The Credential Society is a classic on the role of higher education in American society and an essential text for understanding the reproduction of inequality. Controversial at the time, Randall Collins’s claim that the expansion of American education has not increased social mobility, but rather created a cycle of credential inflation, has proven remarkably prescient. Collins shows how credential inflation stymies mass education’s promises of upward mobility. An unacknowledged spiral of the ri...
It's time to radically alter the way we perceive the world. It's time to get real. Multinational oil corporations trumpet their green credentials. Shadowy billionaires orchestrate 'grassroots' political movements. Public-spending cuts target the poor, but supposedly 'give power to the people'. To Eliane Glaser, these are all signs of the maddeningly surreal gap between appearance and reality in modern life. We are living in a looking-glass world in which reality is spun and c...
German Left And The Weimar Republic: A Selection Of Documents (Historical Materialism)
by Ben Fowkes
The German Left and the Weimar Republic illuminates the history of the political left by presenting a wide range of documents on various aspects of socialist and communist activity in Germany. Separate chapters deal with the policy of Social Democracy and the attempts of the Communist Party to overthrow the Weimar Republic. Later chapters discuss social issues, in particular questions of gender and sexuality. The book concludes with a presentation of documents on various groups of socialist and...
The Women's Liberation Movement and the Politics of Class in Britain
by George Stevenson
This is the first study of the British Women's Liberation Movement's relationship with class politics. It explores the meaning of class to women's liberationists' identities and activism, both nationally and regionally, using a previously neglected feminist cluster in North East England as a case study. Stevenson demonstrates that British feminism was shaped fundamentally by its relationship to, synthesis with, and rejection of class politics. Through these processes, feminists recognised how p...
Redrawing the Class Map: Stratification and Institutions in Britain, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland
by Daniel Oesch
Privilege, Agency and Affect: Understanding the Production and Effects of Action
Where are the Right Places, those exclusive locations where the privileged live and play? You may be in for a surprise. For as Stephen Birmingham shows, in the same witty, penetrating style that characterized his other studies of the elite, the Right Places could be just about anywhere, from exclusive chalets in Sun Valley, Idaho to the traditionally swank estates of Fairfield County, Connecticut, to the nascent avant-garde art scene in Kansas City, Missouri. Birmingham goes to great lengths...
The Life and Times of Mary, Dowager Duchess of Sutherland
by Catherine Layton
This definitive biography depicts one Victorian woman's struggle to stay afloat in a rising tide of prurient scandalmongering and snobbery. Could it be that this woman's character and circumstances informed Oscar Wilde's social comedies? She was the daughter of a leading Conservative Oxford don, vilified as an arrogant fortune-hunter. Her liaison dangereuse with a Duke resulted in ostracism by Queen Victoria's cronies, as well as protracted, widely publicised legal disputes with his family. One...
The Penguin Social History of Britain (Social Hist of Britain)
by Roy Porter
A portrait of 18th century England, from its princes to its paupers, from its metropolis to its smallest hamlet. The topics covered include - diet, housing, prisons, rural festivals, bordellos, plays, paintings, and work and wages.
The tension between social reform photography and photojournalism is examined through this study of the life and work of German gr ansel Mieth (1909-1998), who made an unlikely journey from migrant farm worker to Life photographer. She was the second woman in that role, after Margaret Bourke-White. Unlike her colleagues, Mieth was a working-class reformer with a deep disdain for Life's conservatism and commercialism. In fact, her work often subverted Life's typical representations of women, wor...
This book is a twist on the current discourse around 'inclusivity' and 'widening participation'. Higher education is welcoming students from diverse educational, social, and economic backgrounds, and yet it predominantly employs middle-class academics. Conceptually, there appears, on at least these grounds alone, to be a cultural and class mismatch. This work discusses empirical interviews with tenured academics from a working-class heritage employed in one UK university. Interviewees talk candi...
Poverty and Participation in Civil Society
Design for Social Sustainability
by Saffron Woodcraft, Nicola Bacon, Lucia Caistor-Arenda, and Tricia Hacket
Transportation and Deportation (Interface Collection, Vol 15)
by Sharon Floate, Antonio Gomez Alfaro, and Elisa Maria Lopes da Costa
Exile has been a pan-European answer to the problem of malefactors since Roman times. From the age of Discovery it has also been a useful strategy for states to fulfil the manpower needs of the burgeoning colonies of the New World, Africa and Australia. This book brings together historical accounts of the impact transportation and deportation had on the Gypsy populations of England, Spain and Portugal. In the latter two countries the open rounding-up and explusion of complete communities may be...
In this important new book, Bart Landry contributes significantly to the study of black American life and its social stratification and to the study of American middle class life in general.
Communicating Internationally in English
by Bob Dignen and Ian McMaster
The American West, 1860-1890: years of broken promises, disillusionment, war and massacre.Beginning with the Long Walk of the Navajos and ending with the massacre of Sioux at Wounded Knee, this extraordinary book tells how the American Indians lost their land, lives and liberty to white settlers pushing westward. Woven into a an engrossing saga of cruelty, treachery and violence are the fascinating stories of such legendary figures as Sitting Bull, Cochise, Crazy Horse and Geronimo.First publish...