Identities, Boundaries, and Social Ties

Front Cover
Paradigm Publishers, 2005 - Business & Economics - 269 pages
Identities, Boundaries and Social Ties offers a distinctive, coherent account of social processes and individuals' connections to their larger social and political worlds. It is novel in demonstrating the connections between inequality and de-democratization, between identities and social inequality, and between citizenship and identities. The book treats interpersonal transactions as the basic elements of larger social processes. Tilly shows how personal interactions compound into identities, create and transform social boundaries, and accumulate into durable social ties. He also shows how individual and group dispositions result from interpersonal transactions. Resisting the focus on deliberated individual action, the book repeatedly gives attention to incremental effects, indirect effects, environmental effects, feedback, mistakes, repairs, and unanticipated consequences. Social life is complicated. But, the book shows, it becomes comprehensible once you know how to look at it.

Contents

Ties That Bind and Bound
3
Unequal Knowledge
117
Social Boundary Mechanisms
131
Chain Migration and Opportunity Hoarding
153
Boundaries Citizenship and Exclusion
171
Political Boundaries
185
Why Worry About Citizenship?
187
Inequality Democratization and DeDemocratization
199
Political Identities in Changing Polities
207
Invention Diffusion and Transformation of the Social Movement Repertoire
215
References
227
Index
257
Credits
267
About the Author 269
Copyright

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About the author (2005)

Social scientist Charles Tilly was born in Lombard, Illinois on May 27, 1929. He graduated from Harvard Univeristy with a bachelor's degree in 1950 and a docorate in sociology in 1958. He also studied at Oxford University and the Catholic University in Angers, France. During the Korean War, he served in the Navy. He taught sociology and political science at numerous univeristies including the University of Delaware, Harvard University, the University of Toronto, the University of Michigan and Columbia University. During his lifetime, he wrote 51 books and monographs and more than 600 scholoarly articles. He received numerous awards including the Albert O. Hirschman Award from the Social Science Research Council. He died from lymphoma on April 29, 2008.

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