Share This PageSociology Publishing
“Scholars who read a lot and care about good publishing soon learn to distinguish between those presses whose books they will only read when compelling reviews come out and those whose imprint itself signals the likelihood of interesting, valuable publications. Over the last decade, Penn State Press has put itself firmly in the second category. Any new book from the publisher of Miguel Centeno, John Markoff, Jan Kubik, Mark Lichbach, and other distinguished political analysts deserves a good look from scholars who savor quality.”
—Charles Tilly, Columbia University
Compared with political science, which neatly breaks down into four main subfields, sociology encompasses a plethora of subfields, ranging from economic sociology and medical sociology to sociology of the family and sociology of law. As a relatively small publishing house, the Press has largely staked a place in areas where sociology intersects with other fields on the Press’s list.
Until 1990 the Press issued sociology books in four main subfields. Titles such as Richard Stivers’s A Hair of the Dog: Irish Drinking and American Stereotype (1976) or Ken Levi’s edited volume on the People’s Temple of Jim Jones, Violence and Religious Commitment (1982), represented the subfield of crime, law, and deviance. Harry Schwarzweller et al.’s Mountain Families in Transition (1971) and Emilia Martinez-Brawley’s edited volume Pioneer Efforts in Rural Social Welfare (1980), among others, fitted into rural sociology. Peter Roche de Coppens’s Ideal Man in Classical Sociology (1976) and Rick Tilman’s C. Wright Mills (1984) reflected the social theory subfield, and the sociology of religion was represented by works such as The Ministry in Transition (1972), by Yoshio Fukuyama, or Richard Bord and Joseph Faulkner’s The Catholic Charismatics (1983).
As recent catalogues demonstrate, the Press has continued to publish in all of these subfields. Examples include Cecilie Høigård and Liv Finstad’s Backstreets: Prostitution, Money, and Love (1992), Jeffrey Jacob’s New Pioneers: The Back-to-the-Land Movement and the Search for a Sustainable Future (1997), John Rhoads’s Critical Issues in Social Theory (1991), and Fenggang Yang’s Chinese Christians in America (1999). Of these four areas, rural sociology has been developed most strongly, as the Press assumed responsibility for publishing the Rural Studies Series (sponsored by the Rural Sociology Society) in 1996.
But in conjunction with broadening programs in history and political science, the Press began publishing regularly in additional sociological subfields, such as collective behavior and social movements; comparative and historical sociology; economic sociology; labor and labor movements; Marxist sociology; political sociology; race, gender, and class; and sociology of culture. The extended list in sociology is made manifest in titles ranging from Dag MacLeod’s Downsizing the State: Privatization and the Limits of Neoliberal Reform in Mexico (2004) to Nathan Newman’s Net Loss: Internet Prophets, Private Profits, and the Costs to Community (2002) and Anna Szemere’s Up from the Underground: The Culture of Rock Music in Postsocialist Hungary (2001).
The close relationships among Penn State Press’s history, political science, and sociology lists are mirrored in the Press’s publication of the Journal of Policy History, which has representatives from all three disciplines on its editorial advisory board, including Craig Calhoun and Theda Skocpol. Some Press authors hold joint appointments, as John Markoff does in History and Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. Occasionally the Press will publish a book jointly written by people from two fields, such as Market and Community: The Bases of Social Order, Revolution, and Relegitimation (2000), penned by political scientist Mark Lichbach and sociologist Adam Seligman. (In the book, the two authors enter into an engaging dialogue about their competing research traditions.) A number of such titles came to the Press as part of its co-publication arrangement with Polity Press.
But the most successful monograph in sociology the Press has ever published simply arrived “over the transom” from F. James Davis, a colleague of Press author Richard Stivers, who suggested that Davis submit his manuscript. A study of the “one-drop rule” in the United States, with some comparisons to racial orders elsewhere, Davis’s Who Is Black? (1991) quickly established itself as a staple of classroom reading. (To update the story with the trend toward multiracialism, the Press issued a tenth anniversary edition in 2001.) The book has sold in excess of 20,000 copies and has gone through multiple printings. Along the way, Davis became so widely recognized as an authority on this subject that he even appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show to talk about it. One of the earliest enthusiastic reviews of Davis’s book was written by G. Reginald Daniel, whose own Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States was published by the Press in mid-2006.
The title that received the most widespread attention in the world outside academe was John Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey’s Time for Life: The Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time (1997), which became the subject of an Associated Press story, was excerpted in Time magazine, and earned the authors appearances on ABC’s Good Morning America and NBC’s The Today Show. The authors, using their extensive survey data, countered Juliet Schor’s argument in The Overworked American by showing that Americans actually have more free time than they did twenty years earlier—but feel more stressed nevertheless. A foreword to their book was contributed by Harvard’s Robert Putnam, who was much influenced by their findings and later relied on them heavily in his own best-selling Bowling Alone.
The Press’s sociology program has developed a number of series. In addition to Issues in Policy History and the Rural Studies Series, a third—Post-Communist Cultural Studies—was launched in 1998. It will publish its final title (the fourteenth) in late 2006. The series editor, Tom Cushman, has now launched a new series with the Press, Essays on Human Rights. This series issued its first title, Vulnerability and Human Rights by Bryan Turner, in mid-2006.
