First published in 1971, The Economics of the Distributive Trades is a comprehensive analysis of all sectors of the British retailing sector, written by the then-head of the Research Department of the John Lewis Partnership. Using economic statistics and modelling, Patrick McAnally examines the the full range of the retailing business, from output to competition, pricing, assortment and transport to location, staff and finance, and in doing so provides an invaluable snapshot of the state of the distributive trades at the end of the Sixties. First published 1971.

This book is concerned with the spatial aspects of the distributive trades. It provides a comprehensive insight into the relationship between consumer demand and retail supply in the context of both recent business trends and increasing planning controls. It unites a wide variety of theories and techniques to the practical problems confronting businessmen and planners and draws together the findings of a vast research literature on the geography of retailing. Extensive comparisons are drawn between conditions in North America and Western Europe. Originally published 1976. 'A valuable and welcome undergraduate textbook.' Environment and Planning 'Recommended unreservedly to managers and planners in the distributive trades and to all those who are concerned with the implications of current trends in the provision of shopping facilities.' Retail Distribution and Management

In one of the first books to treat retailing as a subject of serious analysis, Retailing and the Public examines the state of one of the most important industries in the country. Retailing gives direct employment to more people than any other trade; it accounts for over half of national income. No other industry affects the public as much as retailing does. These facts stand as true today as they did in the 1930s, and this classic text, groundbreaking in its time, shines as much light on the present as it does the past. First published 1932.

Weber and Durkheim: A methodological comparison is a systematic, comparative analysis of the methodologies of Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. Jensen shows how Weber and Durkheim analyse Protestants and Catholics in practice in The Protestant Ethic and Suicide, respectively. The very different ways that Weber and Durkheim carry out their analyses are then used to describe, analyse and contrast their methodological principles and points of view, raising fundamental questions in sociological and social science analysis, such as: What constitutes the object of sociology? How are concepts developed? What status can be attributed to laws? Which possibilities - and limitations - do we have for producing scientific insight into society? What are we to think of the relationship between 'Is' and 'Ought' - and how can social science deal with values? How are social phenomena to be explained? This book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of sociology, social methodology, political theory, political science, social theory and philosophy.

Over the past decade there has been a remarkable flowering of interest in food and nutrition, both within the popular media and in academia. Scholars are increasingly using foodways, food systems and eating habits as a new unit of analysis within their own disciplines, and students are rushing into classes and formal degree programs focused on food.

Introduced by the editor and including original articles by over thirty leading food scholars from around the world, the Routledge International Handbook of Food Studies offers students, scholars and all those interested in food-related research a one-stop, easy-to-use reference guide. Each article includes a brief history of food research within a discipline or on a particular topic, a discussion of research methodologies and ideological or theoretical positions, resources for research, including archives, grants and fellowship opportunities, as well as suggestions for further study. Each entry also explains the logistics of succeeding as a student and professional in food studies.

This clear, direct Handbook will appeal to those hoping to start a career in academic food studies as well as those hoping to shift their research to a food-related project. Strongly interdisciplinary, this work will be of interest to students and scholars throughout the social sciences and humanities.

Modern political and social theory is fundamentally eurocentric, yet the critique of eurocentrism remains marginal to critical realist and marxist theory. The political and social structures of modernity are dominated by really eurocentric forms and relations, yet the theorisation of the eurocentricity of modernity is largely undeveloped.

In its attempt to tackle eurocentrism, Eurocentrism: A Critical Realist and Marxian Critique of Civil Society brings social theory up against the deeply embedded constraints that modern life places on historical and social reflexivity.

This book examines the powerful anti-eurocentric tendencies of critical realism and marxian critiques of civil society, and evaluates their potential as solutions to this eurocentrist dilemma. Could a more self-consciously anti-eurocentric approach from these fields help us to focus without this historical and social bias? Accomplishing this will significantly expand the potential to provide an adequate grounding for theories of the essentially Eurocentric structures of modern theory and social relations.

First published in 1982, The Sociology of Art considers all forms of the arts, whether visual arts, literature, film, theatre or music from Bach to the Beatles. The last book to be completed by Arnold Hauser before his death in 1978, it is a total analysis of the spiritual forces of social expression, based upon comprehensive historical experience and documentation. Hauser explores art through the earliest times to the modern era, with fascinating analyses of the mass media and current manifestations of human creativity. An extension and completion of his earlier work, The Social History of Art, this volume represents a summing up of his thought and forms a fitting climax to his life's work. Translated by Kenneth J. Northcote.

Mini-set L: Sociology of Education re-issues 48 volumes originally published between 1928 and 1990. The books in this mini-set discuss: Teaching and social change, research processes in education, class, race, culture and education, marxist perspectives in the sociology of education, the family and education, the sociology of the classroom and school organization.

