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The Hinge is an exploration of the way in which vibrant groups and established local communities help to create bonds within civil society and lead to the development of institutional commitments. Drawing from his extensive background in social psychology and micro-sociology, Gary Alan Fine provides a richly detailed theoretical argument about why and how social relations are integral to political life. Fine argues that scholars must incorporate essential building blocks in understanding the development of allegiance to society, drawing on the existence of collaboration, friendships, associational life, place-based action, conflict, social control, and the extension of these relations through social media. Core theoretical concepts that organize the development of civic cultures are the interaction order (how behavior is stabilized, given a set of local norms and expectations), group culture, circuits of action (the routinization of behavior patterns), and tiny publics (those communities in which belonging leads to participation in civil society). In each chapter, Fine presents three detailed case studies that reveal how the building block concepts have been utilized in social science research. The book’s central contribution is in making the case that rather than conceiving of societal attachment only through the existence of macro-level structures, focusing on the meso-level of sites of interaction is essential for appreciating how social relations and expectations of interaction shape and promote stable societies.

This book offers a sociological explanation of urban greening as a contemporary global phenomenon, and of widespread perceptions of green as a “good” for cities. Urban-environmental scholarship dominated by well-known cities at notorious moments of urbanism—paradigmatically, New York City’s 19th century Central Park—has understood such efforts as reactions to urban pathologies such as slums and density. Instead, the book examines Germany’s Ruhr Valley, a polycentric industrial region recurrently “greened” despite its ample open space, to explain the common sense of these associations and their persistence across time and place. It argues that greening is a social practice made possible by an imaginary of nature as an indirect or moral good, called urbanized nature, that is an outcome of urbanization processes rather than a reaction against cities. It traces urbanized nature’s emergence in the Ruhr in the early twentieth century and shows how it has motivated greening, carried out with the goal of creating ideal cities and citizens, across three moments: industrialization in the late 19th century, the postwar crisis of democracy in the 1960s, and postindustrial economic renewal in the 1990s. Across these moments, it also identifies similarities in how this imaginary causes greening to play out, finding that greening is a practice of remaking cities rather than an escape from urban life, and that shared beliefs in nature’s universal benefit condition greening projects to be understood as investments in the public good, even as they reinscribe existing inequalities in public space and distribute their goods unevenly.

History leaves its imprint on human lives for generations to come. When we think of radical changes that have transformed America, our minds often wander first to the fifties and the sixties: the Civil Rights Movement, changing gender roles, the rise in educational and economic opportunities. But these were not the only changes that shaped our world. Living on the Edge shows that rapid social change and uncertainty also defined the lives of Americans born at the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing from the iconic Berkeley Guidance Study, this book reveals the hopes, struggles, and daily lives of the 1900 Generation as they experienced major swings of history at key junctures in life: migration as children, World War I as teens or young adults, the Great Depression while raising young children, and World War II in their prime working years and as they launched youth into adulthood. Along the way, they began to make profound revisions to gendered expectations for life scripts. Most notable among the themes of this generation is how relevant and relatable its lives and experiences are today, despite the gap of a century. From the reorganization of marriage and family roles and relationships to strategies for adapting to a dramatically changing economy, the challenges faced by this earlier generation echo our own time. Living on the Edge offers not just an intimate glimpse into the history of America, but the life-long experiences of a generation remarkably kindred to the present day.