Recommending eBooks for Purchase (Bulletin 155b - June 2021): OUP Latest Titles Published in April-May

Title List

The Rise of Digital Repression by Steven Feldstein
ISBN: 9780190057527
Publication Date: 2021-04-27

Description: The world is undergoing a profound set of digital disruptions that are changing the nature of how governments counter dissent and assert control over their countries. While increasing numbers of people rely primarily or exclusively on online platforms, authoritarian regimes have concurrently developed a formidable array of technological capabilities to constrain and repress their citizens. In The Rise of Digital Repression, Steven Feldstein documents how the emergence of advanced digital tools bring new dimensions to political repression. Presenting new field research from Thailand, the Philippines, and Ethiopia, he investigates the goals, motivations, and drivers of these digital tactics. Feldstein further highlights how governments pursue digital strategies based on a range of factors: ongoing levels of repression, political leadership, state capacity, and technological development. The international community, he argues, is already seeing glimpses of what the frontiers of repression look like. For instance, Chinese authorities have brought together mass surveillance, censorship, DNA collection, and artificial intelligence to enforce their directives in Xinjiang. As many of these trends go global, Feldstein shows how this has major implications for democracies and civil society activists around the world. A compelling synthesis of how anti-democratic leaders harness powerful technology to advance their political objectives, The Rise of Digital Repression concludes by laying out innovative ideas and strategies for civil society and opposition movements to respond to the digital autocratic wave.
The "Third" United Nations by Tatiana Carayannis; Thomas G. Weiss
ISBN: 9780191889493
Publication Date: 2021-04-09

Description: The Third UN is the ecology of supportive non-state actors-intellectuals, scholars, consultants, think tanks, NGOs, the for-profit private sector, and the media-that interacts with the intergovernmental machinery of the First UN (member states) and the Second UN (staff members of internationalsecretariats) to formulate and refine ideas and decision-making at key junctures in policy processes. Some advocate for particular ideas, others help analyze or operationalize their testing and implementation; many thus help the UN "think". While think tanks, knowledge brokers, and epistemiccommunities are phenomena that have entered both the academic and policy lexicons, their intellectual role remains marginal to analyses of such intergovernmental organizations as the United Nations.
Why Nations Rise by Manjari Chatterjee Miller
ISBN: 9780190639969
Publication Date: 2021-02-12

Description: What are rising powers? Do they challenge the international order? Why do some countries but not others become rising powers? In Why Nations Rise, Manjari Chaterjee Miller answers these questions and shows that some countries rise not just because they develop the military and economic powerto do so but because they develop particular narratives about how to become a great power in the style of the great power du jour. These active rising powers accept the prevalent norms of the international order in order to become great powers. On the other hand, countries which have military andeconomic power but not these narratives do not rise enough to become great powers - they stay reticent powers. An examination of the narratives in historical (the United States, the Netherlands, Meiji Japan) and contemporary (Cold War Japan, post-Cold War China and India) cases, Why Nations Riseshows patterns of active and reticent rising powers and presents lessons for how to understand the rising powers of China and India today.
Neoliberal Resilience by Aldo Madariaga
ISBN: 9780691201603
Publication Date: 2020-09-01

Description: An exploration of the factors behind neoliberalism's resilience in developing economies and what this could mean for democracy's future Since the 1980s, neoliberalism has withstood repeated economic shocks and financial crises to become the hegemonic economic policy worldwide. Why has neoliberalism remained so resilient? What is the relationship between this resiliency and the backsliding of Western democracy? Can democracy survive an increasingly authoritarian neoliberal capitalism? Neoliberal Resilience answers these questions by bringing the developing world's recent history to the forefront of our thinking about democratic capitalism's future. Looking at four decades of change in four countries once considered to be leading examples of effective neoliberal policy in Latin America and Eastern Europe--Argentina, Chile, Estonia, and Poland--Aldo Madariaga examines the domestic actors and institutions responsible for defending neoliberalism. Delving into neoliberalism's political power, Madariaga demonstrates that it is strongest in countries where traditional democratic principles have been slowly and purposefully weakened. He identifies three mechanisms through which coalitions of political, institutional, and financial forces have propagated neoliberalism's success: the privatization of state companies to create a supporting business class, the use of political institutions to block the representation of alternatives in congress, and the constitutionalization of key economic policies to shield them from partisan influence. Madariaga reflects on today's most pressing issues, including the influence of increasing austerity measures and the rise of populism. A comparative exploration of political economics at the peripheries of global capitalism, Neoliberal Resilience investigates the tensions between neoliberalism's longevity and democracy's gradual decline.
Policy Analysis in Colombia by Pablo Sanabria-Pulido (Editor); Nadia Rubaii (Editor)
ISBN: 9781447348412
Publication Date: 2020-09-30

