Search results for ""stanford university press""

Lawyers in the United States are frequently described as "hired guns," willing to fight for any client and advance any interest. Claiming that their own beliefs are irrelevant to their work, they view lawyering as a technical activity, not a moral or political one. But there are others, those the authors call cause lawyers, who refuse to put aside their own convictions while they do their legal work. This "deviant" strain of lawyering is as significant as it is controversial, both in the legal profession and in the world of politics. It challenges mainstream ideas of what lawyers should do and of how they should behave. Human rights lawyers, feminist lawyers, right-to-life lawyers, civil rights and civil liberties lawyers, anti-death penalty lawyers, environmental lawyers, property rights lawyers, anti-poverty lawyers—cause lawyers go by many names, serving many causes. Something to Believe In explores the work that cause lawyers do, the role of moral and political commitment in their practice, their relationships to the organized legal profession, and the contributions they make to democratic politics.

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Information technology is a critical element of virtually every business. But effectively aligning and using it to achieve business objectives is very difficult. That is because success requires so many elements to be done properly. Over 60 business leaders and university faculty members have collaborated to bring together insights from a broad spectrum of disciplines—from strategy and finance to information systems and project management. This information is contained in clearly written, concise answers to 100 questions that every manager needs to know to use information technology effectively. Each answer includes references to web and print resources for readers needing more detailed or the most current information. Business professionals will value the book because it covers a range of important areas that few know completely. University students will find the book a valuable source of necessary information for technology and management courses. Rarely is so much diverse expertise brought together and focused in a single book. It will become an essential resource for anyone working with information systems in an organization.

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Lincoln’s heritage is as rich as that of any car built anywhere in the world, and more impressive than all but a few. The Continental produced in the 1940s was one of the first cars to be universally recognized by classic car cognoscenti. The list of Lincoln-built cars in the postwar era certified with classic—or comparable “milestone”— status by various sanctioning bodies is likewise lengthy. The Mark II tops that list, but the slab-sided Continental sedans of the 1960s led the industry in design, and the forthcoming Mark 9 promises to continue the tradition. In recent years, Lincoln has risen from an also-ran in the sales race to a leadership role opposite arch-rival Cadillac. Today, it is vying for preeminence in what has suddenly become an international market. Along the way, the cars have been unfailingly interesting, frequently magnificent and—in several instances—quite literally legends in their own time.

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This book examines the changes taking place in literary writing and publishing in contemporary China under the influence of the emerging market economy. It focuses on the revival of literary best sellers in the Chinese book market and the establishment of a best-seller production machine. The author examines how writers have become cultural entrepreneurs, how state publishing houses are now motivated by commercial incentives, and how “second-channel,” unofficial publishers and distributors both compete and cooperate with official publishing houses in a dual-track, socialist-capitalist economic system. Taken together, these changes demonstrate how economic development and culture interact in a postsocialist society, in contrast to the way they work in the mature capitalist economies of the West. That economic reforms have affected many aspects of Chinese society is well known, but this is the first comprehensive analysis of market influences in the literary field. This book thus offers a fresh perspective on the inner workings of contemporary Chinese society.

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Prostitution and Pornography examines debates about the sex industry and the adequacy of the liberal response to critiques of the sex industry. The anthology focuses particularly on the very different ways prostitution and pornography are treated. Unlike other books that deal with the sex industry, this volume brings together academics and industry veterans and survivors to discuss the ways prostitution, pornography, and other forms of commercial sex are treated, and to ask questions about the role that ideas about the self, personal identity, and freedom play in our attitudes about the sex industry.

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Production of Presence is a comprehensive version of the thinking of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, one of the most consistently original literary scholars writing today. It offers a personalized account of some of the central theoretical movements in literary studies and in the humanities over the past thirty years, together with an equally personal view of a possible future. Based on this assessment of the past and the future of literary studies and the humanities, the book develops the provocative thesis that, through their exclusive dedication to interpretation, i.e. to the reconstruction and attribution of meaning, the humanities have become incapable of addressing a dimension in all cultural phenomena that is as important as the dimension of meaning. Interpretation alone cannot do justice to the dimension of "presence," a dimension in which cultural phenomena and cultural events become tangible and have an impact on our senses and our bodies. Production of Presence is a passionate plea for a rethinking and a reshaping of the intellectual practice within the humanities.

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The aim of this book is to provide an account of modernist painting that follows on from the aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adorno. It offers a materialist account of modernism with detailed discussions of modern aesthetics from Kant to Arthur Danto, Stanley Cavell, and Adorno. It discusses in detail competing accounts of modernism: Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, Yve-Alain Bois, and Thierry de Duve; and it discusses several painters and artists in detail: Pieter de Hooch, Jackson Pollock, Robert Ryman, Cindy Sherman, and Chaim Soutine. Its central thesis is that modernist painting exemplifies a form of rationality that is an alternative to the instrumental rationality of enlightened modernity. Modernist paintings exemplify how nature and the sociality of meaning can be reconciled.

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The aim of this book is to provide an account of modernist painting that follows on from the aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adorno. It offers a materialist account of modernism with detailed discussions of modern aesthetics from Kant to Arthur Danto, Stanley Cavell, and Adorno. It discusses in detail competing accounts of modernism: Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, Yve-Alain Bois, and Thierry de Duve; and it discusses several painters and artists in detail: Pieter de Hooch, Jackson Pollock, Robert Ryman, Cindy Sherman, and Chaim Soutine. Its central thesis is that modernist painting exemplifies a form of rationality that is an alternative to the instrumental rationality of enlightened modernity. Modernist paintings exemplify how nature and the sociality of meaning can be reconciled.

