Topic > Sidewalk by Mitchell Duneier - 1203

Sidewalk is a book written by Mitchell Duneier, an American sociology professor at Princeton University, in 1999; where the book received many favorable reviews, winning the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the C. Wright Mills Award. Likewise, the book had become a classic in urban studies, especially due to the interesting methodology used by Duneier while conducting his research. The book is based on observations, participant observations and interviews, which gave the author the ability to live and interact with book and magazine sellers on a daily basis. While this gave him great insight into the life of the sidewalk, many methodological issues have troubled scholars and students of sociology since the day this book was published. Duneier had admitted throughout the book that he could not be completely subjective while conducting his research and writing his book due to his involvement and personal relationship with the people who work and live on the sidewalk, which raises the question of whether the research is still relevant. if the researcher only provides us with an objective result? The book asks two questions; First, why have the changes on the sidewalk occurred over the past 40 years? Focusing on the concentration of poverty in certain areas, the movement of people from one place to another, and how the people who work/live on Sixth Street come from those neighborhoods. Second: How does life on the sidewalk work today? Observing the mostly poor black men who work as book and magazine salesmen and/or live on the sidewalk of an upper-middle class neighborhood. The book follows the lives of several men working as book and magazine salesmen in Greenwich Village in the 1990s, where most... half of the paper... other places in particular, and the social and demographic structure. of society as a whole. The sidewalk is a social structure for the people who work and live in it. They are mentors to each other. They serve the same role of self-direction and psychological fulfillment as a formal job or family, for example; where society is shrunk onto that one sidewalk. They form informal social organization and social control so that they can survive against the external social system; meanwhile, this social organization organizes property rights and the division of labor. Although their life seems deviant, they still practice conventional social practices and norms. While it may appear that these men are engaging in random behavior, there is nevertheless an organized interplay of norms and goals and a shared collective self-awareness that comes from having a shared common history..