Title: Lawyers in society [computer file]: an overview 
Author: Abel, Richard L
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Law | Sociology | Politics
Publisher's Description: Among all those who encounter the law in the conduct of their lives or who consider it as a career, few have a solid understanding of the legal profession in America, and fewer still know anything about systems in other parts of the world. Lawyers in Society offers a concise comparative introduction to the practice of law in a number of countries: England, Germany, Japan, Venezuela, and Belgium.Extracted from the editors' three highly successful volumes Lawyers in Society , these essays guide readers through the differing worlds of civil and common law, law in Europe and Asia, and first and third world legal systems. One contribution addresses the changing role of women in the profession - women comprise half of all new lawyers in most countries - and the changes they are bringing. A new introduction and concluding essay reflect on the place of this volume in current and future research.   [brief]
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Title: Lawyers, lawsuits, and legal rights: the battle over litigation in American society 
Author: Burke, Thomas Frederick
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Politics | Law
Publisher's Description: Lawsuits over coffee burns, playground injuries, even bad teaching: litigation "horror stories" create the impression that Americans are greedy, quarrelsome, and sue-happy. The truth, as this book makes clear, is quite different. What Thomas Burke describes in Lawyers, Lawsuits, and Legal Rights is a nation not of litigious citizens, but of litigious policies - laws that promote the use of litigation in resolving disputes and implementing public policies. This book is a cogent account of how such policies have come to shape public life and everyday practices in the United States. As litigious policies have proliferated, so have struggles to limit litigation - and these struggles offer insight into the nation's court-centered public policy style. Burke focuses on three cases: the effort to block the Americans with Disabilities Act; an attempt to reduce accident litigation by creating a no-fault auto insurance system in California; and the enactment of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Act. These cases suggest that litigious policies are deeply rooted in the American constitutional tradition. Burke shows how the diffuse, divided structure of American government, together with the anti-statist ethos of American political culture, creates incentives for political actors to use the courts to address their concerns. The first clear and comprehensive account of the national politics of litigation, his work provides a new way to understand and address the "litigiousness" of American society.   [brief]
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Title: Passions of the cut sleeve: the male homosexual tradition in China
Author: Hinsch, Bret
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | Asian History | China | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies
Publisher's Description: The first detailed treatment of the Chinese homosexual tradition in any Western language, Passions of the Cut Sleeve shatters preconceptions and stereotypes. Gone is the image of the sternly puritanical Confucian as sole representative of Chinese sexual practices - and with it the justification for the modern Chinese insistence that homosexuality is a recent import from the decadent West. Rediscovering the male homosexual tradition in China provides a startling new perspective on Chinese society and adds richly to our understanding of homosexuality.Bret Hinsch's reconstruction of the Chinese homosexual past reveals unexpected scenes. An emperor on his deathbed turns over the seals of the empire to a male beloved; two men marry each other with elaborate wedding rituals; parents sell their son into prostitution. The tradition portrays men from all levels of society - emperors, transvestite actors, rapists, elegant scholars, licentious monks, and even the nameless poor.Drawing from dynastic histories, erotic novels, popular Buddhist tracts, love poetry, legal cases, and joke books, Passions of the Cut Sleeve evokes the complex and fascinating male homosexual tradition in China from the Bronze Age until its decline in recent times.   [brief]
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Title: Male colors: the construction of homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan
Author: Leupp, Gary P
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies | Asian Studies | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Tokugawa Japan ranks with ancient Athens as a society that not only tolerated, but celebrated, male homosexual behavior. Few scholars have seriously studied the subject, and until now none have satisfactorily explained the origins of the tradition or elucidated how its conventions reflected class structure and gender roles. Gary P. Leupp fills the gap with a dynamic examination of the origins and nature of the tradition. Based on a wealth of literary and historical documentation, this study places Tokugawa homosexuality in a global context, exploring its implications for contemporary debates on the historical construction of sexual desire.Combing through popular fiction, law codes, religious works, medical treatises, biographical material, and artistic treatments, Leupp traces the origins of pre-Tokugawa homosexual traditions among monks and samurai, then describes the emergence of homosexual practices among commoners in Tokugawa cities. He argues that it was "nurture" rather than "nature" that accounted for such conspicuous male/male sexuality and that bisexuality was more prevalent than homosexuality. Detailed, thorough, and very readable, this study is the first in English or Japanese to address so comprehensively one of the most complex and intriguing aspects of Japanese history.   [brief]
