Title: Silence at Boalt Hall: the dismantling of affirmative action 
Author: Guerrero, Andrea 1970-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: American Studies | Anthropology | Sociology | African American Studies | Asian American Studies | Politics | Gender Studies | Law | Politics | Politics
Publisher's Description: In 1995, in a marked reversal of progress in the march toward racial equity, the Board of Regents voted to end affirmative action at the University of California. One year later the electorate voted to do the same across the state of California. Silence at Boalt Hall is the thirty-year story of students, faculty, and administrators struggling with the politics of race in higher education at U.C. Berkeley's prestigious law school - one of the first institutions to implement affirmative action policies and one of the first to be forced to remove them. Andrea Guerrero is a member of the last class of students admitted to Boalt Hall under the affirmative action policies. Her informed and passionate journalistic account provides an insider's view into one of the most pivotal and controversial issues of our time: racial diversity in higher education. Guerrero relates the stories of those who benefited from affirmative action and those who suffered from its removal. She shows how the "race-blind" admission policies at Boalt have been far from race-neutral and how the voices of underrepresented minority students have largely disappeared. A hushed silence - the silence of students, faculty, and administrators unwilling and unable to discuss the difficult issues of race - now hangs over Boalt and many institutions like it, Guerrero claims. As the legal and sociopolitical battles over affirmative action continue on a number of consequential fronts, this book provides a rich and engrossing perspective on many facets of this crucial question.   [brief]
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Title: Political protest and cultural revolution: nonviolent direct action in the 1970s and 1980s
Author: Epstein, Barbara
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | Politics | American Studies | United States History | Sociology
Publisher's Description: From her perspective as both participant and observer, Barbara Epstein examines the nonviolent direct action movement which, inspired by the civil rights movement, flourished in the United States from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties. Disenchanted with the politics of both the mainstream and the organized left, and deeply committed to forging communities based on shared values, activists in this movement developed a fresh, philosophy and style of politics that shaped the thinking of a new generation of activists. Driven by a vision of an ecologically balanced, nonviolent, egalitarian society, they engaged in political action through affinity groups, made decisions by consensus, and practiced mass civil disobedience.The nonviolent direct action movement galvanized originally in opposition to nuclear power, with the Clamshell Alliance in New England and then the Abalone Alliance in California leading the way. Its influence soon spread to other activist movements - for peace, non-intervention, ecological preservation, feminism, and gay and lesbian rights.Epstein joined the San Francisco Bay Area's Livermore Action Group to protest the arms race and found herself in jail along with a thousand other activists for blocking the road in front of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. She argues that to gain a real understanding of the direct action movement it is necessary to view it from the inside. For with its aim to base society as a whole on principles of egalitarianism and nonviolence, the movement sought to turn political protest into cultural revolution.   [brief]
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Title: No safe place: toxic waste, leukemia, and community action
Author: Brown, Phil
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Sociology | American Studies | Ecology | Medicine | Technology and Society
Publisher's Description: Toxic waste, contaminated water, cancer clusters - these phrases suggest deception and irresponsibility. But more significantly, they are watchwords for a growing struggle between communities, corporations, and government. In No Safe Place , sociologists, public policy professionals, and activists will learn how residents of Woburn, Massachusetts discovered a childhood leukemia cluster and eventually sued two corporate giants. Their story gives rise to questions important to any concerned citizen: What kind of government regulatory action can control pollution? Just how effective can the recent upsurge of popular participation in science and technology be? Phil Brown, a medical sociologist, and Edwin Mikkelsen, psychiatric consultant to the plaintiffs, look at the Woburn experience in light of similar cases, such as Love Canal, in order to show that toxic waste contamination reveals fundamental flaws in the corporate, governmental, and scientific spheres.The authors strike a humane, constructive note amidst chilling odds, advocating extensive lay involvement based on the Woburn model of civic action. Finally, they propose a safe policy for toxic wastes and governmental/corporate responsibility. Woburn, the authors predict, will become a code word for environmental struggles.   [brief]
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Title: Civic wars: democracy and public life in the American city during the nineteenth century
Author: Ryan, Mary P
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | United States History | Urban Studies | Gender Studies | Ethnic Studies