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Harnessing the Holocaust presents the compelling story of how the Nazi genocide of the Jews became an almost daily source of controversy in French politics. Joan Wolf argues that from the Six-Day War through the trial of Maurice Papon in 1997-98, the Holocaust developed from a Jewish trauma into a metaphor for oppression and a symbol of victimization on a wide scale. Using scholarship from a range of disciplines, Harnessing the Holocaust argues that the roots of Holocaust politics reside in the unresolved dilemmas of Jewish emancipation and the tensions inherent in the revolutionary notion of universalism. Ultimately, the book suggests, the Holocaust became a screen for debates about what it means to be French.

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Upon its publication in 1962, this book became one of the founding texts of organizational sociology. Bringing together diverse approaches, it presented a new focus of interest: the formal organization. Blau and Scott raised the level of analysis from attention solely on individual participants and work groups to a broader understanding of organizations as collective actors. In the book, the authors reviewed multiple types of studies—including case studies, experimental research, and surveys—and integrated them to define new central themes. They used their own empirical studies of two social welfare agencies to illustrate the ways in which varying organizational contexts shape work group and participant attitudes and activities. Formal Organizations served to integrate research on both formal and informal systems, authority and leadership, and stressed the importance of links to the wider environment. This reissue, which includes a new introduction by Scott, makes this seminal work accessible to a new generation of scholars and practitioners.

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China's giant project in social engineering has drawn worldwide attention, both because of its coercive enforcement of strict birth limits, and because of the striking changes that have occurred in China's population: one of the fastest fertility declines in modern history and a gender gap among infants that is the highest in the world. These changes have contributed to an imminent crisis of social security for a rapidly aging population, provoking concern in China and abroad. What political processes underlie these population shifts? What is the political significance of population policy for the PRC regime, the Chinese people, and China's place in the world? The book documents the gradual "governmentalization" of China's population after 1949, a remarkable buildup of capacity for governance by the regime, the professions, and individuals. Since the turn of the millennium the regime has initiated a drastic shift from "hard" Leninist methods of birth planning toward "soft" neoliberal approaches involving indirect regulation by the state and self-regulation by citizens themselves. Population policy, once a lagging sector in China's transition from communism, is now helping lead the country toward more modern and internationally accepted forms of governance. Governing China's Population tells the story of these shifts, from the perspectives of both regime and society, based on internal documents, long-term fieldwork, and interviews with a wide range of actors—policymakers and implementers, propagandists and critics, compliers and resisters. This study also illuminates the far-reaching consequences for China's society and politics of deep state intrusion in individual reproduction. Like Mao's Great Leap Forward, Deng's one-child policy has created vast social suffering and human trauma. Yet power over population has also been positive and productive, promoting China's global rise by creating new kinds of "quality" persons equipped to succeed in the world economy. Politically, the PRC's population project has strengthened the regime and created a whole new field of biopolitics centering on the production and cultivation of life itself. Drawing on approaches from political science and anthropology that are rarely combined, this book develops a new kind of interdisciplinary inquiry that expands the domain of the political in provocative ways. The book provides fresh answers to broad questions about China's Leninist transition, regime capacity, "science" and "democracy," and the changing shape of Chinese modernity.

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Between 1880 and 1940, California cities were in the vanguard in creating comprehensive city plans and zoning ordinances that came to characterize modern American city growth. This book reveals the means by which property-owning middle-class women achieved entry into the male-dominated sphere of urban planning. It suggests that women in California were not excluded from public life. Instead, they embraced the middle-class ideology of propertied self-interest and participated to the fullest extent possible in the urban struggle for regional dominance that shaped this period of western history. Likewise, as urban historians have presented this story as essentially male, this work suggests that although California's urban elite often maintained a division of labor along traditional gender lines, they clearly worked in a cross-gender alliance to shape a regional identity based on a commitment to urban growth.

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Your financial health is more than a mere collection of debits and credits on a balance sheet. In fact, the numbers on a financial statement represent a series of decisions that, if made strategically, can ensure that each of us maintains our desired standard of living at every age and stage of life. Many people think that key financial choices are too complicated to make on their own. However, with the right information and guidance, we can all secure our own financial future. Your Money and Your Life is more than your average guide to financial planning and retirement. Acclaimed author and speaker Robert Z. Aliber helps readers to make efficient and effective financial decisions at key moments throughout their lives, such as where to go to college; if and when to buy a home; how much insurance, if any, to buy; how to manage savings and retirement; when the time is right to approach a professional advisor; and how to proceed with estate planning. With an eye toward the issues that are most pressing in today's economy, Aliber clearly explains the sophisticated concepts that underpin everyday money management—with the goal of making this guide the go-to reference in your financial planning library, regardless of your age or wealth. Readers of this book will come away with the sense that Aliber is their own financial planner, offering strategies that will help to guide them toward security in the present and the future. Your Money and Your Life is filled with examples to which readers will be able to relate, as well as checklists of "actionables" to help make their plans realities.

