Title: The view from Vesuvius: Italian culture and the southern question
Author: Moe, Nelson 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: European Studies | European History | Intellectual History | Politics | European Literature
Publisher's Description: The vexed relationship between the two parts of Italy, often referred to as the Southern Question, has shaped that nation's political, social, and cultural life throughout the twentieth century. But how did southern Italy become "the south," a place and people seen as different from and inferior to the rest of the nation? Writing at the rich juncture of literature, history, and cultural theory, Nelson Moe explores how Italy's Mezzogiorno became both backward and picturesque, an alternately troubling and fascinating borderland between Europe and its others. This finely crafted book shows that the Southern Question is far from just an Italian issue, for its origins are deeply connected to the formation of European cultural identity between the mid-eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries. Moe examines an exciting range of unfamiliar texts and visual representations including travel writing, political discourse, literary texts, and etchings to illuminate the imaginative geography that shaped the divide between north and south. His narrative moves from a broad examination of the representation of the south in European culture to close readings of the literary works of Leopardi and Giovanni Verga. This groundbreaking investigation into the origins of the modern vision of the Mezzogiorno is made all the more urgent by the emergence of separatism in Italy in the 1990s.   [brief]
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Title: Stalin's forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and the making of a Soviet Jewish homeland: an illustrated history, 1928-1996
Author: Weinberg, Robert E
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Russian and Eastern European Studies | History | Politics | Judaism
Publisher's Description: Robert Weinberg and Bradley Berman's carefully documented and extensively illustrated book explores the Soviet government's failed experiment to create a socialist Jewish homeland. In 1934 an area popularly known as Birobidzhan, a sparsely populated region along the Sino-Soviet border some five thousand miles east of Moscow, was designated the national homeland of Soviet Jewry. Establishing the Jewish Autonomous Region was part of the Kremlin's plan to create an enclave where secular Jewish culture rooted in Yiddish and socialism could serve as an alternative to Palestine. The Kremlin also considered the region a solution to various perceived problems besetting Soviet Jews. Birobidzhan still exists today, but despite its continued official status Jews are a small minority of the inhabitants of the region. Drawing upon documents from archives in Moscow and Birobidzhan, as well as photograph collections never seen outside Birobidzhan, Weinberg's story of the Soviet Zion sheds new light on a host of important historical and contemporary issues regarding Jewish identity, community, and culture. Given the persistence of the "Jewish question" in Russia, the history of Birobidzhan provides an unusual point of entry into examining the fate of Soviet Jewry under communist rule.   [brief]
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Title: Between Sundays: Black women and everyday struggles of faith
Author: Frederick, Marla Faye 1972-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Religion | African American Studies | Women's Studies | Politics | Anthropology | Christianity
Publisher's Description: To be a black woman of faith in the American South is to understand and experience spirituality in a particular way. How this understanding expresses itself in everyday practices of faith is the subject of Between Sundays, an innovative work that takes readers beyond common misconceptions and narrow assumptions about black religion and into the actual complexities of African American women's spiritual lives. Gracefully combining narrative, interviews, and analysis, this book explores the personal, political, and spiritual commitments of a group of Baptist women whose experiences have been informed by the realities of life in a rural, southern community. In these lives, "spirituality" emerges as a space for creative agency, of vital importance to the ways in which these women interpret, inform, and reshape their social conditions--conditions often characterized by limited access to job opportunities, health care, and equitable schooling. In the words of these women, and in Marla F. Frederick's deft analysis, we see how spirituality - expressed as gratitude, empathy, or righteous discontent - operates as a transformative power in women's interactions with others, and in their own more intimate renegotiations of self.   [brief]
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Title: The new public management: improving research and policy dialogue
Author: Barzelay, Michael
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Politics | Public Policy | Economics and Business | Social Science | Sociology
Publisher's Description: How policymakers should guide, manage, and oversee public bureaucracies is a question that lies at the heart of contemporary debates about government and public administration. In their search for better systems of public management, reformers have looked in particular at the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. These countries are exemplars of the New Public Management, a term used to describe distinctive new themes, styles, and patterns of public service management. Calling for public management to become a vibrant field of public policy, this valuable book consolidates recent work on the New Public Management and provides a basis for improving research and policy debate on managing public bureaucracies. A copublication with the Russell Sage Foundation   [brief]
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Title: Civic innovation in America: community empowerment, public policy, and the movement for civic renewal
Author: Sirianni, Carmen
