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How the university went global and became the heart of the information ageThe university is experiencing an unprecedented level of success today, as more universities in more countries educate more students in more fields. At the same time, the university has become central to a knowledge society based on the belief that everyone can, through higher education, access universal truths and apply them in the name of progress. This book traces the university's rise over the past hundred years to become the cultural linchpin of contemporary society, revealing how the so-called ivory tower has become profoundly interlinked with almost every area of human endeavor.David John Frank and John Meyer describe how, as the university expanded, student and faculty bodies became larger, more diverse, and more empowered to turn knowledge into action. Their contributions to society underscored the public importance of scholarship, and as the cultural authority of universities grew they increased the scope of their research and teaching interests. As a result, the university has become the bedrock of today's information-based society, an institution that is now implicated in the solution to every conceivable problem.But, as Frank and Meyer also show, the conditions that helped spur the university's recent ascendance are not immutable: eruptions of nationalism, authoritarianism, and illiberalism undercut the university's universalistic and rationalistic premises, and may threaten the centrality of the university itself.

An in-depth examination of the economic and social transition from slavery to capitalism during ReconstructionAt the center of the upheavals brought by emancipation in the American South was the economic and social transition from slavery to modern capitalism. In Between Slavery and Capitalism, Martin Ruef examines how this institutional change affected individuals, organizations, and communities in the late nineteenth century, as blacks and whites alike learned to navigate the shoals between two different economic worlds. Analyzing trajectories among average Southerners, this is perhaps the most extensive sociological treatment of the transition from slavery since W.E.B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America.In the aftermath of the Civil War, uncertainty was a pervasive feature of life in the South, affecting the economic behavior and social status of former slaves, Freedmen's Bureau agents, planters, merchants, and politicians, among others. Emancipation brought fundamental questions: How should emancipated slaves be reimbursed in wage contracts? What occupations and class positions would be open to blacks and whites? What forms of agricultural tenure could persist? And what paths to economic growth would be viable? To understand the escalating uncertainty of the postbellum era, Ruef draws on a wide range of qualitative and quantitative data, including several thousand interviews with former slaves, letters, labor contracts, memoirs, survey responses, census records, and credit reports.Through a resolutely comparative approach, Between Slavery and Capitalism identifies profound changes between the economic institutions of the Old and New South and sheds new light on how the legacy of emancipation continues to affect political discourse and race and class relations today.

How the new brain sciences are transforming our understanding of what it means to be humanThe brain sciences are influencing our understanding of human behavior as never before, from neuropsychiatry and neuroeconomics to neurotheology and neuroaesthetics. Many now believe that the brain is what makes us human, and it seems that neuroscientists are poised to become the new experts in the management of human conduct. Neuro describes the key developments—theoretical, technological, economic, and biopolitical—that have enabled the neurosciences to gain such traction outside the laboratory. It explores the ways neurobiological conceptions of personhood are influencing everything from child rearing to criminal justice, and are transforming the ways we'know ourselves'as human beings. In this emerging neuro-ontology, we are not'determined'by our neurobiology: on the contrary, it appears that we can and should seek to improve ourselves by understanding and acting on our brains.Neuro examines the implications of this emerging trend, weighing the promises against the perils, and evaluating some widely held concerns about a neurobiological'colonization'of the social and human sciences. Despite identifying many exaggerated claims and premature promises, Neuro argues that the openness provided by the new styles of thought taking shape in neuroscience, with its contemporary conceptions of the neuromolecular, plastic, and social brain, could make possible a new and productive engagement between the social and brain sciences.Copyright note: Reproduction, including downloading of Joan Miro works is prohibited by copyright laws and international conventions without the express written permission of Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Recent surveys show that more than half of American entrepreneurs share ownership in their business startups rather than going it alone. Yet the media and many scholars continue to perpetuate the myth of the lone visionary who single-handedly revolutionizes the marketplace. In The Entrepreneurial Group, Martin Ruef shatters this myth, demonstrating that teams, not individuals, are the leading force behind entrepreneurial startups. This is the first book to provide an in-depth sociological analysis of entrepreneurial groups, and to put forward a theoretical framework for understanding activities and outcomes within them.

