Title: The making of the English middle class: business, society, and family life in London, 1660-1730 
Author: Earle, Peter 1937-
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: History
Publisher's Description: This is the first major study of a neglected yet extremely significant subject: the London middle classes in the period between 1660 and 1730, a period in which they created a society and economy that can be seen with hindsight to have ushered in the modern world. Using a wealth of material from contemporary sources - including wills, business papers, inventories, marriage contracts, divorce hearings, and the writings of Daniel Defoe and Samuel Pepys - Peter Earle presents a fully rounded picture of the "middling sort of people," getting to the hearts of their lives as men and women struggling for success in the biggest, richest, and most middle-class city in contemporary Europe.He examines in fascinating and convincing detail the business life of Londoners, from apprenticeship through the problems and potential rewards of different occupational groups, going on to look at middle-class family, social, political and material life - from relationships with spouses, children, servants, and neighbors, to food and clothes and furniture, to sickness, death, and burial.Stimulating, scholarly, and constantly illuminating, this book is an important and impressive contribution to English social history.   [brief]
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Title: The middling sort: commerce, gender, and the family in England, 1680-1780
Author: Hunt, Margaret R 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Gender Studies | Social Science
Publisher's Description: To be one of "the middling sort" in urban England in the late seventeenth or eighteenth century was to live a life tied, one way or another, to the world of commerce. In a lively study that combines narrative and alternately poignant and hilarious anecdotes with convincing analysis, Margaret R. Hunt offers a view of middling society during the hundred years that separated the Glorious Revolution from the factory age. Thanks to her exploration of many family papers and court records, Hunt is able to examine what people thought, felt, and valued. She finds that early capitalism and early modern family life were far more insecure than their "classical" models supposed.Commercial needs and social needs coincided to a large extent. The family is central to Hunt's story, and she shows how financial struggles brought conflict, ambiguity, and tension to the home. She investigates the way gender intertwined with class and family hierarchy and the way many businesses survived as precarious successes, secured through the sacrifices made by female as well as male family members. The Middling Sort offers a dynamic portrait of a society struggling to minimize the considerable social and psychic dislocation that accompanied England's launch of a full-scale market economy.   [brief]
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Title: Yakuza: Japan's criminal underworld
Author: Kaplan, David E 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Sociology | Japan | Politics | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Known for their striking full-body tattoos and severed fingertips, Japan's gangsters comprise a criminal class eighty thousand strong - more than four times the size of the American Mafia. Despite their criminal nature, the yakuza are accepted by fellow Japanese to a degree guaranteed to shock most Westerners. Here is the first book to reveal the extraordinary reach of Japan's Mafia. Originally published in 1986, Yakuza was so controversial in Japan that it could not be published there for five years. But in the West it has long served as the standard reference on Japanese organized crime, inspiring novels, screenplays, and criminal investigations. David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro spent nearly two decades conducting hundreds of interviews with everyone from street-level hoodlums and police to Japan's most powerful godfathers. The result is a searing indictment of corruption in the world's second-largest economy. This updated, expanded, and thoroughly revised edition of Yakuza tells the full story of Japan's remarkable crime syndicates, from their feudal start as bands of medieval outlaws to their emergence as billion-dollar investors in real estate, big business, art, and more.   [brief]
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Title: Inventing home: emigration, gender, and the middle class in Lebanon, 1870-1920 
Author: Khater, Akram Fouad 1960-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern History | Women's Studies | Sociology | Middle Eastern Studies
Publisher's Description: Between 1890 and 1920 over one-third of the peasants of Mount Lebanon left their villages and traveled to the Americas. This book traces the journeys of these villagers from the ranks of the peasantry into a middle class of their own making. Inventing Home delves into the stories of these travels, shedding much needed light on the impact of emigration and immigration in the development of modernity. It focuses on a critical period in the social history of Lebanon--the "long peace" between the uprising of 1860 and the beginning of the French mandate in 1920. The book explores in depth the phenomena of return emigration, the questioning and changing of gender roles, and the rise of the middle class. Exploring new areas in the history of Lebanon, Inventing Home asks how new notions of gender, family, and class were articulated and how a local "modernity" was invented in the process.Akram Khater maps the jagged and uncertain paths that the fellahin from Mount Lebanon carved through time and space in their attempt to control their future and their destinies. His study offers a significant contribution to the literature on the Middle East, as well as a new perspective on women and on gender issues in the context of developing modernity in the region.   [brief]