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Title: Creating the corporate soul: the rise of public relations and corporate imagery in American big business
Author: Marchand, Roland
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | American Studies | Popular Culture | Intellectual History | Media Studies | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: Over the course of the twentieth century the popular perception of America's giant corporations has undergone an astonishing change. Condemned as dangerous leviathans in the century's first decades, by 1945 major corporations had become respected, even revered, institutions. Roland Marchand's lavishly illustrated and carefully researched book tells how large companies such as AT&T and U.S. Steel created their own "souls" in order to reassure consumers and politicians that bigness posed no threat to democracy or American values.Marchand traces this important transformation in the culture of capitalism by offering a series of case studies of such corporate giants as General Motors, General Electric, Metropolitan Life Insurance, and Du Pont Chemicals. Marchand examines the rhetorical and visual imagery developed by corporate leaders to win public approval and build their own internal corporate culture. In the "golden era" of the 1920s, companies boasted of their business statesmanship, but in the Depression years many of them turned in desperation to forms of public relations that strongly defended the capitalist system. During World War II public relations gained new prominence within corporate management as major companies linked themselves with Main-Street, small-town America. By the war's end, the corporation's image as a "good neighbor" had largely replaced that of the "soulless giant." American big business had succeeded in wrapping increasingly complex economic relationships in the comforting aura of familiarity.Marchand, author of the widely acclaimed Advertising the American Dream (1985), provides an elegant and convincing account of the origins and effects of the corporate imagery so ubiquitous in our world today.   [brief]
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Title: Spectacular nature: corporate culture and the Sea World experience
Author: Davis, Susan G 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Environmental Studies | Popular Culture | American Studies | Sociology
Publisher's Description: This is the story of Sea World, a theme park where the wonders of nature are performed, marketed, and sold. With its trademark star, Shamu the killer whale - as well as performing dolphins, pettable sting rays, and reproductions of pristine natural worlds - the park represents a careful coordination of shows, dioramas, rides, and concessions built around the theme of ocean life. Susan Davis analyzes the Sea World experience and the forces that produce it: the theme park industry; Southern California tourism; the privatization of urban space; and the increasing integration of advertising, entertainment, and education. The result is an engaging exploration of the role played by images of nature and animals in contemporary commercial culture, and a precise account of how Sea World and its parent corporation, Anheuser-Busch, succeed. Davis argues that Sea World builds its vision of nature around customers' worries and concerns about the environment, family relations, and education.While Davis shows the many ways that Sea World monitors its audience and manipulates animals and landscapes to manufacture pleasure, she also explains the contradictions facing the enterprise in its campaign for a positive public identity. Shifting popular attitudes, animal rights activists, and environmental laws all pose practical and public relations challenges to the theme park. Davis confronts the park's vast operations with impressive insight and originality, revealing Sea World as both an industrial product and a phenomenon typical of contemporary American culture. Spectacular Nature opens an intriguing field of inquiry: the role of commercial entertainment in shaping public understandings of the environment and environmental problems.   [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: Dioscorus of Aphrodito: his work and his world 
Author: MacCoull, Leslie B
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Classics
Publisher's Description: From the hand of Dioscorus of Aphrodito, sixth-century Coptic lawyer and poet, we have the only autograph poems to come down to us on papyrus from the late ancient world. Both the poetry he wrote for special occasions and the documents he produced in his legal career, in Greek and Coptic, reflect the major preoccupations of Dioscorus' society and his age: the nature of Byzantine imperial government, the patronage of the powerful elite, and the spirituality of the Egyptian Christian church. Thanks to residence in Egypt and many years of work with the original papyri, Leslie S. B. MacCoull is able to present a comprehensive picture of Dioscorus and his times. Through detailed analyses of the documents and poems, some previously unknown, she leads us to a fresh perception of the Coptic culture of Byzantine Egypt. She reveals the man and his world as inheritors of and contributors to the Egyptian-Classical-Christian fusion of society and intellectual life that gave birth to Gnosticism and the Desert Fathers. Dioscorus of Aphrodito epitomizes the little-known cultural flowering of late antique Egypt, which is now seen not as a place of sterility and decadence, but as the home of a strikingly original and creative culture whose subsequent eclipse still remains unexplained.   [brief]
