This book reexamines Chinese sociology's point of departure and boundaries of western sociology from a new academic perspective, and offers a new definition of the essence and mission of sociology, drawing and critically reflecting on the ideological and theoretical theories of the classic sociologists. On this basis, it makes a careful study of the origin of Confucian classics and western sources of Chinese sociology and analyses the origin and evolution of Chinese sociology at the intersection of Chinese and western academic history. Further, it provides a deep and thorough discussion of the social theories of Chinese sociology pioneers and founders (such as Fu Yan, Youwei Kang, and Qichao Liang) and comments on Shuming Liang's sociological theory, which emphasizes the Chinese culture and tradition as well as the particularity of the Chinese social structure. In addition, it also offers an in-depth analysis of Xiaotong Fei's advocacy of the idea of expanding the traditional boundaries of sociology in his later years. With regard to promoting the development of a new Chinese sociology, the book is particularly important in terms of expanding academic research and promoting discipline construction.

This book highlights the shortcomings of the present Digital Rights Management (DRM) regulations in China. Using literature reviews and comparative analysis from theoretical and empirical perspectives, it appraises different DRM restriction regulations and practices as well as current advice on balance of interests to analyze the dilemma faced by the DRM system. This research intends to help China establish a comprehensive DRM regulatory model through comparative theoretical and empirical critiques of systems in America and Europe. A newly designed DRM regulatory model should be suitable for specific Chinese features, and should consist of government regulated, self-regulated, and even unregulated sections. The new regulation model might be an addition to existing legal structures, while self-regulations/social enforcement also would be as important as legislation based on case studies.

In her book, Juliane Kanitz not only examines the frequently asked question of why Muslim women wear a headscarf, but also concentrates on how it is worn. She is concerned with the cultural, aesthetic and fashionable preferences of women and not primarily with the religious motives that are otherwise often the focus of attention. In addition to a contribution to research on the Muslim headscarf, the author presents theoretical and empirical supplements to Islamic fashion and Islam in Germany as a whole. She also discusses the debate on Europeanization, in which arguments against Muslims are put forward, and develops some perspectives on the topic of the headscarf in Germany that have not yet been taken into account, made possible by the new perspective of fashion.

This book argues that in the digital era, a reinvention of democracy is urgently necessary. It discusses the mounting evidence showing that digitalisation is pushing classical parliamentary democracy to its limits, offering examples such as how living in a filter bubble and debating with political bots is profoundly changing democratic communication, making it more emotional, hysterical even, and less rational. It also explores how classical democracy involves long, slow thinking and decision processes, which don't fit to the ever-increasing speed of the digital world, and examines the technical developments some fear will lead to governance by algorithms.In the digitalised world, democracy no longer functions as it has in the past. This does not mean waving goodbye to democracy - instead we need to reinvent it. How this could work is the central theme of this book.

Drawing on qualitative research conducted in Brussels, Wallonia and Flanders, Islam and Turks in Belgium examines the interdependence between Muslim community and association. With a focus on social groups, religious structures and circles within Turkish populations, this book demonstrates how communal and associative movements operate through a combination of relationships of proximity and distance. Proximity is a way in which Muslim organisations establish religious, social, and cultural ties with communities. Distance, on the other hand, takes into account social, historical, and political elements from abroad, and refers to the relationship with the Muslim world more broadly. As this reciprocal web of relations gives rise to Islamic mobilisations, it leads to the emergence or persistence of different figures of authority within associations and communities who articulate traditional, charismatic, and bureaucratic legitimacies. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of the sociology of religion, migration, race, ethnicity and Islamic studies.

Putting the anthropological imagination under the spotlight, this book represents the experience of three generations of researchers, each of whom have long collaborated with the same Indigenous community over the course of their careers. In the context of a remote Indigenous Australian community in northern Australia, these researchers-anthropologists, an archeologist, a literary scholar, and an artist-encounter reflexivity and ethnographic practice through deeply personal and professionally revealing accounts of anthropological consciousness, relational encounters, and knowledge sharing. In six discrete chapters, the authors reveal the complexities that run through these relationships, considering how any one of us builds knowledge, shares knowledge, how we encounter different and new knowledge, and how well we are positioned to understand the lived experiences of others, whilst making ourselves fully available to personal change. At its core, this anthology is a meditation on learning and friendship across cultures.