Publisher's Description: Mary P. Ryan traces the fate of public life and the emergence of ethnic, class, and gender conflict in the nineteenth-century city in this ambitious retelling of a key period of American political and social history. Basing her analysis on three quite different cities - New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco - Ryan illustrates how city spaces were used, understood, and fought over by a dazzling variety of social groups and political forces. She finds that the democratic exuberance America enjoyed in the 1820s and 1840s was irrevocably damaged by the Civil War. Civic life rebounded after the War but was, in Ryan's words, "less public, less democratic, and more visibly scarred by racial bigotry."Ryan's analysis is played out on three different levels - the spatial, the ceremonial, and the political. As she follows the decline of informal democracy from the age of Jackson to the heyday of industrial capitalism, she finds the roots of America's resilient democratic culture in the vigorous, often belligerent urban conflicts that found expression in the social movements, riots, celebrations, and other events that punctuated daily life in these urban centers. With its insightful comparisons, meticulous research, and graceful narrative, this study illustrates the ways in which American cities of the nineteenth century were as full of cultural differences and as fractured by social and economic changes as any metropolis today.   [brief]
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Title: Learning to be a sage: selections from the Conversations of Master Chu, arranged topically
Author: Zhu, Xi 1130-1200
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Philosophy | Asian Studies | China | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: Students and teachers of Chinese history and philosophy will not want to miss Daniel Gardner's accessible translation of the teachings of Chu Hsi (1130-1200) - a luminary of the Confucian tradition who dominated Chinese intellectual life for centuries. Homing in on a primary concern of our own time, Gardner focuses on Chu Hsi's passionate interest in education and its importance to individual development.For hundreds of years, every literate person in China was familiar with Chu Hsi's teachings. They informed the curricula of private academies and public schools and became the basis of the state's prestigious civil service examinations. Nor was Chu's influence limited to China. In Korea and Japan as well, his teachings defined the terms of scholarly debate and served as the foundation for state ideology.Chu Hsi was convinced that through education anyone could learn to be fully moral and thus travel the road to sagehood. Throughout his life, he struggled with the philosophical questions underlying education: What should people learn? How should they go about learning? What enables them to learn? What are the aims and the effects of learning?Part One of Learning to Be a Sage examines Chu Hsi's views on learning and how he arrived at them. Part Two presents a translation of the chapters devoted to learning in the Conversations of Master Chu .   [brief]
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Title: The color bind: California's battle to end affirmative action 
Author: Chavez, Lydia 1951-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Politics | American Studies | Public Policy | California and the West
Publisher's Description: The Color Bind tells the story of how Glynn Custred and Thomas Wood, two unknown academics, decided to write Proposition 209 in 1992 and thereby set in motion a series of events, far beyond their control, destined to transform the legal, political, and everyday meaning of civil rights for the next generation. Going behind the mass media coverage of the initiative, Lydia Chávez narrates the complex underlying motivations and maneuvering of the people, organizations, and political parties involved in the campaign to end affirmative action in California.For the first time, the role of University of California regent Ward Connerly in the campaign - one largely assigned to public relations - is put into perspective. In the course of the book Chávez also provides a rare behind-the-scenes journalistic account of the complex and fascinating workings of the initiative process. Chávez recreates the post-election climate of 1994, when the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI) appeared to be the right-time, right-place vehicle for Governor Pete Wilson and other Republican presidential prospects. President Clinton and the state Democratic Party thought the CCRI would splinter the party and jeopardize the upcoming presidential election. The Republicans, who saw the CCRI as a "wedge issue" to use against the Democrats, found to their surprise that the initiative was much more divisive in their own party.Updating her text to include the most current material, Chávez deftly delineates the interplay of competing interests around the CCRI, and explains why the opposition was unsuccessful in its strategy to fight the initiative. Her analysis probes the momentous - and national - implications of this state initiative in shaping the future of affirmative action in this country.   [brief]
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Title: Managing the medical arms race: public policy and medical device innovation 
Author: Foote, Susan Bartlett
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Politics | Medicine | Public Policy | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: The allure of medical innovation is powerful - it holds out the promise of perfect health, the end of pain, the deferral of death. Our insatiable appetite for costly new technologies, fed by a profusion of innovations and the profits they generate, has led to what has been dubbed the medical arms race. During the last several decades government has been called upon to manage the escalation of this race.Foote has written the first comprehensive examination of the profound influence of government policies on medical innovation. She explains how these policies have proliferated to affect every stage of the innovative process in medical device technology - from the first research idea to the patient's bedside. Drawing on case studies of technologies as diverse as lasers, cardiac pacemakers, CT scanners, and IUDs, she traces the interaction between the industry and government institutions, including the National Institutes of Health, the FDA, and the Medicare and Medicaid programs.Public policies during the 1950s and 1960s, Foote discovers, tended to promote innovation, while the regulation and cost controls of the 1970s and 1980s began to inhibit it. For the 1990s and beyond she proposes incremental policy improvements that will rationalize and streamline government intervention. She cautions that we must recognize the limits of medical technology and public policy to cure all ills.Medical innovation is a crucial part of health care reform, a subject of increasing complexity and controversy. Written clearly and accessibly, Managing the Medical Arms Race is an invaluable source for medical, industry, and policy professionals, but it also has much to say to anybody concerned with how we as a society choose to take care of our health.   [brief]
