Title: Acceptable risk?: making decisions in a toxic environment 
Author: Clarke, Lee Ben
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Sociology | Technology and Society | Environmental Studies | Public Policy
Publisher's Description: Organizations and modern technology give us much of what we value, but they have also given us Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Bhopal. The question at the heart of this paradox is "What is acceptable risk?" Based on his examination of the 1981 contamination of an office building in Binghamton, New York, Lee Clarke's compelling study argues that organizational processes are the key to understanding how some risks rather than others are defined as acceptable. He finds a pattern of decision-making based on relationships among organizations rather than the authority of individuals or single agencies.   [brief]
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Title: Aging in the past: demography, society, and old age 
Author: Kertzer, David I 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Sociology | History | Demography
Publisher's Description: Thanks to improved food, medicine, and living conditions, the average age of the population is increasing throughout the modern industrialized world. Yet, despite the recent upsurge of scholarly interest in the lives of older people and the blossoming of historical demography, little historical demographic attention has been paid to the lives of the elderly. A landmark volume, Aging in the Past marks the emergence of the historical demographic study of aging.Following a masterly explication of the new field by Peter Laslett, leading scholars in family history and historical demography offer new research results and fresh analyses that greatly increase our understanding of aging, historically and across cultures. Focusing primarily on post-Industrial Europe and the United States, they explore a range of issues under the broad topics of living arrangements, widowhood, and retirement and mortality. This important work provides a much-needed historical perspective on and suggests possible alternative solutions to the problems of the aged.   [brief]
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Title: AIDS: the making of a chronic disease 
Author: Fee, Elizabeth
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | Medicine | United States History | Sociology
Publisher's Description: When AIDS was first recognized in 1981, most experts believed that it was a plague, a virulent unexpected disease. They thought AIDS, as a plague, would resemble the great epidemics of the past: it would be devastating but would soon subside, perhaps never to return. By the middle 1980s, however, it became increasingly clear that AIDS was a chronic infection, not a classic plague.In this follow-up to AIDS: The Burdens of History , editors Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox present essays that describe how AIDS has come to be regarded as a chronic disease. Representing diverse fields and professions, the twenty-three contributors to this work use historical methods to analyze politics and public policy, human rights issues, and the changing populations with HIV infection. They examine the federal government's testing of drugs for cancer and HIV, and show how the policy makers' choice of a specific historical model (chronic disease versus plague) affected their decisions. A powerful photo essay reveals the strengths of women from various backgrounds and lifestyles who are coping with HIV. A sensitive account of the complex relationships of the gay community to AIDS is included. Finally, several contributors provide a sampling of international perspectives on the impact of AIDS in other nations.   [brief]
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Title: Alliance capitalism: the social organization of Japanese business 
Author: Gerlach, Michael L
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Economics and Business | Sociology | Japan
Publisher's Description: Business practices in Japan inspire fierce and even acrimonious debate, especially when they are compared to American practices. This book attempts to explain the remarkable economic success of Japan in the postwar period - a success it is crucial for us to understand in a time marked by controversial trade imbalances and concerns over competitive industrial performance.Gerlach focuses on what he calls the intercorporate alliance, the innovative and increasingly pervasive practice of bringing together a cluster of affiliated companies that extends across a broad range of markets. The best known of these alliances are the keiretsu , or enterprise groups, which include both diversified families of firms located around major banks and trading companies and vertical families of suppliers and distributors linked to prominent manufacturers in the automobile, electronics, and other industries. In providing a key link between isolated local firms and extended international markets, the intercorporate alliance has had profound effects on the industrial and social organization of Japanese businesses.Gerlach casts his net widely. He not only provides a rigorous analysis of intercorporate capitalism in Japan, making useful distinctions between Japanese and American practices, but he also develops a broad theoretical context for understanding Japan's business networks. Addressing economists, sociologists, and other social scientists, he argues that the intercorporate alliance is as much a result of overlapping political, economic, and social forces as are such traditional Western economic institutions as the public corporation and the stock market.Most compellingly, Alliance Capitalism raises important questions about the best method of exchange in any economy. It identifies situations where cooperation among companies is an effective way of channeling corporate activities in a world marked by complexity and rapid change, and considers in detail alternatives to hostile takeovers and other characteristic features of American capitalism. The book also points to the broader challenges facing Japan and its trading partners as they seek to coordinate their distinctive forms of economic organization.   [brief]
