Appropriating Technology: Vernacular Science and Social Power (September, 2004)
by Ron Eglash (Editor), Jennifer L. Croissant (Editor), Giovanna Di Chiro (Editor), Rayvon Fouché (Editor)
From the vernacular engineering of Latino car design to environmental analysis among rural women to the production of indigenous herbal cures—groups outside the centers of scientific power persistently defy the notion that they are merely passive recipients of technological products and scientific knowledge. This is the first study of how such "outsiders" reinvent consumer products—often in ways that embody critique, resistance, or outright revolt.--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Ron Eglash is assistant professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Jennifer Croissant is associate professor at the University of California. Giovanna Di Chiro is assistant professor at Allegheny College. Rayvon Fouché is assistant professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Demeaned but Empowered: The Social Power of the Urban Poor in Jamaica (July 31, 2004) Obika Gray

Social Power and the Turkish State (June 15, 2004)
by Michael Mann (Foreword), Tim Jacoby
This book looks at how the method of governance apparent in Turkey came into being by applying, and expanding upon, the historical and comparative sociological theory of Michael Mann. Nature and distribution of social power.

Bullying and Teasing : Social Power in Children's Groups (Dec 31, 2003)
by Gayle L. Macklem
Current research demonstrates that bullying affects all children in schools, not simply the several students who may be most visibly involved in an individual incident. In order to prevent escalation or to stop the action, something different must happen. The victim or bully must change, but this may not be easy. Importantly the classmates or the adults who witness the interaction have the power to change the interaction as well.Bullying and Teasing: Social Power in Children's Groups frames bullying and teasing as part of the critical foundations of elementary and middle school planning that will allow children to experience the sense of personal safety needed to learn and grow. Bullying and Teasing is designed for school psychologists and other school mental health workers, including school counselors, social workers and school nurses, who want to address the ways bullying and teasing impact both individual students and the school as a whole. The book will also be of interest to school administrators, health coordinators, special educators and school board members.
Gayle L. Macklem is a Massachusetts licensed school psychologist and a Massachusetts licensed educational psychologist. She has served in the field of education for 29 years. A former president of the Massachusetts School Psychologists Association (MSPA), Gayle is the current Technology Chairperson of the state association. She was elected School Psychologist of Year by MSPA in 2001, received a GPR award from the National Association of School Psychologists in 1997, and received a special merit award for action research in schools in 1993. Gayle taught for a number of years in the Counseling and School Psychology training program at UMass-Boston. She is currently practicing in the Manchester-Essex Regional School District as school psychologist/team chairperson and serves as testing coordinator for the district.

The Dark Zone: Groundwater, Irrigation, Politics and Social Power in North Gujarat (January, 2005)
by Anjal Prakash
Based on an intensive social anthropological study of a village in north Gujarat, this book investigates the factors that shaped unrestrained use of groundwater and the responses of various social groups to this process.
A student of Rural Management and Social Work, Anjal Prakash won a Ford Foundation doctoral fellowship to the Irrigation and Water Engineering Group, Wageningen University and Reasearch Center, the Netherlands, in 2000. He works with the Water and Sanitation Management Organisation, Gandhinagar.

Frustrated Fellowship: The Black Baptist Quest for Social Power
by James Melvin Washington

Politics in Place : Social Power Relations in an Australian Country Town Ian Gray
Politics in Place focuses on political life in a typical Australian agricultural town. It examines the maintenance of a local political power structures through an analysis of the town's social processes and asociated ideologies. Dr Gray argues that local government does affect peoples' lives and discusses why it is that some people can use their local political system to their advantage while others remain unempowered. Unlike many earlier studies, Politics in Place does not rely on the identification of an élite group, nor does it merely decribe static features of social stratification. Rather, it examines the historically-based processes that have created the constraints which limit prospects for local people. The book will be of interest to anyone wishing to gain an insight into the workings of politics at local level.

