Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace


Pun Ngai - 2005
    The dagongmei are women in their late teens and early twenties who move from rural areas to urban centers to work in factories. Because of state laws dictating that those born in the countryside cannot permanently leave their villages, and familial pressure for young women to marry by their late twenties, the dagongmei are transient labor. They undertake physically exhausting work in urban factories for an average of four or five years before returning home. The young women are not coerced to work in the factories; they know about the twelve-hour shifts and the hardships of industrial labor. Yet they are still eager to leave home. Made in China is a compelling look at the lives of these women, workers caught between the competing demands of global capitalism, the socialist state, and the patriarchal family.Pun Ngai conducted ethnographic work at an electronics factory in southern China’s Guangdong province, in the Shenzhen special economic zone where foreign-owned factories are proliferating. For eight months she slept in the employee dormitories and worked on the shop floor alongside the women whose lives she chronicles. Pun illuminates the workers’ perspectives and experiences, describing the lure of consumer desire and especially the minutiae of factory life. She looks at acts of resistance and transgression in the workplace, positing that the chronic pains—such as backaches and headaches—that many of the women experience are as indicative of resistance to oppressive working conditions as they are of defeat. Pun suggests that a silent social revolution is underway in China and that these young migrant workers are its agents.

Constructions of Deviance: Social Power, Context, and Interaction


Patricia A. Adler - 1994
    It demonstrates to students how the concepts and theories of deviance can be applied to the world around them. The authors include both theoretical analyses and ethnographic illustrations of how deviance is socially constructed, organized, and managed. The Adlers challenge the reader to see the diversity and pervasiveness of deviance in society by covering a wide variety of deviant acts represented throughout the text. Most importantly, the Adlers present deviance as a component of society and examine the construction of deviance in terms of differential social power, whereby some members of society have the power to define other whole groups as "deviant." The book takes an "interactionist" or "constructionist" perspective on deviance, looking at the processes in society that create deviance. The authors have selected studies that are ethnographic in character, focusing on the experiences of deviants, the deviant-making process, and the ways in which people who are labeled as deviant in society react to that label.

The Function of Reason


Alfred North Whitehead - 1929
    This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

The Myth of Closure: Ambiguous Loss in a Time of Pandemic and Change


Pauline Boss - 2021
    In this book, pioneering therapist Pauline Boss identifies these vague feelings of distress as caused by ambiguous loss, losses that remain unclear and hard to pin down, and thus have no closure. Collectively the world is grieving as the pandemic continues to change our everyday lives.With a loss of trust in the world as a safe place, a loss of certainty about health care, education, employment, lingering anxieties plague many of us, even as parts of the world are opening back up again. Yet after so much loss, our search must be for a sense of meaning, and not something as elusive and impossible as "closure."This book provides many strategies for coping: encouraging us to increase our tolerance of ambiguity and acknowledging our resilience as we express a normal grief, and still look to the future with hope and possibility.

It's a Jetsons World: Private Miracles and Public Crimes


Jeffrey Tucker - 2011
    Meanwhile, the public sector is systematically wrecking the physical world in sneaky and petty ways that really do matter. Jeffrey Tucker, in this follow-up to his Bourbon for Breakfast, draws detailed attention to both. He points out that the products of digital capitalism are amazing, astounding, beyond belief-more outrageously advanced than anything the makers of the Jetsons could even imagine. With this tiny box in hand, we can do a real-time video chat with anyone on the planet and pay nothing more than my usual service fee. This means that anyone on the planet can do business with and be friends with any other person on the globe. The borders, the limits, the barriers-they are all being blasted away. The pace of change is mind-boggling. The world is being reinvented in our lifetimes, every day. Email has only been mainstream for 15 years or so, and young people now regard it as a dated form of communication used only for the most formal correspondence. Today young people are brief instant messaging through social media, but that's only for now, and who knows what next year will bring. Oddly, hardly anyone seems to care, and even fewer care about the institutional force that makes all this possible, which is the market economy. Instead, we just adjust to the new reality. We even hear of the grave problem of "miracle fatigue"-too much great stuff, too often. Truly, this new world seems to have arrived without much fanfare at all. And why? It has something to do with the nature of the human mind, Tucker argues, which does not and This book will inspire love for free markets - and loathing of government.

Four Sociological Traditions


Randall Collins - 1994
    Presents a concise intellectual history of sociology organized around the development of 4 classic schools of thought: the conflict tradition of Marx and Weber, the ritual solidarity of Durkheim, the micro-interactionist tradition of Mead, Blumer and Garfinkel, and the utilitarian/rational choice tradition.

The Dalai Lama: A Life Inspired


Lynn M. Hamilton - 2014
    But there is more to him than that. He is also a model of innovation and adaptation. He has taken the tenets of Buddhism and made them relevant to everyone. He has found commonalities in the teachings of Catholicism and Buddhism. His message is not just about personal happiness and good karma, it is also very much about respecting the earth’s resources, recognizing the equality of all people, and sharing with the less fortunate. He has said that, at ninety, he will decide whether his long series of lives as the Dalai Lama will end. As of this writing, he is nearly eighty. Will he live another ten years? We can only hope so.