Monica Prasad
Biographic Data
| ID | 3685684 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Monica Prasad |
| GIVEN NAMES | Monica |
| FAMILY NAME | Prasad |
| SIGNATURE | PRASAD M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Northwestern University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9674-560X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 294 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Problem-Solving Sociology of Development
The sociology of development has not always focused on trying to address or ameliorate poverty. In this paper we cast the foundations for a problem-solving sociology of development by identifying three problem-solving traditions in the subdiscipline: the developmental states tradition, a new tradition focusing on collective action in pursuit of redistribution, and the coping strategies tradition. We show how the articles in this special issue on …
Proto-Bureaucracies
The emergence of bureaucracy is often described as occurring at a particular historical period in a society, as a result of the pressures of war, the improvement of communication and transportation technologies, or societywide cultural changes. But recently many scholars have drawn attention to examples of meritocratic bureaucracies in societies otherwise organized according to patrimonial logics, what I call proto-bureaucracies. In this article …
Peace by committee: State, society, and the control of communal violence in Bhagalpur, Bihar
Why do communal provocations generate violence in some moments but not in others? Drawing on 52 interviews and archival and ethnographic evidence from Bhagalpur, Bihar, we develop a theoretical framework to explain how communal conflict might be controlled. In Bhagalpur, we find that a state-society partnership has helped the city to avoid active violence since 1989. Civil society elites gain and maintain local followings by drawing on their acce…
Bureaucratic Quality and Social Development
Although a long tradition of research shows that the correlation between economic growth and well-being is imperfect, the sociology of development continues to focus on economic growth. In this paper we take a first step toward a sociology of social development by defining which indicators other than economic growth best capture different facets of citizen well-being, theorizing what social phenomena explain the variance in these indicators, and …
Problem-Solving Sociology: A Guide for Students
Problem-solving sociology attempts to use the traditions of sociological research to solve real-world problems, and uses the attempt to grapple with real-world problems as a way to reformulate understandings of society and renew or reinvent those traditions. This book provides advice for how to turn an interest in solving major social problems into research projects that begin to do so. The book provides suggested methods and tools, models of suc…
Pragmatism as Problem Solving
At the level of sociological practice a three-sided debate occurs in American sociology between the rationalist tradition, in which the goal is the better understanding of society; the emancipatory tradition, in which the goal is improvement of society; and the skeptical tradition, which argues that we cannot know if either our knowledge or our norms are correct, and therefore it is not possible to expect progress in either. Each of these strands…
Piketty and the Gilded Age
After Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century , comparing our era to the Gilded Age is no longer just a metaphor: Piketty argues that we never actually left the Gilded Age. The mid-twentieth-century period of lower inequality was a massive and perhaps unrepeatable exception to what Piketty sees as the natural tendencies toward inequality inherent in capitalist societies. But comparing our current period of relentless cuts in taxes an…
Approaches to Corruption: A Synthesis of the Scholarship
Starving the Beast: Ronald Reagan and the Tax Cut Revolution
Problem-Solving Sociology
Roaring Metropolis: Businessmen's Campaign for a Civic Welfare State
The elusive dream of progressives has been to get business on their side. Doesn't business have an interest in healthy, well-educated workers not distracted by economic anxiety? Shouldn't businesspeople therefore be interested in health care, education, and economic security for everyone? Over the last decades, scholars have explored in various ways the shifting positions of business on the welfare state in this country and others, and at nationa…
Mechanisms of the ‘Aid Curse’: Lessons from South Korea and Pakistan
Recently scholars have argued that, far from contributing to development, foreign aid hinders development. But in the 1960s the East Asian countries developed rapidly despite receiving large amounts of aid. To examine why aid seems to undermine development in some cases but not in others, we conduct a detailed comparison of the mechanisms of the ‘aid curse’ in South Korea and Pakistan. We show that South Korea saw astonishing levels of corruption…
American Exceptionalism and the Welfare State: The Revisionist Literature
Recent research has argued that the American welfare state is not necessarily smaller than the welfare state in other advanced industrial countries. Rather, it is organized on principles that make it seem smaller: Because it functions through tax expenditures and public–private partnerships, it is less visible than welfare states that operate on the principle of direct spending. This review summarizes the most important messages of this revisioni…