Economists and Societies is the first book to systematically compare the profession of economics in the United States, Britain, and France, and to explain why economics, far from being a uniform science, differs in important ways among these three countries. Drawing on in-depth interviews with economists, institutional analysis, and a wealth of scholarly evidence, Marion Fourcade traces the history of economics in each country from the late nineteenth century to the present, demonstrating how each political, cultural, and institutional context gave rise to a distinct professional and disciplinary configuration. She argues that because the substance of political life varied from country to country, people's experience and understanding of the economy, and their political and intellectual battles over it, crystallized in different ways--through scientific and mercantile professionalism in the United States, public-minded elitism in Britain, and statist divisions in France. Fourcade moves past old debates about the relationship between culture and institutions in the production of expert knowledge to show that scientific and practical claims over the economy in these three societies arose from different elites with different intellectual orientations, institutional entanglements, and social purposes. Much more than a history of the economics profession, Economists and Societies is a revealing exploration of American, French, and British society and culture as seen through the lens of their respective economic institutions and the distinctive character of their economic experts.

There's a scene in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass in which the Red Queen, having just led a chase with Alice in which neither seems to have moved from the spot where they began, explains to the perplexed girl:'It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.'Evolutionary biologists have used this scene to illustrate the evolutionary arms race among competing species. William Barnett argues that a similar dynamic is at work when organizations compete, shaping how firms and industries evolve over time. Barnett examines the effects--and unforeseen perils--of competing and winning. He takes a fascinating, in-depth look at two of the most competitive industries--computer manufacturing and commercial banking--and derives some startling conclusions. Organizations that survive competition become stronger competitors--but only in the market contexts in which they succeed. Barnett shows how managers may think their experience will help them thrive in new markets and conditions, when in fact the opposite is likely to be the case. He finds that an organization's competitiveness at any given moment hinges on the organization's historical experience. Through Red Queen competition, weaker competitors fail, or they learn and adapt. This in turn heightens the intensity of competition and further strengthens survivors in an ever-evolving dynamic. Written by a leading organizational theorist, The Red Queen among Organizations challenges the prevailing wisdom about competition, revealing it to be a force that can make--and break--even the most successful organization.

How do corporations and other organizations maintain and transmit their cultures over time? Culture and Demography in Organizations offers the most reliable and comprehensive answer to this complex question to date. The first book on the subject to ground its analysis in mathematical tools and computer simulation, it goes beyond standard approaches, which focus on socialization within organizations, by explicitly considering the effects of demographic processes of entry, exit, and organizational growth. J. Richard Harrison and Glenn R. Carroll base their analysis on a formal model with three components: hiring, socialization, and employee turnover. In exploring the model's implications through computer simulation methods, the authors cover topics such as organizational growth and decline, top management teams, organizational influence networks, terrorist organizations, cultural integration following mergers, and organizational failure. For each topic, they identify the conditions influencing cultural transmission. In general, they find that demographic processes play a central role in influencing organizational culture and that studying these processes leads to some surprising insights unavailable when considering socialization alone. This book, which also serves as an ideal introduction to the increasingly popular use of computer simulation, will be an indispensable resource for scholars and students of organization theory and behavior, cultural studies, strategic management, sociology, economics, and social simulation.

Is America bitterly divided? Has America lost its traditional values? Many politicians and religious leaders believe so, as do the majority of Americans, based on public opinion polls taken over the past several years. But is this crisis of values real? This book explores the moral terrain of America today, analyzing the widely held perception that the nation is in moral decline. It looks at the question from a variety of angles, examining traditional values, secular values, religious values, family values, economic values, and others. Using unique data from the World Values Surveys, the largest systematic attempt ever made to document attitudes, values, and beliefs around the world, this book systematically evaluates the perceived crisis of values by comparing America's values with those of over 60 other nations. The results are surprising. The evidence shows overwhelmingly that America has not lost its traditional values, that the nation compares favorably with most other societies, and that the culture war is largely a myth. The gap between reality and perception does not represent mass ignorance of the facts or an overblown moral panic, Baker contends. Rather, the widespread perception of a crisis of values is a real and legitimate interpretation of life in a society that is in the middle of a fundamental transformation and that contains growing cultural contradictions. Instead of posing a problem, the author argues, this crisis rhetoric serves the valuable social function of reminding us of what it means to be American. As such, it preserves the ideological foundation of the nation.

