for land conservation, urging all of us to make better use of the land that has survived amid suburban sprawl. Whyte's pioneering work on easements led to the passage of major open space statutes in many states, and his argument for using and linking green spaces, however small the areas may be, is a recommendation that has more currency today than ever before.
Regarded as one of the most important sociological and business commentaries of modern times, The Organization Man developed the first thorough description of the impact of mass organization on American society. During the height of the Eisenhower administration, corporations appeared to provide a blissful answer to postwar life with the marketing of new technologies—television, affordable cars, space travel, fast food—and lifestyles, such as carefully planned suburban communities centered around the nuclear family. William H. Whyte found this phenomenon alarming. As an editor for Fortune magazine, Whyte was well placed to observe corporate America; it became clear to him that the American belief in the perfectibility of society was shifting from one of individual initiative to one that could be achieved at the expense of the individual. With its clear analysis of contemporary working and living arrangements, The Organization Man rapidly achieved bestseller status. Since the time of the book's original publication, the American workplace has undergone massive changes. In the 1990s, the rule of large corporations seemed less relevant as small entrepreneurs made fortunes from new technologies, in the process bucking old corporate trends. In fact this "new economy" appeared to have doomed Whyte's original analysis as an artifact from a bygone day. But the recent collapse of so many startup businesses, gigantic mergers of international conglomerates, and the reality of economic globalization make The Organization Man all the more essential as background for understanding today's global market. This edition contains a new foreword by noted journalist and author Joseph Nocera. In an afterword Jenny Bell Whyte describes how The Organization Man was written.
The remaining corner of an old farm, unclaimed by developers. The brook squeezed between housing plans. Abandoned railroad lines. The stand of woods along an expanded highway. These are the outposts of what was once a larger pattern of forests and farms, the "last landscape." According to William H. Whyte, the place to work out the problems of our metropolitan areas is within those areas, not outside them. The age of unchecked expansion without consequence is over, but where there is waste and neglect there is opportunity. Our cities and suburbs are not jammed; they just look that way. There are in fact plenty of ways to use this existing space to the benefit of the community, and The Last Landscape provides a practical and timeless framework for making informed decisions about its use. Called "the best study available on the problems of open space" by the New York Times when it first appeared in 1968, The Last Landscape introduced many cornerstone ideas for land conservation, urging all of us to make better use of the land that has survived amid suburban sprawl. Whyte's pioneering work on easements led to the passage of major open space statutes in many states, and his argument for using and linking green spaces, however small the areas may be, is a recommendation that has more currency today than ever before.
Named by Newsweek magazine to its list of "Fifty Books for Our Time." For sixteen years William Whyte walked the streets of New York and other major cities. With a group of young observers, camera and notebook in hand, he conducted pioneering studies of street life, pedestrian behavior, and city dynamics. City: Rediscovering the Center is the result of that research, a humane, often amusing view of what is staggeringly obvious about the urban environment but seemingly invisible to those responsible for planning it. Whyte uses time-lapse photography to chart the anatomy of metropolitan congestion. Why is traffic so badly distributed on city streets? Why do New Yorkers walk so fast—and jaywalk so incorrigibly? Why aren't there more collisions on the busiest walkways? Why do people who stop to talk gravitate to the center of the pedestrian traffic stream? Why do places designed primarily for security actually worsen it? Why are public restrooms disappearing? "The city is full of vexations," Whyte avers: "Steps too steep; doors too tough to open; ledges you cannot sit on. . . . It is difficult to design an urban space so maladroitly that people will not use it, but there are many such spaces." Yet Whyte finds encouragement in the widespread rediscovery of the city center. The future is not in the suburbs, he believes, but in that center. Like a Greek agora, the city must reassert its most ancient function as a place where people come together face-to-face.