“In sociology—a discipline that often seems to be searching for itself and finding that it is really an enormously diverse collection of subfields—Penn State Press has played a very important role by publishing uniformly high-quality books in a large number of these subfields. My own shelves include valuable books in the sociology of religion, political sociology and social movements, culture, and sociological theory. The lists on Latin America, historical sociology, and agrarian issues are especially strong. It is a great credit to the Press’s leadership to have been able to take risks at times and maintain such an excellent selection of titles.”
—Robert Wuthnow, Princeton University
Choice Outstanding Academic Books
Michael Mayerfeld Bell, Farming for Us All: Practical Agriculture and the Cultivation of Sustainability (2005)
David L. Brown and Louis Swanson, eds., Challenges for Rural America in the Twenty-First Century (2004)
Nathan Newman, Net Loss: Internet Prophets, Private Profits, and the Costs to Community (2002)
José Itzigsohn, Developing Poverty: The State, Labor Market Deregulation, and the Informal Economy in Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic (2001)
Miguel Angel Centeno, Democracy Within Reason: Technocratic Revolution in Mexico (1994)
Gilles Kepel, The Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism in the Modern World (1994)
Christopher Pierson, Beyond the Welfare State? The New Political Economy of Welfare (1991)
Book Prizes
Miguel Angel Centeno, Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America (Honorable Mention, 2003 Mattei Dogan Award, Society for Comparative Research)
Michael Forman, Nationalism and the International Labor Movement: The Idea of the Nation in Socialist and Anarchist Theory (1999 Michael Harrington Award, Caucus for a New Political Science)
Lutz Kaelber, Schools of Asceticism: Ideology and Organization in Medieval Religious Communities (1999 Book of the Year Award, Sociology of Religion Section of the American Sociological Association)
Dubravka Ugrei, The Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays, trans. Celia Hawkesworth (1999 Heldt Prize, Association for Women in Slavic Studies)
Gerald W. Creed, Domesticating Revolution: From Socialist Reform to Ambivalent Transition in a Bulgarian Village (1998 Book Prize, Bulgarian Studies Association)
John Markoff, The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution (1998 Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award, American Sociological Association; 1997 Allan Sharlin Memorial Award, Social Science History Association; 1996 David Pinkney Prize, Society for French Historical Studies)
Jan Kubik, The Power of Symbols Against the Symbols of Power: The Rise of Solidarity and the Fall of State Socialism in Poland (1994 Biennial Young Scholar Award, Polish Studies Association)
F. James Davis, Who Is Black? One Nation’s Definition (1992 Outstanding Book on the Subject of Human Rights, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in the United States)
Alex Callinicos, The Revenge of History: Marxism and the East European Revolutions (1992 Distinguished Scholarship Book Award, Marxist Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association)
Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach (Honorable Mention, 1991 European Amalfi Prize for Sociology and Social Sciences)
Best Sellers
F. James Davis, Who Is Black? (1991; 10th anniv. ed. 2001): 23,000+
John P. Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey, Time for Life (1997; 2nd ed. 1999): 6,500+
Gilles Kepel, The Revenge of God (1994): 5,500+
Judy Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology (1991): 5,500+
Martin Carnoy, Manuel Castells, Stephen S. Cohen, and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, The New Global Economy in the Information Age (1993): 5,000+
Sidney Kraus and Dennis Davis, The Effects of Mass Communication on Political Behavior (1976): 5,000+
Judy Scales-Trent, Notes of a White Black Woman (1995): 5,000+
Martha Crenshaw, ed., Terrorism in Context (1995): 4,500+
James J. Shields Jr., ed., Japanese Schooling (1993): 4,000+
Åke Daun, Swedish Mentality (1995): 4,000+
Miguel Angel Centeno, Democracy Within Reason (1994; 2nd ed. 1997): 4,000+
Christopher Pierson, Beyond the Welfare State? (1991; 2nd ed. 1998): 3,000+
John Higham, ed., Civil Rights and Social Wrongs (1999): 3,000+
Alex Callinicos, The Revenge of History (1991): 2,500+
Bob Jessop, State Theory (1991): 2,500+
David L. Brown and Louis Swanson, eds., Challenges for Rural America in the Twenty-First Century (2004): 2,500+
Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Social Movements (1991): 2,500+
Philip D. Oxhorn, Organizing Civil Society (1995): 2,000+
“Penn State Press has developed a very impressive sociology list and has been a leader in publishing books that have multidisciplinary roots. It is especially strong at the intersection of sociology, politics, and history. In my own subfield I find Penn State to be a leader in the publication of books that show the constructed and highly political nature of race and ethnicity. The seminal Who Is Black? by F. James Davis, published in 1991, compared the conceptions of race in the U.S. with other countries, making clear the social construction of race in our society. ...The Press’s strength in the study of religion has also intersected with one of the most important emerging fields in the study of immigration, and Fenggang Yang’s Chinese Christians in America is an early trailblazer in this field, along with Kwon, Kim, and Warner’s Korean Americans and Their Religions. Penn State Press publishes high-quality books with broad appeal and deep scholarly roots. Its list in sociology is innovative and stimulating.”
—Mary C. Waters, Harvard University