William Kornblum

Carolyn D. Smith

This book was written to bring a more cohesive thematic approach –emphasizing social/global change—to the introductory course and to give students a better understanding of sociology as it is applied to the real world. The text is accessible, while advanced students will be challenged with material in the exhibit boxes such as Sociological Methods and Mapping Social Change. This comprehensive, student-friendly introductory textbook emphasizes the reality of social change and its impact on individuals, groups, and societies throughout the world. The text carefully balances contemporary and classic theory and research, with special attention to the works of female and minority social scientists and cross-cultural studies. Kornblum applies all the major perspectives of sociology without giving undue emphasis to any single approach.

Sociology in a Changing World

Marseille, France’s sunny second city, is a beguiling place. A major Mediterranean port, it beckons to urban wanderers and anyone enthralled by cities in all their multiplicity. Marseille’s ancient streets tell stories of fires, plagues, wars, decay, and regrowth. Waves of people of diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds have made their way there, and many have found homes for themselves. Although the city hosts visitors from around the world, France’s social and political fault lines are on full display. For all its charm, Marseille struggles to overcome its reputation for corruption and crime. William Kornblum—an eminent urban sociologist and a veteran traveler in the Francophone world—invites readers on an exploration of a changing city. Blending travelogue and social observation, he roams Marseille’s neighborhoods and regions in the company of writers, scholars, activists, and ordinary people. The living history of the city comes through in Kornblum’s character sketches and the stories that his guides tell. Relishing Marseille’s coasts and crags and reveling in its rich maritime culture, they discuss the political, social, and environmental challenges the city faces. Kornblum also draws connections with his hometown, New York City, which like Marseille is a deindustrialized port city increasingly dependent on the production and consumption of culture. Offering a captivating and thoughtful portrait of the city and its citizens, this book is for all readers who have ever wondered what makes Marseille so distinctive.

Marseille, Port to Port

Terry Moses Williams

This ethnographic study looks at teenagers trapped in poverty--how some succeed in the struggle to get out and others finally give up trying. It is an outgrowth of interviews with some 900 teens in New York City, Cleveland, Louisville, and Meridian, Mississippi. The neighborhoods where they live are socially and racially diverse. Among them are white areas slding into poverty as traditional blue-collar jobs in smokestack industries fade away, and black and Hispanic neighborhoods where chronic unemployment has long been the prevailing tradition and fact of life. Based on the teenagers' own accounts, the book describes their experiences with working and seeking work, achievements in school and athletics, family life, and the positive influences of their peers and adult mentors. It also details the negative choices that tend to make poverty a life sentence: prostitution and street hustles, pregnancy and early parenthood, gang membership and criminal outlets, drugs and withdrawal into despair. Still, hope is an unquenchable attribute of youth, and it bubbles up in this book as the authors show how much these teenagers seek to do for themselves in exercising their limited options.

Growing Up Poor

These engaging accounts by masters of field research illustrate the synthesis of passionate involvement and objective analysis. An informative and inspiring collection for students and professional social scientists. (Cynthia Fuchs Epstein Distinguished Professor of Sociology City University of New York). This revised, edited volume brings together personal accounts by a group of noted ethnographic researchers to examine the natural history of participant observation. An ideal supplemental text for methods courses, In The Field is designed to give students a sense of what it is actually like to conduct ethnographic research. As the selections show, field researchers must struggle to gain acceptance by the group under study but then often become deeply involved in the lives of the people and at times are forced into a reexamination of their own values. By learning how social scientists conduct research under field conditions and how they feel while they are doing it, students will be better prepared to carry out successful field research projects of their own.

Readings on the Field Research Experience

In the Field

Stéphane Tonnelat

Nicknamed the International Express, the New York City Transit Authority 7 subway line runs through a highly diverse series of ethnic and immigrant neighborhoods in Queens. People from Andean South America, Central America, China, India, Italy, Korea, Mexico, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, and Vietnam, as well as residents of a number of gentrifying blue-collar and industrial neighborhoods, fill the busy streets around the stations. The 7 train is a microcosm of a specifically urban, New York experience, in which individuals from a variety of cultures and social classes are forced to interact and get along with one another. For newcomers to the city, mastery of life in the subway space is a step toward assimilation into their new home. In International Express, the French ethnographer Stéphane Tonnelat and his collaborator William Kornblum, a native New Yorker, ride the 7 subway line to better understand the intricacies of this phenomenon. They also ask a group of students with immigrant backgrounds to keep diaries of their daily rides on the 7 train. What develops over time, they find, is a set of shared subway competences leading to a practical cosmopolitanism among riders, including immigrants and their children, that changes their personal values and attitudes toward others in small, subtle ways. This growing civility helps newcomers feel at home in an alien city and builds what the authors call a "situational community in transit." Yet riding the subway can be problematic, especially for women and teenagers. Tonnelat and Kornblum pay particular attention to gender and age relations on the 7 train. Their portrait of integrated mass transit, including a discussion of the relationship between urban density and diversity, is invaluable for social scientists and urban planners eager to enhance the cooperative experience of city living for immigrants and ease the process of cultural transition.

William Kornblum

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