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Join The Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform The World (2011)

by Tina Rosenberg(Favorite Author)

3.52 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0393068587 (ISBN13: 9780393068580)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

W. W. Norton & Company

review 1: I picked this up because I was a big fan of Tina's work on Latin America, and because it's not every day that a MacArthur genius presents at a non-profit staff meeting, but I am SO glad to have read this book. The focus is on the "social cure," identity's ability to motivate more effectively than information. Her examples include anti-corporate teen anti-smoking campaigns, rural community health programs in India, calculus study groups for minority students at American universities, micro finance, and the student-led Monty Python-inspired movement that toppled Milosevic. The book doesn't read like Malcolm Gladwell, though - the examples are interesting AND thoughtfully described and this book is really changing my approach to community-based work. I loved... more it!!
review 2: "Other researchers have confirmed this -- if there is litter on the ground or graffiti on the wall, people will not only litter and draw graffiti, they will begin to commit crimes. People adjust their behavior to fit the message sent by their physical surroundings about what a neighborhood finds acceptable." "Industry Spokesman" was the first in a series of ads that made Big Tobacco a character. In another ad, black rappers attacked the tobacco industry for using menthol cigarettes to get blacks to smoke. The ad ended with the line: "We used to pick it; now they want us to smoke it.""A California TV commercial running in 2009, called "Programmed" shows a split screen. A man smokes a cigarette in one half of the screen. In the other half, a laboratory rat in a cage sucks on a spigot marked "nicotine." Carousel music plays. An announcer says, "The tobacco industry designs cigarettes to be addictive. How long will you let them control you?" Words come up: "Undo the manipulation.""In another commercial, Perez and another teen call an ad agency that advertises cigarettes. They offer the hapless person on the line an award for killing more teens than anyone else. Ad after ad showed teenagers getting people from the tobacco-industrial complex on the phone -- and then torturing them. It is likely that never before in the history of public health had anyone done a media campaign based on prank phone calls. "California came up with the idea that the industry is manipulating you," said Peter Mitchel, who oversaw the "truth" campaign. "No one likes to be manipulated. But Crispin Porter took it to the next step. What do teenagers want? They are shopping for a way to rebel against their parents. Well, these people are even less cool than your parents.""If it becomes evident that states are going to run antismoking campaigns, the industry is brilliant at getting them to choose ineffective themes. Even the Master Settlement Agreement fell into this trap -- states could use their settlement money only on ads "regarding the addictiveness, health effects and social costs related to the use of tobacco products and shall not be used for any personal attack on, or vilification of, any person (whether by name or business affiliation), company, or governmental agency, whether individually or collectively.""Early on, Otpor's leaders realized that to keep volunteers happy, they needed to feel responsible and important, that their work and achievement mattered. They also needed to be constantly busy, not sitting around and waiting from instructions from above. So while the central organization set overall strategy, each cluster decided how to carry it out and how best to use local talent. Volunteers trained in Otpor methods and principles of nonviolent struggle then set loose to be the movement in their towns and neighborhoods." "Masses of people will not become hooligans -- they will only agree to be arrested for activities they know should not be punished. That is the only way to convert arrests into public sympathy." "Studies of people who joined Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church or Germany's Baaer-Meinhof Gang -- a leftist terrorist group active in the 1970s -- found that, as with Islamic radicals, the social bonds come first, leading people into the ideology. The radicalization is a product of the gradual tightening of that social circle as al moderate voices depart." less

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