How has American society changed over the last fifteen years? Do we raise our children differently now than in 1953? Has women's liberation produced a shift in attitudes toward marriage or altered our idea about appropriate activities for women? Have our attitudes toward race undergone a significant revision?

In this challenging volume, three eminent sociologists examine questions like these in the light of hard data which have become available, year by year, over the last two decades. The major purpose of the book is to demonstrate how measures of social change can be developed, capitalizing on past efforts in survey research. An omnibus survey, carried out in 1971, was designed almost entirely as a selective repitition of questions originally asked in the 1950s. It provides precise and reliable measures of change in such areas as marital and sex roles, social participation, child rearing, religious behavior, political orientations, and racial attitudes.

Lucid and authoritative, Social Change in a Metropolitan Community presents a unique body of information on changes in public opinion, social norms, and institutional behavior. Its large number of statistical measurements are presented in an extremely accessible form—almost always as simple percentage comparisons. The research findings included here are unduplicated by any other study, and as a source of information on current social trends they provide fascinating reading for anyone who wishes to enlarge his understanding of the temper of our times.

OTIS DUDLEY DUNCAN, HOWARD SCHUMAN, and BEVERLY DUNCAN are all professors of sociology at the University of Michigan.

Traces the development of the sanitary and health problems of New York City from earliest Dutch times to the culmination of a nineteenth-century reform movement that produced the Metropolitan Health Act of 1866, the forerunner of the present New York City Department of Health. Professor Duffy shows the city's transition from a clean and healthy colonial settlement to an epidemic-ridden community in the eighteenth century, as the city outgrew its health and sanitation facilities. He describes the slow growth of a demand for adequate health laws in the mid-nineteenth century, leading to the establishment of the first permanent health agency in 1866.

JOHN DUFFY is professor of history of medicine in the history department and School of Medicine at Tulane University.

Globalization, technological change, and deregulation have made the American marketplace increasingly competitive in recent decades, but for many workers this “new economy” has entailed heightened job insecurity, lower wages, and scarcer benefits. As the job market has grown more volatile, a variety of labor market intermediaries—organizations that help job seekers find employment—have sprung up, from private temporary agencies to government “One-Stop Career Centers.” In Staircases or Treadmills? Chris Benner, Laura Leete, and Manuel Pastor investigate what approaches are most effective in helping workers to secure jobs with decent wages and benefits, and they provide specific policy recommendations for how job-matching organizations can better serve disadvantaged workers.

Staircases or Treadmills? is the first comprehensive study documenting the prevalence of all types of labor market intermediaries and investigating how these intermediaries affect workers’ employment opportunities. Benner, Leete, and Pastor draw on years of research in two distinct regional labor markets—“old economy” Milwaukee and “new economy” Silicon Valley—including a first-of-its-kind random survey of the prevalence and impacts of intermediaries, and a wide range of interviews with intermediary agencies’ staff and clients. One of the main obstacles that disadvantaged workers face is that social networks of families and friends are less effective in connecting job-seekers to stable, quality employment. Intermediaries often serve as a substitute method for finding a job.  Which substitute is chosen, however, matters: The authors find that the most effective organizations—including many unions, community colleges, and local non-profits—actively foster contacts between workers and employers, tend to make long-term investments in training for career development, and seek to transform as well as satisfy market demands. But without effective social networks to help workers locate the best intermediaries, most rely on private temporary agencies and other organizations that offer fewer services and, statistical analysis shows, often channel their participants into jobs with low wages and few benefits. Staircases or Treadmills? suggests that, to become more effective, intermediary organizations of all types need to focus more on training workers, teaching networking skills, and fostering contact between workers and employers in the same industries.

A generation ago, rising living standards were broadly distributed and coupled with relatively secure employment. Today, many Americans fear that heightened job insecurity is overshadowing the benefits of dynamic economic growth. Staircases or Treadmills? is a stimulating guide to how private and public job-matching institutions can empower disadvantaged workers to share in economic progress.

CHRIS BENNER is assistant professor of urban and economic geography at Pennsylvania State University.

LAURA LEETE is the Fred H. Paulus Director of Public Policy Research and associate professor of economics and public policy at Willamette University.

