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The Indian diaspora is increasingly engaging with the homeland by forming a range of migrant organizations—organizations constituting a growing sector of non-State actors who engage with the host country and the country of origin in a sustained and profound way. Research on migrant organizations tends to focus only transnational migrant organizations in host countries. Indian Migrant Organizations analyses a set of local and transnational organizations formed by Indian migrants, whose activities include mobilizing resources and connections and engaging in numerous development initiatives in India, and studies their engagement particularly in the Indian healthcare and education sectors. In particular, the book discusses how these organizations have evolved, what kind of healthcare and educational projects and activities they are carrying out, and how such collective efforts are affecting development dynamics in India.

In a conversation about youth agency, the most common discourses that come up are of acts of liberation, resistance, and deviance. However, this perspective is fairly narrow and runs the risk of reinforcing pervasive and often polarizing depictions of youth. In order to broaden the understanding of young people’s collective actions and their potential social implications, it is necessary to ask: What types of agency do young people demonstrate? This book aims to scrutinize some of the conceptual ideas that underlie prevalent visions of youth as agents of social change and as a source of hope for a better future. As a part of the Education and Society in South Asia series, it provides insightful accounts of students’ daily routines on and around a public university campus in Kathmandu, Nepal, and calls attention to a group of non-elite university students who have remained less visible in scholarly and public debates about student activism, youth unemployment, and international migration. By placing different strands of literature on youth, aspiration, and mobility into conversation, In Search of a Future unveils new and important perspectives on how young people navigate competing social expectations, educational inequalities, and limited job prospects.

Crime stories attract audiences and social buzz, but they also serve as prisms for perceived threats. As immigration, technological change, and globalization reshape our world, anxiety spreads. Because journalism plays a role in how the public adjusts to moral and material upheaval, this unease raises the ethical stakes. Reporters can spread panic or encourage reconciliation by how they tell these stories. Murder in Our Midst uses crime coverage in select North American and Western European countries as a key to examine culturally constructed concepts like privacy, public, public right to know, and justice. Working from close readings of news coverage, codes of ethics and style guides, and personal interviews with almost 200 news professionals, this book offers fertile material for a provocative conversation. The findings divide the ten countries studied into three media models. The book explores what the differing coverage decisions suggest about underlying attitudes to criminals and crime and how justice in a democracy is best served. Today, journalists’ work can be disseminated around the world without any consideration of whether what’s being told (or how) might dissolve cultural differences or undermine each community’s right to set its own standards to best reflect its citizens’ values. At present, unique reporting practices persist among the three models, but the Internet and social media threaten to dissolve distinctions and the cultural values they reflect. There is a need for a journalism that both opens local conversations and bridges differences among nations. This book is a first step in that direction.

Heartland Blues provides a new perspective on union decline by revisiting the labor movement at its historical peak in the 1950s and analyzing campaigns over right-to-work laws and public-sector collective bargaining rights in the industrial Midwest. The focus on 1950s labor conflicts, including union failures, departs from popular and academic treatments of the period that emphasize consensus, an accord between capital and labor in collective bargaining, or the conservative drift and bureaucratization of the labor movement. The state campaigns examined in Heartland Blues instead reveal a labor movement often beset by dysfunctional divisions, ambivalent political allies, and substantial employer opposition. Drawing on social movement theories, the book shows how many of the key ingredients necessary for activist groups to succeed, including effective organization and influential political allies, were not a given for labor at its historical peak but instead varied in important ways across the industrial heartland. These limits slowed unions in the 1950s. Not only did labor fail to crack the Sunbelt, it never really conquered the industrial Midwest, where most union members resided in the mid-twentieth century. This diminished union influence within the Democratic Party and in society. The 1950s are far more than an interesting side story. Indeed, the labor movement never solved many of these basic problems. The labor movement’s social and political isolation and its limited responses to employer mobilization became a death knell in the coming decades as unions sought organizational and legislative remedies to industrial decline and the rising anti-union tide.

Defying the conventional split between “theory” and “methodology,” this book introduces a yet unarticulated and thus far never systematized method of theorizing designed to reveal abstract social patterns. Insisting that such methodology can actually be taught, it tries to make the mental processes underlying the practice of a “concept-driven sociology” more explicit. Many sociologists tend to study the specific, often at the expense of also studying the generic. To correct this imbalance, the book examines the theoretico-methodological process by which we can “distill” generic social patterns from the culturally, historically, and situationally specific contexts in which we encounter them. It thus champions a “generic sociology” that is pronouncedly transcontextual (transcultural, transhistorical, transsituational, and translevel) in its scope. In order to uncover generic, transcontextual social patterns, data need to be collected in a wide range of social contexts. Such contextual diversity is manifested multi-culturally, multihistorically, multisituationally, as well as at multiple levels of social aggregation. True to its message, the book illustrates generic social patterns by drawing on numerous examples from diverse cultural contexts and historical periods and a wide range of diverse social domains, as well as by disregarding scale. Emphasizing cross-contextual commonality, generic sociology tries to reveal formal “parallels” across seemingly disparate contexts. This book features the four main types of cross-contextual analogies generic sociologists tend to use (cross-cultural, cross-historical, cross-domain, and cross-level), disregarding conventionally noted substantive differences in order to note conventionally disregarded formal equivalences.