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Title: Learning from experience: minority identities, multicultural struggles 
Author: Moya, Paula M. L
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Literature | American Studies | Ethnic Studies | Chicano Studies | Gender Studies | Social and Political Thought | Politics | Social Theory | Immigration
Publisher's Description: In Learning from Experience, Paula Moya offers an alternative to some influential philosophical assumptions about identity and experience in contemporary literary theory. Arguing that the texts and lived experiences of subordinated people are rich sources of insight about our society, Moya presents a nuanced universalist justification for identity-based work in ethnic studies. This strikingly original book provides eloquent analyses of such postmodernist feminists as Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Norma Alarcón, and Chela Sandoval, and counters the assimilationist proposals of minority neoconservatives such as Shelby Steele and Richard Rodriguez. It advances realist proposals for multicultural education and offers an understanding of the interpretive power of Chicana feminists including Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Helena María Viramontes. Learning from Experience enlarges our concept of identity and offers new ways to situate aspects of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation in discursive and sociopolitical contexts.   [brief]
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Title: What machines can't do: politics and technology in the industrial enterprise
Author: Thomas, Robert Joseph 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Economics and Business | Politics | Sociology | Technology and Society
Publisher's Description: Virtually every manufacturing company has plans for an automated "factory of the future." But Robert J. Thomas argues that smart machines may not hold the key to an industrial renaissance. In this provocative and enlightening book, he takes us inside four successful manufacturing enterprises to reveal the social and political dynamics that are an integral part of new production technology. His interviews with nearly 300 individuals, from top corporate executives to engineers to workers and union representatives, give his study particular credibility and offer surprising insights into the organizational power struggles that determine the form and performance of new technologies.Thomas urges managers not to put blind hopes into smarter machines but to find smarter ways to organize people. As U.S. companies battle for survival in an era of growing global competition, What Machines Can't Do is an invaluable treatise on the ways we organize work. While its call for change is likely to be controversial, it will also attract anyone who wishes to understand the full impact of new technology on jobs, organizations, and the future of the industrial enterprise.   [brief]
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Title: Althusser and the renewal of Marxist social theory 
Author: Resch, Robert Paul
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | Political Theory | Social and Political Thought
Publisher's Description: The writings of the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and his associates have figured prominently in the development of contemporary social theory. The Althusserian school of Structural Marxism is a startlingly original synthesis of Marxism and Modernism, which has produced a large body of work that extends across the human sciences and the humanities to engage a wide variety of cultures, theoretical problems, and political issues. Despite the fact that Althusser himself is widely recognized as a major figure, the breadth, coherence, and achievements of Structural Marxism as a whole have gone largely unrecognized.In this, the most systematic and wide-ranging assessment of Structural Marxism in any language, Resch provides a comprehensive and thematic introduction to the work of Althusser, Nicos Poulantzas, Pierre Macherey, Etienne Balibar, Emmanuel Terray, Terry Eagleton, Göran Therborn, Renée Balibar, Perry Anderson, Pierre-Philippe Rey, Michel Pêchaux, Guy Bois, and others. Resch's sympathetic and critical study demonstrates the enormous significance of Althusser's modernist renewal of Marxist social theory and its ongoing challenge to post-Marxist movements such as postmodernism and neo-liberalism.   [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: Take my word: autobiographical innovations of ethnic American working women 
Author: Goldman, Anne E 1960-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Literature | Literary Theory and Criticism | Ethnic Studies | Women's Studies | United States History | American Studies
Publisher's Description: In an innovative critique of traditional approaches to autobiography, Anne E. Goldman convincingly demonstrates that ethnic women can and do speak for themselves, even in the most unlikely contexts. Citing a wide variety of nontraditional texts - including the cookbooks of Nuevo Mexicanas, African American memoirs of midwifery and healing, and Jewish women's histories of the garment industry - Goldman illustrates how American women have asserted their ethnic identities and made their voices heard over and sometimes against the interests of publishers, editors, and readers. While the dominant culture has interpreted works of ethnic literature as representative of a people rather than an individual, the working women of this study insist upon their own agency in narrating rich and complicated self-portraits.   [brief]