In this edited volume, authors analyze how symbolic boundaries of belonging are negotiated and reflected upon by school actors in different educational contexts and how that contributes to a richer understanding of the ways in which "we-ness" acts as a fundamentally structuring force in immigrant incorporation. The analyses draw on cultural sociologist Jeffrey Alexander's work on civil sphere theory, thus grasping both the solidaristic dimensions of incorporation and processes of exclusion. Chapters are guided by two major themes: school choice/ethnic school segregation and religion/faith in schooling. Both of these themes provide rich examples of how immigrant school actors negotiate the symbolic codes that define boundaries of belonging/non-belonging in different communities. This focus will broaden the understanding of how educational practices and formal schooling works in relation to immigrant incorporation into different school cultures, as well as in the Swedish civil sphere.

This book provides insight into how flamenco travels, the forms it assumes in new locales, and the reciprocal effects on the original scene. Utilising a postnational approach to cultural identity, Martin explores the role of non-native culture brokers in cultural transmission. This concept, referred to as 'cosmopolitan human hubs', builds on Kiwan and Meinhof's 'hubs' theory of network migration to move cultural migration and globalisation studies forwards. Martin outlines a post-globalisation flamenco culture through analysis of ethnographic research carried out in the UK, Sevilla and Madrid. Insight into these glocal scenes characterises flamenco as a historically globalized art complex, represented in various hubs around the world. This alternative approach to music migration and globalisation studies will be of interest to students and scholars across leisure studies, musicology, sociology and anthropology.

This volume is first consistent effort to systematically analyze the features and consequences of colonial repatriation in comparative terms, examining the trajectories of returnees in six former colonial countries (Belgium, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and Portugal). Each contributor examines these cases through a shared cultural sociology frame, unifying the historical and sociological analyses carried out in the collection. More particularly, the book strengthens and improves one of the most important and popular current streams of cultural sociology, that of collective trauma. Using a comparative perspective to study the trajectories of similarly traumatized groups in different countries allows for not only a thick description of the return processes, but also a thick explanation of the mechanisms and factors shaping them. Learning from these various cases of colonial returnees, the authors have been able to develop a new theoretical framework that may help cultural sociologists to explain why seemingly similar claims of collective trauma and victimhood garner respect and recognition in certain contexts, but fail in others.

This book not only seeks to theoretically analyze the concept, chief characteristics and framework of "social mentality", but also explores the influence of social mentality on such elements of social functioning as individuals, groups, societies, markets and countries, and the influence of such elements as cultural, social, economic, political and mental factors on social mentality. Besides, this book discusses the structure of social mentality, tools for measuring it, and an indicator system. What's more, it explores the role of the social mentality mechanism in the construction of harmonious societies.

This book takes an in-depth look at the integration of fashion and philosophy. It challenges the deeply rooted prejudice or misconception that fashion is a field limited to body-oriented and appearance-related themes and practices. It also reveals that fashion is intermeshed with distinctively modern issues that belong to the realm of the mind as well as the body. In doing so, it refashions philosophy and philosophizes fashion, which ultimately amount to the same thing. The book argues that while the philosophization of fashion can give a clearer understanding of some esoteric areas of philosophy and fashion's close connection to modern societies and politics, it also shows that philosophy can assist in redeeming fashion from the objective, bodily world, positioning it as an indispensable part of the humanities. This is because fashion manifests critical aspects of human culture in our time, and is an expression of the zeitgeist, which is interwoven with the unfolding of history. This book will be highly relevant to students and researchers in fashion studies who are looking for the theoretical underpinnings and insights for their own work. It will also be of keen interest to scholars in the field of philosophy who are seeking to apply philosophical concepts to both everyday life and our empirical world.

Applying a cultural sociology of performance, this book interrogates how the meaning of sport intersects with gender. Trygve B. Broch points out uncertainties in the causal arguments made by key figures in the cultural studies tradition, instead advancing a meaning-centered study of sports as involving both a social and an athletic performance. Sports not only reflect or reverse social realities, but capture and keep our attention when we use and experience them as a means to reflect on social life, injustice, and hierarchy. More specifically, blending approaches from media studies with ethnography, Broch explores the women-dominated sport of handball in Norway, a country that considers gender equality a basis of democracy. As such, the analyses here show how broadly available meanings about sameness and equality are mediated and experienced through a performative feel for the game.

