Building on the author's thirty-six years of experience with North Town, Texas, this second edition presents an ethnographic study of the ways the town's youth learn traditional American values through participation in sports, membership in formal and informal social groups, dating, and interactions with teachers in the classroom.

This lost classic by famous anthropological theorist Leslie A. White, published now for the first time, represents twenty-five years of his scholarship on the anthropology of modern capitalism. Drawing out his now classic formulations of social organization, cultural evolution, and the relationship between technology, ecology, and culture, this major theoretical work traces a vast expanse of history from the earliest forms of capitalism to the detailed inner workings of contemporary democratic institutions. A substantial foreword by Burton J. Brown, Benjamin Urish, and Robert Carneiro both situates this posthumous work within the history of anthropological theory and shows its importance to contemporary debates within the discipline.

Subtitled, Corporate liberalism and the reconstruction of American higher education, 1894-1928. Barrow (political science, Southeastern Mass. U.) argues (and demonstrates) that government and the private sector have guided the development and management of the university. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

We live in a time of great uncertainty about the future. Those heady days of the late twentieth century, when the end of the Cold War seemed to be ushering in a new and more optimistic age, now seem like a distant memory. During the last couple of decades, we’ve been battered by one crisis after another and the idea that humanity is on a progressive path to a better future seems like an illusion. It is only now that we can see clearly the real scope and structure of the profound shifts that Western societies have undergone over the last 30 years. Classical industrial society has been transformed into a late-modern society that is molded by polarization and paradoxes. The pervasive singularization of the social, the orientation toward the unique and exceptional, generates systematic asymmetries and disparities, and hence progress and unease go hand in hand. Reckwitz examines this dual structure of singularization and polarization as it plays itself out in the different sectors of our societies and, in so doing, he outlines the central structural features of the present: the new class society, the characteristics of a postindustrial economy, the conflict about culture and identity, the exhaustion of the self resulting from the imperative to seek authentic fulfillment, and the political crisis of liberalism. Building on his path-breaking work The Society of Singularities, this new book will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, politics, and the social sciences generally, and to anyone concerned with the great social and political issues of our time.

Financial collapses—whether of the junk bond market, the Internet bubble, or the highly leveraged housing market—are often explained as the inevitable result of market cycles: What goes up must come down. In Liquidated, Karen Ho punctures the aura of the abstract, all-powerful market to show how financial markets, and particularly booms and busts, are constructed. Through an in-depth investigation into the everyday experiences and ideologies of Wall Street investment bankers, Ho describes how a financially dominant but highly unstable market system is understood, justified, and produced through the restructuring of corporations and the larger economy. Ho, who worked at an investment bank herself, argues that bankers’ approaches to financial markets and corporate America are inseparable from the structures and strategies of their workplaces. Her ethnographic analysis of those workplaces is filled with the voices of stressed first-year associates, overworked and alienated analysts, undergraduates eager to be hired, and seasoned managing directors. Recruited from elite universities as “the best and the brightest,” investment bankers are socialized into a world of high risk and high reward. They are paid handsomely, with the understanding that they may be let go at any time. Their workplace culture and networks of privilege create the perception that job insecurity builds character, and employee liquidity results in smart, efficient business. Based on this culture of liquidity and compensation practices tied to profligate deal-making, Wall Street investment bankers reshape corporate America in their own image. Their mission is the creation of shareholder value, but Ho demonstrates that their practices and assumptions often produce crises instead. By connecting the values and actions of investment bankers to the construction of markets and the restructuring of U.S. corporations, Liquidated reveals the particular culture of Wall Street often obscured by triumphalist readings of capitalist globalization.

This lost classic by Leslie A. White represents twenty-five years of his scholarship on the anthropology of modern capitalism. Drawing out his now classic formulations of social organization, cultural evolution, and the relationship between technology, ecology, and culture, this major theoretical work traces a vast expanse of history from the earliest forms of capitalism to the detailed inner workings of contemporary democratic institutions. The abridged version of Modern Capitalist Culture delivers all of White’s major arguments in a clear and concise manner. A substantial foreword by Burton J. Brown, Benjamin Urish, and Robert Carneiro both situates this posthumous work within the history of anthropological theory and shows its importance to contemporary debates within the discipline.

Christian Lotz argues that Immanuel Kant’s idea of a mental schematism, which gives the human mind access to a stable reality, can be interpreted as a social concept, which, using Karl Marx, the author identifies as money. Money and its “fluid” form, capital, constitute sociality in capitalism and make access to social reality possible. Money, in other words, makes life in capitalism meaningful and frames all social relations. Following Marx, Lotz argues that money is the true Universal of modern life and that, as such, we are increasingly subjected to its control. As money and capital are closely linked to time, Lotz argues that in capitalism money also constitutes past and future “social horizons” by turning both into “monetized” horizons. Everything becomes faster, global, and more abstract. Our lives, as a consequence, become more mobile, “fluid,” unstable, and precarious. Lotz presents analyses of credit, debt, and finance as examples of how money determines the meaning of future and past, imagination, and memory, and that this results in individuals becoming increasingly integrated into and dependent upon the capitalist world. This integration and dependence increases with the event of electronics industries and brain-science industries that channel all human desires towards profits, growth, and money. In this way, the book offers a critical extension of Theodor Adorno’s analysis of exchange and the culture industry as the basis of modern societies. Lotz argues—paradoxically with and against Adorno—that we should return to the basic insights of Marx’s philosophy, given that the principle of exchange is only possible on the basis of more fundamental social and economic categories, such as money.

Claims the rebellion of poor and working class children against school authority prepares them for working class jobs.