Arlie Hochschild is best known for her contributions to the domestic division of labor (The Second Shift), emotional labor (The Managed Heart), the rationalization of the home (Time Bind), the commodification of private life (The Commercialization of Intimate Life, The Outsourced Self). In her latest book, Strangers in Their Own Land, Hochschild takes her notion of “feeling rules” to Louisiana, exploring the emotional foundations of right wing politics (The Tea Party and support for Donald Trump) by studying divergent responses to one of the most pressing issues facing the region – environmental pollution. On the basis of her fieldwork, conducted between 2011 and 2016, Hochschild advances the “deep story” of supporters of the American right: “…the shifting moral qualifications for the American Dream had turned them into strangers in their own land, afraid, resentful, displaced, and dismissed by the very people who were, they felt, cutting in line.”

Compulsory ujamaa villages in Tanzania, collectivization in Russia, Le Corbusier's urban planning theory realized in Brasilia, the Great Leap Forward in China, agricultural "modernization" in the Tropics -- the twentieth century has been racked by grand utopian schemes that have inadvertently brought death and disruption to millions. Why do well-intentioned plans for improving the human condition go tragically awry? In this wide-ranging and original book, James C. Scott analyzes failed cases of large-scale authoritarian plans in a variety of fields. Centrally managed social plans misfire, Scott argues, when they impose schematic visions that do violence to complex interdependencies that are not -- and cannot -- be fully understood. Further, the success of designs for social organization depends upon the recognition that local, practical knowledge is as important as formal, epistemic knowledge. The author builds a persuasive case against "development theory" and imperialistic state planning that disregards the values, desires, and objections of its subjects. He identifies and discusses four conditions common to all planning disasters: administrative ordering of nature and society by the state; a "high-modernist ideology" that places confidence in the ability of science to improve every aspect of human life; a willingness to use authoritarian state power to effect large-scale interventions; and a prostrate civil society that cannot effectively resist such plans. "A broad-ranging, theoretically important, and empirically grounded treatment of the modern state and its propensity to simplify and make legible a society which by nature is complex and opaque. For anyone interested inlearning about this fundamental tension of modernity and about the destruction wrought in the twentieth century as a consequence of the dominant development ideology of the simplifying state, this is a must-read". -- Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of Hitler's Willing Executioners

For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround them?slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. This book, essentially an ?anarchist history,? is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remain stateless. Among the strategies employed by the people of Zomia to remain stateless are physical dispersion in rugged terrain; agricultural practices that enhance mobility; pliable ethnic identities; devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders; and maintenance of a largely oral culture that allows them to reinvent their histories and genealogies as they move between and around states.
In accessible language, James Scott, recognized worldwide as an eminent authority in Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies, tells the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey in search of self-determination. He redefines our views on Asian politics, history, demographics, and even our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization, and challenges us with a radically different approach to history that presents events from the perspective of stateless peoples and redefines state-making as a form of ?internal colonialism.? This new perspective requires a radical reevaluation of the civilizational narratives of the lowland states. Scott?s work on Zomia represents a new way to think of area studies that will be applicable to other runaway, fugitive, and marooned communities, be they Gypsies, Cossacks, tribes fleeing slave raiders, Marsh Arabs, or San-Bushmen.

Rightly fearing that unscrupulous rulers would break them up, seize their resources, or submit them to damaging forms of intervention, strong networks of trust such as kinship groups, clandestine religious sects, and trade diasporas have historically insulated themselves from political control by a variety of strategies. Drawing on a vast range of comparisons over time and space, Charles Tilly asks and answers how, and with what consequences, members of trust networks have evaded, compromised with, or even sought connections with political regimes.

The twenty-first century workplace compels Americans to be more flexible. To embrace change, work with unpredictable schedules, be available 24/7, and take charge of one's own career. What are the wider implications of these pressures for workers' lives? How do they conceive of good work and a good life amid such incessant change?
In The Disrupted Workplace, Benjamin Snyder examines how three groups of American workers—financial professionals, truck drivers, and unemployed job seekers—construct moral order in a capitalist system that demands flexibility. Based on seventy in-depth interviews and three years of participant observation, he argues that the flexible economy transforms how workers experience time. New scheduling techniques, employment strategies, and technologies disrupt the flow and trajectory of working life, which makes the workplace a site of perplexing moral dilemmas. Work can feel both liberating and terrorizing, engrossing in the short term but unsustainable in the long term.
Through a vivid portrait of real workers' struggles to adapt their lives to constant disruption, Benjamin Snyder mounts a compelling critique of the costs of the flexible economy.