Walking the Line: The White Working Class and the Economic Consequences of Morality
Over one-third of the white working class in America vote for Republicans. Some scholars argue that these voters support Republican economic policies, while others argue that these voters' preferences on cultural and moral issues override their economic preferences. We draw on in-depth interviews with 120 white working-class voters to defend a broadly 'economic' interpretation: for this segment of voters, moral and cultural appeals have an econom…
The End of Laissez-Faire? On the Durability of Embedded Neoliberalism by Damien Cahill
Reviewed by: The End of Laissez-Faire? On the Durability of Embedded Neoliberalism by Damien Cahill Monica Prasad Damien Cahill. The End of Laissez-Faire? On the Durability of Embedded Neoliberalism. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2014. xii + 197 pages. ISBN: 978-1781000274, $110.00 (cloth). Damien Cahill asks whether the recent upheavals of the financial crisis spell the end of neoliberalism; he concludes that they do not, because of the continui…
Romain D. Huret. American Tax Resisters
Elsie de Wolfe, by many accounts the founder of the profession of interior design, became rich through her efforts in the early twentieth century. When her wealth brought her into the crosshairs of the new income tax law of 1913, she bristled: how could women be taxed when they did not have the right to vote? How could this be anything other than taxation without representation? The story of how the women's suffrage movement became entangled with…
Globalization and the American State: The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire
Taxes and Fiscal Sociology
This article reviews recent research in fiscal sociology. We specifically examine contributions to the study of taxation that illuminate core issues in the sociology of contemporary capitalism, including the causes of poverty and inequality in rich countries and of inequality between rich and poor countries. Research on developed countries suggests that tax policy changes are important for explaining rising income inequality, tax policies may str…
The Political Economy of Transnational Tax Reform: The Shoup Mission to Japan in Historical Context
This volume of essays explores the history of the US tax mission to Japan during the occupation following World War II. Under General MacArthur, economist Carl S. Shoup led the mission with the charge of framing a tax system for Japan designed to strengthen democracy and accelerate economic recovery. The volume examines the sources, conduct and effects of the mission and situates the mission within the history of international financial and fisca…
The Land of Too Much: American Abundance and the Paradox of Poverty
The Land of Too Much presents a simple but powerful hypothesis that addresses three questions: Why does the United States have more poverty than any other developed country? Why did it experience an attack on state intervention starting in the 1980s, known today as the neoliberal revolution? And why did it recently suffer the greatest economic meltdown in seventy-five years? Although the United States is often considered a liberal, laissez-faire …
The Popular Origins of Neoliberalism in the Reagan Tax Cut of 1981
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the 'Save PDF' action button
Tax “Expenditures” and Welfare States: A Critique
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
New Fiscal Sociology: Taxation in Comparative and Historical Perspective
Taxation and the worlds of welfare
We use Luxembourg Income Study data to compare the progressivity of the tax structure in the U.S. and Europe.LIS data allow a comparison of tax rates that attempts to take different starting rates, thresholds, and exemptions into account.Our study supports the argument others have made that the US has more progressive taxes than the European countries.However, we find that Britain's tax structure is more regressive than those of the continental w…
The New Fiscal Sociology: Taxation in Comparative and Historical Perspective
The New Fiscal Sociology: Taxation in Comparative and Historical Perspective demonstrates that the study of taxation can illuminate fundamental dynamics of modern societies. The sixteen essays in this collection offer a state-of-the-art survey of the new fiscal sociology that is emerging at the intersection of sociology, history, political science, and law. The contributors include some of the foremost comparative historical scholars in these dis…
Taxation and the worlds of welfare
We use Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) data to compare the progressivity of the tax structure in the USA and Europe. LIS data allow a comparison of tax rates that attempts to take different starting rates, thresholds and exemptions into account. Our study supports the argument others have made that the USA has more progressive taxes than the European countries. However, we find that Britain's tax structure is more regressive than those of the conti…
Taxes and Fiscal Sociology
This article reviews recent research in fiscal sociology. We specifically examine contributions to the study of taxation that illuminate core issues in the sociology of contemporary capitalism, including the causes of poverty and inequality in rich countries and of inequality between rich and poor countries. Research on developed countries suggests that tax policy changes are important for explaining rising income inequality, tax policies may str…
The Origins of Tax Systems: A French-American Comparison