Social Power and the CEO: Leadership and Trust in a Sustainable Free Enterprise System
Elliott Jaques
The power of top management is pervasive and profound. It affects the quality of economic life, but also our personal and social lives. Equally strong is its impact on the sustainability of a free enterprise system. Psychoanalyst, teacher, and management consultant, Elliott Jaques argues that great as this power is, it is being squandered, not because of what managers do but because of what they don't know. Serious misconceptions about managerial leadership--and equally serious misunderstandings of people--abound. Jaques argues that the problems inherent in the way management is practiced are attributable to gravely dysfunctional systems of managerial leadership, systems that have evolved over the years and are now, despite their ineffectualities, taken for granted. The result of more than a half century of thought, observation, analysis and experimentation, Jaques' book is essential reading for academics, students, consultants, top management, and executives on the way up throughout the public and private sectors.
ELLIOTT JAQUES is Research Professor of Management Science, Department of Management, George Washington University, and Professor Emeritus of Social Science at Brunel University, England. He holds an M.D. from Johns Hopkins, a Ph.D. from Harvard, and is a member of the British Psycho-Analytical Society. Dr. Jaques was cited by (then General) Colin Powell for ". . . his outstanding contribution in the field of military leadership theory and instruction. . . ." He is author of numerous articles, in one of which he created the concept of the mid-life crisis, and more than 20 books, among them The Life and Behavior of Living Organisms, published by another imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Praeger Publishers.

Dangerous Diagnostics : The Social Power of Biological Information
Dorothy Nelkin, Laurence Tancredi
Sociologist Nelkin and law professor Tancredi ask the old question, "What are they keeping in our files?" about a panoply of new information that falls under the rubric of personal biochemistry, including genetic testing, brain chemistry studies, and hereditary predisposition to conditions such as heart disease. The authors say that medical test results are finding their way into personnel files, school records, insurance company data banks, and courtrooms and are too incompletely understood, wrongly applied, or used for the wrong reasons. Particularly well-reasoned in its analysis of biological data in the courtroom, this book is slightly ahead of its time and should have a place in collections on the cutting edge of social issues. Well-documented, but, alas, no bibliography, just end notes.
- Mark L. Shelton, Columbus, Ohio
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Dangerous Diagnostics is a powerful study of the pervasiveness of diagnostic testing and the potential it offers institutions to classify, categorize, and ultimately control individuals. Nelkin and Tancredi explore the ethical, social, and legal implications of cutting-edge technologies that can lead to new forms of discrimination in the name of standardized, objective measurements. They caution against the creation of an underclass deemed unemployable, untrainable, or uninsurable by such diagnostic tests.

Social Power and Legal Culture: Litigation Masters in Late Imperial China (Law, Society, and Culture in China) Melissa MacAuley