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Title: America at century's end 
Author: Wolfe, Alan 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: American Studies | Ethnic Studies | Sociology | Urban Studies | Politics | Postcolonial Studies
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Title: American homo: community and perversity 
Author: Escoffier, Jeffrey
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Gender Studies | Sociology | American Studies | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies
Publisher's Description: Jeffrey Escoffier traces the emergence of a gay and lesbian political identity over the last four decades in this wide-ranging collection of his most influential essays. Situating the development of gay and lesbian communities in a broad sweep of recent American history, Escoffier examines how an urban subculture created by stigmatized and invisible men and women evolved into a vital public community with an activist political agenda and an influential position in contemporary American culture. Detailing what he calls the "political economy of the closet," Escoffier argues that the market process often played a crucial role (for better or for worse) in the emergence of gay and lesbian communities, and conversely, that these new communities have significantly impacted the American marketplace.From the development of a camp sensibility in popular culture - inspired by the erotic exhibitionism of drag queens - to the public reformation of safer-sex guidelines, Escoffier demonstrates how the gay movement has gradually acquired both social authority and recognition as a booming market. Throughout the ongoing struggle for legitimacy, gays and lesbians have had to negotiate the historical tension between the homoeroticism that courses through American culture and periodic outbreaks of homophobic paranoia. Escoffier follows the lesbian and gay movement across the contested terrain of American political life between the poles of multiculturalism and the religious right, to reveal how sexual minorities constitute a challenge to American society even as they are thoroughly integrated as citizens and kin. From McCarthy-era witchhunts to the activism of Queer Nation, Escoffier vividly describes the characteristic American homosexual journey through the tangled political web of authenticity, identity, and community.   [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: Authors of their own lives: intellectual autobiographies 
Author: Berger, Bennett M
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Sociology | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: All students and scholars are curious about the human faces behind the impersonal rhetoric of academic disciplines. Here twenty of America's most prominent sociologists recount the intellectual and biographical events that shaped their careers. Family history, ethnicity, fear, private animosities, extraordinary determination, and sometimes plain good fortune are among the many forces that combine to mold the individual talents presented in Authors of Their Own Lives . With contributions from women and men, young and old, native-born Americans and immigrants, quantitative scholars and qualitative ones, this book provides a fascinating source for students and professional sociologists alike.Some of the autobiographies maintain their reserve, others are profoundly revealing. Their subjects range from childhood, educational, and intellectual influences, to academic careerism and burnout, to the history of American sociology. Authors stands alone as a deeply personal autobiographical account of contemporary sociology.   [brief]
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Title: Behind the postmodern facade: architectural change in late twentieth-century America 
Author: Larson, Magali Sarfatti
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Architecture | Architecture | Philosophy | Politics | American Studies | Sociology | Social Theory
Publisher's Description: Magali Larson's comprehensive study explores how architecture "happens" and what has become of the profession in the postmodern era. Drawing from extensive interviews with pivotal architects - from Philip Johnson, who was among the first to introduce European modernism to America, to Peter Eisenman, identified with a new "deconstructionist" style - she analyzes the complex tensions that exist between economic interest, professional status, and architectural product. She investigates the symbolic awards and recognition accorded by prestigious journals and panels, exposing the inner workings of a profession in a precarious social position. Larson captures the struggles around status, place, and power as architects seek to redefine their very purpose in contemporary America.The author's novel approach in synthesizing sociological research and theory proposes nothing less than a new cultural history of architecture. This is a ground-breaking contribution to the study of culture and the sociology of knowledge, as well as to architectural and urban history.   [brief]
