Sociology

In 1989, citizens in China and East Germany rose up, demanding political change. Both movements used the tactics of strategic nonviolence but their outcomes differed: the Tiananmen Square revolt was crushed but East German resisters were victorious. Nonviolent Revolutions examines these two movements, along with citizen revolts against authoritarian regimes in Panama, Chile, Kenya, and the Philippines in the late twentieth century. Through a comparison of successful and failed uprisings, Sharon Erickson Nepstad analyzes the effects of movement strategies and regime counter-strategies. She concludes that security force defections were critical for movement success since regimes that maintained troop loyalty were the least likely to collapse. She also examines the impact of international sanctions, arguing that they sometimes harm movements by generating new allies for authoritarian leaders or by shifting the locus of power from local civil resisters to international actors. In conclusion, this book argues that theories of armed revolution do not sufficiently account for the factors shaping unarmed revolutions. Nonviolent Revolutions offers insight into the distinctive dynamics of civil resistance and explores the reasons why nonviolent insurrections succeed or fail.

This book presents an examination of a scenario that appears likely to be played out again and again as federal budget policies result in reduced services for urban areas across the United States. Based on a three-year study conducted in Brooklyn's Greenpoint/Williamsburg section, the book is a detailed description of life in a multi-ethnic working class neighborhood during New York City's fiscal crisis of 1975–78. Updated with a new introduction to address the changes and events of the thirty years since the book's original publication, its lessons continue to demonstrate the impact of political and economic changes on everyday lives. Relating local events to national policy, this book deals directly with issues and problems that face industrial cities nationwide: ethnic and race relations are analyzed within the context of community organization and local politics; the impact of landlord/tenant relations, housing discrimination, and red-lining are examined; and the effects on the urban poor of gentrification are documented. Since neighborhood issues are often of primary concern to women, much of the book concerns the role of women as community organizers and their integration of this role with domestic responsibilities.

Every industrial nation in the world guarantees its citizens access to essential health care services—every country, that is, except the United States. In fact, one in eight Americans—43 million people—do not have any health care insurance at all. This book offers a history of America's failed efforts to address the health care needs of its citizens. Covering the entire twentieth century, it shows how each attempt to enact national health insurance was met with fierce attacks by powerful stakeholders, who mobilized their considerable resources to keep the financing of health care out of the government's hands. The author describes how, at first, physicians led the anti-reform coalition, fearful that government entry would mean government control of the lucrative private health care market. Doctors lobbied legislators, influenced elections by giving large campaign contributions to sympathetic candidates, and organized “grassroots” protests, conspiring with other like-minded groups to defeat reform efforts. As the success of Medicare and Medicaid in the mid-century led physicians and the AMA to start scaling back their attacks, the insurance industry began assuming a leading role against reform that continues to this day.

How are families responding to the challenges of parenting young people in the digital age? This book draws on in-depth interviews with families from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds in order to trace the difference that social class makes in how families are making decisions about digital and mobile media use. This book finds that upper income families employ an ethic of expressive empowerment, in which parents encourage their children to use these media in relation to education and self-development and to avoid use that might distract them from goals of achievement. Lower income families, in contrast, embrace an ethic of respectful connectedness, in which family members are encouraged to use digital and mobile media in ways that are respectful, compliant toward parents, and family focused. Each approach has its own benefits and drawbacks, as upper income families are increasingly tempted to employ communication technologies in helicopter and surveillance parenting, and lower income families may use technologies in ways that strengthen interfamilial and neighborhood bonds while inadvertently reinforcing social isolation from other groups. The book challenges the hope that digital and mobile media might assist in bridging cultural and economic divides. It concludes that as U.S. families experience lives that are increasingly isolated from those whose economic circumstances differ from their own, the different roles that digital and mobile media are playing in family lives are reinforcing rather than alleviating what continues to be a troubling economic and social gap in U.S. society.

Contemporary observers of politics in America often reduce democracy to demography. Whatever portion of the vote not explained by the class, gender, race, and religious differences of voters is attributed to the candidates' positions on the issues of the day. But are these the only—or even the main—factors that determine the vote? This book develops a new way of looking at democratic struggles for power, explaining what happened, and why, during the 2008 presidential campaign in the United States. Drawing on vivid examples taken from a range of media coverage, participant observation at a Camp Obama, and interviews with leading political journalists, the book argues that images, emotion, and performance are the central features of the battle for power. While these features have been largely overlooked by pundits, they are, in fact, the primary foci of politicians and their staff. Obama and McCain painstakingly constructed heroic self-images for their campaigns and the successful projections of those images suffused not only each candidate's actual rallies, and not only their media messages, but also the ground game. Money and organization facilitate the ground game, but they do not determine it. Emotion, images, and performance do. Though an untested senator and the underdog in his own party, Obama succeeded in casting himself as the hero—and McCain the anti-hero—and the only candidate fit to lead in challenging times. Illuminating the drama of Obama's celebrity, the effect of Sarah Palin on the race, and the impact of the emerging financial crisis, the book marries the immediacy and excitement of the final months of this historic presidential campaign with a new understanding of how politics work.

