First published in 1980, Street-Level Bureaucracy received critical acclaim for its insightful study of how public service workers, in effect, function as policy decision makers, as they wield their considerable discretion in the day-to-day implementation of public programs. Three decades later, the need to bolster the availability and effectiveness of healthcare, social services, education, and law enforcement is as urgent as ever. In this thirtieth anniversary expanded edition, Michael Lipsky revisits the territory he mapped out in the first edition to reflect on significant policy developments over the last several decades. Despite the difficulties of managing these front-line workers, he shows how street-level bureaucracies can be and regularly are brought into line with public purposes. Street-level bureaucrats--from teachers and police officers to social workers and legal-aid lawyers--interact directly with the public and so represent the frontlines of government policy. In Street-Level Bureaucracy, Lipsky argues that these relatively low-level public service employees labor under huge caseloads, ambiguous agency goals, and inadequate resources. When combined with substantial discretionary authority and the requirement to interpret policy on a case-by-case basis, the difference between government policy in theory and policy in practice can be substantial and troubling. The core dilemma of street-level bureaucrats is that they are supposed to help people or make decisions about them on the basis of individual cases, yet the structure of their jobs makes this impossible. Instead, they are forced to adopt practices such as rationing resources, screening applicants for qualities their organizations favor, rubberstamping applications, and routinizing client interactions by imposing the uniformities of mass processing on situations requiring human responsiveness. Occasionally, such strategies work out in favor of the client. But the cumulative effect of street-level decisions made on the basis of routines and simplifications about clients can reroute the intended direction of policy, undermining citizens' expectations of evenhanded treatment. This seminal, award-winning study tells a cautionary tale of how decisions made by overburdened workers translate into ad-hoc policy adaptations that impact peoples' lives and life opportunities. Lipsky maintains, however, that these problems are not insurmountable. Over the years, public managers have developed ways to bring street-level performance more in line with agency goals. This expanded edition of Street-Level Bureaucracy underscores that, despite its challenging nature, street-level work can be made to conform to higher expectations of public service.

Race and class inequality are at the crux of many policy disputes in American cities. But are they the only factors driving political discord? In Race/Class Conflict and Urban Financial Threat, political scientist Jennifer L. Hochschild examines significant policies in four major American cities to determine when race and class shape city politics, when they do not, and what additional forces have the power to shape urban policy choices.

Hochschild investigates the root causes of disputes in the arenas of policing, development, schooling, and budgeting. She finds that race and class are central to the Stop-Question-Frisk policing policy in New York City and the development of Atlanta's Beltline. New York's Stop-Question-Frisk policy was intended to fight crime and keep all New Yorkers safe. In practice, however, young Black and Latino men in low-income neighborhoods were disproportionately stopped by a predominantly White police force. The goal of the Atlanta Beltline, a redevelopment project that includes public parks, new housing, commercial development, and a robust public transit system, is to expand access around the city and keep working-class residents in the city by constructing affordable housing. Instead, the construction completed thus far has encouraged gentrification and displacement of poor, disproportionately Black residents, and has increased the wealth and power of both Black and White city elites.

However, Hochschild finds that race and class inequality are not central to all urban policy disputes. When investigating the issues of charter schools in Los Angeles and Chicago's pension system she identifies a third driver: financial threat that feels existential to the policy and political actors. In Los Angeles, there is a battle between traditional public schools and independent charter schools. Increasingly, families with sufficient resources are moving out of L.A. to areas with better school districts. Traditional public schools and charter schools must fight for the remaining students and the funding that comes with them. There are not enough students to teach and not enough money to teach them. The school district risks school closures, layoffs, and pension deficits; in this context, race/class conflict fades into the background.

Chicago's public sector pension debt is at least three times as large as the city's annual budget and continues to grow. Policy actors agree that the pension system needs to be stably funded. Yet city leaders, fearful of upsetting constituents and jeopardizing their political careers, fail to implement policies that would do so. Meaningful policy change to rectify the pension deficit continues to get kicked down the line for future policy actors to address. In this context also, race/class conflict fades into the background.

Race/Class Conflict and Urban Financial Threat is a compelling examination of the role that race, class, and political and fiscal threat play in shaping urban policy.

While Americans largely support legal immigration, this support is conditional on the basis that immigrants do not make use of public assistance. Previous generations of immigrants, such as European-origin Industrial Era immigrants, came to U.S. impoverished, worked hard, and achieved the American Dream seemingly on their own. Mexican immigrants, the nation's largest contemporary immigrant group, are often viewed with suspicion and are accused of being dependent on the government and refusing to integrate into American society the right way. In Texas-Style Exclusion, sociologists Jennifer Van Hook and James D. Bachmeier investigate such claims by comparing how American society has responded to different groups of immigrants over time.

