A commonplace assumption about American workers is that they lack class consciousness. This perception has baffled social scientists, demoralized activists, and generated a significant literature on American exceptionalism. In this provocative book, a young sociologist takes the prevailing assumptions to task and sheds new light upon this very important issue. In three vivid case studies Fantasia explores the complicated, multi-faceted dynamics of American working-class consciousness and collective action.

This book combines radical history, critical geography, and political theory in an innovative history of the solidarity campaign in London during the 1984-5 miners’ strike. Thousands of people collected food and money, joined picket lines and demonstrations, organised meetings, travelled to mining areas, and hosted coalfield activists in their homes during the strike. The support campaign encompassed longstanding elements of the British labour movement as well as autonomously organised Black, lesbian and gay, and feminist support groups. This book shows how the solidarity of 1984-5 was rooted in the development of mutual relationships of support between the coalfields and the capital since the late 1960s. It argues that a culture of solidarity was developed through industrial and political struggles that brought together diverse activists from mining communities and London. The book also takes the story forward, exploring the aftermath of the miners’ strike and the complex legacies of the support movement up to the present day. This rich history provides a compelling example of how solidarity can cross geographical and social boundaries. This book is essential reading for students, scholars, and activists with an interest in left-wing politics and history.

How did the interplay between class and ethnicity play out within the working class during the Gilded Age? Richard Jules Oestreicher illuminates the immigrant communities, radical politics, worker-employer relationships, and the multiple meanings of workers' affiliations in Detroit at the end of the nineteenth century.

Society and Culture reclaims the classical heritage, provides a clear-eyed assessment of the promise of sociology in the 21st century and asks whether the `cultural turn′ has made the study of society redundant. Sociologists have objected to the rise of cultural studies on the grounds that it produces cultural relativism and lacks a stable research agenda. This book looks at these criticisms and illustrates the relevance of a sociological perspective in the analysis of human practice. The book argues that the classical tradition must be treated as a living tradition, rather than a period piece. It analyzes the fundamental principles of belonging and conflict in society and provides a detailed critical survey of the principal social theories that offer solutions to the challenges of modernism.

Popular conceptions hold that capitalism is driven almost entirely by the pursuit of profit and self-interest. Challenging that assumption, this major new study of American business associations shows how market and non-market relations are actually profoundly entwined at the heart of capitalism. In Solidarity in Strategy, Lyn Spillman draws on rich documentary archives and a comprehensive data set of more than four thousand trade associations from diverse and obscure corners of commercial life to reveal a busy and often surprising arena of American economic activity. From the Intelligent Transportation Society to the American Gem Trade Association, Spillman explains how business associations are more collegial than cutthroat, and how they make capitalist action meaningful not only by developing shared ideas about collective interests but also by articulating a disinterested solidarity that transcends those interests. Deeply grounded in both economic and cultural sociology, Solidarity in Strategy provides rich, lively, and often surprising insights into the world of business, and leads us to question some of our most fundamental assumptions about economic life and how cultural context influences economic.

Sacred Bonds of Solidarity is a history of the emergence of Jewish international aid and the language of "solidarity" that accompanied it in nineteenth-century France.

Solidarity as a phenomenon lies like an erratic block in the midst of the moral landscape of our age. Until now, the geologists familiar with this landscape - ethicists and moral theorists - have taken it for granted, have circumnavigated it! in any case, they have been incapable of moving it. In the present volume, scientists from diverse disciplines discuss and examine the concept of solidarity, its history, its scope and its limits.

This book brings together philosophers, social psychologists and social scientists to approach contemporary social reality from the viewpoint of solidarity. It examines the nature of different kinds of solidarity and assesses the normative and explanatory potential of the concept. Various aspects of solidarity as a special emotionally and ethically responsive relation are studied: the nature of collective emotions and mutual recognition, responsiveness to others’ suffering and needs, and the nature of moral partiality included in solidarity. The evolution of norms of solidarity is examined both via the natural evolution of the human “social brain” and via the institutional changes in legal constitutions and contemporary work life. This text will appeal to students, scholars, and anyone interested in the interdisciplinary topic of social solidarity.