Grace Budrys brilliantly reimagines Dick and Jane-not as cheerful learners, but as voices of conscience in a crumbling 2031. Their world, dominated by privatization and corporate rule, mirrors our own as governments lose control and democracy erodes under profit's shadow.In 2025, Budrys warnings strike with uncanny force. From healthcare and education to AI and energy, global power is shifting to corporations, echoing her vision of a world where accountability vanishes and survival...

Market-Based Health Care defines for students the challenges, arguments and politics behind the concept of consumer-driven health care including what it would look like if the business sector would do a better job of organizing our health care arrangements and remove any governmental components built into the system. As a sociologist interested in health care, Budrys focuses on the impact our health care arrangements have on not just an economic level but how they affect people as well. Th...

Our Unsystematic Healthcare System presents readers with a comprehensive overview of the U.S. healthcare system with an emphasis on change. It opens with a comparison of U.S. life expectancy and national expenditures with those of other economically advanced countries. The chapters that follow outline the different sectors of the healthcare system including public health, physician and hospital networks, private and public health insurance plans, and the pharmaceutical industry. T...

The authors recontextualize contemporary sociological theory to argue that in recent decades sociology has been deeply permeated by a new paradigm, conflict constructionism. Their analysis integrates and sheds new light on eight prominent domains of recent social thought: the micro-level; discourses, framing, and renewed interest in signs and language; the construction of difference and dominance; regulation and punishment; cultural complexity and transculturation; the body; new approaches...

How Nonprofits Work looks at nonprofit organizations through a sociological lens, identifying characteristics that make some nonprofits successful and characteristics that cause challenges, focusing on nonprofts in the health services sector. The book opens with helpful background information about nonprofit organizations, then shares case studies that take readers more deeply into the challenges and successes of various organizations. Given the trials nonprofits face in the current econom...

Unequal Health examines the reasons why stark differences in health and well-being persist, even as the health care industry and access to health care grow. The third edition of this powerful book retains the accessible style and focus on inequality from previous editions while featuring significant new material throughout.After an overview of key themes, the book introduces the concept of epidemiology—measuring the number of people who are sick or dying—and offers an overview of h...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In her acclaimed memoir, former Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris delivers “a life story that genuinely entrances” (Los Angeles Times) as she looks back on how she was shaped by the core truths that unite us.“An engaging read that provides insights into the influences of [Harris’s] life—most of all, her mother Shyamala Gopalan Harris, Ph.D., a breast cancer researcher . . . Reve...

What is Urban Theory? How can it be used to understand our urban experiences? Experiences typically defined by enormous inequalities, not just between cities but within cities, in an increasingly interconnected and globalised world. This book explains:Relations between urban theory and modernity in key ideas of the Chicago School, spatial analysis, humanistic urban geography, and ‘radical′ approaches like MarxismCities and...

A New York Times Notable Book of the YearThe story of a kind of poverty in America so deep that we, as a country, don’t even think exists—from a leading national poverty expert who "defies convention." (The New York Times)Jessica Compton’s family of four would have no income if she didn’t donate plasma twice a week at her local donation center in Tennessee. Modonna Harris and her teenage daughter, Brianna, in Chicago, often have no...

The extensively revised and updated second edition combines carefully chosen primary quotes with wide-ranging discussion and everyday illustrative examples to provide an in-depth introduction to classical and contemporary sociological theory.Combines classical and contemporary theory in a single, integrated textShort biographies and historical timelines of significant events provide context to theorists' ideasInnovatively builds on excerpts from original t...

This Fight Is Our Fight: Elizabeth Warren's Passionate Call to Save America's Middle ClassIn This Fight Is Our Fight, #1 New York Times bestselling author and U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren offers a candid, inspiring look at why our middle class is under siege and how we can win the battle to save it. Drawing on her own experiences growing up in Oklahoma at the ragged edge of the middle class, Warren shows how a government that once looked out for ...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • With stark poignancy and political dispassion Tightrope addresses the crisis in working-class America while focusing on solutions to mend a half century of governmental failure. This must-read book from the authors of Half the Sky “shows how we can and must do better” (Katie Couric)."A deft and uniquely credible exploration of rural America, and of other left-behind pockets of our country. One of the most important books I've...