This article examines the origins of tax systems. Through a historical comparison of France and the United States, and analysis of several shadow cases, the article explains why the United States has relied more heavily on progressive income taxation than France, which has favored regressive sales taxes. This study traces the origins of these two tax systems to the early 20th century, arguing that decisions about tax structure were shaped by resi…
There Must Be a Reason: Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification
One of the most curious aspects of the 2004 presidential election was the strength and resilience of the belief among many Americans that Saddam Hussein was linked to the terrorist attacks of September 11. Scholars have suggested that this belief was the result of a campaign of false information and innuendo from the Bush administration. We call this the information environment explanation. Using a technique of 'challenge interviews' on a sample …
Why Is France So French? Culture, Institutions, and Neoliberalism, 1974-1981
French capitalism has changed in many ways in the last two decades, but France has not seen the extreme neoliberalism of Britain and the United States. The author first provides evidence that the French pattern is not caused by adherence to cultural traditions of egalitarianism. The author then uses historical and interview data to compare the French case with the American counterexample. The argument is that France has adopted a “pragmatic neoli…
The Morality of Market Exchange: Love, Money, and Contractual Justice
Prostitution as a cultural practice describes the line between what must be given as a gift and what may be exchanged as a commodity; an investigation of prostitution can therefore further our understanding of the ideological underpinnings of commodity exchange. This study uses interviews with prostitutes' clients to show how commodity exchange can be understood as being morally superior to gift exchange. The interviewees praise 'market exchange'…
The Undeserving Rich: “Moral Values” and the White Working Class 1
White working‐class citizens who vote for the Republican Party have been fodder for much political discussion and speculation recently, and a debate has arisen about the role that “moral values” played in the political decision making of this segment of voters. In this article, we defend a version of the moral values claim. We show that although the Republicans’ policies are unpopular, they are bundled with an overarching moral framework that is …
American Exceptionalism and the Welfare State: The Revisionist Literature
Recent research has argued that the American welfare state is not necessarily smaller than the welfare state in other advanced industrial countries. Rather, it is organized on principles that make it seem smaller: Because it functions through tax expenditures and public–private partnerships, it is less visible than welfare states that operate on the principle of direct spending. This review summarizes the most important messages of this revisioni…
The Popular Origins of Neoliberalism in the Reagan Tax Cut of 1981
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the 'Save PDF' action button
Pragmatism as Problem Solving
At the level of sociological practice a three-sided debate occurs in American sociology between the rationalist tradition, in which the goal is the better understanding of society; the emancipatory tradition, in which the goal is improvement of society; and the skeptical tradition, which argues that we cannot know if either our knowledge or our norms are correct, and therefore it is not possible to expect progress in either. Each of these strands…
Walking the Line: The White Working Class and the Economic Consequences of Morality
Over one-third of the white working class in America vote for Republicans. Some scholars argue that these voters support Republican economic policies, while others argue that these voters' preferences on cultural and moral issues override their economic preferences. We draw on in-depth interviews with 120 white working-class voters to defend a broadly 'economic' interpretation: for this segment of voters, moral and cultural appeals have an econom…
Approaches to Corruption: A Synthesis of the Scholarship
The Land of Too Much: American Abundance and the Paradox of Poverty
The Land of Too Much presents a simple but powerful hypothesis that addresses three questions: Why does the United States have more poverty than any other developed country? Why did it experience an attack on state intervention starting in the 1980s, known today as the neoliberal revolution? And why did it recently suffer the greatest economic meltdown in seventy-five years? Although the United States is often considered a liberal, laissez-faire …
Tax “Expenditures” and Welfare States: A Critique
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
"International Capital on "Silicon Plateau: Work and Control in India's Computer Industry
Journal Article International Capital on "Silicon Plateau": Work and Control in India's Computer Industry Get access Monica Prasad Monica Prasad University of Chicago Direct correspondence to Monica Prasad, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, 1126 E. 59th St., Chicago, IL 60637. E-mail: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Forces, Volume 77, Issue 2, December 1998…
Consumers of the World Unite: A Market-based Response to Sweatshops
