In this new study, Andrew Abbott presents a fresh and daring analysis of the evolution and development of the social sciences. "Chaos of Disciplines" reconsiders how knowledge actually changes and advances. Challenging the accepted belief that social sciences are in a perpetual state of progress, Abbott contends that disciplines instead cycle around an inevitable pattern of core principles. New schools of thought, then, are less a reaction to an established order than they are a reinvention of fundamental concepts. "Chaos of Disciplines" uses fractals to explain the patterns of disciplines, and then applies them to key debates that surround the social sciences. Abbott argues that knowledge in different disciplines is organized by common oppositions that function at any level of theoretical or methodological scale. Opposing perspectives of thought and method, then, in fields ranging from history, sociology and literature, become radically similar, much like fractals, they are each mutual reflections of their own distinctions.

What do variables really tell us? When exactly do inventions occur? Why do we always miss turning points as they transpire? When does what doesn't happen mean as much, if not more, than what does? Andrew Abbott considers these fascinating questions in Time Matters, a diverse series of essays that constitutes the most extensive analysis of temporality in social science today. Ranging from abstract theoretical reflection to pointed methodological critique, Abbott demonstrates the inevitably theoretical character of any methodology. Time Matters focuses particularly on questions of time, events, and causality. Abbott grounds each essay in straightforward examinations of actual social scientific analyses. Throughout, he demonstrates the crucial assumptions we make about causes and events, about actors and interaction and about time and meaning every time we employ methods of social analysis, whether in academic disciplines, market research, public opinion polling, or even evaluation research. Turning current assumptions on their heads, Abbott not only outlines the theoretical orthodoxies of empirical social science, he sketches new alternatives, laying down foundations for a new body of social theory.

From the rise of terrorism to the uncertainties associated with economic crisis and recession, our age is characterized by fear. Fear is the expression of a society on unstable foundations. Most of us feel that our social status is under threat and our future prospects in jeopardy. We are overwhelmed by a sense of having been catapulted into a world to which we no longer belong. Tracing this experience of fear, Heinz Bude uncovers a society marked by disturbing uncertainty, suppressed anger and quiet resentment. This is as true in our close relationships as it is in the world of work, in how we react to politicians as much as in our attitudes towards bankers and others in the financial sector. Bude shows how this fear is not derived so much from a 'powerful other' but rather from the seemingly endless range of possibilities which we face. While this may seem to offer us greater autonomy and freedom, in reality the unknown impact and meaning of each option creates a vacuum which is filled by fear. What conditions lead people to feel anxious and fearful for themselves and others? How can individuals withstand fear and develop ways of making their fears intelligible? Probing these and other questions, Bude provides a fresh analysis of some of the most fundamental features of our societies today.

Through the modern history of the sport of swimming, readers come to understand the mysteries of technique, training, and coaching while meeting the athletes and the coaches. Contains portraits of Rowdy Gaines, Mary T. Meagher, Mike O'Brien, and Dara Torres. Published to coincide with the 1988 Summer Olympics. 8 pages of photos.

For the past twenty years, noted sociologist Andrew Abbott has been developing what he calls a processual ontology for social life. In this view, the social world is constantly changing—making, remaking, and unmaking itself, instant by instant. He argues that even the units of the social world—both individuals and entities—must be explained by these series of events rather than as enduring objects, fixed in time. This radical concept, which lies at the heart of the Chicago School of Sociology, provides a means for the disciplines of history and sociology to interact with and reflect on each other. In Processual Sociology, Abbott first examines the endurance of individuals and social groups through time and then goes on to consider the question of what this means for human nature. He looks at different approaches to the passing of social time and determination, all while examining the goal of social existence, weighing the concepts of individual outcome and social order. Abbott concludes by discussing core difficulties of the practice of social science as a moral activity, arguing that it is inescapably moral and therefore we must develop normative theories more sophisticated than our current naively political normativism. Ranging broadly across disciplines and methodologies, Processual Sociology breaks new ground in its search for conceptual foundations of a rigorously processual account of social life. Close REVIEW QUOTES Rogers Brubaker, University of California–Los Angeles “Abbott has long been one of sociology’s most fertile and original thinkers. These lucid and challenging essays display Abbott’s remarkably wide-ranging sociological intelligence at its best. Cumulatively, they articulate the core principles of a distinctively processual sociology, and they challenge us to recognize the irreducibly humanistic and moral nature of the sociological enterprise.” Paul DiMaggio, New York University “Processual Sociology’s essays draw on a dizzying range of sources and examples, blended into a stunningly original, disruptive, and fecund analysis. The interrogation of such basic concepts as actor and outcome; the insights into the way that sequence and ecology frustrate causal reasoning; the effort to reconstitute macro-sociology on a radically micro-sociological foundation; and the reclamation of the moral dimension are just a few of this volume’s important themes. Processual Sociology is both a good read and an ambitious and compelling challenge to the way that social scientists understand and carry out their craft.” Craig Calhoun, director, London School of Economics “In Processual Sociology, Abbott makes clear that his ambition is to change sociology fundamentally. In elegant but also rigorous essays, he connects his seemingly disparate past writings and foreshadows a basic rethinking of social ontology. This starts from the historical character of individual life and moves on to connect historical demography to the nature of groups, the constant making and remaking of all cultural and social relationships, and the inextricable connection between the empirical and the moral. It is a brilliant book that makes one want to drop everything else to join in thinking about sociology’s hardest, most basic questions.” Randall Collins, University of Pennsylvania “Abbott is the most surprising and innovative of today’s social theorists, in part because he combines disciplines as diverse as mathematical philosophy and literary theory. His work cuts in an entirely different way across the quantitative/qualitative and most other divides. Abbott repeatedly reverses the gestalts, advocating a lyrical sociology of contemporaneous flows rather than narratives explaining ‘outcomes’ abstracted from time, proposing that more is explained by problems of excess than problems of scarcity, and exposing concepts of inequality that run contrary to what we do in our own lives. This is a book to change the way sociologists think.”