Drawing on census and archival data on the quality of public schooling, Van Hook and Bachmeier find that Industrial Era European immigrants, who were primarily located in the northeastern U.S., benefited from programs and policies championed by the Americanization and Progressive movements. The Americanization movement sought to help acclimate new arrivals and transform foreigners into Americans by providing night school programs to promote civic integration and basic education, as well as other services. The Progressive movement, which aimed to improve education, work, and health conditions, sought to expand investment in public schools and make primary and secondary schooling mandatory, which kept working class children in school as opposed to entering the workforce. This access to education allowed for integration and astonishing intergenerational mobility.

Mexican immigrants in the 1920s and 1930s, the majority of whom resided in Texas, had radically different experiences from their European counterparts. Mexicans in Texas were subjected to racism, segregation, labor exploitation, and intentional school failures. This resulted in tremendous generational disadvantage that persists to the current day. Mexicans from this cohort who left Texas for states with strong Americanization and Progressive movements saw improved educational outcomes and integration. Additionally, Mexicans who immigrated after the Civil Rights Movement saw significantly greater inter-generational mobility and educational attainment than earlier cohorts due to the protections provided by civil rights laws. Van Hook and Bachmeier conclude that whether one is optimistic or pessimistic about the integration of Mexican Americans depends on when and where one looks.

Texas-Style Exclusion is an engaging examination of policies and practices that have been glossed over and forgotten that promoted mobility and integration for certain immigrant groups and impeded them for others.

Social movements--organized efforts by relatively powerless people to change society--can result in legal and policy changes, such as laws protecting same-sex marriage and tax rebates for solar energy. However, movements also change people's beliefs, values, and everyday behavior. Such changes may help bring about new policies or take place in the absence of new policy, yet we still know little about when and why they occur. In Changing Minds, sociologists Francesca Polletta and Edwin Amenta ask why movements have sometimes had fast and far-reaching cultural influence.

Polletta and Amenta examine the trajectories of U.S. social movements, including the old-age pension movements of the 1930s and 1940s, the Black rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the women's movement of the 1970s, right-wing movements in the 1980s and 1990s, and the environmental movement up to the present, to determine when, why, and how social movements change culture. They find that influential movements are featured in the news, but not only in the news. Movement perspectives may appear also in opinion and commentary outlets, on television talk shows and dramas, in movies, stand-up comedy, and viral memes. Popular culture producers remake movement messages as they transmit them, sometimes in ways that make those messages compelling. For example, while the news largely ignored feminists' challenge to inequality in the home, popular cultural outlets turned liberation into a resonant demand for women's right to self-fulfillment outside the home and within it. Widespread attention to the movement may lead people to change their minds individually. But more substantial change is likely when companies, schools, and other organizations outside government strive to get out in front of a newly legitimate issue, whether environmental sustainability or racial equity, by adopting movement-supportive norms and practices. Eventually, ideas associated with a movement may become a new common sense--though not always the ideas that the movement intended.

Throughout Changing Minds, Polletta and Amenta provide activists with strategies for getting their message heard and acted on. They suggest how movement actors can get into the news as political players or experts rather than lawbreakers or zealots. They show when it makes sense for activists to work with popular cultural producers and when they should create their own cultural outlets. They explain why the routes to cultural influence have changed and why urging people to take one easy step to save the planet can do more harm than good.

Changing Minds is a fascinating exploration of why and how some social movements have caused profound shifts in society.

U.S.-born Mexicans in New York City have achieved one of the biggest one-generation jumps in mobility in American immigration history. In 2020, 42-percent of U.S.-born Mexican men and 49-percent of U.S.-born Mexican women in New York City had graduated from college. This high level of educational attainment is dramatically higher than their U.S.- and foreign-born counterparts in other places. How did U.S.-born Mexicans in New York City achieve such remarkable mobility? In Dreams Achieved and Denied, sociologist Robert Courtney Smith examines the laws, policies, and individual and family practices that promoted-and inhibited-their social mobility.

For over twenty years, Smith followed nearly one hundred children of Mexican immigrants in New York City to learn what determined their ability to move up the social ladder. Smith finds that legal status was fundamental in shaping opportunities for mobility. Having or gaining legal status enabled individual and family efforts for mobility to be rewarded and by allowing efficacious use of New York City and New York State policies and practices that support mobility. Lacking legal status, however, blocked mobility, even for those individuals and families engaging in the same strategies, limiting the benefit derived from those mobility-promoting city and state policies.

