First published in 1957 ,and reprinted with a new introduction in 1986, Michael Young and Peter Willmott’s book on family and kinship in Bethnal Green in the 1950s is a classic in urban studies. A standard text in planning, housing, family studies and sociology, it predicted the failure in social terms of the great rehousing campaign which was getting under way in the 1950s. The tall flats built to replace the old ‘slum’ houses were unpopular. Social networks were broken up. The book had an immediate impact when it appeared – extracts were published in the newspapers, the sales were a record for a report of a sociological study, Government ministers quoted it. But the approach it advocated was not accepted until the late 1960s, and by then it was too late. This Routledge Revivals reissue includes the authors' introduction from the 1986 reissue, reviewing the impact of the book and its ideas thirty years on. They argue that if the lessons implicit in the book had been learned in the 1950s, London and other British cities might not have suffered the 'anomie' and violence manifested in the urban riots of the 1980s.
Author: Geoff Payne,Robert Dingwall,Judy Payne,Mick Carter
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317650859
Category: Social Science
Page: 332
View: 1920
A social science which has become so remote from the society which pays for its upkeep is ultimately doomed, threatened less by repression than by intellectual contempt and financial neglect. This is the message of the authors of this book in this reassessment of the evolution and present state of British sociology. Their investigation analyses the discipline as a social institution, whose product is inexorably shaped by the everyday circumstances of its producers; it is the concrete outcome of people’s work, rather than a body of abstract ideas. Drawing upon their varied experience as teachers and researchers, they identify three major trends in contemporary sociology. First, that the discipline’s rapid expansion has led to a retreat from rigorous research into Utopian and introspective theorising. Second, that the concept of sociological research is being taught in a totally false way because of this, and encourages ‘research’ within a wholly academic environment. Third, that the current unpopularity of sociology with academics, prospective students and politicians is no coincidence, but a reflection of the conditions under which sociology is now produced and practised. In Sociology and Social Research the authors suggest substantial changes in sociological research, the way in which it is carried out and the conditions under which it is undertaken. Their book is a timely warning to fellow sociologists when the profession is under attack as a result of public expenditure cuts.
Collection of 18 papers on the direction of significant changes in the Australian family structure; Includes special problems of the aged, alcoholic, immigrant, poverty-stricken, and Aboriginal families; Includes article by D. Barwick - The Aboriginal family in south-eastern Australia (listed separately, q.v.)
Children, Modern Architecture and Reconstruction in Postwar England
Author: Roy Kozlovsky
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317044657
Category: Architecture
Page: 292
View: 7702
Between 1935 and 1959, the architecture of childhood was at the centre of architectural discourse in a way that is unique in architectural history. Some of the seminal projects of the period, such as the Secondary Modern School at Hunstanton by Peter and Alison Smithson, Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation at Marseilles, or Aldo van Eyck’s playgrounds and orphanage, were designed for children; At CIAM, architects utilized photographs of children to present their visions for reconstruction. The unprecedented visibility of the child to architectural discourse during the period of reconstruction is the starting point for this interdisciplinary study of modern architecture under welfare state patronage. Focusing mainly on England, this book examines a series of innovative buildings and environments developed for children, such as the adventure playground, the Hertfordshire school, the reformed children hospital, Brutalist housing estates, and New Towns. It studies the methods employed by architects, child experts and policy makers to survey, assess and administer the physiological, emotional and developmental needs of the ’user’, the child. It identifies the new aesthetic and spatial order permeating the environments of childhood, based on endowing children with the agency and autonomy to create a self-regulating social order out of their own free will, while rendering their interiority and sociability observable and governable. By inserting the architectural object within a broader social and political context, The Architectures of Childhood situates post-war architecture within the welfare state’s project of governing the self, which most intensively targeted the citizen in the making, the children. Yet the emphasis on the utilization of architecture as an instrument of power does not reduce it into a mere document of social policy, as the author uncovers the surplus of meaning and richness of experience invested in these environments at the historical mom
Author: Philip A. Cowan,Dorothy Field,Donald A. Hansen,Arlene Skolnick,Guy E. Swanson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131778278X
Category: Psychology
Page: 516
View: 7871
Any agenda for family research in the 1990s must take seriously a contextual approach to the study of family relationships. The editors and contributors to this volume believe that the richness in family studies over the next decade will come from considering the diversity of family forms -- different ethnic groups and cultures, different stages of family life, as well as different historical cohorts. Their goal is to make more explicit how we think about families in order to study them and understand them. To illustrate the need for diversity in family studies, examples are presented from new and old families, majority and minority families, American and Japanese families, and intact and divorcing families. This variety is intended to push the limits of current thinking, not only for researchers but also for all who are struggling to live with and work with families in a time when family life is valued but fragmented and relatively unsupported by society's institutions. Students and researchers interested in family development from the viewpoint of any of the social sciences will find this book of value.