Description: Leading Colombian academics and experienced policy practitioners cast new light on their country in this systematic overview of policy analysis for an international audience.Examining the historical development and current status of policy analysis as a field of study and in practice, it considers public policy analysis in government and the judiciary, and across domains including health, education and the military. Contributors also delve into Colombia's notable success in economic regeneration, the management of cultural diversity and the resolution of long-term internal armed conflict.Not just an important summation of policy analysis in Colombia, this book also provides insights and lessons applicable elsewhere.
Austerity, Welfare and Work by David Etherington
ISBN: 9781447350118
Publication Date: 2020-10-07

Description: David Etherington provides bold and fresh perspectives on the link between welfare policy and employment relations as he assesses their fundamental impact on social inequalities. Exploring how reforms, including Universal Credit, have reinforced employment and social insecurity, he assesses the role of NGOs, trade unions and policymakers in challenging this increasingly work-focused welfare agenda. Drawing on international and national case studies, the book reviews developments, including rising job insecurity, low pay and geographical inequalities, considered integral to neoliberal approaches to social spending. Etherington sets out the possibilities and challenges of alternative approaches and progressive new paths for welfare, the labour market and social rights.
It's the Government, Stupid! by Keith Dowding
ISBN: 9781529206432
Publication Date: 2020-09-01

Description: Governments have developed a convenient habit of blaming social problems on their citizens, placing too much emphasis on personal responsibility and pursuing policies to 'nudge' their citizens to better behaviour. Keith Dowding shows that, in fact, responsibility for many of our biggest social crises - including homelessness, gun crime, obesity, drug addiction and problem gambling - should be laid at the feet of politicians. He calls for us to stop scapegoating fellow citizens and to demand more from our governments, who have the real power and responsibility to alleviate social problems and bring about lasting change.
Confronting Desire by Ilan Kapoor
ISBN: 9781501751738
Publication Date: 2020-09-15

Description: By applying psychoanalytic perspectives to key themes, concepts, and practices underlying the development enterprise, Confronting Desire offers a new way of analyzing the problems, challenges, and potentialities of international development. Ilan Kapoor makes a compelling case for examining development's unconscious desires and in the process inaugurates a new field of study: psychoanalytic development studies. Drawing from the work of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj ?i?ek, as well as from psychoanalytic postcolonial and feminist scholarship, Kapoor analyzes how development's unconscious desires "speak out," most often in excessive and unpredictable ways that contradict the outwardly rational declarations of its practitioners. He investigates development's many irrationalities?from obsessions about growth and poverty to the perverse seductions of racism and over-consumption. By deploying key psychoanalytic concepts?enjoyment, fantasy, antagonism, fetishism, envy, drive, perversion, and hysteria?Confronting Desire critically analyzes important issues in development?growth, poverty, inequality, participation, consumption, corruption, gender, "race," LGBTQ politics, universality, and revolution. Confronting Desire offers prescriptions for applying psychoanalysis to development theory and practice and demonstrates how psychoanalysis can provide fertile ground for radical politics and the transformation of international development.
The Many-Minded Man by Joel Christensen
ISBN: 9781501752346
Publication Date: 2020-12-15

Description: In The Many-Minded Man, Joel Christensen explores the content, character, and structure of the Homeric Odyssey through a modern psychological lens, focusing on how the epic both represents the workings of the human mind and provides for its audiences?both ancient and modern?a therapeutic model for coping with the exigencies of chance and fate. By reading the Odyssey as an exploration of the constitutive elements of human identity, the function of narrative in defining the self, and the interaction between the individual and their social context, The Many-Minded Man addresses enduring questions about the poem, such as the importance of Telemachus's role, why Odysseus must tell his own tale, and the epic's sudden and unexpected closure. Through these dynamics, Christensen reasons, the Odyssey not only instructs readers about how narrative shapes a sense of agency but also offers solutions for avoiding dangerous stories and destructive patterns of thought.
How Nations Remember by James V. Wertsch
ISBN: 9780197551493
Publication Date: 2021-03-09

