Over the past several decades, the number of lawyers in large cities has doubled, women have entered the bar at an unprecedented rate, and the scale of firms has greatly expanded. This immense growth has transformed the nature and social structure of the legal profession. In the most comprehensive analysis of the urban bar to date, Urban Lawyers presents a compelling portrait of how these changes continue to shape the field of law today.

Drawing on extensive interviews with Chicago lawyers, the authors demonstrate how developments in the profession have affected virtually every...

"The Social Organization of Sexuality" reports the complete results of the nation's most comprehensive representative survey of sexual practices in the general adult population of the United States. This highly detailed portrait of sex in America and its social context and implications has established a new and original scientific orientation to the study of sexual behavior.
"The most comprehensive U.S. sex survey ever." -"USA Today"
"The findings from this survey, the first in decades to provide detailed insights about the sexual behavior of a representative sample of Americans,...

We think of the city as a place where anything goes. Take the sensational fantasies and lurid antics of single women on "Sex in the City" or young men on "Queer as Folk," and you might imagine the city as some kind of sexual playground a place where you can have any kind of sex you want, with whomever you like, anytime or anywhere you choose.
But in "The Sexual Organization of the City, " Edward Laumann and company argue that this idea is a myth. Drawing on extensive surveys and interviews with Chicago adults, they show that the city is to the contrary a place where sexual choices and...

Based on interviews with over 3,000 Americans, this book provides startling information about American sexual practices--exploding longstanding myths and divulging the truth about what goes on between the sexes.

Critics of the policy-making process argue that private interest groups exert too much influence on the decisions of government, but only rarely has this proposition been examined systematically. The Hollow Core draws on interviews with more than 300 interest groups, 800 lobbyists, and 300 government officials to assess the efforts of private organizations to influence federal policy in four areas--agriculture, energy, health, and labor policy.

The legal profession is stratified primarily by the character of the clients served, not by the type of legal service rendered, as John P. Heinz and Edward O. Laumann convincingly demonstrate. In their classic study of the Chicago bar, the authors draw on interviews with nearly 800 lawyers to show that the profession is divided into two distinct hemispheres--corporate and individual--and that this dichotomy is reflected in the distribution of prestige among lawyers.

The Federal Government in the United States is a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people." Presidents are elected by popular vote in the nation (filtered through the electoral college), Senators are elected by popular vote in their states, and Representatives are elected by popular vote in their Congressional districts. Cabinet members and agency heads are appointed by the elected president, as are members of the Supreme Court.

But this says nothing about politics. Professor Lauman and Knoke have asked, in this book, how policies were made, in the period 1977-1980, in...