Social capital is a relatively new concept in the social sciences. In the last twenty or so years it has come to indicate that networks of social relationships represent a 'resource' for both the individual and society, since they provide support for the individual and facilitate collective action. Although this is not an entirely new idea, the more systematic way in which social capital captures such an intuition has created a new theoretical paradigm and helped to develop a series of innovative research programs in politics, economics, and the study of human well-being. The concept has gained currency beyond academia, extending its influence to political and policy-making circles at local, national, and international levels. It has also affected the way in which social surveys are conceived and public policies assessed. As the idea of social capital has spread, the literature about it has increased exponentially. After twenty years of rapid expansion it is time for a more considered and critical assessment of how the original concept has been adapted and refined, and how successful its application has been. The Handbook of Social Capital intends to do precisely that. It offers a state-of-the-art view of discussions about the concept of social capital and the way in which it has been applied in empirical research.
The organization of the Handbook reflects this intention by focusing on conceptual development and analysis in the first part; by identifying two main areas of research in which social capital has favored the development of new and influential research programs--political participation in democratic societies, and economic development; and by exploring the more normativeand policy oriented consequences of social capital. All chapters comprising the volume were specifically written for the Handbook by some of the main experts in the fields. The book provides an authoritative and innovative introduction to the study of social capital.

Renowned visionary and theorist bell hooks began her exploration of the meaning of love in American culture with the critically acclaimed All About Love: New Visions. She continued her national dialogue with the bestselling Salvation: Black People and Love. Now hooks culminates her triumphant trilogy of love with Communion: The Female Search for Love.

Intimate, revealing, provocative, Communion challenges every female to courageously claim the search for love as the heroic journey we must all choose to be truly free. In her trademark commanding and lucid language, hooks explores the ways ideas about women and love were changed by feminist movement, by women's full participation in the workforce, and by the culture of self-help.

Communion is the heart-to-heart talk every woman -- mother, daughter, friend, and lover -- needs to have.

Some fundamental aspects of the lived body only become evident when it breaks down through illness, weakness or pain. From a phenomenological point of view, various breakdowns are worth analyzing for their own sake, and discussing them also opens up overlooked dimensions of our bodily constitution. This book brings together different approaches that shed light on the phenomenology of the lived body-its normality and abnormality, health and sickness, its activity as well as its passivity. The contributors integrate phenomenological insights with discussions about bodily brokenness in philosophy, theology, medical science and literary theory. Phenomenology of the Broken Body demonstrates how the broken body sheds fresh light on the nuances of embodied experience in ordinary life and ultimately questions phenomenology's preunderstanding of the body.

Your organs are failing and require replacement. If you had the choice, would you prefer organs from other humans or non-human animals, or would you choose a 'cybernetic' medical implant? Using a range of social science methods and drawing on the sociology of the body and embodiment, biomedicine and technology, this book asks what happens to who we are (our identity) when we change what we are (our bodies)? From surveying young adults about whether they would choose options such as 3-D bioprinting, living or deceased human donation, or non-human animal or implantable biomechanical devices, to interviewing those who live with an implantable cardiac defibrillator, Haddow invites us to think about what kind of relationship we have with our bodies. She concludes that the reliance on 'cybernetic' medical devices create 'everyday cyborgs' who can experience alienation and new forms of vulnerability at implantation and activation. Embodiment and everyday cyborgs invites readers to consider the relationship between personal identity and the body, between humans and non-human animals, and our increasing dependency on 'smart' implantable technology. The creation of new techno-organic hybrid bodies makes us acutely aware of our own bodies and how ambiguous the experience of embodiment actually is. It is only through understanding how modifications such as transplantation, amputation and implantation make our bodies a 'presence' to us, Haddow argues, that we realise our everyday experience of our bodies as an absence. -- .

