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

While the defense of public image in political, corporate, and celebrity rhetoric has been widely studied, religious image repair has been largely ignored. "Divine Apology" considers the unique circumstances facing religious figures in need of restoring their reputations by examining a blend of historical and contemporary defenses offered by various figures and groups. The author covers apologia as advanced by the Apostle Paul, Justin Martyr, Martin Luther, Jimmy Swaggart, evangelical opponents of the Jesus Seminar, and conservative leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention. He concludes that strategies used for religious image repair often differ significantly from those employed by politicians, corporations, and other public figures.

In this unique volume, Miller demonstrates that religious groups and individuals are as motivated as anyone else to purify their public images. The issues prompting defenses, however, are more likely to focus on epistemological conflicts and clashes of worldviews than on inappropriate behaviors. As a consequence, religious apologists are more likely to associate attacks against their beliefs as assaults against their characters. This causes religious image restoration discourse to manifest itself as more transcendent than defenses in traditional situations involving laypeople. Miller posits that the presence of God and religious antecedents as salient audiences, as well as other factors concerning audience and context, work to shape a form of apology that is characteristically religious.

In this book, the author marshals evidence to support an arena-specific approach towards viewing Vietnam's state-society relations. In practice, the Vietnamese party-state's relations with society vary from the hard and uncompromising state, with the bureaucracy getting its way, to society's ability to negotiate the state's boundaries and regimes to make them less harsh. Any analysis of Vietnam's state-society relations needs to recognize and demonstrate both elements of dominance and accommodation, as well as specify the context in which either or both are seen. Alone, neither is adequate. In particular, the idea of the ""state"" needs to be disaggregated because ""state"" is not a singular actor that is coherent or uniform through time and space. To demonstrate how state-disaggregation can make our view more nuanced, this book analyses state-society interaction at the ward level of Hanoi, an urban local authority.

Clinical sociology, in its broadest sense, is the application of a sociological perspective to facilitate change. Its practitioners are primarily change agents rather than scholars or researchers, and work with a client, be that an individual, family, group, organization, or community. The contribut

This book is an inquiry into identity in modern society. The inquiry starts from the social psychological premise that identity both results from interaction in the social world and in turn guides interaction in the social world. It builds on and incorporates insights from philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, psychology, cultural studies, anthropology and sociology.

The theoretical heart of the book is an integrative social psychological approach which revolves around the author's self-aspect model of identity (SAMI). The text reviews previous research guided by SAMI, but also further refines the model. In addition, it places particular emphasis on identity in the context of minority-majority relations, intercultural contact and conflict, and participation in collective action. The book concludes by identifying areas of identity worthy of future research.

This book offers an interpretation of the myths that shape television images and reinforce this culture's dominant ideology. It provides histories of all television genres and connects developments within each genre to political, social, and cultural shifts in the larger society. This new Second Edition updates the previous edition's close textual analysis of representative series and serials to mid-1993, reflecting the significant changes that have occurred in both the business of television in the United States and in the larger society's dominant ideology. The Second Edition also reflects significant advances in critical theory related to the study of television that have occurred over the past decade, and it incorporates both the structuralist critical position (dominant in the first edition) and a post-structuralist position which moves away from a determinist textual analysis of ideology to a consideration of possible multiple decodings.

In this groundbreaking book, sociologist Andrew Perrin shows that rules and institutions, while important, are not the core of democracy. Instead, as Alexis de Tocqueville showed in the early years of the American republic, democracy is first and foremost a matter of culture: the shared ideas, practices, and technologies that help individuals combine into publics and achieve representation. Reinterpreting democracy as culture reveals the ways the media, public opinion polling, and changing technologies shape democracy and citizenship. As Perrin shows, the founders of the United States produced a social, cultural, and legal environment fertile for democratic development and in the two centuries since, citizens and publics use that environment and shared culture to re-imagine and extend that democracy. American Democracy provides a fresh, innovative approach to democracy that will change the way readers understand their roles as citizens and participants. Never will you enter a voting booth or answer a poll again without realizing what a truly social act it is. This will be necessary reading for scholars, students, and the public seeking to understand the challenges and opportunities for democratic citizenship from Toqueville to town halls to Twitter.

