Continuity and Change in the American Family engages students with issues they see every day in the news, providing them with a comprehensive description of the social demography of the American family. Understanding ever-changing family systems and patterns requires taking the pulse of contemporary family life from time to time. This book paints a portrait of family continuity and change in the later half of the 20th century, with a focus on data from the 1970′s to present. The authors explore such topics as the growth in cohabitation, changes in childbearing, and how these trends affect family life. Other topics include the changing lives of single mothers, fathers, and grandparents and increasing economic disparities among families; child care and child well-being; and combining paid work and family. The authors are talented writers who bring considerable professional and scholarly background to bear in illuminating this topic in a thoughtful yet lively presentation.

The Industrial Revolution brought into being a distinct world, a world of greater affluence, longevity and mobility, an urban rather than a rural world. But the great surge of economic growth was balanced against severe constraints on the opportunities for expansion, revealing an intriguing paradox. This book, published to considerable critical acclaim, explores the paradox and attempts to provide a distinct model' of the changes that comprised the industrial revolution.

As the dust settles on nearly three decades of economic reform in Latin America, one of the most fundamental economic policy areas has changed far less than expected: labor regulation. To date, Latin America's labor laws remain both rigidly protective and remarkably diverse. Continuity Despite Change develops a new theoretical framework for understanding labor laws and their change through time, beginning by conceptualizing labor laws as comprehensive systems or "regimes." In this context, Matthew Carnes demonstrates that the reform measures introduced in the 1980s and 1990s have only marginally modified the labor laws from decades earlier. To explain this continuity, he argues that labor law development is constrained by long-term economic conditions and labor market institutions. He points specifically to two key factors—the distribution of worker skill levels and the organizational capacity of workers. Carnes presents cross-national statistical evidence from the eighteen major Latin American economies to show that the theory holds for the decades from the 1980s to the 2000s, a period in which many countries grappled with proposed changes to their labor laws. He then offers theoretically grounded narratives to explain the different labor law configurations and reform paths of Chile, Peru, and Argentina. His findings push for a rethinking of the impact of globalization on labor regulation, as economic and political institutions governing labor have proven to be more resilient than earlier studies have suggested.

Continuity and often violent change in medieval Persia are revealed in this detailed study of aspects of Persian history during three turbulent centuries (1040–1335 A.D.). An extensive introduction provides the chronological framework for this examination of the vital areas of administrative, economic, and social history. This book is a major contribution from the pen of a scholar whose knowledge of the sources of the history of Islamic Persia and of the country itself is hardly to be matched by any living Western scholar. Lambton provides an astonishing amount of information and also uniquely deep insights into Persian history and society.

Faith Elliot's book has a coherence unusual in a textbook. As its title suggests, it directs our attention to change and continuity in the family. It reviews debates about the biological origins of the nuclear family and gender roles, accounts of the development of the conjugal family as the dominant family form in modern Western societies and of change in the roles of men and women within and without the family, the remodelling of the conjugal family consequent on the legitimation of divorce and the emergence of one-parent families and remarriage families, and the development of alternative lifestyles as exemplified in unmarried cohabitation, same-sex pairings and group living. The book considers Marxist and feminist approaches alongside the functional approaches which have been more traditional in the sociological study of the family.

First Published in 1984. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.