Examines broad shifts in American work values from their Calvinist origins to present controversies involving work, welfare, and affirmative action.

Indhold: Introduction: Understanding the Culture of the United States; Traditional American Values and Beliefs; The American Religious Heritage; The Frontier Heritages; The Heritage of Abundance; The World of American Business; Government and Politics in the United States; Ethnic and Racial Diversity in the United States; Education in the United States; How Americans spend their leisure time; The American Family; American Values at the Crossroads;

What values do Americans hold dear? What happens when real-world situations cause those values to conflict? To better understand the intellectual map of how American society works, Arthur G. Neal and Helen Youngelson-Neal analyze values prominent in American word and deed. These values appear in our nation’s formal documents—rights and privileges prominently emphasized in the US Constitution and inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. They have shaped the historical destiny and, indeed, include those values most extensively propagated by the general population. Using these criteria, the authors identify individualism, the pursuit of happiness, freedom, consumerism, materialism, equality of opportunity, technology, mastery of the environment, quality of marriage, and national unity as the core American values. Core values provide the raw materials for the construction of contemporary society as a moral community, wherever that community is located. Such values are clusters of ideas that are central to self-identities; they generate a sense of collective belonging and membership. As such, core values define the existing social order and advance a set of ideas for depicting a desirable future. The analysis presented here helps us understand contemporary conflicts inherent in the American value system and the problems confronted by Americans as they try to live within the limitations and contradictions of value systems.

Tensions over democratic values in today's business market -- The development of the Mondragón cooperatives -- Key value debates at Mondragón -- Practical lessons from Mondragón -- Participation and marketization at Mondragón and beyond.

This study analyzes American, Vietnamese and Japanese personal values, attempting to understand how it can be ethnographers find large differences in values between cultures, yet empirical surveys find relatively small, almost trivial differences in personal values between cultures.

Considers the principles underlying the American concept of freedom by drawing on inspirational anecdotes taken from a cross-section of the population. Describes how people have bettered themselves both morally and in their careers by practicing such values as honesty, compassion, self-discipline, initiative, hard work, charity and forgiveness.

This book identifies how certain core values have made our nation great and shows how these values are compatible with the rules for productive living of most of the religions of the world.

Over the past half-century, El Salvador has transformed dramatically. Historically reliant on primary exports like coffee and cotton, the country emerged from a brutal civil war in 1992 to find much of its national income now coming from a massive emigrant workforce that earns money in the US and sends it home. In this work, Pedersen examines this new way of life as it extends across two places: Intipucā, a Salvadoran town infamous for its remittance wealth, and the Washington, DC metro area.

Why stigmatizing and confining a large segment of our population should be unacceptable to all Americans. The United States, home to five percent of the world's population, now houses twenty-five percent of the world's prison inmates. Our incarceration rate—at 714 per 100,000 residents and rising—is almost forty percent greater than our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). More pointedly, it is 6.2 times the Canadian rate and 12.3 times the rate in Japan. Economist Glenn Loury argues that this extraordinary mass incarceration is not a response to rising crime rates or a proud success of social policy. Instead, it is the product of a generation-old collective decision to become a more punitive society. He connects this policy to our history of racial oppression, showing that the punitive turn in American politics and culture emerged in the post-civil rights years and has today become the main vehicle for the reproduction of racial hierarchies. Whatever the explanation, Loury argues, the uncontroversial fact is that changes in our criminal justice system since the 1970s have created a nether class of Americans—vastly disproportionately black and brown—with severely restricted rights and life chances. Moreover, conservatives and liberals agree that the growth in our prison population has long passed the point of diminishing returns. Stigmatizing and confining of a large segment of our population should be unacceptable to Americans. Loury's call to action makes all of us now responsible for ensuring that the policy changes.

With rich detail, compelling honesty, and a storyteller’s gift, RFK Jr. describes his life growing up Kennedy in a tumultuous time in history that eerily echoes the issues of nuclear confrontation, religion, race, and inequality that we confront today. “With emotion and striking detail, RFK Jr. recalls both the private joys and very public pain of his childhood.”— Independent Catholic News In this powerful book that combines the best aspects of memoir and political history, the third child of Attorney General Robert Kennedy and nephew of JFK takes us on an intimate journey through his life, including watershed moments in the history of our nation. Stories of his grandparents Joseph and Rose set the stage for their nine remarkable children, among them three U.S. senators—Teddy, Bobby, and Jack—one of whom went on to become attorney general, and the other, the president of the United States. We meet Allen Dulles and J. Edgar Hoover, two men whose agencies posed the principal threats to American democracy and values. We live through the Cuban Missile Crisis, when insubordinate spies and belligerent generals in the Pentagon and Moscow brought the world to the cliff edge of nuclear war. At Hickory Hill in Virginia, where RFK Jr. grew up, we encounter the celebrities who gathered at the second most famous address in Washington, members of what would later become known as America’s Camelot. Through his father’s role as attorney general we get an insider’s look as growing tensions over civil rights led to pitched battles in the streets and 16,000 federal troops were called in to enforce desegregation at Ole Miss. We see growing pressure to fight wars in Southeast Asia to stop communism. We relive the assassination of JFK, RFK’s run for the presidency that was cut short by his own death, and the aftermath of those murders on the Kennedy family. RFK Jr. also shares his own experiences, not just with historical events and the movers who shaped them but also with his mother and father, with his own struggles with addiction, and with the ways he eventually made peace with both his Kennedy legacy and his own demons. A lyrically written book that provides insight, hope, and steady wisdom for Americans as they wrestle, as never before, with questions about America’s role in history and the world and what it means to be American.