At Work In The Iron Cage

One fifth of all correctional officers are women and this comparative analysis of men's and women's prisons identifies the factors that influence the gendering of the American workplace, a process that often leaves women in lower-paying jobs with less prestige and responsibility. [back cover].

This major study of the father of modern sociology explores the intimate relationship between the events of Max Weber's personal history and the development of his thought. When it was first published in 1970, Paul Roazen described The Iron Cage as ""an example of the history of ideas at its very best""; while Robert A. Nisbet said that ""we learn more about Weber's life in this volume than from any other in the English language.""Weber's life and work developed in reaction to the rigidities of familial and social structures in Imperial Germany. In his youth he was torn by irreconcilable tensions between the Bismarckian authoritarianism of his father and the ethical puritanism of his mother. These tensions led to a psychic crisis when, in his thirties, he expelled his father (who died soon thereafter) from his house. His reaction to the collapse of the European social order before and during World War I was no less personal and profound. It is the triumph of Professor Mitzman's approach that he convincingly demonstrates how the internalizing of these severe experiences led to Weber's pessimistic vision of the future as an ""iron cage"" and to such seminal ideas as the notion of charisma and the concept of the Protestant ethic and its connection with the spirit of capitalism. The author's thesis also serves as a vehicle for describing the social, political, and personal plight of the European bourgeois intellectual of Weber's generation.In synthesizing Weber's life and thought, Arthur Mitzman has expanded and refined our understanding of this central twentieth-century figure. As Lewis Coser writes in the preface, until now ""there has been little attempt to bring together the work and the man, to show the ways in which Weber's cognitive intentions, his choice of problems, were linked with the details of his personal biography. Arthur Mitzman fills this gap brilliantly.

When most people think of prisons, they imagine chaos, violence, and fundamentally, an atmosphere of overwhelming brute masculinity. But real prisons rarely fit the “Big House” stereotype of popular film and literature. One fifth of all correctional officers are women, and the rate at which women are imprisoned is growing faster than that of men. Yet, despite increasing numbers of women prisoners and officers, ideas about prison life and prison work are sill dominated by an exaggerated image of men’s prisons where inmates supposedly struggle for physical dominance. In a rare comparative analysis of men’s and women’s prisons, Dana Britton identifies the factors that influence the gendering of the American workplace, a process that often leaves women in lower-paying jobs with less prestige and responsibility. In interviews with dozens of male and female officers in five prisons, Britton explains how gender shapes their day-to-day work experiences. Combining criminology, penology, and feminist theory, she offers a radical new argument for the persistence of gender inequality in prisons and other organizations. At Work in the Iron Cage demonstrates the importance of the prison as a site of gender relations as well as social control.

A brilliant and sobering critique of the Palestinian failure to achieve statehood, by a major Palestinian historian and political commentator At a time when a lasting peace between Palestinians and Israelis seems virtually unattainable, understanding the roots of the longest-running conflict in the Middle East is an essential step in restoring hope to the region. In The Iron Cage, Rashid Khalidi, one of the most respected historians and political observers of the Middle East, examines the Palestinian’s struggle for statehood, presenting a succinct and insightful history of the people and their leadership throughout the twentieth century. Ranging from the Palestinian struggle against colonial rule and the establishment of the State of Israel to the current rivalry between Hamas and Fatah, this is an unflinching and sobering critique of the Palestinian failure to achieve statehood, as well as a balanced account of the odds ranged against them. Lucid yet challenging, Rashid Khalidi’s engrossing narrative of this tortuous history is required reading for anyone concerned about peace in the Middle East.

Hayek has been one of the key liberal thinkers of the twentieth century. He has also been much misunderstood. His work has crossed disciplines -- economics, philosophy and political science -- and national boundaries. He was an early critic of Keynes, and became famous in the 1940s for his warnings that the advance of collectivism in western democr

He finds mostly middle-class men trying to cope with the legacy of fathers who gave little emotional sustenance and with a competitive society they find unsatisfying, who sympathize with many of women's complaints about men and sexism (though Schwalbe also finds that many joined as a reaction to what they saw as feminism's blanket indictment of men), and who are searching for an alternative to the traditional image of a man as rational, tough, ambitious, and in control.

A staggering 30,000 British prisoners of war "liberated" from German POW camps by the Soviets at the end of World War II were never returned home. In investigating the fate of victims of the Cold War, Nigel Cawthorne travelled to Siberia to follow their trail.