the faculty bookshelf

Black Feminist Sociology: Perspectives and Praxis
You’re Paid What You’re Worth: And Other Myths of the Modern Economy
Flatlining: Race, Work, and Health Care in the New Economy
Unequal Origins: Immigrant Selection and the Education of the Second Generation
Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-Era Ku Klux Klan
Yes We Can?: White Racial Framing and the 2008 Presidential Campaign
Yes We Can?: White Racial Framing and the Obama Presidency
Doing Business With Beauty: Black Women, Hair Salons, and the Racial Enclave Economy
Changing Times for Black Professionals
No More Invisible Man: Race and Gender in Men's Work
Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving
What Unions No Longer Do
Rules without Rights: Land, Labor, and Private Authority in the Global Economy
There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence
Looking behind the Label: Global Industries and the Conscientious Consumer
After the Great Recession: The Struggle for Economic Recovery and Growth

Black Feminist Sociology: Perspectives and Praxis

The book centers Black feminist sociology (BFS) within the sociology canon and widens is to feature Black feminist sociologists both outside the US and the academy. Inspired by a BFS lens, the essays are critical, personal, political and oriented toward social justice. Key themes include the origins of BFS, expositions of BFS orientations to research that extend disciplinary norms, and contradictions of the pleasures and costs of such an approach both academically and personally. Authors explore their own sociological legacy of intellectual development to raise critical questions of intellectual thought and self-reflexivity. The book highlights the dynamism of BFS so future generations of scholars can expand upon and beyond the book’s key themes.

You’re Paid What You’re Worth: And Other Myths of the Modern Economy

A myth-busting book challenges the idea that we’re paid according to objective criteria and places power and social conflict at the heart of economic analysis.

Your pay depends on your productivity and occupation. If you earn roughly the same as others in your job, with the precise level determined by your performance, then you’re paid market value. And who can question something as objective and impersonal as the market? That, at least, is how many of us tend to think. But according to Jake Rosenfeld, we need to think again.

Flatlining: Race, Work, and Health Care in the New Economy

What happens to black health care professionals in the new economy, where work is insecure and organizational resources are scarce? In Flatlining, Adia Harvey Wingfield exposes how hospitals, clinics, and other institutions participate in “racial outsourcing,” relying heavily on black doctors, nurses, technicians, and physician assistants to do “equity work”—extra labor that makes organizations and their services more accessible to communities of color. Wingfield argues that as these organizations become more profit-driven, they come to depend on black health care professionals to perform equity work to serve increasingly diverse constituencies. Yet black workers often do this labor without recognition, compensation, or support. Operating at the intersection of work, race, gender, and class, Wingfield makes plain the challenges that black employees must overcome and reveals the complicated issues of inequality in today’s workplaces and communities.

Unequal Origins: Immigrant Selection and the Education of the Second Generation

Feliciano examines how immigrants compare to those left behind in their origin countries, and how that selection affects the educational adaptation of children of immigrants in the United States. Her findings contradict the assumption that immigrants are negatively selected: nearly all immigrants are more educated than the populations in their home countries, but Asian immigrants are the most highly selected. This helps explain the Asian second generations' superior educational attainment as compared to Europeans, Afro-Caribbeans, or Latin Americans. The book challenges cultural explanations for ethnic differences by highlighting how inequalities in the relative pre-migration educational attainments of immigrants are reproduced among their children in the U.S.

Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-Era Ku Klux Klan

In the 1960s, on the heels of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision and in the midst of the growing Civil Rights Movement, Ku Klux Klan activity boomed, reaching an intensity not seen since the 1920s, when the KKK boasted over 4 million members. Most surprisingly, the state with the largest Klan membership-more than the rest of the South combined-was North Carolina, a supposed bastion of southern-style progressivism. 

Klansville, U.S.A. is the first substantial history of the civil rights-era KKK's astounding rise and fall, focusing on the under-explored case of the United Klans of America (UKA) in North Carolina. Why the UKA flourished in the Tar Heel state presents a fascinating puzzle and a window into the complex appeal of the Klan as a whole. Drawing on a range of new archival sources and interviews with Klan members, including state and national leaders, the book uncovers the complex logic of KKK activity. David Cunningham demonstrates that the Klan organized most successfully where whites perceived civil rights reforms to be a significant threat to their status, where mainstream outlets for segregationist resistance were lacking, and where the policing of the Klan's activities was lax. Moreover, by connecting the Klan to the more mainstream segregationist and anti-communist groups across the South, Cunningham provides valuable insight into southern conservatism, its resistance to civil rights, and the region's subsequent dramatic shift to the Republican Party.

