Description: Human beings are hierarchical animals. Always and everywhere, people have developed social ranking systems. These differ dramatically in how they are organized, but the underlying causal mechanisms that create and sustain them are the same
Brief description:
Melvyn L. Fein is professor of sociology at Kennesaw State University in Georgia and is the editor of the Journal of Public and Professional Sociology.
Review Quotes:
"Starting from a position that takes as given a liberal, "neo-Marxist" orientation in the social sciences, Fein (Kennesaw State Univ.) argues that this has wrongly shifted focus from the scientific study of hierarchies in human societies to philosophical and moralistic construction of inequalities, and seeks to recuperate a scientific view of hierarchy as innately human, probably biologically determined. Those who see conservative values as marginalized and penalized in contemporary academia will find resonance with these arguments.... Recommended."
--F. W. Fleach, Choice