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Title: Permitted and prohibited desires: mothers, comics, and censorship in Japan
Author: Allison, Anne 1950-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Anthropology | Gender Studies | Popular Culture | Japan
Publisher's Description: This provocative study of gender and sexuality in contemporary Japan investigates elements of Japanese popular culture including erotic comic books, stories of mother-son incest, lunchboxes - or obentos - that mothers ritualistically prepare for schoolchildren, and children's cartoons. Anne Allison brings recent feminist psychoanalytic and Marxist theory to bear on representations of sexuality, motherhood, and gender in these and other aspects of Japanese culture. Based on five years of fieldwork in a middle-class Tokyo neighborhood, this theoretically informed, accessible ethnographic study provides a provocative analysis of how sexuality, dominance, and desire are reproduced and enacted in late-capitalistic Japan.   [brief]
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Title: Labor and imperial democracy in prewar Japan
Author: Gordon, Andrew 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Asian Studies | Japan | Politics | Asian History | Labor Studies
Publisher's Description: Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan examines the political role played by working men and women in prewar Tokyo and offers a reinterpretation of the broader dynamics of Japan's prewar political history. Gordon argues that such phenomena as riots, labor disputes, and union organizing can best be understood as part of an early twentieth-century movement for "imperial democracy" shaped by the nineteenth-century drive to promote capitalism and build a modern nation and empire. When the propertied, educated leaders of this movement gained a share of power in the 1920s, they disagreed on how far to go toward incorporating working men and women into an expanded body politic. For their part, workers became ambivalent toward working within the imperial democratic system. In this context, the intense polarization of laborers and owners during the Depression helped ultimately to destroy the legitimacy of imperial democracy.Gordon suggests that the thought and behavior of Japanese workers both reflected and furthered the intense concern with popular participation and national power that has marked Japan's modern history. He points to a post-World War II legacy for imperial democracy in both the organization of the working class movement and the popular willingness to see GNP growth as an index of national glory. Importantly, Gordon shows how historians might reconsider the roles of tenant farmers, students, and female activists, for example, in the rise and transformation of imperial democracy.   [brief]
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Title: Unequal childhoods: class, race, and family life
Author: Lareau, Annette
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Sociology | American Studies | Ethnic Studies | Anthropology | Education
Publisher's Description: Class does make a difference in the lives and futures of American children. Drawing on in-depth observations of black and white middle-class, working-class, and poor families, Unequal Childhoods explores this fact, offering a picture of childhood today. Here are the frenetic families managing their children's hectic schedules of "leisure" activities; and here are families with plenty of time but little economic security. Lareau shows how middle-class parents, whether black or white, engage in a process of "concerted cultivation" designed to draw out children's talents and skills, while working-class and poor families rely on "the accomplishment of natural growth," in which a child's development unfolds spontaneously - as long as basic comfort, food, and shelter are provided. Each of these approaches to childrearing brings its own benefits and its own drawbacks. In identifying and analyzing differences between the two, Lareau demonstrates the power, and limits, of social class in shaping the lives of America's children.   [brief]
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Title: Where are you from?: Middle-class migrants in the modern world
Author: Raj, Dhooleka Sarhadi 1969-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Earth Sciences | Postcolonial Studies | Sociology | European Studies | South Asia | Immigration | Sociology | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Dhooleka S. Raj explores the complexities of ethnic minority cultural change in this incisive examination of first- and second-generation middle-class South Asian families living in London. Challenging prevalent understandings of ethnicity that equate community, culture, and identity, Raj considers how transnational ethnic minorities are circumscribed by nostalgia for culture. Where Are You From? argues that the nostalgia for culture obscures the complexities of change in migrant minority lives and limits the ways the politics of diversity can be imagined by the nation. Based on ethnographic research with Indian migrants and their children, this book examines how categories of identity, culture, community, and nation are negotiated and often equated.   [brief]