This book tells the remarkable story of the friendship between Liria Hernandez, a Roma woman from Madrid, and Paloma Gay y Blasco, a non-Roma anthropologist. In this unique reciprocal experiment, the former informant returns the gaze to write about the anthropologist, her life and her environment. Through finely crafted and deeply moving text, Hernandez and Gay y Blasco suggest new ways of doing and writing anthropology. The dialogue between Hernandez and Gay y Blasco provides a courageous account of the entanglements and rewards of anthropological research. Drawing on letters, conversations, and fieldnotes gathered over twenty-five years, each of the authors talks about herself, the other, and the impact of anthropology on their two lives. They examine their intertwined trajectories as Spanish women and reflect on the challenges of devising their own reciprocal genre. Blending ethnography, life story and memoir, they undermine the dichotomy between author and subject around which scholarship still revolves.

This book reviews the research on Einstein's brain from a sociological perspective and in the context of the social brain paradigm. Instead of "Einstein, the genius of geniuses" standing on the shoulders of giants, Restivo proposes a concept of Einstein the social being standing on the shoulders of social networks. Rather than challenging Einstein's uniqueness or the uniqueness of his achievements, the book grounds Einstein and his achievements in a social ecology opposed to the myths of the "I," individualism, and the very idea of "genius." "Einstein" is defined by the particular configuration of social networks that he engaged as his life unfolded, not by biological inheritances.

Exploring mediated time, this book contemplates how far (and in what ways) media and time are intertwined from a diverse set of theoretical and empirical angles. It builds from theoretical discussions concerning the question of mediation and the normative framing of time (especially acceleration) and works its way through questions of time for/of one's own, resisting temporalities, polychronicity, in-between-time, simultaneity and other time concepts. It further examines specific time frames, imaginations of a media future and the past, questions of online journalism and multitasking or liveness. Bringing together authors from diverse backgrounds, this collection presents a rich combination of milestone articles, new empirical research, enriching theoretical work and interviews with leading researchers to bridge sociology, media studies, and science and technology studies in one of the first book-length publications on the emerging field of media and time.

This book advances understanding of the manifestations, causes, and consequences of generosity. Synthesizing the findings of the 14 research projects conducted by the Science of Generosity Initiative and offering an appendix of methods for studying generosity, this comprehensive account integrates insights from disparate disciplines to facilitate a broader understanding of giving-ultimately creating a compendium of not only the latest research in the field of altruistic behaviors, but also a research roadmap for the future. As the author sequentially explores the manifestations, causes, and consequences of generosity, Patricia Snell Herzog here also offers analyses ranging from the micro- to macro-level to paint a full picture of the individual, interpersonal and familial, and collective (inter)actions involved in altruism and generosity. The author concludes with a call to stimulate further interdisciplinary generosity studies, describing the implications for emerging scholars and practitioners across sociology, economics, political science, religious studies, and beyond.

At a time when traditional dating practices are being replaced with new ways to meet potential partners, this book provides fresh insights into how are men responding to new ways of dating. Drawing upon original research, this book examines a wide range of contemporary dating practices that includes speed dating, holiday romances, use of dating apps, online sex seeking and dogging. It reveals the ways in which men draw upon traditional models of masculinity to negotiate these changes; but also, the extent to which men are responding by elaborating new masculinities. Through an investigation of the dynamics of heterosexuality and masculinity, this book highlights the importance attached to authenticity, and the increasing marketization and commodification of dating. It argues that in a post-truth world, men must also come to terms with a post-trust dating landscape. Combining rich empirical material with keen theoretical analysis, this innovative work will have interdisciplinary appeal for students and scholars of sociology, media studies, cultural studies, and gender studies.

Winner of the 2020 British Sociological Association Philip Abrams Prize Providing a theory of moral practice for a contemporary sociological audience, Owen Abbott shows that morality is a relational practice achieved by people in their everyday lives. He moves beyond old dualisms-society versus the individual, social structure versus agency, body versus mind-to offer a sociologically rigorous and coherent theory of the relational constitution of the self and moral practice, which is both shared and yet enacted from an individualized perspective. In so doing, The Self, Relational Sociology, and Morality in Practice not only offers an urgently needed account of moral practice and its integral role in the emergence of the self, but also examines morality itself within and through social relations and practices. Abbott's conclusions will be of interest to social scientists and philosophers of morality, those working with pragmatic and interactionist approaches, and those involved with relational sociology and social theory.

This book argues the crucial role of culture and cultural policies in defining the notion of urban citizenship in Barcelona since 1979. Through analysis of official documents, municipal publicity campaigns, sport - including the Olympic Games and Barcelona F.C - and film, Balibrea makes sense of the city as a global cultural destination and reveals how such transformation impacts local inhabitants. Scrutinizing municipal discourses on culture from the late 1970s, this interdisciplinary work unveils how ideas of the function and nature of citizenship articulate changing definitions of the city, from model to brand. Over the course of topics such as: tourism, social democracy and urban regeneration, Balibrea constructs an original argument for how the Barcelona image mobilizes neoliberal fantasies of subject transformation. A wide-ranging study, this book will be of great interest to scholars of urban geography, sociology and cultural studies.