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This book takes a historical approach to examining Islam’s role in globalization. The author identifies complex historical and geopolitical trends in Islamic history, and constructs from these a clear assessment of contemporary Islam. Most important, the book examines historical trends from a perspective that contributes to an understanding of Islam in the aftermath of September 11. The author takes us through a review of the first Islamic millennium and Islam’s role as a globalizing force, to subsequent changes in the Muslim world, through a comparison with earlier radical movements in Russia, and finally to trends in contemporary political Islam and projections for future developments. Along the way, the author points out many of the challenges Islamists have faced, some of their pitfalls, and some modernizing attributes of contemporary Islam. This accessible, timely book should be of strong interest to anyone with a desire for greater understanding in this transformed global environment.

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This book adds to the environmental politics and policy literature by conducting a comprehensive investigation of business influence in agenda building and environmental policymaking in the United States over time. As part of this investigation, the author presents an analysis of six cases in which private firms were involved in disputes concerning pollution control and natural resource management. In addition to determining how much business interests influence environmental and natural resource policy, the book tests possible explanations for their level of success in shaping the government's agenda and policy. The study offers a general conceptual framework for analyzing the influence of corporate America over environmental policymaking. The research then explores how much firms have influenced Congress, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and certain natural resource agencies, and the courts on environmental and natural issues since the beginning of the environmental movement in 1970. No other study has examined the ability of business to influence environmental policy in all three branches of government and in such detail.

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Grasses of Remembrance, the second volume of Edwin Cranston's monumental Waka Anthology, carries forward the story of Japanese court poetry through its Early Classical period, drawing from sources dating from the 890s to the 1080s. These two centuries saw the revival of the prestige of poetry in the native tongue after a century of official preference for versification in Chinese. An anthology of anthologies, Grasses of Remembrance draws copiously from the first four imperially ordered collections, Kokinshu, Gosenshu, Shuishu, and Goshuishu, examining the structure and illustrating the content of each. In all, the book contains over 2,600 poems in lively and readable translation, including selections from Shinsen Man'yoshu, a late-ninth-century collection of parallel verses in Chinese and Japanese, and all 795 poems from The Tale of Genji.

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Empires of the Mind tells the story of I. A. Richards, Britain's foremost literary critic in the 1920s, and his effort to promote an 850-word version of "global" English in China. Examining the cultural milieu of Cambridge between the World Wars, where Richards's internationalist vision first arose, this book traces the heretofore-unexplored connections between Richards's literary theories and his political ideals. Richards's time in China covers a volatile period in Chinese history: the Japanese occupation, the Communist revolution, and the beginnings of the Cold War all feature prominently in the history of Basic English over a fifty-year period. Koeneke considers Richards's project in the light of current theories about imperialism: Did Basic English anticipate today's multicultural aspirations for global exchange? Or did it advance new "empires of the mind" whose spoils are language and information? Ultimately, the history of Richards's time in China offers a crucial window onto the postcolonial complexities of our own.

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Mexico’s movement toward independence from Spain was a key episode in the dissolution of the great Spanish Empire, and its accompanying armed conflict arguably the first great war of decolonization in the nineteenth century. This book argues that in addition to being a war of national liberation, the struggle was also an internal war pitting classes and ethnic groups against each other, an intensely localized struggle by rural people, especially Indians, for the preservation of their communities. While local and national elites focused their energies on wresting power from colonial authorities and building a new nation-state, rural people were often much more concerned about keeping village identities and lifeways intact against the forces of state expansion, commercialization, and modernization. Conventional wisdom says that Mexican independence was achieved through a cross-class and cross-ethnic alliance between creole ideologues, military leaders, and a mass following. This book shows that this is not only an incomplete explanation of what went on in Mexico during the decade of armed confrontation that led to Mexico’s independence, but also a distortion of Mexican social and cultural history. The author delves deeply into life histories, previously unexamined texts, statistical social profiling, and local historical ethnography to examine the dynamics of popular rebellion. He focuses especially on Mexico’s Indian villages, but also considers the role of parish priests as insurgent leaders; local conflicts over land, politics, and religious symbols; the influence of messianism and millenarianism in popular insurgent ideology; and the everyday language of political upheaval.

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An intensive global search is on for the "rule of law," the holy grail of good governance, which has led to a dramatic increase in judicial reform activities in developing countries. Very little attention, however, has been paid to the widening gap between theory and practice, or to the ongoing disconnect between stated project goals and actual funded activities. Beyond Common Knowledge examines the standard methods of legal and judicial reform. Taking stock of international experience in legal and judicial reform in Latin America, Europe, India, and China, this volume answers key questions in the judicial reform debate: What are the common assumptions about the role of the courts in improving economic growth and democratic politics? Do we expect too much from the formal legal system? Is investing in judicial reform projects a good strategy for getting at the problems of governance that beset many developing countries? If not, what are we missing?

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Psyche: Inventions of the Other is the first publication in English of the twenty-eight essay collection Jacques Derrida published in two volumes in 1998 and 2003. In Volume I, Derrida advances his reflection on many topics: psychoanalysis, theater, translation, literature, representation, racism, and nuclear war, among others. The essays in this volume also carry on Derrida's engagement with a number of key thinkers and writers: Barthes, Benjamin, de Man, Flaubert, Freud, Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, Levinas, and Ponge. Included in this volume are new or revised translations of seminal essays (for example, "Psyche: Invention of the Other," "The Retrait of Metaphor," "At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am," "Tours de Babel" and "Racism's Last Word"), as well as three essays that appear here in English for the first time.

