SOCIOLOGY

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    What Children Need
Waldfogel, Jane
Emphasizing the importance of parental choice, quality of care, and work opportunities, economist Jane Waldfogel guides readers through a maze of social science research evidence to offer comprehensive answers and a vision for change. Drawing on the evidence, Waldfogel proposes a bold new plan to better meet the needs of children in working families, from birth through adolescence, while respecting the core values of choice, quality, and work.
A Nation by Design
Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America
Zolberg, Aristide R.
In A Nation by Design, Aristide Zolberg explores American immigration policy from the colonial period to the present, discussing how it has been used as a tool of nation building. This is an authoritative account of American immigration history and the political and social factors that brought it about. Zolberg's book shows how America has struggled to shape the immigration process to construct the kind of population it desires.
Made to Break
Technology and Obsolescence in America
Slade, Giles
Made to Break is a history of twentieth-century technology as seen through the prism of obsolescence. Giles Slade explains how disposability was a necessary condition for America's rejection of tradition and our acceptance of change and impermanence. This book gives us a detailed and harrowing picture of how, by choosing to support ever-shorter product lives, we may well be shortening the future of our way of life as well.
Prejudice in Politics
Group Position, Public Opinion, and the Wisconsin Treaty Rights Dispute
Bobo, Lawrence D.
In Prejudice in Politics, Lawrence Bobo and Mia Tuan explore a lengthy controversy surrounding the fishing, hunting, and gathering rights of the Chippewa Indians in Wisconsin. The book uses a carefully designed survey of public opinion to explore the dynamics of prejudice and political contestation, and to further our understanding of how and why racial prejudice enters into politics in the United States.
new in paperback
 
     
    Making Whole What Has Been Smashed
On Reparations Politics
Torpey, John
This book explores the spread in recent years of political efforts to rectify injustices handed down from the past. Although it recognizes that campaigns for reparations may lead to an improvement in the well-being of victims of mistreatment by states and to reconciliation among former antagonists, it examines the extent to which the concern with the past may represent a departure from the traditionally future-oriented stance of progressive politics.
Welfare Reform
Effects of a Decade of Change
Grogger, Jeffrey
In Welfare Reform, Jeffrey Grogger and Lynn Karoly assemble evidence from numerous studies to assess how welfare reform has affected behavior. To broaden our understanding of this wide-ranging policy reform, the authors evaluate the evidence in relation to an economic model of behavior.
The End of Southern Exceptionalism
Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South
Shafer, Byron E.
Until now, the critical shift in Southern political allegiance from Democratic to Republican has been explained, by scholars and journalists, as a white backlash to the civil rights revolution. In this myth-shattering book, Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston refute that view, one stretching all the way back to V. O. Key in his classic book Southern Politics. The true story is instead one of dramatic class reversal, beginning in the 1950s and pulling everything else in its wake.
City Economics
O'Flaherty, Brendan
This introductory but innovative textbook on the economics of cities is aimed at students of urban and regional policy as well as of undergraduate economics. It deals with standard topics, including automobiles, mass transit, pollution, housing, and education but it also discusses non-standard topics such as segregation, water supply, sewers, garbage, fire prevention, housing codes, homelessness, crime, illicit drugs, and economic development.
 
     
    Wild Cowboys
Urban Marauders & the Forces of Order
Jackall, Robert
In this bloody urban saga, Robert Jackall tells how New York detectives pieced together a case of drug trafficking, money laundering, and murder, all centered on a vicious gang of Dominican youths known as the Wild Cowboys. Alongside this gripping tale he tells a sobering one--of a society with irreconcilable differences, fraught with self-doubt and moral ambivalence, where the institutional logics of law and bureaucracy often have perverse outcomes.
new in paperback
Women in Science
Career Processes and Outcomes
Xie, Yu
Why do so few women choose a career in science--even as they move into medicine and law in ever-greater numbers? In one of the most comprehensive studies of gender differences in science careers ever conducted, Women in Science provides a systematic account of how U.S. youth are selected into and out of science education in early life, and how social forces affect career outcomes later in the science labor markets.
new in paperback
Civility in the City
Blacks, Jews, and Koreans in Urban America
Lee, Jennifer
Hollywood and the news media have repeatedly depicted the inner-city retail store as a scene of racial conflict and acrimony. Civility in the City uncovers a quite different story. Jennifer Lee examines the relationships between African American, Jewish, and Korean merchants and their black customers in New York and Philadelphia, and shows that, in fact, social order, routine, and civility are the norm.
new in paperback
The Time Divide
Work, Family, and Gender Inequality
Jacobs, Jerry A.
In a panoramic study that draws on diverse sources, Jacobs and Gerson explain why and how time pressures have emerged and what we can do to alleviate them. In contrast to the conventional wisdom that all Americans are overworked, they show that time itself has become a form of social inequality that is dividing Americans in new ways--between the overworked and the underemployed, women and men, parents and non-parents.
new in paperback
 
     
    Remaking the American Mainstream
Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration
Alba, Richard
In this age of multicultural democracy, the idea of assimilation seems outdated and, in some forms, even offensive. But as Richard Alba and Victor Nee show in the first systematic treatment of assimilation since the mid-1960s, it continues to shape the immigrant experience. Surveying a variety of domains--language, socioeconomic attachments, residential patterns, and intermarriage--they demonstrate the continuing importance of assimilation in American life.
new in paperback
The Challenge of Crime
Rethinking Our Response
Ruth, Henry
Rejecting traditional liberal and conservative outlooks, The Challenge of Crime examines the history, scope, and effects of the revolution in America's response to crime since 1970. Henry Ruth and Kevin Reitz offer a comprehensive, long-term, pragmatic approach to increase public understanding of and find improvements in the nation's response to crime.
new in paperback
Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives
Delinquent Boys to Age 70
Laub, John H.
This book analyzes newly collected data on crime and social development up to age 70 for 500 men who were remanded to reform school in the 1940s. Updating their lives at the close of the twentieth century, and connecting their adult experiences to childhood, this book is arguably the longest longitudinal study of age, crime, and the life course to date.
new in paperback
The New Geography of Global Income Inequality
Firebaugh, Glenn
Critics of globalization and others maintain that the spread of consumer capitalism is dramatically polarizing the worldwide distribution of income. But as the demographer Glenn Firebaugh carefully shows, income inequality for the world peaked in the late twentieth century and is now heading downward because of declining income inequality across nations. Furthermore, as income inequality declines across nations, it is rising within nations (though not as rapidly as it is declining across nations).
new in paperback