Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America

Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America PDF Author: Steve J. Heims
Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
ISBN:
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Focusing on the Macy Foundation conferences, a series of encounters that captured a moment of transformation in the human sciences.

Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America

Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America PDF Author: Steve J. Heims
Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
ISBN:
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Get Book

Book Description
Focusing on the Macy Foundation conferences, a series of encounters that captured a moment of transformation in the human sciences.

Society on the Edge

Society on the Edge PDF Author: Philippe Fontaine
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108803458
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
The social sciences underwent rapid development in postwar America. Problems once framed in social terms gradually became redefined as individual with regards to scope and remedy, with economics and psychology winning influence over the other social sciences. By the 1970s, both economics and psychology had spread their intellectual remits wide: psychology's concepts suffused everyday language, while economists entered a myriad of policy debates. Psychology and economics contributed to, and benefited from, a conception of society that was increasingly skeptical of social explanations and interventions. Sociology, in particular, lost intellectual and policy ground to its peers, even regarding 'social problems' that the discipline long considered its settled domain. The book's ten chapters explore this shift, each refracted through a single 'problem': the family, crime, urban concerns, education, discrimination, poverty, addiction, war, and mental health, examining the effects an increasingly individualized lens has had on the way we see these problems.

The Experts' War on Poverty

The Experts' War on Poverty PDF Author: Romain D. Huret
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501712179
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
In the critically acclaimed La Fin de la Pauverté?, Romain D. Huret identifies a network of experts who were dedicated to the post-World War II battle against poverty in the United States. John Angell's translation of Huret's work brings to light for an English-speaking audience this critical set of intellectuals working in federal government, academic institutions, and think tanks. Their efforts to create a policy bureaucracy to support federal socio-economic action spanned from the last days of the New Deal to the late 1960s when President Richard M. Nixon implemented the Family Assistance Plan. Often toiling in obscurity, this cadre of experts waged their own war not only on poverty but on the American political establishment. Their policy recommendations, as Huret clearly shows, often militated against the unscientific prejudices and electoral calculations that ruled Washington D.C. politics. The Experts' War on Poverty highlights the metrics, research, and economic and social facts these social scientists employed in their work, and thereby reveals the unstable institutional foundation of successive executive efforts to grapple with gross social and economic disparities in the United States. Huret argues that this internal war, coming at a time of great disruption due to the Cold War, undermined and fractured the institutional system officially directed at ending poverty. The official War on Poverty, which arguably reached its peak under President Lyndon B. Johnson, was thus fomented and maintained by a group of experts determined to fight poverty in radical ways that outstripped both the operational capacity of the federal government and the political will of a succession of presidents.

The Cybernetics Group

The Cybernetics Group PDF Author: Steve J. Heims
Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
ISBN:
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
This is the engaging story of a moment of transformation in the human sciences, a detailed account of a remarkable group of people who met regularly to explore the possibility of using scientific ideas that had emerged in the war years as a basis for interdisciplinary alliances.

Higher Education for Women in Postwar America, 1945–1965

Higher Education for Women in Postwar America, 1945–1965 PDF Author: Linda Eisenmann
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801888891
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Outstanding Academic Title for 2007, Choice Magazine This history explores the nature of postwar advocacy for women's higher education, acknowledging its unique relationship to the expectations of the era and recognizing its particular type of adaptive activism. Linda Eisenmann illuminates the impact of this advocacy in the postwar era, identifying a link between women's activism during World War II and the women's movement of the late 1960s. Though the postwar period has been portrayed as an era of domestic retreat for women, Eisenmann finds otherwise as she explores areas of institution building and gender awareness. In an era uncomfortable with feminism, this generation advocated individual decision making rather than collective action by professional women, generally conceding their complicated responsibilities as wives and mothers. By redefining our understanding of activism and assessing women's efforts within the context of their milieu, this innovative work reclaims an era often denigrated for its lack of attention to women.

The Americanization of Social Science

The Americanization of Social Science PDF Author: David Haney
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 1592137156
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
A highly readable introduction to and overview of the postwar social sciences in the United States, The Americanization of Social Science explores a critical period in the evolution of American sociology’s professional identity from the late 1940s through the early 1960s. David Paul Haney contends that during this time leading sociologists encouraged a professional secession from public engagement in the name of establishing the discipline’s scientific integrity. According to Haney, influential practitioners encouraged a willful withdrawal from public sociology by separating their professional work from public life. He argues that this separation diminished sociologists’ capacity for conveying their findings to wider publics, especially given their ambivalence towards the mass media, as witnessed by the professional estrangement that scholars like David Riesman and C. Wright Mills experienced as their writing found receptive lay audiences. He argues further that this sense of professional insularity has inhibited sociology’s participation in the national discussion about social issues to the present day.

The History of the Social Sciences since 1945

The History of the Social Sciences since 1945 PDF Author: Roger E. Backhouse
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107717779
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
This compact volume covers the main developments in the social sciences since the Second World War. Chapters on economics, human geography, political science, psychology, social anthropology, and sociology will interest anyone wanting short, accessible histories of those disciplines, all written by experts in the relevant field; they will also make it easy for readers to make comparisons between disciplines. A final chapter proposes a blueprint for a history of the social sciences as a whole. Whereas most of the existing literature considers the social sciences in isolation from one other, this volume shows that they have much in common; for example, they have responded to common problems using overlapping methods, and cross-disciplinary activities have been widespread.

Power in Postwar America

Power in Postwar America PDF Author: Richard Gillam
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description


Environmental Justice in Postwar America

Environmental Justice in Postwar America PDF Author: Christopher W. Wells
Publisher: Weyerhaeuser Environmental Cla
ISBN: 9780295743684
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In the decades after World War II, the American economy entered a period of prolonged growth that created unprecedented affluence--but these developments came at the cost of a host of new environmental problems. Unsurprisingly, a disproportionate number of them, such as pollution-emitting factories, waste-handling facilities, and big infrastructure projects, ended up in communities dominated by people of color. Constrained by long-standing practices of segregation that limited their housing and employment options, people of color bore an unequal share of postwar America's environmental burdens. This reader collects a wide range of primary source documents on the rise and evolution of the environmental justice movement. The documents show how environmentalists in the 1970s recognized the unequal environmental burdens that people of color and low-income Americans had to bear, yet failed to take meaningful action to resolve them. Instead, activism by the affected communities themselves spurred the environmental justice movement of the 1980s and early 1990s. By the turn of the twenty-first century, environmental justice had become increasingly mainstream, and issues like climate justice, food justice, and green-collar jobs had taken their places alongside the protection of wilderness as "environmental" issues. Environmental Justice in Postwar America is a powerful tool for introducing students to the US environmental justice movement and the sometimes tense relationship between environmentalism and social justice. For more information, visit the editor's website: http: //cwwells.net/PostwarEJ

Cybernetics for the Social Sciences

Cybernetics for the Social Sciences PDF Author: Bernard Scott
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004464492
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 134

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Book Description
Bernard Scott’s book explains the relevance of cybernetics for the social sciences. He provides a non-technical account of the history of cybernetics and its core concepts, with examples of applications of cybernetics in psychology, sociology, and anthropology.