Qualitative interviewing is one of the most widely used methods in social research, but it is arguably the least well understood. To address that gap, this book offers a theoretically rigorous, empirically rich, and user-friendly set of strategies for conceiving and conducting interview-based research. Much more than a how-to manual, the book shows why depth interviewing is an indispensable method for discovering and explaining the social world—shedding light on the hidden patterns and dynamics that take place within institutions, social contexts, relationships, and individual experiences. It offers a step-by-step guide through every stage in the research process, from initially formulating a question to developing arguments and presenting the results. To do this, the book shows how to develop a research question, decide on and find an appropriate sample, construct an interview guide, conduct probing and theoretically focused interviews, and systematically analyze the complex material that depth interviews provide—all in the service of finding and presenting important new empirical discoveries and theoretical insights. The book also lays out the ever-present but rarely discussed challenges that interviewers routinely encounter and then presents grounded, thoughtful ways to respond to them. By addressing the most heated debates about the scientific status of qualitative methods, the book demonstrates how depth interviewing makes unique and essential contributions to the research enterprise. With an emphasis on the integral relationship between carefully crafted research and theory building, the book offers a compelling vision for what the “interviewing imagination” can and should be.

How do women claim rights against violence in India and with what consequences? By observing how women navigate the Indian criminal justice system, Roychowdhury provides a unique lens on rights negotiations in the world’s largest democracy. She finds that women interact with the law not by following legal procedure or abiding by the rules but by deploying collective threats and doing the work of the state themselves. They do so because law enforcement personnel are incapacitated and unwilling to enforce the law. As a result, rights negotiations do not necessarily lead to more woman-friendly outcomes or better legal enforcement. Instead, they allow some women to make gains outside the law: repossess property and children, negotiate cash settlements, join women’s groups, access paid employment, develop a sense of self-assurance, and become members of the public sphere. Capable Women, Incapable States shows how the Indian criminal justice system governs violence against women not by protecting them from harm but by forcing them to become “capable”: to take the law into their own hands and complete the hard work that incapable and unwilling state officials refuse to complete. Roychowdhury’s book houses implications for how we understand gender inequality and governance not just in India but in large parts of the world where political mobilization for rights confronts negligent and incapacitated criminal justice systems.

The scope of criminal justice surveillance, from policing to incarceration, has expanded rapidly in recent decades. At the same time, the use of big data has spread across a range of fields, including finance, politics, health, and marketing. While law enforcement’s use of big data is hotly contested, very little is known about how the police actually use it in daily operations and with what consequences. This book offers an inside look at how police use big data and new surveillance technologies, leveraging on-the-ground fieldwork with one of the most technologically advanced law enforcement agencies in the world—the Los Angeles Police Department. Drawing on original interviews and ethnographic observations from over two years of fieldwork with the LAPD, the text examines the causes and consequences of big data and algorithmic control. It reveals how the police use predictive analytics and new surveillance technologies to deploy resources, identify criminal suspects, and conduct investigations; how the adoption of big data analytics transforms police organizational practices; and how the police themselves respond to these new data-driven practices. While big data analytics has the potential to reduce bias, increase efficiency, and improve prediction accuracy, the book argues that it also reproduces and deepens existing patterns of inequality, threatens privacy, and challenges civil liberties.

The phenomenal growth of penal confinement in the United States in the last quarter of the twentieth century is still a public policy mystery. Why did it happen when it happened? What explains the unprecedented magnitude of prison and jail expansion? Why are the current levels of penal confinement so very close to the all-time peak rate reached in 2007? What is the likely course of levels of penal confinement in the next generation of American life? Are there changes in government or policy that can avoid the prospect of mass incarceration as a chronic element of governance in the United States? This study is organized around four major concerns: What happened in the 33 years after 1973? Why did these extraordinary changes happen in that single generation? What is likely to happen to levels of penal confinement in the next three decades? What changes in law or practice might reduce this likely penal future?

Colleges and universities in the United States play a profoundly important role in American society. Currently, that role is being hampered by a climate that constrains teaching, research, hiring, and overall discourse. There are three core beliefs that define this climate. First, any initiative framed as an antidote to historical societal ills is automatically deemed meritorious, and thus exempted from objective scrutiny of its potential effectiveness. However, to use a medical analogy, not all proposed cures for a disease are good cures. Second, all differences in group-level outcomes are assumed to be due entirely to discrimination, with little tolerance given to exploring the potential role of factors such as culture or preferences. Third, everything must be interpreted through the lens of identity. Non-identity-centered perspectives, regardless of how worthy they might be, are viewed as less legitimate or even illegitimate. All of these beliefs are well intentioned and have arisen in response to important historical and continuing injustices. However, they are enforced in uncompromising terms through the use of social media, which has gained an ascendant role in shaping the culture of American campuses. The result is a climate that forecloses entire lines of research, entire discussions, and entire ways of conducting classroom teaching. The book explains these three beliefs in detail and provides an extensive list of case studies illustrating how they are impacting education and knowledge creation—and increasingly the world beyond campus. The book also provides a detailed set of recommendations on ways to help foster an environment on American campuses that would be more tolerant of diverse perspectives and open inquiry. A note about Covid-19: While the production of this book was done in spring and summer of 2020, we completed the manuscript in 2019, well before the Covid-19 pandemic shuttered American college campuses in March 2020. To put it mildly, the dynamics of campus discourse are very different when dorms have been largely emptied and instruction has been moved to Zoom. Of course, at present we cannot know when students will be able to return to campus in significant numbers. That said, we are confident that our call for a culture of more open discourse in higher education will remain relevant both during the pandemic and after it has passed.