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Politics | Public Policy | Print Media | Environmental Studies | Social Problems
Publisher's Description: In this book, two leading experts on community action provide the first scholarly examination of the civic renewal movement that has emerged in the United States in recent decades. Sirianni Friedland examine civic innovation since the 1960s as social learning in four arenas (community organizing/development, civic environmentalism, community health, and public journalism), and they link local efforts to broader networks and to the development of "public policy for democracy." They also explore the emergence of a movement for civic renewal that builds upon the civic movements in these four arenas. In contrast to some recent studies that stress broad indicators of civic decline, this study analyzes innovation as a long process of social learning within specific institutional and policy domains with complex challenges and cross-currents. It draws upon analytical frameworks of social capital, policy learning, organizational learning, regulatory culture, democratic theory, and social movement theory. The study is based upon interviews with more than 400 innovative practitioners, as well as extensive field observation, case study, action research, and historical analysis.   [brief]
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Title: Dateline Soweto: travels with black South African reporters 
Author: Finnegan, William
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Media Studies | African Studies | Social Problems | Politics | African History
Publisher's Description: Dateline Soweto documents the working lives of black South African reporters caught between the mistrust of militant blacks, police harrassment, and white editors who - fearing government disapproval - may not print the stories these reporters risk their lives to get. William Finnegan revisited seve . . . [more]
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Title: Rainbow's end: Irish-Americans and the dilemmas of urban machine politics, 1840-1985
Author: Erie, Steven P
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Politics | Sociology | Urban Studies | Ethnic Studies | United States History
Publisher's Description: Unprecedented in its scope, Rainbow's End provides a bold new analysis of the emergence, growth, and decline of six classic Irish-American political machines in New York, Jersey City, Chicago, San Francisco, Pittsburgh and Albany. Combining the approaches of political economy and historical sociology, Erie examines a wide range of issues, including the relationship between city and state politics, the manner in which machines shaped ethnic and working-class politics, and the reasons why centralized party organizations failed to emerge in Boston and Philadelphia despite their large Irish populations. The book ends with a thorough discussion of the significance of machine politics for today's urban minorities.   [brief]
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Title: Rich democracies: political economy, public policy, and performance
Author: Wilensky, Harold L
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Politics | Social Theory | Public Policy | Economics and Business | Sociology
Publisher's Description: In this landmark work, the culmination of 30 years of systematic, comprehensive comparison of 19 rich democracies, Wilensky answers two basic questions: (1) What is distinctly modern about modern societies--in what ways are they becoming alike? (2) How do variations in types of political economy shape system performance? He specifies similarities and differences in the structure and interplay of government, political parties, the mass media, industry, labor, professions, agriculture, churches, and voluntary associations. He then demonstrates how differences in bargaining arrangements among these groups lead to contrasting policy profiles and patterns of taxing and spending, which in turn explain a large number of outcomes: economic performance, political legitimacy, equality, job security, safety and risk, real health, the reduction of poverty and environmental threats, and the effectiveness and fairness of regulatory regimes. Drawing on quantitative data and case studies covering the last 50 years and more than 400 interviews he conducted with top decision-makers and advisors, Wilensky provides a richly detailed account of the common social, economic, and labor problems modern governments confront and their contrasting styles of conflict resolution. The result is new light on the likely paths of development of rich democracies as they become richer. Assessing alternative theories, Wilensky offers a powerful critique of such images of modern society as "post-industrial" or "high-tech," "the information age" or the alleged dominance of "globalization." Because he systematically compares all of the rich democracies with at least three million population, Wilensky can specify what is truly exceptional about the United States, what it shares with Britain and Britain abroad (Canada, Australia, New Zealand) and what it shares with all or almost all of the West European democracies, Israel, and Japan. He gives careful attention to which successful social and labor policies are transferable across nations and which are not. Rich Democracies will interest both scholars and practitioners. It combines the perspectives of political economy (the interplay of markets and politics) and political sociology (the social bases of politics). It will be especially useful in courses on comparative political economy, comparative politics, European politics, public policy, political sociology, the welfare state, American government, advanced industrial societies, and industrial relations.   [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: When the Soviet Union entered world politics 
