The City of Cape Town is a place of contrasts, the legacy of apartheid having left a distinct make-up. Yet the challenges confronting the contemporary city are notably aggravated by modern-day factors such as increasing unemployment and poverty.

In this timely work, Mayor of Cape Town Patricia de Lille and Craig Kesson, the city’s Director of Policy and Strategy, confront some of the issues of governance: how can the city help overcome social and physical segregation; how can the government live up to the promises made to South Africans; and how can the city function and heal within these limitations?

"I’ve seen firsthand the progress Cape Town has made under Mayor De Lille. Successes in one city often spreads to others, and this book provides a valuable guide for how, with a bit of motivated and dynamic leadership, cities can lead the way on the most important issues of our day.” Michael Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg L.P. and former mayor of New York City

"A brilliantly clear and concise guide. Highly recommended." - Ben Chu Economic inequality in the UK is currently at historically high levels and the rise in income inequality over the last 30 years is one of the largest across developed nations. But what caused this sustained increase in inequality and what does it mean for modern society in the UK? In this book, Economist Mike Brewer discusses the causes and consequences of these high levels of economic inequality, outlining why the UK became so unequal in the 1980s and how this has developed further since the 2008 financial crash and the austerity that followed. Brewer then presents new analysis of the top 1% and 0.1%, before assessing the relevance of Thomas Piketty's landmark work and predictions around wealth inequalities. The author then outlines six key areas that need addressing to move the UK off its high-inequality path and towards a fairer society, including wealth redistribution, social mobility, and excessive pay at the top. ABOUT THE SERIES: The 'What Do We Know and What Should We Do About...?' series offers readers short, up-to-date overviews of key issues often misrepresented, simplified or misunderstood in modern society and the media. Each book is written by a leading social scientist with an established reputation in the relevant subject area. The Series Editor is Professor Chris Grey, Royal Holloway, University of London

A Companion to Border Studies introduces an exciting and expanding field of interdisciplinary research, through the writing of an international array of scholars, from diverse perspectives that include anthropology, development studies, geography, history, political science and sociology. * Explores how nations and cultural identities are being transformed by their dynamic, shifting borders where mobility is sometimes facilitated, other times impeded or prevented * Offers an array of international views which together form an authoritative guide for students, instructors and researchers * Reflects recent significant growth in the importance of understanding the distinctive characteristics of borders and frontiers, including cross-border cooperation, security and controls, migration and population displacements, hybridity, and transnationalism

A collection of stories-some well known, some more obscure- capturing some of the best storytelling of this golden age of nonfiction. An anthology of the best new masters of nonfiction storytelling, personally chosen and introduced by Ira Glass, the producer and host of the award-winning public radio program "This American Life." These pieces-on teenage white collar criminals, buying a cow, Saddam Hussein, drunken British soccer culture, and how we know everyone in our Rolodex-are meant to mesmerize and inspire.

"This is a book that should be read by anyone interested in class, inequality, poverty and politics. Actually, probably more importantly it should be read by people who think that those things do not matter! It provides a wonderful summation of the huge amount of work on these topics that now exists and it also offers its own distinctive perspectives on a set of issues that are - despite the claims of some influential commentators - still central to the sociological enterprise and, indeed to political life." - Roger Burrows, University of York "A clear and compelling analysis of the dynamics of social and spatial inequality in an era of globalisation. This is an invaluable resource for students and scholars in sociology, human geography and the social sciences more generally." - Gary Bridge, University of Bristol With the declining attention paid to social class in sociology, how can we analyze continuing and pervasive socio-economic inequality? What is the impact of recent developments in sociology on how we should understand disadvantage? Moving beyond the traditional dichotomies of social theory, this book brings the study of social stratification and inequality into the 21st century. Starting with the widely agreed 'fact' that the world is becoming more unequal, this book brings together the 'identity of displacement' in sociology and the 'spaces of flow' of geography to show how place has become an increasingly important focus for understanding new trends in social inquality.

Multi-faced Social Transformations: Challenges and Studies brings together the proceedings of the 7th Slovenian Social Science Conference, "The Challenges of Social Transformations", held in September 2014. It was organized by the School of Advanced Social Studies (SASS), the Slovenian National Committee of the Management of Social Transformations programme (MOST), and the Slovenian National Commission for UNESCO. The multidisciplinary contributions presented here analyse various aspects of the economic, social, and cultural transformations that accompany the contemporary globalized world.The book consists of four sections dealing with particular areas of transformations. These include a range of political, economic and cultural dimensions that are observed from the macro-level, in social systems and structural changes, to the micro-level, in aspects of individuals' lives. The book will be of interest for academics in the field of social sciences, as well as for civil society activists and policy makers. The frames of the transformations are not limited to the European space, and provide a more global perspective.

The figure of the medieval "wandering scholar" (Pietsch) has never been as true as today: Academic Mobility and Migration have now become a reality for most people involved in higher education. We also know for sure that they are actively contributing to the postmodern transformation of the "social as society" into the "social as mobility" (Urry).Written by leading and emerging scholars, this volume explores the impact of Academic Mobility and Migration on institutions, people and their social environment. It also considers up-to-date aspects which remain relatively underexplored: Academic migration (vs. mobility), virtual academic mobility, North-South mobility, language policies at a "glocal" level, and questions of identity. The authors examine the personal, social, professional and educational consequences of Academic Mobility and Migration from a variety of disciplinal orientations including sociology, language education, linguistics and education. Some of the chapters also seek to propose alternative ways of analysing these phenomena.This unique book is an invaluable resource for anybody with an interest in educational mobility in the 21st century: researchers, teachers, policy-makers, politicians, administrators, but also college and university students.

This book is a twist on the current discourse around 'inclusivity' and 'widening participation'. Higher education is welcoming students from diverse educational, social, and economic backgrounds, and yet it predominantly employs middle-class academics. Conceptually, there appears, on at least these grounds alone, to be a cultural and class mismatch. This work discusses empirical interviews with tenured academics from a working-class heritage employed in one UK university. Interviewees talk candidly about their childhood backgrounds, their school experiences, and what happened to them after leaving compulsory education. They also reveal their experiences of university, both as students and academics from their early careers to the present day. This book will be of interest to an international audience that includes new and aspiring academics who come from a working-class background themselves. The multifaceted findings will also be relevant to established academics and students of sociology, education studies and social class.