This book is about multiculturalism, broadly defined as the recognition, respect and accommodation of cultural differences. Teo proposes a framework of multicultural denizenship that includes group-specific rights and intercultural dialogue, by problematising three issues: a) the unacknowledged misrecognition of non-citizens within the scholarship of multiculturalism; b) uncritical treatment of citizens and non-citizens as binary categories and; c) problematic parcelling of group-specific rights with citizenship rights. Drawing on the case of Singapore as an illustrative example, where temporary labour migrants are culturally stereotyped, socioeconomically disenfranchised and denied access to rights accorded only to citizens, Teo argues that understandings of multiculturalism need to be expanded and adjusted to include a fluidity of identities, spectrum of rights and shared experiences of marginalisation among citizens and non-citizens. Civic Multiculturalism in Singapore will be of interest to students and scholars of multiculturalism, critical citizenship studies, migration studies, political theory and postcolonial studies.

In a world where the global engagement and international dialogue intensifies, some areas of cultivated knowledge suffer from this dialogue and this has consequences for people and communities. We propose education to be such a case. The global dialogue in education tends to be restricted to and mediated by standardized measurements. Such standards are meant to measure qualities of education and of student behavior and create the sought for condition for normative comparability and competition. The obvious drawback is that cultural variability - in local living as well as in education - is rendered irrelevant. Are there alternatives? The book insists on maintaining the discussion about education on a global level, but rather than moving towards homogenization and standardization of education, the attention is drawn towards the potential for learning from creative fits - and misfits - between concrete local cultures, institutional practices and global aims and standards of education. This work brings together a group of educational and developmental researchers and scholars grappling to find culturally informed and sensitive modes of educating people and communities. Case studies and examples from four geographical contexts are being discussed: China, Brazil, Australia and Europe. While being embedded in these local cultures, the authors share a conceptual grounding in cultural developmental theorizing and a vision for a culturally informed globalized perspective on education. As the theme of the book is learning from each other, the volume also includes commentaries from leading scholars in the field of cultural psychology and education.

This book explores the ways in which religion is observed, performed, and organised in skateboard culture. Drawing on scholarship from the sociology of religion and the cultural politics of lifestyle sports, this work combines ethnographic research with media analysis to argue that the rituals of skateboarding provide participants with a rich cultural canvas for emotional and spiritual engagement. Paul O'Connor contends that religious identification in skateboarding is set to increase as participants pursue ways to both control and engage meaningfully with an activity that has become an increasingly mainstream and institutionalised sport. Religion is explored through the themes of myth, celebrity, iconography, pilgrimage, evangelism, cults, and self-help.

Leading scholars in the sociology of migration, Michaela Benson and Karen O'Reilly, re-theorise lifestyle migration through a sustained focus on postcolonialism at its intersections with neoliberalism. This book provides an in-depth analysis of the interplay of colonial traces and neoliberal presents, the relationship between residential tourism and economic development, and the governance and regulation of lifestyle migration. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken by the authors among lifestyle migrants in Malaysia and Panama, they reveal the structural and material conditions that support migration and how these are embodied by migrant subjects, while also highlighting their agency within this process. This rigorous work marks an important contribution to emerging debates surrounding privileged migration and mobility. It will appeal to sociologists, social theorists, human and cultural geographers, economists, social psychologists, demographers, social anthropologists, tourism and migration studies specialists.

This book outlines and systematises findings from a growing body of research that examines the different rationales, dimensions and dynamics of risk-taking in current societies; providing insight into the different motivations and social roots of risk-taking to advance scholarly debates and improve social regulation. Conceptually, the book goes beyond common approaches which problematise socially undesirable risk-taking, or highlight the alluring character of risk-taking. Instead, it follows a broadly interpretivist approach and engages in examining motives, control, routinisation, reflexivity, skills, resources, the role of identity in risk-taking and how these are rooted in and framed by different social forces. Zinn draws on qualitative studies from different theoretical and conceptual backgrounds such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, pragmatism, feminism, class analysis, theory of practice and discourse analysis among others, to outline key distinctions and concepts central to the understanding of risk-taking. It will be a key resource for everyone who is concerned with the understanding and management of risk-taking in all kinds of social domains, such as immigration, youth, leisure sports, crime, health, finance, and social policy.