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What accounts for the growing income inequalities in Silicon Valley, despite huge technological and economic strides? Why have the once-powerful labor unions declined in their influence? How are increasing waves of immigration and ethnic diversity changing the workplace in the Valley? Silicon Valley, Women, and the California Dream examines these questions from a fresh perspective: that provided by the history of women in Silicon Valley in the twentieth century. Silicon Valley is internationally renowned. It is less well known, however, that the Valley once contained the world's largest concentration of fruit-processing plants, set in a sea of fruit orchards. Despite the many differences between the fruit and electronics industries, one important thread connects them: the production workers have been preponderantly immigrant women. (In the early part of the twentieth century, the newcomers came primarily from southern Europe; in the latter part of the century, they came mostly from Asia and Latin America, especially Mexico.) The author examines both industries, both work forces, and the changing nature of the local power structure. Although she documents the many sources of vitality and ferment that have undergirded the region's economic might, she also demonstrates that its wealth has not been equally distributed.

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This book reflects on popular politics in Britain during the turbulent period of industrialization, focusing on how political meanings were produced and sustained. It is also a spirited series of responses to the changing terrain of historical studies. It takes as its starting point the goal of defining a middle ground between E. P. Thompson’s concept of cultural materialism and the postmodern view of culture as a system of signs and codes (with emphasis on the linguistic grounding of experience). The first part of the book evaluates and critiques the work of two of the most influential proponents of the linguistic turn in British historical writing: Gareth Stedman Jones and Patrick Joyce. The second part contains four case studies: the first two treating British political culture in the age of the French Revolution, the third dealing with the role of space in historical reasoning, and the fourth assessing the role of gentleman leaders within popular movements.

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Welfare experiments conducted at the state level during the 1990s radically restructured the American welfare state and have played a critical—and unexpected—role in the broader policymaking process. Through these experiments, previously unpopular reform ideas, such as welfare time limits, gained wide and enthusiastic support. Ultimately, the institutional legacy of the old welfare system was broken, new ideas took hold, and the welfare experiments generated a new institutional channel in policymaking. In this book, Rogers-Dillon argues that these welfare experiments were not simply scientific experiments, as their supporters frequently contend, but a powerful political tool that created a framework within which few could argue successfully against the welfare policy changes. Legislation proposed in 2002 formalized this channel of policymaking, permitting the executive, as opposed to legislative, branches of federal and state governments to renegotiate social policies—an unprecedented change in American policymaking. This book provides unique insight into how social policy is made in the United States, and how that process is changing.

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This ambitious book presents the most thorough historicist account to date of the development of subjectivity in the medieval period, as traced in medieval literature and historical documentation . Presenting the essence of the modern subject as resting in its subjection to specific historical forms of state power, the author examines literary texts from the Middle Ages that participate in the cultural invention of the subject. Overall, The Subject Medieval/Modern makes a remarkable case for the relevance of studying the Middle Ages to today's world. The book examines the constitution of subjects in literary texts as the result of the interplay of violence, ideology, and political structures as an integral part of the process of state-formation between the ninth and the fifteenth centuries. Each text is considered a singular event, a unique, self-reflexive structure modifying conventions in ideological exploration to offer performative models of subjectivity. Some texts line up with political evolution, others take a critical distance.

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Is academic writing, particularly in the disciplines of literary theory and cultural studies, needlessly obscure? The claim has been widely circulated in the media and subject to passionate debate, but it has not been the subject of serious discussion. Just Being Difficult? provides learned and thoughtful analyses of the claim, of those it targets, and of the entire question of how critical writing relates to its intended publics and to audiences beyond them. In this book, a range of distinguished scholars, including some who have been charged with willful obscurity, argue for the interest and importance of some of the procedures that critics have preferred to charge with obscurity rather than confront in another way. The debate on difficult writing hovers on the edges of all academic writing that seeks to play a role in the public arena. This collection is a much-needed contribution to the discussion.

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Gift-giving is extremely important in Japanese society, not only at personal and household levels, but at the national and macroeconomic levels as well. This book is the first in English to document the extraordinary scale, complexity, and variation of giving in contemporary Japan. Gift-Giving in Japan is based on eighteen months' fieldwork in the Tokyo metropolitan area, as well as short-term research in other parts of Japan. The core of the study is the experience of family representatives of different ages, classes, genders, occupations, neighborhoods, and religions. The author also interviewed experts, including the author of gift-giving etiquette books, Buddhist and Shinto priests, department store and funeral home employees, and workers at Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market. She participated in neighborhood festivals, election rallies, house-building rites, and other ceremonies of which gift-giving was an integral part. Recent anthropological interest in drawing a strong contrast between commodities and gifts both reflects and reinforces the conception of the gift as part of the giver and the related distinction between the realm of the gift and the realm of the marketplace. The author argues that Japanese practices of giving and receiving challenge assumptions related to this idea of the gift.

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This volume collects a number of important and revealing interviews with Richard Rorty, spanning more than two decades of his public intellectual commentary, engagement, and criticism. In colloquial language, Rorty discusses the relevance and nonrelevance of philosophy to American political and public life. The collection also provides a candid set of insights into Rorty's political beliefs and his commitment to the labor and union traditions in this country. Finally, the interviews reveal Rorty to be a deeply engaged social thinker and observer.

