What has really happened in Poland since the election of 2005? After such spectacular events as the practice of lustration and the questioning of solidarity with the European Union, one has to ask: what is the nature of this newly emerging society? As with many of the recent developments in former communist countries that seem to be mysterious and irrational, the situation and ensuing problems are complex and the answers neither trivial nor easy. This book, by the distinguished Polish philosopher, addresses these complexities through the role of the communist past in post-communist Poland. It describes the events that led to the collapse of the Solidarity program and the growing influence of the nationalistic and religious parties in the government. The author investigates the nature of social and political temporality and develops a theoretical framework that allows him to apply his conclusions not only to Poland but also to other formerly communist countries. Leszek Koczanowicz is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Cultural Studies Department at University of Lower Silesia (DSW) in Wroclaw. His previous affiliations include Wroclaw University (1977-1997), Opole University (1997-2002), SUNY/Buffalo (1998-1999 and 2000-2001), and Columbia University (2004-2005) where he was Distinguished Professor at the School of International and Public Affairs. He is an author and editor of six books and numerous articles in Polish and English.

We often hear that selves are no longer formed through producing material things at work, but by consuming them in leisure, leading to 'meaningless' modern lives. This important book reveals the cultural shift to be more complex, demonstrating how people in postindustrial societies strive to form meaningful and moral selves through both the consumption and production of material culture in leisure. Focusing on the material culture of food, the book explores these theoretical questions through an ethnography of those individuals for whom food is central to their self: 'foodies'. It examines what foodies do, and why they do it, through an in-depth study of their lived experiences. The book uncovers how food offers a means of shaping the self not as a consumer but as an amateur who engages in both the production and consumption of material culture and adopts a professional approach which reveals the new moralities of productive leisure in self-formation. The chapters examine a variety of practices, from fine dining and shopping to cooking and blogging, and include rare data on how people use media such as cookbooks, food television, and digital food media in their everyday life. This book is ideal for students, scholars, and anyone interested in the meaning of food in modern life.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become an increasingly important topic in our global society. Corporate Social Responsibility Across Europe is the first volume of its kind to bring together twenty-three national perspectives on this issue. Thirty-seven European researchers worked on the book, which provides a comprehensive and structured survey of CSR developments and progress at national levels. An overview and analysis is provided for each country. Topics addressed include business and societal mindsets in the different cultural settings, national drivers for the current development of CSR, and prospects for the individual countries in the future. Furthermore it contains three comprehensive pan-European analyses. The chapters also contain practical information and references to the Internet as well as relevant literature in order to support further research and stimulate business activities in this field. The result is a rather unique collection of essays on the topic of CSR across Europe.

The work of Raymond Williams continues to exercise a powerful hold over the minds of contemporary cultural analysts and social commentators. This collection responds to the challenge of Williams's thinking in discussions of topics of current interest and concern. The essays embrace a widely-divergent field of enquiry, from the study of language, dramaturgical theory, the theory of human needs and approaches to sociology, cultural studies and television, to issues of history, temporality and the future in relation to modernity and the postmodern.

Pierre Bourdieu has been making a distinguished contribution to European sociology for the past 25 years. He is Professor of Sociology at the Collge de France in Paris and author of many influential books including, most recently, Distinction and Homo Academicus, which have both been translated into English. This book serves to introduce this important body of work to the Anglo-American world. In a cross-disciplinary collaboration Richard Harker, Cheleen Mahar and Chris Wilkes provide the reader with the necessary tools to understand this complex and rewarding body of French sociology. Post modernist sociology has already been influenced by the French theorist Foucault; it is likely that the generation to come will be reading Bourdieu.

Retired Justice Macklin Fleming argues that in its quest for money, the legal profession has lost sight of its true tasks and responsibilities, with the result that the profession is rife with client dissatisfaction, public distrust, and individual lawyer discontent. Money is now the measure of success, he says, and honesty has been diluted, while fiduciary responsibility has eroded. Fleming elaborates his case with unusual rigor. In the quest for the brass ring of financial success, corner-cutting, absence of candor, and distortions of fact have become increasingly tolerated, to the extent that clients, the public, and lawyers themselves no longer have a sense of trust and confidence in the legal profession. Obviously, changes are needed, and unless they come from within the firms themselves, lawyers can be sure that they will come from individuals, agencies, and organizations outside these firms. Attorneys in all kinds of practices, their clients in all sectors of the economy, and academics concerned with the practice of law in all its dimensions will find Fleming's book informative, challenging, and certainly provocative reading.

