University of Chicago Press: New Titles in Sociology: General Sociology

Militant Liverpool

Diane Frost; Peter North — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 05:00:00 GMT

In May of 1983—in the wake of a victory in the Falkland Islands—Margaret Thatcher won the second of her three general election victories. Liverpool, going against the grain in the same year, elected a Labour council that vowed to be different, joining others across the country in refusing to a set a Thatcher-like budget that would hurt the poorest citizens of the United Kingdom. At first wildly popular, the council soon became the center of a battle between city and central governments. Militant Liverpool gets underneath this complex development, offering evenhanded assessments and testimonies from key agents during that time of upheaval. In doing so, it provides historical insight into the similar political and economic environment that Liverpool now faces thirty years later.

Unequal Health

Danny Dorling — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Health inequalities are the most important inequalities of all, and in the United States and United Kingdom they have reached a formidable size. In this new book from provocative critic Daniel Dorling, health inequalities are held up as the scandal of our times. While health is generally better now than it was a century ago, the gaps in life expectancy between regions, cities—even neighborhoods—have surpassed the worst measures recorded over the past century. Drawing on international studies, annotated lectures, newspaper articles, and interviews, Dorling provides an authoritative critique of this egregious social problem, calling for immediate action against an injustice that any leading nation should be ashamed to allow.

Education Debate

Stephen J. Ball — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

In this fully updated edition of The Education Debate, Stephen J. Ball guides us through a flood of government initiatives and policies concerning education over the past twenty years, showing how these policy interventions have changed the landscape and meaning of education, turned children into learners and parents into consumers, and played their part in the reformation of contemporary governance. Analyzing current policies and ideas around education from a sociological approach, he addresses issues of class, choice, globalization, race, and citizenship. The book will interest student teachers, other students of politics and social policy courses, and the general reader who wants to go beyond the simplistic analyses of newspapers.

Political Arithmetic

Robert William Fogel; Enid M. Fogel; Mark Guglielmo; Nathaniel Grotte — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

We take for granted today that the assessments, measurements, and forecasts of economists are crucial to the decision-making of governments and businesses alike. But less than a century ago that wasn’t the case—economists simply didn’t have the necessary information or statistical tools to understand the ever more complicated modern economy.

With Political Arithmetic, Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Fogel and his collaborators tell the story of economist Simon Kuznets, the founding of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the creation of the concept of GNP, which for the first time enabled us to measure the performance of entire economies. The book weaves together the many strands of political and economic thought and historical pressures that together created the demand for more detailed economic thinking—Progressive-era hopes for activist government, the production demands of World War I, Herbert Hoover’s interest in business cycles as President Harding’s commerce secretary, and the catastrophic economic failures of the Great Depression—and shows how, through trial and error, measurement and analysis, economists such as Kuznets rose to the occasion and in the process built a discipline whose knowledge could be put to practical use in everyday decision-making.

The product of a lifetime of studying the workings of economies and skillfully employing the tools of economics, Political Arithmetic is simultaneously a history of a key period of economic thought and a testament to the power of applied ideas.

Symbolic Power, Politics, and Intellectuals

David L. Swartz — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Power is the central organizing principle of all social life, from culture and education to stratification and taste. And there is no more prominent name in the analysis of power than that of noted sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Throughout his career, Bourdieu challenged the commonly held view that symbolic power—the power to dominate—is solely symbolic. He emphasized that symbolic power helps create and maintain social hierarchies, which form the very bedrock of political life. By the time of his death in 2002, Bourdieu had become a leading public intellectual, and his argument about the more subtle and influential ways that cultural resources and symbolic categories prevail in power arrangements and practices had gained broad recognition.

In Symbolic Power, Politics, and Intellectuals, David L. Swartz delves deeply into Bourdieu’s work to show how central—but often overlooked—power and politics are to an understanding of sociology. Arguing that power and politics stand at the core of Bourdieu’s sociology, Swartz illuminates Bourdieu’s political project for the social sciences, as well as Bourdieu’s own political activism, explaining how sociology is not just science but also a crucial form of political engagement.

Introduction to International Migration Studies

Marco Martiniello; Jan Rath — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

This essential volume is the second published in the textbook series of the International Migration and Social Cohesion Research Network. The editors have assembled a comprehensive collection of twenty-five classic papers that have had a lasting impact on studies of international migration and immigrant integration in Europe. The contributors discuss migration studies in the context of both history and theory as their base point, presenting a broad range of central topics in an accessible textbook format.

School Admissions and Accountability

Mike Feintuck; Roz Stevens — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

The processes for allocating places at secondary schools in England are always controversial. School Admissions and Accountability addresses issues relevant to school admissions over the past sixty years, exploring three primary ways it has been done: planning via local authorities, quasi-market mechanisms, and random allocation. Each approach is assessed on its own terms, but also examined via constitutional and legal analysis. The book shows how repeated failure to identify and pursue specific values for school admissions underlies questions regarding the fairness of the process. Interdisciplinary in approach, it makes the issue of school admissions relevant and accessible to a wide readership in education, social policy, and sociolegal studies.?

SPSS Step by Step

Cole Davis — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

SPSS Step by Step is a concise overview for beginning and intermediate statistical test users. Clearly written—and without relying on mathematical formulas—it covers topics such as qualitative data analysis, multiple regression, survival analysis, and factor analysis. A logically ordered guide to analyzing everyday problems, it will prove invaluable for undergraduate and postgraduate students and academics undertaking or teaching research and will also be of interest to professionals in social work, criminal justice, health, and education.