A Crooked Line

A Crooked Line PDF Author: Geoff Eley
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472069040
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
A first-hand account of the genealogy of the discipline, and of the rise of a new era of social history, by one of the leading historians of a generation

A Crooked Line

A Crooked Line PDF Author: Geoff Eley
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472069040
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
A first-hand account of the genealogy of the discipline, and of the rise of a new era of social history, by one of the leading historians of a generation

Society on the Line

Society on the Line PDF Author: William H. Dutton
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 9780198774617
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
Society on the Line presents a new way of thinking about the social and economic implications of the revolution in information and communication technologies (ICTs). It offers a clear overview of information in the digital age, and explains how social and technical choices about ICTs influence access to information, people, services, and technologies themselves. The author calls this process `the shaping of tele-access' and shows how the concept challenges prevailing theoretical perspectives of the information and communication revolution. His clear, informed and challenging analysis ranges from the household; through the workplace and business organization; to the media as new information providers; and to government policies on information and economic strategy. In doing so he touches on important issues of information inequality, privacy, censorship, the Internet; information and organizational design; and information in the community and public policy. The maintext is fully supported by case studies, boxed information, and essays written by leading ICT experts on both sides of the Atlantic. This accessible and useful book offers an invaluable guide to the information politics of the digital age. Pre-publication Endorsement `Society on the Line is a very useful book that organizes and analyses clearly and cogently a substantial body of relevant documentation. It will become required reading in universities around the world.' ManuelCastells, Professor of Sociology, University of California; author of the The Rise of the Network Society Pre-publication endorsement `...a fascinating perspective...which provokes fresh consideration of the issues. By showing us how to identify the games being played in the on-line environment, Dutton helps us focus on the pressure points for achieving respect for our information. Privacy need not be at risk as ICTs are exploited.The more we understand the drivers for change, the more we can influence the information handling culture which is emerging.' Elizabeth France, UK Data Protection Registrar pre-publication endorsement `In a time of information overload, Society on the Line cuts through hype and jargon to spell out clearly how information and communications technologies affect our lives. It presents a sound, thoughful, and well-balanced account of the contending factors and forces shaping hte new digital media and influencing individuals, organizations, and cultures. This is an essential book for communications professionals and students, as well as for all those who want a better understanding of the technical, political, and social dimensions of the information revolution.' Walter S. Baer, The RAND Corporation pre-publication endorsement `This book's key theme of tele-access opens the door to a profound and fascinating exploration of the dominant question of our time: does information technology determine history, or does society or at least political economy hold the reins of time? All who have a humanistic interest in technology, the future, or both should read this book'. Reed Hundt, former Chair of the US Federal Communications Commission, and Chair of the Forum on Communication and Soceity of the Aspen Institute pre-publication endorsement `As we enter the `information age', we urgently need to be armed with considered values for assessing its impact and to frame people-serving policies, In this remarkably integrative book, William Dutton advances the notion of `access'to fill this bill. In his hands, `access' becomes both a multi-dimensional and a highly versatile idea. ...Dutton's analysis deserves to be widely read and debated.' Jay G Blumler, Professor Emeritus of Leeds University, and former President of the International Communication Association

What We Owe Each Other

What We Owe Each Other PDF 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.

Leave Society

Leave Society PDF Author: Tao Lin
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101974486
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
From the acclaimed author of Taipei, a bold portrait of a writer working to balance all his lives—artist, son, loner—as he spins the ordinary into something monumental. An engrossing, hopeful novel about life, fiction, and where the two blur together. In 2014, a novelist named Li leaves Manhattan to visit his parents in Taipei for ten weeks. He doesn't know it yet, but his life will begin to deepen and complexify on this trip. As he flies between these two worlds--year by year, over four years--he will flit in and out of optimism, despair, loneliness, sanity, bouts of chronic pain, and drafts of a new book. He will incite and temper arguments, uncover secrets about nature and history, and try to understand how to live a meaningful life as an artist and a son. But how to fit these pieces of his life together? Where to begin? Or should he leave society altogether? Exploring everyday events and scenes--waiting rooms, dog walks, family meals--while investigatively venturing to the edges of society, where culture dissolves into mystery, Lin shows what it is to write a novel in real time. Illuminating and deeply felt, as it builds toward a stunning, if unexpected, romance, Leave Society is a masterly story about life and art at the end of history. A VINTAGE ORIGINAL

The Horizontal Society

The Horizontal Society PDF Author: Lawrence Meir Friedman
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300147201
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
This book argues that modern technology has radically and irretrievably altered our sense of identity and hence our social, political, and legal life. In traditional societies, relationships and identities were strongly vertical: there was a clear line of authority from top to bottom, and identity was fixed by one's birth or social position. But in modern society, identity and authority have become much more horizontal: people feel freer to choose who they are and to form relationships on a plane of equality. The author examines how modern life centers on human identity seen in terms of race, gender, ethnicity, and religion, and how this new way of defining oneself affects politics, social structure, and the law. He claims that our horizontal society is the product of the mass media -- in particular, television -- which break down the isolation of traditional life and allow individuals to connect with like-minded others across barriers of space and time. As horizontal groups blossom, loyalties and allegiances to smaller groups fragment what seemed to be the unity of the larger nation. In addition, the media's ability to spread a global mass culture causes a breakdown of cultural isolation that leads to more immigration and heavy pressure on the laws and institutions of citizenship and immigration.