Highly popular with both the public and political leaders, community policing is the most important development in law enforcement in the last twenty-five years. But does it really work? Can police departments fundamentally change their organization? Can neighborhood problems be solved? In the early 1990s, Chicago, the nation's third-largest city, instituted the nation's largest community policing initiative. This book provides a comprehensive evaluation of that citywide program, examining its impact on crime, neighborhood residents, and the police. Based on the results of a thirteen-year study, including interviews, citywide surveys, and sophisticated statistical analyses, it reveals a city divided among African Americans, whites, and Latinos. By looking at the varying effects community policing had on each of these groups, the book provides an analysis of what works and why. As the use of community policing increases and issues related to race and immigration become more pressing, it will serve the needs of an increasing amount of students, scholars, and professionals interested in the most effective and harmonious means of keeping communities safe.

Set against the backdrop of the capital’s history, culture, and socio-political scenario, this is a full-length study of the connection between rapid urbanization, rising crime, and law enforcement in Delhi. Providing an insider’s account of the evolution of policing in Delhi since the mid-19th century, the book closely looks at the patterns of policing in the ‘seven cities of Delhi’. From infrastructure constraints and related crime, crime against women and juveniles, terrorism to technology, the typology of criminals, and its trends in the process of the growth of the metropolis—the analyses demonstrates Delhi’s uniqueness as a metropolis and the attendant challenges. Aside from presenting different methods the Delhi police adopt to prevent crime, this book attempts to evaluate the successes and failures of these methods. While the rich historical records, statistical data, maps, and empirical surveys and observations brought together for the first time provide a wealth of additional information, the bibliography offers suggestions for the interested reader. Focusing on the challenges posed by over-urbanization and the changes in policing to counter them, the book draws out valuable lessons applicable in various degrees in other Indian cities.

This book offers a probing account of the erosion of privacy in American society, which shows that we are often unwitting, if willing, accomplices, providing personal data in exchange for security or convenience. The book reveals that in today's “information society,” the personal data that we make available to virtually any organization for virtually any purpose is apt to surface elsewhere, applied to utterly different purposes. The mass collection and processing of personal information produces such tremendous efficiencies that both the public and private sector feel justified in pushing as far as they can into our private lives. There is no easy cure. Indeed, there are many cases where privacy invasion is both hurtful to the individual and indispensable to an organization's quest for efficiency. As long as we willingly accept the pursuit of profit, or the reduction of crime, or cutting government costs as sufficient reason for intensified scrutiny over our lives, then privacy will remain endangered.

Universities are unlikely venues for grading, branding, and marketing gendered beauty, bodies, poise, and style. Nonetheless, thousands of college women have sought not only college diplomas but campus beauty titles and tiaras throughout the twentieth century. The cultural power of beauty pageants continues into the 21st century as campus beauty pageants, especially racial/ethnic pageants and pageants for men, have soared in popularity. Tice asks how, and why, does higher education remain in the beauty and body business and with what effects on student bodies and identities. She explores why students compete in and attend pageants as well as why campus-based etiquette and charm schools are flourishing. Based on archival research and interviews with contemporary campus queens and university sponsors as well as hundreds of hours observing college pageants on predominantly black and white campuses, Tice examines how campus pageant contestants express personal ambitions, desires, and, sometimes, racial/political agendas to resolve the incongruities of performing in evening gowns and bathing suits on stage while seeking their degrees. Tice argues the pageants help to illuminate the shifting iterations of class, race, religion, region, culture, sexuality, and gender braided in campus rituals and student life. Moving beyond a binary of objectification versus empowerment, Tice offers a nuanced analysis of the contradictory politics of higher education, feminism and post-feminism, empowerment, consumerism, race and ethnicity, class mobility, and popular culture on student bodies and cultures, the making of idealized collegiate masculinities and femininities, and the stylization of higher education itself.

American society has been long plagued by cycles of racial violence, most dramatically in the 1960s when hundreds of ghetto uprisings erupted across American cities. Though the larger, underlying causes of contentious race relations have remained the same, the lethality, intensity, and outcomes of these urban rebellions have varied widely. What accounts for these differences? And what lessons can be learned that might reduce the destructive effects of riots and move race relations forward? This detailed study is the first attempt to compare six major race riots that occurred in the three largest American urban areas during the course of the twentieth century: in Chicago in 1919 and 1968; in New York in 1935/1943 and 1964; and in Los Angeles in 1965 and 1992. The book weaves together detailed narratives of each riot, placing them in their changing historical contexts and showing how urban space, political regimes, and economic conditions—not simply an abstract “race conflict”—have structured the nature and extent of urban rebellions. The book draws upon archival research, primary sources, case studies, and personal observations to reconstruct events—especially for the 1964 Harlem-Bedford Stuyvesant uprising and Chicago's 1968 riots where no documented studies are available. By focusing on the similarities and differences in each city, identifying the unique and persisting issues, and evaluating the ways political leaders, law enforcement, and the local political culture have either defused or exacerbated urban violence, this book points the way toward alleviating long-standing ethnic and racial tensions.