Sociology

Over the past half-century, two overarching topics have dominated the study of mass political behaviour: How do ordinary citizens form their political judgments, and how good are they from a normative perspective? This book provides a novel goal-based approach to these questions, one that compels a wholesale rethinking of the roots of responsible democratic citizenship. The central claim of the book is that partisan identity comes in qualitatively different forms, with distinct political consequences. Blind partisan loyalty, as the pejorative label implies, facilitates bias and reduces attention to valuable information. Critical loyalty, by doing the opposite, outperforms standard measures of political engagement in leading to normatively desirable judgments. Drawing on both experimental and survey methods—as well as five decades of American political history—this book examines the nature and quality of mass political judgment across a wide range of political contexts, from perceptions of the economy, to the formation, updating, and organization of public policy preferences, to electoral judgment and partisan change. Contrary to much previous scholarship, the empirical findings reveal that rational judgment—holding preferences that align with one's material interests, values, and relevant facts—does not hinge on cognitive ability. Rather, breaking out of the apathy-versus-bias prison requires critical involvement, and critical involvement requires critical partisan loyalty.

This book revisits the Black Seventh Ward neighborhood and residents of W. E. B. DuBois’s The Philadelphia Negro over the course of the twentieth century. Through the dual lens of political agency and critical historical events, Black Citymakers follows the transformation of the neighborhood from being predominantly black at the beginning of the twentieth century into a largely white upper-middle-class and commercial neighborhood by the century’s conclusion. Employing the insights of an array of scholars such as Robin D. G. Kelley, James Scott, Cathy Cohen, William Julius Wilson, and Mary Pattillo, Black Citymakers argues that black Philadelphians were by no means mere victims of large-scale socioeconomic, structural, and political changes such as deindustrialization of the local and national economy, urban renewal, and the growing federal intervention into urban America following World War II. As the book shows, black Americans framed their own understandings of urban social change, forging dynamic inter- and intraracial alliances that allowed them to shape their own migration from the old Black Seventh Ward to emergent black urban enclaves throughout Philadelphia. Whereas most urban studies analyze multiple facets of black life over the span of a few decades, Black Citymakers extends the chronology to nearly a century, capturing events such as banking and tenement collapses, housing activism, black-led antiurban renewal mobilization, and the changing politics emergent in post–civil rights Philadelphia.

Irrigation management for agriculture and rural development has a long history in South Asia, yet today it asserts a critical paradox: new scarcities are emerging, but irrigated agriculture still contributes vitally to food security and agro-industries. This collection of case studies from India and Nepal shows how irrigation management operates across complex dynamics of ecology, technology, and society, documenting interdisciplinary research approaches to study these. It takes the reader through irrigation technologies developed in different agro-ecological zones: large-scale public canal systems in semi-arid zones; small-scale farmer-managed canal systems in hill environments, ponds, and tank irrigation systems; and groundwater-based systems developed from borewells and in conjunctive use settings. It also includes a study of micro-hydel systems developed alongside irrigation. The case studies analyse these technologies in relation to processes of change through public policy and local action. They examine the design choices of irrigation agencies and farmers in irrigation provision, and show the forces of agrarian change acting on water access, property rights, and water institutions. Some review recent state policies for reforming irrigation management that introduce new organizational forms, but also promote markets and cost recovery. In this way, the volume documents the wider development policies acting onto irrigation management. The volume offers new scientific understanding of the complex interrelationships between water as a crucial resource in irrigation-based livelihoods, and the technologies and institutions that regulate its use. For emerging questions of equitable access to water and water productivity in South Asia, such interrelated understanding of technology and institutional choices is fundamental.

The study of crime has focused primarily on why particular people commit crime or why specific communities have higher crime levels than others. This book presents a new and different way of looking at the crime problem by examining why specific streets in a city have specific crime trends over time. Based on a sixteen-year longitudinal study of crime in Seattle, Washington, the book focuses our attention on small units of geographic analysis-micro communities, defined as street segments. Half of all Seattle crime each year occurs on just 5–6% of the city's street segments, yet these crime hot spots are not concentrated in a single neighborhood and street by street variability is tremendous. This book sets out to explain why. It shows how much essential information about crime is inevitably lost when we focus on larger units like neighborhoods or communities. Reorienting the study of crime by focusing on small units of geography, the book identifies a large group of possible crime risk and protective factors for street segments and an array of interventions that could be implemented to address them.

This book studies the rise of social media in the first decade of the twenty-first century, up until 2012. It provides both a historical and a critical analysis of the emergence of networking services in the context of a changing ecosystem of connective media. Such history is needed to understand how the intricate constellation of platforms profoundly affects our experience of online sociality. In a short period of time, services like Facebook, YouTube and many others have come to deeply penetrate our daily habits of communication and creative production. While most sites started out as amateur-driven community platforms, half a decade later they have turned into large corporations that do not just facilitate user connectedness, but have become global information and data mining companies extracting and exploiting user connectivity. Offering a dual analytical prism to examine techno-cultural as well as socio-economic aspects of social media, the author dissects five major platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Wikipedia. Each of these microsystems occupies a distinct position in the larger ecosystem of connective media, and yet, their underlying mechanisms for coding interfaces, steering users, filtering content, governance and business models rely on shared ideological principles. Reconstructing the premises on which these platforms are built, this study highlights how norms for online interaction and communication gradually changed. “Sharing,” “friending,” “liking,” “following,” “trending,” and “favoriting” have come to denote online practices imbued with specific technological and economic meanings. This process of normalization is part of a larger political and ideological battle over information control in an online world where everything is bound to become “social.”

