Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Description
A Systems Theory of Religion, still unfinished at Niklas Luhmann's death in 1998, was first published in German two years later thanks to the editorial work of André Kieserling. One of Luhmann's most important projects, it exemplifies his later work while redefining the subject matter of the sociology of religion. Religion, for Luhmann, is one of the many functionally differentiated social systems that make up modern society. All such subsystems...
Author
Language
English
Description
Tax cuts are such a pervasive feature of the American political landscape that the political establishment rarely questions them. Since 2001, Congress has abolished the tax on inherited wealth and passed a major income tax cut every year, including two of the three largest income tax cuts in American history despite a long drawn-out war and massive budget deficits. The Permanent Tax Revolt traces the origins of this anti-tax campaign to the 1970s,...
Author
Language
English
Description
Symbolic resources affect social, cultural, and economic development. The value of being "Made in America" or "Made in Italy," for example, depends not only on the material advantages each place offers but also on the symbolic resources embedded in those places of production. Drawing on case studies that range from the vineyards of South Africa and the textiles of Thailand to the Mundo Maya in Latin America and tourist destinations in Tuscany, this...
Author
Language
English
Description
The world economic order has been upended by the rise of the BRIC nations and the attendant decline of the United States' international influence. In Breaking the WTO, Kristen Hopewell provides a groundbreaking analysis of how these power shifts have played out in one of the most important theaters of global governance: the World Trade Organization. Hopewell argues that the collapse of the Doha Round negotiations in 2008 signals a crisis in the American-led...
Author
Language
English
Description
State Phobia and Civil Society draws extensively upon the work of Michel Foucault to argue for the necessity of the concept of the state in political and social analysis. In so doing, it takes on not only the dominant view in the human sciences that the concept of the state is outmoded, but also the large interpretative literature on Foucault, which claims that he displaces the state for a de-centered analytics of power. Understanding Foucault means...
Author
Language
English
Description
Stem cell research has sparked controversy and heated debate since the first human stem cell line was derived in 1998. Too frequently these debates devolve to simple judgments-good or bad, life-saving medicine or bioethical nightmare, symbol of human ingenuity or our fall from grace-ignoring the people affected. With this book, Ruha Benjamin moves the terms of debate to focus on the shifting relationship between science and society, on the people...
Author
Language
English
Description
Barack Obama's election as the first black president in American history forced a reconsideration of racial reality and possibility. It also incited an outpouring of discussion and analysis of Obama's personal and political exploits. Paint the White House Black fills a significant void in Obama-themed debate, shifting the emphasis from the details of Obama's political career to an understanding of how race works in America. In this groundbreaking...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Class and Power in the New Deal provides a new perspective on the origins and implementation of the three most important policies that emerged during the New Deal-the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the National Labor Relations Act, and the Social Security Act. It reveals how Northern corporate moderates, representing some of the largest fortunes and biggest companies of that era, proposed all three major initiatives and explores why there were no viable...
Author
Language
English
Description
The Asian Financial Crisis dramatically illustrated the vulnerability of financial markets in emerging, transitional, and advanced economies. In response, international organizations insisted that legal reforms could help protect markets from financial breakdowns. Sitting at the nexus between the legal system and the market, corporate bankruptcy law ensures that the casualties of capitalism are treated in an orderly way. Halliday and Carruthers show...
Author
Language
English
Description
National Matters investigates the role of material culture and materiality in defining and solidifying national identity in everyday practice. Examining a range of "things"-from art objects, clay fragments, and broken stones to clothing, food, and urban green space-the contributors to this volume explore the importance of matter in making the nation appear real, close, and important to its citizens. Symbols and material objects do not just reflect...
Author
Language
English
Description
A Thrice-Told Tale is one ethnographer's imaginative and powerful response to the methodological issues raised by feminist and postmodernist critics of traditional ethnography. The author, a feminist anthropologist, uses three texts developed out of her research in Taiwan-a piece of fiction, anthropological fieldnotes, and a social science article-to explore some of these criticisms. Each text takes a different perspective, is written in a different...
Author
Language
English
Description
This study analyzes the impact of Spanish rule on Indian peasant identity in the late colonial period by investigating three areas of social behavior. Based on the criminal trial records and related documents from the regions of central Mexico and Oaxaca, it attempts to discover how peasants conceived of their role under Spanish rule, how they behaved under various kinds of street, and how they felt about their Spanish overlords. In examining the...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
This second volume of Niklas Luhmann's two-part final work was first published in German in 1997. The culmination of his thirty-year theoretical project to reconceptualize sociology, it offers a comprehensive description of modern society. Beginning with an account of the fluidity of meaning and the accordingly high improbability of successful communication, Luhmann analyzes a range of communicative media, including language, writing, the printing...
Author
Language
English
Description
The 2008 Sichuan earthquake killed 87,000 people and left 5 million homeless. In response to the devastation, an unprecedented wave of volunteers and civic associations streamed into Sichuan to offer help. The Politics of Compassion examines how civically engaged citizens acted on the ground, how they understood the meaning of their actions, and how the political climate shaped their actions and understandings. Using extensive data from interviews,...
Author
Language
English
Description
In this groundbreaking study of Puerto Rican and Dominican migration to the United States, Wendy D. Roth explores the influence of migration on changing cultural conceptions of race-for the newcomers, for their host society, and for those who remain in the countries left behind. Just as migrants can gain new language proficiencies, they can pick up new understandings of race. But adopting an American idea about race does not mean abandoning earlier...
Author
Language
English
Description
Asked to name an activist, many people think of someone like Cesar Chavez or Rosa Parks-someone uniquely and passionately devoted to a cause. Yet, two-thirds of Americans report having belonged to a social movement, attended a protest, or engaged in some form of contentious political activity. Activism, in other words, is something that the vast majority of people engage in. This book examines these more common experiences to ask how and when people...
Author
Language
English
Description
Insulated from the dust, noise, and crowds churning outside, China's luxury hotels are staging areas for the new economic and political landscape of the country. These hotels, along with other emerging service businesses, offer an important, new source of employment for millions of workers, but also bring to light levels of inequality that surpass most developed nations. Examining how gender enables the globalization of markets and how emerging forms...
Author
Language
English
Description
This book addresses the impact of globalization on the lives of youth, focusing on the role of legal institutions and discourses. As practices and ideas travel the globe-such as the promotion and transmission of zero tolerance and retributive justice programs, the near ubiquitous acceptance of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the transnational migration of street gangs-the legal arena is being transformed. The essays in this book...
Author
Language
English
Description
In 2004, the U.S. State Department declared Filipina hostesses in Japan the largest group of sex trafficked persons in the world. Since receiving this global attention, the number of hostesses entering Japan has dropped by nearly 90 percent-from more than 80,000 in 2004 to just over 8,000 today. To some, this might suggest a victory for the global anti-trafficking campaign, but Rhacel Parreñas counters that this drastic decline-which stripped thousands...
Author
Language
English
Description
Speculation is often associated with financial practices, but The Time of Money makes the case that it not be restricted to the financial sphere. It argues that the expansion of finance has created a distinctive social world, one that demands a speculative stance toward life in general. Replacing a logic of extraction, speculation changes our relationship to time and organizes our social worlds to maximize the productive capacities of populations...
In Interlibrary Loan
Didn't find what you need? Items not owned by Penticton Public Library can be requested from other Interlibrary Loan libraries to be delivered to your local library for pickup. Items must be over 1 year old.
Didn't find it?
Can't find what you are looking for? Try our Materials Request Service for new books published this year. Submit Request