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Is inbreeding harmful? Are human beings and other primates naturally inclined to mate with their closest relatives? Why is incest widely prohibited? Why does the scope of the prohibition vary from society to society? Why does incest occur despite the prohibition? What are the consequences? After one hundred years of intense argument, a broad consensus has emerged on the first two questions, but the debate over the others continues. That there is a biological basis for the avoidance of inbreeding seems incontrovertible, but just how injurious inbreeding really is for successive generations remains an open question. Nor has there been any conclusion to the debate over Freud’s view that the incest taboo is necessary because humans are sexually attracted to their closest relatives—a claim countered by Westermarck's argument for the sexually inhibiting effects of early childhood association. This book brings together contributions from the fields of genetics, behavioral biology, primatology, biological and social anthropology, philosophy, and psychiatry which reexamine these questions.

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Although the study of politics dates to ancient Greece, the basic questions that interested those earliest political scientists still linger with us today: What are the origins of government? What should government do? What conditions foster effective governance? Rational choice theory offers a new means for developing correctable answers to these questions. This volume illustrates the promise of rational choice theory and demonstrates how theory can help us develop interesting, fresh conclusions about the fundamental processes of politics. Each of the book’s three sections begins with a pedagogical overview that is accessible to those with little knowledge of rational choice theory. The first group of essays then discusses various ways in which rational choice contributes to our understanding of the foundations of government. The second set focuses on the contributions of rational choice theory to institutional analysis. The final group demonstrates ways in which rational choice theory helps to understand the character of popular government.

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Memory of historical trauma has a unique power to generate works of art. This book analyzes the relation of public memory to history, forgetting, and selective memory in Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York—three late-twentieth-century cities that have confronted major social or political traumas. Berlin experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall and the city’s reemergence as the German capital; Buenos Aires lived through the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s and their legacy of state terror and disappearances; and New York City faces a set of public memory issues concerning the symbolic value of Times Square as threatened public space and the daunting task of commemorating and rebuilding after the attack on the World Trade Center. Focusing on the issue of monumentalization in divergent artistic and media practices, the book demonstrates that the transformation of spatial and temporal experience by memory politics is a major cultural effect of globalization.

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This is a study of love, specifically of men’s and women’s emotional roles vis-à-vis one another in Northeast Brazil; of how people form conjugal relationships in this region; and of the impact of rapid socioeconomic change on courtship, marriage, cohabitation, and infidelity. Rapid urbanization and expansion of the cash economy have transformed the region in a few decades. Among the transformations are shifts in how people conduct courtship, form marriages, view the proprieties of sexual behavior, and assess the proper social and economic roles of men and women. These changes have altered the relative importance of physical, economic, and emotional intimacy in conjugal relationships, transforming the nature of marriage—once defined as a largely economic relationship—into a largely emotional relationship, as ideas of romance once associated with infidelity, concubinage, and courtship are increasingly attached to marriage. The book is largely based on interviews with men and women who talked about their often complicated love lives with wit and passion, and the book is rich in personal stories and quotations. Women were asked to discuss the nature of men and women, and men were asked to talk about women. Both sexes were questioned about their views on prostitution, concubinage, and promiscuity, as well as their definitions of love. Parents were asked for their views about marriage and child rearing (especially differences in raising boys and girls), their relations with their own parents, lovers, spouses, and friends, and their views on virginity and sexual propriety. The bluntness and articulateness of the informants about their motivations and experiences not only demonstrated that men and women viewed conjugal relationships very differently but enabled the author to specify and explore these differences in unusually interesting ways.

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What does it mean to be a child or an adolescent growing up on the streets or in a state institution? How do children define their everyday lives in the midst of global processes? This ethnographic study situates childhood and adolescence as social forms within the changing family and political structures of the complex urban world of Caracas, Venezuela. The presence of youngsters on the streets of Caracas embodies social contradictions at the national level, and this book discusses how these contradictions are played out in an oil-producing nation afflicted with hyperinflation, generalized corruption, the deterioration of public services, increasing poverty, and violence. Vivid life stories told by street children themselves portray their relations with family and friends, as well as with people they encounter: police officers, journalists, social workers, and passersby at their local hangouts. The book also describes and analyzes the justice system and institutions for minors, illustrating the constant failures to respond to, contain, or lessen youth violence. Many young people come from shantytowns to the streets of Caracas for a better life, and the author shows how they seek status and power through style, pursuing commodities of the global consumer market, from Nike shoes to cellular phones. Drawing on her ethnographic data and contemporary theories of power, control, and style, the author critiques the inequalities of the Venezuelan class structure and the oil boom’s failure to provide adequate social services for a great majority of the population.

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Foreign policy makers and international relations scholars have become increasingly interested in the relationship between democracy and war. In this book, the author argues that the international relations of democratic states are best understood in the context of the interaction of democratic and international politics. Elections are an essential institution of democratic states, while war is a defining element of international politics. This book examines the interaction of these two elemental phenomena. All state leaders must deal simultaneously with internal and external pressures. The conjunction of domestic electoral pressures and international pressures for war presents an acute form of this dilemma. Those who support increasing democratic influence on foreign policy have argued that this influence would make states more peaceful, while others have asserted that it would make foreign policy more volatile. The author shows that democratic publics have been vulnerable to excessive enthusiasm for war, but that this enthusiasm is tempered in an electoral environment by the ability of politically legitimate antiwar leaders to increase the domestic costs of going to war. Democratic leaders may have an electoral incentive to seek out international conflict, but they also have a strong motivation not to allow such conflicts to escalate to war when elections are imminent. The author also argues that the transparency of electoral politics in a democracy can lead to changes in the behavior of other states. Electoral institutions serve as an effective commitment mechanism for democratic states, and other states want to avoid contributing to the favorable electoral prospects of hawkish candidates. The author supports his argument with both structured case studies and analysis of the aggregate experience of all the democratic states over the past two centuries. He shows that despite variation in public attitudes toward international conflict, democratic states have engaged in significantly fewer wars in the period leading up to elections than in other parts of their electoral cycles.