Sweatshops are re-emerging across the globe. In the current neoliberal environment—which has unions, government protec tion of worker rights, and fair trade policies on the defensive—we propose a market-based strategy that relies on "conscientious con sumers" to slow the global race to the bottom. To assess whether the consumer market in the United States could provide the added revenues needed to lift workers in the southern hemisphere up and ou…
Taxation and the worlds of welfare
We use Luxembourg Income Study data to compare the progressivity of the tax structure in the U.S. and Europe.LIS data allow a comparison of tax rates that attempts to take different starting rates, thresholds, and exemptions into account.Our study supports the argument others have made that the US has more progressive taxes than the European countries.However, we find that Britain's tax structure is more regressive than those of the continental w…
Inequality and Prosperity: Social Europe vs. Liberal America
"International Capital on "Silicon Plateau: Work and Control in India's Computer Industry
Journal Article International Capital on "Silicon Plateau": Work and Control in India's Computer Industry Get access Monica Prasad Monica Prasad University of Chicago Direct correspondence to Monica Prasad, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, 1126 E. 59th St., Chicago, IL 60637. E-mail: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Forces, Volume 77, Issue 2, December 1998…
The Morality of Market Exchange: Love, Money, and Contractual Justice
Prostitution as a cultural practice describes the line between what must be given as a gift and what may be exchanged as a commodity; an investigation of prostitution can therefore further our understanding of the ideological underpinnings of commodity exchange. This study uses interviews with prostitutes' clients to show how commodity exchange can be understood as being morally superior to gift exchange. The interviewees praise 'market exchange'…
Consumers of the World Unite: A Market-based Response to Sweatshops
Sweatshops are re-emerging across the globe. In the current neoliberal environment—which has unions, government protec tion of worker rights, and fair trade policies on the defensive—we propose a market-based strategy that relies on "conscientious con sumers" to slow the global race to the bottom. To assess whether the consumer market in the United States could provide the added revenues needed to lift workers in the southern hemisphere up and ou…
Why Is France So French? Culture, Institutions, and Neoliberalism, 1974-1981
French capitalism has changed in many ways in the last two decades, but France has not seen the extreme neoliberalism of Britain and the United States. The author first provides evidence that the French pattern is not caused by adherence to cultural traditions of egalitarianism. The author then uses historical and interview data to compare the French case with the American counterexample. The argument is that France has adopted a “pragmatic neoli…
Consumers with a Conscience: Will they Pay More?
Most Americans say they will pay more for clothes not made in sweatshops. Is this just talk, or will they actually put their money where their mouth is? An in-store test of consumer behavior turns up some surprising results.
Inequality and Prosperity: Social Europe vs. Liberal America
The United States since 1980 - By Dean Baker
The New Fiscal Sociology: Taxation in Comparative and Historical Perspective
The New Fiscal Sociology: Taxation in Comparative and Historical Perspective demonstrates that the study of taxation can illuminate fundamental dynamics of modern societies. The sixteen essays in this collection offer a state-of-the-art survey of the new fiscal sociology that is emerging at the intersection of sociology, history, political science, and law. The contributors include some of the foremost comparative historical scholars in these dis…
The Undeserving Rich: “Moral Values” and the White Working Class 1
White working‐class citizens who vote for the Republican Party have been fodder for much political discussion and speculation recently, and a debate has arisen about the role that “moral values” played in the political decision making of this segment of voters. In this article, we defend a version of the moral values claim. We show that although the Republicans’ policies are unpopular, they are bundled with an overarching moral framework that is …
Taxation and the worlds of welfare
We use Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) data to compare the progressivity of the tax structure in the USA and Europe. LIS data allow a comparison of tax rates that attempts to take different starting rates, thresholds and exemptions into account. Our study supports the argument others have made that the USA has more progressive taxes than the European countries. However, we find that Britain's tax structure is more regressive than those of the conti…
There Must Be a Reason: Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification
One of the most curious aspects of the 2004 presidential election was the strength and resilience of the belief among many Americans that Saddam Hussein was linked to the terrorist attacks of September 11. Scholars have suggested that this belief was the result of a campaign of false information and innuendo from the Bush administration. We call this the information environment explanation. Using a technique of 'challenge interviews' on a sample …
The Origins of Tax Systems: A French-American Comparison
