Dlittle30

LATEST ARTICLES ( 863 )

• How Jim Crow Worked

  

  Understanding history is partly about understanding some of the dry facts of social sequence and cause and effect in the making of various periods of... Read more

  Posted on 12 September 2012 SOCIETY

• Why Spatial Analysis?

  

  G. William Skinner's contributions to the China field were many (link). A great deal of current research in the China field builds on his regionalization... Read more

  Posted on 10 September 2012 SOCIETY

• Quality of Life in China

  

  One of the important developments in efforts to measure economic progress has been the creation of various measures of quality of life. Read more

  Posted on 05 September 2012 SOCIETY

• Liberal Education

  

  One of the most fundamental and distinctive aspects of the American approach to undergraduate education is the priority given to making sure that students... Read more

  Posted on 03 September 2012 SOCIETY

• The Great Divergence

  It has been ten years since Ken Pomeranz published The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy., a book that forced some rea... Read more

  Posted on 01 September 2012 SOCIETY

• Rural Studies in China

  

  I spent a rewarding afternoon at the Institute for Rural Studies at Central China Normal University in Wuhan this week (link). The Institute is the leading... Read more

  Posted on 28 August 2012 SOCIETY

• Technical Knowledge

  There is a kind of knowledge in an advanced mechanical society that doesn't get much attention from philosophers of science and sociologists of science, but it... Read more

  Posted on 26 August 2012 SOCIETY

• Political Polarization?

  

  Is the American electorate "polarized" with regard to sets of political issues? McCarty, Rosenthal, and Poole accept the common view that we have in fact... Read more

  Posted on 22 August 2012 POLITICS, SOCIETY

• Social Obligations and Markets

  

  The vice presidential pick for the Republican ticket is an extreme voice on the question of whether individuals have obligations to others in society that... Read more

  Posted on 17 August 2012 SOCIETY

• Mobilizing the Masses

  

  One of the books on the Chinese Revolution that I particularly respect is Odoric Wou's 1994 Mobilizing the Masses: Building Revolution in Henan. As noted in... Read more

  Posted on 13 August 2012 SOCIETY

• Civil Rights History

  

  What is involved in assembling the history of a complicated period like the US civil rights movement? This is a difficult question for any complex historical... Read more

  Posted on 10 August 2012 SOCIETY

• Mayer Zald

  

  I am sorry to share the news with readers that Mayer Zald passed away today in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Mayer was a brilliant sociologist, a founding contributor... Read more

  Posted on 08 August 2012 SOCIETY

• Response to Little by Dave Elder-Vass

  

  [Dave Elder-Vass accepted my invitation to write a response to my discussion of his recent book, The Reality of Social Construction (link). Read more

  Posted on 08 August 2012 SOCIETY

• What is the Good of a University Education?

  

  Martha Nussbaum is one of the most exceptional voices in philosophy and public policy we have today, and she has contributed to a wide range of topics. Her wor... Read more

  Posted on 05 August 2012 PHILOSOPHY, SCHOOLING, SOCIETY

• Many Capitalisms?

  

  Professor Luciano Segreto lectured in Michigan this week on the subject of a comparison between US and European capitalisms. Segreto is professor of... Read more

  Posted on 03 August 2012 DEBATE, SOCIETY

• Elder-Vass on Social Realism

  

  Dave Elder-Vass's arguments for the real causal powers of social structures have been considered here several times (link, link). Elder-Vass's recent book,... Read more

  Posted on 01 August 2012 SOCIETY

• Social Embeddedness

  

  To what extent do individuals choose their courses of action largely on the basis of a calculation of costs and benefits? And to what extent, on the contrary,... Read more

  Posted on 31 July 2012 SOCIETY

• Woodward Avenue

  

  How does a rust belt city relaunch itself? How can the stakeholders of Detroit, Cleveland, or Milwaukee begin to reinvent their cities and get on a track that... Read more

  Posted on 27 July 2012 SOCIETY

• Durable Inequality

  

  Chuck Tilly was an enormously creative historical sociologist, and he also had a knack for a good title. This is certainly true of his 1998 book, Durable... Read more

  Posted on 22 July 2012 SOCIETY

• Readers' List of Innovative Social Science Writing

  

  Image: graph of relationships among the social sciences, Eigenfactor.org To the readers of UnderstandingSociety, I am writing directly to you to ask your... Read more

  Posted on 19 July 2012 SOCIETY