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Title: Learning to go to school in Japan: the transition from home to preschool life
Author: Peak, Lois
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Japan | Education
Publisher's Description: Japanese two-year-olds are indulged, dependent, and undisciplined toddlers, but by the age of six they have become obedient, self-reliant, and cooperative students. When Lois Peak traveled to Japan in search of the "magical childrearing technique" behind this transformation, she discovered that the answer lies not in the family but in the preschool, where teachers gently train their pupils in proper group behavior. Using case studies drawn from two contrasting schools, Peak documents the important early stages of socialization in Japanese culture.Contrary to popular perceptions, Japanese preschools are play-centered environments that pay little attention to academic preparation. It is here that Japanese children learn their first lessons in group life. The primary goal of these cheerful--even boisterous--settings is not to teach academic facts of learning-readiness skills but to inculcate behavior and attitudes appropriate to life in public social situations.Peak compares the behavior considered permissible at home with that required of children at preschool, and argues that the teacher is expected to be the primary agent in the child's transition. Step by step, she brings the socialization process to life, through a skillful combination of classroom observations, interviews with mothers and teachers, transcripts of classroom events, and quotations from Japanese professional literature.   [brief]
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Title: Biodiversity conservation in Costa Rica: learning the lessons in a seasonal dry forest
Author: Frankie, G. W
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: EcologyEvolutionEnvironment | Ecology | Conservation | Latin American Studies
Publisher's Description: The beautiful tropical dry forest of northwest Costa Rica, with its highly seasonal rainfall and diversely vegetated landscape, is disappearing even more rapidly than Costa Rica's better-known rain forest, primarily because it has been easier to convert to agriculture. This book, based on more than thirty years of study, offers the first comprehensive look at the ecology, biodiversity, and conservation status of this endangered and fragile region. The contributors, from Costa Rica, Britain, Mexico, and the United States, and representing the fields of ecology, environmental education, policy, and the law, examine the major plant and animal groups living in the dry forest and present the first technical evaluation of Costa Rica's conservation efforts. As they assess the status of their area of specialty in the dry forest, the contributors also look beyond this particular region to show how its plants and animals are ecologically and evolutionarily connected to other geographic areas in Costa Rica and Central America. Their chapters cover topics such as watershed and coastal management, plant phenology, pollination, insects, birds, mammals, amphibians, and reptiles. They also consider the socioeconomic, policy, legal, and political aspects of biodiversity conservation, giving the volume a wide-ranging perspective and making a unique contribution to our knowledge of the tropical dry forest. The book concludes with an important synthesis of the contributors' recommendations on future directions, policies, and actions that will better conserve biodiversity in Costa Rica and other neotropical forests as well.   [brief]
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Title: Prague territories: national conflict and cultural innovation in Franz Kafka's fin de siècle
Author: Spector, Scott 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History of Food | European History | Jewish Studies | European Studies
Publisher's Description: Scott Spector's adventurous cultural history maps for the first time the "territories" carved out by German-Jewish intellectuals living in Prague at the dawn of the twentieth century. Spector explores the social, cultural, and ideological contexts in which Franz Kafka and his contemporaries flourished, revealing previously unseen relationships between politics and culture. His incisive readings of a broad array of German writers feature the work of Kafka and the so-called "Prague circle" and encompass journalism, political theory, Zionism, and translation as well as literary program and practice. With the collapse of German-liberal cultural and political power in the late-nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire, Prague's bourgeois Jews found themselves squeezed between a growing Czech national movement on the one hand and a racial rather than cultural conception of Germanness on the other. Displaced from the central social and cultural position they had come to occupy, the members of the "postliberal" Kafka generation were dazzlingly productive and original, far out of proportion to their numbers. Seeking a relationship between ideological crisis and cultural innovation, Spector observes the emergence of new forms of territoriality. He identifies three fundamental areas of cultural inventiveness related to this Prague circle's political and cultural dilemma. One was Expressionism, a revolt against all limits and boundaries, the second was a spiritual form of Zionism incorporating a novel approach to Jewish identity that seems to have been at odds with the pragmatic establishment of a Jewish state, and the third was a sort of cultural no-man's-land in which translation and mediation took the place of "territory." Spector's investigation of these areas shows that the intensely particular, idiosyncratic experience of German-speaking Jews in Prague allows access to much broader and more general conditions of modernity. Combining theoretical sophistication with a refreshingly original and readable style, Prague Territories illuminates some early signs of a contemporary crisis from which we have not yet emerged.   [brief]