This book explores the ways in which sociological arguments are constructed and presented, looking at what can be learned from the contrasting styles of sociologists working in different periods and theoretical traditions. Fundamental debates in the discipline are addressed, such as 'can sociology provide final answers?' and 'how far is detachment feasible or desirable?'. Finally, the book considers the practical significance which thinking about styles of argument has for all students of sociology.

This comprehensive handbook provides an overview of key theoretical perspectives, concepts, and methodological approaches that, while applied to diverse phenomena, are united in their general approach to the study of lives across age phases. In surveying the wide terrain of life course studies with dual emphases on theory and empirical research, this important reference work presents probative concepts and methods and identifies promising avenues for future research.

Included are sections on history and cross-national variability, normative structuring, movement through the life course, transitions in the life course, turning points, connections between life phases, methodology, and the future of the life course. A major reference work and a seminal text, it is essential reading for social scientists studying phases within the life course, social psychologists in sociology and psychology, demographers and academics in the field of the life course as well as students in these disciplines.

Participants from Couch-Stone Symposium 2014 have transformed their presentations into elegant papers for this collection. Chapters fall into three categorical themes, largely reflecting their position in the symposium but, more importantly, reflecting a natural progression in scope of symbolic interactionist work in music: moving from observations of the individual to observation of organizations to interdisciplinary observations of music from scholars in related disciplines.

In this book, leading figures describe group deliberation in education and other practical enterprises of society. This volume encompasses a spectrum of angles on deliberation and views theory, research, and practice of deliberation in education and society. It displays actual cases as well as abstract concepts, and precepts along with principles. The book also illustrates a variety of methods and settings, and identifies the major topics and questions of deliberation.

The papers in this volume were presented in at the third conference of the European Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction (SSSI). The theme of the 2012 conference was "Conflict, Cooperation and Transformation in Everyday Life." The fifteen papers presented across this volume and volume 45 cover a diverse range of topics, which are divided into two main categories: 'Reflections on Methods' and 'Conflict and Cooperation', this volume focuses on the former. The central issue of the first four papers is how we navigate our emotional, analytical and political selves in the social worlds that we study. How do we relate to those we observe and interview? How do we deal with issues of power, suffering and politics? The following three papers provide a critical analysis of Geertz' 'Thick Description', perspectives on obesity in modern society and an analysis of the relationship between police officers and licensed marijuana coffeeshop owners in Rotterdam. Contributing authors to this volume and the next come from Belgium, Canada, Sweden, The US, The Netherlands and Germany, suggesting the thriving diversity of European SSSI in terms of its research themes and methods.

One Sunday in February 1987, protesters stood outside the Unitarian Universalist Church of Amherst in Massachusetts, whose minister planned to hand out condoms during his sermon, dramatizing the need for the church to confront the AIDS crisis. The minister gave out nearly five hundred condoms as the audience exploded into applause. But he could not hang around to enjoy it; having received threats in advance of the service, he dashed out of the sanctuary immediately. Thus was the climate for religious AIDS activism in the mid-1980s. After the Wrath of God is the first book to tell the story of American religion and the AIDS epidemic. Anthony Petro shows how religious leaders and organizations posited AIDS as a religious and moral epidemic, and analyzes how this construction has informed cultural and political debates about public health and sexual morality. While most attention to religion and AIDS foregrounds the role of the Religious Right, this book examines the much broader-and more influential-range of mainline Protestant, evangelical, and Catholic groups that shaped public discussions of AIDS prevention and care in the U.S. The AIDS epidemic, Petro argues, effected a shift in Christian rhetoric regarding sexuality. Mainstream religious groups almost uniformly called for compassion for those afflicted with the disease. While the Christian Right focused on what not to do, an increasing number of mainstream religious leaders promoted instead a positive prescription for sex, one more readily taken up in public health endeavors and sex education curricula alike-a vision that informs debates over sexual morality to this day.

