Don’t think about why you’re applying. Select a topic for entirely strategic reasons. Choose the coolest supervisor. Write only to deadlines. Expect people to hold your hand. Become “that” student. When it comes to a masters or PhD program, most graduate students don’t deliberately set out to  fail. Yet, of the nearly 500,000 people who start a graduate program each year, up to half will never complete their degree. Books abound on acing the admissions process, but there is little on what to do once the acceptance letter arrives. Veteran graduate directors Kevin D. Haggerty and Aaron Doyle have set out to demystify the world of advanced education. Taking a wry, frank approach, they explain the common mistakes that can trip up a new graduate student and lay out practical advice about how to avoid the pitfalls. Along the way they relate stories from their decades of mentorship and even share some slip-ups from their own grad experiences. The litany of foul-ups is organized by theme and covers the grad school experience from beginning to end: selecting the university and program, interacting with advisors and fellow students, balancing personal and scholarly lives, navigating a thesis, and creating a life after academia. Although the tone is engagingly tongue-in-cheek, the lessons are crucial to anyone attending or contemplating grad school. 57 Ways to Screw Up in Grad School allows you to learn from others’ mistakes rather than making them yourself.

Product Description: We live in an age of increasing doubt about whether our institutions and technologies can provide security against risks, many of which they themselves have created. Uncertain Business is an unprecedented inquiry into insurance industry practices and what they tell us about risks and uncertainties in contemporary society...read more

While most research on television examines its impact on viewers, Arresting Images asks instead how TV influences what is in front of the camera, and how it reshapes other institutions as it broadcasts their activities. Aaron Doyle develops his argument with four studies of televised crime and policing: the popular American 'reality-TV' series Cops; the televising of surveillance footage and home video of crime and policing; footage of Vancouver's Stanley Cup riot; and the publicity-grabbing demonstrations of the environmental group Greenpeace. Each of these studies is of significant interest in its own right, but Doyle also uses them to make a broader argument rethinking television's impacts. The four studies show how televised activities tend to become more institutionally important, tightly managed, dramatic, simplified and fitted to society's dominant values. Powerful institutions, like the police, harness television for their own legitimation and surveillance purposes, often dictating which situations are televised, and usually producing 'authorized definitions' of the situations, which allow them to control the consequences. While these institutions invoke the notion that .seeing is believing. to reinforce their positions of dominance, the book argues that many observers and researchers have long overstated and misunderstood the role of TV's visual component in shaping its influences.

Product Description: Insurance as Governance is the first major sociological study of the insurance industry. It examines how the industry controls our institutions and daily lives in ways that are largely invisible, and how it thereby functions as a form of government beyond the state...read more

Product Description: Risk and Morality examines how decisions about risk and uncertainty relate to moral principles and ethical conduct. Editors Richard Ericson and Aaron Doyle have brought together in this volume a selection of original essays on the topic by renowned scholars in the disciplines of philosophy, sociology, law, political science, geography, criminology, and accounting from Canada, the United States, England, France, and Australia...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)