Structured Luck

The Diversity Immigrant Visa Program is a lottery that awards winners from underrepresented countries the chance to apply for legal permanent residence in the United States. Most lottery winners think of themselves as lucky, viewing the win as an opportunity to pursue better lives for themselves and their families. In Structured Luck, sociologist Onoso Imoagene uses immigrants’ stories to show that while the visa program benefits many recipients, the program’s design can also lead to exploitation in their countries of origin and reduced potential once they are in the United States. Combining ethnographic observation in Africa and interviews with immigrants, their family members, and friends from Ghana and Nigeria, Imoagene demonstrates that the visa program is a process of “structured luck,” from how people hear about the lottery, who registers for it, and who participates in it to the application requirements for the visa. In Ghana and Nigeria, people often learn about the lottery through friends, colleagues, or relatives who persuade them to enter for the perceived benefits of receiving a visa: opportunities for upward mobility, permanent legal status, and the ability to bring along family members. Though anyone can enter the lottery, not everyone who wins obtains a visa. The visa application process requires proof of a high school diploma or artisan skills, a medical exam, a criminal background check, an interview with U.S. consular officers, and payment of fees. Such requirements have led to the growth of visa entrepreneurs, who often charge exorbitant fees to steer immigrants through the process. Visa recipients who were on track to obtain university degrees at home often leave in the middle of their studies for the United States but struggle to continue their education due to high U.S. tuition costs. And though their legal status allows them to escape the demoralizing situations that face the undocumented, these immigrants lack the social support that the government sometimes provides for refugees and other migrants. Ultimately, Imoagene notes, the real winner of the visa lottery is not the immigrants themselves but the United States, which benefits from their relatively higher levels of education. Consequently, she argues, the U.S. must do more to minimize the visa program’s negative consequences. Structured Luck illuminates the trauma, resilience, and determination of immigrants who come to the United States through the Diversity Visa Program and calls for the United States to develop policies that will better integrate them into society.

Robert K. Merton is unarguably one of the most influential sociologists of his time. A figure whose wide-ranging theoretical and methodological contributions have become fundamental to the field, Merton is best known for introducing such concepts and procedures as unanticipated consequences, self-fulfilling prophecies, focused group interviews, middle-range theory, opportunity structure, and analytic paradigms. This definitive compilation encompasses the breadth and brilliance of his works, from the earliest to the most recent. Merton's foundational writings on social structure and process, on the sociology of science and knowledge, and on the discipline and trajectory of sociology itself are all powerfully represented, as are his autobiographical insights in a fascinating coda. Anchored by Piotr Sztompka's contextualizing introduction, Merton's vast oeuvre emerges as a dynamic and profoundly coherent system of thought, a constant source of vitality and renewal for present and future sociology.

I felt, intuitively, that luck exists. It’s like capitalism: For better or for worse, and whether you believe in it or not, luck is inescapable. —from As Luck Would Have It While cowriting the books in the Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook series, Joshua Piven came across dozens of people with tremendously compelling stories of triumph (or misfortune), seemingly against all odds and logic. When they were asked what they had in common, invariably their answer was: good luck, or not enough of it. The beneficiary of his own brand of extraordinary luck in publishing, Piven decided to take a closer look at how this phenomenon plays a part in success and survival. As Luck Would Have It offers a fascinating survey of the phenomenon, presented through incredible first- person stories: the swimming pool repairman who had only a hundred-dollar bill to pay for his hot dog, asked for his change in lottery tickets, and won $180 million; the woman who survived a plane crash at sea; the teller who was struck by lightning while at his window inside the bank; the guy who invented the Pet Rock. Weaving the subjects’ own beliefs about their experiences with compelling research on chance, probability, and luck psychology, As Luck Would Have It also includes research on how to prepare for luck, how to deal with it when it arrives, and how to make the choices that will help us benefit from luck. Mesmerizing, by turns hilarious and harrowing, As Luck Would Have It offers a series of scenarios that are at once unimaginable and vividly real.

