It's not just bullies in the schoolyard that should worry us. Charles Derber and Yale Magrass point to a larger, more systemic problem with aggression and intimidation – waged by corporations, by Congress, by our military.

In a discussion of their new book Bully Nation: How the American Establishment Creates a Bullying Society, the two Massachusetts sociologists examine the bullying culture of our national institutions in striving to create profits or sustain power and the inevitable trickle-down to schools and playing fields. The issue can’t be corrected at the bottom, Derber and Magrass say, without challenging those institutions and inequities of power at the top.

Derber is a sociology professor at Boston College. Magrass is the Chancellor Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth.