The Success Ethic Education And The American Dream

Explores, interprets, and critically analyzes various success ethics that have shaped American culture and education. It also formulates new forms of the success ethic in order to uncover overlooked models and to overcome the shortcomings of previous genres.

The experience of shifting from one social class to another—from a dominated group to a dominant group—raises the question of how the upwardly mobile person relates to his/her group of origin. Stepping into the Elite traces the particular ways in which upwardly mobile people in India, France, and the United States—countries embodying three distinct stratification systems—make sense of this change. Given that people draw upon specific cultural tools or repertoires to analyse their world and situate themselves in it, Naudet identifies the extent to which narratives of ‘success’ vary from one country to another. For instance, he explains that while stories in a caste-ridden society such as India hinge on the preservation of bonds with the original class, in France, they are centered on the idea that an upwardly mobile person is alienated from all social groups. In the United States, on the other hand, the rhetoric of success is tinged by the ardent belief in the American society being classless. A sociological journey in three different cultural contexts, this book deftly ties the exploration of questions regarding transformation of social identity and views on being successful.

The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream: Volume 2 explores the social, economic, and cultural aspects of the American Dream in both theory and reality in the twenty-first century. This collection of essays brings together leading scholars from a range of fields to further develop the themes and issues explored in the first volume. The concept of the American Dream, first expounded by James Truslow Adams in The Epic of America in 1931, is at once both ubiquitous and difficult to define. The term perfectly captures the hopes of freedom, opportunity and upward social mobility invested in the nation. However, the American Dream appears increasingly illusory in the face of widening inequality and apparent lack of opportunity, particularly for the poor and ethnic, or otherwise marginalized, minorities in the United States. As such, an understanding of the American Dream through both theoretical analyses and empirical studies, whether qualitative or quantitative, is crucial to understanding contemporary America. Like the first volume of The Routledge Handbook on the American Dream, this collection will be of great interest to students and researchers in a range of fields in the humanities and social sciences.

The scholars included in this collection sought to indicate more contemporary working definitions for the expression "American Dream", or rather Dreams. The multidisciplinary selections come from many countries and represent scholars from different backgrounds. They reflect the current developments and approaches in the field of US Studies and we hope to help broaden the scope of programs in higher education institutions. The chapters are thematically organized in two sections: “Initial Dialogues” and “Comparative Dialogues.” The first one comprises essays that set the foundations for our discussions and intends to familiarize newcomers with the theme. The second section extends the possibilities of working comparatively with the American Dreams and a number of other interdisciplinary fields of interest for US Studies programs.

This book provides a typology of higher education ethics that infuses both cognitive and affective domains to help mitigate ethical issues in colleges and universities at the global level. The five ethical domains presented are decision ethics (with 24 ethical theories and 14 ethical decision-making processes), professional ethics, business ethics, organizational ethics, and social ethics at the national and global levels. Higher education accreditation issues are presented with a call to implement ethics committees to help provide proactive ethics programs to better educate faculty and staff in colleges and universities. Using 220 educational objectives and 16 ethical cases, as well as the Ethics Statements of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics (SCCP), ethics and compliance officers, higher education administrators, higher education graduate students, and higher education student advisors are provided with specific ethical theories and ethics decision making processes to tackle ethics issues in higher education.

This work presents a provocative and wide-ranging introduction to the notion that information technologies are creating new formations of power, control and resistance across the planet. The essays--ranging from the language used by the Bush administration to shape the war on terror, the strategies of media management deployed to shape how the war in Iraq was presented in the public sphere, to the attempts to "brand" economic globalization and strategies of resistance developed by the anti-globalization movement--unearth the new transformations that are unfolding in the twenty first century.