Peter Adler – författare

Drugs and the American Dream presents an up-to-date anthology of chiefly contemporary readings that explore the myriad sociological correlates of licit and illicit drug use in the United States. Unique approach to the topic that offers an organizing theme of sociological concepts-age, social class, ethnicity, gender, as well as societal response to drug use including drug education, treatment, and policy.The book is interdisciplinary in terms of approach, making it useful in a variety of contexts.Includes a wide array of ethnographic articles that place reader directly into the perspectives of drug users through their own voicesBrief framing introductions to each article provide "interconnective tissue," guiding the student to the heart of what's important in the piece that follows.Offers a balanced approach to various substances-tobacco, alcohol, prescription drugs, and illegal drugs.Provides students with a realistic perspective on the extent of substance use in American society as well as a critical appreciation of the real versus imagined harms associated with use of various substances.

Resorts have become important to American society and its economy; one in eight Americans is now employed by the tourism industry. Yet despite the ubiquity of hotels, little has been written about those who labor there. Drawing on eight years of participant observation and in-depth interviews, the renowned ethnographers Patricia A. Adler and Peter Adler reveal the occupational culture and lifestyles of workers at five luxury Hawaiian resorts.These resorts employ a workforce that is diverse in gender, class, ethnicity, and nationality. Hawaiian resort workers, like those in nearly all resorts, consist of four groups. New immigrants hold difficult and dirty low-status jobs for little pay. Locals provide an authentic Polynesian flavor for guests, a ready pool of youthful high-turnover employees, and a population trapped in a place that offers few occupational alternatives. Managers tend to be middle-class, college-educated young and middle-aged men from the mainland whose lifestyles are occupationally transient. Seekers, mostly young, white, and from the mainland as well, escape to paradise seeking adventure, warmth, extreme sports, or some alternate life experiences.The Adlers describe the work, lives, and careers of these four groups that labor in organizations that never close, with shifts scheduled around the clock and around the year. Paradise Laborers adds to the growing interest in the global flow of labor, as these immigrant workers display different trends in gendered opportunities and mobility than those exhibited by other groups. The authors propose a political economy of tourist labor in which they compare the different expectations and rewards of organizations, employees, and local labor markets.

Resorts have become important to American society and its economy; one in eight Americans is now employed by the tourism industry. Yet despite the ubiquity of hotels, little has been written about those who labor there. Drawing on eight years of participant observation and in-depth interviews, the renowned ethnographers Patricia A. Adler and Peter Adler reveal the occupational culture and lifestyles of workers at five luxury Hawaiian resorts.These resorts employ a workforce that is diverse in gender, class, ethnicity, and nationality. Hawaiian resort workers, like those in nearly all resorts, consist of four groups. New immigrants hold difficult and dirty low-status jobs for little pay. Locals provide an authentic Polynesian flavor for guests, a ready pool of youthful high-turnover employees, and a population trapped in a place that offers few occupational alternatives. Managers tend to be middle-class, college-educated young and middle-aged men from the mainland whose lifestyles are occupationally transient. Seekers, mostly young, white, and from the mainland as well, escape to paradise seeking adventure, warmth, extreme sports, or some alternate life experiences.The Adlers describe the work, lives, and careers of these four groups that labor in organizations that never close, with shifts scheduled around the clock and around the year. Paradise Laborers adds to the growing interest in the global flow of labor, as these immigrant workers display different trends in gendered opportunities and mobility than those exhibited by other groups. The authors propose a political economy of tourist labor in which they compare the different expectations and rewards of organizations, employees, and local labor markets.

