The world is at our fingertips, but understanding what is going on has never been more daunting. Garth Massey’s Ways of Social Change is a primer for making sense of both rapidly moving events and the cultural and structural forces on which social life is built, while teaching critical thinking skills needed to understand social change. With an approach that is fresh, timely, challenging, and engaging, Ways of Social Change shows students how social change is both a lived experience and the result of our actions in the world. It invites the reader into the realm of social science, where clarification, understanding, and inquiry provide for both informed opinions and a path to effective involvement. The core of the book focuses on five forces that powerfully influence the direction, scope and speed of social change: science and technology, social movements, war and revolution, large corporations, and the state. A concluding chapter encourages students to examine their own perspectives and offers ways to engage in social change, now and in their lifetime.

From the Stone Age to the Internet Age, this book tells the story of human sociocultural evolution. It describes the conditions under which hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists, agricultural states, and industrial capitalist societies formed, flourished, and declined. Drawing evidence from archaeology, ethnography, linguistics, historical documents, statistics, and survey research, the authors trace the growth of human societies and their complexity, and they probe the conflicts in hierarchies both within and among societies. They also explain the macro-micro links that connect cultural evolution and history with the development of the individual self, thinking processes, and perceptions. Key features of the text Designed for undergraduate and graduate social science classes on social change and globalization topics in sociology, world history, cultural geography, anthropology, and international studies. Describes the evolution of the modern capitalist world-system since the fourteenth century BCE, with coverage of the rise and fall of system leaders: the Dutch in the seventeenth century, the British in the nineteenth century, and the United States in the twentieth century. Provides a framework for analyzing patterns of social change. Includes numerous tables, figures, and illustrations throughout the text. Supplemented by framing part introductions, suggested readings at the end of each chapter, an end of text glossary, and a comprehensive bibliography. Offers a web-based auxiliary chapter on Indigenous North American World-Systems and a companion website with excel data sets and additional web links for students.

Revised and updated Fifth Edition of this popular critical exploration of the global and political economy. Adopted in sociology, politics, development and geography departments worldwide.

This Handbook provides an accessible critical review of the complex issues surrounding development and social change today. With chapters from recognized experts, examining economic, political and social aspects, and covering key topics and developing regions, it goes beyond current theory and sets out the debates which will shape an approach better suited to the modern world.

The Second Edition of Social Policy and Social Change is a timely examination of the field, unique in its inclusion of both a historical analysis of problems and policy and an exploration of how capitalism and the market economy have contributed to them. The New Edition of this seminal text examines issues of discrimination, health care, housing, income, and child welfare and considers the policies that strive to improve them. With a focus on how domestic social policies can be transformed to promote social justice for all groups, Jimenez et al. consider the impact of globalization in the United States while addressing developing concerns now emerging in the global village.

A timely examination of social policy through a social constructivist and economic lens, Social Policy and Social Change illuminates the root causes of common social problems and how policy has attempted to ameliorate them. In so doing, the book focuses on how social policies in the United States can be transformed to promote social justice for all groups. The book uniquely offers both an historical analysis of social problems and social policies, and an economic analysis of how capitalism and the market economy have contributed to social problems and impacted social policies. The book goes beyond the U.S. borders to examine the impact of globalization in the United States and in the Global South. It considers the meaning and impact of the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States and explores the policy solutions his administration has proposed to deal with the economic recession of 2008-2009. The book also discusses social workers as agents of social change and advocates of social and economic justice. It examines five key realms: Poverty in families and the welfare system, poverty among the elderly and social security, child maltreatment and child welfare policy, health and mental health policy, and housing policy. Social Policy and Social Change is a primary text for social policy/social welfare policy courses in MSW programs and possibly some higher level BSW programs. It will be supplemented with a comprehensive ancillary program, including a test bank, instructor's manual, and student website.

Social Change and Social Work discusses and examines how social work is challenged by social, political and economic tendencies going on in current societies. The authors ask how social work as a discipline and practice is encountering global and local transformations. Divided into three parts, topics covered include the changing social work mandate throughout history; social work paradigms and theoretical considerations; phenomenological social work; practice research; and gender and generational research. Taken together, the chapters in this anthology provide an authoritative and up-to-date overview of current discussions within the European social work research community.

Transportation research has traditionally been dominated by engineering and logistics research approaches. This book integrates social, economic, and behavioral sciences into the transportation field. As its title indicates, emphasis is on socioeconomic changes, which increasingly govern the development of the transportation sector. The papers presented here originated at a conference on Social Change and Sustainable Transport held at the University of California at Berkeley in March 1999, under the auspices of the European Science Foundation and the National Science Foundation. The contributors, who represent a range of disciplines, including geography and regional science, economics, political science, sociology, and psychology, come from twelve different countries. Their subjects cover the consequences of environmentally sustainable transportation vs. the "business-as-usual" status quo, the new phenomenon of "edge cities," automobile dependence as a social problem, the influence of leisure or discretionary travel and of company cars, the problems of freight transport, the future of railroads in Europe, the imposition of electronic road tolls, potential transport benefits of e-commerce, and the electric car.

During the last decade, contemporary German and Austrian cinema has grappled with new social and economic realities. The “cinema of consensus,” a term coined to describe the popular and commercially oriented filmmaking of the 1990s, has given way to a more heterogeneous and critical cinema culture. Making the greatest artistic impact since the 1970s, contemporary cinema is responding to questions of globalization and the effects of societal and economic change on the individual. This book explores this trend by investigating different thematic and aesthetic strategies and alternative methods of film production and distribution. Functioning both as a product and as an agent of globalizing processes, this new cinema mediates and influences important political and social debates. The contributors illuminate these processes through their analyses of cinema’s intervention in discourses on such concepts as “national cinema,” the effects of globalization on social mobility, and the emergence of a “global culture.” The essays illustrate the variety and inventiveness of contemporary Austrian and German filmmaking and highlight the complicated interdependencies between global developments and local specificities. They confirm a broader trend toward a more complex, critical, and formally diverse cinematic scene. This book offers insights into the strategies employed by German and Austrian filmmakers to position themselves between the commercial pressures of the film industry and the desire to mediate or even attempt to affect social change. It will be of interest to scholars in film studies, cultural studies, and European studies.