Emeriti Publications

The Atlas of Global Inequalities (2011)

Drawing on research from around the world, this atlas gives shape and meaning to statistics, making it an indispensable resource for understanding global inequalities and an inspiration for social and political action. Inequality underlies many of the challenges facing the world today, and The Atlas of Global Inequalities considers the issue in all its dimensions. Organized in thematic parts, it maps not only the global distribution of income and wealth, but also inequalities in social and political rights and freedoms. It describes how inadequate health services, unsafe water, and barriers to education hinder people’s ability to live their lives to the full; assesses poor transport, energy, and digital communication infrastructures and their effect on economic development; and highlights the dangers of unclean and unhealthy indoor and outdoor environments. Through world, regional, and country maps, and innovative and intriguing graphics, the authors unravel the complexity of inequality, revealing differences between countries as well as illustrating inequalities within them.

Studying the Power Elite Fifty Years of Who Rules America? (2018)

This book critiques and extends the analysis of power in the classic, Who Rules America?, on the fiftieth anniversary of its original publication in 1967—and through its subsequent editions. The chapters, written especially for this book by twelve sociologists and political scientists, provide fresh insights and new findings on many contemporary topics, among them the concerted attempt to privatize public schools; foreign policy and the growing role of the military-industrial component of the power elite; the successes and failures of union challenges to the power elite; the ongoing and increasingly global battles of a major sector of agribusiness; and the surprising details of how those who hold to the egalitarian values of social democracy were able to tip the scales in a bitter conflict within the power elite itself on a crucial banking reform in the aftermath of the Great Recession. These social scientists thereby point the way forward in the study of power, not just in the United States, but globally.

A brief introductory chapter situates Who Rules America? within the context of the most visible theories of power over the past fifty years—pluralism, Marxism, Millsian elite theory, and historical institutionalism. Then, a chapter by G. William Domhoff, the author of Who Rules America?, takes us behind the scenes on how the original version was researched and written, tracing the evolution of the book in terms of new concepts and research discoveries by Domhoff himself, as well as many other power structure researchers, through the 2014 seventh edition.

Readers will find differences of opinion and analysis from chapter to chapter. The authors were encouraged to express their views independently and frankly. They do so in an admirable and useful fashion that will stimulate everyone’s thinking on these difficult and complex issues, setting the agenda for future studies of power.

"{Studying the Power Elite is} a useful overview of the debate…a guide to the key schools of thought."

--The Financial Times

"I am hard pressed to think of another book which has the author so vigorously defending himself from his critics. And when all is said and done, even the strongest critics in the new book recognize that on the big picture question of class power, Bill Domhoff’s 1967 analysis remains largely correct."

- Randy Shaw, Beyond Chron

“In the new volume, each coauthor builds on Domhoff's signature contributions, revealing how the corporate rich triumphs repeatedly over organized labor, liberals, and environmentalists… The other contributors, invited by the publisher to extend or critique Domhoff's work, bring a range of perspectives to Studying the Power Elite.”

The New CEOs Women, African American, Latino, and Asian American Leaders of Fortune 500 Companies (2011)

Racism Postrace (2019)

With the election of Barack Obama, the idea that American society had become postracial—that is, race was no longer a main factor in influencing and structuring people's lives—took hold in public consciousness, increasingly accepted by many. The contributors to 

Toward a Sociology of the Trace (2010)

Questions national identity by investigating the creation of memory and meaning.

Using culture as an entry point, the essays in this volume identify and challenge sites where the representational dimension of social life produces national identity through scripts of belonging, or traces. The contributors utilize empirically based studies of social policy, political economy, and social institutions to offer a new way of looking at the creation of meaning, representation, and memory.

Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation (2005)

Herman Gray takes a sweeping look at black popular culture over the past decade to explore culture's role in the push for black political power and social recognition. In a series of linked essays, he finds that black artists, scholars, musicians, and others have been instrumental in reconfiguring social and cultural life in the United States and he provocatively asks how black culture can now move beyond a preoccupation with inclusion and representation. 

Watching Race Television and the Struggle for Blackness (1995)

A classic examination of the cultural relationship between television and race—with a new introduction!

In the late 1980s and early 1990s television representations of African Americans exploded on the small screen. Starting with the portrayal of blacks on series such as The Jack Benny Show and Amos ’n’ Andy and continuing through The Cosby Show and In Living Color, Herman Gray shows how the meaning of blackness on screen has changed through the years.

Producing Jazz: The Experience of an Independent Record Company (1988)

Small independent cultural organizations—record companies, book publishers, newspapers, radio stations—are among the most significant yet economically marginal producers of culture today. In Producing Jazz, Herman Gray explores the organization, ideologies, and social relations of an independent jazz recording company. His portrait of Theresa Records, a small but nationally known company in San Francisco, focuses on the ways in which an avocation grows into a business and highlights the conflicting goals of staying small and staying solvent. Gray describes the financial constraints, distribution system, aesthetic decisions, and organizational adjustments faced by Theresa.