The young people that Smith followed employed a number of strategies to pursue advancement. Smith finds that having strong mentors, picking better high schools, and the desire to keep the immigrant family bargain-the expectation that children of immigrants will redeem their parents' sacrifice by doing well in school, helping their parents and younger siblings, and becoming ethical, well-educated people-all led to better adult lives and outcomes. The ability to successfully utilize these strategies was aided by New York City and State policies that are immigrant-inclusive and mobility promoting, including New York State laws that offers undocumented New Yorkers in-state tuition at public universities, allows them to get standard driver's licenses, and access state health insurance programs, as well as New York City's school choice system, which allows for students to attend better schools outside of their designated school catchment zone.
Dreams Achieved and Denied is a fascinating exploration of the historic upward mobility of Mexicans in New York City, which counters the dominant story research and public discourse tell about Mexican mobility in the United States.

Winner of the 2020 Outstanding Book Award Presented by the Public and Nonprofit Section of the National Academy of Management

Winner of the 2019 Louis Brownlow Book Award from the National Academy of Public Administration

Bureaucracy, confusing paperwork, and complex regulations--or what public policy scholars Pamela Herd and Donald Moynihan call administrative burdens--often introduce delay and frustration into our experiences with government agencies. Administrative burdens diminish the effectiveness of public programs and can even block individuals from fundamental rights like voting. In AdministrativeBurden, Herd and Moynihan document that the administrative burdens citizens regularly encounter in their interactions with the state are not simply unintended byproducts of governance, but the result of deliberate policy choices. Because burdens affect people's perceptions of government and often perpetuate long-standing inequalities, understanding why administrative burdens exist and how they can be reduced is essential for maintaining a healthy public sector.

Through in-depth case studies of federal programs and controversial legislation, the authors show that administrative burdens are the nuts-and-bolts of policy design. Regarding controversial issues such as voter enfranchisement or abortion rights, lawmakers often use administrative burdens to limit access to rights or services they oppose. For instance, legislators have implemented administrative burdens such as complicated registration requirements and strict voter-identification laws to suppress turnout of African American voters. Similarly, the right to an abortion is legally protected, but many states require women seeking abortions to comply with burdens such as mandatory waiting periods, ultrasounds, and scripted counseling. As Herd and Moynihan demonstrate, administrative burdens often disproportionately affect the disadvantaged who lack the resources to deal with the financial and psychological costs of navigating these obstacles.

However, policymakers have sometimes reduced administrative burdens or shifted them away from citizens and onto the government. One example is Social Security, which early administrators of the program implemented in the 1930s with the goal of minimizing burdens for beneficiaries. As a result, the take-up rate is about 100 percent because the Social Security Administration keeps track of peoples' earnings for them, automatically calculates benefits and eligibility, and simply requires an easy online enrollment or visiting one of 1,200 field offices. Making more programs and public services operate this efficiently, the authors argue, requires adoption of a nonpartisan, evidence-based metric for determining when and how to institute administrative burdens, with a bias toward reducing them. By ensuring that the public's interaction with government is no more onerous than it need be, policymakers and administrators can reduce inequality, boost civic engagement, and build an efficient state that works for all citizens.

Status is ubiquitous in modern life, yet our understanding of its role as a driver of inequality is limited. In Status, sociologist and social psychologist Cecilia Ridgeway examines how this ancient and universal form of inequality influences today's ostensibly meritocratic institutions and why it matters. Ridgeway illuminates the complex ways in which status affects human interactions as we work together towards common goals, such as in classroom discussions, family decisions, or workplace deliberations.

Ridgeway's research on status has important implications for our understanding of social inequality. Distinct from power or wealth, status is prized because it provides affirmation from others and affords access to valuable resources. Ridgeway demonstrates how the conferral of status inevitably contributes to differing life outcomes for individuals, with impacts on pay, wealth creation, and health and wellbeing. Status beliefs are widely held views about who is better in society than others in terms of esteem, wealth, or competence. These beliefs confer advantages which can exacerbate social inequality. Ridgeway notes that status advantages based on race, gender, and class--such as the belief that white men are more competent than others--are the most likely to increase inequality by facilitating greater social and economic opportunities.

Ridgeway argues that status beliefs greatly enhance higher status groups' ability to maintain their advantages in resources and access to positions of power and make lower status groups less likely to challenge the status quo. Many lower status people will accept their lower status when given a baseline level of dignity and respect--being seen, for example, as poor but hardworking. She also shows that people remain willfully blind to status beliefs and their effects because recognizing them can lead to emotional discomfort. Acknowledging the insidious role of status in our lives would require many higher-status individuals to accept that they may not have succeeded based on their own merit; many lower-status individuals would have to acknowledge that they may have been discriminated against.

