Rational Lives: Norms and Values in Politics and Society by Dennis Chong (University of Chicago Press, 2000). Although economic reasoning has been applied to many fields in the social sciences, those who study value conflicts have resisted rational choice approaches to the subject. Instead, most argue that group loyalties, symbolic motives, and other "nonrational" factors best explain political conflict over cultural values. In this book, Chong shows that a single model based on people's desires for material gain and social acceptance explains how individuals make decisions across both social and economic realms. He argues that our preferences reflect the costs and benefits of the available options and the influence of psychological dispositions formed throughout our lives. The model explores the formation of preferences, beliefs, values, norms, and group identifications, and offers a provocative explanation of how ingrained social norms and values are able to change over time in spite of the forces working to maintain the status quo.

The Network Inside Out by Annelise Riles (University of Michigan Press, 2000). "Networks" and other artifacts of institutional life‹documents, funding proposals, newsletters, organizational charts‹are such ubiquitous aspects of the information age that they often go unnoticed. In this book, Riles examines the aesthetics of these artifacts and practices to learn what their forms and formats can tell us about knowledge and legality in today's world. The immediate subject of Riles's ethnographic work was a group of Fijian bureaucrats and activists preparing for and participating in the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. Participants in this meeting and the activities surrounding it understood themselves to be focal points in national, regional, and global networks. Starting from the premise that anthropologists are "inside˛ the network, that is, that they are producers, consumers, and aesthetes, not simply observers, of the artifacts of institutional life, Riles enacts a new ethnographic method for turning the network "inside out."

The Postmodern Military: Armed Forces after the Cold War edited by Charles Moskos, John A.Williams, and David Segal (Oxford University Press, 2000). This book focuses on the militaries of the United States and 12 other Western democracies to uncover civil-military trends since the end of the Cold War. The authors examine the changes within the armed forces under a model of national military transformation they call the "postmodern military." The modern military that emerged in the 19th century was associated with the rise of the nation-state. It was a conscripted mass army, war-oriented in mission, masculine in makeup, and structurally and culturally distinct from civilian society. The postmodern military, by contrast, loosens ties with the nation state, becomes multipurpose in mission, and moves toward a smaller volunteer force. It is increasingly androgynous in makeup and better resembles civilian society.