- D. J. O’Brien, Defining Public Goods: An Institutional Approach to Community-Building and Negotiating Inter-Community Conflict (Edward Elgar, Expected Publication Date: July 2021). Through the lens of an economist’s notion of public goods, the book analyzes the dual problems of declining communities and polarizing conflicts between metropolitan and rural communities. This macro-level Institutional approach identifies specific ways in which community-level challenges can negatively affect a larger voting public. The book describes in detail how seemingly intractable community-level problems and inter-community conflicts have been substantially reduced by framing them in terms of the self-interest of a larger polity. Examples include the Federalist papers, written in defense of the U. S. Constitution, New Deal institutions created during the Great Depression, the post-World War II European Union, and more recent macro-level institutional changes that are assisting, in varying degrees, rural community sustainability and reduction in inter-ethnic and regional conflicts in the U.S., Kenya, Rwanda and Russia.
- D. J. O’Brien and V. V. Patsiorkovsky, Measuring Social and Economic Change in Rural Russia: Surveys from 1991 to 2003 (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2006). This book, based on the authors’ surveys of households from 1991 to 2003, examines how post-Soviet institutional changes have affected the economic strategies and outcomes, as well as mental health and quality of life indicators, of rural Russian families. Buy this book on amazon.com here.
- D. J. O’Brien & S. K. Wegren (eds.), Rural Reform in Post-Soviet Russia (Washington, D. C. & Baltimore: Woodrow Wilson Center Press & Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). This book is the result of two symposia, sponsored by the University of Missouri and the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, Woodrow Wilson Center, in which an inter-disciplinary group of scholars – sociologists, economists, political scientists and anthropologists – reported research findings on the social and economic organization of rural Russian households in the wake of agrarian reforms. Buy this book on amazon.com here.
- D. J. O’Brien, V.V. Patsiorkovski & L. D. Dershem, Household Capital & the Agrarian Problem in Russia (Aldershot, U. K.: Ashgate, 2000). Buy this book on amazon.com here.
- D. J. O’Brien, V. V. Patsiorkovski, L. D. Dershem, A. Bonanno & C. Timberlake, Services & Quality of Life in Rural Villages in the Former Soviet Union: Data from 1991 & 1993 Surveys (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1998).
- V. V. Patsiorkovski & D. J. O’Brien, Research Methodology & Quality of Rural Life in Russia and the USA (Moscow: Institute for the Socio-Economic Studies of Population, Russian Academy of Sciences, 1996).
- D. J. O’Brien & S. S. Fugita, The Japanese American Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
- S. S. Fugita & D. J. O’Brien, Japanese American Ethnicity: The Persistence of Community (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991, 1994). Buy this book from amazon.com here.
- D. J. O’Brien, Neighborhood Organization and Interest-Group Processes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975, 1979). Buy this book from amazon.com here.
David J. O'Brien 