Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Culture, Class, Distinction
Drawing on the first systematic study of cultural capital in contemporary Britain, Culture, Class, Distinction examines the role played by culture in the relationships between class, gender and ethnicity. Its findings promise a major revaluation of the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu’s account of the relationships between class and culture.
Networked Urbanism
Despite considerable interest in social capital amongst urban policy makers and academics alike, there is currently little direct focus on its urban dimensions. In this volume leading urban researchers from the Netherlands, the UK, the USA, Australia, Italy and France explore the nature of social networks and the significance of voluntary associations for contemporary urban life. Networked Urbanism recognizes that there is currently a sense of crisis in the cohesion of the city which has led to public attempts to encourage networking and the fostering of 'social capital'. However, the contributors collectively demonstrate how new kinds of 'networked urbanism' associated with ghettoization, suburbanization and segregation have broken from the kind of textured urban communities that existed in the past. This has generated new forms of exclusionary social capital, which fail to significantly resolve the problems of poor residents, whilst strengthening the position of the advantaged. Grounded in theoretical reflection and empirical research, Networked Urbanism will be of interest to scholars and students of sociology, geography and urban studies, as well as to policy makers.
Studio Studies
Consider the vast array of things around you, from the building you are in, the lights illuminating the interior, the computational devices mediating your life, the music in the background, even the crockery, furniture and glassware you are in the presence of. Common to all these objects is that their concrete, visual and technological forms were invariably conceived, modelled, finished and tested in sites characterised as studios. Remarkably, the studio remains a peculiar lacuna in our understanding of how cultural artefacts are brought into being and how ‘creativity’ operates as a located practice. Studio Studies is an agenda setting volume that presents a set of empirical case studies...
Class and Gender
During China’s “socio-economic transition period”, stretching from 1978 to the present day, the nation’s social structure underwent enormous changes. The economic restructuring from a centrally-planned economy to a market-oriented one, combined with the retreat of the state administrative sphere from the labour market, gradually transformed the mechanisms of resource allocation. This has given rise to enlarging gaps between different social groups, which have led to an escalation in tensions between the higher and the lower social strata. In addition, the situation of Chinese women has also changed, with those in contemporary China in a quite different position from their “pre-comm...
Creativity and Academic Activism
This work explores in detail how innovative academic activism can transform our everyday workplaces in contexts of considerable adversity. Personal essays by prominent scholars provide critical reflections on their institution-building triumphs and setbacks across a range of cultural institutions. Often adopting narrative approaches, the contributors examine how effective programmes and activities are built in varying local and national contexts within a common global regime of university management policy. Here they share experiences based on developing new undergraduate degrees, setting up research centers and postgraduate schools, editing field-shaping book series and journals, establishi...
Diasporas and Diplomacy
This volume links contemporary debates on cosmopolitanism to historical and comparative case studies on international broadcasting. Through the prism of the BBC World Service, it illuminates how diasporic broadcasters at the BBC translate and produce news in dozens of languages and, as skilled cultural intermediaries, are integral to British diplomacy.
Foodies
This important cultural analysis tells two stories about food. The first depicts good food as democratic. Foodies frequent ‘hole in the wall’ ethnic eateries, appreciate the pie found in working-class truck stops, and reject the snobbery of fancy French restaurants with formal table service. The second story describes how food operates as a source of status and distinction for economic and cultural elites, indirectly maintaining and reproducing social inequality. While the first storyline insists that anybody can be a foodie, the second asks foodies to look in the mirror and think about their relative social and economic privilege. By simultaneously considering both of these stories, and studying how they operate in tension, a delicious sociology of food becomes available, perfect for teaching a broad range of cultural sociology courses.
Theorizing Cultural Work
In recent years, cultural work has engaged the interest of scholars from a broad range of social science and humanities disciplines. The debate in this ‘turn to cultural work’ has largely been based around evaluating its advantages and disadvantages: its freedoms and its constraints, its informal but precarious nature, the inequalities within its global workforce, and the blurring of work–life boundaries leading to ‘self-exploitation’. While academic critics have persuasively challenged more optimistic accounts of ‘converged’ worlds of creative production, the critical debate on cultural work has itself leant heavily towards suggesting a profoundly new confluence of forces and ...
Taste: Media and Interior Design
This book traces and explores the evolution of taste from a design perspective: what it is, how it works, and what it does. Karin Tehve examines taste primarily through its recursive relationship to media. This ongoing process changes the relationship between designers and the public, and our understanding of the relationship of individuals to their social contexts. Through an analysis of taste, design is understood to be an active constituent of social life, not as autonomous from it. This book reclaims a term long dismissed from interior design and unveils taste’s role as a powerful social and political agent within systems of aesthetics, affecting both its producers and consumers. Each ...
The Return of Inequality
A pioneering book that takes us beyond economic debate to show how inequality is returning us to a past dominated by empires, dynastic elites, and ethnic divisions. The economic facts of inequality are clear. The rich have been pulling away from the rest of us for years, and the super-rich have been pulling away from the rich. More and more assets are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Mainstream economists say we need not worry; what matters is growth, not distribution. In The Return of Inequality, acclaimed sociologist Mike Savage pushes back, explaining inequalityÕs profound deleterious effects on the shape of societies. Savage shows how economic inequality aggravates cultural, socia...