Author: Jacobson, Jon 1938-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Politics | European History | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: The dissolution of the Soviet Union has aroused much interest in the USSR's role in world politics during its 74-year history and in how the international relations of the twentieth century were shaped by the Soviet Union. Jon Jacobson examines Soviet foreign relations during the period from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the first Five-Year Plan, focusing on the problems confronting the Bolsheviks as they sought to promote national security and economic development. He demonstrates the central importance of foreign relations to the political imagination of Soviet leaders, both in their plans for industrialization and in the struggle for supremacy among Lenin's successors.Jacobson adopts a post-Cold War interpretative stance, incorporating glasnost and perestroika-era revelations. He also considers Soviet relations with both Europe and Asia from a global perspective, integrating the two modes of early Soviet foreign relations - revolution and diplomacy - into a coherent discussion. Most significantly, he synthesizes the wealth of information that became available to scholars since the 1960s. The result is a stimulating work of international history that interfaces with the sophisticated existing body of scholarship on early Soviet history.   [brief]
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Title: Material girls: making sense of feminist cultural theory
Author: Walters, Suzanna Danuta
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Gender Studies | Sociology | Women's Studies | American Studies | Politics | Media Studies
Publisher's Description: Madonna, Murphy Brown, Thelma and Louise: These much-discussed media icons are the starting points of Suzanna Walter's brilliant, much-needed introduction to feminist cultural theory. Accessible yet theoretically sophisticated, up-to-date and entertaining, Material Girls acquaints readers with the major theories, debates, and concepts in this new and exciting field.With numerous case studies and illustrations, Walters situates feminist cultural theory against the background of the women's movement and media studies. Using examples from film, television, advertising, and popular discourse, she looks at topics such as the "male gaze," narrative theory, and new work on female "ways of seeing" and spectatorship. Throughout, Walters provides a historically grounded account of representations of women in popular culture while critiquing the dominance of psychoanalytic and postmodern analyses.The first comprehensive guide to the approaches and debates that make up this growing field, Material Girls belongs on the shelf of every cultural critic and savvy student today.   [brief]
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Title: The Free Speech Movement: reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s
Author: Cohen, Robert 1955 May. 21-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: American Studies | Politics | Sociology | Gender Studies | United States History | Education
Publisher's Description: This is the authoritative and long-awaited volume on Berkeley's celebrated Free Speech Movement (FSM) of 1964. Drawing from the experiences of many movement veterans, this collection of scholarly articles and personal memoirs illuminates in fresh ways one of the most important events in the recent history of American higher education. The contributors - whose perspectives range from that of FSM leader Mario Savio to University of California president Clark Kerr - -shed new light on such issues as the origins of the FSM in the civil rights movement, the political tensions within the FSM, the day-to-day dynamics of the protest movement, the role of the Berkeley faculty and its various factions, the 1965 trial of the arrested students, and the virtually unknown "little Free Speech Movement of 1966."   [brief]
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Title: Almost chosen people: oblique biographies in the American grain
Author: Zuckerman, Michael 1939-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: History | Politics | United States History | American Literature | American Studies
Publisher's Description: Few historians are bold enough to go after America's sacred cows in their very own pastures. But Michael Zuckerman is no ordinary historian, and this collection of his essays is no ordinary book.In his effort to remake the meaning of the American tradition, Zuckerman takes the entire sweep of American history for his province. The essays in this collection, including two never before published and a new autobiographical introduction, range from early New England settlements to the hallowed corridors of modern Washington. Among his subjects are Puritans and Southern gentry, Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Spock, P. T. Barnum and Ronald Reagan. Collecting scammers and scoundrels, racists and rebels, as well as the purest genius, he writes to capture the unadorned American character.Recognized for his energy, eloquence, and iconoclasm, Zuckerman is known for provoking - and sometimes almost seducing - historians into rethinking their most cherished assumptions about the American past. Now his many fans, and readers of every persuasion, can newly appreciate the distinctive talents of one of America's most powerful social critics.   [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: Facundo: civilization and barbarism: the first complete English translation
Author: Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino 1811-1888
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Literature | History | Latin American History | Politics | Literature in Translation
Publisher's Description: A classic work of Latin American literature, Domingo Sarmiento's Facundo has become an integral part of the history, politics, and culture of Latin America since its first publication in 1845. Partially translated into English when it was first published, this foundational text appears here for the first time in its entirety. An educator and writer, Sarmiento was President of Argentina from 1868 to 1874. His Facundo is a study of the Argentine character, a prescription for the modernization of Latin America, and a protest against the tyranny of the government of Juan Manuel de Rosas (1835-1852). The book brings nineteenth-century Latin American history to life even as it raises questions still being debated today - questions regarding the "civilized" city versus the "barbaric" countryside, the treatment of indigenous and African populations, and the classically liberal plan of modernization. Facundo's celebrated and frequently anthologized portraits of the caudillo Juan Facundo Quiroga and other colorful characters give readers an exhilarating sense of Argentine culture in the making. Kathleen Ross's translation renders Sarmiento's passionate prose into English with all its richness intact, allowing the English-language reader the full experience of Facundo's intensity and historical reach.   [brief]