Rural issues are currently attracting unprecedented levels of interest, with the debates surrounding the future of 'traditional' rural customs and practice becoming a significant political concern. However, the problem of racism in rural areas has been largely overlooked by academics, practitioners and researchers who have sought almost exclusively to develop an understanding of racism in urban contexts. This book aims to address this oversight by examining notions of ethnic identity, 'otherness' and racist victimisation that have tended to be marginalised from traditional rural discourse.

In the wake of the debates over high/low culture distinction spilling into the effective dismantling of the boundary that once separated them, the past decade has seen the explosion of ?bad taste? production on screen. Starting with paracinema or ?badfilm? ? a movement that has grown up around sleazy, excessive, or poorly executed B-movies and has come to encompass disreputable and unworthy films ? this trend has been evident in various formats: on television and in video-art, low-budget and straight to TV films, amateur and home movies. The proliferation of trash on screen can be seen as delivering the final blow to the vexed issue of taste.

More importantly, it prompts a reconsideration of some critical issues surrounding production, circulation, understanding and teaching of ?bad objects? in the media. This collection of essays, written by international film and television scholars, provides detailed critical analysis of the issues surrounding judgements of cultural value and taste, feeling and affect, cultural morals and politics, research methodologies and teaching strategies in the new landscape of ?after taste? media. Addressing global and local developments ? from global Hollywood to Australian indigenous film and television, through auteurs Sergei Eisenstein to Jerry Bruckheimer, on to examples such as Twilight to Sukiyaki Western Django ? the essays in this book offer a range of critical tools for understanding the recent shifts affecting cultural, aesthetic and political value of the moving image.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies.

The study of Cosmopolitanism has been transformed in the last 20 years and the subject itself has become highly discussed across the social sciences and the humanities. The Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism pursues distinct theoretical orientations and empirical analyses, bringing together mainstream discussions with the newest thinking and developments on the main themes, debates and controversies surrounding the subject. The contributions are grouped into three parts, each reflecting a different analytical focus within a variety of intellectual disciplines and methodological approaches. Part I (Cultural Cosmopolitanism) is primarily concerned with the empirically-grounded aspects of cosmopolitanism which are apparent in mundane practices and lifestyle options on the micro-scale of daily interactions. It focuses on the outlooks and lived experience of ordinary individuals and groups in concrete situational contexts and social structures. Part II (Political Cosmopolitanism) sets out the main topics and issues dealt with by scholars writing within the tradition of political cosmopolitanism. Addressing timely issues such as human rights, global justice, and global democracy, it focuses on Cosmopolitanism as an ethico-political ideal and a political project to devise new forms of supranational and transnational governance. Part III (Debates) reflects the major debates and controversies on the subject and deliberately eschews any bland consensus to instead foreground the key arguments and lively intellectual discussions in play across disciplinary divisions. Featuring contributions from key thinkers in the field, including Ulrich Beck, David Held and Martha Nussbaum, this comprehensive volume will be a valuable resource for all academics and students working within this area of study.

China's rise and processes of Sinicization suggest that recombination of new and old elements rather than a total rupture with or return to the past is China's likely future. In both space and time, civilizational politics offers the broadest social context. It is of particular salience in China. Reification of civilizations into simple categories such as East and West is widespread in everyday politics and common in policy and academic writings. This book's emphasis on Sinicization as a specific instance of civilizational processes counters political and intellectual shortcuts and corrects the mistakes to which they often lead. Sinicization illustrates that like other civilizations China has always been open to variegated social and political processes that have brought together many different kinds of peoples adhering to very different kinds of practices. This book tries to avoid the reifications and celebrations that mark much of the contemporary public debate about China's rise. It highlights instead complex processes and political practices bridging East and West that avoid easy shortcuts. The analytical perspectives of this book are laid out in Katzenstein's opening and concluding chapters. They are explored in six outstanding case studies, written by widely known authors, which over questions of security, political economy and culture. Featuring an exceptional line-up and representing a diversity of theoretical views within one integrative perspective, this work will be of interest to all scholars and students of international relations, sociology and political science.

This is a sociological study of a Norwegian penal institution. The author spent two years in the institution, observing and interviewing inmates and staff, the target being to learn the extent to which American prisons fit with prison life in a different culture. He gives a fascinating answer to the question: Norwegian prisons were, at the time of the study, miles away from their American counterparts. The conflicts between prison officers and inmates were certainly there, but they took a very different form. Rather than engaging in deviant practices and norms, emphasising more or less solidary opposition against the staff, the Norwegian prisoners criticised the staff and the prison fiercely on the basis of their own norms; rather than engaging in deviance, they turned the common practises and norms of Norwegian society against the staff, engaging in a kind of moral surveillance of those in power. He coined the phrase of "censoriousness" to this approach from the "bottom" of the prison. Mathiesen spells out the major causes of this different approach, from characteristics of this particular prison to broader social forces.

