Power, Money and the People: The Making of Modern Austin

Twenty years ago Austin, Texas was a small, unassuming city whose greatest distinctions were being the state capital and the home of the University of Texas. Today Austin is touted in such places as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times as one of the fastest-growing cities in America. Its population shot up from 186,000 in 1960 to more than 700,000 in 1987. It is home to such notable companies as IBM, Motorola, Lockhead, and Tracor, and in 1983 Austin beat out scores of American cities to attract the glamorous high tech research consortium known as MCC.

Anthony M. Orum is Professor of Sociology and Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Previously he taught in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin for fifteen years (1972-1986). Besides this book on Austin, he has also written two other books on cities: City-Building in America (Westview Press, 1995) and, with Xiangming Chen, The World of Cities: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (Blackwell Publishers, 2002). He is the Inaugural Editor of a new quarterly journal, cosponsored by the American Sociological Association and its Community and Urban Sociology section, City & Community. He has also written on methods in the social sciences, including, Joe Feagin, Anthony Orum, and Gideon Sjoberg (coeditors), A Case for the Case Study (University of North Carolina Press, 1991) and, on politics, including Anthony Orum, Introduction to Political Sociology, 4th edition (Prentice-Hall, 2001). Presently he is involved in two new projects, one, with Xiangming Chen, a study of the impact of globalization on Shanghai, and, the other, a study of the ways in which the latest generation of American immigrants has reshaped cities like Chicago.