The fifth edition of this text presents a balanced review of the ecological arguments that the urban arena produces unique experiential and urban-based cultural effects while exploring the broader political and economic contexts that produce and modify the urban environment. In addition to examining the urban dimensions of such topics as community formation and continuity, minority and majority dynamics, ethnic experience, poverty, power, and crime, it provides an analysis of the spatial distribution of population and resources with regard to the metropolitanization of the urban form, and the interaction between urban concentration and development and underdevelopment. From a first chapter that begins with a discussion of some of the more micrological features of the urban experience, the text focuses on the significance of the more macrological cultural, social organizational, and political dimensions of urban change, in an historical span that includes the first cities and concludes with an exploration of the implications of cyberspace, transnationalism, and global terrorism for the future of urban sociology. While the work focuses primarily on the North American case, its analytical and integrated discussion makes it applicable to urban societies in general.
This third edition of a classic urban sociology text examines critical but often-neglected aspects of urban life from a social-psychological theoretical perspective. Symbolic interaction is among the most central theoretical paradigms in sociology and the theory that most thoroughly attends to how individuals give meaning to their world—in this case, how city dwellers interpret and respond to their daily experiences as urbanites. This thoroughly updated edition of Being Urban: A Sociology of City Life remains true to this particular theoretical angle of vision—the symbolic interactionist approach—focusing on specific topics that are relatively neglected in other urban sociology texts, and that lend themselves to the kind of social-psychological analyses that define the distinctive conceptual core of the authors' efforts. After the first two chapters supply readers with theoretical foundations of urban sociology, the next four chapters describe the various ways that individuals experience and make sense of key aspects of urban life. The final section—also composed of four chapters—addresses strategically chosen urban institutions and related processes of social change. Specific subject areas covered include sports, everyday public life, tolerance for diversity, women in cities, urban politics, and the arts. Readers will learn about how order is maintained in public urban places, understand why cities naturally breed a tolerance for diversity that may not be so easily achieved in less urban settings, and appreciate the delicate political and economic tensions between cities and their surrounding suburbs.
This sequel to the authors' acclaimed Organizational America reconsiders the central theme of that volume-the unprecedented growth of the modern organization in America and the replacement of American founding values by the values of the modern organization. That book warned that as the modern organization becomes the dominant social and economic reality in American life, influencing everything that individuals do on and off the job, the consequences for the future would be severe. The authors saw an America forced into a path that unimpeded could result in totalitarianism.
Following their rampage through Southeast Asia and the Pacific in the five months after Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces moved into the Solomon Islands, intending to cut off the critical American supply line to Australia. But when they began to construct an airfield on Guadalcanal in July 1942, the Americans captured the almost completed airfield for their own strategic use. The Japanese Army countered by sending to Guadalcanal a reinforced battalion under the command of Col. Kiyonao Ichiki. The attack that followed would prove to be the first of four attempts by the Japanese over six months to retake the airfield, resulting in some of the most vicious fighting of the Pacific War. During the initial battle on the night of August 20–21, 1942, Marines wiped out Ichiki’s men, who—imbued with “victory fever”—had expected a quick and easy victory. William H. Bartsch draws on correspondence, interviews, diaries, memoirs, and official war records, including those translated from Japanese sources, to offer an intensely human narrative of the failed attempt to recapture Guadalcanal’s vital airfield.
Lazonick explores the origins of the new era of employment insecurity and income inequality, and considers what governments, businesses, and individuals can do about it. He also asks whether the United States can refashion its high-tech business model to generate stable and equitable economic growth. --from publisher description.
