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In this collaboratively authored work, five sociologists develop an ambitious theoretical model of “cultural trauma” and on this basis build a new understanding of how social groups interact with emotion to create new and binding understandings of social responsibility. Looking at the “meaning making process” as an open-ended social dialogue in which strikingly different social narratives vie for influence, the chapters outline a strongly constructivist approach to trauma and apply this theoretical model in a series of extensive case studies, including the Nazi Holocaust, slavery in the United States, and September 11, 2001.

Throughout American history, ingestion (eating) has functioned as a metaphor for interpreting and imagining this society and its political systems. Discussions of American freedom itself are pervaded with ingestive metaphors of choice (what to put in) and control (what to keep out). From the country's founders to the abolitionists to the social activists of today, those seeking to form and reform American society have cast their social-change goals in ingestive terms of choice and control. But they have realized their metaphors in concrete terms as well, purveying specific advice to the public about what to eat or not. These conversations about “social change as eating” reflect American ideals of freedom, purity, and virtue. Drawing on social and political history as well as the history of science and popular culture, this book examines how American ideas about dietary reform mirror broader thinking about social reform. Inspired by new scientific studies of the human body as a metabiome—a collaboration of species rather than an isolated, intact, protected, and bounded individual—the author invokes a new metaphor—digestion—to reimagine the American body politic, opening social transformations to ideas of mixing, fermentation, and collaboration. In doing so, the author explores how social activists can rethink politics as inclusive processes that involve the inherently risky mixing of cultures, standpoints, and ideas.

How well can democratic decision making incorporate the knowledge and expertise generated by public policy analysts? This book examines the historical development of policy analysis (a new professional class of advisors that began developing during the 1950s in the United States), as well as its use in legislative and regulatory bodies and in the federal executive branch. The chapters show that policy-analytic expertise effectively improves governmental services only when it complements democratic decision making. When successful, policy analysis fosters valuable new ideas, better use of evidence, and greater transparency in decision processes. The book concludes by assessing the development and impact of the policy-analytic profession and suggests that the growth in the voluntary employment of analysts not only by governments of all types as well as private sector and nonprofit agencies is a key indicator of the profession's effectiveness and value.

What leads to national progress? The growing consensus in the social sciences is that neither capital flows, nor the savings rate, nor diffuse values are the key, but that it lies in the quality of a nation's institutions. This book is the first comparative study of how real institutions affect national development. It seeks to examine and deepen this insight through a systematic study of institutions in five Latin American countries and how they differ within and across nations. Postal systems, stock exchanges, public health services and others were included in the sample, all studied with the same methodology. The country chapters present detailed results of this empirical exercise for each individual country. The introductory chapters present the theoretical framework and research methodology for the full study. The summary results of this ambitious study presented in the concluding chapter draw comparisons across countries and discuss what these results mean for national development in Latin America.

In the wake of the Great Recession, Americans across the political divide flocked to local citizens organizations, where they worked to refocus political attention on the needs of ordinary people like them. This book chronicles the efforts of two such groups—a progressive faith-based community organizing coalition and a conservative Tea Party group. At first glance, these groups could not seem more different: in addition to significant demographic differences between them, their members also lined up on opposite sides of nearly every national policy debate during this period. But these differences do not tell the whole story of these groups. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with both groups, this book reveals surprising similarities between their efforts that are typically not acknowledged, while also tracing more subtle differences between them that typically go unrecognized. It shows that in the face of rising anxiety and frustration, members of both groups chose to wake up, stand up, and speak up. They dedicated themselves to becoming active citizens, capable of inserting their voices, values, and knowledge into public debates about issues that impacted them. In so doing, they came to understand themselves as prophets and patriots, respectively, carrying forward the promise of American democracy. Yet when the groups set out to actually enact this vision – by holding government accountable and putting their faith in action – their styles of active citizenship diverged, reflecting different ways of imagining how American democracy ought to work and the proper role of active citizens within it.

The language of psychology is all-pervasive in American culture—from The Sopranos to Oprah, from the abundance of self-help books to the private consulting room, and from the support group to the magazine advice column. This book examines the profound impact of therapeutic discourse on our lives and on our contemporary notions of identity. The book plumbs today's particular cultural moment to understand how and why psychology has secured its place at the core of modern identity. It examines a wide range of sources to show how self-help culture has transformed contemporary emotional life and how therapy complicates individuals' lives even as it claims to dissect their emotional experiences and heal trauma.

This study explores the profound relationship between science and government to present a new understanding of modern state formation. Beginning with the experimental science of Robert Boyle in seventeenth-century England, the book develops the concept of engine science to capture the centrality of engineering practices and technologies in the emerging mechanical philosophy. It traces the introduction of engine science into colonial Ireland, showing how that country subsequently became a laboratory for experiments in statecraft. The author's wide-ranging study, spanning institutions, political philosophy, and policy implementation, demonstrates that a number of new technological developments—from cartography, statistics, and natural history to geology, public health, and sanitary engineering—reveal how modern science came to engineer land, people, and the built environment into a material political state in an unprecedented way, creating the “modern” state. Shedding new light on sociology, the history of science and technology, and on the history of British colonial projects in Ireland from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, this study has implications for understanding postcolonial occupations and nation-building ventures today and on contemporary dilemmas such as the role of science and government in environmental sustainability.

Teacher, scholar, and leader, Neil Smelser stands as an iconic figure in sociology in the second half of the twentieth century. The chapters in this volume, written by prominent scholars from all walks of the social sciences, reveal the range and depth of Smelser's influence and his substantial contributions to diverse fields such as British history, social change, collective behavior, higher education, the economy, and psychoanalysis.