Edward Gibbon's allegation at the beginning of his Essay on the Study of Literature (1764) that the history of empires is that of the miseries of humankind whereas the history of the sciences is that of their splendour and happiness has for a long time been accepted by professional scientists and by historians of science alike. For its practitioner, the history of a discipline displayed above all the always difficult but fmally rewarding approach to a truth which was incorporated in the discipline in its actual fonn. Looking back, it was only too easy to distinguish those who erred and heretics in the field from the few forerunners of true science. On the one hand, the traditional history of science was told as a story of hero and hero worship, on the other hand it was, paradoxically enough, the constant attempt to remind the scientist whom he should better forget. It is not surprising at all therefore that the traditional history of science was a field of only minor interest for the practitioner of a distinct scientific diSCipline or specialty and at the same time a hardly challenging task for the professional historian. Nietzsche had already described the historian of science as someone who arrives late after harvest-time: it is somebody who is only a tolerated guest at the thanksgiving dinner of the scientific community .

In 1960 millions of Japanese citizens took to the streets for months of protest against the U.S. -- Japan Security Treaty (Anpo) and its forcible ratification by the Kishi government. In the decades that followed, the Anpo era citizens' movements exerted a major influence on the organization and political philosophies of the anti - Vietnam War effort, local residents' environmental movements, alternative lifestyle groups, and consumer movements. Organizing the Spontaneous departs from previous scholarship by focusing on the significance of the Anpo protests on the citizens' drive to transform Japanese society rather than on international diplomacy. It shows that the movement against Anpo comprised diverse, at times conflicting, groups of politically conscious actors attempting to reshape the body politic.

The essays in this annual series consist of original research and theory within the general sociological perspective known as Symbolic Interactionism. International in scope, this series draws upon the work of interpretive students of cultural studies, ethnographers, phenomenologists, ethnomethodologists, critical, standpoint and feminist theorists, as well as traditional symbolic interactionists. The emphasis is on new thought and research which bridge links to an emergent critical theory of self, language, the media, socialization, interaction, social relationships, and race, class, and gender.

The Sociology of the Military is an authoritative selection of articles providing an historical overview of the field and illustrating the major directions of contemporary research. The book considers the forerunners to a sociology of the military and the research trends in America and the rest of the world. Topics covered include models for comparative research, the military profession and the relationship between military and civil society. Finally, the book explores new roles for the armed forces in our changing world.

"We are better than this" has been the rallying cry since Donald Trump was elected. But as New York Times-bestselling author Mychal Denzel Smith shows, Americans are too comfortable imagining our greatness. We like to believe in the rightness of our path and the inevitability of choosing our better angels. But historically, we've only come close to living up to the ideals we profess after we've been dragged, kicking and screaming, toward justice. Growth only happens when we confront our deceptions and our own complicity in them. In Stakes Is High, Smith exposes the contradictions at the heart of American life - between patriotism and justice, between freedom and inequality, incarceration, police violence. In a series of incisive essays, Smith holds us to account individually and as a nation. He examines his own shortcomings, grapples with the anxiety of feeling stuck and looks in new directions for the tools to build a just America. He questions whether Martin Luther King, Jr. can ever really be the hero we need in our time, untangles the persistent cultural power of Bill Cosby and weighs the value of police and prison abolition. Stakes Is High establishes Mychal Denzel Smith as a voice to be heeded as we prepare for the fight ahead.

With specially commissioned introductions from international experts, the Psychological Insights for Understanding COVID-19 series draws together previously published chapters on key themes in psychological science that engage with people's unprecedented experience of the pandemic. In this volume on health, Dominika Kwasnicka and Robbert Sanderman introduce chapters that explore the crucial topics of health behaviour change, wellbeing, stress, and coping. They highlight the key role digital health technologies can play in how we manage health conditions, and how we facilitate change to help individuals manage stressful situations such as physical isolation, job loss, and financial strain during the COVID-19 pandemic. The volume also offers an important overview of environmental and policy-based approaches to health behaviour change and addresses the highly relevant issues of identity and trust and how they shape the health of individuals, communities, and society. Highlighting theory and research on these key topics germane to the global pandemic, the Psychological Insights for Understanding COVID-19 series offers thought-provoking reading for professionals, students, academics, and policymakers concerned with psychological consequences of COVID-19 for individuals, families, and society.

