For centuries Japan, although a totalitarian dictatorship, was ruled by figureheads who signed laws formulated 'behind the screen'. Hierarchy still defines everyone's status. The man at the top has power but jeopardizes his position if he ignores consensus opinions. Nowadays fashionable twentieth-century clothing cloaks a contradictory blend of intense competition with a tradition of harmony dependent on close human-relations and complex communal restraint. The Japanese organise themselves in cliques (not groups) which raise barriers against outsiders. Companies are controlled from within; shareholders are outsiders. Women are more than equal in their homes; less than equal at work. After living and managing his own business in Japan for forty years, the author explored widely before coining the term 'competitive communism' to describe Japan's economic and social system.

block possible Soviet expansion by mobilizing European "democracies," the policy soon extended to some developing countries in Asia and Latin America. In response, the USSR gradually initiated development programs for newly independent nations in Asia and Africa. In this context, super power rivalry operated in the South to (i) expand spheres of influence and control; (ii) guard Southern nations from the influence and incursions launched by the opposed camp; (iii) stimulate indigenous development. With few exceptions, Southern nations provided little input to the definition and execution of North-South dynamics during this period. In the case of Africa and to some extent Asia, the acquisition of independence was so recent and often sudden that there was little time to reflect on the kind of policies and measures needed to build bal anced relations with the former mother country. In Latin America, the Monroe Doctrine had long insured that the region was a virtual captive of the US. Aid for development was contingent on conformity to US political and economic interests. The cognitive component of South-North dealings strongly reflected the two above mentioned dispositions. The relative lack of political experience in the South. and the dearth of an organized and sizable intellectual/academic community, meant that there were few cognitive and human resources for undertaking careful study and analysis of the conditions and needs of develop ment from a Southern perspective (influential exceptions existed though, such as Raul Prebisch in Latin America or Ghandi in India)."

The digital revolution has not only transformed multiple aspects of social life - it also shakes sociological theory, transforming the most basic assumptions that have underlain it. In this timely book, Ori Schwarz explores the main challenges digitalization poses to different strands of sociological theory and offers paths to adapt them to new social realities. What would symbolic interactionism look like in a world where interaction no longer takes place within bounded situations and is constantly documented as durable digital objects? How should we understand new digitally mediated forms of human association that bind our actions and lives together but have little in common with old-time 'collectives'; and why are they not simply 'social networks'? How does social capital transform when it is materialized in a digital form, and how does it remould power structures? What happens to our conceptualization of power when faced with the emergence of new forms of algorithmic power? And what happens when labour departs from work? By posing and answering such fascinating questions, and offering critical tools for both students and scholars of social theory and digital society to engage with them, this thought-provoking book draws the outline of future sociological theory for our digital society.

This accessible introductory text explains the importance of studying 'everyday life' in the social sciences. Susie Scott examines such varied topics as home, time and schedules, leisure, and eating, to show how societies are created and reproduced by the apparently mundane micro-level practices of everyday life.

Syria is now one of the most important countries in the world for the documentary film industry. Since the 1970s, Syrian cinema masters played a defining role in avant-garde filmmaking and political dissent against authoritarianism. After the outbreak of violence in 2011, an estimated 500,000 video clips were uploaded making it one of the first YouTubed revolutions in history. This book is the first history of documentary filmmaking in Syria. Based on extensive media ethnography and in-depth interviews with Syrian filmmakers in exile, the book offers an archival analysis of the documentary work by masters of Syrian cinema, such as Nabil Maleh, Ossama Mohammed, Mohammed Malas, Hala Al Abdallah, Hanna Ward, Ali Atassi and Omar Amiralay. Joshka Wessels traces how the works of these filmmakers became iconic for a new generation of filmmakers at the beginning of the 21st century and maps the radical change in the documentary landscape after the revolution of 2011. Special attention is paid to the late Syrian filmmaker and pro-democracy activist, Bassel Shehadeh, and the video-resistance from Aleppo and Raqqa against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and the Islamic State. An essential resource for scholars of Syrian Studies, this book will also be highly relevant to the fields of media & conflict research, anthropology and political science.

This book presents previously unexamined connections between teaching practices and specific philosophical ideas, locating the prior beliefs and practical knowledge of early childhood practitioners in urban India within a broader social and historical religio-philosophical context.

The biggest challenges in public health today are often related to attitudes, diet and exercise. In many ways, this marks a return to the state of medicine in the eighteenth century, when ideals of healthy living were a much more central part of the European consciousness than they have become since the advent of modern clinical medicine. Enlightenment advice on healthy lifestyle was often still discussed in terms of the six non-naturals - airs and places, food and drink, exercise, excretion and retention, and sleep and emotions. This volume examines what it meant to live healthily in the Enlightenment in the context of those non-naturals, showing both the profound continuities from Antiquity and the impact of newer conceptions of the body. Chapter 8 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429465642

'1989 was as important a date as 1945; it was a watershed.' - Lord Dahrendorf. The essays assembled in this volume are a thoughtful and lively commentary on Europe after the revolution of 1989. Must revolutions fail? Certainly, the open society has its own problems, not least that of citizens in search of meaning. The Good Society has to square the circle of prosperity, civility and liberty. Social science can help us understand what needs to be done, and intellectuals have a responsibility to initiate and accompany change. All this raises questions for Europe which extend far beyond the all too narrow confines of the European Union.