Yes We Can?: White Racial Framing and the 2008 Presidential Campaign

This book offers one of the first sociological analyses of Barack Obama's historic 2008 campaign for the presidency of the United States. Elaborating on the concept of the white racial frame, Harvey Wingfield and Feagin assess the ways racial framing was deployed by principal characters in the 2008 election. This book counters many commonsense assumptions about race, politics, and society, particularly the idea that Obama's election ushered in a post-racial era. Readers will find this book uniquely valuable because it relies on sound sociological analysis to assess numerous events and aspects of this historic campaign.

Yes We Can?: White Racial Framing and the Obama Presidency

The first edition of this book offered one of the first social science analyses of Barack Obama’s historic electoral campaigns and early presidency. In this second edition the authors extend that analysis to Obama’s service in the presidency and to his second campaign to hold that presidency. Elaborating on the concept of the white racial frame, Harvey Wingfield and Feagin assess in detail the ways white racial framing was deployed by the principal characters in the electoral campaigns and during Obama’s presidency. With much relevant data, this book counters many commonsense assumptions about U.S. racial matters, politics, and institutions, particularly the notion that Obama’s presidency ushered in a major post-racial era. Readers will find this fully revised and updated book distinctively valuable because it relies on sound social science analysis to assess numerous events and aspects of this historic campaign.

Doing Business With Beauty: Black Women, Hair Salons, and the Racial Enclave Economy

Black women comprise one of the fastest-growing groups of business owners in the United States. In Doing Business with Beauty, sociologist Adia Harvey Wingfield examines this often-overlooked group and one of the most popular businesses run by these entrepreneurs: hair salons. Using in-depth interviews with hair salon owners, Doing Business with Beauty explores several facets of the business of owning a hair salon, including the process of becoming an owner, the dynamics of the owner-employee relationship, and the factors that steer black women to work in the hair industry. Through Harvey Wingfield's research we can understand the black female business owner's struggle for autonomy and her success in entrepreneurship.

Changing Times for Black Professionals

This book is a study of the challenges, issues, and obstacles facing black professional workers in the United States. Though they have always been a part of the U.S. labor force, black professionals have often been overlooked in media, research, and public opinion. Ironically, however, their experiences offer a particularly effective way to understand how race shapes social life, opportunities, and upward mobility. As the 21st century continues to usher in increasing demographic, social, and economic change to the United States, it is critical to consider the impact this will have on an important sector of the labor force. In this book, I examine the reasons why sociological study of black professional workers is important and valuable, review the literature that examines their experiences in the workplace, and consider the issues and challenges they are likely to face in a rapidly shifting social world.

No More Invisible Man: Race and Gender in Men's Work

The 'invisible men' of sociologist Adia Harvey Wingfield's urgent and timely No More Invisible Man are African American professionals who fall between extremely high status, high profile black men and the urban underclass. Her compelling interview study considers middle class, professional black men and the challenges, obstacles, and opportunities they encounter in white male-dominated occupations. No More Invisible Man chronicles these men's experiences as a tokenized minority in the workplace to show how issues of power and inequality exist - especially as it relates to promotion, mobility, and developing occupational networks. Wingfield's intersectional analysis deftly charts the ways that gender, race, and class collectively shape black professional men's work experiences. 

Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving

The work-family conflict that mothers experience today is a national crisis. Women struggle to balance breadwinning with the bulk of parenting, and stress is constant. Social policies don’t help. Of all Western industrialized countries, the United States ranks dead last for supportive work-family policies: No federal paid parental leave. The highest gender wage gap. No minimum standard for vacation and sick days. The highest maternal and child poverty rates. Can American women look to European policies for solutions? Making Motherhood Work draws on interviews that sociologist Caitlyn Collins conducted over five years with 135 middle-class working mothers in Sweden, Germany, Italy, and the United States. She explores how women navigate work and family given the different policy supports available in each country.

Taking readers into women’s homes, neighborhoods, and workplaces, Collins shows that mothers’ desires and expectations depend heavily on context. In Sweden—renowned for its gender-equal policies—mothers assume they will receive support from their partners, employers, and the government. In the former East Germany, with its history of mandated employment, mothers don’t feel conflicted about working, but some curtail their work hours and ambitions. Mothers in western Germany and Italy, where maternalist values are strong, are stigmatized for pursuing careers. Meanwhile, American working mothers stand apart for their guilt and worry. Policies alone, Collins discovers, cannot solve women’s struggles. Easing them will require a deeper understanding of cultural beliefs about gender equality, employment, and motherhood. With women held to unrealistic standards in all four countries, the best solutions demand that we redefine motherhood, work, and family.

What Unions No Longer Do

From workers’ wages to presidential elections, labor unions once exerted tremendous clout in American life. In the immediate post-World War II era, one in three workers belonged to a union. The fraction now is close to one in ten, and just one in twenty in the private sector—the lowest in a century. The only thing big about Big Labor today is the scope of its problems. While many studies have attempted to explain the causes of this decline, What Unions No Longer Do lays bare the broad repercussions of labor’s collapse for the American economy and polity.