Description: How Nations Remember draws on multiple disciplines in the humanities and social sciences to examine how a nation's account of the past shapes its actions in the present. National memory can underwrite noble aspirations, but the volume focuses largely on how it contributes to the negativetendencies of nationalism that give rise to confrontation. Narratives are taken as units of analysis for examining the psychological and cultural dimensions of remembering particular events and also for understanding the schematic codes and mental habits that underlie national memory more generally.In this account, narratives are approached as tools that shape the views of members of national communities to such an extent that they serve as co-authors of what people say and think. Drawing on illustrations from Russia, China, Georgia, the United States, and elsewhere, the book examines how"narrative templates," "narrative dialogism," and "privileged event narratives" shape nations' views of themselves and their relations with others. The volume concludes with a list of ways to manage the disputes that pit one national community against another.
Our Brains at War by Mari Fitzduff
ISBN: 9780197512685
Publication Date: 2021-05-25

Description: Our Brains at War: The Neuroscience of Conflict and Peacebuilding suggests that we need a radical change in how we think about war, leadership, and politics. Most of us, political scientists included, fail to appreciate the extent to which instincts and emotions, rather than logic, factor into our societal politics and international wars. Many of our physiological and genetic tendencies, of which we are mostly unaware, can all too easily fuel our antipathy towards other groups, make us choose 'strong' leaders over more mindful leaders, assist recruitment for illegal militias, and facilitate even the most gentle of us to inflict violence on others. Drawing upon the latest research from emerging areas such as behavioral genetics, biopsychology, and social and cognitive neuroscience, this book identifies the sources of compelling instincts and emotions, and how we can acknowledge and better manage them so as to develop international and societal peace more effectively.
Making Better Choices by Charles E. Phelps; Guru Madhavan
ISBN: 9780190871178
Publication Date: 2021-04-15

Description: Systems engineering offers a set of capabilities and competencies to design and manage complex systems as they evolve. Drawing from social choice research and systems engineering practice, Making Better Choices examines how we make decisions together and the tools we use to arrive at thosedecisions. It takes a critical look at the rules and methods we apply to important decisions - from how we run meetings to how we elect presidents - with an interest in how we can improve these mechanisms. By reviewing different voting systems, their original intents, and their deficits, the authorsoutline a systems engineering approach to making collective choices in society. Written by an economist and an engineer, this groundbreaking work draws from insights in sociology, linguistics, law, political science, philosophy, psychology, economics, and systems design. In an era of relentlessrating, this book offers a fresh vision for engineering better democracies by enabling diverse and inclusive choices
Public Sociology As Educational Practice by Eurig Scandrett (Editor)
ISBN: 9781529201451
Publication Date: 2020-09-29

Description: Through pedagogical case studies and inter-contributor dialogues, this book sheds new light on concepts and boundaries in public sociology education. With sections on publics, special knowledges and practices in the field, it offers bold thinking on important questions including the purposes and targets of sociological knowledge. For students and academics in this and related fields, it is a timely and thought-provoking contribution to discipline debate.
Critical Race Theory and Inequality in the Labour Market by Ebun Joseph
ISBN: 9781526158406
Publication Date: 2020-07-28

Description: This book presents racial stratification as the underlying system that accounts for the differential in outcomes in the labour market. It employs critical race theory to discuss the operation, research, maintenance and impact of racial stratification. Making innovative use of a stratification framework to expose the pervasiveness of racial inequality, this book teaches readers how to use critical race theory to investigate the racial hierarchy and develop a race consciousness. Using Ireland as a case study, Ebun Joseph examines how migrants navigate the labour market and respond to their marginality.Representing the first study in Europe to examine inequality, racism and discrimination in the labour market from a racial stratification perspective, this book offers scholars a method to conduct empirical study of racial stratification across different countries without an over-reliance on secondary data. While based on a study of Ireland, Joseph's theoretical approach and insight into migrant perspectives will appeal to readers interested in social justice, diversity and inclusion, race and ethnicity, and critical whiteness and migration.
Suicide Voices by Sarah Waters
ISBN: 9781800341586
Publication Date: 2020-10-31

Description: This book examines the phenomenon of work suicides in France and asks why, in the present historical juncture, conditions of work can push individuals to take their own lives. During the 2000s, France experienced what commentators have described as a "suicide epidemic", whereby increasingnumbers of workers in the face of extreme pressures of work, chose to take their own lives. This book analyses a corpus of testimonial material linked to 66 suicide cases across three large French companies during the period from 2005 to 2015. A key aim is to consider what the extreme and subjectiveexperiences of self-killing narrated in suicide letters can tell us about the contemporary economic order and its impact on flesh and blood experiences of work. What do rising work suicides tell us about conditions of human labour in the 21st century? Does neoliberal economics condition a desire forsuicide? How do suicidal individuals describe the causes and motivations of their self-killing? Combining critical perspectives from sociology, history, testimony studies, economics, cultural studies and public health, the book raises critical questions about the human costs of the shift to afinance-driven neoliberal order and its everyday effects within the localised spaces of the French workplace.
Workers Against the City by Donald W. Rogers
ISBN: 9780252052347
Publication Date: 2020-09-28

