1. Michel Crozier comes close to fitting this description. See The Trouble with America: Why the System Is Breaking Down (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984).

2. For greater documentation of these changes, see Alejandro Portes and Rubén Rumbaut, Immigrant America: A Portrait (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990). break

3. A collection of essays exploring these changes at length is Gary Gerstle and Steve Fraser, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1950 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989). For a good overview, see Ruy A. Teixeira, "Things Fall Apart: Americans and Their Political Institutions," in Change in Societal Institutions , ed. Maureen T. Hallinan, David M. Klein, and Jennifer Glass (New York: Plenum, 1990), 239-55.

4. For an analysis of how the rhetoric of American politics has changed under the impact of electronic technologies, see Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Eloquence in an Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechmaking (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

5. This, of course, is one of the major themes of Robert N. Bellah and others, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985).

6. For statistics of the changing income distribution in the United States in recent years, see Frank Levy, Dollars and Dreams: The Changing American Income Distribution (New York: Norton, 1988). What the figures mean in human terms is explored in Barbara Ehrenreich's Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: Pantheon, 1989).

7. Katherine S. Newman, Falling from Grace: The Experience of Downward Mobility in the American Middle Class (New York: Free Press, 1988).

8. An overview of the general changes in American industrial relations can be found in Thomas A. Kochan, Harry C. Katz, and Robert B. McKersie, The Transformation of American Industrial Relations (New York: Basic Books, 1986).

9. One of the best treatments of the changes in union life in the postwar period is Gordon L. Clark, Unions and Communities under Siege: American Communities and the Crisis of Organized Labor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). See also Michael Goldfield, The Decline of Organized Labor in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

10. A study of the ideology of the American family in the 1950s is Elaine Tyler May's Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1986).

11. Arlie Russell Hochschild and Anne Machung, The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home (New York: Penguin, 1989).

12. Some of the debates spawned by these developments are explored in Edward F. Zigler and Meryl Frank, eds., The Parental Leave Crisis: Toward a National Policy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988).

13. One sociologist who is worried about the possible consequences of the decline of the nuclear family, and who has written extensively about it, is David Popenoe (see Disturbing the Nest: Family Change and Decline in Modern Societies (Hawthorne, N.Y.: de Gruyter, 1988). The chapters in this book by Judith Stacey and Kathleen Gerson present a perspective quite distinct from Popenoe's.

14. See Marie Winn, Children without Childhood (New York: Pantheon, 1983).

15. For an ethnographic treatment of how peer group subcultures emerge among American youth, see Gary Schwartz, Beyond Conformity and Rebellion: Youth and Authority in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1987). break

16. Constance Perin, Everything in Its Place: Social Order and Land Use in America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977) and Belonging in America: Reading between the Lines (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).

17. These changes are explored in Walter Russell Mead, Mortal Splendor: The American Empire in Transition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

18. An in-depth review of some of the changes facing African-Americans in the United States in the 1980s is Gerald David Jaynes and Robin M. Williams, Jr., eds., A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1989). For a sensitive treatment of what these changes mean to both black and white Americans, see Bob Blauner, Black Lives, White Lives: Three Decades of Race Relations in America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989).

19. That these technological changes have not necessarily given women greater free time is the theme of Ruth Schwartz Cowan's More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1985).

20. The ways in which computers will alter how Americans understand themselves are explored by Sherry Turkle in The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (New York: Touchstone, 1985). On the impact of computers on the workplace, see Shoshana Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (New York: Basic Books, 1985).

21. For an ethnographic portrayal of how the elderly view themselves, see Sharon B. Kaufman, The Ageless Self: Sources of Meaning in Late Life (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986).

22. For historical material on the actual shape and dimension of American social institutions in this period, see Robert H. Bremmer and Gary Reichard, eds., Reshaping America: Society and Institutions, 1945-1969 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982). Studies of the cultural dynamics of the period are included in Lary May, ed., Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

23. Robin Williams, Jr.'s American Society: A Sociological Interpretation (New York: Knopf, 1951) is the best account.

24. Though British, the works of R. D. Laing and of David Cooper remain the best illustrations of this tendency; see, for example, David Graham Cooper, The Death of the Family (New York: Pantheon, 1971). A less extreme American example of the "second generation" study of institutions is Jerome H. Skolnick and Elliott Curry's Crisis in American Institutions (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970).

25. James G. March and Johan P. Olson, Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics (New York: Free Press, 1989).

26. Jon Elster, The Cement of Society: A Study of Social Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 248. Elster does go on to admit the existence of "clusters of individuals who interact more strongly with each other than with people in other clusters," thus making the study of institutions possible.

27. The work of Oliver Williamson is the most relevant. See, for example, The Economic Institutions of Capitalism: Firms, Markets, and Rational Contracting continue

(New York: Free Press, 1985). Another interesting work is Andrew Schotter, The Economic Theory of Social Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

28. See Samuel Weber, Institutions and Interpretation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); and E. J. Burt and Janie Vanpee, eds., Reading the Archive: On Texts and Institutions, Yale French Studies 77 (1990), entire issue.

29. For a recent example of this concern, see Margaret Weir, Ann Shola Orloff, and Theda Skocpol, eds., The Politics of Social Policy in the United States (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988).

30. For examples of an institutional turn in sociology, see Hallinan, Klein, and Glass, eds., Change in Societal Institutions and Michael Hechter, Karl-Dieter Opp, and Richard Wippler, eds., Social Institutions: Their Emergence, Maintenance, and Effects (New York: de Gruyter, 1990).

31. For examples of sociologists interested in neo-institutionalism from an organizational perspective, see W. Richard Scott, "The Adolescence of Institutional Theory," Administrative Science Quarterly 32 (December 1987): 493-511; and the literature cited therein; Lynne G. Zucker, ed., Institutional Patterns and Organizations: Culture and Environment (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1988); Marshall W. Meyer and Lynne G. Zucker, Permanently Failing Organization (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1989); and Paul J. Dimaggio, ed., Nonprofit Enterprise in the Arts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

32. One of the best examples of this tendency from an earlier period is Sociology Today: Problems and Prospects , 2 vols., ed. Robert K. Merton, Leonard Broom, and Leonard S. Cottrell, Jr. (New York: Harper & Row, 1959).

33. Besides other works cited in this chapter, I would also cite as representative examples of this concern the following: Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988); Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1982); Barbara Katz Rothman, Recreating Motherhood: Ideology and Technology in a Patriarchal Society (New York: Norton, 1989); Andrew Scull, Social Order/Mental Order: Anglo-American Psychiatry in Historical Perspective (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989); Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Mark Baldassere, Trouble in Paradise: The Suburban Transformation in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); Roger Waldinger, Through the Eye of the Needle: Immigrants and Entrepreneurs in New York's Garment Trades (New York: New York University Press, 1986); Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Italians and Jews of Brooklyn against Liberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985); Eviatar Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Murray Melbin, Night as Frontier: Colonizing the World after Dark (New York: Free Press, 1987); Carole Joffe, The Regulation of Sexuality: Experiences of Family Planning Workers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); and Nicole Woolsey Biggard, Charismatic Capitalism: Direct Selling Organizations in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). There are, no doubt, many relevant works I have neglected to mention. break

34. For the reflections of Riesman—and many other sociologists born two decades before those assembled in this book—see Bennett M. Berger, ed., Authors of Their Own Lives: Intellectual Autobiographies by Twenty American Sociologists (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990).