American Labor Unions in the Electoral Arena By Herbert B. Asher, Eric S. Heberlig, Randall B. Ripley, and Karen Snyder. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001. 207p. $69.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (3) ◽  
pp. 630-630
Author(s):  
Glenn Perusek

For more than a generation, as the authors rightly point out, the impact of organized labor on electoral politics has been neglected in scholarly literature. Indeed, only a tiny minority of social scientists explicitly focuses on organized labor in the United States. Although the impact of the social movements of the 1960s appeared to heighten awareness of the importance of class, race, and gender, class and its organized expression, the union movement, has received less attention, while studies of race and gender have flourished.

2005 ◽  
Vol 67 ◽  
pp. 177-181
Author(s):  
William Mello

Would the existing powerlessness of American unions be much different had organized labor not been the focus of cold-war repression in the late 1940s and 1950s? How did workers experience the anticommunist upsurge and reshape their political alliances in light of what some have called America's darkest political hour? American Labor and the Cold War is a collection of smart and challenging essays that examine the impact of cold war politics on organized labor and the labor-left. The authors explore the historical impact of the cold war and the constraints placed on working class political power in the United States immediately following the Second World War. They argue that the cold war on labor reflected a process that was driven by state-organized repressive measures that were sustained by regional political-cultural traditions and in some cases high levels of working-class conservatism. The essays highlight the efforts of conservative labor leaders to take control of left-led unions, purging Communist Party (CP) activists and their allies and the ways in which communists sought to resist the radical right-wing movement in their unions and surrounding communities.


2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 408-427
Author(s):  
Elaine Bell Kaplan

Sociology is being challenged by the new generation of students and scholars who have another view of society. Millennial/Gen Zs are the most progressive generation since the 1960s. We have had many opportunities to discuss and imagine power, diversity, and social change when we teach them in our classes or attend their campus events. Some Millennial/Gen Z believe, especially those in academia, that social scientists are tied to old theories and ideologies about race and gender, among other inconsistencies. These old ideas do not resonate with their views regarding equity. Millennials are not afraid to challenge the status quo. They do so already by supporting multiple gender and race identities. Several questions come to mind. How do we as sociologists with our sense of history and other issues such as racial and gender inequality help them along the way? Are we ready for this generation? Are they ready for us?


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 312-313
Author(s):  
Juha Lee ◽  
Manjing Gao ◽  
Chioun Lee

Abstract Parents, particularly mothers, who experienced early life adversities (ELAs) are more likely to have a child with developmental disabilities (DD). We have little knowledge about how parental health varies across race-gender groups among those with a DD child and the role of ELAs in the associations. Using Black and White adults (n = 8,778; 25% Blacks) from the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study, we examine racial disparities in the impact of having a child with DD (vs. having healthy children) on parental health outcomes. This study questions (1) the extent to which parents’ ELAs (e.g., poverty and abuse) are associated with having a child with DD and (2) how considering early-life factors reveals racial and gender disparities in the impact of having a child with DD. We found that as the number of ELAs increases, the probability of having a healthy child decreases for all race-gender groups, but most dramatically for Black women. Having a DD has adverse effects on chronic illnesses and functional limitations more for mothers than fathers. Black women are most adversely affected, with no effect on Black men. There is no gender difference in the impact of having a DD child on depressive symptoms, yet White parents are more vulnerable than Black parents. After controlling for ELAs, the adverse effects of having a DD child on both physical and mental health remain significant. Future research should identify life-course circumstances that reveal why the impact of having a DD child varies by race and gender.


1981 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-19

Canada bears some similarities to, and yet in many respects is distinctively different from the United States of America. Composed of two linguistic communities, French and English, and demographically lop-sided, with the majority of its inhabitants living within 200 miles of the U. S. border, the nation presents questions for the social scientist with applied interests which while not unique, are not easily resolved by recourse to American models. Until fairly recently, the social sciences in Canada, and anthropology in particular, were only sparsely represented within and without academia. The 1960s were witness to a rapid growth pattern, with substantial recrutiment of social scientists from the U. S.A, Great Britain and Commonwealth countries such as Australia. The establishment in time of graduate programs led to the present situation, in which positions in Canada are increasingly being filled by persons with Canadian training. Many of these positions are in non-academic settings, such as museums, federal and provincial government agencies, private consulting firms and elsewhere. Many social scientists in Canada find themselves today in applied career patterns.


2007 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 405-434 ◽  
Author(s):  
KIM MCQUAID

An era of space explorations and an era of expanded civil rights for racial minorities and women began simultaneously in the United States. But such important social changes are very rarely discussed in relation to each other. Four recent books on how the US astronaut program finally opened to women and minorities in 1978 address a key part of this connection, without discussing the struggles that compelled the ending of traditional race and gender exclusions. This essay examines the organizational and political dynamics of how civil rights in employment came to the US civilian space program in the decades after 1970.


