Studies the direct sales industry, the social and cultural factors that have given rise to direct selling and the dynamics of its organizational life.

Capitalism in Contrasting Cultures.

Harvard Business School Emeritus professor Richard S. Tedlow examines how the role of the business leader has changed since World War II. A handful of individuals have helped transform the face of modern-day leadership, making charisma essential to the role. Through Tedlow's in-depth accounts of modern business history, we see how charismatic leadership enables the creation of revolutionary new products and makes it possible for former outsiders to attain power and influence. Tedlow shows the skills and tools necessary to oversee a successful business and become a charismatic business leader.

What is the work that miracles do in American Charismatic Evangelicalism? How can miracles be unanticipated and yet worked for? And finally, what do miracles tell us about other kinds of Christianity and even the category of religion? A Diagram for Fire engages with these questions in a detailed sociocultural ethnographic study of the Vineyard, an American Evangelical movement that originated in Southern California. This movement is known worldwide for its intense musical forms of worship and for advocating the belief that all Christians can perform biblical-style miracles. Setting the miracle as both a strength and a challenge to institutional cohesion and human planning, this book situates the miracle as a fundamentally social means of producing change—surprise and the unexpected used to reimagine and reconfigure the will. Jon Bialecki shows how this configuration of the miraculous shapes typical Pentecostal and Charismatic religious practices as well as music, reading, economic choices, and conservative and progressive political imaginaries.

In the context of commodification, material culture has particular properties hitherto considered irrelevant or neglected. First, the market is a spatial structure, assigning special properties to the things offered: the goods and commodities. Secondly, the market defines a principle of dealing with things, including them in some contexts, excluding them from others. The contributions to Market as Place and Space address a variety of aspects of markets within the framework of archaeological and anthropological case studies and with a special focus on the indicators of practices attached to the commodities and their valuation.

Beauty seems simple; we know it when we see it. But of course our ideas about what is attractive are influenced by a broad range of social and economic factors, and in Beauty and Business leading historians set out to provide this important cultural context. How have retailers shaped popular consciousness about beauty? And how, in turn, have cultural assumptions influenced the commodification of beauty? The contributors here look to particular examples in order to address these questions, turning their attention to topics ranging from the social role of the African American hair salon, and the sexual dynamics of bathing suits and shirtcollars, to the deeper meanings of corsets and what the Avon lady tells us about changing American values. As a whole, these essays force us to reckon with the ways that beauty has been made, bought, and sold in modern America.

Sigmund Freud is widely known for his extra-ordinary contribution to the world of psychology, especially to the domain of psychoanalysis. But he is less known as a social theorist. His contribution in this area is quite extensive, important, and relevant for understanding of many social facts, including the delicate process of social change. His utterings are worthwhile, reasonable, and scientific to a great extent. Freud is not valuable only for his theoretical activities, but he is also inevitable for locating a better profile of human behavior, society, culture, and civilization. By exhibiting the fact that neither the unconscious was absolute, eternal, or unalterable nor the conscious, he emphasized the idea that the reality and psyche were interdependent. Social circumstances and psyche shaped and conditioned each other; neither could grow in isolation. Freud pointed out that there was a conflict within each individual and that was the fundamental feature of 'socialization' into every societyan unavoidable 'Repression', characterizing human life. Repression occupies a major area in Freudian literature, so does the idea of social distance. Social distance, according to Freud, is not only a biological entity, but also is a functional entity. Social distance, as is adhered to by the Marxian dialectical materialists as being the creation of private property and its disproportionate ownership, identified as a symbol of superiority in any such spheres as power, prestige, privilege, etc, is considered to be an inevitable phenomenon in human existence and its movement forward.