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Title: Japan's administrative elite 
Author: Koh, Byung Chol
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Asian Studies | Japan | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: A major player in Japanese society is its government bureaucracy. Neither Japan's phenomenal track record in the world marketplace nor its remarkable success in managing its domestic affairs can be understood without insight into how its government bureaucracy works - how its elite administrators are recruited, socialized, and promoted; how they interact among themselves and with other principal players in Japan, notably politicians; how they are rewarded; and what happens to them when they retire at a relatively young age. Yet, despite its pivotal importance, there is no comprehensive and up-to-date study of Japan's administrative elite in the English language. This book seeks to fill that gap.Koh examines patterns of continuity and change, identifies similarities and differences between Japan and four other industrialized democracies (the United States, Britain, France, and Germany), and assesses the implications of the Japanese model of public management. Though many features of Japanese bureaucracy are found in the Western democracies, the degree to which they manifest themselves in Japan appears to be unsurpassed.Koh shows that the Japanese model of public management contains both strengths and weaknesses. For example, the price Japan pays for the high caliber of its administrative elite is the stifling rigidity of a multiple track system, a system with second-class citizens and demoralized "non-career" civil servants who actually bear a lion's share of administrative burden. The Japanese experience demonstrates not only how steep the price of success can be but also the enduring effects of culture over structure.   [brief]
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Title: Industrialization, family life, and class relations: Saint Chamond, 1815-1914 
Author: Accampo, Elinor Ann
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: History | European History | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In this provocative study, Elinor Accampo explores the interrelationship between the structure of work and strategies of family formation in Saint Chamond, a French city that underwent intensive industrialization during the nineteenth century. Through a detailed analysis of fertility, mortality, marriages, and migration, the author analyzes the ways in which the family responded to changes in the organization of work. In the first half of the nineteenth century work was in the home, and families tended to be large in order to meet the demand for workers. But by the 1860s the mechanization of labor had begun to separate family life and work life, fundamentally transforming the relationship between work and family and making the survival of the working-class family more difficult. Accampo argues that workers began to have smaller families much earlier than has previously been suggested, and she demonstrates that fertility declined for reasons unique to working-class conditions. This decline in family size, and the context in which it took place, provides fascinating new material for understanding the working class world and the dynamics of class relations.   [brief]
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Title: Japan under construction: corruption, politics, and public works 
Author: Woodall, Brian
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Politics | Japan
Publisher's Description: In 1987, Japan excluded American firms from bidding on the multibillion-dollar New Kansai International Airport, sparking yet another trade dispute between the United States and Japan. The State Department, Congress, and the President himself were caught up in the dispute, which still smolders even after Congress passed a threatening resolution to retaliate. Scandal after scandal - both domestic and international - splashes across headlines in Japan, generating wave after wave of attempts at reform. Why is this industry so rife with bid-rigging, collusion, and pork-barrel politics? What are the political forces behind the industry? Brian Woodall answers these questions in this book, based on extensive research and over one hundred candid and revealing interviews with contractors, industry association officials, public works bureaucrats, elected politicians and aides, political party officials, journalists, and scholars.This inside view begins with a profile of the institutionalized system of bid-rigging in the public construction market. It explores the powerful positions of unelected bureaucrats, who are often hired by private-sector firms after retirement. Career politicians within the Liberal Democratic Party are revealed to use the construction industry to exploit party factions toward their own electoral ends. Recent events - the Sagawa affair and the massive "general contractors" (zenekon) scandal as well as the political reform movements that followed them - are examined in detail. Throughout, Brian Woodall illuminates the construction rift between Japan and the United States and demonstrates how international pressures were subverted within the shadowy domestic system. Japan Under Construction is must reading for anyone interested in Japanese politics, United States-Japan trade relations, and political corruption and reform anywhere in the world.   [brief]