Ridgeway suggests that inequality need not be an inevitable consequence of our status beliefs. She shows how status beliefs can be subverted--as when we reject the idea that all racial and gender traits are fixed at birth, thus refuting the idea that women and people of color are less competent than their male and white counterparts. This important new book demonstrates the pervasive influence of status on social inequality and suggests ways to ensure that it has a less detrimental impact on our lives.

In the era of mass incarceration, over 600,000 people are released from federal or state prison each year, with many returning to chaotic living environments rife with violence. In these circumstances, how do former prisoners navigate reentering society? In Homeward, sociologist Bruce Western examines the tumultuous first year after release from prison. Drawing from in-depth interviews with over one hundred individuals, he describes the lives of the formerly incarcerated and demonstrates how poverty, racial inequality, and failures of social support trap many in a cycle of vulnerability despite their efforts to rejoin society.

Western and his research team conducted comprehensive interviews with men and women released from the Massachusetts state prison system who returned to neighborhoods around Boston. Western finds that for most, leaving prison is associated with acute material hardship. In the first year after prison, most respondents could not afford their own housing and relied on family support and government programs, with half living in deep poverty. Many struggled with chronic pain, mental illnesses, or addiction--the most important predictor of recidivism. Most respondents were also unemployed. Some older white men found union jobs in the construction industry through their social networks, but many others, particularly those who were black or Latino, were unable to obtain full-time work due to few social connections to good jobs, discrimination, and lack of credentials. Violence was common in their lives, and often preceded their incarceration. In contrast to the stereotype of tough criminals preying upon helpless citizens, Western shows that many former prisoners were themselves subject to lifetimes of violence and abuse and encountered more violence after leaving prison, blurring the line between victims and perpetrators.

Western concludes that boosting the social integration of former prisoners is key to both ameliorating deep disadvantage and strengthening public safety. He advocates policies that increase assistance to those in their first year after prison, including guaranteed housing and health care, drug treatment, and transitional employment. By foregrounding the stories of people struggling against the odds to exit the criminal justice system, Homeward shows how overhauling the process of prisoner reentry and rethinking the foundations of justice policy could address the harms of mass incarceration.

On January 6, 2021, an angry mob stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. This assault on America's democratic system was orchestrated by then President Donald Trump, abetted by his political party, and supported by a vocal minority of the American people. Did denial of the election results and the subsequent insurrection inflict damage on American political institutions? While most pundits and many scholars say yes, they have offered little rigorous evidence for this assertion. In Democracy's Destruction? political scientist James L. Gibson uses surveys from representative samples of the American population to provide a more informed answer to the question.

Focusing on the U.S. Supreme Court, the presidency, and the U.S. Senate, Gibson reveals that how people assessed the election, the insurrection, and even the second Trump impeachment has little connection to their willingness to view American political institutions as legitimate. Instead, legitimacy is grounded in more general commitments to democratic values and support for the rule of law. On most issues of institutional legitimacy, those who denied the election results and supported the insurrection were not more likely to be alienated from political institutions and to consider them illegitimate.

Gibson also investigates whether Black people might have responded differently to the events of the 2020 election and its aftermath. He finds that in comparison to the White majority, Black Americans were less supportive of America's democratic institutions and of democratic values, such as reverence for the rule of law, because they often have directly experienced unfair treatment by legal authorities. But he emphasizes that the actions of Trump and his followers are not the cause of those weaker commitments.

Democracy's Destruction? offers rigorous analysis of the effect of the Trump insurrection on the state of U.S. democracy today. While cautioning that Trump and many Republicans may be devising schemes to subvert the next presidential election more effectively, the book attests to the remarkable endurance of American political institutions.

It is conventional wisdom that there is a grave crisis in our criminal courts: the widespread reliance on plea-bargaining and the settlement of most cases with just a few seconds before the judge endanger the rights of defendants. Not so, says Malcolm Feeley in this provocative and original book. Basing his argument on intensive study of the lower criminal court system, Feeley demonstrates that the absence of formal due process is preferred by all of the court's participants, and especially by defendants. Moreover, he argues, it is not all clear that as a group defendants would be better off in a more 'formal' court system, since the real costs to those accused of misdemeanors and lesser felonies are not the fines and prison sentences meted out by the court, but the costs incurred before the case even comes before the judge--lost wages from missed work, commissions to bail bondsmen, attorney's fees, and wasted time. Therefore, the overriding interest of the accused is not to secure the formal trappings of the judicial process, but to minimize the time, and money, spent dealing with the court. Focusing on New Haven, Connecticut's, lower court, Feeley found that the defense and prosecution often agreed that the pre-trial process was sufficient to teach the defendant a lesson. In effect, Feeley demonstrates that the informal practices of the lower courts as they are presently constituted are more just than they are usually given credit for being. ... a book that should be read by anyone who is interested in understanding how courts work and how the criminal sanction is administered in modern, complex societies.-- Barry Mahoney, Institute for Court Management, Denver It is grounded in a firm grasp of theory as well as thorough field research.--Jack B. Weinstein, U.S. District Court Judge. a feature that has long been the hallmark of good American sociology: it recreates a believable world of real men and women.--Paul Wiles, Law & Society Review. This book's findings are well worth the attention of the serious criminal justice student, and the analyses reveal a thoughtful, probing, and provocative intelligence....an important contribution to the debate on the role and limits of discretion in American criminal justice. It deserves to be read by all those who are interested in the outcome of the debate. --Jerome H. Skolnick, American Bar Foundation Research Journal

