Product Description: This book contends that beneath the frenzied activism of the sixties and the seeming quiescence of the seventies, a "silent revolution" has been occurring that is gradually but fundamentally changing political life throughout the Western world...read more

In this book, Miguel Basáñez presents a provocative look at the impact of culture on global development. Drawing on data from governments, NGOs, the World Values Survey and more addressing over one hundred countries, he argues that values, as the "building blocks" of culture, are directly related to the speed with which social, cultural and economic development occurs. Basáñez utilizes quantitative survey data to delineate three cultural hyperclusters across the globe: cultures of honor, which prioritize political authority; cultures of achievement, which emphasize economic advancement; and cultures of joy, which focus on social interactions. According to Basáñez, these cultures evolved chronologically, mirroring the development of agrarian, industrial and service societies.He argues that a country's developmental path is profoundly influenced by its people's values and culture, as crystallized through its formal and informal governing institutions. Culture is passed down over generations through families, schools, the media, religious institutions, leadership, and the law. Although culture and values are in a permanent state of evolution, leaders and policymakers can also push cultural change in order to promote desirable goals such as economic growth, democratization, and equality. Over the course of the book, Basáñez introduces two new measures of development: the Objective Development Index (which blends rubrics such as health, education, income, gender equality, political rights and civil liberties, and economic inequality) and the Subjective Development Index (which uses responses to the World Values Survey to classify countries according to their values).

Product Description: The financial/social cataclysm beginning in 2007 ended notions of a “great moderation” and the view that capitalism had overcome its systemic tendencies to crisis. The subsequent failure of contemporary social formations to address the causes of the crisis gives renewed impetus to better analysis in aid of the search for a better future...read more

Product Description: This I Believe is an international project engaging people in writing, sharing, and discussing the core values that guide their daily lives. And it all started in Philadelphia more than seven decades ago with a local radio series that became an international sensation...read more

Product Description: Owing to digitization, globalization and mass culture, what is deemed 'desirable' and 'of the moment' in art has increasingly followed the patterns of fashion. While in the past artistic styles were always inflected with signs of their modernity, today biennales and art markets are defined by the next big thing, the next sensation, the next new idea...read more

Unique Features Pervasive decision-making perspective Extensive use of real-world applications International applications integrated throughout the text Up-to-date coverage of cutting-edge research on important new topics like pricing practices, asymmetric information and organized design, decision making under uncertainity, oligopoly, game theory, public sector decisions, negotiation, competitive bidding The analysis begins simply, but it is progressively applied to more challenging decisions.

How can people of diverse religious, ethnic, and linguistic allegiances and identities live together without committing violence, inflicting suffering, or oppressing each other? In this volume, contributors explore the limits of toleration and suggest we think beyond them to mutual respect. Salman Rushdie reflects on the once tolerant Sufi-Hindu culture of Kashmir. Ira Katznelson follows with an intellectual history of toleration as a layered institution in the West. Charles Taylor advances a new approach to secularism in our multicultural world, and Akeel Bilgrami responds by offering context and caution to that approach. Nadia Urbinati explores why Cicero's humanist ideal of Concord was not used in response to religious discord. The volume concludes with a refutation of the claim that toleration was invented in the West. Rajeev Bhargava writes on Asoka's India, and Karen Barkey explores toleration within the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires. Sudipta Kaviraj examines accommodations and conflicts in India, and Alfred Stepan highlights contributions to toleration and multiple democratic secularisms in such Muslim-majority countries as Indonesia and Senegal.

Product Description: This book presents a comprehensive theory of why human freedom gave way to increasing oppression since the invention of states - and why this trend began to reverse itself more recently, leading to a rapid expansion of universal freedoms and democracy...read more

Product Description: Drug users are typically portrayed as worthless slackers, burdens on society, and just plain useless―culturally, morally, and economically. By contrast, this book argues that the social construction of some people as useless is in fact extremely useful to other people...read more

Product Description: In Accidental Intolerance, Susan Hawthorne argues that in the past few decades, our medical, scientific, and social approaches to ADHD have jointly -- but unintentionally-reinforced intolerance of ADHD-- diagnosed people. We have packed social values, such as interests in efficiency and productivity, into science and medicine...read more

Product Description: Assigning Cultural Values is a collection of thirteen essays focusing on the analysis of cultural value in light of aestheticization or aesthetic practices. Reflecting the fruits of the Research Council of Norway’s comprehensive programme for cultural research (KULVER), this anthology studies cultural phenomena not as static dimensions, but rather as factors involved in negotiations and exchanges...read more

Product Description: Over the past three decades, economic sociology has been revealing how culture shapes economic life even while economic facts affect social relationships. This work has transformed the field into a flourishing and increasingly influential discipline...read more

Product Description: One is the beloved author of The Name of the Rose, a celebrated scholar, philosopher, and self-declared secularist; the other is a preeminent clergyman and a respected expert on the New Testament. In this intellectually stimulating dialogue, often adversarial but always amicable, these two great men, who stand on opposite sides of the church door, discuss some of the most controversial issues of our day, including the apocalypse, abortion, women in the clergy, and ethics...read more

Product Description: Research into the ways in which the past is constructed and consumed in the present is now reaching a mature stage. This maturity derives from the general acceptance that heritage as a social and cultural construct is closely connected to the making and maintaining of identity at all spatial scales...read more

Product Description: Andrew Sayer undertakes a fundamental critique of social science's difficulties in acknowledging that people's relation to the world is one of concern. As sentient beings, capable of flourishing and suffering, and particularly vulnerable to how others treat us, our view of the world is substantially evaluative...read more

Product Description: There is something wrong with our politics that elections cannot solve. For nearly twenty years, the American people have tried to mind their own business at home while carrying on a seemingly futile search for the right combination of R's and D's in Washington...read more

Book by Cooper Sr., Stirling M.

Product Description: In recent years, life has improved significantly in material terms for many, particularly in the Western world. The global financial crisis has applied a brake to this trend, with the exception of a small minority who continue to receive obscene incomes and accumulate vast wealth...read more