MANUEL PASTOR is a professor of geography and American Studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

Over the past eight years, a marked shift in the national political mood has substantially reduced the federal government's involvement in ameliorating urban problems and enhanced the prominence of state and local governments in the domestic policy arena. Many states and big cities have been forced to reassess their traditionally vexed relationships.

Nowhere has this drama been played out more stormily than in New York. In The Two New Yorks, experts from government, the academy, and the non-profit sector examine aspects of an interaction that has a major impact on the performance of state and city institutions. The analyses presented here explore current state-city strategies for handling such troubling policy areas as education, health care, and housing. Attention is also given to important contextual factors such as economic and demographic trends, and to structural features such as the political framework, relationships with the national government, and the system of public finance.

Despite its uniquely large scope, the drama of the new New Yorks parallels or presages issues faced by virtually all large cities and their states. This unprecedented study makes a vital contribution in an era of declining federal aid and pressing urban need.

GERALD BENJAMIN is at SUNY New Paltz.

CHARLES BRECHER is at New York University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Richard D. Alba, Mary Jo Bane, Gerald Benjamin, Robert Berne, Susan Blamk, Barbara B. Blum, Matthew Drennan, Barbara Gordon Espejo, Ester Fuchs, Cynthia B. Green, James M. Hartman, Raymond D. Horton, Sarah F. Liebschutz, David Lewin, Irene Lurie, Paul D. Moore, James C. Musselwhite Jr., Martin Shefter, Kenneth E. Thorpe, Emanuel Tobier, Katherine Trent, 

Little over a century ago, New York and Budapest were both flourishing cities engaging in spectacular modernization. By 1930, New York had emerged as an innovating cosmopolitan metropolis, while Budapest languished under the conditions that would foster fascism. Budapest and New York explores the increasingly divergent trajectories of these once-similar cities through the perspectives of both Hungarian and American experts in the fields of political, cultural, social and art history. Their original essays illuminate key aspects of urban life that most reveal the turn-of-the-century evolution of New York and Budapest: democratic participation, use of public space, neighborhood ethnicity, and culture high and low.

What comes across most strikingly in these essays is New York's cultivation of social and political pluralism, a trend not found in Budapest. Nationalist ideology exerted tremendous pressure on Budapest's ethnic groups to assimilate to a single Hungarian language and culture. In contrast, New York's ethnic diversity was transmitted through a mass culture that celebrated ethnicity while muting distinct ethnic traditions, making them accessible to a national audience. While Budapest succumbed to the patriotic imperatives of a nation threatened by war, revolution, and fascism, New York, free from such pressures, embraced the variety of its people and transformed its urban ethos into a paradigm for America.

Budapest and New York is the lively story of the making of metropolitan culture in Europe and America, and of the influential relationship between city and nation. In unifying essays, the editors observe comparisons not only between the cities, but in the scholarly outlooks and methodologies of Hungarian and American histories. This volume is a unique urban history. Begun under the unfavorable conditions of a divided world, it represents a breakthrough in cross-cultural, transnational, and interdisciplinary historical work.

THOMAS BENDER is University Professor of the Humanities and professor of history at New York University.

CARL E. SCHORSKE is professor emeritus at Princeton University, and the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture.

CONTRIBUTORS: Thomas Bender, Elizabeth Blackmar, Geza Buzinkay, Wanda M. Corn, Deborah Dash Moore, Philip Fisher, Eva Forgacs, Gabor Gyani, David C. Hammack, Peter Hanak, Neil Harris, Miklos Lacko, Zsuzsa L. Nagy, Roy Rosenzweig, Carl E. Schorske, Robert W. Snyder, and Istvan Teplan.

A recent Supreme Court decision confirmed the churches' right to tax exemption for religious property. In this highly relevant book, Alfred Balk places this question in social perspective and demonstrates how tax exemption and immunity affect the fiscal load of local communities and the well-being of our whole society. Among the "free list" or tax-free properties which the author examines are churches, hospitals, schools, and government buildings. Seven specific proposals for reform are set forth.

ALFRED BALK is visiting editor of the Columbia Journalism Review and an Editor-at-Large of Saturday Review. He has written more than a hundred articles for national magazines, including Harper’s, Saturday Review, Saturday Evening Post, New York Times Magazine, Reader’s Digest, This Week, The Nation, McCall’s, and The Reporter. He also is the author of The Religion Business (John Knox, 1968), and a contributor to a number of anthologies.