Winner of the 2007 Richard A. Lester Prize for Outstanding Book in Labor Economics and Industrial Relations

"[Higher Ground] is valuable for what it tells us not only about strategies to fight poverty, but also about how to generate evidence on strategies to fight poverty."
-INDUSTRIAL & LABOR RELATIONS REVIEW

"Higher Ground describes the results from the New Hope demonstration project in Milwaukee, one of the most creative social experiments of the past twenty- five years. It tells how New Hope was designed to help participants move into jobs, retain health insurance, and find effective child care. While not all the results of the program were positive, they do show that good policies can make a difference in providing economic stability to low-income families. The les sons from New Hope, described in this book, should be part the current public discussion. This is a book that students, researchers, and policy analysts will all find useful."
-REBECCA M. BLANK, Joan and Sanford Weill Dean of Public Policy, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan

"New Hope was an ambitious experiment in helping the poor and near-poor. Higher Ground brings out its full significance and potential, especially by showing the effects on families and children. Greg J. Duncan, Aletha C. Huston, and Thomas S. Weisner make visible what rebuilding the welfare state around employment might mean."
-LAWRENCE M. MEAD, professor of politics, New York University

"Higher Ground puts the word 'hope' back into the debate about poverty, offering compelling evidence that government can make a difference in the lives of the poor. While others sought to 'end welfare as we know it,' the architects of New Hope had a grander vision, to end poverty as we know it. New Hope restored dignity and rewarded work, and its impact extended to the next generation."
-KATHRYN EDIN, visiting professor of public policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

During the 1990s, growing demands to end chronic welfare dependency culminated in the 1996 federal “welfare-to-work” reforms. But regardless of welfare reform, the United States has always been home to a large population of working poor—people who remain poor even when they work and do not receive welfare. In a concentrated effort to address the problems of the working poor, a coalition of community activists and business leaders in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, launched New Hope, an experimental program that boosted employment among the city’s poor while reducing poverty and improving children’s lives. In Higher Ground, Greg Duncan, Aletha Huston, and Thomas Weisner provide a compelling look at how New Hope can serve as a model for national anti-poverty policies.

New Hope was a social contract—not a welfare program—in which participants were required to work a minimum of thirty hours a week in order to be eligible for earnings supplements and health and child care subsidies. All participants had access to career counseling and temporary community service jobs. Drawing on evidence from surveys, public records of employment and earnings, in-depth interviews, and ethnographic observation, Higher Ground tells the story of this ambitious three-year social experiment and evaluates how participants fared relative to a control group. The results were highly encouraging. Poverty rates declined among families that participated in the program. Employment and earnings increased among participants who were not initially working full-time, relative to their counterparts in a control group. For those who had faced just one significant barrier to employment (such as a lack of access to child care or a spotty employment history), these gains lasted years after the program ended. Increased income, combined with New Hope’s subsidies for child care and health care, brought marked improvements to the well-being and development of participants’ children. Enrollment in child care centers increased, and fewer medical needs went unmet. Children performed better in school and exhibited fewer behavioral problems, and gains were particularly dramatic for boys, who are at the greatest risk for poor academic performance and behavioral disorders.

As America takes stock of the successes and shortcomings of the Clinton-era welfare reforms, the authors convincingly demonstrate why New Hope could be a model for state and national policies to assist the working poor. Evidence based and insightfully written, Higher Ground illuminates how policymakers can make work pay for families struggling to escape poverty.

GREG J. DUNCAN is the Edwina S. Tarry Professor of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research.

ALETHA C. HUSTON is the Priscilla Pond Flawn Regents Professor of Child Development in the department of human ecology at the University of Texas, Austin and associate director of the Population Research Center.

THOMAS S. WEISNER is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

"As long as individuals continue to enter or desire admission to the United States, immigration will always be an issue that incites lively and controversial debates. Deaux brilliantly provides the first comprehensive text addressing immigration using a systematic social-psychological approach .... She skillfully presents and reviews scholarship that addresses both broad-level issues pertaining to policy and attitudes toward immigrants as well as micro-level issues such as ethnic identity, acculturation, and the immigrant's experience."
-ANALYSES OF SOCIAL ISSUES AND PUBLIC POLICY

"At last, we have a definitive social psychological treatment of American immigration. Kay Deaux's outstanding work is essential reading for all who care about this critical issue."
-THOMAS PETTIGREW, Research Professor of Social Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz

"To Be an Immigrant offers a penetrating psychological treatment of immigrant adaptation and integration that is very welcome and long overdue. Although scholars have traditionally studied the social, economic, cultural, and political dimensions of immigration, Kay Deaux reminds us that assimilation has important psychological dimensions as well. Immigration researchers need to pay close attention to this book to incorporate psychological insights into the models of immigrant behavior they construct."
-DOUGLAS S. MASSEY, Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University

"The migration of people within and between countries presents the world with one of the most urgent challenges of the twenty-first century. To help meet that challenge, an informed social science of the causes and consequences of migration will surely be needed. In Kay Deaux's wonderful book we have an important contribution to such migration studies. It combines a dispassionate and incisive analysis with a humane and interdisciplinary perspective, and it is elegantly and lucidly written."
-RUPERT BROWN, professor of social psychology, University of Sussex

Immigration is often discussed in broad, statistical terms, with a focus on how it affects labor markets, schools, and social services. But at its most basic level, immigration is a process that affects people and their identities in deeply personal ways. In To Be an Immigrant, social psychologist Kay Deaux explores the role of both social conditions and individual capacities in determining how well immigrants adapt to life in their new homelands, and makes a strong case for the relevance of social psychology in immigration studies.