This book represents a major step forward in the use of economic sociology to illuminate the nature and workings of capitalism amid the far-reaching changes of the contemporary era of global capitalism. For the past twenty years economic sociologists have focused on mesa-level phenomena of networks, but they have done relatively little to analyze capitalism as an overall system or to show how such phenomena emerge from and shape the dynamics of capitalism. The Economic Sociology of Capitalism seeks to change this, by presenting both big-picture analyses of capitalism and more focused pieces on institutions crucial to capitalism. The book, which includes sixteen chapters by leading scholars in economic sociology, is organized around three broad themes. The first section addresses core issues and problems in the new study of capitalism; the second considers a variety of topics concerning America, the leading capitalist economy of the world; and the third focuses attention on the question of convergence stemming from the global transformation of capitalism and the challenge of explaining institutional change. The contributions, which follow a foreword by economic historian Avner Greif and the editor's introduction, are by Mitchel Abolafia, James Baron and Michael Hannan, Mary C. Brinton, John Campbell, Gerald Davis and Christopher Marquis, Paul DiMaggio and Joseph Cohen, Peter Evans, Neil Fligstein, John Freeman, Francis Fukuyama, Ko Kuwabara, Victor Nee, Douglass C. North, AnnaLee Saxenian, Richard Swedberg, and Viviana Zelizer.

The Handbook of Economic Sociology, Second Edition is the most comprehensive and up-to-date treatment of economic sociology available. The first edition, copublished in 1994 by Princeton University Press and the Russell Sage Foundation as a synthesis of the burgeoning field of economic sociology, soon established itself as the definitive presentation of the field, and has been widely read, reviewed, and adopted. Since then, the field of economic sociology has continued to grow by leaps and bounds and to move into new theoretical and empirical territory. The second edition, while being as all-embracing in its coverage as the first edition, represents a wholesale revamping. Neil Smelser and Richard Swedberg have kept the main overall framework intact, but nearly two-thirds of the chapters are new or have new authors. As in the first edition, they bring together leading sociologists as well as representatives of other social sciences. But the thirty chapters of this volume incorporate many substantial thematic changes and new lines of research--for example, more focus on international and global concerns, chapters on institutional analysis, the transition from socialist economies, organization and networks, and the economic sociology of the ancient world. The Handbook of Economic Sociology, Second Edition is the definitive resource on what continues to be one of the leading edges of sociology and one of its most important interdisciplinary adventures. It is a must read for all faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates doing work in the field. A thoroughly revised and updated version of the most comprehensive treatment of economic sociology available Almost two-thirds of the chapters are new or have new authors Authors include leading sociologists as well as representatives of other social sciences Substantial thematic changes and new lines of research, including more focus on international and global concerns, institutional analysis, the transition from socialist economies, and organization and networks The definitive resource on what continues to be one of the leading edges of sociology and one of its most important interdisciplinary adventures A must read for faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates doing work in the field

One of the most wide-ranging studies of prejudice undertaken in a decade, The Outsider combines new research methods and rich analysis to upend many of our assumptions about prejudice. Noting that hostility toward immigrants has been on the rise throughout Western Europe, Paul Sniderman and his team conduct the first study of prejudice in Italy and offer insights applicable to nearly all countries worldwide. The study of prejudice, they argue, has been both stimulated and limited by tensions among partial theories. Prejudice and group conflict are said to be rooted in the psychological makeup of individuals, or alternatively, to spring from real competition over material goods or social status, or yet again, to follow in the wake of a quest for identity. It is the distinctive effort of The Outsider to develop a unified theory of prejudice integrating personality, realistic conflict, and social identity approaches. Drawing on computer-assisted interviewing, this book focuses on Italy partly because it has experienced two different waves of immigration, from Northern Africa and Eastern Europe, and thus allows one to consider to what extent the color of immigrants'skin imposes a special burden of prejudice. Italy is also an apt site for the study of intolerance because of long-standing prejudices that have existed internally, between Northern and Southern Italians. The book's findings show that any point of difference--color, nationality, or language--marks the immigrant as an outsider. The fact of difference, not the particular mode of difference, is crucial. Moreover, the general election of 1994 provided a rare opportunity to investigate the political impact of prejudice when the party system was itself in the process of transformation. The authors uncover a potential line of cleavage: rather than prejudice being concentrated on the political right, it has a wide following among the less educated of the political left. Analyzing the contributions of personality, social-structural factors, and political orientation to the wave of intolerance toward immigrants, The Outsider offers unprecedented insights into the phenomenon of prejudice and its link to politics.