As one of the most prestigious high schools in the nation, St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, has long been the exclusive domain of America's wealthiest sons. But times have changed. Today, a new elite of boys and girls is being molded at St. Paul's, one that reflects the hope of openness but also the persistence of inequality. In "Privilege", Shamus Khan returns to his alma mater to provide an inside look at an institution that has been the private realm of the elite for the past 150 years. He shows that St. Paul's students continue to learn what they always have - how to embody privilege. Yet, while students once leveraged the trappings of upper-class entitlement, family connections, and high culture, current St. Paul's students learn to succeed in a more diverse environment. To be the future leaders of a more democratic world, they must be at ease with everything from highbrow art to everyday life - from Beowulf to Jaws - and view hierarchies as ladders to scale. Through deft portrayals of the relationships among students, faculty, and staff, Khan shows how members of the new elite face the opening of society while still preserving the advantages that allow them to rule.

本书以内容丰富的故事情节和极富洞察力的生活细节，考察了书中那些贫困家庭、工人阶级家庭、中产阶级家庭及富有家庭孩子在学校和在家里的生活，颇具思想性地展示了不同社会分层的人们占有不同的资源，这种不同表现在日常生活中养育子女的点滴例行上，并有可能对孩子获得更高的社会地位、实现美国梦的机会产生巨大的影响。

Sociological research is hard enough already you don't need to make it even harder by smashing about like a bull in a china shop, not knowing what you're doing or where you're heading. Or so says John Levi Martin in this witty, insightful, and desperately needed primer on how to practice rigorous social science. Thinking Through Methods focuses on the practical decisions that you will need to make as a researcher where the data you are working with comes from and how that data relates to all the possible data you could have gathered. This is a user's guide to sociological research, designed to be used at both the undergraduate and graduate level. Rather than offer mechanical rules and applications, Martin chooses instead to team up with the reader to think through and with methods. He acknowledges that we are human beings and thus prone to the same cognitive limitations and distortions found in subjects and proposes ways to compensate for these limitations. Martin also forcefully argues for principled symmetry, contending that bad ethics makes for bad research, and vice versa. Thinking Through Methods is a landmark work one that students will turn to again and again throughout the course of their sociological research.

How the leisure class has been replaced by a new elite, and how their consumer habits affect us all In today's world, the leisure class has been replaced by a new elite. Highly educated and defined by cultural capital rather than income bracket, these individuals earnestly buy organic, carry NPR tote bags, and breast-feed their babies. They care about discreet, inconspicuous consumption--like eating free-range chicken and heirloom tomatoes, wearing organic cotton shirts and TOMS shoes, and listening to the Serial podcast. They use their purchasing power to hire nannies and housekeepers, to cultivate their children's growth, and to practice yoga and Pilates. In The Sum of Small Things, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett dubs this segment of society "the aspirational class" and discusses how, through deft decisions about education, health, parenting, and retirement, the aspirational class reproduces wealth and upward mobility, deepening the ever-wider class divide. Exploring the rise of the aspirational class, Currid-Halkett considers how much has changed since the 1899 publication of Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class. In that inflammatory classic, which coined the phrase "conspicuous consumption," Veblen described upper-class frivolities: men who used walking sticks for show, and women who bought silver flatware despite the effectiveness of cheaper aluminum utensils. Now, Currid-Halkett argues, the power of material goods as symbols of social position has diminished due to their accessibility. As a result, the aspirational class has altered its consumer habits away from overt materialism to more subtle expenditures that reveal status and knowledge. And these transformations influence how we all make choices. With a rich narrative and extensive interviews and research, The Sum of Small Things illustrates how cultural capital leads to lifestyle shifts and what this forecasts, not just for the aspirational class but for everyone.