Fleming starts by examining what he sees as a paradox: a large increase in lawyers' fees despite a fourfold increase in lawyer numbers and a threefold increase in their proportion of the general population. What happened to the law of supply and demand? he asks. After tracing the history of the large corporate law firm and its dominance within the profession, he shows how cost-effectiveness within large firms has declined while at the same time what he calls the magic of the emperor's new clothes has suspended the law of supply and demand. He discusses excessive legal fees, their resistance to client and court controls, and relates his discussion to the present pervasive distrust of lawyers among the public. Fleming outlines the four existing challenges to business-as-usual by lawyers and law firms, and then ventures his own analysis of the needed future changes in law firms. These include professional law firm management under a less archaic structure, effective integrity and quality controls, cost-controlled delivery of legal services, and increased job satisfaction for its working lawyers.

From the mysterious powers and forces peculiar to both individual and community that can turn our lives into either good or bad lives, I wish to point to two such powers being at the same time different in their own nature and yet closely related to each other: The powers that emerge from exemplary persons and leaders. Understood as basic to both sociology and the philosophy of history, it comes to us as no surprise that the problem of exemplary persons and leaders - along with the questions of the qualities types, selections and education of leaders; forms of unison existing be tween leaders and their followers, all of which belonging to the subdivisions of this problem - must be a burning problem for a people whose historical leaders from all walks of life have, in part, been swept away by wars and revolutions. This fact we also find in all salient epochs of history characterized more or less by changes in leadership. It is precisely for this reason that in our own time every group appears to struggle ever so hard with this problem, namely, who their leaders should be. This pertains equally to a group within a party, to a class, to occupations, to unions, to various schools or present-day youth movements, and even to religious and ecclesias tical groupings. Beyond any comparison, there is yearning everywhere for lead ership."

This book makes a contribution to the developing field of complex hunter-gatherer studies with an archaeological analysis of the development of one such group. It examines the evolution of complex hunter-gatherers on the North Pacific coast of Alaska. It is one of the first books available to examine in depth the social evolution of a specific complex hunter-gatherer tradition on the North Pacific Rim and will be of interest to professional archaeologists, anthropologists, and students of archaeology and anthropology.

Privacy. We want lots of it for ourselves. We love to invade the privacy of others. We are willing to trade it for benefits of all kinds, including credit, social services, and friendship. Why is this? Where should we draw a line? How should we handle our ambivalence in an era in which privacy often appears to be under official attack? This book explores such questions by rooting into scarce literature to explain why privacy is such a strong need, reviewing a variety of methods for guarding privacy, and concluding that at one time America was a very fortunate place privacy-wise. McLean examines problem areas in which privacy invasions play, or have played, large roles. Rape and sexual offenses are analyzed; so, too, is news reporting that touches private matters and race relations.

Privacy and its Invasion also has a point to make: that privacy, despite its dark side, is an idea whose time has come, an ancient need that now requires explicit endorsement and protection as a value. A thought-provoking examination of something we have come to regard as a basic right, but a right under assault, this book is for all concerned with contemporary social and legal issues, civil liberties, and communications.

At the moment, no other European city attracts so much fascination as the city of Berlin. An unrivalled symbol of modern urban life, Berlin is a dynamic city whose inhabitants, in the course of the past two centuries, have lived through both the rapid growth and the violent destruction of the institutions of civil society, several times over. This volume situates itself within these developments by presenting, for the first time in English, a sample of the best, recently written essays on contemporary civil societies, their structural problems, and their uncertain future, written by scholars with a close, long-standing relationship with the city. They are pre-occupied with a broad sweep of substantive themes, but in each case they focus upon one or other of the key trends that are shaping actually existing civil societies.

First published in 1988, this book provides students with a way to increase their understanding of the role of science and technology in society. Steven Yearley draws on and develops ideas from research in the sociology and politics of science to address, in particular: the nature of scientific knowledge and the authority it commands; the political and economic role of science in the West; the relationship between science, technology, and social change in underdeveloped countries. Examples used range from nineteenth-century brain science to the strategic defence initiative, and from hugely expensive experiments in nuclear physics, to proposals for inexpensive boat-building programmes in the Sudan. Overall, this reissue provides a comprehensive and stimulating account of the role played by science and technology in contemporary social change.

This work presents the thinking of thirteen distinguished foreign observers who examine and evaluate the imprint of America on their own lives and on their nation. It covers the whole spectrum of American political and cultural influences ranging from the material benefits of American influence to the violence which can be found in American life.

This wide-ranging handbook presents in-depth discussions on the array of subspecialties that comprise the field of sociological theory. Prominent theorists working in a variety of traditions discuss methodologies and strategies; the cultural turn in sociological theorizing; interaction processes; theorizing from the systemic and macro level; new directions in evolutionary theorizing; power, conflict, and change; and theorizing from assumptions of rationality.

Practising Identities is a collection of papers about how identities - gender, bodily, racial, ethnic and national - are practised in the contemporary world. Identities are actively constructed, chosen, created and performed by people in their daily lives, and this book focuses on a variety of identity practices, in a range of different settings, from the gym and the piercing studio, to the further education college and the National Health Service. Drawing on detailed empirical studies and recent social and cultural theory about identity this book makes an important intervention in current debates about identity, reflexivity, and cultural difference.

