Drawing on collaborative research from a distinguished team at Harvard and Manchester universities, 'The age of Obama' asks how two very different societies are responding to the tide of diversity that is being felt around the rich world. 'Guardian' journalist Tom Clark, Robert D. Putnam - best-selling author of 'Bowling alone' - and Manchester's Edward Fieldhouse offer a wonderfully readable account. Like 'Bowling alone', 'The age of Obama' mixes social scientific rigor with accessible charts and lively arguments. It will be enjoyed by politics, sociology and geography students, as well as by anyone else with an interest in ethnic relations. Injustice, it turns out, still blight lives of many UK and US minorities - particularly African Americans. And there are signs the new diversity strains community life. Yet in both countries, public opinion is running irreversibly in favour of tolerance. That augurs well for the future - and suggests a British Obama cannot be ruled out.

Builds on the hopeful message about civic renewal introduced in Bowling Alone to reveal a dozen places around the country where people are engaging in new forms of social activism and community renewal. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

Product Description: In his national bestseller Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam illuminated the decline of social capital in the US. Now, in Democracies in Flux, Putnam brings together a group of leading scholars who broaden his findings as they examine the state of social capital in eight advanced democracies around the world...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Social capital can be defined as the institutions and networks of relationships between people, complemented by the attitudes, norms and values that underlie them. Based on a large volume of newly collected data from ten countries, this is the first book to provide a rigorous empirical testing of the link between social capital and economic development...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: For more than a decade the leaders of the United States, Japan, Western Europe and Canada have met annually to discuss international economic and political issues. Hanging Together analyses the history of these seven-power summits and the relations between the Western allies during these turbulent years...read more

Shows how changes in work, family structure, women's roles, and other factors have caused people to become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, neighbors, and democratic structures--and how they may reconnect.

Product Description: Once we bowled in leagues, usually after work -- but no longer. This seemingly small phenomenon symbolizes a significant social change that Robert Putnam has identified in this brilliant volume, Bowling Alone, which The Economist hailed as "a prodigious achievement...read more

Product Description: It is a notable irony that as democracy replaces other forms of governing throughout the world, citizens of the most established and prosperous democracies (the United States and Canada, Western European nations, and Japan) increasingly report dissatisfaction and frustration with their governments...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: This examination of the dynamics of international relations attempts to define the impact of both domestic and international politics on subjects as diverse as nuclear disarmament, human rights and trade.

Product Description: For nearly a decade the leaders of the seven major industrial countries―the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy, and Canada―have met annually to discuss international economic and political issues. Regular summitry of this sort is virtually unprecedented in modern diplomacy...read more

Examines the annual economic summits held by the U.S., Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy, and Canada and looks at how nations balance national interests and international economic interdependence

Product Description: The Contemporary Comparative Politics Series will treat the more enduring as well as the more recent themes, approaches, and problems pertaining to the study of political systems. In all cases, the volumes are pointed toward the following goals; to illustrate the relationship between theory and method without being theoretically pretentious or methodologically self-conscious; to underline the essential interrelatedness between fact and value or empirical and normative considerations in politics; to inform the reader in brief compass and in ordinary language, free from the jargon and neologisms of modern social science...read more