First published in 1976. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 1973. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Public librarians do not usually see themselves as politicians. However, as decision-makers in an institutional setting, affected by a variety of pressures and conflicting interests, they are involved in politics in both the broad and narrow sense. Moreover, recent developments in the public library system have brought the librarian directly into the political sphere. Professor Shavit's study, the first major work on the subject in over 35 years, fills a major gap in scholarship on the public library in the political process and provides a detailed survey of the political context in which the modern library functions.

From the viewpoint of carrying out multi-disciplinary studies between economics and other social sciences, Pareto's theories are especially important as they are the core of contemporary orthodox economics. His sociology is constructed very differently from his economics. First the former deals with non-rational social behaviour of human beings, whilst the latter with rational behaviour; secondly, in the methodology the former is empirical and inductive, while the latter is logical and deductive. The present volume is a revamping of works by two authorities on Pareto. It combines Alfonso de Pietri-Tonelli's address to the Italian Association for Advancement of Science on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Pareto's death with selected chapters of Vilfredo Pareto, sa vie et son oeuvre, Payot, Paris, 1928 by G.H. Bousquet.

Scholars of different schools have extensively analyzed world systems as networks of communication under the fashionable heading globalization.' Our collected new research pushes the argument one step further. Globalization is not a homogenization of all social life on earth. It is a heterogeneous process that connects the global and the local on different levels. To understand these contemporary developments this book employs innovative concepts, strategies of research, and explanations. Globalization is a metaphor for different borderstructures, new borderlines, and conditions of membership, which emerge in a global world-system. As a world-system expands it incorporates new territories and new peoples. The process of incorporation creates frontiers or boundaries of the world-system. These frontiers or boundary zones are the locus of resistance to incorporation, ethnogenesis, ethnic transformation, and ethnocide.

First Published in 1971. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This volume presents articles by an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars spanning the social sciences, humanities, and law. It offers new perspectives on political relationships, politics, legal reform, law and the family, race relations and gender issues.

The question of minority rights is one of the great dilemmas of contemporary politics. Increases in the flow of immigrants, migrants and refugees have raised public concerns that greater cultural and ethnic diversity creates instability within nation-states. But does stability really require homogeneity? Or can it be maintained in the presence of different minority groups?

In this path-breaking book, Jackson Preece analyses whether traditional minority rights theory is sufficiently dynamic to inform effective responses to modern challenges. The central premise behind minority rights is that groups recognized and supported by the political community are far less likely to challenge its authority or threaten its territorial integrity. However, as Jackson Preece shows, the potential for collisions of values and interests still exists, and the possibility of a permanent solution to the problem of diversity remains illusive.

"Minority Rights" will be an indispensable resource for students and scholars of political science, international relations, law, and sociology.

How can humans learn to function most effectively in their individual and social lives and best approach important ethical and social concerns? "Developing Sanity in Human Affairs" answers this question through application of general semantics to the fields of education, counseling, communication, critical thinking, journalism, and ethics.

General semantics, developed by Alfred Korzybski, is concerned with how humans can learn to evaluate and act more responsibly in conducting their individual and social lives. The chapters in this collection deal with these issues in education and counseling, social and cultural areas, critical thinking, communications, humanism, and ethics. Highlights include the Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture, which bridges past and present work in general semantics and applications to important current problems in media and other areas of communication. Traditional and revisionist perspectives on foundations in general semantics are presented, as are dialogues on critical thinking and general semantics.

We live in a time of turbulent change when many of the frameworks that have characterized our societies over the last few centuries - such as the international order of sovereign nation-states - are being called into question. In this new volume of essays and interviews, Habermas focuses his attention on these processes of change and provides some of the resources needed to understand them.

What kind of international order should we seek to create in our contemporary global age? How should we understand the political project of Europe and how can the democratic deficit of the EU be overcome? How should we understand the relation between democracy as popular sovereignty, which has become the defining principle of political legitimacy in the modern world, and the idea of basic human rights embodied in the rule of law?

Habermas brings his formidable powers of analysis and his distinctive theoretical perspective to bear on these and other key questions of the modern age. His analysis is shaped throughout by his commitment to informed public debate and his powerful advocacy of a postnational renewal of the project of constitutional democracy.

"Time of Transitions" will be essential reading for all students and scholars of sociology and politics, and it will be of interest to anyone concerned with the key social and political questions of our time.

This volume is the product of a conference on the theme 'Development - the Next Twenty-five Years' which the Institute of Social Studies held in Decem ber 1977 to mark its own twenty-fifth anniversaryas a centre of development studies. We felt it appropriate at that point in time to caU together specialists from all over the world in an attempt to assess the 'state of play' in our field as we move into the last quarter of the twentieth century. 1 For several days, therefore, the Institute's new building house d a remarkable concentration of knowledge and experience concerning the problems of the so-calle d less developed countries, drawn from all over the world. Although it was inevitable that the participants should represent the past (and it was several times re marked that, in that sense, there were too few women present), the earnest and sometimes heated discussions looked to the future as much as to what had happened in the last twenty-five years. As the discussions proceeded, three things became apparent. Firstly, although the papers submitted did not fully reveal it, the ongoing debate between radicals and moderates, those who saw possibilities of change only basically through a direct break with existing structures and those who felt change possibIe within them, is by no means at an end."