The independent status of a recording company is defined not by its economic and structural circumstances, but by the nature of its work, its records, the creative responses to its circumstances, and the commitment and ideology of its staff. The members of Theresa Records describe how staying small enables such a company to produce only the music it believes in and to avoid a hierarchical work structure. But smallness is a disadvantage when it comes to building a reputation, collecting receivables, and ensuring cash flow for the next production.

Despite its low output and tenuous existence, companies like Theresa Records occupy an important niche in the music business by developing new talent, continuing to produce the work of seasoned musicians regardless of their popularity, and remaining stylistically adventurous. Producing Jazz suggests that from the creative and social spaces of such small producers comes much of the most vital, innovative, and progressive music, and therefore their significance far exceeds their size or profit margins.

The Perfect Sister (2005)

The Seven Stories of Love: And How to Choose Your Happy Ending (2001)

In this groundbreaking work, Marcia Millman reveals that women's romantic relationships are enacted through seven basic love stories. Based on her popular course The Sociology of Love at the University of California at Santa Cruz, a decade's worth of research, more than one hundred interviews, and examples from movies, novels, and memoirs, Millman identifies the seven love scenarios as reenactments of early experiences and efforts to change past defeats into victories. She also shows how the success or failure of each is determined by unconscious choices. Explaining the hidden needs and emotions that come into play in these love stories, Millman creates a tool for relationship guidance that women and men can use to reach the fall potential of any partnership.

Over time, most of us play out a repertoire of these seven romantic plots, but we always return to our primary love story. By learning to recognize our own pattern of love, we can understand its hidden meanings and source and avoid potential heartache. Women and men who are otherwise strong and perceptive frequently get into the wrong relationships because they don't understand the love stories they are enacting. Shattering the popular myth that most romantic problems are caused by pervasive low self-esteem or miscommunication, this essential book can help anyone succeed in finding a satisfying, lasting relationship.

Using examples from timeless and popular romantic movies such as Casablanca, Fatal Attraction, Pretty woman, and Dirty Dancing, and novels such as Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Melissa Banks's The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, Scott Spencer's Endless Love, and Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, Millman clarifies the difficulties that can arise in these love stories and explains how they can be remedied.

Discovering which story we are reenacting helps us to avoid potential pitfalls and allows us to make choices that bring greater happiness. Love and relationships, in their many manifestations, can be elusive even to those in the midst of them. This book is a first step on the road to romantic fulfillment.

Warm Hearts and Cold Cash: The Intimate Dynamics of Families and Money (1991)

Marcia Millman questions the belief that the family is a haven in a heartless world, and argues that it is characterized by many of the hard traits of the market, expressed in the ways in which we use money. By focusing attention on money and the way it works within the intimate economy of the family, she cuts through the sentimentality that obscures this important aspect of familial relationships.

Such a Pretty Face: Being Fat in America (1980)

We are a fat-obsessed society. Four out of every ten Americans are clinically overweight. Being fat, especially for American women, holds a special significance and is laden with symbolism. Low-fat foods, dieting programs, and diet books, few of which make a lasting difference, are the basis of a multibillion-dollar industry.

Yet, despite this obsession with weight control, there is little serious discussion of the deeper meaning of obesity. In a way, obesity is as powerful a taboo as sexuality was for the Victorians.

This book argues that the effort to lose weight should be secondary to an understanding of the mythology of fat. Being fat is seen as much more than a physical condition. Fat women are stereotypically viewed as unfeminine, either in flight from sexuality or sexual in some forbidden way, intentionally antisocial, out of control, hostile, aggressive.

Using case studies, moving, sometimes painful, autobiographical accounts, and observing such organizations as a fat rights society, Overeaters Anonymous, and a children's diet camp, Marcia Millman reveals how people live with the burden of these stereotypes and explores the truth or falsity of them.

This book proves the humanness, the defiance, vulnerability, self-doubt, courage, and even the beauty of those who violate our arbitrary standards of physical beauty. It sees them as whole people, to whom attention must be paid.

Expanding Addiction: Critical Essays (2014)

The study of addiction is dominated by a narrow disease ideology that leads to biological reductionism. In this short volume, editors Granfield and Reinarman make clear the importance of a more balanced contextual approach to addiction by bringing to light critical perspectives that expose the historical and cultural interstices in which the disease concept of addiction is constructed and deployed. The readings selected for this anthology include both classic foundational pieces and cutting-edge contemporary works that constitute critical addiction studies. This book is a welcome addition to drugs or addiction courses in sociology, criminal justice, mental health, clinical psychology, social work, and counseling.

Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice (1997)

Crack in America is the definitive book on crack cocaine. In reinterpreting the crack story, it offers new understandings of both drug addiction and drug prohibition. It shows how crack use arose in the face of growing unemployment, poverty, racism, and shrinking social services. It places crack in its historical context—as the latest in a long line of demonized drugs—and it examines the crack scare as a phenomenon in its own right. Most important, it uses crack and the crack scare as windows onto America's larger drug and drug policy problems.

