'A memorable, oddly beautiful book' Wall Street Journal'A marvellous glimpse of the Japan that rarely peeks through the country's public image' Washington PostOne sunny spring morning in the 1970s, an unlikely Englishman set out on a pilgrimage that would take him across the entire length of Japan. Travelling only along small back roads, Alan Booth travelled on foot from Soya, the country's northernmost tip, to Sata in the...

Based on the presentations and discussions from a national symposia, Just Living Together represents one of the first systematic efforts to focus on cohabitation. The book is divided into four parts, each dealing with a different aspect of cohabitation. Part I addresses the big picture question, "What are the historical and cross cultural foundations of cohabitation?" Part II focuses specifically on North America and asks, "What is the role of cohabitation in contemporary North Am...

This "landmark work in urban sociology" examines the influence of neighborhoods on social phenomena and in our lives (Claude Fischer, City & Community).For over fifty years numerous public intellectuals and social theorists have insisted that community is dead. Some would have us believe that we act solely as individuals choosing our own fates regardless of our surroundings, while other theories place us at the mercy of global forces beyond our control. The...

Disability exists in the shadows of public awareness and at the periphery of policy making. People with disabilities are, in many respects, missing from the theories and practices of social rights, political participation, employment, and civic membership. Absent Citizens brings to light these chronic deficiencies in Canadian society and emphasizes the effects that these omissions have on the lives of citizens with disabilities.Drawing together elements from feminist studi...

Social policy shapes the daily lives of every Canadian citizen and should reflect the beliefs of a majority of Canadians on just approaches to the promotion of health, safety, and well-being. Too often, those on the front lines—social workers, nurses, and teachers—observe that policies do not work well for the most vulnerable groups in society. In the first part of this new edition of Canadian Social Policy, Westhues and Wharf argue that service deliverers have discretion in how p...

In At Risk, Karen J. Swift and Marilyn Callahan examine risk and risk assessment in the context of professional practice in child protection, social work, and other human services. They argue that the tools, technologies, and practices used to measure risk to the individual have gone unquestioned and unstudied and that current methods of risk assessment may be distorting the principles of social justice.Central to this study is an examination of the everyday experiences of...

In bioethics, discussions of justice have tended to focus on questions of fairness in access to health care: is there a right to medical treatment, and how should priorities be set when medical resources are scarce. But health care is only one of many factors that determine the extent to which people live healthy lives, and fairness is not the only consideration in determining whether a health policy is just. In this pathbreaking book, senior bioethicists Powers and Faden confront foundati...

Early childhood education is critical for preparing children for success in formal school settings, and as such, is a major concern throughout the world. This volume brings together ground-breaking research in this area to help practitioners, students, policy makers, curriculum designers, and intervention program developers understand the latest ideas and advances in the field.Recent Perspectives of Early Childhood Education and Care in Canada centres on three key themes. ...

African Americans and Latinos earn lower grades and drop out of college more often than whites or Asians. Yet thirty years after deliberate minority recruitment efforts began, we still don't know why. In The Shape of the River, William Bowen and Derek Bok documented the benefits of affirmative action for minority students, their communities, and the nation at large. But they also found that too many failed to achieve academic success. In The Source of the River, Douglas M...

Why do people commit crimes? How do we control crime? The theories that criminologists use to answer these questions are built on a number of underlying assumptions, including those about the nature of crime, free will, human nature, and society. These assumptions have a fundamental impact on criminology: they largely determine what criminologists study, the causes they examine, the control strategies they recommend, and how they test their theories and evaluate crime-control strategies.

The Psychology of Diversity presents a captivating social-psychological study of diversity, the obstacles confronting it, and the benefits it provides.Goes beyond prejudice and discrimination to discuss the personal and social implications of diversity for both majority and minority group membersConsiders how historical, political, economic, and societal factors shape the way people think about and respond to diversityExplains why discrimination l...

This volume focuses on two questions: why do people from one social group oppress and discriminate against people from other groups? and why is this oppression so mind numbingly difficult to eliminate? The answers to these questions are framed using the conceptual framework of social dominance theory. Social dominance theory argues that the major forms of intergroup conflict, such as racism, classism and patriarchy, are all basically derived from the basic human predisposition to form and ...