Sociology

Based on an extensive ethnography of the emergence of commercial life insurance in China, this book examines how culture impacts economic practice. It details how a Chinese life insurance market is created in the presence of an ingrained Chinese cultural taboo on the topic of death. It documents how transnational insurance firms, led by AIG’s subsidiary AIA, introduced commercial life insurance to Chinese urbanites, and how they were confronted with local resistance to the risk management concept of life insurance. It compares the organizational strategies of the transnational and the newly emerged domestic insurance firms, analyzing why they adopted disparate strategies to deal with the same local cultural resistance. It further compares the management styles of individual firms headed by executives of different origins, explaining why some were more effective in managing and motivating the local sales agents. It describes how sales agents mobilized various cultural tool-kits to prompt sales, and how potential buyers negotiated with life insurers regarding the meaning of life insurance, and the kinds of products they preferred. The book argues that these dynamics and micro-politics produced a Chinese life insurance market with a specific developmental trajectory. The market first emerged with a money management, instead of risk management, character. As the local cultural tool-kit enabled insurance practitioners to circumvent local resistance to achieve sales, local cultural values shaped the characteristics of the emergent market. This analysis sheds light on the dynamics through which modern capitalist enterprises are diffused to regions with different cultural traditions.

This book presents a new approach to how culture works in contemporary societies. Exposing our everyday myths and narratives in a series of empirical studies that range from Watergate to the Holocaust, it shows how these unseen yet potent cultural structures translate into concrete actions and institutions. Only when these deep patterns of meaning are revealed, it argues, can we understand the stubborn staying power of violence and degradation, but also the steady persistence of hope. By understanding the darker structures that restrict our imagination, we can seek to transform them. By recognizing the culture structures that sustain hope, we can allow our idealistic imaginations to gain more traction in the world.

Taking stock of the urban transport scenario in Indian cities, this is the first full-length study of the metro rail system in India. In recent times the metro rail has come up as a favoured alternative of mass transport in urban spaces faced with growing population, heightened vehicular traffic, and increased pollution. Using data, analysis, and first-hand information, this book tells the story of metro rail as proposed and undertaken across India — from Kolkata in the east and Mumbai in the west to Delhi and Jaipur in the north and Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Kochi in the south. Focusing on the complexities of project planning and contrasting the Indian experience with those of its global counterparts, this volume distils important lessons for future infrastructure projects. While the metro rail system has considerably improved inter-city connectivity, the metro story in India is an ongoing one.

Though Islam and Muslims form an integral part of the rich history and culture of India, their voice in present times is a muted one. Academic discourse in the West, which is increasingly engaging with Islam, often chooses to ignore their existence. Much of what is written about India's Muslims, by Indian as well as Western scholars, tends to highlight the reactionary and strident over the moderate and normal. In this book, Mushirul Hasan articulates a vision of Islam or rather the many different kinds of Islam, instead of the frightening monolith of popular perception, living in harmony with other faiths, and of Indian Muslims, inheritors of the great Indian civilization, living in a plural society. Engaging with the debates surrounding the society, polity, and history of India's Muslims, and using historical and literary sources, as well as the writings of modern Muslim thinkers like Aziz Ahmad and Mohammad Mujeeb, Hasan traces the development of contemporary ideas about Muslims from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, through British rule and the partition, to the present day. For Hasan, a truly secular reading of Indian history reveals Indian Islam as one that exists in a pluralist milieu

This book reflects contemporary concerns about the inadequacies of secularism in the context of religious assertiveness in recent decades. It examines the ideologies of secularism and fundamentalism in the setting of the Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh religious traditions. Each chapter begins with appropriate quotes pertaining to the subject. In a new preface and two appendices, the author recapitulates earlier formulations on the subject and revisits the current debates. The book has been described as ‘an invitation to an enticing intellectual journey that reveals new landscapes’ (Louis Dumont), acclaimed as a ‘tour de force’ (Rajni Kothari), ‘a landmark intervention from the social sciences in public affairs’ (Satish Saberwal), and a ‘major contribution to scholarship and the delineation of the interrelationship of religion and politics’ (Harold Gould).