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A new moral, ethical, and legal framework is needed for international human rights law. Never in human history has there been such an elaborate international system for human rights, yet from massive disasters, such as the Darfur genocide, to everyday tragedies, such as female genital mutilation, human rights abuses continue at an alarming rate. As the world population increases and global trade brings new wealth as well as new problems, international law can and should respond better to those who live in fear of violence, neglect, or harm. Modern critiques global human rights fall into three categories: sovereignty, culture, and civil society. These are not new problems, but have long been debated as part of the legal philosophical tradition. Taking lessons from tradition and recasting them in contemporary light, Helen Stacy proposes new approaches to fill the gaps in current approaches: relational sovereignty, reciprocal adjudication, and regional human rights. She forcefully argues that law and courts must play a vital role in forging a better human rights vision in the future.

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Based on new data and new analytical frameworks, this book assesses the forces of change at play in the development of American universities and their prospects for the future. The book begins with a lengthy introduction by Clark Kerr that not only provides an overview of change since the time he coined the phrase “the city of intellect” but also discusses the major changes that will affect American universities over the next thirty years. Part One examines demographic and economic changes, such as the rise of nearly universal higher education, private gift and corporate sponsorship of research, new labor market opportunities, and increasing inequality among institutions and disciplines. Part Two assesses the profound influence of the Internet and other technologies on teaching and learning. Part Three describes how the various forces of change affect the nature of academic research and the organization of disciplines and the curriculum. Part Four analyzes the consequences of change for university governance and the means by which universities in the future can maintain high levels of achievement while maintaining high levels of autonomy. The contributors include many of today’s leading scholars of higher education. They are Andrew Abbott, Steven Brint, Richard Chait, Burton R. Clark, Randall Collins, David J. Collis, Roger L. Geiger, Patricia J. Gumport, Clark Kerr, Richard A. Lanham, Jason Owen-Smith, Walter W. Powell, Sheila Slaughter, and Carol Tomlinson-Keasey.

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Universal ideas of freedom are to be found throughout the world’s diverse intellectual and political traditions, spread by the global trade in ideas which has grown exponentially during the past 200 years. In Africa and Asia, the conceptualization of freedom for individuals and societies has been heavily influenced by the translation of specific European or American ideas of freedom into new political and social contexts. This volume represents a pioneering preliminary assessment of some of the causes and consequences of this process. Africa and Asia have too often been portrayed in Western accounts as having no historical purchase on ideas of freedom, but the chapters in this volume reveal that these societies have long had their own ideas about the proper degree of individual autonomy relative to the authority exercised by the state and other institutions. The topics covered here are ideas of freedom in Africa from the slave trade era through colonialism to the nationalism that followed World War II (Crawford Young); the many forms of freedom in the states of sub-Saharan Africa since independence (William J. Foltz); why certain concepts of freedom have been empowered and others not in the Arab states of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq (James L. Gelvin); the differing ideas of freedom in modern India for individuals and for specific social groups (Sudipta Kaviraj); the contrasting fates of ideas of freedom in Burma and Thailand (Robert H. Taylor); political struggles in the Philippines and Vietnam about the meaning and practice of freedom (Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet); the evolution of the idea of freedom in Japan with respect to freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of association, and the liberation of such unfree persons as prostitutes (Sheldon Garon); and the ways in which Chinese conceptions of political freedom resemble or depart from modern Western conceptions (Andrew J. Nathan).

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In this daring book, the author proposes that artistic and literary forms can be understood as modulations of wave forms in the physical world. By the phrase "natural syntax," he means that physical nature enters human communication literally by way of a transmitting wave frequency. This premise addresses a central question about symbolism in this century: How are our ideas symbolically related to physical reality? The author outlines a theory of communication in which nature is not reached by reference to an object; rather, nature is part of the message known only tacitly as the wavy carrier of a sign or signal. One doesn't refer to nature, even though one might be aiming to; one refers with nature as carrier vehicle. The author demonstrates that a natural language of transmission has an inherent physical syntax of patterned wave forms, which can also be described as certain "laws of form"—a phrase used by D'Arcy Thompson, L. L. Whyte, Noam Chomsky, and Stephen Jay Gould. He describes a syntax inherent in natural languages that derives from the rhythmic form of a propelling wave. Instead of the "laws" of a wave's form, however, the author speaks of its elements of rhythmic composition, because "rythmos" means "wave" in Greek and because "composition" describes the creative process across the arts. In pursuing a philosophy of rhythmic composition, the author draws on cognitive science and semiotics. But he chiefly employs symmetry theory to describe the forms of art, and especially the patterns of poetry, as structures built upon the natural syntax of wave forms. Natural syntax, it turns out, follows a fascinating group of symmetry transformations that derive from wave forms.