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Title: Between craft and class: skilled workers and factory politics in the United States and Britain, 1890-1922 
Author: Haydu, Jeffrey
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Sociology | United States History | European History | Labor Studies | Technology and Society
Publisher's Description: Between Craft and Class provides an incisive new look at workers' responses to the momentous economic changes surrounding them in the early years of the twentieth century. In this work, Haydu focuses on the reaction of skilled metal workers to new production methods that threatened time-honored craft traditions. He finds that the workers' responses to industrial change varied - some defended the status quo, while others agreed to trade customary rules for economic rewards. Under some conditions class protest arose, as workers of diverse skills and trades joined to demand a greater voice in the management of industry. Between Craft and Class explores how broadly based movements for workers' control developed during this critical period, and why they ultimately failed.Comparing workers in the United States and Britain, Haydu's scholarship is distinguished by extensive primary source research and provocative theoretical insights. In its scope and depth, this book will revise current notions of craft politics and working-class radicalism during this period.   [brief]
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Title: Between feminism and labor: the significance of the comparable worth movement 
Author: Blum, Linda M
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Sociology | Gender Studies | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: "Equal pay for equal work" has long been a forceful slogan of the feminist and labor movements. Now, however, as the American economy depends more and more on "women's work," it has become clear that this objective does not benefit the majority of women, who are employed in sex-segregated jobs. In Between Feminism and Labor , Linda M. Blum examines the movement for comparable worth, or equal pay for comparable work, as a strategy to raise wages for the "pink-collar" jobs that are most frequently occupied by women. She explores the larger political implications of the movement and provides the first study of pay equity to focus directly on the mobilization of the female work force at the grass-roots level.Through two case studies of local comparable worth movements - in San Jose and Contra Costa County, California - Blum probes several important issues. She asks whether comparable worth can contribute to the formation of active labor-feminist alliances, and after a nuanced, intelligent analysis of the complexities and contradictions of comparable worth, endorses its radical potential to improve women's wages and forge links between gender- and class-based politics. Between Feminism and Labor also situates comparable worth in the context of the limitations of affirmative action, a strategy seeking to move women into male jobs as opposed to raising the value of women's work. It is the first study to contrast these two strategies and to place them within the theoretical and political debates over the validation of gender difference versus the requirement of gender neutrality. As such, the book should stimulate debate among those concerned with the future of the feminist movement, as well as those interested in the future of organized labor and progressive politics in America.   [brief]
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Title: Beyond second opinions: making choices about fertility treatment 
Author: Turiel, Judith Steinberg 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Science | Sociology | Gender Studies | Medicine
Publisher's Description: Beyond Second Opinions is both an exposé of the risks, errors, and distortions surrounding fertility medicine and an authoritative guide for people seeking treatment. Accessible, comprehensive, and extremely well-informed, this book takes the reader beyond hype to the hard data on diagnoses and treatments. Judith Steinberg Turiel, a consumer health activist and herself a veteran of fertility treatments, uses the most up-to-date medical literature to shed new light on difficult decisions patients face today and on reproductive questions society must begin to address now. Those who are seeking a more balanced perspective to help them make better, more informed decisions will find a wealth of information about current reproductive interventions - from simple fertility pills to dazzling experimental options - as well as a discussion of the non-medical forces (economic and political) that shape an individual's treatment choices and reproductive outcomes. Despite quantities of information showered upon patients, they remain woefully misinformed; some fertility treatments may actually reduce chances for a successful pregnancy and threaten a patient's health. Turiel looks beyond surface claims to the real information, often uncovering counterintuitive findings and sometimes scandalous revelations. She exposes a realm of unregulated expansion, unscientific experimentation, and recent scandal over stolen embryos. Weaving together first-hand accounts, compelling stories, a range of scientific information, and lively anecdotes, Turiel addresses the persistent gulfs that separate medical professionals and health care consumers. In the process she arms laypeople with what they might not learn about infertility practices from doctors, patient education brochures, and the newspaper.   [brief]