A powerful investigative look at data-based discrimination―and how technology affects civil and human rights and economic equity
The State of Indiana denies one million applications for healthcare, foodstamps and cash benefits in three years―because a new computer system interprets any mistake as “failure to cooperate.” In Los Angeles, an algorithm calculates the comparative vulnerability of tens of thousands of homeless people in order to prioritize them for an inadequate pool of housing resources. In Pittsburgh, a child welfare agency uses a statistical model to try to predict which children might be future victims of abuse or neglect.
Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health and human services has undergone revolutionary change. Today, automated systems―rather than humans―control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor.
In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile.
The U.S. has always used its most cutting-edge science and technology to contain, investigate, discipline and punish the destitute. Like the county poorhouse and scientific charity before them, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhumane choices: which families get food and which starve, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. In the process, they weaken democracy and betray our most cherished national values.
This deeply researched and passionate book could not be more timely.

Das Buch unternimmt erstmals den Versuch, die sich potenzierende Dynamisierung gesellschaftlicher Verhältnisse, wie sie in der jüngsten politischen und digitalen Beschleunigungswelle etwa unter dem Stichwort 'Globalisierung' firmiert, systematisch zu erfassen und sie in ihren kulturellen und strukturellen Ursachen ebenso wie in ihren Auswirkungen auf die individuelle und kollektive Lebensführung zu analysieren. Entwickelt wird dabei die These, daß die zunächst befreiende und befähigende Wirkung der modernen sozialen Beschleunigung, die mit den technischen Geschwindigkeitssteigerungen des Transports, der Kommunikation oder der Produktion zusammenhängt, in der Spätmoderne in ihr Gegenteil umzuschlagen droht. Individuell wie kollektiv verändert sich die Erfahrung von Zeit und Geschichte: An die Stelle einer gerichteten Vorwärtsbewegung tritt die Wahrnehmung einer gleichsam bewegungslosen und in sich erstarrten Steigerungsspirale.

Winner of the Pulitzer prize in 1974 and the culmination of a life's work, The Denial of Death is Ernest Becker's brilliant and impassioned answer to the "why" of human existence. In bold contrast to the predominant Freudian school of thought, Becker tackles the problem of the vital lie - man's refusal to acknowledge his own mortality. In doing so, he sheds new light on the nature of humanity and issues a call to life and its living that still resonates more than twenty years after its writing.

突破信息茧房，看清世界真相
一位思想者视野中的当下与未来
★吴敬琏、许纪霖、刘苏里、高全喜、刘擎、曾鸣、徐小平、罗振宇 诚挚推荐！★
2020年，新冠疫情、贸易战、Tiktok禁令等“黑天鹅”事件仿佛一面面放大镜，暴露出诸多已经存在的问题，也加剧了各种持不同观点人们之间的争论，其中有些只是情绪化的立场之争。种种乱象折射出我们对真实世界认知上的偏差。而这些偏差，与社交媒体、移动互联网、推荐算法等导致人们处于各自的信息茧房有莫大关联。我们该如何突破信息茧房，看清真实世界？在全球化的今天，如何看待中国在世界中的位置？
在《破茧》一书中，外交学院教授、国际政治学者施展告诉我们，首先要破除各种观念对现实的遮蔽，在认识到各国的经济深度相互依赖的前提下，看到经济空间与政治空间的不重合，进而审视民族主义“封装式思维”的不妥之处，理解中国与世界的一致性，也正视中国的特殊性：中国经济的成长是在世界创新经济的背景下，结合中国的种种优势实现的，中国也当之无愧是超大规模国家，是世界秩序的自变量。
而在另一层面，人类秩序的每一次演化，都与技术的推动有关。在信息技术时代的背景下，字节跳动与华为等公司遭遇的困境，反应出各国深切关注穿透国界的数据带来的政治外溢效应，背后则是对价值观与生活方式的捍卫。
深入理解技术时代的特点和国际局势的机理，突破信息茧房对视野和格局的限制，我们才能理解中国在世界中的位置，看清全球治理秩序的演化方向，进而找到通往未来的道路。

In this eye-opening look at the doctor-patient decision-making process, physician and law professor Jay Katz examines the time-honored belief in the virtue of silent care and patient compliance. Historically, the doctor-patient relationship has been based on a one-way trust-despite recent judicial attempts to give patients a greater voice through the doctrine of informed consent. Katz criticizes doctors for encouraging patients to relinquish their autonomy, and demonstrates the detrimental effect their silence has on good patient care. Seeing a growing need in this age of medical science and sophisticated technology for more honest and complete communication between physician and patients, he advocates a new, informed dialogue that respects the rights and needs of both sides. In a new foreword to this edition of The Silent World of Doctor and Patient, Alexander Morgan Capron outlines the changes in medical ethics practice that have occurred since the book was first published in 1984, paying particular attention to the hotly debated issues of physician-assisted suicide and informed consent in managed care.