"Science, Technology and Society: A Sociological Approach" is a comprehensive guide to the emergent field of science, technology, and society (STS) studies and its implications for today's culture and society.
Discusses current STS topics, research tools, and theories
Tackles some of the most urgent issues in current STS studies, including power and culture, race, gender, colonialism, the Internet, cyborgs and robots, and biotechnology
Includes case studies, a glossary, and further reading lists

Just fifty years ago Julian Huxley, the biologist grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, published a book which easily could be seen to represent the prevail ing outlook among young scientists of the day: If I were a Dictator (1934). The outlook is optimistic, the tone playfully rational, the intent clear - allow science a free hand and through rational planning it could bring order out of the surrounding social chaos. He complained, however: At the moment, science is for most part either an intellectual luxury or the paid servant of capitalist industry or the nationalist state. When it and its results cannot be fitted into the existing framework, it and they are ignored; and furthermore the structure of scientific research is grossly lopsided, with over-emphasis on some kinds of science and partial or entire neglect of others. (pp. 83-84) All this the scientist dictator would set right. A new era of scientific human ism would provide alternative visions to the traditional religions with their Gods and the civic religions such as Nazism and fascism. Science in Huxley's version carries in it the twin impulses of the utopian imagination - Power and Order. Of course, it was exactly this vision of science which led that other grand son of Thomas Henry Huxley, the writer Aldous Huxley, to portray scientific discovery as potentially subversive and scientific practice as ultimately en slaving."

Clinical sociology is an action-oriented field that seeks to prevent, reduce, or resolve the seemingly overwhelming number of social problems confronting modern society. In an extensive revision of the first edition of this classic text and reference, published by Plenum in 1990, the editors have assembled a distinguished roster of contributors to address such topics as theory and practice; intervention at various levels of social organization; specific kinds of sociological practice; social problems; and the process of becoming a clinical sociologist.

A collection of her speeches and writings which address the political and social changes of the past decade as they are concerned with the struggle for racial, sexual, and economic equality.

This is the 18th volume in a series discussing a topics in social theory. It is divided into three parts which address: critical social theory beyond critical theory; critical social theory and contemporary social structures; and critical and contemporary social H locies.

What does online community look like in the age of social networking? How do participatory culture platforms reflect both their designers' intentions and the desires of their users? In this incisive and timely work, Adrienne L. Massanari discusses how culture is created and challenged on Reddit.com, the self-proclaimed "front page of the internet". Reddit enables the sharing of original and reposted content from around the web, and provides a platform for like-minded individuals to commune around topics of interest - everything from the joys of drinking beer in a shower (/r/showerbeer) to celebrating the pleasures of tidy penmanship (/r/penmanshipporn). Massanari's ethnographic work provides a detailed examination of the contradictions that shape Reddit's culture and how they reflect its role as an epicenter of geek culture. The book explores the ways in which community on Reddit is formed and solidified through play and humor, and the complex ways in which Redditors come together, which demonstrate a deep capacity for altruism and charitable giving, but can easily lapse into mob action. It also explores the community's troubling gender and racial politics and how some Redditors are carving out their own space on the site to fight back.

This volume aims at further articulating and developing the cultural psychological interest in community. It focuses on the processes through which individuals constitute communities and the processes that restrain or enable moving forward with others. This interest is necessary especially now that the world is on the move. Economic crises, political crises and ecological crises have led to reinforced migration patterns, a rise in authoritarianism and xenophobia, and have become a threat to the survival of the world as we know it, particularly to minorities and indigenous communities. At the same time, we are witnessing the birth of new networks, dialogues and actions, generated by people within, between and among communities. Therefore, this volume collects interdisciplinary theoretical, empirical and applied contributions enabling engagement with communities in cultural psychology. This involves both reflections on meaning-making processes and projections on how they feed into social transformation, in exchange with community psychology, anthropology and sociology. People vitally depend on community to effectively negotiate or resist in complex intercultural or intergroup settings. In the wake of human rights violations or to prevent further damage to the environment a community is needed to undertake action. From feminist movements and disability activism to the otherwise marginalized: how do people constitute communities? How do they resist as a community? How can cultural psychology contribute not only to understand meaning-making processes, but also connect them to processes of social transformation? Migration, moving through and connecting to different communities can affect meaning making in significant ways. People consider themselves as members of one or another community, but they also increasingly enter into new settings of social practice with new means for action. How might creative meaning-making build bridges between communities? How might new community arise in between or with others? How can cultural psychology deal with intercultural processes without reifying different cultures? These are the central questions that the, mostly emerging, scholars from many corners of the world address in this book. Their research addresses different institutional settings that are resisted and transformed from within, in dialogue with others. From social work, NGOs and municipal activity to university talent mobility and art projects for youth. Other settings are newly inhabited, from the public square and the social media to a foreign city and neighborhood church. Thus, more communities appear on the map of cultural psychology.