In settings involving subcultures and deviant groups, the ethnographer must assume an active role in securing the trust of the group, thus becoming a participant in his or her object of study. The choice of role-from detached observer to complete member-affects the types of data used and how the ethnography is written. Drawing upon their own experiences as well as several contemporary ethnographic studies, Patricia and Peter Adler discuss the problems and advantages presented by each level of involvement in group study. Written for both the novice and the professional field researcher, this volume is a superb supplement for research methods courses. "An exciting book that portrays the traditions of social science field work in a creative, enlightening, nondogmatic manner. By maintaining a critical eye towards a priori ipistemological tenets while drawing on diverse examples of research to support each assertion, the Adlers provide both the experienced researcher and the interested novice a valuable assessment of fieldwork and strategies for conducting such research." --Sociological Inquiry "Written clearly and concisely enough to be used with undergraduates, it offers the more sophisticated reader ideas and concepts that will be useful for further theoretical and empirical investigations of social action." --Urban Life "Provides[s] numerous examples of good research that will help students better understand what it means to be a qualitative researcher and to use one's self as a research informant. . . . Adler and Adler's sound grasp of the literature provides an excellent history and philosophy of field roles in sociology. . . . This contribution to qualitative research methodology is a creative synthesis of a large literature." --Qualitative Studies in Education

Peer Power seeks to explode existing myths about children's friendships, power and popularity, and the gender chasm between elementary school boys and girls. Based on eight years of intensive insider participant observation in their own children's community, Peter and Patti Adler discuss the vital components of the lives of preadolescents, popularity, friendships, cliques, social status, social isolation, loyalty, bullying, boy-girl relationships, and afterschool activities. They describe how friendships shift and change, how people are drawn into groups and excluded from them, how clique leaders maintain their power and popularity, and how individuals' social experiences and feelings about themselves differ from the top of the pecking order to the bottom. In so doing, the Adlers focus their attention on the peer culture of the children themselves and the way this culture extracts and modifies elements from adult culture. Children's peer culture, as it is nourished in those spaces where grown ups cannot penetrate, stands between individual children and the larger adult society. As such, it is a mediator and shaper, influencing the way children collectively interpret their surroundings and deal with the common problems they face.The Adlers explore some of the patterns that develop in this social space, noting both the differences in boys' and girls' gendered cultures and the overlap in many social dynamics, afterschool activities, role behaviour, romantic inclinations and social stratification. For example, children's participation in adult-organized afterschool activities - a now-prominent feature of many American children's social experience - has profound implications for their socialization and development, moving them away from the negotiated, spontaneous character of play into the formal systems of adult norms and values at ever-younger ages. When they retreat from adults, however, they still display distinctive peer group dynamics, forging strong ingroup/outgroup differentiation, loyalty and identification. Peer culture thus contains informal social mechanisms through which children create their social order, determine their place and identity, and develop positive and negative feelings about themselves. Studying children's peer culture is thus valuable as it reveals not only how this subculture parallels the adult world but also how it differs from it.

Choice's Outstanding Academic Title list for 20132013 Honorable Mention for the Distinguished Book Award presented by the Midwest Sociological SocietyHonorable Mention for the Charles H. Cooley Award for Outstanding Book from the Society for the Study of Symbolic InteractionIlluminates the misunderstood meaning of self-injury in the 21st centuryCutting, burning, branding, and bone-breaking are all types of self-injury, or the deliberate, non-suicidal destruction of one's own body tissue, a practice that emerged from obscurity in the 1990s and spread dramatically as a typical behavior among adolescents. Long considered a suicidal gesture, The Tender Cut argues instead that self-injury is often a coping mechanism, a form of teenage angst, an expression of group membership, and a type of rebellion, converting unbearable emotional pain into manageable physical pain.Based on the largest, qualitative, non-clinical population of self-injurers ever gathered, noted ethnographers Patricia and Peter Adler draw on 150 interviews with self-injurers from all over the world, along with 30,000-40,000 internet posts in chat rooms and communiqués. Their 10-year longitudinal research follows the practice of self-injury from its early days when people engaged in it alone and did not know others, to the present, where a subculture has formed via cyberspace that shares similar norms, values, lore, vocabulary, and interests. An important portrait of a troubling behavior, The Tender Cut illuminates the meaning of self-injury in the 21st century, its effects on current and former users, and its future as a practice for self-discovery or a cry for help.