Blogs, You Tube, citizen journalism, social networking sites and museum interactivity are but a few of the new media options available for ordinary people to express themselves in public. This intensely technological presentation of everyday lives in our public culture is today hailed as a new, playful form of citizenship that enhances democratic participation and cosmopolitan solidarity. But is this celebration of self- mediation justified or premature?

Drawing on a view of self-mediation as a pluralistic practice that potentially enhances our democratic public culture but which is, at the same time, closely linked to the monopolistic interests of the market, this volume critically explores the dynamics of mediated self-representation as an essentially ambivalent cultural phenomenon. It is, the volume argues, the hybrid potential for increased democratization but also for subtler social control, inherent in the public visibility of the ordinary, which ultimately defines contemporary citizenship.

The volume is organized along two-dimensions, which conceptualize the dialectical relationship between new media and the participatory practices these enable in terms of, what Foucault calls, a dual economy of freedom and constraint (Foucault 1982). The first dimension of the dialectic, the democratization of technology, addresses self-mediation from the perspective of the empowering potential of new technologies to invent novel discourses of counter-institutional resistance and activism (individual or collective); the second dimension, the technologization of democracy, addresses self-mediation from the perspective of the regulative potential of new technologies to control the discourses and genres of ordinary participation and, in so doing, to reproduce the institutional power relations that such participation seeks to challenge.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Discourse Studies.

Regional development strategies are becoming more similar all around Europe, even though regional differences are more pronounced than ever and many European regions have become more autonomous actors. This thesis of a peculiar standardized diversification of sub-national space in the modern European Union is the point of departure of this book. Based upon the analytical premises of Stanford School Sociological Institutionalism, Sebastian M. Buttner studies regional mobilization in contemporary Europe from a new and innovative perspective. He highlights the importance of scientific expertise and global scientific models in contemporary regional development practice, and exemplifies their significance with the example of region-building in Poland in the course of EU integration. This new wave of regional mobilization is not just conceived as an effect of local, national or European politics, but as an expression of a larger conceptual shift in governing society and space. This well researched and clearly argued book not only provides fresh insights into region-building and regionalization in contemporary European space, but also contributes to the new sociology of Europeanization. It will be an illuminating read for scholars and students in Sociology, European and EU studies, International Relations, Cultural Studies, Geography, Regional Science, Polish Studies and related subject areas.

Throughout history, the functions and roles of borders have been continuously changing. They can only be understood in their context, shaped as they are by history, politics and power, as well as cultural and social issues. Borders are therefore complex spatial and social phenomena which are not static or invariable, but which are instead highly dynamic. This comprehensive volume brings together a multidisciplinary team of leading scholars to provide an authoritative, state-of-the-art review of all aspects of borders and border research. It is truly global in scope and, besides embracing the more traditional strands of the field including geopolitics, migration and territorial identities, it also takes in recently emerging topics such as the role of borders in a seemingly borderless world; creating neighbourhoods, and border enforcement in the post-9/11 era.

First published in 1986 Mary Douglas? theory of institutions uses the sociological theories of Emile Durkheim and Ludwig Fleck to determine not only how institutions think, but also the extent to which thinking itself is dependent upon institutions. Different kinds of institutions allow individuals to think different kinds of thoughts and to respond to different emotions. It is just as difficult to explain how individuals come to share the categories of their thought as to explain how they ever manage to sink their private interests for a common good.

Douglas forewarns us that institutions do not think independently, nor do they have purposes, nor do they build themselves. As we construct our institutions, we are squeezing each other's ideas into a common shape in order to prove their legitimacy by sheer numbers. She admonishes us not to take comfort in the thought that primitives may think through institutions, but moderns decide on important issues individually. Our legitimated institutions make major decisions, and these decisions always involve ethical principles.

The question of agency is a key issue in social theory and research. The discourse of human agency as an effect of social relations is deeply intertwined with the history of sociological thought. However, in most recent discussions the role of non-humans gains a substantial impact concerning agency. Agency without Actors? New Approaches to Collective Action asks: Are nonhumans active, do they have agency? And if so: how and in which different ways?

Consequently, Agency without Actors? New Approaches to Collective Action

• outlines a wide range of novel accounts that link human and non-human agency
• tries to understand social-technical, political and environmental networks as different forms of agency that produce discrete and identifiable entities
• asks how different types of (often conflicting) agency and agents are distinguished in practice, how they are maintained and how they interfere with each other.

By studying the substantial impact of the role of non-humans in connection with human relations, the book aims to advance the discourse on agency and investigates into the different possible modes of human and nonhuman interplay.

This book is essential reading for students and scholars of sociology, science and technology studies, social anthropology, animal studies, environmental studies and social theory.

Furthers the interreligious, international and interdisciplinary understanding of the concrete role of religion in global issues, particularly the SDGs. Combines cutting-edge research with case studies and concrete implications for academics, policy makers, and practitioners. Features practical case studies from contributors with different religious, cultures, and geographic backgrounds.