14 essays cover cities in United States, Canada, England, France, and Columbia. Contributors include Norman Birnbaum, Stuart Blumin, Michael Frisch, Clyde Griffen, Herbert Gutman, Michael Katz, Peter Knights, Lynn Lees, Anthony Maingot, Joan Scott, Leo Schnore.

The distinguished sociologist Richard Sennett surveys major differences between earlier forms of industrial capitalism and the more global, more febrile, ever more mutable version of capitalism that is taking its place. He shows how these changes affect everyday life--how the work ethic is changing; how new beliefs about merit and talent displace old values of craftsmanship and achievement; how what Sennett calls "the specter of uselessness" haunts professionals as well as manual workers; how the boundary between consumption and politics is dissolving.

In recent years, reformers of both...

From the assembly halls of Athens to the Turkish baths of New York's Lower East Side, from eighteenth-century English gardens to the housing projects of Harlem a study of the physical fabric of the city as a mirror of Western society and culture."

The distinguished social critic Richard Sennett here shows how the excessively ordered community freezes adults--both the young idealists and their security-oriented parents--into rigid attitudes that stifle personal growth. He argues that the accepted ideal of order generates patterns of behavior among the urban middle classes that are stultifying, narrow, and violence-prone. And he proposes a functioning city that can incorporate anarchy, diversity, and creative disorder to bring into being adults who can openly respond to and deal with the challenges of life.

This book is a study of both how we experience authority and how we might experience it differently. Sennett explores the bonds that rebellion against authority paradoxically establishes, showing how this paradox has been in the making since the French Revolution and how today it expresses itself in offices, in factories, and in government as well as in the family. Drawing on examples from psychology, sociology, and literature, he eloquently projects how we might reinvigorate the role of authority according to good and rational ideals.

The authors conclude that in the games of hierarchical respect, no class can emerge the victor; and that true egalitarianism can be achieved only by rediscovering diverse concepts of human dignity. Examining personal feelings in terms of a totality of human relations, and looking beyond the struggle for economic survival, The Hidden Injuries of Class takes an important step forward in the sociological critique of everyday life.

Ablaze with intellectual and social change, Paris in the 1830s and 1840s beckons to two English brothers--Frederick and Charles Courtland, an architect and a priest--each of whom is struggling for self-definition and social recognition. Of their lives and this world Sennett has made a remarkable work of fiction that transports the reader into nineteenth century Europe and into the nature and inconsistencies of culture and faith, and the way each is shaped by the passage of time.

Flesh and Stone is the story of the deepest parts of life--how women and men moved in public and private spaces, what they saw and heard, the smells that assailed them, where they ate, how they dressed, the mores of bathing and of making love--all in the architecture of stone and space from ancient Athens to modern New York. Early inFlesh and Stone, Richard Sennett probes the ways in which the ancient Athenians experienced nakedness, and the relation of nakedness to the shape of the ancient city, its troubled politics, and the inequalities between men and women. The story...

This work describes, explains and warns Europe against following the road alreadly taken by the US and, perhaps not quite irreversibly, Britain by providing an account of life in high-risk, low-loyalty workplaces.

Richard Sennett thinks differently. In this dazzling blend of personal memoir and reflective scholarship, he addresses need and social responsibility across the gulf of inequality. In the uncertain world of "flexible" social relationships, all are troubled by issues of respect: whether it is an employee stuck with insensitive management, a social worker trying to aid a resentful client, or a virtuoso artist and an accompanist aiming for a perfect duet Opening with a memoir of growing up in Chicago's infamous Cabrini Green housing project, Richard Sennett looks at three factors that undermine...