The AIDS Disaster

WARNING

You are viewing an older version of the Yalebooks website. Please visit out new website with more updated information and a better user experience: https://www.yalebooks.com

The Failure of Organizations in New York and the Nation

Mauro F. Guillén and Charles Perrow

View Inside Format: Cloth
Price: $30.00
Our shopping cart only supports Mozilla Firefox. Please ensure you're using that browser before attempting to purchase.

Also Available in:
Paper

Out of Print

The seriousness, potential dimensions, and likely victims of the AIDS epidemic were known as early as 1981, yet the reaction of public and private organizations was shockingly slow and feeble and is even now woefully inadequate.  Basing their analysis largely on the hardest hit city, New York, Charles Perrow and Mauro Guillén deliver a passionate, yet well-documented indictment of governmental and private groups for failing to provide the necessary education and care in response to this disaster. 

 

In this controversial book the authors describe the patterns of denial, avoidance, and segregation that various organizations exhibited toward the AIDS crisis and its victims.  In so doing they extend our theories of organizational dynamics.  It is well known that society has an aversion to the major groups threatened or afflicted with AIDS—male homosexuals and, more recently, intravenous drug users and their sexual partners—and that the poor and members of the minorities contribute most heavily to the ranks of the drug users.  This situation, Perrow and Guillén argue, results in a stigma that makes AIDS unique among epidemics and contaminates the response of most organizations involved.  Society’s hostility toward the urban poor bears even more responsibility for the organizational mishandling of the crisis than the economic and ideological preoccupations of the Reagan era and the homophobia of lawmakers and establishment organizations.  The second wave of the epidemic, affecting intravenous drug users, and through them, crack users, interacts fatally with growing problems of poverty in the inner cities, where homelessness, joblessness, rising tuberculosis and syphilis rates, crime, and the paucity of strong indigenous community agencies all foster the rapid spread of the disease.

 

What is needed, the authors contend, is an all-out war on AIDS that attacks both sexual discrimination and poverty.  The AIDS epidemic, they claim, presents an occasion for redressing long-standing social injustices.

ISBN: 9780300048797
Publication Date: October 24, 1990
208 pages, x
Yale Fastback Series
The AIDS Benefits Handbook

Everything you need to know to get Social Security, Welfare, Medicaid, Medicare, Food Stamps, Housing...

Thomas P. McCormack

View details
The Demise of Nuclear Energy?

Lessons for Democratic Control of Technology

Joseph G. Morone and Edward J. Woodhouse

View details
The New American Dilemma

Liberal Democracy and School Desegregation

Jennifer L. Hochschild

View details
Sexual Harassment of Working Women

A Case of Sex Discrimination

Catharine A. MacKinnon; Foreword by Thomas I. Emerson

View details
Who Votes?

Raymond E. Wolfinger and Steven J. Rosenstone

View details
Clean Coal/Dirty Air

or How the Clean Air Act Became a Multibillion-Dollar Bail-Out for High-Sulfur Coal Producers

Bruce Ackerman and William T. Hassler

View details