Author: Viviana A. Zelizer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069115810X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 494
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Book Description
Revealing the human side of economic life Over the past three decades, economic sociology has been revealing how culture shapes economic life even while economic facts affect social relationships. This work has transformed the field into a flourishing and increasingly influential discipline. No one has played a greater role in this development than Viviana Zelizer, one of the world's leading sociologists. Economic Lives synthesizes and extends her most important work to date, demonstrating the full breadth and range of her field-defining contributions in a single volume for the first time. Economic Lives shows how shared cultural understandings and interpersonal relations shape everyday economic activities. Far from being simple responses to narrow individual incentives and preferences, economic actions emerge, persist, and are transformed by our relations to others. Distilling three decades of research, the book offers a distinctive vision of economic activity that brings out the hidden meanings and social actions behind the supposedly impersonal worlds of production, consumption, and asset transfer. Economic Lives ranges broadly from life insurance marketing, corporate ethics, household budgets, and migrant remittances to caring labor, workplace romance, baby markets, and payments for sex. These examples demonstrate an alternative approach to explaining how we manage economic activity—as well as a different way of understanding why conventional economic theory has proved incapable of predicting or responding to recent economic crises. Providing an important perspective on the recent past and possible futures of a growing field, Economic Lives promises to be widely read and discussed.
Author: Charles Stafford
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108654231
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
This clearly written and engaging book brings together anthropology, psychology and economics to show how these three human science disciplines address fundamental questions related to the psychology of economic life in human societies - questions that matter for people from every society and every background. Based around vivid examples drawn from field research in China and Taiwan, the author encourages anthropologists to take the psychological dimensions of economic life more seriously, but also invites psychologists and economists to pay much more attention than they currently do to cultural and historical variables. In the end, this intrinsically radical book challenges us to step away from disciplinary assumptions and to reflect more deeply on what really matters to us in our collective social and economic life.
Author: M.V. Lee Badgett
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226034010
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 318
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Book Description
How does the standard of living of gay men and lesbians compare with that of heterosexuals? Do homosexuals make financial and family decisions differently? Why are the professional lives of gay men and lesbians dissimilar from those of heterosexuals? Or do they even differ? Have gay people benefited from the recent economic boom? Or have public policies denied them their fair share? Money, Myths, and Change provides new answers to these complex questions. This is the first comprehensive work to explore the economic lives of gays and lesbians in the United States. M. V. Lee Badgett weaves through and debunks common stereotypes about gay privilege, income, and consumer behavior. Studying the ends and means of gay life from an economic perspective, she disproves the assumption that gay men and lesbians are more affluent than heterosexuals, that they inspire discrimination when they come out of the closet, that they consume more conspicuously, that they enjoy a more self-indulgent, even hedonistic lifestyle. Badgett gets to the heart of these misconceptions through an analysis of the crucial issues that affect the livelihood of gay men and lesbians: discrimination in the workplace, denial of health care benefits to domestic partners and children, lack of access to legal institutions such as marriage, the corporate wooing of gay consumer dollars, and the use of gay economic clout to inspire social and political change. Both timely and readable, Money, Myths, and Change stands as a much-needed corrective to the assumptions that inhibit gay economic equality. It is a definitive work that sheds new light on just what it means to be gay or lesbian in the United States.
Author: Chuck Collins
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801454522
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
Class Lives is an anthology of narratives dramatizing the lived experience of class in America. It includes forty original essays from authors who represent a range of classes, genders, races, ethnicities, ages, and occupations across the United States. Born into poverty, working class, the middle class, and the owning class—and every place in between—the contributors describe their class journeys in narrative form, recounting one or two key stories that illustrate their growing awareness of class and their place, changing or stable, within the class system.The stories in Class Lives are both gripping and moving. One contributor grows up in hunger and as an adult becomes an advocate for the poor and homeless. Another acknowledges the truth that her working-class father's achievements afforded her and the rest of the family access to people with power. A gifted child from a working-class home soon understands that intelligence is a commodity but finds his background incompatible with his aspirations and so attempts to divide his life into separate worlds.Together, these essays form a powerful narrative about the experience of class and the importance of learning about classism, class cultures, and the intersections of class, race, and gender. Class Lives will be a helpful resource for students, teachers, sociologists, diversity trainers, activists, and a general audience. It will leave readers with an appreciation of the poignancy and power of class and the journeys that Americans grapple with on a daily basis.