Written by a team of veteran drug researchers in medicine, law, and the social sciences, this book provides the most comprehensive, penetrating, and original analysis of the crack problem to date. It reviews the social pharmacology of crack and offers rich ethnographic case studies of crack binging, addiction, and sales. It explores crack's different impacts on whites, blacks, the middle class, and the poor, and explains why crack was always much less of a problem in other countries such as Canada, Australia, and The Netherlands.

Cocaine Changes: The Experience of Using and Quitting (1991)

The latest War on Drugs in the United States targeted cocaine and later crack as an "epidemic" sweeping the nation with tragic and irreversible effects. Dan Waldorf, Craig Reinarman, and Sheigla Murphy conducted a study of heavy cocaine users in an effort to understand how they got started, their uses of cocaine, the "natural" progression of use and abuse, and the motivations to stop as well as strategies to do so. Cocaine Changes, based on 267 in-depth interviews with heavy users, authoritatively documents the dangers of cocaine but contends that the national hysteria over it is largely unfounded. Many of the respondents actually could, and did, regulate their use so that it did not disrupt their daily lives. Many others managed to stop using and walk away from cocaine. The authors' surprising conclusions challenge the American public to think about drug use and its cultural context in more complicated ways and to develop more rational public policies toward drug problems.

With compelling evidence, the authors found that cocaine is neither immediately nor inevitably addictive, and that controlled use is not only possible but extremely common. Presenting what they describe as "politically inconvenient scientific knowledge," they demonstrate that what keeps many heavy users from falling into "the abyss of abuse" and what helps retrieve those who do fall is a stake in conventional life: jobs, families, friends. While millions of dollars have been spent on ads asserting that "the best thing you can do for a cocaine addict is to cut him off," these findings argue that friends, family, and meaningful roles are precisely what makes controlled use and cessation possible.

Another surprising result of this study is the relative ease with which so many heavy users managed to quit. Most of the participants who wanted to quit using cocaine did so without treatment and found it was far less difficult than imagined (or advertised). Furthermore, many formerly heavy users resumed occasional use without relapse. Most assuredly, Waldorf, Reinarman, and Murphy are convinced that cocaine use entails real risks. Their interviews reveal a wide array of physical, psychological, and social problems. Nevertheless, they conclude that if controlled use is possible and addiction not inevitable, then "cocaine's image as the great scourge of the late twentieth century" is distorted by moralistic rhetoric.

PDFs of select articles:

• "Cannabis Policies and User Practices: Market Separation, Price, Potency, and Accessibility in Amsterdam and San Francisco," International Journal of Drug Policy 20 (2009)
• "Policing Pleasure: Food Drugs, and the Politics of Ingestion," Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 7/3 (2007)
• "5 Myths About That Demon Crack: The Supreme Court's Sentencing Problem." Washington Post, October 14, 2007
• "Addition as Accomplishment: The Discursive Construction of Disease," Addiction Research and Theory 13 (2005)
• "Crack in the Rear-view Mirror: Deconstructing Drug War Mythology," Social Justice 31 (2004) with H.G. Levine
• “The Limited Relevance of Drug Policy: Cannabis in Amsterdam and San Francisco,” American Journal of Public Health 94 (2004), with P. Cohen and H. Kaal

The Retreat from Race: Asian-American Admissions and Racial Politics (1993)

Winner of the Association for Asian American Studies's 1993 National Book Award, Social Science!

“An excellent book. Takagi takes a very complex and sensitive subject—racial politics—and shows, through a careful analysis . . . that changes in the discourse about Asian American admissions have facilitated a 'retreat from race' in the area of affirmative action. . . . This book will appeal to an audience significantly wider than a typical academic one.”— David Karen, Bryn Mawr College

Charges by Asian Americans that the top universities in the United States used quotas to limit the enrollment of Asian-American students developed into one of the most controversial public controversies in higher education since the Bakke case. In Retreat from Race, Dana Takagi follows the debates over Asian-American admissions at Berkeley, UCLA, Brown, Stanford, Harvard, and Princeton. She explains important developments in the politics of race:  changes in ethnic coalitions, reconstruction of the debate over affirmative action, and the conservative challenge to the civil rights agenda of the 1960s. Takagi examines the history and significance of the Asian American admissions controversy on American race relations both inside and outside higher education.

Takagi's central argument is that the Asian-American admissions controversy facilitated a subtle but important shift in affirmative action policy away from racial preferences toward class preferences. She calls this development a retreat from race. Takagi suggests that the retreat signals not only an actual policy shift but also the increasing reluctance on the part of intellectuals, politicans, and policy analysts to identify and address social problems as explicitly racial problems.

Moving beyond the university setting, Takagi explores the political significance of the retreat from race by linking Asian-American admissions to other controversies in higher education and in American politics, including the debates over political correctness and multiculturalism. In her assessment, the retreat from race is likely to fail at its promise of easing racial tension and promoting racial equality.

Doing Gender, Doing Difference Inequality, Power, and Institutional Change (2002)

For the first time the anthologized works of Sarah Fenstermaker and Candace West have been collected along with new essays to provide a complete understanding of this topic of tremendous importance to scholars in social science.