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Title: Another kind of love: male homosexual desire in English discourse, 1850-1920 
Author: Craft, Christopher 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Sociology | Literary Theory and Criticism | Gender Studies | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies
Publisher's Description: In a study that will be of interest to all those concerned with the politics of gender, the history of sexuality, and the erotics of reading, Christopher Craft investigates questions fundamental to any history of present sexualities. How does the modern binary homosexual/heterosexual relate to earlier formulations like "sexual inversion" and "sodomy"? What part does literature play in the development of such categories, or in a culture's resistance to them? And what are the implications for the creation and maintenance of the presumed "natural" male heterosexual subject? How has male heterosexual subjectivity been established as a bulwark against the attractions of a homosexual desire that is repeatedly incited by the very culture that condemns it?Craft examines the discourses of nineteenth-century psychiatry and sexology; some of Freud's central writings; and Tennyson's In Memoriam , Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest , Stoker's Dracula , and Lawrence's Women In Love .   [brief]
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Title: Gender differences at work: women and men in nontraditional occupations
Author: Williams, Christine L 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Sociology | Gender Studies | Labor Studies
Publisher's Description: Nurses and marines epitomize accepted definitions of femininity and masculinity. Using ethnographic research and provocative in-depth interviews, Christine Williams argues that our popular stereotypes of individuals in nontraditional occupations - male nurses and female marines for example - are ent . . . [more]
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Title: History, power, ideology: central issues in Marxism and anthropology
Author: Donham, Donald L. (Donald Lewis)
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Anthropology | Social Theory | African Studies
Publisher's Description: Is Marxism a reflection of the conceptual system it fights against, rather than a truly comprehensive approach to human history? Drawing on recent work in anthropology, history, and philosophy, Donald Donham confronts this problem in analyzing a radically different social order: the former Maale kingdom of southern Ethiopia."Every once in a while there appears a book that . . . opens up new ways of inquiring into the ways of the world. Donald Donham has written such a book. The style is quiet and judicious, but the effect is stunning. . . . In putting inherited partisan approaches to the test of explaining the realities of Maale society and culture, Donham enriches anthropology and imparts new vigor to the analytical Marxian traditions. History, Power, Ideology embodies a major accomplishment." - From the Foreword   [brief]
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Title: Seeing double: intercultural poetics in Ptolemaic Alexandria
Author: Stephens, Susan A
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Classics | Classical Literature and Language | Poetry | Classical Politics
Publisher's Description: When, in the third century B.C.E., the Ptolemies became rulers in Egypt, they found themselves not only kings of a Greek population but also pharaohs for the Egyptian people. Offering a new and expanded understanding of Alexandrian poetry, Susan Stephens argues that poets such as Callimachus, Theocritus, and Apollonius proved instrumental in bridging the distance between the two distinct and at times diametrically opposed cultures under Ptolemaic rule. Her work successfully positions Alexandrian poetry as part of the dynamic in which Greek and Egyptian worlds were bound to interact socially, politically, and imaginatively. The Alexandrian poets were image-makers for the Ptolemaic court, Seeing Double suggests; their poems were political in the broadest sense, serving neither to support nor to subvert the status quo, but to open up a space in which social and political values could be imaginatively re-created, examined, and critiqued. Seeing Double depicts Alexandrian poetry in its proper context - within the writing of foundation stories and within the imaginative redefinition of Egypt as "Two Lands" - no longer the lands of Upper and Lower Egypt, but of a shared Greek and Egyptian culture.   [brief]
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Title: Public faces, private voices: community and individuality in South India 
Author: Mines, Mattison 1941-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | South Asia
Publisher's Description: Individuality is often viewed as an exclusively Western value. In non-Western societies, collective identities seem to eclipse those of individuals. These generalities, however, have overlooked the importance of personal uniqueness, volition, and achievement in these cultures. As an anthropologist in Tamil Nadu, South India, Mattison Mines found private and public expressions of self in all sectors of society. Based on his twenty-five years of field research, Public Faces, Private Voices weaves together personal life stories, historical description, and theoretical analysis to define individuality in South Asia and to distinguish it from its Western counterpart.This engaging and controversial book will be of great interest to scholars and students working in anthropology, psychology, sociology, South Asian history, urban studies, and political science.   [brief]
