Full Description
This collection of recent essays by the influential sociologist Herbert J. Gans brings together the many themes of Gans's wide-ranging career to make the case for a policy-oriented vision of sociology. Sociology and Social Policy presents a range of studies that explicate and help solve social problems by studying what people, institutions, and social structures do with, for, and against one another. These works from across Gans's major areas of study-the city, poverty, ethnicity, employment and political economy, and the relationship between race and class-together make a powerful call to action for the field of sociology.
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Part I: The City
1. Some Problems of and Futures for Urban Sociology: Toward a Sociology of Settlements
2. The Sociology of Space: A Use-Centered View
3. Involuntary Segregation and the Ghetto: Disconnecting Process and Place
4. Concentrated Poverty: A Critical Analysis
Part II: Poverty
5. Studying the Bottom of American Society
6. The Challenge of Multigenerational Poverty
7. The Benefits of Poverty
Part III: Jobs and the Political Economy
8. Superfluous Workers: The Labor Market's Invisible Discards
9. Work-Time Reduction: Possibilities and Problems
10. Basic Income: A Remedy for a Sick Labor Market?
11. Seeking a Political Solution to the Economy's Problems
12. High School Economics Texts and the American Economy
Part IV: Race and Class
13. Race as Class
14. "Whitening" and the Changing American Racial Hierarchy
15. The Moynihan Report and Its Aftermaths: A Critical Analysis
Part V: Ethnicity
16. The Coming Darkness of Late-Generation European-American Ethnicity
17. The End of Late-Generation European Ethnicity in America?
Appendix: Working in Six Research Areas—a Multi-Field Sociological Career