Americans' relationship to the federal government is paradoxical. Polls show that public opinion regarding the government has plummeted to all-time lows, with only one in five saying they trust the government or believe that it operates in their interest. Yet, at the same time, more Americans than ever benefit from some form of government social provision. Political scientist Suzanne Mettler calls this growing gulf between people's perceptions of government and the actual role it plays in their lives the government-citizen disconnect. In The Government-Citizen Disconnect, she explores the rise of this phenomenon and its implications for policymaking and politics.

Drawing from original survey data which probed Americans' experiences of 21 federal social policies -- such as food stamps, Social Security, Medicaid, and the home mortgage interest deduction -- Mettler shows that 96 percent of adults have received benefits from at least one of them, and that the average person has utilized five. Overall usage rates transcend social, economic, and political divisions, and most Americans report positive experiences of their policy experiences. However, the fact that they have benefited from these policies has little positive effect on people's attitudes toward government. Mettler finds that shared identities and group affiliations, as well as ideological forces, are more powerful and consistent influences. In particular, those who oppose welfare tend to extrapolate their unfavorable views of it to government in general. Deep antipathy toward the government has emerged as the result of a conservative movement that has waged a war on social welfare policies for over forty years, even as economic inequality and benefit use have increased.

Mettler finds that voting patterns exacerbate the government-citizen disconnect, as those holding positive views of federal programs and supporting expanded benefits have lower rates of political participation than those holding more hostile views of the government. As a result, the loudest political voice belongs to those who have benefited from policies but who give government little credit for their economic well-being, seeing their success more as a matter of their own deservingness. This contributes to the election of politicians who advocate cutting federal social programs. According to Mettler, the government-citizen disconnect frays the bonds of representative government and democracy.

The Government-Citizen Disconnect illuminates a paradox that increasingly shapes American politics. Mettler's examination of hostility toward government at a time when most Americans will at some point rely on the social benefits it provides helps us better understand the roots of today's fractious political climate.

The nature of well-being is one of the most enduring and elusive subjects of human inquiry. Well-Being draws upon the latest scientific research to transform our understanding of this ancient question. With contributions from leading authorities in psychology, social psychology, and neuroscience, this volume presents the definitive account of current scientific efforts to understand human pleasure and pain, contentment and despair. The distinguished contributors to this volume combine a rigorous analysis of human sensations, emotions, and moods with a broad assessment of the many factors, from heredity to nationality, that bear on our well-being. Using the tools of experimental science, the contributors confront the puzzles of human likes and dislikes. Why do we grow accustomed and desensitized to changes in our lives, both good and bad? Does our happiness reflect the circumstances of our lives or is it determined by our temperament and personality? Why do humans acquire tastes for sensations that are initially painful or unpleasant? By examining the roots of our everyday likes and dislikes, the book also sheds light on some of the more extreme examples of attraction and aversion, such as addiction and depression. Among its wide ranging inquiries, Well-Being examines systematic differences in moods and behaviors between genders, explaining why women suffer higher rates of depression and anxiety than men, but are also more inclined to express positive emotions. The book also makes international comparisons, finding that some countries' populations report higher levels of happiness than others. The contributors deploy an array of methods, from the surveys and questionnaires of social science to psychological and physiological experiments, to develop a comprehensive new approach to the study of well-being. They show how the sensory pleasures of the body can tells us something about the higher pleasures of the mind and even how the effectiveness of our immune system can depend upon the health of our social relationships.

Algorithms-rules written into software-shape key moments in our lives: from who gets hired or admitted to a top public school, to who should go to jail or receive scarce public benefits. Today, high stakes software is rarely open to scrutiny, but its code navigates moral questions: Which of a person's traits are fair to consider as part of a job application? Who deserves priority in accessing scarce public resources, whether those are school seats, housing, or medicine? When someone first appears in a courtroom, how should their freedom be weighed against the risks they might pose to others?