Mrs. Astor's New York : Money and Social Power in a Gilded Age (September 10, 2004)
by Eric Homberger
New York scholar Homberger (Scenes from the Life of a City: Corruption and Conscience in Old New York) gathers a dog's breakfast of research into his latest exploration of the Big Apple. The result is an intriguing and curious volume that can't seem to decide whether it's a coffee table book or a study of the psychology of late 19th- and early 20th- century American aristocrats. The idea of an aristocracy emerging from a fervently democratic society is oxymoronic, as Homberger points out, but for over half a century New York's upper class was peculiarly concerned with such a hierarchy. Ward McAllister's "Patriarchs," considered to be the elite of New York society, and Mrs. Astor's list of "Four Hundred" were the bread and butter of this era's snobbery; the latter half of Homberger's book delves into McAllister's and Astor's lives, chronicling their cotillions, lunches, amusements and affairs with considerable relish. The slightly whimsical last chapter, "Being Mrs. Astor," which begins with a description of that lady's last years (spent planning parties that her doctors had instructed her servants not to hold, and making purchases merchants knew not to send to her house), may be the best part of Homberger's book. His skill for bringing to life characters of a century ago saves the book from the occasionally tedious specificity of earlier chapters, which seem to have gotten bogged down by admittedly impressive research in newspapers and other contemporary records. Illus.
From Library Journal
This history is a rare find-a book of sophisticated scholarship that also makes for entertaining reading. Homberger's (The Historical Atlas of New York City) descriptive account of aristocratic life in late 19th- and early 20th-century America is an attempt to deal in nonfiction with a subject he feels is mostly understood through novels. New York's aristocracy may have been newer and more fluid than that of other cities, but it was still "a great lumbering elephant of a social presence." Paradoxically, the wealth and power of the social elites resulted not in a sense of freedom but a strangling anxiety to conform to the narrow rules of correct behavior. Mrs. William Astor, a central player in New York's world of aristocratic excess, was an arbiter of social acceptability while also working to keep the undesirables in their place. Homberger takes us to the extravagant balls that defined the social season, develops the rise of the media involved with social life, and describes the elites' tony neighborhoods. All this occurs against the backdrop of a city teeming with poverty, as illustrated by Jacob Riis's influential pictorial, How the Other Half Lives (1890). Solidly researched and a delight to read, this book is recommended for public libraries and for academic libraries with collections in New York history.
Bonnie Collier, Yale Law Lib. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Nuclear Power and Social Power
by Rick Eckstein
We often think of "progress" and "economic growth" as natural developments that benefit all members of society. Nuclear Power and Social Power challenges this view and instead suggests that specific definitions of progress and economic growth can be molded by powerful individuals, organizations, and classes. These definitions, and their manifestation in social policy, often serve narrow parochial interests rather than the common good. Such inequities of social power, hiding behind the semantic facade of "progress" and "economic growth," threaten the existence of democratic communities and societies.
In Nuclear Power and Social Power, Rick Eckstein helps us understand this perspective of social power by examining the civilian nuclear power industry in the United States. More specifically, he compares the Shoreham reactor in New York and the Seabrook reactor in New Hampshire, which faced similar financial and public oppositions yet met very different fates. The $5.5 billion Shoreham plant was the first completed and licensed reactor in the United States never to operate commercially. Seabrook, costing about the same, managed to open even though its primary owner went bankrupt. Despite the differences, the cast of winners and losers was very much the same. In both cases, banks and other powerful corporations won while regular folks and small businesses lost amid a barrage of egalitarian discourse about progress and growth.
A critical examination of the Shoreham and Seabrook nuclear power plants and the way expensive corporate initiatives purported as good for social "progress" or "economic growth" actually serve the parochial interests of powerful organizations and classes

Social Power and Everyday Class Relations: Agrarian Transformation in North Bihar (June, 2001)
by Anand Chakravarti
`Anand Chakravarti has movingly and convincingly shown us that the Kosi River remains a "River of Sorrow" for the downtrodden in Aghanbigha' - Christopher V Hill, Contemporary South Asia
This book, based on intensive fieldwork, examines the inter-connection between the social power wielded by members of the dominant landowning caste and their practice of agrarian capitalism.

The State and Social Power in Global Environmental Politics
Ronnie D. Lipschutz, Ken Conca
Peter Haas, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Contains some of the most creative and exciting essays on environmental topics that I have seen in a long time.
"Probably the best book yet written on global environmental politics." -- Environmental Politics

Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power Kenneth Bancroft Clark
KENNETH B. CLARK began his education in the Harlem public schools and was later graduated from Howard University and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University. In 1962 he returned to Harlem as an "involved observer," serving as the chief consultant and chairman of the board of directors of the Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited project (Haryou), from which Dark Ghetto arose. But, according to Clark, "Dark Ghetto is a summation of my personal and lifelong experiences and observations as a prisoner within the ghetto long before I was aware that I was really a prisoner."

Bible-Carrying Christians: Conservative Protestants and Social Power David Harrington Watt
In the United States, there are hundreds of thousands of Protestant churches whose members habitually carry their Bibles with them. These churches--often referred to as "evangelical" or "fundamentalist"--play a crucial role in shaping American society. In this book, David Watt draws on years of fieldwork to present an elegant reinterpretation of the way that conservative Protestants influence American politics and culture. At the heart of the book is a sympathetic, but far from uncritical, analysis of those forms of social power that are assumed to be natural among Bible-carrying Christians. While outsiders often presuppose that evangelical Christians take for granted the authority of certain institutions (among them the American state, corporations, ministers, men, and heterosexuals), Watt argues that the reality is far more complex. This is a concise and lively book that sheds new light on the way that Bible-carrying Christians influence the way that people in America think--and avoid thinking--about social power.