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Getting Started
on Social Analysis in Canada helps unpack
social issues. It has a long history. And it stands
apart from textbook projects developed by
transnational publishing enterprises after
exhaustive market analysis. The book was originally
conceived at Toronto's Jesuit Centre for Social
Faith and Justice, an activist organization in a
gritty working class neighbourhood dotted with
aging factories and newly gentrified houses. Lead
contamination was an urgent local issue, and the
popular struggles to rid Central America of
military dictatorship animated a small staff
steeped in liberation theology.
The Centre wanted a resource for church-based
social justice groups, a book that would allow
community organizers to go beyond issue-based
campaigns. They needed a broader analysis of how
social organization affects people's experience of
everyday life. As it happened, the book served more
than just that purpose. It was also picked up by
college and university instructors who discovered a
clearly written text that succeeded in helping
their students to better understand the social
issues of the day.
Twenty years and some 50,000 copies later, this
fourth edition brings a new generation of readers
up to date with factual information -- data,
events, observable trends. It now frames its
analysis in ways that reflect changes in analytical
approach. Issues of gender and race are integrated
more thoroughly, challenging readers to imagine the
experience of excluded people as the norm. It
maintains the social justice perspective that has
provided continuity and made the previous editions
so useful.
Plus ça change
The first edition of Getting Started was
written when Pierre Trudeau was Prime Minister and
Brian Mulroney was opposing free trade. The Canada
Health Act had recently been passed. Canadians who
had heard of a place called Oka thought about a
kind of cheese once made there. Acid rain was the
environmental issue of the day. Civil wars in
Central America pitted peasant insurgents (duly
labelled terrorists by the US president of the day)
against military dictators. Globalization and the
Internet were unheard of.
The first edition of Getting Started,
drafted on Kaypro and Osborne computers, included a
chapter titled "Microtechnology and the Future."
Although the content shifted somewhat in subsequent
editions, the technology chapter has always
included a discussion of the social origins of
Luddism, and begins with a the French expression
"plus ça change."
Often it's enough just to say "the more things
change..." and people will know what you mean, even
if you don't complete the maxim: "Plus ça
change, plus ça reste la même
chose--the more things change, the more they stay
the same."
What's changing, and what's staying the same?
Microtechnology may be only a tag for the latest
fad in consumer goods--or it may be part of a rapid
and significant change in Canada's economic life.
It's important to know what is changing merely
superficially in society, and what is changing more
profoundly. At the same time, what is failing to
change?
Students reading this fourth edition will be
steeped in a rapidly changing world where speed is
everything. Internet, all-news television, cell
phones, listserves--the world is awash with
information. Even the Luddite sympathizers who warn
of the corrosive effects of new technologies build
elaborate Web sites to get the message out.
This edition of Getting Started takes such
changes into account, analyzing how new
technologies being deployed in the workplace, the
supermarket and at home are becoming so commonplace
as to seem as natural and invisible as the air
while apparently altering the way society works.
But at the same time, the book looks at social
relations, asking questions. What has really
changed? How do these changes compare to the big
changes of the past? Who wins? Who loses?
Aside from updated statistics and case studies
drawn from recent events, the book itself has
changed in ways that are both significant and
subtle. Two new chapters have been added, with a
discussion of globalization replacing the "Canada
and the Americas" chapter. The merging of the
environment and energy chapters is based on an
analysis of the monumental issues surrounding
global climate change.
Along with change there is enough continuity in the
book's structure that instructors who have used
earlier editions will find an approach that is
reassuring and familiar as well as fresh and
thought-provoking. As in previous editions, Getting
Started IV is divided into exploration of key
social issues in three major sections. Each
concludes with a more reflective chapter that draws
readers' attention to the tools available to social
analysts, and the skills they have developed as
they make their way through the book.
In this edition the chapter "Welcome to Social
Analysis" uses an updated look at the economy and
culture of coffee to introduce the questioning
awareness of society that runs through the book.
This is followed by four chapters grouped under the
general heading "Issues in the Everyday." This
basic needs section includes chapters on health,
housing, food (the ever-popular supermarket as
market metaphor chapter) and the job market.A
second reflective chapter, "Social Analysis Again,"
helps readers shift their focus from our immediate
experience as individuals, to the world in which
people and communities are located. The natural
environment, globalization, and new technology are
addressed in this set of issue chapters under the
heading "The World Around Us."
The next transition chapter, "Media and Ideology,"
explores the ways that mass media represent, shape,
and often distort our understanding of the issues
that require social analysis. Looking at how this
happens, especially the role played by already
popular stereotypes and commonly held prejudices
about how the world works, this chapter shows how
some groups of people are more misrepresented or
under-represented in the media than others.
The next set of issue chapters, "People and
Perspectives," considers the way in which Issues in
the Everyday are experienced by three groups of
people often ignored or dismissed: old people,
Native people, and women. Heeding the way they see
things tells us not only about their lives but also
presents us with ways of looking at the world we
all share. These perspectives offer social analysts
possibilities for understanding the world in richer
ways that in turn may suggest responses to social
problems that would not have otherwise occurred to
the reader.
The concluding chapter examines how social analysis
is connected to social action in a world where the
deluge of information and the enormity of problems
can overwhelm individual citizens, students, and
instructors alike. The content and consequences of
analysis can include victories, not just setbacks.
Getting Started IV examines impediments to
analysis, priorities, and political power, and
steps beyond social analysis.
Against this background it appears that, contrary
to Mrs. Thatcher's dictum (There Is No
Alternative), social analysis can help the reader
see beyond an approach that emphasizes individual
solutions. With a nod to C. Wright Mills in its
examination of the polarized job market, Getting
Started IV explains that--unlike private
troubles--issues of this kind are public
matters.
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"The supermarket chapter is a really good way of
looking at different sociological approaches.
Interpretive sociology looks at our experiences in
the store, advertising and manipulation. Who is at
the checkout gets at women's issues and work."
--instructor, University of New Brunswick
"It's clear and to the point. The thing on
supermarkets just blew their minds. They had no
idea about how few companies were involved int he
food system. That raised some WONDERFUL discussion.
We could take political economy theory and
communications theory using that issue and play
with it a lot."
--Margaret Malone, RN, PhD., Associate
Professor, School of Nursing, Ryerson University
What
more people have had to say about the 4th
Edition
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