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Product Description The world is at our fingertips, but understanding what is going on has never been more daunting. Garth Massey’s Ways of Social Change is a primer for making sense of both rapidly moving events and the cultural and structural forces on which social life is built, while teaching critical thinking skills needed to understand social change. With an approach that is fresh, timely, challenging, and engaging, Ways of Social Change shows students how social change is both a lived experience and the result of our actions in the world. It invites the reader into the realm of social science, where clarification, understanding, and inquiry provide for both informed opinions and a path to effective involvement. The core of the book focuses on five forces that powerfully influence the direction, scope and speed of social change: science and technology, social movements, war and revolution, large corporations, and the state. A concluding chapter encourages students to examine their own perspectives and offers ways to engage in social change, now and in their lifetime. About the Author Garth Massey (PhD, Indiana University-Bloomington) is Professor Emeritus at the University of Wyoming where he was Director of International Studies (1998-2008) and a faculty member in Sociology (1974-2008). He has been a visiting professor at the University of Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania (1979-80), the University of Zagreb, Yugoslavia (1986-88), the University of Gödöllö, Hungary (1993-4), Flinders University, Australia (2002), Truman Institute, Israel (2003), and taught in London (1998). His research has been published in the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, and The American Sociological Review. In addition to Ways of Social Change, he authored Subsistence and Change: Lessons of Agropastoralism in Somalia (Westview) and edits Readings for Sociology (W.W.Norton). He currently lives in Portland, Oregon, writing and working on Indian voting rights.