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Title: Big doctoring in America: profiles in primary care 
Author: Mullan, Fitzhugh
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Medicine | Health Care | Sociology
Publisher's Description: The general practitioner was once America's doctor. The GP delivered babies, removed gallbladders, and sat by the bedsides of the dying. But as the twentieth century progressed, the pattern of medical care in the United States changed dramatically. By the 1960s, the GP was almost extinct. The later part of the twentieth century, however, saw a rebirth of the idea of the GP in the form of primary care practitioners. In this engrossing collection of oral histories and provocative essays about the past and future of generalism in health care, Fitzhugh Mullan - a pediatrician, writer, and historian - argues that primary care is a fascinating, important, and still endangered calling. In conveying the personal voices of primary care practitioners, Mullan sheds light on the political and economic contradictions that confront American medicine. Mullan interviewed dozens of primary care practitioners - family physicians, internists, pediatricians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants - asking them about their lives and their work. He explains how, during the last forty years, the primary care movement has emerged built on the principles of "big doctoring"--coordinated, comprehensive care over time. This book is essential reading for understanding core issues of the current health care dilemma. As our country struggles with managed care, market reforms, and cost containment strategies in medicine, Big Doctoring in America provides an engrossing and illuminating look at those in the trenches of the profession.   [brief]
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Title: Bureaucracy and race: native administration in South Africa 
Author: Evans, Ivan Thomas 1957-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: African Studies | African History | Sociology | Postcolonial Studies | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Bureaucracy and Race overturns the common assumption that apartheid in South Africa was enforced only through terror and coercion. Without understating the role of violent intervention, Ivan Evans shows that apartheid was sustained by a great and ever-swelling bureaucracy. The Department of Native Affairs (DNA), which had dwindled during the last years of the segregation regime, unexpectedly revived and became the arrogant, authoritarian fortress of apartheid after 1948. The DNA was a major player in the prolonged exclusion of Africans from citizenship and the establishment of a racially repressive labor market. Exploring the connections between racial domination and bureaucratic growth in South Africa, Evans points out that the DNA's transformation of oppression into "civil administration" institutionalized and, for whites, legitimized a vast, coercive bureaucratic culture, which ensnared millions of Africans in its workings and corrupted the entire state. Evans focuses on certain features of apartheid - the pass system, the "racialization of space" in urban areas, and the cooptation of African chiefs in the Bantustans - in order to make it clear that the state's relentless administration, not its overtly repressive institutions, was the most distinctive feature of South Africa in the 1950s. All observers of South Africa past and present and of totalitarian states in general will follow with interest the story of how the Department of Native Affairs was crucial in transforming "the idea of apartheid" into a persuasive - and all too durable - practice.   [brief]
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Title: Busing and backlash: white against white in a California school district Lillian B. Rubin 
Author: Rubin, Lillian B
Published: University of California Press,  1973
Subjects: Sociology | Urban Studies | American Studies | African American Studies
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Title: Chinese families in the post-Mao era 
Author: Davis, Deborah 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Sociology | Anthropology | China
Publisher's Description: How have the momentous policy shifts that followed the death of Mao Zedong changed families in China? What are the effects of the decollectivization of agriculture, the encouragement of limited private enterprise, and the world's strictest birth-control policy? Eleven sociologists and anthropologists explore these and other questions in this path-breaking volume. The essays concern both urban and rural communities and range from intellectual to working-class families. They show that there is no single trend in Chinese family organization today, but rather a mosaic of forms and strategies that must be seen in the light of particular local conditions.   [brief]
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Title: Citizenship, gender, and work: the social organization of industrial agriculture 
