A vivid look at China's shifting place in the global political economy of technology production How did China's mass manufacturing and "e;copycat"e; production become transformed, in the global tech imagination, from something holding the nation back to one of its key assets?
Health care, welfare, Social Security, employment programs--all are part of ongoing national debates about the future of social policy in the United States.
A revealing exploration of political disruption and violence in a rural Chinese county during the Cultural RevolutionA Decade of Upheaval chronicles the surprising and dramatic political conflicts of a rural Chinese county over the course of the Cultural Revolution.
An in-depth look at how mortuary cultures and issues of death and the dead in Africa have developed over four centuriesIn My Time of Dying is the first detailed history of death and the dead in Africa south of the Sahara.
Finalist for the National Book AwardAn intimate reckoning with aquifer depletion in America's heartlandThe Ogallala aquifer has nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia.
Bioprospecting--the exchange of plants for corporate promises of royalties or community development assistance--has been lauded as a way to develop new medicines while offering southern nations and indigenous communities an incentive to preserve their rich biodiversity.
A New York Times BestsellerA Wall Street Journal BestsellerA New York Times Notable Book of 2020A New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceShortlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the YearA New Statesman Book to ReadFrom economist Anne Case and Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton, a groundbreaking account of how the flaws in capitalism are fatal for America's working classDeaths of despair from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism are rising dramatically in the United States, claiming hundreds of thousands of American lives.
An important investigation of the sociocultural fallout of America's work on the atomic bombIn The Nuclear Borderlands, Joseph Masco offers an in-depth look at the long-term consequences of the Manhattan Project.
In this richly detailed, sensitive ethnographic work, Sally Cole takes as her starting point the firsthand accounts of five differently situated Portuguese women, who describe their lives in a rural fishing community on the north coast of Portugal.
The essential handbook for doing historical research in the twenty-first centuryThe Princeton Guide to Historical Research provides students, scholars, and professionals with the skills they need to practice the historian's craft in the digital age, while never losing sight of the fundamental values and techniques that have defined historical scholarship for centuries.
As collective violence erupts in many regions throughout the world, we often hear media reports that link the outbreaks to age-old ethnic or religious hostilities, thereby freeing the state, its agents, and its political elites from responsibility.
The forgotten story of the nineteenth-century freethinkers and twentieth-century humanists who tried to build their own secular religionIn The Church of Saint Thomas Paine, Leigh Eric Schmidt tells the surprising story of how freethinking liberals in nineteenth-century America promoted a secular religion of humanity centered on the deistic revolutionary Thomas Paine (1737-1809) and how their descendants eventually became embroiled in the culture wars of the late twentieth century.
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.
The first modern scholarly synthesis of animal domesticationAcross the globe and at different times in the past millennia, the evolutionary history of domesticated animals has been greatly affected by the myriad, complex, and diverse interactions humans have had with the animals closest to them.
An in-depth look at Qatar's migrant workers and the place of skill in the language of control and powerSkill-specifically the distinction between the "e;skilled"e; and "e;unskilled"e;-is generally defined as a measure of ability and training, but Does Skill Make Us Human?
This compelling text and dramatic photographic essay convey the emotional power of the death rituals of a small Greek village--the funeral, the singing of laments, the distribution of food, the daily visits to the graves, and especially the rite of exhumation.
A remarkable look at how the growth, technology, and politics of high-frequency trading have altered global financial marketsIn today's financial markets, trading floors on which brokers buy and sell shares face-to-face have increasingly been replaced by lightning-fast electronic systems that use algorithms to execute astounding volumes of transactions.
How tech giants are reshaping spirituality to serve their religion of peak productivitySilicon Valley is known for its lavish perks, intense work culture, and spiritual gurus.
Balancing respect for religious conviction and the values of liberal democracy is a daunting challenge for judges and lawmakers, particularly when religious groups seek exemption from laws that govern others.
As debate rages over the widening and destructive gap between the rich and the rest of Americans, Claude Fischer and his colleagues present a comprehensive new treatment of inequality in America.
An illuminating account of cultural resilience in JavaFive centuries after the fall of its last Hindu Buddhist kingdom, Java retains only one small population that preserves a non-Islamic priestly tradition descended from early Hindu clergy.
Douglas Holmes develops the concept of peasant-worker society to analyze a kind of social formation that has until now gone largely unrecognized and unstudied.
A study of the structure, growth, and future of transnational human travel and communicationIncreasingly, people travel and communicate across borders.
Unlike the 1930s, when the United States tragically failed to open its doors to Europeans fleeing Nazism, the country admitted over three million refugees during the Cold War.
In this study a social and cultural anthropologist and a specialist in the study of religion pool their talents to examine recent changes in popular religion in Sri Lanka.
Why too much work and too little time is hurting workers and companies-and how a proven workplace redesign can benefit employees and the bottom lineToday's ways of working are not working-even for professionals in "e;good"e; jobs.
The phenomenal growth of global pharmaceutical sales and the quest for innovation are driving an unprecedented search for human test subjects, particularly in middle- and low-income countries.
Terrorism is the most clear and present danger we confront today, yet no phenomenon is more poorly understood by policymakers, the media, and the general public.
Robert Wuthnow finds that those who are most involved in acts of compassion are no less individualistic than anyone else--and that those who are the most intensely individualistic are no less involved in caring for others.
Exploring the unintentional production of seemingly feminist outcomes In India, elite law firms offer a surprising oasis for women within a hostile, predominantly male industry.
The brilliant but turbulent life of a public intellectual who transformed the social sciencesRobert Bellah (1927-2013) was one of the most influential social scientists of the twentieth century.
How the attorney-client relationship favors the privileged in criminal court-and denies justice to the poor and to working-class people of colorThe number of Americans arrested, brought to court, and incarcerated has skyrocketed in recent decades.
Winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in EconomicsA renowned economic historian traces women's journey to close the gender wage gap and sheds new light on the continued struggle to achieve equity between couples at homeA century ago, it was a given that a woman with a college degree had to choose between having a career and a family.
A groundbreaking account of how the welfare state began with early nineteenth-century child labor laws, and how middle-class and elite reformers made it happenThe beginnings of the modern welfare state are often traced to the late nineteenth-century labor movement and to policymakers' efforts to appeal to working-class voters.
A vital and underappreciated dimension of social interaction is the way individuals justify their actions to others, instinctively drawing on their experience to appeal to principles they hope will command respect.
Emilio Gentile, an internationally renowned authority on fascism and totalitarianism, argues that politics over the past two centuries has often taken on the features of religion, claiming as its own the prerogative of defining the fundamental purpose and meaning of human life.