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Title: Same-sex affairs: constructing and controlling homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest
Author: Boag, Peter
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Gender Studies | History | Men and Masculinity | Californian and Western History | Urban Studies | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies | Sociology
Publisher's Description: At the turn of the twentieth century, two distinct, yet at times overlapping, male same-sex sexual subcultures had emerged in the Pacific Northwest: one among the men and boys who toiled in the region's logging, fishing, mining, farming, and railroad-building industries; the other among the young urban white-collar workers of the emerging corporate order. Boag draws on police logs, court records, and newspaper accounts to create a vivid picture of the lives of these men and youths--their sexual practices, cultural networks, cross-class relations, variations in rural and urban experiences, and ethnic and racial influences.   [brief]
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Title: Learned girls and male persuasion: gender and reading in Roman love elegy
Author: James, Sharon L
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Classics | Classical Literature and Language | Literature | Poetry | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: This study transforms our understanding of Roman love elegy, an important and complex corpus of poetry that flourished in the late first century b.c.e. Sharon L. James reads key poems by Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid for the first time from the perspective of the woman to whom they are addressed - the docta puella, or learned girl, the poet's beloved. By interpreting the poetry not, as has always been done, from the stance of the elite male writers - as plaint and confession - but rather from the viewpoint of the women - thus as persuasion and attempted manipulation - James reveals strategies and substance that no one has listened for before.   [brief]
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Title: Faces of power: Alexander's image and Hellenistic politics
Author: Stewart, Andrew F
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Art | Art and Architecture
Publisher's Description: Alexander the Great changed the face of the ancient world. During his life and after his death, his image in works of art exerted an unprecedented influence?on marbles, bronzes, ivories, frescoes, mosaics, coins, medals, even painted pottery and reliefware. Alexander's physiognomy became the most famous in history. But can we really know what meaning lies behind these images?Andrew Stewart demonstrates that these portraits - wildly divergent in character, quality, type, provenance, date, and purpose - actually transmit not so much a likeness of Alexander as a set of carefully crafted clichés that mobilize the notion "Alexander" for diverse ends and diverse audiences. Stewart discusses the portraits as studies in power and his original interpretation of them gives unprecedented fullness and shape to the idea and image called "Alexander."   [brief]
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Title: The corporate practice of medicine: competition and innovation in health care
Author: Robinson, James C 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Politics | Public Policy | Medicine | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: One of the country's leading health economists presents a provocative analysis of the transformation of American medicine from a system of professional dominance to an industry under corporate control. James Robinson examines the economic and political forces that have eroded the traditional medical system of solo practice and fee-for-service insurance, hindered governmental regulation, and invited the market competition and organizational innovations that now are under way. The trend toward health care corporatization is irreversible, he says, and it parallels analogous trends toward privatization in the world economy.The physician is the key figure in health care, and how physicians are organized is central to the health care system, says Robinson. He focuses on four forms of physician organization to illustrate how external pressures have led to health care innovations: multispecialty medical groups, Independent Practice Associations (IPAs), physician practice management firms, and physician-hospital organizations. These physician organizations have evolved in the past two decades by adopting from the larger corporate sector similar forms of ownership, governance, finance, compensation, and marketing.In applying economic principles to the maelstrom of health care, Robinson highlights the similarities between competition and consolidation in medicine and in other sectors of the economy. He points to hidden costs in fee-for-service medicine - overtreatment, rampant inflation, uncritical professional dominance regarding treatment decisions - factors often overlooked when newer organizational models are criticized.Not everyone will share Robinson's appreciation for market competition and corporate organization in American health care, but he challenges those who would return to the inefficient and inequitable era of medicine from which we've just emerged. Forcefully written and thoroughly documented, The Corporate Practice of Medicine presents a thoughtful - and optimistic - view of a future health care system, one in which physician entrepreneurship is a dynamic component.   [brief]