The book introduces a new theory that overcomes essentializing approaches to ethnicity all the while avoiding the pitfalls of excessive constructivism. It suggests understanding ethnic/racial boundaries as the outcome of a negotiation process between actors who pursue different boundary making strategies, depending on institutional incentives, their position within power hierarchies, and their pre-existing networks of alliances. This theory contrast with mainstream approaches in the social sciences, where ethnic groups are often treated as self-evident units of observation and ethnic culture and solidarity as self-explanatory variables, thus overlooking the process through which certain ethnic cleavages but not others become culturally meaningful, politically salient, and associated with dense networks of solidarity. By paying systematic attention to variation in the nature of ethnic boundaries, the book also overcomes the exclusive focus on fluidity, malleability, and contextual instability that characterizes radically constructivist approaches. Ethnic Boundaries introduces a series of epistemological principles, theoretical stances, research designs, and modes of interpretation that allow to disentangle ethnic from other processes of group formation and to assess in how far ethnic boundaries structure the allocation of resources, invite political passion, and represent primary aspects of individual identity. Using a variety of qualitative and quantitative research techniques, several chapters exemplify how this agenda can be realized in concrete empirical research: on how local residents in immigrant neighborhoods draw symbolic boundaries against each other, on the ethnic and racial composition of friendship networks, and how ethnic closure influences the cultural values of Europeans.

No school district can be all charismatic leaders and super-teachers. It can't start from scratch, and it can't fire all its teachers and principals when students do poorly. Great charter schools can only serve a tiny minority of students. Whether we like it or not, most of our youngsters will continue to be educated in mainstream public schools. The good news, this book reveals, is that there is a sensible way to rebuild public education and close the achievement gap for all students. Indeed, this is precisely what's happening in a most unlikely place: Union City, New Jersey, a poor, crowded Latino community just across the Hudson from Manhattan. The school district—once one of the worst in the state—has ignored trendy reforms in favor of proven game-changers like quality early education, a word-soaked curriculum, and hands-on help for teachers. When beneficial new strategies have emerged, like using sophisticated data-crunching to generate pinpoint assessments to help individual students, they have been folded into the mix. The results demand that we take notice—from third grade through high school, Union City scores on the high-stakes state tests approximate the statewide average. In other words, these inner-city kids are achieving just as much as their suburban cousins in reading, writing, and math. What's even more impressive, nearly ninety percent of high school students are earning their diplomas and sixty percent of them are going to college. Top students are winning national science awards and full rides at Ivy League universities. These schools are not just good places for poor kids. They are good places for kids, period.

In the 1960s, on the heels of the Brown decision and in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, Ku Klux Klan activity boomed, reaching an intensity not seen since the 1920s, when KKK membership extended into the millions. Surprisingly, the state with the largest Klan membership—more than the rest of the South combined—was North Carolina, a supposed bastion of southern-style progressivism. Klansville, U.S.A. documents and explains the civil rights-era KKK's astounding rise and fall, by focusing on the under-explored case of the United Klans of America (UKA) in North Carolina. Like its contemporaries in the Deep South, the massive Carolina Klan engaged in secretive campaigns of terror and intimidation, but also developed a strong public presence, spreading its message and supporting its members at massive nightly rallies, afternoon street walks, weekend church services and turkey shoots, and through local radio shows and roadside billboards. The UKA's successes in the Tar Heel State provide a window into the complex appeal of the KKK as a whole, demonstrating how the Klan organized most successfully where whites perceived civil rights reforms to be a significant threat to their status, where mainstream outlets for segregationist resistance were lacking, and where the policing of the Klan's activities was lax. By connecting the KKK to the more mainstream segregationist and anti-communist groups across the South, this book offers new insight into southern conservatism, resistance to civil rights, and the region's subsequent dramatic shift to the Republican Party—shedding new light on organized racism and on how political extremism can intersect with mainstream institutions and ideals.

In 2004, the first United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government of India created a National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS) to review the country’s informal economy in general and to improve the plight of poor workers in particular. The result was a series of reports highlighting the problems of the labouring poor with regards to livelihood security. Some of the Commission’s major findings are: 86 per cent of the total number of workers are in the informal sector, self-employment and casual labor are the most common forms of employment in India, and almost 80 per cent of the informal sector workers belong to households that are poor and vulnerable. The Indian government promptly enacted two major social security laws: the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) of 2005 and the Unorganized Workers Social Security Act (UWSSA) of 2008. This book examines the impact of NREGA and UWSSA at the national level, focusing on the social security schemes designed for workers in the informal economy. It reviews the implementation of NREGA and the national health insurance scheme known as Rashtriya Swasthaya Bima Yojana (RSBY), as well as the functioning of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) and the Rajiv Aarogyasri Community Health Insurance Scheme in Andhra Pradesh. Aside from Andhra Pradesh, the book also presents case studies of the functioning of social security schemes in Kerala, Gujarat, Odisha, and Punjab.

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.