Are there classes in America? In The Classless Society Paul Kingston forcefully answers no. This book directly challenges a long-standing intellectual tradition of class analysis, recently revitalized by such prominent scholars as Erik Olin Wright and John Goldthorpe. Insisting on a realist conception of class, Kingston argues that presumed -classes- do not significantly share distinct, life-defining experiences. Individual chapters assess the extent of class structuration in five dimensions of life: mobility (how demographically cohesive are classes?), interaction patterns (do classes...

One of the most dramatic economic changes of the past century has been the increase in married women's work outside the home. This volume examines the nature of married women's participation in the economies of three East Asian countries--Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. In addition to asking what is similar or different about women's economic participation in this region of the world compared to Western societies, the book also asks how women's work patterns vary across the three countries. The essays focus on key theoretical questions for the study of women's labor and, more broadly,...

This volume brings together leading public intellectuals--Amartya Sen, Martha C. Nussbaum, Francois Bourguignon, William J. Wilson, Douglas S. Massey, and Martha A. Fineman--to take stock of current analytic understandings of poverty and inequality. Contemporary research on inequality has largely relied on conceptual advances several decades old, even though the basic structure of global inequality is changing in fundamental ways. The reliance on conventional poverty indices, rights-based approaches to poverty reduction, and traditional modeling of social mobility has left scholars and...

“ When the most distinguished empirical social researcher in Britain takes on the problem of the relation between theory and research, places the issues in their larger historical setting (based on wide and accurate reading in the historical literature), and also states the issue in current technical terms, and does so with both panache and bite, we get a book that is well worth reading.” — American Journal of Sociology
“ Goldthorpe's project has all the scope and reach of the post-war functionalist program of Parsons and Merton, but it is likely to be more...

The last half-century has witnessed dramatic declines in gender inequality, evidenced by the rise of egalitarian views on gender roles and the narrowing of long-standing gender gaps in university attendance and labor force participation. This development, while spectacular, has been coupled with similarly impressive forms of resistance to equalization, most notably the continuing tendency for women to crowd into female "occupational ghettos." This book answers the important questions: Why has such extreme segregation persisted even as other types of gender inequality have lessened? Why is...

This book provides a new perspective on the origins of the three most important New Deal policies-the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the National Labor Relations Act, and the Social Security Act-while examining the strengths and weaknesses of historical institutionalism, Marxism, protest-disruption theory, and non-Marxian class-dominance theory.

How often do working-class children obtain college degrees and then pursue professional careers? Conversely, how frequently do the children of doctors and lawyers fail to enter high status careers upon completion of their schooling? As inequalities of wealth and income have increased in industrialized nations over the past 30 years, have patterns of between-generation mobility changed? In this volume, leading sociologists and economists present original findings and conceptual arguments in response to questions like these. After assessing the range of mobility patterns observed in recent...

This book tests a new approach to understanding ethnic mobilization and considers the interplay of global forces, national-level variation in inequality and repression, and political mobilization of ethnicity. It advances the claim that economic and political integration among the world's states increases the influence of ethnic identity in political movements. Drawing on a 100-country dataset analyzing ethnic events and rebellions from 1965 to 1998, Olzak shows that to the degree in which a country participates in international social movement organizations, ethnic identities in that country...

American families are far more diverse and complex today than they were 50 years ago. As ideas about marriage, divorce, and remarriage have changed, so too have our understandings about cohabitation, childbearing, parenting, and the transition to adulthood. Americans of all socioeconomic backgrounds have witnessed changes in the nature of family life, but as this book reveals, these changes play out in very different ways for the wealthy or well off than they do for the poor. Social Class and Changing Families in an Unequal America offers an up-to-the-moment assessment of the condition...

About 1.5 million households filed bankruptcy in the last year, making bankruptcy as common as college graduation and divorce. The recession has pushed more and more families into financial collapse--with unemployment, declines in retirement wealth, and falling house values destabilizing the American middle class. Broke explores the consequences of this unprecedented growth in consumer debt and shows how excessive borrowing undermines the prosperity of middle class America. While the recession that began in mid-2007 has widened the scope of the financial pain caused by...