Indian society is extremely complex, particularly in the twentieth century. However, this complexity has not been captured by Indian social theory. One reason is the theoretical burden caused by historical events such as colonialism, which incidentally brought modernity to India. Western modernity is mainly normative, and its norms include the concept of autonomous individual, freedom, and instrumental rationality. This normative project is sought to be ruthlessly implemented through modern programmes of secularism, nationalism, urbanization, and industrialization where the pre-modern is sought to be disinherited. This book explores the limitations surrounding Indian social theorists' views on Indian society. It discusses Partha Chatterjee's perspectives on Indian nationalism, Javeed Alam's interpretation of Indian secularism and the use of plural character of Indian society by some Indian social scientists, and Gopal Guru's proposal to move Dalits' lived experience from literature into social theory. The book also examines the limitations surrounding the reading of contemporary texts and activities of thinkers such as Mahatma Gandhi, Swami Vivekananda, B.R. Ambedkar, and Aurobindo Ghosh.

Conflict is ubiquitous and inevitable, but people generally dislike it and try to prevent or avoid it as much as possible. So why do clashes of right and wrong occur? And why are some more serious than others? This book presents a new theory of conflict that provides answers to these and many other questions. The heart of the theory is a completely new concept of social time. The book claims that the root cause of conflict is the movement of social time, including relational, vertical, and cultural time—changes in intimacy, inequality, and diversity. The theory of moral time reveals the causes of conflict in all human relationships, from marital and other close relationships to those between strangers, ethnic groups, and entire societies. Moreover, the theory explains the origins and clash of right and wrong not only in modern societies but across the world and across history, from conflict concerning sexual behavior such as rape, adultery, and homosexuality, to bad manners and dislike in everyday life, theft and other crime, racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, witchcraft accusations, warfare, heresy, obscenity, creativity, and insanity. The book concludes by explaining the evolution of conflict and morality across human history, from the tribal to the modern age. It also provides surprising insights into the postmodern emergence of the right to happiness and the expanding rights of humans and non-humans across the world. The book offers an incisive, powerful, and radically new understanding of human conflict—a fundamental and inescapable feature of social life.

In the past few decades the number of women entering graduate and professional schools has been going up and up, while the number of women reaching the top rung of the corporate and academic worlds has remained relatively stagnant. Why are so many women falling off the fast track? This book traces the career paths of the first generation of ambitious women who started careers in academia, law, medicine, business, and the media in large numbers in the 1970s and '80s. Many women who had started families but continued working had ended up veering off the path to upper management at a point the author calls “the second glass ceiling.” Rather than sticking to their original career goals, they allowed themselves to slide into a second tier of management that offers fewer hours, less pay, lower prestige, and limited upward mobility. Men who did likewise—entered the career world with high aspirations and then started families while working—not only did not show the same trend, they reached even higher levels of professional success than men who had no families at all. Along with her daughter, an aspiring journalist, the author has written a guide for young women who are facing the tough decision of when—and if—to start a family. It is also a guide for older women seeking a second chance to break through to the next level, as the author herself did in academia.

The environment, and how humans affect it, is more of a concern now than ever. We are constantly told that halting climate change requires raising awareness, changing attitudes, and finally altering behaviors among the general public—and doing it fast. New information, attitudes, and actions, it is conventionally assumed, will necessarily follow one from the other. However, this approach ignores much of what is known about attitudes in general and environmental attitudes in particular—a huge gap lies between what we say and what we do. Solving environmental problems requires a scientific understanding of public attitudes. Like rocks in a swollen river, attitudes often lie beneath the surface—hard to see, and even harder to move or change. This book helps us read the water and negotiate its hidden obstacles, explaining what attitudes are, how they change and influence behavior. Rather than trying to change attitudes, we need to design solutions and policies with attitudes in mind. Heberlein illustrates these points by tracing the attitudes of the well-known environmentalist Aldo Leopold, while tying social psychology to real-world behaviors throughout the book. Bringing together theory and practice, this book provides a realistic understanding of why and how attitudes matter when it comes to environmental problems; and how, by balancing natural with social science, we can step back from false assumptions and unproductive, frustrating programs to work toward fostering successful, effective environmental action.

The Naxalite beginnings are by now history, and not a little nostalgia tinges the memory of these dreaded events. The leaders, the organizers, the spine, and the continuity of the movement are the revolutionary intellectuals. The Naxalite movement is not principally a rural, agrarian problem as the doctrine of the Naxalites argues, but is a problem of the leading edge of the urban intelligentsia. Though the Naxalites take their name from the incident at Naxalbari in 1967, the defining attributes of the Naxalite view of revolution emerged only later. From the beginning, it was not the labouring poor of the nation or Bengal that Charu Mazumdar addressed, but, first, the disaffected revolutionary activists within the communist movement and, later, the ‘student–youth’. This book discusses the ideologies of the Naxalite terrorists, the terrorist in the Bengali society, the Communist Party of India, and the Indian economy.