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Title: State capitalism and working-class radicalism in the French aircraft industry 
Author: Chapman, Herrick
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | European History | Politics | Technology and Society | French Studies
Publisher's Description: In the 1950s and 1960s France experienced an economic miracle. As the state's role expanded with efforts to create a more modern economy, however, labor relations remained more volatile and workers more radical than elsewhere in western Europe. Herrick Chapman argues in this important new book that state capitalism and working-class radicalism went hand-in-hand and that both have antecedents in the tumultuous events of the 1930s and 1940s.The author focuses on a key industry - aviation - which held center stage in France from the Great Depression to the Cold War. While manufacturers and state officials struggled to modernize, the aviation industry became a bastion of the Communist Party and an arena of combat where workers, employers, and officials promoted competing visions of industrial reform. This gave rise to a new environment where state intervention and working-class radicalism became mutually reinforcing, and by the postwar era a peculiarly contentious form of industrial politics had become firmly entrenched.Using local and national archives, the author analyzes not only how an industry transformed but also how people reacted to the Popular Front, the defeat of 1940, the Nazi Occupation, and the onset of the Cold War. He also sheds light on such central themes in modern French history as the style of entrepreneurship, the sources of state interventionism, the response of workers to technological change and the nature of the Communist movement.   [brief]
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Title: Putting Islam to work: education, politics, and religious transformation in Egypt 
Author: Starrett, Gregory 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Middle Eastern Studies | Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Education | Religion | Islam | Politics
Publisher's Description: The development of mass education and the mass media have transformed the Islamic tradition in contemporary Egypt and the wider Muslim world. In Putting Islam to Work , Gregory Starrett focuses on the historical interplay of power and public culture, showing how these new forms of communication and a growing state interest in religious instruction have changed the way the Islamic tradition is reproduced.During the twentieth century new styles of religious education, based not on the recitation of sacred texts but on moral indoctrination, have been harnessed for use in economic, political, and social development programs. More recently they have become part of the Egyptian government's strategy for combating Islamist political opposition. But in the course of this struggle, the western-style educational techniques that were adopted to generate political stability have instead resulted in a rapid Islamization of public space, the undermining of traditional religious authority structures, and a crisis of political legitimacy. Using historical, textual, and ethnographic evidence, Gregory Starrett demonstrates that today's Islamic resurgence is rooted in new ways of thinking about Islam that are based in the market, the media, and the school.   [brief]
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Title: Managing in the corporate interest: control and resistance in an American bank 
Author: Smith, Vicki 1951-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Sociology | Technology and Society | Economics and Business | Politics
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Title: Legal hermeneutics: history, theory, and practice 
Author: Leyh, Gregory
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Politics | Political Theory | Postcolonial Studies | Law | Language and Linguistics
Publisher's Description: Interpretation of the law is based on assumptions about the nature of texts, language, and the act of interpretation itself. These fourteen new essays trace the origin of these assumptions, examine their philosophical implications, and extend legal interpretation in new and constructive directions.
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Title: The enigma of 1989: the USSR and the liberation of Eastern Europe 
Author: Lévesque, Jacques
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Politics | History | European History | Russian and Eastern European Studies
Publisher's Description: The Soviet external empire fell in 1989 virtually without bloodshed. The domino-like collapse of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe was not anticipated by political experts in either the East or the West. Most surprising of all was the Soviet Union's permissive reactions to the secession. For the first time in modern history, such an epochal upheaval could take place not only without war but also without major international tensions.This book is the first comprehensive scholarly attempt to elucidate Soviet behavior toward Eastern Europe in 1989. Jacques Lévesque thoroughly analyses the policies of the USSR toward Eastern Europe during the Gorbachev era and clarifies the goals that underpinned these policies.Based on interviews with political leaders and exhaustive research in Russia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and the other ex-Warsaw Pact countries, this book traces the nuances of each country's case as a set of continually changing, mutually reinforcing causes and effects.   [brief]
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