While some people find new opportunities in the postindustrial economy, many working-class men find their social and economic well-being collapse as blue-collar jobs are outsourced and offshored to the global labor market. Faced with limited options to earn a living-wage, many of these blue-collar workers are instead changing who they are, embracing a deviant, rebellious identity expressed by the contemporary southern rock revival musicians studied in this book. Although loosely based in the traditional culture and lifestyle of the southeastern United States, contemporary southerness has little to do with region but instead is a way to rebel from the very institutions blue-collar men traditionally used as the basis of their masculine pride: family, education, employment, military service, and religion. This contemporary form of southerness reflected in their music also involves deviance, as many of these men adorn themselves with the highly controversial confederate flag, binge drink alcohol, brawl with one another and use drugs. Combining interviews, participant observation and a lyrical analysis, this book explores these aspects of rebellious southerness through music as it exists in the ideal sense and as individual men try to live up to these subcultural ideals in their daily lives. The southern rock revival is a new social movement carving out a place for an alternative way to live while simultaneously perpetuating stereotypes about poor men, reinforcing social disadvantage and marginalization.

Golf is a Scottish game. It has been played by the Scots for centuries, and Scotland is its spiritual and cultural home. This is a book devoted to one nation's devotion to a game of stick and ball which today casts its enchantment over the entire world. The beginnings of golf and its early development are shrouded in mystery and are part fact and part fable. The Scottish Golf Book separates one from the other as it traces the early history of golf to the multimillion-dollar, worldwide obsession it has become today. Images from the earliest days of Scottish photography recall titanic battles between the early superstars of the game, while the modern lens takes the reader on a spectacular and magical journey around the historic, the classic, and the hidden treasures of Scotland's finest courses.

This study is designed to show how personality dispositions and cognitive variables may combine with social norms to influence wife abuse. Prior research examining the role of individual differences in wife abuse has been sparse, unsystematic, and appear questionable for two reasons. First, these studies have not considered that contextual norms and cognitive variables are likely to interact with dispositional variables to either facilitate or discourage abuse. Second, the theoretical relationship between dispositional variables and macrolevel approaches (i.e. feminist and sociological) has not been investigated. How demographic variables, contextual norms, and individual differences interact may have important implications for the study of wife abuse. The present project addresses these issues by focusing on a description of the relationship between personality (authoritarianism & sex-role attitudes), cognitive variables (self-consciousness & the hostile attribution bias), contextual norms (military experience & regional background) and wife abuse. 149 males completed a questionnaire containing the Conflict Tactics Scale, RWA scale, Self-Consciousness Scale, Adversarial Sexual Beliefs Scale, and the Attitudes Toward Women Scale. Furthermore, subjects responded to a variety of demographic items designed to assess income level, age, regional background, alcohol consumption, educational level, and military experience. Results suggest three principal conclusions. First, they show that the hostile attributional bias is the most powerful predictor of verbal and physical abuse. Analyses consistently indicated that subjects possessing hostile attributions toward women are the most likely to verbally and physically abuse their present partner. Second, the contextual norms and demographics emphasized in past models of abuse were found to interact with personality and cognitive variables. The effect of military experience, Southerness, and alcohol use were mediated by personality and cognitive variables. Finally, the present results are consistent with past studies showing that abusers consume more alcohol, are younger, and earn less than non-abusers. Insofar as the results show significant relationships between relevant of cognitive, personality, and contextual factors, they provide a new, more accurate description of the problem, and may allow more effective forms of prediction, intervention and treatment.