Families Without Fatherhood - Softcover

Dennis, Norman; Erdos, George

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1903386039 ISBN 13: 9781903386033

Publisher: Civitas/Inst for the Study of, 2000

Synopsis

The authors argue that the traditional family system developed to equip children for their own eventual adult responsibilities, but they present evidence that since the 1960s there has been a weakening of these norms with damaging consequences.

This Third Edition reproduces the now-classic 1993 text and adds an Afterword by Professor Peter Saunders, which updates the analysis and the statistics.

About this title

About the Author:

Norman Dennis, who was Reader in Social Studies at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, has been a Rockefeller Fellow, Ford Fellow, Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto, California, Leverhulme Fellow, and Visiting Fellow at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. With Professor A.H. Halsey he is author of English Ethical Socialism, Clarendon Press, 1988. The Institute for the Study of Civil Society published Rising Crime and the Dismembered Family, 1993 and The Invention of Permanent Poverty, 1997. He edited and with Detective Superintendent Ray Mallon contributed two chapters to Zero Tolerance: Policing a Free Society, 1997 and contributed 'Beautiful Theories, Brutal Facts: the welfare state and sexual liberation' to Welfare, Work and Poverty, 2000, edited by David Smith. He is also well known for his study of a Yorkshire coal-mining town, Coal Is Our Life (with Cliff Slaughter and Fernando Henriques), Eyre and Spottiswood, 1956, and two studies of bureaucracy and politics as they affected the working-class district of his birth, Millfield, Sunderland, People and Planning, Faber and Faber, 1970, and Public Participation and Planners' Blight, Faber and Faber, 1972. He has been a Sunderland city councillor, and is active in his local Labour party. He is currently studying the struggle between the bureaucratic, political, academic and media advocates of family, drug and educational permissiveness in Z|rich and one of their most important opponents, a Z|rich citizen's organization called the VPM. He lives in Sunderland. He is married, with two children and three grandchildren.

Dr George Erdos was born in 1946 in Hungary, and spent his formative years there. He left in 1964. He finished his secondary education in Germany. He then studied psychology at the universities of Frankfurt, New Hampshire, Bar-Ilan, Mainz and Cambridge. He settled in England and is currently lecturer in psychology at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He experienced communism directly, and through his German relatives he experienced fascism indirectly. He saw that in times of growing crime and disorder people can be brought to abandon their civil liberties for the sake of security. From 1985 he worked on the Educational Opportunities programme run by Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. Its basis was that, in the course of studying for and by obtaining a university degree, the African-American male would assimilate his conduct to that of the white middle-class male and be enabled to enjoy success in American terms. Although the programme was targeted at African-American men, it was actually utilised with enthusiasm by the African-American women participants. Changes taking place at that time in the culture and conduct of white middle-class men stimulated Dr Erdos' interest in the role of the male in English and American society. Dr Erdos is an adherent of ethical socialism, in the sense given the term in English Ethical Socialism. He is married with three children.

A.H. Halsey is Emeritus Professor, University of Oxford; and Emeritus Fellow of Nuffield College. He is the author of numerous books on sociology and social policy, including Origins and Destinations: Family, Class, and Education in Modern Britain, with A.F. Heath and J.M. Ridge, 1980; Change in British Society, 3rd edition, 1986; and English Ethical Socialism, with Norman Dennis, 1988. He edited, with Jerome Karabel, Power and Ideology in Education, 1977.

Peter Saunders is professor of sociology at the University of Sussex, but is currently on a two-year secondment as research manager at the Australian Institute of Family Studies in Melbourne. He has published ten books in the areas of urban sociology, social inequality and social policy, and has held visiting academic positions in the USA, Germany and New Zealand as well as Australia. Recently he has been working on youth welfare dependency and on issues surrounding the reform of

Review:

...interesting precisely because its authors ... are able to break through both left and right knee-jerk responses. -- The Guardian

For a book that opens out argument, rather than just dishes it out, read Norman Dennis. -- Times Literary Supplement

Norman Dennis, George Erdos and A.H. Halsey, have put a radical back-to-basics cat among the status-quo welfare pigeons. -- The Economist

About this edition

• Publisher: Civitas/Inst for the Study of
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1903386039
• ISBN 13: 9781903386033
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 133