This collection of recent essays by the influential sociologist Herbert J. Gans brings together the many themes of Gans’s wide-ranging career to make the case for a policy-oriented vision for sociology. Sociology and Social Policy explicates and helps solve social problems by presenting a range of studies on what people, institutions, and social structures do with, for, and against one another. These works from across Gans’s areas of interest—the city, poverty, ethnicity, employment and political economy, and the relationship between race and class—together make a powerful call to action for the field of sociology.
Price: $37.00
Pages: 280
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Publication Date:
05 September 2017
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780231183055
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / General, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / Social Policy, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Discrimination, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Emigration & Immigration
How good to have this exceptionally stimulating collection of essays that deploy decades of learning to probe fundamental challenges of political economy, race, and bases of identity. Written by a master sociologist in his characteristically lucid, accessible prose, these deep and compelling ruminations offer challenges to thought and action on every page.
Herbert J. Gans is Robert S. Lynd Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Columbia University. His many books include People, Plans, and Policies: Essays on Poverty, Racism, and Other National Urban Problems (1991) and The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community (Legacy Edition, 2017), both from Columbia University Press.
Preface and Acknowledgments
Part I: The City
1. Some Problems of and Futures for Urban Sociology: Toward a Sociology of Settlements
2. The Sociology of Space: A Use-Centered View
3. Involuntary Segregation and the Ghetto: Disconnecting Process and Place
4. Concentrated Poverty: A Critical Analysis
Part II: Poverty
5. Studying the Bottom of American Society
6. The Challenge of Multigenerational Poverty
7. The Benefits of Poverty
Part III: Jobs and the Political Economy
8. Superfluous Workers: The Labor Market’s Invisible Discards
9. Work-Time Reduction: Possibilities and Problems
10. Basic Income: A Remedy for a Sick Labor Market?
11. Seeking a Political Solution to the Economy’s Problems
12. High School Economics Texts and the American Economy
Part IV: Race and Class
13. Race as Class
14. “Whitening” and the Changing American Racial Hierarchy
15. The Moynihan Report and Its Aftermaths: A Critical Analysis
Part V: Ethnicity
16. The Coming Darkness of Late-Generation European-American Ethnicity
17. The End of Late-Generation European Ethnicity in America?
Appendix: Working in Six Research Areas—a Multi-Field Sociological Career
