The Active Society, published in 1968, is the most ambitious book in Amitai Etzioni's remarkable career. In this new collection of essays, Wilson Carey McWilliams brings together scholars in a range of disciplines to analyze the significance and shortcomings of this important work.

Contributors to this volume respond to the normative capsule framing economic behaviour that Amitai Etzioni has explored. The text also looks at his works on organisations, public policy, socio-economics and communitarianism.

What is the contribution of General System Theory to the macro-level understanding of economic, social and technological changes in our epoch from a multidimensional perspective? What is the contribution of Social Action Theory on a micro-scale? Can complex scenario analyses, although based upon uncertainty and unpredictability, offer a viable toolkit for managing these transformations? This book contains twelve chapters, dealing with these questions from various points of view. It brings together essays in sociology, economics, law and humanities to provide as complete a representation as possible of the current global situation. The theoretical framework adopted here is that the systemic approach provides the most effective tool both for understanding social phenomena and elaborating policy-modelling strategies for decision makers that are supposed to tackle social criticalities.

This collection speaks to universal concerns, presenting creative and resourceful solutions from dozens of librarians representing a wide variety of institutions.

Many academic libraries across the country have developed and maintained library diversity residency programs in support of a larger campaign to diversify librarianship as a profession. Library diversity residencies strive to provide early-career librarians of color with the experience and toolkit necessary to pursue a successful lifelong career in academic librarianship. Beyond the residents themselves, there are various stakeholders involved in every residency program: residency coordinators, library administrators, and the professional organizations that back them. This book provides a space for the perspectives of all types of residency stakeholders to intersect, thereby producing a holistic narrative of library diversity residencies. The intended audience for this narrative is all academic librarians and administrators currently involved or interested in library diversity residency programs or generally interested in diversity initiatives. On paper, diversity residencies have the potential to do so much good: jump-start someone's career, offer much-needed entry-level employment for recent graduates, and even offer the (false) promise of diversifying a predominantly and problematically white field. This collection will leave everyone asking: who do these programs really help? Preethi Gorecki is the Communications Librarian at MacEwan University. In 2018, she started her career in librarianship as a Library Faculty Diversity Fellow at Grand Valley State University. Preethi holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology from Concordia University in Montréal, Québec, Canada and a Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) degree from the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada. Her research interests include practices for diversifying librarianship, project and task management tools and techniques for everyday academic librarianship, and student engagement as related to student wellness. Arielle Petrovich is the College Archivist at Beloit College. She holds an MS in Library and Information Science from Simmons College and a BA in American Studies from Smith College. Her research interests include strategies for diversifying the archival profession, de-mystifying the archives, and fostering historical empathy in the archival classroom.

Drawing extensively on the research findings of natural and social sciences both in America and Europe, Reframing the Social argues for a critical realist and systemist social ontology, designed to shed light on current debates in social theory concerning the relationship of social ontology to practical social research, and the nature of 'the social'. It explores the works of the systems theorist Mario Bunge in comparison with the approach of Niklas Luhmann and critical social systems theorists, to challenge the commonly held view that the systems-based approach is holistic in nature and necessarily downplays the role of human agency. Theoretically sophisticated and investigating the work of a theorist whose work has until now received insufficient attention in Anglo-American thought, this book will be of interest to those working in the field of social theory, as well as scholars concerned with philosophy of social science, the project of analytical sociology, and the nature of the relationship between the natural and social sciences.