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

Tina Rosenberg

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1848313004 ISBN 13: 9781848313002

Publisher: Icon Books, 2011

Synopsis

In the style of Nudge or The Spirit Level - a groundbreaking book that will change the way you look at the world. Tina Rosenberg has spent her career tackling some of the world's hardest problems. The Haunted Land, her searing book on how Eastern Europe faced the crimes of Communism, was awarded both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in the US. In Join the Club, she identifies a brewing social revolution that is changing the way people live, based on harnessing the positive force of peer pressure. Her stories of peer power in action show how it has reduced teen smoking in the United States, made villages in India healthier and more prosperous, helped minority students get top grades in college calculus, and even led to the fall of Slobodan Milosevic. She tells how creative social entrepreneurs are starting to use peer pressure to accomplish goals as personal as losing weight and as global as fighting terrorism. Inspiring and engrossing, Join the Club explains how we can better our world through humanity's most powerful and abundant resource: our connections with one another.

About this title

About the Author:

Tina Rosenberg is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a former member of the Times editorial board. Her book The Haunted Land won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award

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: Icon Books
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1848313004
• ISBN 13: 9781848313002
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400