The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society

This paper aims to clarify the meaning, and explain the utility, of the case study method, a method often practiced but little understood. A “case study,” I argue, is best defined as an intensive study of a single unit with an aim to generalize across a larger set of units. Case studies rely on the same sort of covariational evidence utilized in non-case study research. Thus, the case study method is correctly understood as a particular way of defining cases, not a way of analyzing cases or a way of modeling causal relations. I show that this understanding of the subject illuminates some of the persistent ambiguities of case study work, ambiguities that are, to some extent, intrinsic to the enterprise. The travails of the case study within the discipline of political science are also rooted in an insufficient appreciation of the methodological tradeoffs that this method calls forth. This paper presents the familiar contrast between case study and non-case study work as a series of characteristic strengths and weaknesses—affinities—rather than as antagonistic approaches to the empirical world. In the end, the perceived hostility between case study and non-case study research is largely unjustified and, perhaps, deserves to be regarded as a misconception. Indeed, the strongest conclusion to arise from this methodological examination concerns the complementarity of single-unit and cross-unit research designs.

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What Is a Case Study and What Is It Good for

Sociological studies sensitive to the issue of place are rarely labeled thus, and at the same time there are far too many of them to fit in this review. It may be a good thing that this research is seldom gathered up as a “sociology of place,” for that could ghettoize the subject as something of interest only to geographers, architects, or environmental historians. The point of this review is to indicate that sociologists have a stake in place no matter what they analyze, or how: The works cited below emplace inequality, difference, power, politics, interaction, community, social movements, deviance, crime, life course, science, identity, memory, history. After a prologue of definitions and methodological ruminations, I ask: How do places come to be the way they are, and how do places matter for social practices and historical change?

A Space for Place in Sociology

This article proposes and argues for the importance of a distinction between "low-" and "high-risk/cost activism" and outlines a model or recruitment to the latter. The model emphasizes the importa...

http://files.meetup.com/160880/High-risk%20activism.pdf

Recruitment to high-risk activism: The case of Freedom Summer.

Since the end of World War II, social science research has become increasingly quantitative in nature. A Case for the Case Study provides a rationale for an alternative to quantitative reserach: the close investigation of single instances of social phenomena. The first section of the book contains an overview of the central methodological issues involved in the use of the case study method. Then, well-known scholars describe how they undertook case study research in order to undersand changes in church involvement, city life, gender roles, white-collar crimes, family structure, homelessness, and other types of social experience. Each contributor contronts several key questions: What does the case study tell us that other approaches cannot? To what extent can one generalize from the study of a single case or of a highly limited set of cases? Does case study work provide the basis for postulating broad principles of social structure and behavior? The answers vary, but the consensus is that the opportunity to examine certain kinds of social phenomena in depth enables social scientists to advance greatly our empirical understanding of social life. The contributors are Leon Anderson, Howard M. Bahr, Theodore Caplow, Joe R. Feagin, Gilbert Geis, Gerald Handel, Anthonly M. Orum, Andree F. Sjoberg, Gideon Sjoberg, David A. Snow, Ted R. Vaughan, R. Stephen Warner, Christine L. Williams, and Norma Williams.

A Case for the Case Study

Great American City

The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. III: End of Millennium

Inspection of the effec of socioeconomic status on the organizational membership of Negroes and whites indicates that the konwn relationship between social class and membership is much less pronounced for Negroes. Lower-class Negroes are more likely to belong to organizations than lower-class whites, while middle-class whites are slighty more likely to belong than middle-class Negroes. Upper-class whites, in turn, are much more likely to be "joiners" than their Negro Counterparts. Similar comparisons of Negroes and whites show that Negroes are, without exception, more likely to participate actively in associations. Examination of membership in different kinds of organizations reveals that Negroes are more likely to belong to political and church groups than their white counterparts and equally likely to belong to civic groups. Finally, evidence on Negro voting in presidential elections since 1952 points to a remarkable increase in voter turnout, especially in comparison with the stable turnout of the nati...

A reappraisal of the social and political participation of Negroes.

Locating Public Space PART I - Public Space as Civil Order Introduction The Death and Life of Great American Cities - Jane Jacobs The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces - William H. Whyte The Character of Third Places - Ray Oldenburg The Moral Order of Strangers - M. P. Baumgartner Street Etiquette and Street Wisdom - Elijah Anderson PART II - Public Space as Power and Resistance Introduction The End of Public Space? People's Park, Definitions of the Public, and Democracy - Don Mitchell Fortress Los Angeles - Mike Davis Whose Culture? Whose City? - Sharon Zukin Dispersing the Crowd: Bonus Plazas and the Creation of Public Space - Gregory Smithsimon Defying Disappearance: Cosmopolitan Public Spaces in Hong Kong - Lisa Law PART III - Public Space as Art, Theatre, and Performance Introduction Art and the Transit Experience / Creating a Sense of Purpose: Public Art and Boston's Orange Line - Cynthia Abrahamson, Myrna Margulies Breitbart, & Pamela Worden The Harsh Reality: Billboard Subversion and Graffiti - Timothy W. Drescher The Paradox of Public Art: Democratic Space, the Avant-Garde, and Richard Serra's 'Tilted Arc' - Caroline Levine Those "Gorgeous Incongruities': Polite Politics and Public Space on the Streets of Nineteenth Century New York - Mona Domosh Soundscape and Society: Chinese Theatre and Cultural Authenticity in Singapore - Tong Soon Lee Relocating Public Space Toolkits for Interrogating Public Space

Anthony M. Orum

Papers

A Case for the Case Study

Great American City

The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. III: End of Millennium

A reappraisal of the social and political participation of Negroes.

Common Ground?: Readings and Reflections on Public Space