Author: Thomas, Robert J
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Sociology | Labor Studies | Anthropology | Gender Studies | Agriculture
Publisher's Description: Why do farm workers earn less and have a lower status than blue-collar employees in comparable jobs? Robert J. Thomas answers this question through a multi-method study of agricultural work and labor markets. Fieldwork as a lettuce harvester provides valuable insights from the perspective of undocum . . . [more]
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Title: Cool conduct: the culture of distance in Weimar Germany 
Author: Lethen, Helmut
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: History | Sociology | German Studies | Literary Theory and Criticism
Publisher's Description: Cool Conduct is an elegant interpretation of attitudes and mentalities that informed the Weimar Republic by a scholar well known for his profound knowledge of this period. Helmut Lethen writes of "cool conduct" as a cultivated antidote to the heated atmosphere of post-World War I Germany, as a way o . . . [more]
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Title: Critical crossings: the New York intellectuals in postwar America 
Author: Jumonville, Neil
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | Autobiographies and Biographies | Sociology | Politics | American Studies
Publisher's Description: The period immediately following the Second World War was a time, observed Randall Jarrell, when many American writers looked to the art of criticism as the representative act of the intellectual. Rethinking this interval in our culture, Neil Jumonville focuses on the group of writers and thinkers who founded, edited, and wrote for some of the most influential magazines in the country, including Partisan Review , Politics , Commentary , and Dissent . In their rejection of ideological, visionary, and romantic outlooks, reviewers and essayists such as Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, Lionel Trilling, Harold Rosenberg, and Daniel Bell adopted a pragmatic criticism that had a profound influence on the American intellectual community. By placing pragmatism at the center of intellectual activity, the New York Critics crossed from large belief systems to more tentative answers in the hope of redefining the proper function of the intellectual in the new postwar world.Because members of the New York group always valued being intellectuals more than being political leftists, they adopted a cultural elitism that opposed mass culture. Ready to combat any form of absolutist thought, they found themselves pitted against a series of antagonists, from the 1930s to the present, whom they considered insufficiently rational and analytical to be good intellectuals: the Communists and their sympathizers, the Beat writers, and the New Left. Jumonville tells the story of some of the paradoxes and dilemmas that confront all intellectuals. In this sense the book is as much about what it means to be an intellectual as it is about a specific group of thinkers.   [brief]
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Title: A democratic South Africa?: constitutional engineering in a divided society 
Author: Horowitz, Donald L
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Politics | African Studies | Sociology | Law
Publisher's Description: Can a society as deeply divided as South Africa become democratic? In a most timely work, Donald L. Horowitz, author of the acclaimed Ethnic Groups in Conflict , points to the conditions that make democracy an improbable outcome in South Africa. At the same time, he identifies ways to overcome these obstacles, and he describes institutions that offer constitution makers the best chance for a democratic future.South Africa is generally considered an isolated case, a country unlike any other. Drawing on his extensive experience of racially and ethnically divided societies, however, Horowitz brings South Africa back into African and comparative politics. Experience gained in Nigeria, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and other divided societies around the world is relevant because, as South Africa leaves apartheid behind, it will still confront problems of pluralism: racial, ethnic, and ideological. Countries like South Africa, Horowitz argues, must develop institutions capable of coping with such divisions.Reviewing an array of constitutional proposals for South Africa - group rights, consociation, partition, binationalism, and an enhanced role for the judiciary - Horowitz shows that most are inappropriate for the country's problems, or else run afoul of some major ideological taboo. Institutions that are both apt and acceptable do exist, however. These are premised on the need to create incentives for accommodation across group lines. In the final chapter, Horowitz makes a major contribution to the theory of democratization as he considers how commitments to democracy might be extracted even from political groups with undemocratic objectives.Ranging skillfully across studies of social distance and stereotypes, electoral and party systems, constitutions and judiciaries, conflict and accommodation, and negotiation and democratization, Horowitz displays a broad comparative vision. His innovative study will change the way theorists and practitioners approach the task of making democracy work in difficult conditions.   [brief]
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