Social mobility is the hope of economic development and the mantra of a good society. There are disagreements about what constitutes social mobility, but there is broad agreement that people should have roughly equal chances of success regardless of their economic status at birth. Concerns about rising inequality have engendered a renewed interest in social mobility—especially in the developing world. However, efforts to construct the databases and meet the standards required for conventional analyses of social mobility are at a preliminary stage and need to be complemented by innovative, conceptual, and methodological advances. If forms of mobility have slowed in the West, then we might be entering an age of rigid stratification with defined boundaries between the always-haves and the never-haves-which does not augur well for social stability. Social mobility research is ongoing, with substantive findings in different disciplines—typically with researchers in isolation from each other. A key contribution of this book is the pulling together of the emerging streams of knowledge. Generating policy-relevant knowledge is a principal concern. Three basic questions frame the study of diverse aspects of social mobility in the book. How to assess the extent of social mobility in a given development context when the datasets by conventional measurement techniques are unavailable? How to identify drivers and inhibitors of social mobility in particular developing country contexts? How to acquire the knowledge required to design interventions to raise social mobility, either by increasing upward mobility or by lowering downward mobility?

This dramatic story of land and power from twentieth-century Eastern Europe is set in two extraordinary villages: a rebel village, where peasants fought the advent of Communism and became its first martyrs, and a model village turned forcibly into a town, Dictator Ceauşescu’s birthplace. The two villages capture among themselves nearly a century of dramatic transformation and social engineering, ending up with their charged heritage in the present European Union. "One of Romania’s foremost social critics, Alina Mungiu-Pippidi offers a valuable look at several decades of policy that marginalized that country’s rural population, from the 1918 land reform to the post-1989 property restitution. Illustrating her arguments with a close comparison of two contrasting villages, she describes the actions of a long series of “predatory elites,” from feudal landowners through the Communist Party through post-communist leaders, all of whom maintained the rural population’s dependency. A forceful concluding chapter shows that its prospects for improvement are scarcely better within the EU. Romania’s villagers have an eminent and spirited advocate in the author.”

Rural sociology monograph on social mobility in rural area Bangladesh, based on village studies in three districts - presents theoretical aspects of peasant studies, research methods, etc., and analyses relationship between rural development, population trends and social change, income distribution between households, internal migration, landlessness and increasing poverty. Bibliography p. 342 to 361.

An important contribution to our cumulative knowledge of castes, based on a case study of the pueblo of San Luis Jilotepeque, about ninety miles from Guatemala City in Central America. "Much of the fascination of the book derives from the intrinsic interest of the material itself its exotic locale, and its broader significance for other parts of Latin America."—The Annals. Originally published in 1952. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The author presents a convincing new interpretation of the origins and nature of the agrarian crisis that gripped the North China Plain in the two centuries before the Revolution. His extensive research included eighteenth-century homicide case records, a nineteenth-century country government archive, large quantities of 1930's Japanese ethnographic materials, and his own field studies in 1980. Through a comparison of the histories of small family farms and larger scale managerial farms, the author documents and illustrates the long-term trends of agricultural commercialization, social stratification, and mounting population pressure in the peasant economy. He shows how those changes, in the absence of dynamic economic growth, combined over the course of several centuries to produce a majority, not simply of land-short peasants or of exploited tenants and agricultural laborers, but of poor peasants who required both family farming and agricultural wage income to survive. This interlocking of family farming with wage labor furnished a large supply of cheap labor, which in turn acted as a powerful brake of capital accumulation in the economy. The formation of such a poor peasantry ultimately altered both the nature of village communities and their relations with the elites and the state, creating tensions that led in the end to revolution.

The essays included in Social Organization and Peasant Societies were written in honor of the man who taught their authors. Each entry is about different problems within the general field of "social organization."They were composed in many styles; and deal ethnographically with a heterogeneous collection of peoples and countries. Together they illustrate an important aspect of Firth's influence as a teacher: the range of his interests and his success in promoting social anthropological research on the broadest front.The breadth and the variety in the work of his students reflect Firth's own catholicity. From economics he reached into every corner of the field covered by social anthropology, and many of his interests can be traced in these essays on themes in kinship and marriage (by Baric, Benedict, Kaberry, and Leach) and on religious subjects (by Freedman, Morris, and Stanner). Still more detail the study of modern social change (by Little and Mayer). There is even one is on art (by Forge). Three are devoted to subjects in economic anthropology (by Belshaw, Swift, and Ward). On all of these varied and complex topics Raymond Firth has written extensively and taught untiringly. Many of the contributors to his festschrift are themselves leading anthropologists.Raymond Firth's importance in the history of social anthropology is undisputed. He came into the profession when it was small and unformed, when it existed only in the tiny groups of people around Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown. He urged it on, by intellectual leadership, by careful organization, and by devoted service. He was one of a small band of scholars; he created a large school. He inherited an esoteric seminar from Malinowski; he turned it into a great class where, over the years, hundreds of students marveled at his skill and learned their craft as analysts and field workers. His protege listened to his formulation of problems, his critique of methods, and his courteous but un

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.