Description: The 1939 Supreme Court decision Hague v. CIO was a constitutional milestone that strengthened the right of Americans, including labor organizers, to assemble and speak in public places. Donald W. Rogers eschews the prevailing view of the case as a morality play pitting Jersey City, New Jersey, political boss Frank Hague against the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) and allied civil libertarian groups. Instead, he draws on a wide range of archives and evidence to re-evaluate Hague v. CIO from the ground up. Rogers's review of the case from district court to the Supreme Court illuminates the trial proceedings and provides perspectives from both sides. As he shows, the economic, political, and legal restructuring of the 1930s refined constitutional rights as much as the court case did. The final decision also revealed that assembly and speech rights change according to how judges and lawmakers act within the circumstances of a given moment. Clear-eyed and comprehensive, Workers against the City revises the view of a milestone case that continues to impact Americans' constitutional rights today.
Upon the Altar of Work by Betsy Wood
ISBN: 9780252052323
Publication Date: 2020-09-14

Description: Rooted in the crisis over slavery, disagreements about child labor broke down along sectional lines between the North and South. For decades after emancipation, the child labor issue shaped how Northerners and Southerners defined fundamental concepts of American life such as work, freedom, the market, and the state.Betsy Wood examines the evolution of ideas about child labor and the on-the-ground politics of the issue against the backdrop of broad developments related to slavery and emancipation, industrial capitalism, moral and social reform, and American politics and religion. Wood explains how the decades-long battle over child labor created enduring political and ideological divisions within capitalist society that divided the gatekeepers of modernity from the cultural warriors who opposed them. Tracing the ideological origins and the politics of the child labor battle over the course of eighty years, this book tells the story of how child labor debates bequeathed an enduring legacy of sectionalist conflict to modern American capitalist society.
Redistributing the Poor by Armando Lara-Millán
ISBN: 9780197507933
Publication Date: 2021-04-09

Description: Whenever the topic of large jails and public hospitals in urban America is raised, a single idea comes to mind. It is widely believed that because we as a society have dis-invested from public health, the sick and poor now find themselves within the purview of criminal justice institutions. InRedistributing the Poor, ethnographer and historical sociologist Armando Lara-Millan takes us into the day-to-day operations of running the largest hospital and jail system in the world and argues that such received wisdom is a drastic mischaracterization of the way that states govern urban povertyat the turn of the 21st century. Rather than focus on our underinvestment of health and overinvestment of criminal justice, his idea of "redistributing the poor" draws attention to how state agencies circulate people between different institutional spaces in such a way that generates revenue forsome agencies, cuts costs for others, and projects illusions that services have been legally rendered. By centering the state's use of redistribution, Lara-Millan shows how certain forms of social suffering-the premature death of mainly poor, people of color-are not a result of the state's failureto act, but instead the necessary outcome of so-called successful policy.
The Sustainability Myth by Melissa Checker
ISBN: 9781479859245
Publication Date: 2020-10-27

Description: Uncovers the hidden costs and contradictions of sustainable policies in an era driven by real estate development From state-of-the-art parks to rooftop gardens, efforts to transform New York City's unsightly industrial waterfronts into green, urban oases have received much public attention. In The Sustainability Myth, Melissa Checker uncovers the hidden costs--and contradictions--of the city's ambitious sustainability agenda in light of its equally ambitious redevelopment imperatives. Focusing on industrial waterfronts and historically underserved places like Harlem and Staten Island's North Shore, Checker takes an in-depth look at the dynamics of environmental gentrification, documenting the symbiosis between eco-friendly initiatives and high-end redevelopment and its impact on out-of-the-way, non-gentrifying neighborhoods. At the same time, she highlights the valiant efforts of local environmental justice activists who work across racial, economic, and political divides to challenge sustainability's false promises and create truly viable communities. The Sustainability Myth is a cautionary, eye-opening tale, taking a hard--but ultimately hopeful--look at environmental justice activism and the politics of sustainability.
Inventing the Ties That Bind by Francesca Polletta
ISBN: 9780226734347
Publication Date: 2020-12-11