Policymakers and the public often find algorithms to be complex, opaque and intimidating--and it can be tempting to pretend that hard moral questions have simple technological answers. But that approach leaves technical experts holding the moral microphone, and it stops people who lack technical expertise from making their voices heard. Today, policymakers and scholars are seeking better ways to share the moral decisionmaking within high stakes software -- exploring ideas like public participation, transparency, forecasting, and algorithmic audits. But there are few real examples of those techniques in use.

In Voices in the Code, scholar David G. Robinson tells the story of how one community built a life-and-death algorithm in a relatively inclusive, accountable way. Between 2004 and 2014, a diverse group of patients, surgeons, clinicians, data scientists, public officials and advocates collaborated and compromised to build a new transplant matching algorithm - a system to offer donated kidneys to particular patients from the U.S. national waiting list.

Drawing on interviews with key stakeholders, unpublished archives, and a wide scholarly literature, Robinson shows how this new Kidney Allocation System emerged and evolved over time, as participants gradually built a shared understanding both of what was possible, and of what would be fair. Robinson finds much to criticize, but also much to admire, in this story. It ultimately illustrates both the promise and the limits of participation, transparency, forecasting and auditing of high stakes software. The book's final chapter draws out lessons for the broader struggle to build technology in a democratic and accountable way.

From its inception, the public safety net in the United States has excluded many people because of their race, gendered roles, or other factors. As a result, they must prove their moral worthiness to get resources for themselves and their families. In When Care Is Conditional, sociologist Dani Carrillo reveals the ramifications of this conditional safety net by focusing on one particularly vulnerable population: undocumented immigrants.

Through in-depth interviews with Latinx immigrants in northern California, Carrillo examines three circumstances--place, gender, and immigration status--that intersect to influence an individual's access to health care, food assistance, and other benefits. She demonstrates that place of residence affects undocumented immigrants' ability to get care since more services are available in urban areas, where many immigrants cannot afford to live, than suburban areas, where public transportation is limited. She also shows that while both men and women who are undocumented have difficulty obtaining care, men often confront more challenges. Undocumented women who are pregnant or mothers are eligible for some government safety net programs and rely on informal coethnic networks or a guiding figure--a relative, friend, neighbor, or coworker--who explains how to get care and makes them feel confident in accessing it. Most undocumented men, in contrast, are not eligible for public programs except in a medical emergency and often lack someone to guide them directly to care. Men sometimes steer one another to jobs through worker centers--where they may learn about various services and take advantage of those that increase their employability, like English or computer classes--but a culture of masculinity leads them to downplay medical problems and seek health care only in a crisis.

As undocumented immigrants navigate this exclusionary system, Carrillo finds that they resist the rhetoric stigmatizing them as lawbreakers. Dismissing the importance of papers and highlighting their work ethic, they question the fairness of U.S. immigration policies and challenge ideas about who deserves care.

Carrillo offers concrete recommendations, such as improving labor conditions and reexamining benefit eligibility, to increase access to care for not only undocumented immigrants but also people who have been excluded because of their race, criminal record, gender identity, sexual orientation, or disability. She argues that working with and across populations creates a powerful form of solidarity in advocating for inclusive care.
When Care Is Conditional provides compelling insights into how safety net and immigration policies intersect to affect people's everyday lives and calls for a cultural shift so that the United States can provide unconditional care for all.