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Title: Postwar Japan as history
Author: Gordon, Andrew 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Politics | Japan | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Japan's catapult to world economic power has inspired many studies by social scientists, but few have looked at the 45 years of postwar Japan through the lens of history. The contributors to this book seek to offer such a view. As they examine three related themes of postwar history, the authors describe an ongoing historical process marked by unexpected changes, such as Japan's extraordinary economic growth, and unanticipated continuities, such as the endurance of conservative rule. A provocative set of interpretative essays by eminent scholars, this book will appeal to anyone interested in the history of twentieth-century Japan and the dilemmas facing Japan today.   [brief]
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Title: Tokugawa village practice: class, status, power, law 
Author: Ooms, Herman
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Asian History | Japan | Law
Publisher's Description: In contrast to modern Japanese citizens, during the Tokugawa period (1600-1868) villagers frequently resorted to lawsuits to settle conflicts. Herman Ooms uses colorful, skillfully analyzed case studies to trace the evolution of class and status conflicts through lawsuits and petitions in villages. Inspired by the work of Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu, this exploration of social and legal history illuminates the texture and detail of village life, focusing on relations to authority.Opening with a story of an angry peasant woman's lifelong struggle against village authority (a story involving murder and revenge), Ooms highlights the role played by obscure historical actors including local elites, commoners, women, and outcastes. He also discusses the important role lineages played in village politics and examines the origins of discrimination against Japan's burakumin , or outcastes.   [brief]
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Title: Dearest beloved: the Hawthornes and the making of the middle-class family 
Author: Herbert, T. Walter (Thomas Walter) 1938-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Literature | American Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Women's Studies | Men and Masculinity | Autobiographies and Biographies | American Studies | United States History
Publisher's Description: The marriage of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne - for their contemporaries a model of true love and married happiness - was also a scene of revulsion and combat. T. Walter Herbert reveals the tragic conflicts beneath the Hawthorne's ideal of domestic fulfillment and shows how their marriage reflected the tensions within nineteenth-century society. In so doing, he sheds new light on Hawthorne's fiction, with its obsessive themes of guilt and grief, balked feminism and homosexual seduction, adultery, patricide, and incest.   [brief]
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Title: Making health work: human growth in modern Japan 
Author: Mosk, Carl
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Sociology | Demography | Japan | Asian History | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: Mosk shows how population quality provides a key to understanding economic growth and social change in Japan.
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Title: Everyday things in premodern Japan: the hidden legacy of material culture
Author: Hanley, Susan B 1939-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | Japan | Asian History | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: Japan was the only non-Western nation to industrialize before 1900 and its leap into the modern era has stimulated vigorous debates among historians and social scientists. In an innovative discussion that posits the importance of physical well-being as a key indicator of living standards, Susan B. Hanley considers daily life in the three centuries leading up to the modern era in Japan. She concludes that people lived much better than has been previously understood - at levels equal or superior to their Western contemporaries. She goes on to illustrate how this high level of physical well-being had important consequences for Japan's ability to industrialize rapidly and for the comparatively smooth transition to a modern, industrial society.While others have used income levels to conclude that the Japanese household was relatively poor in those centuries, Hanley examines the material culture - food, sanitation, housing, and transportation. How did ordinary people conserve the limited resources available in this small island country? What foods made up the daily diet and how were they prepared? How were human wastes disposed of? How long did people live? Hanley answers all these questions and more in an accessible style and with frequent comparisons with Western lifestyles. Her methods allow for cross-cultural comparisons between Japan and the West as well as Japan and the rest of Asia. They will be useful to anyone interested in the effects of modernization on daily life.   [brief]
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Title: Importing diversity: inside Japan's JET Program
