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Professor Margaret Archer is a leading critical realist and major contemporary social theorist. This edited collection seeks to celebrate the scope and accomplishments of her work, distilling her theoretical and empirical contributions into four sections which capture the essence and trajectory of her research over almost four decades. Long fascinated with the problem of structure and agency, Archer’s work has constituted a decade-long engagement with this perennial issue of social thought. However, in spite of the deep interconnections that unify her body of work, it is rarely treated as a coherent whole. This is doubtless in part due to the unforgiving rigour of her arguments and prose, ...
Psychotherapy across distance and time, from Freud’s treatments by mail to crisis hotlines, radio call-ins, chatbots, and Zoom sessions. Therapy has long understood itself as taking place in a room, with two (or more) people engaged in person-to-person conversation. And yet, starting with Freud’s treatments by mail, psychotherapy has operated through multiple communication technologies and media. These have included advice columns, radio broadcasts, crisis hotlines, video, personal computers, and mobile phones; the therapists (broadly defined) can be professional or untrained, strangers or chatbots. In The Distance Cure, Hannah Zeavin proposes a reconfiguration of the traditional therape...
Since the 1970s, critical realism has grown to address a range of subjects, including economics, philosophy, science, and religion. It has become a complex and mature philosophy. Enlightened Common Sense: The Philosophy of Critical Realism looks back over this development in one concise and accessible volume. The late Roy Bhaskar was critical realism’s philosophical originator and chief exponent. He draws on a lifetime’s experience to give a definitive, systematic account of this increasingly influential, international and multidisciplinary approach. Critical realism’s key element has always been its vindication and deepening of our understanding of ontology. Arguing that realist ontology is inexorable in knowledge and action, Bhaskar sees this as the key to a new enlightened common sense. From the definition of critical realism and its applicability in the social sciences, to explanation of dialectical critical realism and the philosophy of metaReality, this is the essential introduction for students of critical realism.
This book sketches the contours of a vision that moves beyond the dominant paradigm or worldview that underlies and governs modernity (and postmodernity). It does so by drawing on the remarkable leap in human consciousness that occurred during the Axial Age and on a cross-pollination of what are arguably the three most comprehensive integrative metatheories available today: Complex thought, integral theory and critical realism – i.e. a complex integral realism. By deploying the three integrative metatheories this book recounts how the seeds of a number of biases within the Western tradition – analytical over dialectical, epistemology over ontology, presence over absence and exterior over...
This book offers a comprehensive overview of Japan’s media policies. In light of the attention Japanese media content has attracted in recent years, not only in Japan but also overseas, the book examines the media industry that supports such content. Beginning with the traditional terrestrial broadcasting industry, it also covers cable TV, satellite broadcasting, and over-the-top media services (OTT), as well as media policies for film, animation, games and music. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC), a key media industry regulator in Japan, has been developing broadcasting policies for more than 70 years, and while their traditional policies have not changed in principle, the scope of their business sphere has expanded. For instance, major broadcasting stations in Tokyo, known as key stations, have played an important role in filmmaking with the big four film companies, and have started joint ventures with major OTT, such as Hulu. This book allows readers to gain a comprehensive understanding of the changes in the Japanese media industry in general and the related policies in Japan, while also offering insights into developments in the individual sectors.
One of the most significant and obvious examples of how mobile communication influences our understanding of time and space is how we coordinate with one another. Mobile communication enables us to call specific individuals, not general places. Regardless of location, we are able to make contact with almost anyone, almost anywhere. This advancement has changed, and continues to change, human interaction. Now, instead of agreeing on a particular time well beforehand, we can iteratively work out the most convenient time and place to meet at the last possible moment--on the way to the meeting or once we arrive at the destination.In their early days, mobile devices were primarily used for variou...
Mobile Communication covers a wide range of topics. These include the replacement of co-present interaction with mediated contact and analysis of mobile-based cohesion and gender. The authors also explore the role of media choice and its effect on the quality as well as quantity of social cohesion. Other topics include mobile communication and communities of interest; and mobile communication, cohesion, and youth.This volume brings together scholars from around the world to consider how mobile communication both builds and destroys our sense of social cohesion. There is no question that uses of technology can lead to increased cohesion within personal communities. For example, this volume in...
Listening, experiencing, drawing or interpreting spaces: narratives, experiences, visualizations and discourses can be helpful for the empirical investigation of spaces. This interdisciplinary handbook presents a broad spectrum of established methods and innovative method development to capture and understand different facets of spaces. Instructive explanations and concrete examples make the varied qualitative methods of spatial research understandable and applicable across disciplines. The theoretical and methodological aspects of qualitative spatial research form the framework of this handbook.
This book provides an analysis of the various challenges and opportunities facing the Japanese broadcasting industry. It is the first book in English that explores how Japanese broadcasting, especially commercial broadcasting, fulfills its social mission under the threat of the increased popularity of Internet-based media services as it reexamines the role and nature of broadcasting. During a series of disasters and the spread of the new coronavirus in Japan, while varied media connected people and supported socio-economic activities, broadcasting continued to be the most trusted. However, as Internet media attract increasing attention, the trend in broadcast viewership is downward. Commerci...
This book throws light onto the nature and causes of three different but strongly interconnected crises in contemporary societies worldwide: an economic crisis, an ecological crisis and a normative (moral and political) crisis. These crises are reflected in the profoundly inequitable distribution of wealth, resources and life opportunities around the world. If we follow the causal roots of these crises, we are led back to an inherent dynamic in the capitalist economic system itself, discursively expressed as neoclassical, mainstream economics. For instance, by conflating human needs with market demand, mainstream economics disregards the needs of those who do not have sufficient purchasing p...