Organized labor was not just a minor player during the “golden age” of welfare capitalism in the middle decades of the twentieth century, Jake Rosenfeld asserts. Rather, for generations it was the core institution fighting for economic and political equality in the United States. Unions leveraged their bargaining power to deliver tangible benefits to workers while shaping cultural understandings of fairness in the workplace. The labor movement helped sustain an unprecedented period of prosperity among America’s expanding, increasingly multiethnic middle class.

What Unions No Longer Do shows in detail the consequences of labor’s decline: curtailed advocacy for better working conditions, weakened support for immigrants’ economic assimilation, and ineffectiveness in addressing wage stagnation among African-Americans. In short, unions are no longer instrumental in combating inequality in our economy and our politics, and the result is a sharp decline in the prospects of American workers and their families.

Rules without Rights: Land, Labor, and Private Authority in the Global Economy

Activists have exposed startling forms of labor exploitation and environmental degradation in global industries, leading many large retailers and brands to adopt standards for fairness and sustainability. This book is about the idea that transnational corporations can push these standards through their global supply chains, and in effect, pull factories, forests, and farms out of their local contexts and up to global best practices. For many scholars and practitioners, this kind of private regulation and global standard-setting can provide an alternative to regulation by territorially-bound, gridlocked, or incapacitated nation states, potentially improving environments and working conditions around the world and protecting the rights of exploited workers, impoverished farmers, and marginalized communities. But can private, voluntary standards actually create meaningful forms of regulation? Are forests and factories around the world actually being made into sustainable ecosystems and decent workplaces? Can global norms remake local orders?

This book provides striking new answers by comparing the private regulation of land and labor in democratic and authoritarian settings. Case studies of sustainable forestry and fair labour standards in Indonesia and China show not only how transnational standards are implemented 'on the ground' but also how they are constrained and reconfigured by domestic governance. Combining rich multi-method analyses, a powerful comparative approach, and a new theory of private regulation, Rules without Rights reveals the contours and contradictions of transnational governance.

There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence

Using over twelve thousand previously classified documents made available through the Freedom of Information Act, David Cunningham uncovers the riveting inside story of the FBI's attempts to neutralize political targets on both the Right and the Left during the 1960s. Examining the FBI's infamous counterintelligence programs (COINTELPROs) against suspected communists, civil rights and black power advocates, Klan adherents, and antiwar activists, he questions whether such actions were aberrations or are evidence of the bureau's ongoing mission to restrict citizens' right to engage in legal forms of political dissent. At a time of heightened concerns about domestic security, with the FBI's license to spy on U.S. citizens expanded to a historic degree, the question becomes an urgent one. This book supplies readers with insights and information vital to a meaningful assessment of the current situation. 

There's Something Happening Here looks inside the FBI's COINTELPROs against white hate groups and the New Left to explore how agents dealt with the hundreds of individuals and organizations labeled as subversive threats. Rather than reducing these activities to a product of the idiosyncratic concerns of longtime director J. Edgar Hoover, Cunningham focuses on the complex organizational dynamics that generated literally thousands of COINTELPRO actions. His account shows how--and why--the inner workings of the programs led to outcomes that often seemed to lack any overriding logic; it also examines the impact the bureau's massive campaign of repression had on its targets. The lessons of this era have considerable relevance today, and Cunningham extends his analysis to the FBI's often controversial recent actions to map the influence of the COINTELPRO legacy on contemporary debates over national security and civil liberties.

Looking behind the Label: Global Industries and the Conscientious Consumer

What does it mean when consumers "shop with a conscience" and choose products labeled as fair or sustainable? Does this translate into meaningful changes in global production processes? To what extent are voluntary standards implemented and enforced, and can they really govern global industries? Looking behind the Label presents an informative introduction to global production and ethical consumption, tracing the links between consumers' choices and the practices of multinational producers and retailers. Case studies of several types of products―wood and paper, food, apparel and footwear, and electronics―are used to reveal what lies behind voluntary rules and to critique predominant assumptions about ethical consumption as a form of political expression.

After the Great Recession: The Struggle for Economic Recovery and Growth

The severity of the Great Recession and the subsequent stagnation caught many economists by surprise. But a group of Keynesian scholars warned for some years that strong forces were leading the U.S. toward a deep, persistent downturn. This book collects essays about these events from prominent macroeconomists who developed a perspective that predicted the broad outline and many specific aspects of the crisis. From this point of view, the recovery of employment and revival of strong growth requires more than short-term monetary easing and temporary fiscal stimulus. Economists and policy makers need to explore how the process of demand formation failed after 2007, and where demand will come from going forward. Successive chapters address the sources and dynamics of demand, the distribution and growth of wages, the structure of finance, and challenges from globalization, and inform recommendations for monetary and fiscal policies to achieve a more efficient and equitable society.