The first generation of children born under China’s one-child family policy is now reaching adulthood. What are these children like? What are their values, goals, and interests? What kinds of relationships do they have with their families? This is the first in-depth study to analyze what it is like to grow up as the state-appointed vanguard of modernization. Based on surveys and ethnographic research in China, where the author lived with teenage only children and observed their homes and classrooms for 27 months between 1997 and 2002, the book explores the social, economic, and psychological consequences of the government’s decision to accelerate the fertility transition. Only Hope shows how the one-child policy has largely succeeded in its goals, but with unintended consequences. Only children are expected to be the primary providers of support and care for their retired parents, grandparents, and parents-in-law, and only a very lucrative position will allow them to provide for so many dependents. Many only children aspire to elite status even though few can attain it, and such aspirations lead to increased stress and competition, as well as intense parental involvement.

日本摄影师秋山亮二拍摄的《你好小朋友》近年来在网络风靡。1983年出版的这本摄影集已绝版。拍摄对象都是1980年代初期中国的孩子们。 这本摄影集为中日双语版。登载有“樱花牌胶卷”的广告。现在的柯尼卡美能达（KONICA MINOLTA）当时名为“小西六”。因为小西六想在中国销售自己生产的“樱花牌胶卷”（1987年更名为柯尼卡胶卷），以中国为题材制作年历。当时中国还没有生产彩色胶卷，也没有冲洗彩色照片的地方。之后这个计划慢慢扩大、转变成为制作摄影集。在中国摄影家协会的帮助下，1981～1982年小西六邀请秋山先生拍摄。他5次前往中国，每次两到三周的时间逗留，拍摄了近8000张彩色照片，筛选116张出版了《你好小朋友》摄影集。拍摄地点包含北京，成都，昆明，广州，海南岛，上海，苏州，桂林，哈尔滨，乌鲁木齐・吐鲁番，呼和浩特等12个城市。 翻开这本摄影集，孩子们天真纯洁朴实的面容接连不断地闯入我们的视野，裹挟着无法言喻的乡愁。那是中国改革开放初期，整个社会向着新希望前行的特殊氛围弥漫着整本摄影集。作品出版之后至今的36年，也是中国发生巨变的36年。建筑、衣服、使用的包或者餐具、街边的垃圾桶，特别对于经历了那个年代的70后80后看来，这些物品无疑让他们倍感怀念。然而，比起这些，更打动人心的是孩子们脸上那种无所忧虑的神情。 我们近年通过媒体看到过很多有着悲伤表情的孩子们。由于地震等灾害失去双亲的孩子、从叙利亚死里逃生难民的孩子、被空袭轰炸失去家园的孩子、受虐待而进福利院的孩子、被应试烦恼困扰而自杀的孩子。但原本孩子的存在就是，不用工作不必担心金钱问题，只需玩耍和学习并应被无条件保护，看着这本书中被拍摄的小朋友们，再次真切感受到的确应该如此。所以明明不是自己的小孩，却被一种想要拥抱画面中每一个孩子的情绪溢满心田。随后又想到这些拥有明眸的孩子们创想的未来即是当下，一边想象他们现在过着什么样的生活呢，一边不自觉的又一次次翻开新的一页。 秋山先生在自身的著作中这么写道：“随着岁月的流逝，内容的深度也随之加深，怎么也看不腻的大概就是好照片吧。即使只有一张，也希望自己的照片中能诞生出这样的影像作品。”《你好小朋友》正是这样的作品。 很多人希望《你好小朋友》能够复刻。直到2018年11月16日，创立于京都的出版社青艸堂与秋山亮二先生达成复刻意向。历时半年终于完成复刻版的制作，在其社交媒体（新浪微博、instagram、facebook）持续更新了详细的制作过程。复刻版于2019年6月1日正式发行。

This text explains the act of prognosis in its varying forms - doctors telling patients if their cancer is curable, when their pain will stop, if they will live to see their child graduate from college - from the perspective of doctors. Nicholas Christakis examines why physicians are reluctant to predict the future, what uses doctors make of prognosis, the symbolism it contains, and the practical and emotional difficulties it involves. Drawing on his experiences both as a doctor and as a sociologist, the author conducted interviews with physicians; he searched medical textbooks and medical school curricula for discussions of prognosis; and he developed quantitative data showing that physicians are systematically optimistic in their predictions. With its combination of approaches and methods, this book is a study of a murky area of medical practice that, despite its importance, is only partially understood and rarely discussed. Christakis argues that physicians and the medical profession as a whole have the duty to prognosticate, and shirking the difficult questions - as most doctors tend to do - advances neither medical knowledge nor the care seriously ill patients receive. The book aims to be a clarion call for a renewed effort to understand and improve the art and science of prognostication.