2021 ◽  
pp. 529-552
Author(s):  
Jill A. McCorkel

This chapter traces the emergence, maturation, and subsequent decline of ethnographic studies of prisons and jails in the United States. It provides a summary and overview of classic and contemporary prison ethnographies and identifies key issues and themes that animate qualitative research on prisons and carceral facilities. These include questions about the forms that punishment, surveillance, and control take, the ways that incarcerated men and women experience, resist, and make sense of the conditions of confinement, and the impact incarceration has for their relationships with families, communities, and one another. The chapter considers the dramatic reduction in the number of ethnographic studies of prisons and jails at century’s end and identifies how punitive policies associated with mass incarceration made it all but impossible for ethnographers to gain entry to carceral institutions. Contemporary ethnographers have reinvented the form by documenting practices and ideologies of control in alternate carceral spaces including visiting rooms, drug treatment programs, and group homes. A summary of recent work is included, along with a review of the ways that contemporary ethnographers foreground issues related to race and gender inequality. The chapter concludes with a discussion of prison ethnography in Europe where ethnographers enjoy greater access to carceral facilities and have considerable influence over public policy. For comparative purposes, I include a summary of ethnographic research from Ireland, the United Kingdom, and France.


Author(s):  
Taylor N. Carlson ◽  
Marisa Abrajano ◽  
Lisa García Bedolla

Individuals arrive at meaning through conversation. Scholars have long explored political conversations in the United States, and the vast majority of this research suggests that political discussion has important effects on political attitudes and engagement. However, much of this research relies on samples of White respondents, making it potentially difficult to generalize these findings to our increasingly diverse electorate. In this book, we seek to understand how political discussion networks vary across groups who have vastly different social positions in the United States, specifically along the lines of ethnorace, nativity, and gender. We build upon seminal work in the field as we argue that individuals with different social positions likely discuss politics with different groups of people and, as a consequence, their discussion networks have different effects on their political behavior. We use a novel discussion network data set with an ethnoracially diverse sample, paired with qualitative interviews, to test this argument. We assert that this book makes three central contributions: (1) expanding the scope of the political discussion network literature by providing a comparative analysis across ethnorace, nativity, and gender; (2) demonstrating how historical differences in partisanship, policy attitudes, and engagement are reflected within groups’ social networks; and (3) revealing how the social position of our respondents affects the impact that networks can have on their trust and efficacy in government, political knowledge, policy attitudes, and political and civic engagement patterns.


Author(s):  
Shelton Stromquist ◽  
Greg Patmore

Comparative history provides an opportunity for scholars to move beyond national boundaries and reflect on their own societies in new light. But such comparisons are not always straightforward. While both Australia and the United States have federal governments, the state played a more coercive role against organized labor and radicals in the United States than in Australia. Several factors softened the impact of the state on labor in Australia: a stronger trade union movement, the formation of labor parties, and a political consensus on regulating industrial relations at least until the 1980s. In the United States, unbridled hostility of large corporations toward organized labor governed state policy. Despite these differences, labor in both countries found political space to promote progressive policies and modify the harsh behavior of governments....


Author(s):  
Martin A. Schain

The impact of immigration on socioeconomic stability, the challenge of integration, and issues surrounding citizenship has generated the interest of scholars for years. The literature is generally focused on the challenge (rather than the benefits) of immigration for social cohesion, identity, and the well-established rules of citizenship. For social scientists and analysts in Western Europe and the United States, the destabilizing aspects of immigration appear to have largely displaced class as a way of understanding sources of political instability. Scholarly interest in questions of immigrant integration on the one hand and naturalization and citizenship on the other, first emerged in the social sciences in the 1960s. In the United States, integration and citizenship questions have often been explored in the context of race relations. In Europe, the debates on issues of citizenship have been much more influenced by questions of identity and integration. As interest grew in comparison, scholars increasingly turned their attention to national differences that crystallized around national models for integration. However, such models are not always in congruence with aspects of public policy. There are a number of research directions that scholars may consider with respect to immigrant integration, naturalization, and citizenship, such as the relationship between immigrant integration and class analysis, the careful development of theories of policy change, the role of the European Union in the policy process, and the impact of integration and citizenship on the political system.


Author(s):  
Dorothy Pawluch ◽  
Samuel Schotland

Although interest in the health, illnesses, and well-being of the young dates back to Antiquity, the term pediatrics is relatively modern, originating in the latter half of the 19th century with the emergence of a distinct and organized specialty within medicine. The literature covering that development, and the history of medical interest in children more generally, is vast, characterized by contributions from clinician-historians and, especially after the 1960s, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and other social scientists. The tendency in the earlier literature was to produce largely descriptive works celebrating the great men (less so women) of pediatrics and their triumphs. Since the 1960s, however, appreciation has grown of the need to look beyond a simple chronicling and honoring of individuals and their scientific and technological achievements. The trend has been toward more analytical histories that pay attention to the social, cultural, political, and economic contexts within which pediatrics developed, and to the role of such factors as class, race, and gender. Both types of contributions—those generated by clinician-historians and those by critical analysts writing from vantage points outside of medicine—are reflected here. Drawing clear boundaries around the subject of pediatric history is difficult. The literature cited inevitably overlaps to a greater or lesser extent with other Oxford Bibliographies articles, such as “Children and Social Policy and “Ethics in Research with Children.” An effort has been made to include sources where pediatrics as a specialty features centrally or that cover developments that have been pivotal to the evolution of the specialty.


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