Gossip is one of the most common, and most condemned, forms of discourse in which we engage - even as it is often absorbing and socially significant, it is also widely denigrated. This volume examines fascinating moments in the history of gossip in America, from witchcraft trials to People magazine, helping us to see the subject with new eyes.

German Ordoliberalism and French Regulation theory, two institutionalist theories born in different national contexts, show striking convergences and complementarities. Based on an original comparison, Institutional Economics in France and Germany analyses the basic concepts, the development and the present relevance of both schools, the way they deal with the crucial methodological issue of complexity and with transformation in post-socialist Europe. It underlines the specificity and fruitfulness of these European approaches to institutional economics, often unfortunately ignored in the English-language literature. Written by leading scholars, this book is a clear presentation of both theories, with numerous illustrations and in-depth analysis of recent research developments. This theoretical, methodological and thematic comparison raises central issues in the growing field of socioeconomic and institutionalist theory.

What do young people do with the novels they read, the films they see, the music they hear and sing? How do these cultural products act as 'symbolic resources' in the process of development? And what can we, as researchers, learn by studying people's uses of fiction? This monograph approaches development through the study of transitions and the processes of exploration that follow ruptures in people's lives. Specifically, it examines young people's symbolic responsibility as they have to choose among the wide range of cultural products societies exposes them to. The book thus examines the books, films and music that young people mobilize when they need to redefine their identity, learn informal know-how, or have to confer meaning to what happens to them in transitions. The book has a theoretical scope. It draws on cultural psychology and psychoanalysis to formulate the importance of semiotic mediation in thinking, feeling and acting. Its main contribution is to propose a model for analyzing uses of symbolic resources, such as books and films, in everyday life. It thus shows how uses of symbolic resources can enable new forms of experiences and conduct. It finally highlights social and personal conditions that might facilitate or hinder developmental uses of symbolic resources. The book, based on in-depth case studies, is addressed to scholars, professional and students in the fields of youth, culture and the media, cultural and developmental psychology, and life-long education.

This volume examines the concept of performance in ethnographic studies, with a special focus on the issues surrounding the performances of race, and cultural and environmental identities. A special partial section honours the contributions of David R. Maines to the field of communication studies. The concluding section considers new theoretical developments in interaction theory, including a re-examination of the spectatorial gaze in film and literary approaches to the imagined past.

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.

Hardbound. Volume 5 covers many ethical problems in bioethics from the relevance of the law in making medical decisions, to genetics, and to assisted reproduction. Authors apply ethical theory, meta-ethical theory and valuational perspectives to a variety of ethical issues.

The author examines the relationships between the social problems of the mass age, developments in late 20th century capitalism, the growth of a mass media advertising system, and the operation and assumptions of liberal democracy.;The changing structure of capitalism, where production so easily outstrips consumption, demands that an increasing share of resources be absorbed, not in the creation of new wealth, but in supporting the marketing process. Advertising must sell, not only goods and services, but also definitions of life and of status, images, hopes and feelings. In turn, the very universality of advertising, and its acceptance as a mode of communication, have forced the political system into the same mould. The consequences, examined here, have on the whole been unfortunate, although not actually fatal. The institutional arrangements of modern liberal democracy and the selling of images demean democracy and obstruct the realizations of its own ideals.

Organization Structures: Theory and Design, Analysis and Prescription describes how to organize people to achieve a desired outcome. This is accomplished by establishing sets of rules from "real world" organization contexts. Moreover, the development of these rules within "real world" contexts means that the rules must be true, general, operational, technically sound, and easy to use. With an understanding of rules and the processes of their use, organization structures can be identified, which in turn form the basis of a theoretical framework. This book discusses, examines, and demonstrates the interrelationship of the design rules, their theoretical use within these organization structures, along with their practical implications. Throughout the book, an extended example of the Masters Brewing Corporation (MBC) is used to illustrate the conceptual material and to make the implications of the organizational analysis explicitly concrete.

This volume presents a diverse array of articles by an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars. Their work spans the social sciences, humanities, and law. It examines the many ways citizens learn about law, law beyond the nation-state and the relationship of law and labour.

Are bad girls casualties of patriarchy, a necessary evil, or visionary pioneers? The authors in this volume propose shifts in our perceptions of bad girls by providing new ways to understand them through the case of Japan. By tracing the concept of the bad girl as a product of specific cultural assumptions and historical settings, Bad Girls of Japan maps new roads and old detours in revealing a disorderly politics of gender. Bad Girls of Japan explores deviancy in richly diverse media: mountain witches, murderers, performance artists, cartoonists, schoolgirls and shoppers gone wild are all part of the terrain.