In Negotiating Opportunities, Jessica McCrory Calarco argues that the middle class has a negotiated advantage in school. Drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, Calarco traces that negotiated advantage from its origins at home to its consequences at school. Through their parents' coaching, working-class students learn to follow rules and work through problems independently. Middle-class students learn to challenge rules and request assistance, accommodations, and attention in excess of what is fair or required. Teachers typically grant those requests, creating advantages for middle-class students. Calarco concludes with recommendations, advocating against deficit-oriented programs that teach middle-class behaviors to working-class students. Those programs ignore the value of working-class students' resourcefulness, respect, and responsibility, and they do little to prevent middle-class families from finding new opportunities to negotiate advantages in school.

How do the one percent hold on to their wealth? And how do they keep getting richer, despite financial crises and the myriad of taxes on income, capital gains, and inheritance? Capital without Borders takes a novel approach to these questions by looking at professionals who specialize in protecting the fortunes of the world’s richest people: wealth managers. Brooke Harrington spent nearly eight years studying this little-known group—including two years training to become a wealth manager herself. She then “followed the money” to the eighteen most popular tax havens in the world, interviewing practitioners to understand how they helped their high-net-worth clients avoid taxes, creditors, and disgruntled heirs—all while staying just within the letter of the law. Capital without Borders reveals how wealth managers use offshore banks, shell corporations, and trusts to shield billions in private wealth not only from taxation but from all manner of legal obligations. And it shows how practitioners justify their work, despite evidence that it erodes government authority and contributes to global inequality. Harrington’s research offers the first glimpse into the tactics and mentality of a secretive profession that controls astonishingly large flows of capital around the world. Based on sixty-five practitioner interviews—conducted in the traditional financial centers of Europe and the Americas as well as the up-and-coming tax havens of Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific—Capital without Borders gives voice for the first time to an elite that has worked quietly and unobtrusively to enrich the one percent.

Child abuse, incest, child molestation, Halloween sadism, child pornography: although clearly not new problems, they have attracted more attention than ever before. "Threatened Children "asks why. Joel Best analyzes the rhetorical tools used by child advocates when making claims aimed at raising public anxiety and examines the media's role in transmitting reformers' claims and the public's response to the frightening statistics, compelling examples, and expanding definitions it confronts. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from criminal justice records to news stories, from urban legends to public opinion surveys, Best reveals how the cultural construction of social problems evolves.

This powerful and disturbing book clearly links persistent poverty among blacks in the United States to the unparalleled degree of deliberate segregation they experience in American cities. </p> American Apartheid shows how the black ghetto was created by whites during the first half of the twentieth century in order to isolate growing urban black populations. It goes on to show that, despite the Fair Housing Act of 1968, segregation is perpetuated today through an interlocking set of individual actions, institutional practices, and governmental policies. In some urban areas the degree of black segregation is so intense and occurs in so many dimensions simultaneously that it amounts to "hypersegregation." </p> The authors demonstrate that this systematic segregation of African Americans leads inexorably to the creation of underclass communities during periods of economic downturn. Under conditions of extreme segregation, any increase in the overall rate of black poverty yields a marked increase in the geographic concentration of indigence and the deterioration of social and economic conditions in black communities. As ghetto residents adapt to this increasingly harsh environment under a climate of racial isolation, they evolve attitudes, behaviors, and practices that further marginalize their neighborhoods and undermine their chances of success in mainstream American society. This book is a sober challenge to those who argue that race is of declining significance in the United States today. </p>

The explosion of space shuttle Challenger on January 28, 1986, and the death of the seven astronauts aboard had a major impact on American culture, with many people still vividly remembering exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard about the tragedy. Journalists and investigators have historically cited production problems and managerial wrong-doing as the reasons behind the disaster. The Presidential Commission uncovered a flawed decision-making process at the space agency as well, citing a well-documented history of problems with the O-ring and a dramatic last-minute protest by engineers over the Solid Rocket Boosters as evidence of managerial neglect. Why did NASA managers, who not only had all the information prior to the launch but also were warned against it, decide to proceed? In retelling how the decision unfolded through the eyes of the managers and the engineers, this book uncovers an incremental descent into poor judgment, supported by a culture of high-risk technology. The author reveals how and why NASA insiders, when repeatedly faced with evidence that something was wrong, normalized the deviance so that it became acceptable to them. No safety rules were broken. No single individual was at fault. Instead, the cause of the disaster stemmed from the banality of organizational life. This work explains why the Challenger tragedy must be re-examined and seeks to offer a warning about the hidden hazards of living in this technological age.