Social Analysis

Don't miss Robert Cialdiani's long anticipated follow-up to his blockbuster book Influence. Robert Cialdiani uses heavily researched data along with relatable situations to show you a new way to influence people before you even open your mouth.

Why has gender inequality persisted for so long without revolutionary change? That's the central question Joan Wallach Scott poses in her 1998 collection of essays, Gender and the Politics of History. Scott notes that obvious economic, social, and class inequalities have produced large-scale social change, but uncovering the reality of gender inequality has not done the same.

The Discourse on the Method of Reason was the first true work of skepticism, a foundation of doubt which allowed a critical re-examination of all that was previously held to be true. Descartes literally revolutionized both philosophy and mathematics, and this discourse provides the means by which he approached the tangle of contemporary thought and laid the foundation of rational understanding.

Every human being is different - but not so different that you can’t puzzle out what makes them tick, if you know how to look. Science has drilled human personality down to a fine point, identifying the clear categories we each fall into and what drives and motivates each one of us. Using this as your basis, you will learn to read every person who crosses your path like an open book, giving you the advantage in every encounter.

This meticulously researched and thought-provoking book dives deep into the fascinating world of Carlson's ascent to prominence, providing a comprehensive analysis of his career trajectory and the circumstances surrounding his departure from Fox News.

Fantasia of the Unconscious sheds invaluable light on the work of one of the most acclaimed and infamous modernists in literary history. No message stands alone. It is a relationship between the author and the audience, a snapshot of a living interaction, and it is only from this perspective that any classical piece can be fully understood. With this in mind, both the author and the climate of his time have been taken into account in a summary that precedes the narration of the full text.

This study performed an analysis of the cumulative collision data for Autonomous Vehicles that are currently approved Deployment Permit Holders in California (Cruise LLC and Waymo, LLC). The analysis compared the publicly available safety data of relative conventionally driven vehicles in San Francisco, California and the United States (adjusted for underreporting of collision that do not involve fatality).

When American sociologist C. Wright Mills's The Sociological Imagination was first published in 1959, it provoked much hostile reaction. This was understandable: the book was a hard-hitting attack on how sociology was practiced - and on a number of leading sociologists. Mills was a fierce critic of both modern capitalism and Soviet-style authoritarianism, and argued that the sociology profession failed to look at how people's problems are connected to the structures of the society in which they live.

Social capital - the relationships between people that allow communities to function well - has long been recognized as the grease that oils the wheels of society. It facilitates trust, creates bonds among neighbors, and even helps boost employment. In his 2000 book, Bowling Alone, American sociologist Robert Putnam argues that Americans have become disconnected from one another and from the institutions of their common life and investigates the consequences of this change.

Geneva-born thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau's famous work of political philosophy from 1762 is based on a give-and-take theory of the relation between individual freedom and social order: the social contract that gives the work its name. Rousseau thinks about the issue by starting with what is known as the state of nature, a lawless condition where people are free to do what they like, governed only by their own instinctive sense of justice. People are free, but they are also vulnerable to chaos.

In the past decade, social media has taken the world by storm even faster than almost any other technological advancement out there. You likely find it rare to encounter someone who does not have at least one social media account. Everybody and their mother, grandmother, and so on has one. When you think about it, the concept seems very positive, but there is an underlying message that is forgotten. Social media is actually a business in many ways - even if you have nothing to sell.

First published in 1978, Palestinian American historian Hanna Batatu's The Old Social Classes is considered to be the definitive social history of 20th century Iraq. Tom Nieuwenhuis, a scholar specializing in the region, called it "the best, most detailed modern history of any Arab country," while an entire conference was held in 1989 to discuss its implications.

In his 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (also subtitled How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive), author and multifaceted US scholar Jared M. Diamond clearly identifies five major factors that he says determine the success or failure of all human societies in all periods of history. Having first asked why societies collapse, Diamond explores various examples of failed societies, from the Norsemen of Scandinavia, who colonized Greenland in the early 10th century, to the 18th-century inhabitants of Easter Island.

Politics is one of the first books ever to investigate the concept of political philosophy. Written by the famous Greek thinker Aristotle in the fourth century BCE, it focuses on trying to understand how best to create political communities that support, serve, and improve their citizens. Aristotle investigates a number of different areas before drawing conclusions. These include an examination of existing regimes to see which are best, a look at political theories, and even an exploration of the systems of education.

After World War II ended in 1945, the Soviet Union and the United States began a decades-long confrontation that would become known as the Cold War. American foreign policy focused on "containment" - preventing the communist USSR from gaining more ground - and many people looked at the geographical and political implications of this policy. Others, meanwhile, explored American domestic life in that same period. But historian Elaine Tyler May became the first person to bring these seemingly unrelated areas together.

Philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a key text in the development of what we now know as feminism. Written in the atmosphere created by the French Revolution, which made radical change seem possible, Wollstonecraft's work challenges the idea that society's oppression of women is entirely natural. While her male contemporaries happily argued for the fundamental freedoms of all men, few were interested in extending these revolutionary rights to women.

Social anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard wrote Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande after 20 months' fieldwork with the Azande people of the South Sudan. It became the founding text in the anthropology of witchcraft, and has been hailed as a classic. Although Witchcraft had little impact when it first appeared in 1937, its popularity grew after World War II. Alongside his subsequent work on the Nuer people, Witchcraft established Evans-Pritchard's reputation as an important anthropologist.

American sociologist and priest Jay MacLeod's 1987 work Ain't No Makin' It is groundbreaking for the novel way it combines field research with theory. The book follows the lives of two groups of young men from a low-income housing project in the greater Boston area. In it, MacLeod shows how poor people who aspire to live the American dream face many more obstacles than their middle-class counterparts.

In his 1996 book The Clash Of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, American political scientist Samuel Huntington sets out his vision of the post-Cold War world. While the era from 1945 to 1989 was shaped by ideological conflict (communism vs. capitalism), Huntington predicts a future of cultural conflict.

Published in 1996, Arjun Appadurai's Modernity at Large is an edited collection of earlier essays that had already made the Indian-born anthropologist an influential figure in his field of cultural anthropology. Appadurai here presents a theory of globalization, and suggests ways that other researchers can follow up on his ideas. Many of them continue to do so. For anthropologists, the book offered new ways of thinking about how communities are affected by globalization.