In recent years, debates over culture and education have entered the public consciousness as never before. Politicians, bureaucrats, and scholars have credited these endeavors with the capacity to influence matters ranging from public morality to national productivity. Trend examines points at which art and learning intersect in both traditional and nontraditional settings and offers a variety of alternatives for the construction of a new cultural pedagogy. He argues that we need to redefine concepts like "art," "literature," and "education," to integrate them more fully into our lives. On one hand, Trend uses a critical approach to examine how cultural work and pedagogy intersect within a range of discourses such as Marxist, feminist, deconstructionist and postcolonial. Yet on the other, he focuses on the use of specific examples of cultural practice within and outside the classroom to emphasize the importance of action as well as philosophy to bring about social change. Trend provides a theoretical overview of the ideological battles over texts and their discursive contexts and then analyzes how cultural education has evolved in such settings as the school, the university, and the community. He concludes with a discussion of pedagogy and democracy which suggests a range of possible resolutions.

Peter Trudgill looks at why human societies at different times and places produce different kinds of language. He considers how far social factors influence language structure and compares languages and dialects spoken across the globe, from Vietnam to Nigeria, Polynesia to Scandinavia, and from Canada to Amazonia. Modesty prevents Pennsylvanian Dutch Mennonites using the verb wotte ('want'); stratified society lies behind complicated Japanese honorifics; and a mountainous homeland suggests why speakers of Tibetan-Burmese Lahu have words for up there and down there. But culture and environment don't explain why Amazonian Jarawara needs three past tenses, nor why Nigerian Igbo can make do with eight adjectives, nor why most languages spoken in high altitudes do not exhibit an array of spatial demonstratives. Nor do they account for some languages changing faster than others or why some get more complex while others get simpler. The author looks at these and many other puzzles, exploring the social, linguistic, and other factors that might explain them and in the context of a huge range of languages and societies. Peter Trudgill writes readably, accessibly, and congenially. His book is jargon-free, informed by acute observation, and enlivened by argument: it will appeal to everyone with an interest in the interactions of language with culture, environment, and society.

This special volume of "Studies in Law, Politics, and Society" takes up a subject of an enormous import for law and legal scholarship, Guilt. At the center of our belief in law is the hope and expectation that law can differentiate the guilty from the innocent. But as the articles in this volume show law's relationship to guilt is more complex and vexed than that. Law constitutes us as guilty subjects and law itself is a guilty subject. The articles in this volume explore law's guilt about literature, various domains in which bodies of guilt appear, and historical perspectives on the subject of guilt. Taken together they exemplify the way interdisciplinary scholarship opens up new questions and new avenues of inquiry about the social and cultural life of law.

The American court system is making increasing use of sociologists as expert witnesses. From toxic torts to religious cults and brainwashing, sociological knowledge is becoming increasingly more commonplace in the legal arena. This edited volume is a collection of the experiences of sociologists who have appeared as expert witnesses in a variety of court cases. Many of the cases covered in this book revolve around central issues of murder, self-defense, religious cults, battered women, child pornography, environmentalism, and homelessness. This volume is unique in its breadth of topics and contributions.

"Tie a Knot and Hang On" is an analysis of mental health care work that crosses the borders of diverse sociological traditions. The work seeks to understand the theoretical and empirical linkages between environmental pressures and activities and how these intersect with organizations and individuals. The work draws upon a research tradition that sees the issue of mental health care in terms of institutional pressures and normative values. The author provides a description and a sociological analysis of mental health care work, emphasizing the interaction of professionally generated norms that guide the "emotional labor" of mental health care workers, and the organizational contexts within which mental health care is provided. She concludes with a discussion of emerging institutional forces that will shape the mental health care system in the future. These forces are having greater impact than ever before as managed care comes to have a huge fiscal as well as institutional impact on the work of mental health professionals. Scheid's book is a brilliant, nuanced effort to explain the institutional demands for efficiency and cost containment with the professional ethics that emphasize quality care for the individual. The book is essential reading for those interested in mental health care organizations and the providers responding to these seemingly larger, abstract demands. The work offers a rich mixture not just of the problems faced by mental health care personnel, but the equilibrium currently in place u an equilibrium that shapes the theory of the field, no less than the activities of its practitioners. "Teresa L. Scheid" is associate professor of sociology, at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She has published widely in the area, including major essays in "Sociology of Health and Illness, Sociological Quarterly, Perspectives on Social Problems," and "The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science."

