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This accessible and comprehensive overview of the main issues on the modernity-postmodernity controversy is the first clear-sighted book on the subject. It surveys modern social theory, from Kant to Weber with economy and masterly precision. And evaluates the work of...
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This measured and thoughtful book provides a comprehensive critical commentary on Bauman's social theory. It explores the roots of his ideas in questions of capital and labour, and explains how these ideas flourished in Bauman's later writings on culture, intellectuals,...
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Realism and Social Science offers the reader an authoritative and compelling guide to critical realism and its implications for social theory and for the practice of social science. It offers an alternative both to approaches which are overly confident about the...
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An accessible and readable introduction to Bourdieu's work, this book places him in intellectual and historical context, and shows how Bourdieu is best understood as a cultural analyst. It traces his development from his early work on education to his relationship to...
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Understanding Contemporary Society: Theories of the Present is a comprehensive textbook to guide students through the complexities of social theory today. Over 30 chapters, written by an international team of contributors, demonstrate clearly the practical applications...
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Reading feminist theory as a complex imaginative achievement, Feminist Imagination considers feminist commitment through the interrogation of its philosophical, political and affective connections with the past, and especially with the `race' trials of the twentieth...
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`Barne's work is remarkable in its attempt to transcend previously held dualisms like causal versus voluntaristic explanations, and to advance a model of social action that can contribute to a possible resolution of the problematic relation between 'structure' and...
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'If you've ever felt like we're going nowhere fast, and you'd like to know why - preferably sometime before you die - read this book' - James Der Derian, Brown University and UMASS/Amherst
Examining how the 'here and now' of space, territory, the body, are being...
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In this book, one of the foremost sociologists of the present day, turns his gaze upon the key figures and seminal institutions in the rise of sociology. Turner examines the work of Karl Marx, Max Weber, Karl Mannheim, Georg Simmel, Emile Durkheim and Talcott Parsons to...
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Traditionally social science treated culture as a peripheral issue, but the last twenty years have witnessed a cultural turn throughout the social sciences. Culture is now at the core of debate.
Culture and Economy After the Cultural Turn examines the impact of the...
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Through a detailed introductory discussion of the relation between the civil and the political, and between recognition and representation, this book provides a comprehensive vocabulary for understanding citizenship. It uses the work of T H Marshall to frame the...
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This book explores belonging as a performative achievement. The contributors investigate how identities are embodied and effected, and how lines of allegiance and fracture are produced and reproduced. Questions of 'difference' are tackled from a perspective that attends...
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In this incisive and truly impressive book, Ian Burkitt critically addresses the dualism between mind and body, thought and emotion, rationality and irrationality, and the mental and the material, which haunt the post-Cartesian world.
Drawing on the work of contemporary...
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Foucault contra Habermas is an incisive examination of, and a comprehensive introduction to, the debate betweenFoucault and Habermas over the meaning of enlightenment and modernity. It reprises the key issues in the argument between critical theory and genealogy and is...
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To what extent are the techniques of campaigning and media management critical to the outcome of modern elections? This book brings together a group of leading scholars to provide a comprehensive analysis of the role and impact of political communications during...
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This critical analysis of long-term trends and recent developments in world systems examines such questions as: Will the cycles of boom and bust, peace and war of the past 500 years continue? Or have either long-term trends or recent changes so profoundly altered the...
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George Ritzer's McDonaldization thesis argued that contemporary life is succumbing to the standardization, flexibility and practicability of fast-food service. This book brings together specially commissioned papers by leading social and cultural analysts to engage in a...
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Over the last 30 years the post-war centre-ground which recognized the welfare state, the funding of education, protection of the environment and the management of capitalism as the proper business of the state, has fragmented. Emphasis on the freedom of the individual...
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In Spaces of Culture an international group of scholars examines the implications of questions such as: What is culture? What is the relationship between social structure and culture in a globalized and networked world? Do critical perspectives still apply, or does the...
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This book decodes the ambivalence of gift-giving. It examines its socio-ethical and integrative potential. Following a short recollection of contemporary gift-giving, its motives, occasions and its rules, the reader is invited to travel back in time and space examining...
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