REDEFINE YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH FOOD -- AND REACH YOUR IDEAL WEIGHT! Obesity expert Dr. Gerard Musante and his residential weight loss center, Structure House, have helped more than thirty thousand people lose weight. A stay at Structure House costs thousands of dollars. Now Dr. Musante's innovative ideas and effective treatment methods are yours for the price of this book. IT'S NOT FOOD THAT MAKES YOU FAT -- IT'S YOUR EATING BEHAVIOR. During his thirty years of practice, Dr. Musante has shown that it is your relationship with food that determines your ability to reach your ideal weight. His system targets behaviors resulting from habit, boredom, or stress that lead to unstructured eating -- eating for nonnutritional reasons -- and presents concrete methods for designing new, structured eating patterns. You'll learn to isolate your unhealthy eating, recognize and neutralize the food triggers that cause your unstructured eating, and stop using food to satisfy needs other than hunger. Dr. Musante's method gets to the root of these behaviors by completely reconstructing your daily experience with food and therefore the choices you make about what to eat. The Structure House Weight Loss Plan presents Dr. Musante's Structured Eating system. You will learn to eat nutritious food in appropriate portions three times a day -- the food that you need to meet your nutritional requirements and to reach and maintain the level of weight you desire. The Structured Eating program is presented in three sections. The first section, "Get Structured," guides you through making the changes that will increase success, including understanding your eating behaviors that emerge from habit, boredom, and stress; learning how the organization of your refrigerator and cabinets can lead to weight loss or weight gain; and analyzing the attitudes toward food of the people who surround you at work and at home. In the second section, "Be Structured," you learn about food choices; meal planning, including grocery shopping and food preparation; and identifying the right kinds of exercise that will enhance your success. In the final section, "Stay Structured," Dr. Musante shares all the secrets of lifestyle change that will help you take and, more important, keep the weight off. The strategies are both large and small, simple and profound, immediate and long lasting. Using the Structure House approach, you'll be in control of food -- not controlled by it. You'll gain power by taking responsibility -- and then you can take credit for your successes.

Sweatsuits and the apocalypse, the demands of a sofa, a life recalled through window frames, whale watching through cancer, the serendipity of geographical names ... in Feelings of Structure, these are just some of the spaces and places, memories, and experiences addressed by the authors in writings that are multilevel explorations of the tangled-up nature of feeling and structure. Inspired by Raymond Williams's classic essay "Structures of Feeling" and influenced by the current discussion of affect studies, this collection inverts Williams's influential concept to explore the ephemerality of feeling as working in concert with the grounding forces of materiality and history. Feelings of Structure is a collection of twelve original texts that explores the weight of diverse encounters with a variety of configurations, be they institutional, spatial, historical, or fantastical. Featuring writers from a range of disciplines, this book aims for textual evocation in subject matter and approach, with essays that encompass multiple methodologies, writing styles, and tones. Experimental in nature, Feelings of Structure balances the need for concrete and specific observation with the ephemerality of experience.

Evolutionary biology, ecology and ethics: at first glance, three different objects of research, three different worldviews and three different scientific communities. In reality, there are both structural and historical links between these disciplines. First, some topics are obviously common across the board. Second, the emerging need for environmental policy management has gradually but radically changed the relationship between these disciplines. Over the last decades in particular, there has emerged a need for an interconnecting meta-paradigm that integrates more strictly evolutionary studies, biodiversity studies and the ethical frameworks that are most appropriate for allowing a lasting co-evolution between natural and social systems. Today such a need is more than a mere luxury, it is an epistemological and practical necessity.​

Through a detailed economic assessment of the current business of professional sports and prospects for the future in the United States, Scully examines the factors that determine players' salaries; management practices and franchise values; and long-term, short-term, and corporate ownership. Scully shows, for example, that while the economic growth of the last two decades was fueled primarily by sales of television rights, the broadcast market has become saturated and teams will have to look elsewhere for income in the 1990s. This book offers technical insights that will interest business economists and professionals in sports management.