Choice's Outstanding Academic Title list for 20132013 Honorable Mention for the Distinguished Book Award presented by the Midwest Sociological SocietyHonorable Mention for the Charles H. Cooley Award for Outstanding Book from the Society for the Study of Symbolic InteractionIlluminates the misunderstood meaning of self-injury in the 21st centuryCutting, burning, branding, and bone-breaking are all types of self-injury, or the deliberate, non-suicidal destruction of one's own body tissue, a practice that emerged from obscurity in the 1990s and spread dramatically as a typical behavior among adolescents. Long considered a suicidal gesture, The Tender Cut argues instead that self-injury is often a coping mechanism, a form of teenage angst, an expression of group membership, and a type of rebellion, converting unbearable emotional pain into manageable physical pain.Based on the largest, qualitative, non-clinical population of self-injurers ever gathered, noted ethnographers Patricia and Peter Adler draw on 150 interviews with self-injurers from all over the world, along with 30,000-40,000 internet posts in chat rooms and communiqués. Their 10-year longitudinal research follows the practice of self-injury from its early days when people engaged in it alone and did not know others, to the present, where a subculture has formed via cyberspace that shares similar norms, values, lore, vocabulary, and interests. An important portrait of a troubling behavior, The Tender Cut illuminates the meaning of self-injury in the 21st century, its effects on current and former users, and its future as a practice for self-discovery or a cry for help.

This is the fifth volume in a series which endeavours to organize, centralize and present current ideas and research in the field of child development, viewed with a sociological perspective. It contains three main sections: early childhood care; children's peer groups; and, family influence. Papers examine early childhood care; non-parental child care environments; differences in preschool cognitive skills by type of care; quality of centre care and cognitive outcomes: differences by family income; parent involvement in early childhood education and day care; negotiations of norms and sanctions among children; the attainment of peer status: gender and power relationships in the elementary school; social status and interactional competence in families; family and friend relationships of only children: a study of Chinese adults; women and money: cultural contrasts.

This is the fifth volume in a series which endeavours to organize, centralize and present current ideas and research in the field of child development, viewed with a sociological perspective. It contains three main sections: early childhood care; children's peer groups; and, family influence. Papers examine early childhood care; non-parental child care environments; differences in preschool cognitive skills by type of care; quality of centre care and cognitive outcomes: differences by family income; parent involvement in early childhood education and day care; negotiations of norms and sanctions among children; the attainment of peer status: gender and power relationships in the elementary school; social status and interactional competence in families; family and friend relationships of only children: a study of Chinese adults; women and money: cultural contrasts.

Churchill i Talarstolen är en detaljrik och initierad skildring av de krafter som formade en av världshistoriens största talare. Läsaren får stifta bekantskap med de miljöer, människor och tankeströmningar som påverkade Churchills retoriska stil. Boken beskriver dessutom Churchills arbetsteknik när han förberedde sina tal. Den är samtidigt en skildring av en unik människas roll under några av världshistoriens mest dramatiska ögonblick. Så här beskriver författaren själv varför han skrev boken: Churchills personlighet, levnadsöde och retoriska förmåga har fascinerat mig under hela mitt vuxna liv. Vad kom hans retoriska kraft ifrån? Var hans förmåga till stor del medfödd? Vilka ideal, människor och personliga erfarenheter formade talaren Churchill? Från början hade jag tänkt att dessa frågor skulle bilda stommen i en artikel som en tidning hade beställt, men jag fann snart att ämnet krävde vidare ramar. Det blev således en bok. Jag hoppas att den skall göra Churchill rättvisa och bjuda alla som är intresserade av ämnet på stimulerande läsning. Författaren Peter Adler är i grunden statsvetare, men har i drygt 30 år i egenskap av journalist, copywriter, talskrivare och retorisk coach haft tillämpad retorik som yrke. Han är eftersökt som föreläsare och har under ett antal år anlitats som gästföreläsare på Lunds Universitet. Intresset för Churchill som retoriskt fenomen har han fördjupat genom studier vid Oxford University och kontakt med de globala nätverk och akademiska institutioner som är inriktade på Churchills liv och verk. Han har också skrivit ett antal artiklar om retorik i landets största dagstidningar.