Over the past few decades, matching models, which use mathematical frameworks to analyze allocation mechanisms for heterogeneous products and individuals, have attracted renewed attention in both theoretical and applied economics. These models have been used in many contexts, from labor markets to organ donations, but recent work has tended to focus on "nontransferable" cases rather than matching models with transfers. In this important book, Pierre-André Chiappori fills a gap in the literature by presenting a clear and elegant overview of matching with transfers and provides a set of tools that enable the analysis of matching patterns in equilibrium, as well as a series of extensions. He then applies these tools to the field of family economics and shows how analysis of matching patterns and of the incentives thus generated can contribute to our understanding of long-term economic trends, including inequality and the demand for higher education.

Reviewers' comments on the first edition: 'Zygmunt Bauman presents a cogently argued and compelling thesis...an important book from a distinguished scholar, that adds a new dimension to the poverty debate' - "British Journal of Sociology". 'It will be of great interest and value to students, teachers and researchers in sociology and social policy! [Bauman] provides a very forceful and sophisticated statement of the case; and a very well written one too. As a wide ranging analysis of our present discontents it is an admirable example of the sort of challenge which sociology at its best can offer to us and our fellow citizens to re-assess and re-think our current social arrangements' - "Work, Employment and Society". 'This is a stylish and persuasive analysis of the transition between the age of the 'society of producers' to that of the 'society of consumers" - Political Studies.It is one thing to be poor in a society of producers and universal employment; it is quite a different thing to be poor in a society of consumers, in which life projects are built around consumer choices rather than on work, professional skills or jobs. Where 'being poor' was once linked to being unemployed, today it draws its meaning primarily from the plight of a flawed consumer. This has a significant effect on the way living in poverty is experienced and on the prospects for redeeming its misery. "Work, Consumerism and the New Poor" traces this change over the duration of modern history. It makes an inventory of its social consequences, and considers how effective different ways of fighting poverty and relieving its hardships are.The new edition of this seminal work features: updated coverage of key thinkers in the field; discussion of recent work on redundancy, disposability and exclusion; and, current thinking on the effects of capital flows on different countries and the changes on the shop floor through, for example, business process re-engineering; and, new material on security and vulnerability. It is a key reading for students and lecturers in sociology, politics and social policy, and those with an interest in contemporary social issues.

This volume, a second edition of what has become a major work of American sociological thought, demonstrates how the conditions and styles of middle class life - originating from elements of both the newer lower and upper classes - represent modern society as a whole. In his thesis, by examining white-collar life, Mills aimed to learn something about what was becoming more typically "American" than the once-famous Western frontier character. He painted a picture instead of a society that had evolved into a business-based milieu, viewing America instead as a great salesroom, an enormous file, and a new universe of management. Russell Jacoby, author of "The End of Utopia" and "The Last Intellectuals" contributes an afterword to this edition, in which he reflects on the impact the book had at its original publication and considers what it means to society in the 21st century.

Rene Girard is one of the most divisive and striking intellectuals of the 20th century. Over the past forty years, his work has continued to exert an influence across literary theory, philosophy and the social sciences. Echoing the format of his early works, Evolution and Conversion brings Girard into dialogue with two sympathetic interviewers and allows him to speak candidly about the major tenets of his life and thought. Hailed by Michel Serres as "the Charles Darwin" of human sciences, Girard is in fact one of the few thinkers who has given full consideration to an evolutionary perspective to explain the emergence of culture and institutions. Evolution and Conversion draws out not only this aspect of his thought but also emphasises the centrality of religion to his work. Girard's reflection on the relationship between violence and religion is both original and persuasive and, given the urgency of this issue in our contemporary world, in need of a reappraisal.

A Study of the Play-Element in Culture

These are dangerous times for democracy. We live in an age of winners and losers, where the odds are stacked in favour of the already fortunate. Stalled social mobility and entrenched inequality give the lie to the promise that "you can make it if you try". And the consequence is a brew of anger and frustration that has fuelled populist protest, with the triumph of Brexit and election of Donald Trump.
Michael J. Sandel argues that to overcome the polarized politics of our time, we must rethink the attitudes toward success and failure that have accompanied globalisation and rising inequality. Sandel highlights the hubris a meritocracy generates among the winners and the harsh judgement it imposes on those left behind. He offers an alternative way of thinking about success - more attentive to the role of luck in human affairs, more conducive to an ethic of humility, and more hospitable to a politics of the common good.