You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Modern capitalism favors values that undermine our face-to-face bonds with friends and family members. Focusing on the post-communist world, and comparing it to more "developed" societies, this book reveals the mixed effects of capitalist culture on interpersonal relationships. While most observers blame the egoism and asocial behavior found in new free-market societies on their communist pasts, this work shows how relationships are also threatened by the profit orientations and personal ambition unleashed by economic development. Successful people in societies as diverse as China, Russia, and Eastern Germany adjust to the market economy at a social cost, relaxing their morals in order to ob...
The sociology of art is now an established sub-discipline of sociology. But little work has been done to explore the implications not of society on art, but of art on the nature and principles of sociology itself. Vision and Society explores the ways in which art (here mainly understood as visual art) structures in fundamental ways the constitution of society, the relations between societies and the ways in which society and culture should be theorized. Building initially on an unfulfilled project by the French sociologist of art Nathalie Heinich to derive a sociology from art, this book pushes this idea in unconventional directions. Rethinking the relationships between the study of art and the study of sociology and anthropology, this book explores how this rethinking might impact sociological theory in general, and certain aspects of it in particular – especially the study of social movements, social change, the urban, the constitution of space and the ways in which human social relationships are mediated and expressed.
This collection of original articles deals with two intertwined general questions: what is the visual sphere, and what are the means by which we can study it sociologically? These questions serve as the logic for dividing the book into two sections, the first ("Visualizing the Social, Sociologizing the Visual") focuses on the meanings of the visual sphere, and the second ("New Methodologies for Sociological Investigations of the Visual") explores various sociological research methods to getting a better understanding of the visual sphere. We approach the visual sphere sociologically because we regard it as one of the layers of the social world. It is where humans produce, use, and engage wit...
The past decades have seen significant advances in the sociological understanding of human emotion. Sociology has shown how culture and society shape our emotions and how emotions contribute to micro- and macro-social processes. At the same time, the behavioral sciences have made progress in understanding emotion at the level of the individual mind and body. Emotion and Social Structures embraces both perspectives to uncover the fundamental role of affect and emotion in the emergence and reproduction of social order. How do culture and social structure influence the cognitive and bodily basis of emotion? How do large-scale patterns of feeling emerge? And how do emotions promote the coordination of social action and interaction? Integrating theories and evidence from disciplines such as psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience, Christian von Scheve argues for a sociological understanding of emotion as a bi-directional mediator between social action and social structure. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of the sociology of emotion, microsociology, and cognitive sociology, as well as social psychology, cognitive science, and affective neuroscience.
Climate change is widely agreed to be one the greatest challenges facing society today. Mitigating and adapting to it is certain to require new ways of living. Thus far efforts to promote less resource-intensive habits and routines have centred on typically limited understandings of individual agency, choice and change. This book shows how much more the social sciences have to offer. The contributors to Sustainable Practices: Social Theory and Climate Change come from different disciplines – sociology, geography, economics and philosophy – but are alike in taking social theories of practice as a common point of reference. This volume explores questions which arise from this distinctive a...
This book provides an empirical study of the increasing importance of the concept of the entrepreneur in the context of the neoliberal cultural paradigm. Using the theoretical framework of the post-structural discourse theory and methods of qualitative discourse analysis, the book describes the changes in political discourse that resulted in the increasing dominance of the figure of the entrepreneur after the late 1980s.
Civil society activism around issues of global justice has proliferated in Europe during the past two decades. Has such contestation and advocacy made a difference? This book examines whether and how the organizations, networks and campaigns involved have attained their policy objectives in the areas of debt relief, international trade, international taxation and corporate accountability. The analysis also considers the relationship between national and transnational activism. By comparing variations in the "activism-policy nexus" in France, Italy and the United Kingdom, it seeks to understand how such interaction and policy outcomes vary in different institutional and political contexts.
As globalisation deepens, student mobility and migration has not only impacted economy and institutions, it has also infused human desires, imaginaries, experiences and subjectivities. In Transnational Students and Mobility, Hannah Soong portrays the vexed nexus of education and migration as a site of multiple tensions and existence and examines how the notion of imagined mobility through education-migration nexus transforms the social value of international education and transnational mobility.
Notions of social change are often divided into local versus international. But what actually happens at the national level—where policies are ultimately made and implemented—when policy-making is interdependent worldwide? How do policy-makers take into account the prior choices of other countries? Far more research is needed on the process of interdependent decision-making in the world polity. National Policy-Making: domestication of global trends offers a unique set of hybrid cases that straddle these disciplinary and conceptual divides. The volume brings together well-researched case studies of policy-making from across the world that speak to practical issues but also challenge curre...
The corporate and the social are crucial themes of our times. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, both individual lives and society were shaped by capitalist crisis and the rise of social media. But what marks the distinctively social character of "social media"? And how does it relate to the wider social and economic context of contemporary capitalism? The concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is based on the idea that a socially responsible capitalism is possible; this suggests that capitalist media corporations can not only enable social interaction and cooperation but also be socially responsible. This book provides a critical and provocative perspective on Corpor...