Author: McConnell, David L 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Anthropology | Japan | Politics | Education
Publisher's Description: In 1987, the Japanese government inaugurated the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) program in response to global pressure to "internationalize" its society. This ambitious program has grown to be a major government operation, with an annual budget of $400 million (greater than the United States NEA and NEH combined) and more than six thousand foreign nationals employed each year in public schools all over Japan.How does a relatively homogeneous and insular society react when a buzzword is suddenly turned into a reality? How did the arrival of so many foreigners affect Japan's educational bureaucracy? How did the foreigners themselves feel upon discovering that English teaching was not the primary goal of the program? In this balanced study of the JET program, David L. McConnell draws on ten years of ethnographic research to explore the cultural and political dynamics of internationalization in Japan. Through vignettes and firsthand accounts, he highlights and interprets the misunderstandings of the early years of the program, traces the culture clashes at all levels of the bureaucracy, and speculates on what lessons the JET program holds for other multicultural initiatives.This fascinating book's jargon-free style and interdisciplinary approach will make it appealing to educators, policy analysts, students of Japan, and prospective and former JET participants.   [brief]
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Title: Losing face: status politics in Japan 
Author: Pharr, Susan J
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | Asian Studies | Asian History | Japan | Politics
Publisher's Description: How does a "homogeneous" society like Japan treat the problem of social inequality? Losing Face looks beyond conventional structural categories (race, class, ethnicity) to focus on conflicts based on differences in social status. Three rich and revealing case studies explore crucial asymmetries of a . . . [more]
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Title: The silk weavers of Kyoto: family and work in a changing traditional industry
Author: Hareven, Tamara K
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Sociology | Anthropology | Asian Studies | Asian History | Labor Studies
Publisher's Description: The makers of obi, the elegant and costly sash worn over kimono in Japan, belong to an endangered species. These families of manufacturers, weavers, and other craftspeople centered in the Nishijin weaving district of Kyoto have practiced their demanding craft for generations. In recent decades, however, as a result of declining markets for kimono, they find their livelihood and pride harder to sustain. This book is a poignant exploration of a vanishing world. Tamara Hareven integrates historical research with intensive life history interviews to reveal the relationships among family, work, and community in this highly specialized occupation. Hareven uses her knowledge of textile workers' lives in the United States and Western Europe to show how striking similarities in weavers' experiences transcend cultural differences. These very rich personal testimonies, taken over a decade and a half, provide insight into how these men and women have juggled family and work roles and coped with insecurities. Readers can learn firsthand how weavers perceive their craft and how they interpret their lives and view the world around them. With rare immediacy, The Silk Weavers of Kyoto captures a way of life that is rapidly disappearing.   [brief]
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Title: Encounters with aging: mythologies of menopause in Japan and North America
Author: Lock, Margaret M
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical Anthropology | Women's Studies | Japan
Publisher's Description: Margaret Lock explicitly compares Japanese and North American medical and political accounts of female middle age to challenge Western assumptions about menopause. She uses ethnography, interviews, statistics, historical and popular culture materials, and medical publications to produce a richly detailed account of Japanese women's lives. The result offers irrefutable evidence that the experience and meanings - even the endocrinological changes - associated with female midlife are far from universal. Rather, Lock argues, they are the product of an ongoing dialectic between culture and local biologies.Japanese focus on middle-aged women as family members, and particularly as caretakers of elderly relatives. They attach relatively little importance to the end of menstruation, seeing it as a natural part of the aging process and not a diseaselike state heralding physical decline and emotional instability. Even the symptoms of midlife are different: Japanese women report few hot flashes, for example, but complain frequently of stiff shoulders.Articulate, passionate, and carefully documented, Lock's study systematically undoes the many preconceptions about aging women in two distinct cultural settings. Because it is rooted in the everyday lives of Japanese women, it also provides an excellent entree to Japanese society as a whole.Aging and menopause are subjects that have been closeted behind our myths, fears, and misconceptions. Margaret Lock's cross-cultural perspective gives us a critical new lens through which to examine our assumptions.   [brief]
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