Private equity firms have long been at the center of public debates on the impact of the financial sector on Main Street companies. Are these firms financial innovators that save failing businesses or financial predators that bankrupt otherwise healthy companies and destroy jobs? The first comprehensive examination of this topic, Private Equity at Work provides a detailed yet accessible guide to this controversial business model. Economist Eileen Appelbaum and Professor Rosemary Batt carefully evaluate the evidence--including original case studies and interviews, legal documents, bankruptcy proceedings, media coverage, and existing academic scholarship--to demonstrate the effects of private equity on American businesses and workers. They document that while private equity firms have had positive effects on the operations and growth of small and mid-sized companies and in turning around failing companies, the interventions of private equity more often than not lead to significant negative consequences for many businesses and workers. Prior research on private equity has focused almost exclusively on the financial performance of private equity funds and the returns to their investors. Private Equity at Work provides a new roadmap to the largely hidden internal operations of these firms, showing how their business strategies disproportionately benefit the partners in private equity firms at the expense of other stakeholders and taxpayers. In the 1980s, leveraged buyouts by private equity firms saw high returns and were widely considered the solution to corporate wastefulness and mismanagement. And since 2000, nearly 11,500 companies--representing almost 8 million employees--have been purchased by private equity firms. As their role in the economy has increased, they have come under fire from labor unions and community advocates who argue that the proliferation of leveraged buyouts destroys jobs, causes wages to stagnate, saddles otherwise healthy companies with debt, and leads to subsidies from taxpayers. Appelbaum and Batt show that private equity firms' financial strategies are designed to extract maximum value from the companies they buy and sell, often to the detriment of those companies and their employees and suppliers. Their risky decisions include buying companies and extracting dividends by loading them with high levels of debt and selling assets. These actions often lead to financial distress and a disproportionate focus on cost-cutting, outsourcing, and wage and benefit losses for workers, especially if they are unionized. Because the law views private equity firms as investors rather than employers, private equity owners are not held accountable for their actions in ways that public corporations are. And their actions are not transparent because private equity owned companies are not regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Thus, any debts or costs of bankruptcy incurred fall on businesses owned by private equity and their workers, not the private equity firms that govern them. For employees this often means loss of jobs, health and pension benefits, and retirement income. Appelbaum and Batt conclude with a set of policy recommendations intended to curb the negative effects of private equity while preserving its constructive role in the economy. These include policies to improve transparency and accountability, as well as changes that would reduce the excessive use of financial engineering strategies by firms. A groundbreaking analysis of a hotly contested business model, Private Equity at Work provides an unprecedented analysis of the little-understood inner workings of private equity and of the effects of leveraged buyouts on American companies and workers. This important new work will be a valuable resource for scholars, policymakers, and the informed public alike.

For the first half of the twentieth century, private agreements to impose racial restrictions on who could occupy property decisively shaped the development of American cities and the distribution of people within them. Racial restrictions on the right to buy, sell, or occupy property also effectively truncated the political, social, and economic citizenship of those targeted for exclusion. In Patchwork Apartheid, historian Colin Gordon examines the history of such restrictions and how their consequences reverberate today. Drawing on a unique record of property restrictions excavated from local property records in five Midwestern counties, Gordon documents the prevalence of private property restriction in the era before zoning and building codes were widely employed and before federal redlining sanctioned the segregation of American cities and suburbs. This record of private restriction--documented and mapped to the parcel level in Greater Minneapolis, Greater St. Louis, and two Iowa counties--reveals the racial segregation process both on the ground, in the strategic deployment of restrictions throughout transitional central city neighborhoods and suburbs, and in the broader social and legal construction of racial categories and racial boundaries.

Gordon also explores the role of other policies and practices in sustaining segregation. Enforcement of private racial restrictions was held unconstitutional in 1948, and such agreements were prohibited outright in 1968. But their premises and assumptions, and the segregation they had accomplished, were accommodated by local zoning and federal housing policies. Explicit racial restrictions were replaced by the deceptive business practices of real estate agents and developers, who characterized certain neighborhoods as white and desirable and others as black and undesirable, thereby hiding segregation behind the promotion of sound property investments, safe neighborhoods, and good schools. These practices were in turn replaced by local zoning, which systematically protected white neighborhoods while targeting blighted black neighborhoods for commercial and industrial redevelopment, and by a tangle of federal policies that reliably deferred to local and private interests with deep investments in local segregation. Private race restriction was thus a key element in the original segregation of American cities and a source of durable inequalities in housing wealth, housing opportunity, and economic mobility.

Patchwork Apartheid exhaustively documents the history of private restriction in urban settings and demonstrates its crucial role in the ideas and assumptions that have sustained racial segregation in the United States into the twenty-first century.

Changes in federal housing policies over the past several decades shifted the primary responsibility for providing low-income renters with affordable housing from the government to private landlords. Federal, state, and local governments have passed laws to ensure that low-income renters are protected from illicit landlording practices. Yet we know little about how private landlords experience local housing regulations. In Collateral Damages, sociologist Meredith Greif examines how local laws affect private landlords and whether tenants are, in fact, being adequately protected.

For three years, Greif followed sixty private landlords serving low- and moderate-income residents in the Cleveland, Ohio, metropolitan area to better understand how local regulations, such as criminal activity nuisance ordinances (CANOs) and local water billing regulations, affect their landlording practices. CANOs are intended to protect communities by discouraging criminal activity on private properties. Property owners can face financial and criminal sanctions if they do not abate nuisance activities, which can include littering, noise, drug use, and calls for police assistance, including calls for domestic violence. Local water billing regulations hold landlords responsible for delinquent water bills, even in cases where the account is registered in the tenant's name. Greif finds that such laws often increase landlords' sense of financial precarity - the real or perceived uncertainty that their business is financially unsustainable - by holding them responsible for behavior they feel is out of their control. Feelings of financial uncertainty led some landlords to use illegitimate business practices against their tenants, including harassment, oversurveillance, poor property upkeep, and illegal evictions. And to avoid to financial penalties associated with CANOs and delinquent water bills, some landlords engage in discriminatory screening of vulnerable potential tenants who are unemployed or have histories of domestic violence or drug use. In this sense, by promoting a sense of financial insecurity among landlords, laws meant to protect renters ultimately had the opposite effect.

