The meaning that people attribute to things necessarily derives from human transactions and motivations, particularly from how those things are used and circulated. The contributors to this volume examine how things are sold and traded in a variety of social and cultural settings, both present and past. Focusing on culturally defined aspects of exchange and socially regulated processes of circulation, the essays illuminate the ways in which people find value in things and things give value to social relations. By looking at things as if they lead social lives, the authors provide a new way to understand how value is externalized and sought after. They discuss a wide range of goods - from oriental carpets to human relics - to reveal both that the underlying logic of everyday economic life is not so far removed from that which explains the circulation of exotica, and that the distinction between contemporary economics and simpler, more distant ones is less obvious than has been thought. As the editor argues in his introduction, beneath the seeming infinitude of human wants, and the apparent multiplicity of material forms, there in fact lie complex, but specific, social and political mechanisms that regulate taste, trade, and desire. Containing contributions from American and British social anthropologists and historians, the volume bridges the disciplines of social history, cultural anthropology, and economics, and marks a major step in our understanding of the cultural basis of economic life and the sociology of culture. It will appeal to anthropologists, social historians, economists, archaeologists, and historians of art.

The Social Life of Things

Employers have experimented with three broad approaches to promoting diversity. Some programs are designed to establish organizational responsibility for diversity, others to moderate managerial bias through training and feedback, and others to reduce the social isolation of women and minority workers. These approaches find support in academic theories of how organizations achieve goals, how stereotyping shapes hiring and promotion, and how networks influence careers. This is the first systematic analysis of their efficacy. The analyses rely on federal data on the workforces of 708 private-sector establishments from 1971 to 2002, coupled with survey data on their employment practices. Efforts to moderate managerial bias through diversity training and diversity evaluations are least effective at increasing white women, black women, and black men in management. Efforts to attack social isolation through mentoring and networking show modest effects. Efforts to establish responsibility for diversity lead to the broadest increases in managerial diversity. Moreover, organizations that establish responsibility see better effects from diversity training and evaluations, networking and mentoring. Employers subject to federal affirmative action edicts also see stronger effects from some programs. This work lays the foundation for an institutional theory of the remediation of workplace inequality, focused on organizational structures allocating responsibility for reducing segregation.

Best Practices or Best Guesses? Assessing the Efficacy of Corporate Affirmative Action and Diversity Policies

The authors analyze the rapid worldwide expansion of higher educational enrollments over the twentieth century using pooled panel regressions. Expansion is higher in economically developed countries (in some but not all analyses) as classic theories would have it. Growth is greater where secondary enrollments are high and where state control over education is low, consistent with conflict and competition theories. Institutional theories get strong support. growth patterns are similar in all types of countries, are especially high in countries more linked to world society, and sharply accelerate in virtually all countries after 1960. The authors theorize and operationalize the institutional processes involved, which include scientization, democratization and the expansion of human rights, the rise of development planning, and the structuration of the world polity. With these changes, a new model of society became institutionalized globally-one in which schooled knowledge and personnel were seen as appropriate for a wide variety of social positions, and in which many more young people were seen as appropriate candidates for higher education. An older vision of education as contributing to a more closed society and occupational system-with associated fears of "over-education "-was replaced by an open-system picture of education as useful "human capital "for unlimited progress. The global trends are so strong that developing countries now have higher enrollment rates than European countries did only afew decades ago, and currently about one-fifth of the world cohort is now enrolled in higher education.

The Worldwide Expansion of Higher Education in the Twentieth Century

A framework is proposed to analyze the relationships between social structure, patterns of artistic consumption and production, and the ways in which artistic genres are classified. This framework helps to integrate findings of consumption surveys and to explain the emergence of new artistic genres as a form of ritual classification. Societies' artistic classification systems vary along four dimensions: differentiation, hierarchy, universality, and boundary strength. These dimensions are affected by formal characteristics of social structure, the organization of educational systems, and internal relations among cultural dimensions. The dynamics of ritual classification are mediated according to whether artistic production is carried out through commercial, professional, or bureaucratic means.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2095290.pdf

Classification in Art.

This article explores three alternative goals for American education that have been at the root of educational conflicts over the years: democratic equality (schools should focus on preparing citizens), social efficiency (they should focus on training workers), and social mobility (they should prepare individuals to compete for social positions). These goals represent, respectively, the educational perspective of the citizen, the taxpayer, and the consumer. Whereas the first two look on education as a public good, the third sees it as a private good. Historical conflict over these competing visions of education has resulted in a contradictory structure for the educational system that has sharply impaired its effectiveness. More important still has been the growing domination of the social mobility goal, which has reshaped education into a commodity for the purposes of status attainment and has elevated the pursuit of credentials over the acquisition of knowledge.

Public Goods, Private Goods: The American Struggle Over Educational Goals

Schooling as a Cultural Currency@@@The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification.

political economy of rural poverty are either ignored or glossed over with conventional generalities that may even prove to be invalid. These descriptive lacunae and analytical deficiencies mean that the author fails to answer his own question of the utility of community organizing as a method of social change. The Organization for a Better Rice County emerges as a constellation of difficult personalities, but the implications of these personal frictions is unclear when they are not linked to a larger pattern of economic interests and political forces. If the Organization for a Better Rice County had as little relation to the large situation as the book implies by its method of presentation, then that situation ought to be clearly stated and explained. The intensity of individuals' emotional involvement with the organization is never analyzed. Is this merely a consequence of the particular personalities involved in this organization as the author implies, or is this more a general feature of community organizations? If community organizations among new political activists arouse such emotions, what does this mean for successful political action through coalition formation and political trade-offs? Without raising more general questions, the narrative lacks purpose. It is regrettable that the author did not use his own experience more effectively to discuss the role of the middle-class reformer in poverty politics. It is difficult to understand why a participant in these events would have relied so heavily on newspaper accounts rather than on research, organizational records, and his own unique personal experience.

Christopher Hurn

Papers

Schooling as a Cultural Currency@@@The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification.

The revisionists revised : a critique of the radical attack on the schools