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This ambitious work confronts the complex question of who and what is a Nikkei, that is, a person of Japanese descent, by studying their communities in seven countries in the Americas: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Paraguay, Peru, and the United States. It also considers the special case of the many Latin American Nikkei who have returned to Japan in recent decades to seek employment. The contributors draw upon a range of disciplines to present a multifaceted portrait of people of Japanese descent in the Americas, the destination of 90 percent of Japanese emigrants. Thus, for example, the reader is able to view the Peruvian Japanese experience through the eyes of an anthropologist, a demographer/historian, and a journalist—all of whom are Peruvians of Japanese descent. Among the main questions explored in New Worlds, New Lives are: What is the historical background and current status of Nikkei society in a given country? Are there any common attributes the Nikkei share across the Americas, especially in terms of social institutions, the family, the position of women, religion, education, politics, and economics? What are the significant differences between the Nikkei populations in the various countries and why have these differences developed? What are the future prospects of Nikkei communities in the Americas?

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For seven years in the 1970s, the author lived in a village in northeast China as an ordinary farmer. In 1989, he returned to the village as an anthropologist to begin the unparalleled span of eleven years’ fieldwork that has resulted in this book—a comprehensive, vivid, and nuanced account of family change and the transformation of private life in rural China from 1949 to 1999. The author’s focus on the personal and the emotional sets this book apart from most studies of the Chinese family. Yan explores private lives to examine areas of family life that have been largely overlooked, such as emotion, desire, intimacy, privacy, conjugality, and individuality. He concludes that the past five decades have witnessed a dual transformation of private life: the rise of the private family, within which the private lives of individual women and men are thriving.

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What is a promise? What are the consequences of the act of promising? In this bold yet subtle meditation, the author contemplates the seductive promise of speech and the seductive promise of love. Imagining an encounter between Molière’s Don Juan and J. L. Austin, between a mythical figure of the French classical theater and a twentieth-century philosopher, she explores the relation between speech and the erotic, using a literary text as the ground for a telling encounter between philosophy, linguistics, and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. In the years since the publication of this book (which the author today calls “the boldest, the most provocative, but also the most playful” she has written), speech act theory has continued to play a central and defining role in the theories of sexuality, gender, performance studies, post-colonial studies, and cultural studies. This book remains topical as readers increasingly discover how multiply relevant the speaking body is. Moving beyond the domain of formal linguistic analysis to address these questions, the author has written a daring and seductive book.

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What are the processes and mechanisms involved in interpersonal behavior, and how are these constrained by human biology, social structure, and culture? Drawing on and updating classic sociological theory, and with special reference to the most recent research in evolutionary and neurophysiological theory, this ambitious work aims to present no less than a unified, general theory of what happens when people interact. Despite modern technologies that mediate communication among individuals, face-to-face interaction is still primal and primary. This book argues against recent social theory that postulates a dramatic change in the nature of human relationships under postmodernity and, instead, asserts that despite undeniable and accelerating change in people’s environments, certain basic human tendencies toward emotionally inflected, physically present social interaction remain strong. Turner builds on first principles he locates in the work of Mead, Freud, Schutz, Durkheim, and Goffman. After brief overviews of previous work on the embeddedness of social interaction in sociocultural systems and in human biology, each chapter presents elements of the microdynamics involved in encounters: emotions, motivations (transactional needs), culture (normative conventions), role processes, status, demographics, and ecology. Each chapter ends with a series of testable propositions, which are then streamlined into a series of summary principles intended to motivate future research. The book concludes with some cautious hypotheses on the potential influence of microprocesses on broader social dynamics.

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The importance of educational certification for labor market success has increased since the 1970s. But social sciences still cannot answer a fundamental question: Who goes to college and why? In On the Edge of Commitment, Stephen L. Morgan offers a new model of educational achievement to explain why some students are committed to preparation for college. Morgan's model unites in one common framework the forward-looking cost-benefit assessments of students with social influence processes. The model is then used to explain puzzling race differences in patterns of high school achievement and subsequent rates of college enrollment. The book, using this model, makes a major theoretical statement on the process of educational achievement, which will help to launch a new generation of empirical work.

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Historians have paid little attention to divorce in Japan, even though until the mid-twentieth century Japan had one of the highest divorce rates in the world. This book shows that the high prevalence of divorce was made possible by a regulatory framework condoning consensual divorce. Spouses and their families were usually free to negotiate dissolution with little interference from public authorities. Only in the rare cases of intractable conflict did parties seek legal adjudication, a situation that holds true to this day. Despite the institutional and ideological continuities over four centuries, the perception and practice of divorce have been transformed in adapting to new social roles for men and women, changing views of marriage and parenting, and changes in intergenerational relations. Married couples across all social groups have more control over initiating and terminating their marriage than ever before. Wives now have the same legal rights to sue for divorce as their husbands. The author shows, however, that not all changes have been to the women's advantage, nor were traditional practices as detrimental to women as is often assumed.

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Becoming Campesinos argues that the formation of the campesino as both a political category and a cultural identity in Mexico was one of the most enduring legacies of the great revolutionary upheavals that began in 1910. Challenging the assumption that rural peoples "naturally" share a sense of cultural solidarity and political consciousness because of their subordinate social status, the author maintains that the particular understanding of popular-class unity conveyed by the term campesino originated in the interaction of post-revolutionary ideologies and agrarian militancy during the 1920s and 1930s. The book uses oral histories, archival documents, and partisan newspapers to trace the history of one movement born of this dynamic—agrarismo in the state of Michoacán. The author argues that the interaction of grassroots militancy and political mobilization from the top meant that the rural populace entered the political sphere, not as indigenous people or rural proletarians, but as a class-like social category of campesinos.