Even as the specter of populism haunts contemporary societies, scholars have not been able to agree about what it is. Except for one thing: a deviation from democracy, the source, it seems, of the precarious position in which so many societies find themselves today. This volume aims to break the Gordian knot of "populism" by bringing a new social theory to bear and, in so doing so, suggesting that normative judgments about this misunderstood phenomenon need to be reconsidered as well. Populism is not a democratic deviation but a naturally occurring dimension of civil sphere dynamics, fatal to democracy only at the extremes. Because populism is highly polarizing, it has the effect of inducing anxiety that civil solidarity is breaking apart. Left populists feel as if civil solidarity is an illusion, that democratic discourse is a fig leaf for private interests, and that the social and cultural differentiation that vouchsafes the independence of the civil sphere merely reflects the hegemony of narrow professional interests or those of a ruling class. Right populists share the same distrust, even repulsion, for the civil sphere. What seems civil to the center and left, like affirmative action or open immigration, they call out as particularistic; honored civil icons, such as Holocaust memorials, they trash. How can the sense of a vital civil center survive such censure from populism on the left and the right? Populism in the Civil Sphere provides compelling answers to these fundamental questions. Its contributions are both sophisticated theoretical interventions and deeply researched empirical studies, and it will be of great interest to anyone concerned about the most important political developments of our time.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.

Thematically organized around the major concerns of Basil Bernstein's work as a sociologist, this book includes chapters from some of the leading sociologists and educational scholars. Each section attempts to provide a critical evaluation of Bernstein's work, framed within four interrelated contexts: his sociological theory, sociology of language and code theory, sociology of education and social reproduction, and the influence of his sociology on educational research. In a separate section, Bernstein himself responds to the earlier chapters. The book examines Bernstein's sociology of schools in relation to his general sociological theory and in doing so demonstrates that sociology is an essential lens for understanding the structure and processes of schooling. It also provides a critical evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of Bernstein's work, as well as a correction to current work in education, which eschews theory in favor of practicality.

This work builds on the assumption that language learning and teaching needs to be made more relevant to the 'glocalised' digital world we live in. Its authors argue that staff in Higher Education (HE) must prepare students for effective online interaction and explores the digital, linguistic and critical intercultural components of 'global citizenship'. The book pivots around an innovative research study; linguistic politeness frameworks are revisited to analyse the written online exchanges on an Online International Learning (OIL) - or intercultural telecollaborative - project between the UK and France.Through the use of cyberpragmatics, and inspired by Meyer and Land's 'threshold concept pedagogy', the authors examine the challenges and solutions identified by an 'expert student' in managing rules of engagement and intercultural awareness when interacting online. This book will appeal to students and scholars of applied linguistics, education, sociolinguistics and intercultural communication, and provide a valuable resource for teacher trainers, language teachers and educators across the world.

This Handbook provides an overview of interdisciplinary research related to social choice and voting that is intended for a broad audience. Expert contributors from various fields present critical summaries of the existing literature, including intuitive explanations of technical terminology and well-known theorems, suggesting new directions for research. Each chapter presents an expository primer on a particular topic or theme within social choice, with the aim of making the material fully accessible to students and scholars in economics, political science, mathematics, philosophy, law and other fields of study. Topics covered include preference aggregation, voting rules, spatial models, methodology and empirical applications. Scholars, graduate students and even advanced undergraduates in a variety of disciplines will find this introductory and relatively non-technical book an indispensable addition to the field. Contributors: J.F. Adams, W.T. Bianco, A. Blais, P.J. Coughlin, K.L. Dougherty, D.S. Felsenthal, T.H. Hammond, C. Hare, J.C. Heckelman, R.G. Holcombe, C. Kam, M.M. Kaminski, M. Machover, B.C. McCannon, I. McLean, N.R. Miller, S. Moser, E.M. Penn, K.T. Poole, R. Ragan, D.G. Saari, I. Sened, R.A. Smyth, N. Tideman