Bureaucratic Culture and Escalating World Problems: Advancing the Sociological Imagination

Fifty years after of the publication of C. Wright Mills's The Sociological Imagination, the 'œbureaucratic ethos'� that he described has continued to escalate. The eleven authors of this book carry further and systematically develop Mills's broad vision of the scientific method as they analyze escalating bureaucratic barriers that prevent us from solving our many pressing social, environmental, and economic problems.

J. David Knottnerus is Professor of Sociology at Oklahoma State University. In recent years he has focused on the development of structural ritualization theory and research. He recently coauthored Elder Care Catastrophe: Rituals of Abuse in Nursing Homes (Paradigm 2010). Bernard Phillips, a student of C. Wright Mills at Columbia, received a Ph.D. at Cornell and taught at the University of North Carolina and the University of Illinois before teaching at Boston University. He is the coauthor of Saving Society: Breaking Out of Our Bureaucratic Way of Life (Paradigm 2010).