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Title: The faces of Buddhism in America
Author: Prebish, Charles S
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Religion | Buddhism | American Studies | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: Buddhism is the fastest growing religion in the United States, with adherents estimated in the several millions. But what exactly defines a "Buddhist"? This has been a much-debated question in recent years, particularly in regard to the religion's bifurcation into two camps: the so-called "imported" or ethnic Buddhism of Asian immigrants and the "convert" Buddhism of a mostly middle-class, liberal, intellectual elite. In this timely collection Charles S. Prebish and Kenneth K. Tanaka bring together some of the leading voices in Buddhist studies to examine the debates surrounding contemporary Buddhism's many faces.The contributors investigate newly Americanized Asian traditions such as Tibetan, Zen, Nichiren, Jodo Shinshu, and Theravada Buddhism and the changes they undergo to meet the expectations of a Western culture desperate for spiritual guidance. Race, feminism, homosexuality, psychology, environmentalism, and notions of authority are some of the issues confronting Buddhism for the first time in its three-thousand-year history and are powerfully addressed here.In recent years American Buddhism has been featured as a major story on ABC television news, National Public Radio, and in other national media. A strong new Buddhist journalism is emerging in the United States, and American Buddhism has made its way onto the Internet. The faces of Buddhism in America are diverse, active, and growing, and this book will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in understanding this vital religious movement.   [brief]
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Title: Marxist modern: an ethnographic history of the Ethiopian revolution
Author: Donham, Donald L. (Donald Lewis)
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: African Studies | History | Cultural Anthropology | African History | Politics
Publisher's Description: Modernity has become a keyword in a number of recent intellectual discussions. In this book, Donald L. Donham shows that similar debates have long occurred, particularly among peoples located on the margins of world power and wealth. Based on extensive fieldwork in Ethiopia - conducted over a twenty-year period - Marxist Modern provides a cultural history of the Ethiopian revolution that highlights the role of modernist ideas.Moving between the capital, Addis Ababa, and Maale, the home of a small ethnic group in the south, Donham constructs a narrative of upheaval and change, presenting local people's understandings of events, as these echoed with and appropriated stories of other world revolutions. With the help of poststructuralist insights and theories of narrative, Donham locates a recurrent dialectic between modernist Marxism, local Maale traditionalisms, and antimodernist, evangelical Christianity. One of the most consequential outcomes of this interaction - until the late 1980s - was the creation of a more powerful state, one that penetrated peasant communities ever more deeply and pervasively.Combining sophisticated theory with fascinating ethnographic detail, this study contributes to the theory of revolution as well as the study of modernity. In doing so, it seeks to integrate ethnography and history in a new way.   [brief]
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Title: Gendered transitions: Mexican experiences of immigration
Author: Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Sociology | Latin American Studies | Gender Studies | Chicano Studies | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: The momentous influx of Mexican undocumented workers into the United States over the last decades has spurred new ways of thinking about immigration. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo's incisive book enlarges our understanding of these recently arrived Americans and uncovers the myriad ways that women and men recreate families and community institutions in a new land.Hondagneu-Sotelo argues that people do not migrate as a result of concerted household strategies, but as a consequence of negotiations often fraught with conflict in families and social networks. Migration and settlement transform long-held ideals and lifestyles. Traditional patterns are reevaluated, and new relationships - often more egalitarian - emerge. Women gain greater personal autonomy and independence as they participate in public life and gain access to both social and economic influence previously beyond their reach.Bringing to life the experiences of undocumented immigrants and delineating the key role of women in newly established communities, Gendered Transitions challenges conventional assumptions about gender and migration. It will be essential reading for demographers, historians, sociologists, and policymakers."I've opened my eyes. Back there, they say 'no.' You marry, and no, you must stay home. Here, it's different. You marry, and you continue working. Back in Mexico, it's very different. There is very much machismo in those men." - A Mexican woman living in the United States   [brief]
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