The Monochrome Society

The Monochrome Society PDF Author: Amitai Etzioni
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691114576
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Amitai Etzioni is one of the most influential social and political thinkers of our day, a man synonymous with the ideas of communitarianism. In this book, Etzioni challenges those who argue that diversity or multiculturalism is about to become the governing American creed. On the surface, America may seem like a fractured mosaic, but the country is in reality far more socially monochromatic and united than most observers have claimed. In the first chapter, Etzioni presents a great deal of evidence that Americans, whites and African Americans, Hispanics and Asian Americans, new immigrants and decedents of the Pilgrims, continue to share the same core of basic American values and aspirations. He goes on to show that we need not merely a civil but also a good society, one that nurtures virtues. He assesses key social institutions that can serve such a society ranging from revived holidays to greater reliance on public shaming. The most effective sources of bonding and of shared ideas about virtue, he insists throughout, come from the community, not from the state. Etzioni also challenges moral relativists who argue that we have no right to "impose" our moral values on other societies. He responds to those who fear that a cohesive community must also be one that is oppressive, authoritarian, and exclusive. And he explores and assesses possible new sources and definitions of community, including computer-mediated communities and stakeholding in corporations. By turns provocative and reassuring, the chapters here cut to the heart of several of our most pressing social and political issues. The book is further evidence of Etzioni's enduring place in contemporary thought.

Society Of The Spectacle

Society Of The Spectacle PDF Author: Guy Debord
Publisher: Bread and Circuses Publishing
ISBN: 1617508306
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
The Das Kapital of the 20th century,Society of the Spectacle is an essential text, and the main theoretical work of the Situationists. Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960's, in particular the May 1968 uprisings in France, up to the present day, with global capitalism seemingly staggering around in it’s Zombie end-phase, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism, and everyday life in the late 20th century. This ‘Red and Black’ translation from 1977 is Introduced by Notting Hill armchair insurrectionary Tom Vague with a galloping time line and pop-situ verve, and given a more analytical over view by young upstart thinker Sam Cooper.

Explaining Civil Society Development

Explaining Civil Society Development PDF Author: Lester M. Salamon
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421422999
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
How historically rooted power dynamics have shaped the evolution of civil society globally. The civil society sector—made up of millions of nonprofit organizations, associations, charitable institutions, and the volunteers and resources they mobilize—has long been the invisible subcontinent on the landscape of contemporary society. For the past twenty years, however, scholars under the umbrella of the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project have worked with statisticians to assemble the first comprehensive, empirical picture of the size, structure, financing, and role of this increasingly important part of modern life. What accounts for the enormous cross-national variations in the size and contours of the civil society sector around the world? Drawing on the project’s data, Lester M. Salamon, S. Wojciech Sokolowski, Megan A. Haddock, and their colleagues raise serious questions about the ability of the field’s currently dominant preference and sentiment theories to account for these variations in civil society development. Instead, using statistical and comparative historical materials, the authors posit a novel social origins theory that roots the variations in civil society strength and composition in the relative power of different social groupings and institutions during the transition to modernity. Drawing on the work of Barrington Moore, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and others, Explaining Civil Society Development provides insight into the nonprofit sector’s ability to thrive and perform its distinctive roles. Combining solid data and analytical clarity, this pioneering volume offers a critically needed lens for viewing the evolution of civil society and the nonprofit sector throughout the world.

Telling About Society

Telling About Society PDF Author: Howard S. Becker
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226041263
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
Explores the unconventional ways we communicate what we know about society to others. Becker explores the many ways knowledge about society can be shared and interpreted through different forms of telling—fiction, films, photographs, maps, even mathematical models—many of which remain outside the boundaries of conventional social science. Eight case studies, including the photographs of Walker Evans, the plays of George Bernard Shaw, the novels of Jane Austen and Italo Calvino, and the sociology of Erving Goffman, provide support for Becker’s argument: that every way of telling about society is perfect—for some purpose. The trick is, as Becker notes, to discover what purpose is served by doing it this way rather than that. From publisher description.

The Jane Austen Society

The Jane Austen Society PDF Author: Natalie Jenner
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250248728
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
* INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER * "This novel delivers sweet, smart escapism." —People "Fans of The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society will adore The Jane Austen Society... A charming and memorable debut, which reminds us of the universal language of literature and the power of books to unite and heal." —Pam Jenoff, New York Times bestselling author of The Lost Girls of Paris Just after the Second World War, in the small English village of Chawton, an unusual but like-minded group of people band together to attempt something remarkable. One hundred and fifty years ago, Chawton was the final home of Jane Austen, one of England's finest novelists. Now it's home to a few distant relatives and their diminishing estate. With the last bit of Austen's legacy threatened, a group of disparate individuals come together to preserve both Jane Austen's home and her legacy. These people—a laborer, a young widow, the local doctor, and a movie star, among others—could not be more different and yet they are united in their love for the works and words of Austen. As each of them endures their own quiet struggle with loss and trauma, some from the recent war, others from more distant tragedies, they rally together to create the Jane Austen Society. A powerful and moving novel that explores the tragedies and triumphs of life, both large and small, and the universal humanity in us all, Natalie Jenner's The Jane Austen Society is destined to resonate with readers for years to come.