To Be an Immigrant looks at how immigrants are defined, shaped, and challenged by the cultural environment they encounter in their new country and offers an integrated psychological framework for studying the immigrant experience. Deaux argues that in addition to looking at macro-level factors like public policies and social conditions and micro-level issues like individual choices, immigration scholars should also study influences that occur on an intermediate level, such as interpersonal encounters. Each of these three levels of analysis is essential to understanding how immigrants adapt to a new homeland and form distinct identities. As a case study for her framework, Deaux examines West Indians, exploring their perceptions of the stereotypes they face in the United States and their feelings of connection to their new home. Though race plays a limited role in the West Indies, it becomes more relevant to migrants once they arrive in the United States, where they are primarily identified by others as black, rather than Guyanese or Jamaican. Deaux’s research adds to a growing literature in social psychology on stereotype threat, which suggests that negative stereotypes about one’s group can hinder an individual’s performance. She finds that immigrants who have been in the United States longer and identify themselves as African American suffer from the negative effects of stereotype threat more than recent immigrants.
 
More than a discrete event, immigration can be understood as a life-long process that continues to affect people well after they have migrated. To Be an Immigrant takes a novel approach to the study of immigration, looking at how societal influences help shape immigrants and their understanding of who they are.

KAY DEAUX is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the Graduate Center,  City University of New York.

"The Russell Sage project on trust has been one of the most intellectually fecund enterprises anywhere in the social sciences over the last five years. This latest compendium of the fruits of that project is a wonderfully rich introduction to the research frontiers in the rapidly evolving study of trust, ranging across approaches as diverse as political philosophy, anthropological field work, microeconomic theory, and comparative survey research."
-ROBERT D. PUTNAM, Harvard University

"Drawing insights from a variety of social science disciplines, each essay in Trust in Society is a gem in its own right, but together, the package of chapters underscores how much we know about the dynamics of trust, and yet, how much there is to learn. It is rare for a book to stimulate a scholarly agenda for further theorizing and research, while at the same time, to provide so many leads for public policy and practice. I recommend this book to my fellow theorists, to researchers in search of important new lines of inquiry, and to policymakers.Trust in Society has something for all."
-JONATHAN H. TURNER, University of California, Riverside

"Trust in Society brings together a broad set of scholars from multiple disciplines, all of whom have something insightful to say about trust. Trust plays a crucial role in all social relationships as varying as those of incorporating immigrants in a society, building trust among members of corporate team, or creating a viable congregation. Readers from all disciplines will find many chapters that they can immediately use in their own research and in teaching graduate and undergraduate students."
-ELINOR OSTROM, Indiana University 

Trust plays a pervasive role in social affairs, even sustaining acts of cooperation among strangers who have no control over each other's actions. But the full importance of trust is rarely acknowledged until it begins to break down, threatening the stability of social relationships once taken for granted. Trust in Society uses the tools of experimental psychology, sociology, political science, and economics to shed light on the many functions trust performs in social and political life. The authors discuss different ways of conceptualizing trust and investigate the empirical effects of trust in a variety of social settings, from the local and personal to the national and institutional.

Drawing on experimental findings, this book examines how people decide whom to trust, and how a person proves his own trustworthiness to others. Placing trust in a person can be seen as a strategic act, a moral response, or even an expression of social solidarity. People often assume that strangers are trustworthy on the basis of crude social affinities, such as a shared race, religion, or hometown. Likewise, new immigrants are often able to draw heavily upon the trust of prior arrivals—frequently kin—to obtain work and start-up capital.

Trust in Society explains how trust is fostered among members of voluntary associations—such as soccer clubs, choirs, and church groups—and asks whether this trust spills over into other civic activities of wider benefit to society. The book also scrutinizes the relationship between trust and formal regulatory institutions, such as the law, that either substitute for trust when it is absent, or protect people from the worst consequences of trust when it is misplaced. Moreover, psychological research reveals how compliance with the law depends more on public trust in the motives of the police and courts than on fear of punishment.

The contributors to this volume demonstrate the growing analytical sophistication of trust research and its wide-ranging explanatory power. In the interests of analytical rigor, the social sciences all too often assume that people act as atomistic individuals without regard to the interests of others. Trust in Society demonstrates how we can think rigorously and analytically about the many aspects of social life that cannot be explained in those terms.

KAREN S. COOK is the Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor of Sociology at Stanford University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Michael Bacharach, Jean Ensminger, Diego Gambetta, Robert Gibbons, Russell Hardin, Carol A. Heimer, Jack Knight, Roderick M. Kramer, Gerry Mackie, David M. Messick, Gary Miller, Victor Nee, Jimy Sanders, Dietlind Stolle, Tom R. Tyler, Toshio Yamagishi.

A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Series on Trust