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One of the most dramatic economic changes of the past century has been the increase in married women’s work outside the home. This volume examines the nature of married women’s participation in the economies of three East Asian countries—Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. In addition to asking what is similar or different about women’s economic participation in this region of the world compared to Western societies, the book also asks how women’s work patterns vary across the three countries. The essays focus on key theoretical questions for the study of women’s labor and, more broadly, economic gender inequality. How do we assess the “value” of work available to married women in different countries and cultural contexts? What forces promote or hinder women’s work outside the home throughout marriage and childrearing? Does wage employment necessarily benefit women more than the “informal” sector (e.g., family-run businesses)? Is full-time work always more desirable than part-time work? Do women who return to the labor force after absences due to family responsibilities incur a heavy wage penalty for interrupted careers? The essays balance comparative assessments in a broad East Asian context with detailed investigations of one or more questions in the context of a specific country. The studies reveal that, although all three countries share common cultural and demographic conditions, patterns of women’s economic participation are distinctly different in Taiwan from those in Japan and South Korea. Whereas women’s participation in Taiwan’s economy shows striking similarities to many Western countries, married women in Japan and Korea participate less in the economy, and their earnings differ more from men’s than in Taiwan or the West. Why is Taiwan more similar to the West while Japan and South Korea are more similar to each other? The book draws on a broad range of materials to explain this puzzle. One of the explanations advanced is that overall labor demand, a greater supply of highly educated men, and more rigid work conditions (especially in large firms) in Japan and South Korea are major obstacles to the equal economic participation of married women in those countries. Also, the greater flexibility in work demands and work hours prevalent in Taiwan is complemented by relatively weaker patriarchal values in the family.

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God's Beauty Parlor opens the Bible to the contested body of critical commentary on sex and sexuality known as queer theory and to masculinity studies. Through a series of dazzling rereadings staged not only in God's beauty parlor, but also in God's boudoir, locker room, and war room, the author pursues the themes of homoeroticism, masculinity, beauty, and violence through such texts as the Song of Songs, the Gospels, the Letter to the Romans, and the Book of Revelation. He ponders such matters as the curious place of the Song of Songs in the history of sexuality, or how an apparent paean to male-female love became a pretext for literary cross-dressing for legions of male Jewish and Christian commentators; Jesus' face and physique in relation to ideologies of beauty, ranging from the patristic era, when the "earthly" Jesus was regularly represented as ugly, to the contemporary global culture industry, with its trademark equation of looks with worth; the gendered and sexual substratum of Paul's doctrine of salvation embedded in his most influential epistle—not least his gendering of righteousness as masculine and sin as feminine; and the intimate imbrication of masculinity and mass death in Revelation, a book about war making men making war-making men . . . some of whom also happen to be gods. God's Beauty Parlor is an exhilarating attempt to bring some of the most significant currents in contemporary gender studies to bear on a text that, even in the post-Christian West, remains the ultimate cultural icon, cipher, and shibboleth.

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What role did population change play in East Asia’s rapid economic development? A reliable answer to the question is important because the extraordinary economic record of East Asian countries during their high-growth era (1960-90) is central to current development policy debates. This book argues that previous studies have neglected the fundamental ways in which demographic forces have influenced economic growth and regional economic integration. Consequently, the significance of East Asia’s remarkable decline in childbearing, the diminished rates of population growth, and the accompanying changes in age structure are not fully appreciated by policymakers. The fifteen essays in this volume address two broad sets of issues. First, did rapid demographic change contribute to East Asian economic development? Specifically, what aspects of the region’s development were influenced by such demographic trends as economic growth, inequality, and the economic status of women? Second, what was the role of population policy in East Asia? What policies and programs were implemented, and which of them achieved their goals? Were demographic outcomes a product only of the region’s rapid economic development, or did population policies accelerate the transition to low fertility and slower population growth? These questions are addressed through a detailed examination of the experience between 1960 and 1990 of six East Asian economies: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia. The essays compare the countries’ distinctive approaches to population policies and examine the important channels through which population change has affected economic development. Among the topics covered are the impact of population on productivity and innovation; economic structure; saving, investment, and international capital flows; international labor migration; human resource development; distribution of income; and the economic status of women.

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Imperial Fault Lines tells the history of Christian missionary encounters with non-Christians in a part of the world where there were no Christians at all until the advent of British imperial rule in the early nineteenth century. As British and American missionaries spread out from Delhi into the heartland of Punjab, their preconceived ideas about Hinduism and Islam broke down rapidly as they established institutions requiring the close cooperation of Indians. Two-thirds of the foreign missionaries who entered the Punjab were women, and issues of gender as well as race were central dilemmas in a cultural encounter that featured numerous irresolvable conflicts. The missionaries' commitment to Christian universalism clashed with the visible realities of their imperial privileges. Although determined to build multiracial institutions based on spiritual equality, missionaries were the beneficiaries of an imperial racial hierarchy. Their social encounters with Indians were exceedingly complex, involving intimacy and affection as well as affronts and betrayals. Missionaries were compelled to react to circumstances not of their own making, and were forced to negotiate and compromise with Indian Christians, government officials, Indian critics of the missionary movement, and the many non-Christian students, patients, and staff at large and influential missionary schools, colleges, and hospitals. In villages, university-educated clergymen who had hoped to convert the Hindu and Muslim elite found themselves in the surprising position of advocating the rights of stigmatized and oppressed rural laborers. The history of elite institution-building took surprising turns during the rise of the national movement, as missionaries struggled with the conflict between their own transparent entanglement with imperialism and their attempts to foster new forms of indigenous Christianity that would outlive British imperial rule.

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