No American dramatist has had more plays adapted than Tennessee Williams, and few modern dramatists have witnessed as much controversy during the adaptation process. His Hollywood legacy, captured in such screen adaptations as A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Suddenly, Last Summer, reflects the sea change in American culture in the mid-twentieth century. Placing this body of work within relevant contexts ranging from gender and sexuality to censorship, modernism, art cinema, and the Southern Renaissance, Hollywood's Tennessee draws on rarely examined archival research to recast Williams's significance. Providing not only cultural context, the authors also bring to light the details of the arduous screenwriting process Williams experienced, with special emphasis on the Production Code Administration--the powerful censorship office that drew high-profile criticism during the 1950s--and Williams's innovative efforts to bend the code. Going well beyond the scripts themselves, Hollywood's Tennessee showcases findings culled from poster and billboard art, pressbooks, and other production and advertising material. The result is a sweeping account of how Williams's adapted plays were crafted, marketed, and received, as well as the lasting implications of this history for commercial filmmakers and their audiences.
This book explains the nuts and bolts of affordable housing development. Divided into two complementary sections, the book first provides an overview of the effectiveness of existing federal and state housing programs in the United States, such as the LIHTC and TIF programs. In turn, the book’s second section presents an extensive discussion of and insights into the financial feasibility of an affordable real estate development project. Researchers, policymakers and organizations in the public, private and nonprofit sectors will find this book a valuable resource in addressing the concrete needs of affordable housing development. “Luque, Ikromov, and Noseworthy’s new book on Affordable Housing Development is a “must read” for all those seeking to address the growing and vexing problem of affordable housing supply. The authors provide important insights and practical demonstration of important financial tools often necessary to the financial feasibility of such projects, including tax-increment financing and the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. Further, the authors provide important backdrop to the affordability crisis and homelessness. I highly recommend this book to all who seek both to articulate and enhance housing access.” By Stuart Gabriel, Arden Realty Chair, Professor of Finance and Director, Richard S. Ziman Center for Real Estate at UCLA "Over several years Jaime Luque, Nuriddin Ikromov and William Noseworthy applied their analytical bent, and no small measure of empathy, to homelessness as actually experienced in Madison, Wisconsin – and they inspired multiple classes of urban economics students to join them. “Homelessness” is a complex web of issues affecting a spectrum of populations, from individuals struggling with addiction or emotional disorders, to families who’ve been dealt a bad hand in an often-unforgiving economy. Read this book to follow Jaime, Nuriddin, and William as they evaluate a panoply of housing and social programs, complementing the usual top-down design perspective with practical analysis of the feasibility of actual developments and their effectiveness. Analytical but written for a broad audience, this book will be of interest to anyone running a low-income housing program, private and public developers, students, and any instructor designing a learning-by-doing course that blends rigor with real-world application to a local problem." By Stephen Malpezzi, Professor Emeritus, James A. Graaskamp Center for Real Estate, Wisconsin School of Business, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Dean, Weimer School of the Homer Hoyt Institute.
This book explains, with case examples, a variety of social science research methods suitable for studying the unconscious components of irrational social and political actions in world affairs, which can be defined as those that are intensely destructive, self-destructive, or extremely bizarre. The book argues that they are driven in part by feelings and fantasies that are outside of conscious awareness. Meyers explores the role of empathy in clinical understanding, as well as the value of exposing assertions to empirical disconfirmation. With a variety of research methods such as survey research, content analysis, and narrative analysis, and case examples such as studies of 'irreal' statements by authoritarian leaders, fabricated newspaper articles and climate change denial, this book sheds light on how to conduct research on psychodynamic matters in a scientifically valid and credible way.
Over multiple successful editions, this distinctive text puts day-to-day life under the microscope of sociological analysis, providing an engaging treatment of situations and interactions that are resonant with readers’ daily experiences. Clearly written and well-researched, it reveals the underlying patterns and order of everyday life, employing both seminal classical works and contemporary analyses that define and embrace the theories and methods of symbolic interactionism. The latest edition provides fresh insights into patterns of behavior across a wide range of settings and circumstances, connecting our individual “selves” to such issues as the effects of power differentials on social situations, changing definitions of intimacy, varied experiences of aging and the life course, and the ongoing search for meaning. Boxed inserts highlight topics of related interest, while thought-provoking discussion questions encourage readers to apply chapter content to their daily experiences.
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