This article examines the origins of tax systems. Through a historical comparison of France and the United States, and analysis of several shadow cases, the article explains why the United States has relied more heavily on progressive income taxation than France, which has favored regressive sales taxes. This study traces the origins of these two tax systems to the early 20th century, arguing that decisions about tax structure were shaped by resi…
New Fiscal Sociology: Taxation in Comparative and Historical Perspective
Taxation and the worlds of welfare
We use Luxembourg Income Study data to compare the progressivity of the tax structure in the U.S. and Europe.LIS data allow a comparison of tax rates that attempts to take different starting rates, thresholds, and exemptions into account.Our study supports the argument others have made that the US has more progressive taxes than the European countries.However, we find that Britain's tax structure is more regressive than those of the continental w…
Tax “Expenditures” and Welfare States: A Critique
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Land of Too Much: American Abundance and the Paradox of Poverty
The Land of Too Much presents a simple but powerful hypothesis that addresses three questions: Why does the United States have more poverty than any other developed country? Why did it experience an attack on state intervention starting in the 1980s, known today as the neoliberal revolution? And why did it recently suffer the greatest economic meltdown in seventy-five years? Although the United States is often considered a liberal, laissez-faire …
The Popular Origins of Neoliberalism in the Reagan Tax Cut of 1981
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the 'Save PDF' action button
The Political Economy of Transnational Tax Reform: The Shoup Mission to Japan in Historical Context
This volume of essays explores the history of the US tax mission to Japan during the occupation following World War II. Under General MacArthur, economist Carl S. Shoup led the mission with the charge of framing a tax system for Japan designed to strengthen democracy and accelerate economic recovery. The volume examines the sources, conduct and effects of the mission and situates the mission within the history of international financial and fisca…
Globalization and the American State: The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire
Taxes and Fiscal Sociology
This article reviews recent research in fiscal sociology. We specifically examine contributions to the study of taxation that illuminate core issues in the sociology of contemporary capitalism, including the causes of poverty and inequality in rich countries and of inequality between rich and poor countries. Research on developed countries suggests that tax policy changes are important for explaining rising income inequality, tax policies may str…
The End of Laissez-Faire? On the Durability of Embedded Neoliberalism by Damien Cahill
Reviewed by: The End of Laissez-Faire? On the Durability of Embedded Neoliberalism by Damien Cahill Monica Prasad Damien Cahill. The End of Laissez-Faire? On the Durability of Embedded Neoliberalism. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2014. xii + 197 pages. ISBN: 978-1781000274, $110.00 (cloth). Damien Cahill asks whether the recent upheavals of the financial crisis spell the end of neoliberalism; he concludes that they do not, because of the continui…
Romain D. Huret. American Tax Resisters
Elsie de Wolfe, by many accounts the founder of the profession of interior design, became rich through her efforts in the early twentieth century. When her wealth brought her into the crosshairs of the new income tax law of 1913, she bristled: how could women be taxed when they did not have the right to vote? How could this be anything other than taxation without representation? The story of how the women's suffrage movement became entangled with…
Mechanisms of the ‘Aid Curse’: Lessons from South Korea and Pakistan
Recently scholars have argued that, far from contributing to development, foreign aid hinders development. But in the 1960s the East Asian countries developed rapidly despite receiving large amounts of aid. To examine why aid seems to undermine development in some cases but not in others, we conduct a detailed comparison of the mechanisms of the ‘aid curse’ in South Korea and Pakistan. We show that South Korea saw astonishing levels of corruption…
American Exceptionalism and the Welfare State: The Revisionist Literature
Recent research has argued that the American welfare state is not necessarily smaller than the welfare state in other advanced industrial countries. Rather, it is organized on principles that make it seem smaller: Because it functions through tax expenditures and public–private partnerships, it is less visible than welfare states that operate on the principle of direct spending. This review summarizes the most important messages of this revisioni…
Walking the Line: The White Working Class and the Economic Consequences of Morality
Over one-third of the white working class in America vote for Republicans. Some scholars argue that these voters support Republican economic policies, while others argue that these voters' preferences on cultural and moral issues override their economic preferences. We draw on in-depth interviews with 120 white working-class voters to defend a broadly 'economic' interpretation: for this segment of voters, moral and cultural appeals have an econom…
Political science (27 works) · Economics (25 works) · Law (24 works) · Politics (19 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Political economy (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Fiscal Policy and Economic Growth (7 works) · History (7 works) · Law and economics (7 works)