"The stories people tell about themselves are interesting not only for the events and characters they describe but for something in the construction of the stories themselves. The ways in which individuals recount their histories-what they emphasize and omit, their stance as protagonists or victims, the relationship the story establishes between teller and audience-all shape what individuals can claim of their own lives. Personal stories are not merely a way of telling someone (or oneself) about one's life; they are the means by which identities may be fashioned."-from the Introduction In this provocative book, psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists analyze interviews with a range of subjects-a minister who uses the death of his son to reaffirm his identity as a man of God, women who have given up their children at birth for adoption and who blame society for their action, Holocaust survivors, a victim of marital rape, and many others. Together these studies suggest a new way of thinking about autobiographical narratives: that these life stories play a significant role in the formation of identity, that the way they are told is shaped (and at times curtailed) by prevalent cultural norms, and that the stories-and at times the lives to which they relate-may be liberated from their psychic and social constraints if the social conditions of story telling can be critically engaged. Presenting a wide range of life stories, these studies demonstrate how "telling one's life" has the potential to clarify or mystify one's commitments and to animate or encumber one's future development.

The research and theoretical contributions of international and multidisciplinary scholars have advanced our understanding of the role of play in evolution and behavior. The diverse articles in this volume range from theoretical and conceptual advances, scientific investigations, to discourse about applied issues and different dimensions of play. The authors provide excursions into the adaptive, cultural, and social significance of play. The databased papers fall into four categories: the role of age, gender, and ethnicity in play participation, social-cognitive connections to play, fighting and play fighting, and play and process in adulthood. Play is defined as behavior that is not necessary to survival and yet is undertaken voluntarily as a method by which to improve the quality of life. This study, addressing the definition, role, and characteristics of play, falls within the research of education, psychology, anthropology, sociology, leisure studies, and primatology. The play of humans and nonhumans takes a variety of forms and serves multiple purposes within mental and emotional states of being. The motivation and impact of play behavior varies with the type of play performed. The studies included in this volume address simple games, more complex creative activities, the emotional implications of play throughout adult life, and the role of play in human social construction.

Several substantive areas within political sociology are examined in this volume of the series that explores the state of political sociology at the beginning of the 21st century. The collection offers works that show significant advances in the study of the social roots of all things 'political' in society. As in prior volumes, this collection demonstrates the richness of both theoretical and methodological studies in political sociology. The authors brought together in this volume teach students of political sociology the continued significance of questions related to public policy, public opinion, civil society, voting and social movements. The readings offer important summaries of prior work in the field, and in some cases construct an important synthesis of current research. These will help us better prepare a broader research agenda in the study of social movements, public policy, racism, and the civil sphere.The volume also presents important questions about methodological issues. The collection includes examples of current discussion related to the qualitative study of protest movements, and the importance of a comparative-historical approach. The chapters also show how the tools of the field are currently expanding our understanding of important areas of political sociology, such as public policy response to business behavior and the politics of crime. In many ways, this volume offers an assessment of the many conceptual and research debates that characterize political sociology at century's beginning. The results of these collective assessments, regardless of theoretical orientation, offer proof that political sociology is alive and well.

The rise and decline of great powers remains a fascinating topic of vigorous debate. This book brings together leading scholars to explore the historical evolution of world systems through examining the ebb and flow of great powers over time, with particular emphasis on early time periods. The book advances understanding of the regularities in the dynamics of empire and the expansion of political, social and economic interaction networks, from the Bronze Age forward. The authors analyze the expansion and contraction of cross-cultural trade networks and systems of competing and allying political groupings. In premodern times, theses ranged from small local trading networks (even the very small ones of hunting-gathering peoples) to the vast Mongol world-system. Within such systems, there is usually one, or a very few, hegemonic powers. How they achieve dominance and how transitions lead to systems change are important topics, particularly at a time when the United States' position is in flux. The chapters in this book review several recent approaches and present a wealth of new findings.

The sequel to the global bestseller The Courage To Be Disliked, the Japanese phenomenon in applying twentieth-century psychology to contemporary dilemmas continues with life-changing advice on finding happiness. _______________________________________________________________________________ In The Courage To Be Happy, Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga again distil their wisdom into simple yet profound advice to show us how we, too, can use twentieth-century psychological theory to find true happiness. ON THE COURAGE TO BE DISLIKED: The ideas proffered here will certainly make you think twice about the real cause of the emotional drama in your life. A thought-provoking read. - Mail on Sunday. A real game-changer - Marie Claire.