Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World - Softcover

Rosenberg, Tina

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393341836 ISBN 13: 9780393341836

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012

Synopsis

"Empowering . . . sweepingly ambitious . . . . Rosenberg's case studies are as different as they are fascinating . . . A brilliant book." ―Abraham Verghese, Newsweek

A winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, Tina Rosenberg has spent her career tackling some of the world’s hardest problems. Now, through striking stories from around the globe, Rosenberg shows how positive peer pressure can change people’s behavior and solve seemingly intractable social quandaries. In every case, pioneering social entrepreneurs throw out the old models for social change in favor of humanity’s most powerful and abundant resource: our connections with one another. The result is one of those rare books that will not only revolutionize the way you look at the world but also give you the power to change it.

About this title

About the Author:

Tina Rosenberg, the winner of a MacArthur grant, is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. Her last book, The Haunted Land, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. She lives in New York City.

From Publishers Weekly:

The ability of peer groups to affect behavioral change takes on positive connotations when applied to social activism in this ambitious, evocatively written treatment of what the author calls "the social cure." Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Rosenberg (The Haunted Land), recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant, explores join-the-club strategies for progressive causes: South Africa's AIDS-awareness group, loveLife; Serbia's student-led anti-Milosevic democracy movement, Otpor; India's rural health-worker program in Jamkhed; a Christian faith-building community in suburban Chicago; and a teen-driven antismoking campaign in Florida. Overcoming the limited efficacy of the usual models—for instance, information-dispersing approaches to behavioral modification—these cases all successfully employ peer groups and in-group lifestyle campaigns in service of their respective social and political goals. Results range from decreases in teen smoking to the overthrow of oppressive governments. Citing a Brixton-based drop-in center aimed at young British Muslims, she explores the degree to which the fight against terrorism might itself be amenable to a peer group approach. Rosenberg's immersion in the issues and considered reflections on the power of peer groups to shape personal and social action brings an urgency to a strategy as old as any in civilization's arsenal. (Mar.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0393341836
• ISBN 13: 9780393341836
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 432