On July 30, 1965, President Johnson flew to Independence, Missouri to sign the Medicare bill. The new statute included two related insurance programs to finance substantial portions of the hospital and physician expenses incurred by Americans over the age of sixty-five. Public attempts to improve American health standards have typically precipitated bitter debate, even as the issue has shifted from the professional and legal status of physicians to the availability of hospital care and public health programs. In The Politics of Medicare, Marmor helps the reader understand...

For many years Emmanuel Lazega has explored communication behavior and decision-making processes of small workgroups within larger organizations. To account for the knowledge claims of members of those groups, and for the ways in which such claims are legitimated collectively and translated into action, he presents a theory of the interactive elaboration of information on which decisions are based.

The present work is an elaboration of the author's previous efforts in Emile Durkheim and the Reformation of Sociology (1988) and The Coming Fin de Sibcle (1991) to demonstrate Durkheim's neglected relevance to the postmodern discourse. The aims include finding affinities between our fin de sibcle and Durkheim's fin de sibcle, and connecting the contemporary themes of rebellion against Enlightenment narratives found in postmodern culture with similar concerns found in Durkheim's sociology as well as in his fin de sibcle culture, contributing to Durkheimian scholarship as...

Generational conflict has attracted considerable attention in the media and within academic circles during the past decade. At the center of this collection of papers analyzing various facets of that conflict lie complex issues of generational equity--issues that will remain important for the framing of public policy during the 1990s, What do the young and the middle-aged owe the elderly? In discharging that debt, to what extent are they able to provide for their own old age in a climate of changing notions of welfare? What light do the longer perspectives of history shed on these issues?...

In analyzing the fraud-facilitated leveraged buyouts engineered by Michael Milken and the firm of Drexel Burnham Lambert, the author suggests that such buyouts have multiple and extensive consequences for the organization of business and the economy. Zey also demonstrates how ordinary bond trading networks were linked to the extraordinary networks of the Boesky Organizations and Employee Private Partnerships in order to defraud bond issuers and buyers.

This book debunks the myth of rational economic organization in the 1980s and establishes broad implications for theories of...

Although equal employment opportunity laws are often at the center of political debate, it has been difficult for students, teachers, and concerned citizens to learn about the controversy over EEO. Contributions to our understanding are scattered, this collection of writings is a broad interdisciplinary introduction to the struggle for EEO and its consequences. No other collection brings together articles on theories of dis-criminations; competing theories about the likely impact of EEO laws; analyses of the laws' impact on women, blacks, and other minorities; and debates about...

Each topical chapter in this volume crystallizes the findings of a five-year study, under the auspices of the Population Health Program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, that probed the links between social hierarchy, the -macroenvironmental- factors in illness patterns, the quality of the -microenvironmental, - and other determinants of health. In its aggregate, this volume will prove essential to an understanding of the underlying public health issues for the next several decades.