Description: At a time of deep political divisions, leaders have called on ordinary Americans to talk to one another: to share their stories, listen empathetically, and focus on what they have in common, not what makes them different. In Inventing the Ties that Bind, Francesca Polletta questions this popular solution for healing our rifts. Talking the way that friends do is not the same as equality, she points out. And initiatives that bring strangers together for friendly dialogue may provide fleeting experiences of intimacy, but do not supply the enduring ties that solidarity requires. But Polletta also studies how Americans cooperate outside such initiatives, in social movements, churches, unions, government, and in their everyday lives. She shows that they often act on behalf of people they see as neighbors, not friends, as allies, not intimates, and people with whom they have an imagined relationship, not a real one. To repair our fractured civic landscape, she argues, we should draw on the rich language of solidarity that Americans already have.
Front of the House, Back of the House by Eli Revelle Yano Wilson
ISBN: 9781479800674
Publication Date: 2020-12-29

Description: How workers navigate race, gender, and class in the food service industry Two unequal worlds of work exist within the upscale restaurant scene of Los Angeles. White, college-educated servers operate in the front of the house--also known as the public areas of the restaurant--while Latino immigrants toil in the back of the house and out of customer view. In Front of the House, Back of the House, Eli Revelle Yano Wilson shows us what keeps these workers apart, exploring race, class, and gender inequalities in the food service industry. Drawing on research at three different high-end restaurants in Los Angeles, Wilson highlights why these inequalities persist in the twenty-first century, pointing to discriminatory hiring and supervisory practices that ultimately grant educated whites access to the most desirable positions. Additionally, he shows us how workers navigate these inequalities under the same roof, making sense of their jobs, their identities, and each other in a world that reinforces their separateness. Front of the House, Back of the House takes us behind the scenes of the food service industry, providing a window into the unequal lives of white and Latino restaurant workers.
Upsold by Max Besbris
ISBN: 9780226721408
Publication Date: 2020-12-08

Description: What do you want for yourself in the next five, ten years? Do your plans involve marriage, kids, a new job? These are the questions a real estate agent might ask in an attempt to unearth information they can employ to complete a sale, which as Upsold shows, often results in upselling. In this book, sociologist Max Besbris shows how agents successfully upsell, inducing buyers to spend more than their initially stated price ceilings. His research reveals how face-to-face interactions influence buyers' ideas about which neighborhoods are desirable and which are less-worthy investments and how these preferences ultimately contribute to neighborhood inequality. Stratification defines cities in the contemporary United States. In an era marked by increasing income segregation, one of the main sources of this inequality is housing prices. A crucial part of wealth inequality, housing prices are also directly linked to the uneven distribution of resources across neighborhoods and to racial and ethnic segregation. Upsold shows how the interactions between real estate agents and buyers make or break neighborhood reputations and construct neighborhoods by price. Employing revealing ethnographic and quantitative housing data, Besbris outlines precisely how social influences come together during the sales process. In Upsold, we get a deep dive into the role that the interactions with sales agents play in buyers' decision-making and how neighborhoods are differentiated, valorized, and deemed to be worthy of a certain price.
How Civic Action Works by Paul Lichterman
ISBN: 9780691200040
Publication Date: 2020-12-15

Description: The ways that social advocates organize to fight unaffordable housing and homelessness in Los Angeles, illuminated by a new conceptual framework for studying collective action How Civic Action Works renews the tradition of inquiry into collective, social problem solving. Paul Lichterman follows grassroots activists, nonprofit organization staff, and community service volunteers in three coalitions and twelve organizations in Los Angeles as they campaign for affordable housing, develop new housing, or address homelessness. Lichterman shows that to understand how social advocates build their campaigns, craft claims, and choose goals, we need to move beyond well-established thinking about what is strategic. Lichterman presents a pragmatist-inspired sociological framework that illuminates core tasks of social problem solving, both contentious and noncontentious, by grassroots and professional advocates alike. He reveals that advocates' distinct styles of collective action produce different understandings of what is strategic, and generate different dilemmas for advocates because each style accommodates varying social and institutional pressures. We see, too, how patterns of interaction create a cultural filter that welcomes some claims about housing problems while subordinating or delegitimating others. These cultural patterns help solve conceptual and practical puzzles, such as why coalitions fragment when members agree on many things, and what makes advocacy campaigns separate housing from homelessness or affordability from environmental sustainability. Lichterman concludes by turning this action-centered framework toward improving dialogue between social advocates and researchers. Using extensive ethnography enriched by archival evidence, How Civic Action Works explains how advocates meet the relational and rhetorical challenges of collective action.

Recommending eBooks for Purchase (Bulletin 155b - June 2021): OUP Latest Titles Published in April-May

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