Author: Jane Jacobs
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525432876
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
In this eye-opening work of economic theory, Jane Jacobs argues that it is cities—not nations—that are the drivers of wealth. Challenging centuries of economic orthodoxy, in Cities and the Wealth of Nations the beloved author contends that healthy cities are constantly evolving to replace imported goods with locally-produced alternatives, spurring a cycle of vibrant economic growth. Intelligently argued and drawing on examples from around the world and across the ages, here Jacobs radically changes the way we view our cities—and our entire economy.
Author: Mark Granovetter
Publisher: Westview Press
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 552
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Book Description
Classic and contemporary readings in economic sociology, including several original contributions from leading scholars, providing students with a broad understanding of the dimensions of economic life
Author: Keith Wrightson
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300094121
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388
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Book Description
Wrightson describes the basic institutions and relationships of economic life in Britain, tracing the processes of change, and examines how these changes affect men, women, and children of all ages. Illustrations.
Author: Karen Jacobsen
Publisher: Kumarian Press
ISBN: 1565492048
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 145
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Book Description
What happens to refugees, the victims of forced migration, once the first rush of media attention and aid has passed and they must rebuild their lives essentially on their own? Karen Jacobsen explores the economic survival strategies of refugees, and the obstacles that they face, as they live in a protracted state of displacement. She also proposes alternative approaches for humanitarian agencies seeking to offer meaningful support.
Author: Minouche Shafik
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069120764X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
From one of the leading policy experts of our time, an urgent rethinking of how we can better support each other to thrive Whether we realize it or not, all of us participate in the social contract every day through mutual obligations among our family, community, place of work, and fellow citizens. Caring for others, paying taxes, and benefiting from public services define the social contract that supports and binds us together as a society. Today, however, our social contract has been broken by changing gender roles, technology, new models of work, aging, and the perils of climate change. Minouche Shafik takes us through stages of life we all experience—raising children, getting educated, falling ill, working, growing old—and shows how a reordering of our societies is possible. Drawing on evidence and examples from around the world, she shows how every country can provide citizens with the basics to have a decent life and be able to contribute to society. But we owe each other more than this. A more generous and inclusive society would also share more risks collectively and ask everyone to contribute for as long as they can so that everyone can fulfill their potential. What We Owe Each Other identifies the key elements of a better social contract that recognizes our interdependencies, supports and invests more in each other, and expects more of individuals in return. Powerful, hopeful, and thought-provoking, What We Owe Each Other provides practical solutions to current challenges and demonstrates how we can build a better society—together.
Author: Eli Cook
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674982541
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 365
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Book Description
How did Americans come to quantify their society’s progress and well-being in units of money? In today’s GDP-run world, prices are the standard measure of not only our goods and commodities but our environment, our communities, our nation, even our self-worth. The Pricing of Progress traces the long history of how and why we moderns adopted the monetizing values and valuations of capitalism as an indicator of human prosperity while losing sight of earlier social and moral metrics that did not put a price on everyday life. Eli Cook roots the rise of economic indicators in the emergence of modern capitalism and the contested history of English enclosure, Caribbean slavery, American industrialization, economic thought, and corporate power. He explores how the maximization of market production became the chief objective of American economic and social policy. We see how distinctly capitalist quantification techniques used to manage or invest in railroad corporations, textile factories, real estate holdings, or cotton plantations escaped the confines of the business world and seeped into every nook and cranny of society. As economic elites quantified the nation as a for-profit, capitalized investment, the progress of its inhabitants, free or enslaved, came to be valued according to their moneymaking abilities. Today as in the nineteenth century, political struggles rage over who gets to determine the statistical yardsticks used to gauge the “health” of our economy and nation. The Pricing of Progress helps us grasp the limits and dangers of entrusting economic indicators to measure social welfare and moral goals.