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Title: Education and society in late imperial China, 1600-1900
Author: Elman, Benjamin A 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Asian History | China
Publisher's Description: This comprehensive volume integrates the history of late imperial China with the history of education over three centuries, revealing the significance of education in Chinese social, political, and intellectual life. A collaboration between social and intellectual historians, these fifteen essays pr . . . [more]
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Title: Crescendo of the virtuoso: spectacle, skill, and self-promotion in Paris during the Age of Revolution 
Author: Metzner, Paul 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | European History | French Studies | European Studies
Publisher's Description: During the Age of Revolution, Paris came alive with wildly popular virtuoso performances. Whether the performers were musicians or chefs, chess players or detectives, these virtuosos transformed their technical skills into dramatic spectacles, presenting the marvelous and the outré for spellbound audiences. Who these characters were, how they attained their fame, and why Paris became the focal point of their activities is the subject of Paul Metzner's absorbing study. Covering the years 1775 to 1850, Metzner describes the careers of a handful of virtuosos: chess masters who played several games at once; a chef who sculpted hundreds of four-foot-tall architectural fantasies in sugar; the first police detective, whose memoirs inspired the invention of the detective story; a violinist who played whole pieces on a single string. He examines these virtuosos as a group in the context of the society that was then the capital of Western civilization.   [brief]
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Title: Thing knowledge: a philosophy of scientific instruments
Author: Baird, Davis
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Philosophy | Technology and Society
Publisher's Description: Western philosophers have traditionally concentrated on theory as the means for expressing knowledge about a variety of phenomena. This absorbing book challenges this fundamental notion by showing how objects themselves, specifically scientific instruments, can express knowledge. As he considers numerous intriguing examples, Davis Baird gives us the tools to "read" the material products of science and technology and to understand their place in culture. Making a provocative and original challenge to our conception of knowledge itself, Thing Knowledge demands that we take a new look at theories of science and technology, knowledge, progress, and change. Baird considers a wide range of instruments, including Faraday's first electric motor, eighteenth-century mechanical models of the solar system, the cyclotron, various instruments developed by analytical chemists between 1930 and 1960, spectrometers, and more.   [brief]
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Title: African successes: four public managers of Kenyan rural development 
Author: Leonard, David K
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Politics | African Studies
Publisher's Description: For the past twenty-five years Kenya has progressed while much of Africa has stagnated. Instead of the economic disasters, underdevelopment, and serious food shortages that have plagued its neighbors, Kenya has enjoyed an expanding economy and agriculture. And instead of a corrupt and incompetent public administration, Kenya has established several successful rural development programs run by public servants with integrity and professional commitment.What accounts for these Kenyan successes? In this innovative study, David Leonard illustrates the way public policy is made and implemented in Kenya by focusing on four public officials who have had a great impact on rural development. He skillfully weaves his analyses of Kenya's political, economic, and administrative systems into evocative biographical portraits of Charles Karanja, General Manager of the Kenya Tea Development Authority, Harris Mule, administrative head of Finance and Planning, Ishmael Muriithi, head of the Veterinary Department, and Simeon Nyachae, Cabinet Secretary and chief of the Civil Service. The result is a fascinating glimpse of Kenyan political life from the inside, set in the context of the historical and social forces that have shaped that country's government.   [brief]
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Title: The calligraphic state: textual domination and history in a Muslim society 
Author: Messick, Brinkley Morris
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Anthropology | Middle Eastern History | Cultural Anthropology | Middle Eastern Studies
Publisher's Description: In this innovative combination of anthropology, history, and postmodern theory, Brinkley Messick examines the changing relation of writing and authority in a Muslim society from the late nineteenth century to the present. The creation and interpretation of texts, from sacred scriptures to administrative and legal contracts, are among the fundamental ways that authority is established and maintained in a complex state. Yet few scholars have explored this process and the ways in which it changes, especially outside the Western world.Messick brings together intensive ethnography and textual analysis from a wealth of material: Islamic jurisprudence, Yemeni histories, local documents. In exploring the structure and transformation of literacy, law, and statecraft in Yemen, he raises important issues that are of comparative significance for understanding political life in other Muslim and nonwestern states as well.   [brief]
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