While some landlords, particularly those who rented a larger number of units, were able to operate their businesses both lawfully and profitably, the majority could not. Greif offers practical recommendations to address the concerns of small- and mid-sized landlords, such as regular meetings that bring landlords and local authorities together to engage in constructive dialogue about local housing policy, issues, and concerns. She also proposes policy recommendations to protect renters, such as establishing the right to counsel for lower-income tenants in eviction hearings and enacting a federal renter's tax credit.

Collateral Damages is an enlightening investigation on how local laws and practices perpetuate disadvantage among marginalized populations and communities, in ways that are hidden and often unintended.

A series of policy shifts over the past decade promises to change how Americans decide where to send their children to school. In theory, the boom in standardized test scores and charter schools will allow parents to evaluate their assigned neighborhood school, or move in search of a better option. But what kind of data do parents actually use while choosing schools? Are there differences among suburban and urban families? How do parents' choices influence school and residential segregation in America? Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools presents a breakthrough analysis of the new era of school choice, and what it portends for American neighborhoods. The distinguished contributors to Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools investigate the complex relationship between education, neighborhood social networks, and larger patterns of inequality. Paul Jargowsky reviews recent trends in segregation by race and class. His analysis shows that segregation between blacks and whites has declined since 1970, but remains extremely high. Moreover, white families with children are less likely than childless whites to live in neighborhoods with more minority residents. In her chapter, Annette Lareau draws on interviews with parents in three suburban neighborhoods to analyze school-choice decisions. Surprisingly, she finds that middle- and upper-class parents do not rely on active research, such as school tours or test scores. Instead, most simply trust advice from friends and other people in their network. Their decision-making process was largely informal and passive. Eliot Weinginer complements this research when he draws from his data on urban parents. He finds that these families worry endlessly about the selection of a school, and that parents of all backgrounds actively consider alternatives, including charter schools. Middle- and upper-class parents relied more on federally mandated report cards, district websites, and online forums, while working-class parents use network contacts to gain information on school quality. Little previous research has explored what role school concerns play in the preferences of white and minority parents for particular neighborhoods. Featuring innovative work from more than a dozen scholars, Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools adroitly addresses this gap and provides a firmer understanding of how Americans choose where to live and send their children to school.

Students and the public routinely consult various published college rankings to assess the quality of colleges and universities and easily compare different schools. However, many institutions have responded to the rankings in ways that benefit neither the schools nor their students. In Engines of Anxiety, sociologists Wendy Espeland and Michael Sauder delve deep into the mechanisms of law school rankings, which have become a top priority within legal education. Based on a wealth of observational data and over 200 in-depth interviews with law students, university deans, and other administrators, they show how the scramble for high rankings has affected the missions and practices of many law schools.

Engines of Anxiety tracks how rankings, such as those published annually by the U.S. News & World Report, permeate every aspect of legal education, beginning with the admissions process. The authors find that prospective law students not only rely heavily on such rankings to evaluate school quality, but also internalize rankings as expressions of their own abilities and flaws. For example, they often view rejections from first-tier schools as a sign of personal failure. The rankings also affect the decisions of admissions officers, who try to balance admitting diverse classes with preserving the school's ranking, which is dependent on factors such as the median LSAT score of the entering class. Espeland and Sauder find that law schools face pressure to admit applicants with high test scores over lower-scoring candidates who possess other favorable credentials.

Engines of Anxiety also reveals how rankings have influenced law schools' career service departments. Because graduates' job placements play a major role in the rankings, many institutions have shifted their career-services resources toward tracking placements, and away from counseling and network-building. In turn, law firms regularly use school rankings to recruit and screen job candidates, perpetuating a cycle in which highly ranked schools enjoy increasing prestige. As a result, the rankings create and reinforce a rigid hierarchy that penalizes lower-tier schools that do not conform to the restrictive standards used in the rankings. The authors show that as law schools compete to improve their rankings, their programs become more homogenized and less accessible to non-traditional students.

The ranking system is considered a valuable resource for learning about more than 200 law schools. Yet, Engines of Anxiety shows that the drive to increase a school's rankings has negative consequences for students, educators, and administrators and has implications for all educational programs that are quantified in similar ways.