Social Networks and Social Support in Three Urban Areas
Author: Chris Phillipson
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415205313
Category: Medical
Page: 290
View: 3820
What does it mean to grow old in an urban society? Does the family still care for older people? Family life has changed rapidly over the past fifty years, the growth in the proportion of older people in the population providing a major influence. The Family and Community Life of Older People revisits three areas (Bethnal Green in London, Wolverhampton in the Midlands and Woodford in Essex) which were the subject of classic studies in the late 1940s and 1950s and explores changes to the family and community lives of older people. The book examines issues such as: -- changes in household composition -- changes in the geographical proximity of kin and relatives -- the extent and type of help provided by the family -- contact and relationships with neighbors -- relationships with friends -- involvement in social and leisure activities -- experiences of minority ethnic groups. These questions are explored through a unique set of data including census material and survey data from interviews with over six hundred older people. A key finding is that over the past fifty years we have moved from an old age experienced within the context of the family group to one shaped by personal communities in which friends may feature as significantly as immediate kin and relatives. The Family and Community Life of Older People is a major contribution to the sociology of the family, of ageing, and of urban life and addresses the key social policy issues for an ageing society.
This historical anthropology of the family represents a new departure in family studies. Over the past ten years or so, the social scientific sociological analysis of the family has undergone a change, and has been obliged to reconsider its traditional view that industrialisation triggered a shift within society from the 'large family', which fulfilled all social functions from socialising the children to caring for the sick and the old, to the modern nuclear family, which was regarded solely as being the locus for emotional relationships. Historians have shown that in the past there was in fact a great variety of different family structures within a wide range of varying demographic, economic and cultural frameworks, distinctive for each society. At the same time, the interaction between sociology and social anthropology has led to a clearer conceptual analysis of that vague, polysemic term 'family'; and notions of dwelling-place, descent, marriage, the relative roles of husband and wife and parent-child relations, as well as the more general relations between generations, have in a variety of past and present social contexts been taken apart and analysed. In this book, Martine Segalen reviews and synthesises a rich wealth of often little-known European and North American historical and social anthropological material on the family. This results in a reversal of the frequently held view of the family as an institution in decline, showing it instead to be both dynamic and resistant.
Books: subjects; a cumulative list of works represented by Library of Congress printed cards
Author: N.A
Publisher: N.A
ISBN: N.A
Category: Subject catalogs
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Beginning with 1953, entries for Motion pictures and filmstrips, Music and phonorecords form separate parts of the Library of Congress catalogue. Entries for Maps and atlases were issued separately 1953-1955.
In this, the first of two self-standing volumes bringing The New Oxford History of England up to the present, Brian Harrison begins in 1951 with much of the empire intact and with Britain enjoying high prestige in Europe. The United Kingdom could still then claim to be a great power, whose welfare state exemplified compromise between Soviet planning and the USA’s free market. When the volume ends in 1970, no such claims carried conviction. The empire had gone, central planning was in trouble, and even the British political system had become controversial. In an unusually wide-ranging, yet impressively detailed volume, Harrison approaches the period from unfamiliar directions. He explains how British politicians in the 1950s and 1960s responded to this transition by pursuing successive roles for Britain: worldwide as champion of freedom, and in Europe as exemplar of parliamentary government, the multi-racial society, and economic planning. His main focus, though, rests not on the politicians but on the decisions the British people made largely for themselves: on their environment, social structure and attitudes, race relations, family patterns, economic framework, and cultural opportunities. By 1970 the consumer society had supplanted postwar austerity, the socialist vision was fading, and 'the sixties' (the theme of his penultimate chapter) had introduced new and even exotic themes and values. Having lost an empire, Britain was still resourcefully seeking a role: it had yet to find it.