'The Anthem Companion to Auguste Comte' offers the best contemporary work on Auguste Comte, written by the best scholars currently working in this field. Original, authoritative and wide-ranging, the critical assessments of this volume will make it ideal for Comte students and scholars alike.

'Anthem Companions to Sociology' offer authoritative and comprehensive assessments of major figures in the development of sociology from the last two centuries. Covering the major advancements in sociological thought, these companions offer critical evaluations of key figures in the American and European sociological tradition, and will provide students and scholars with both an in-depth assessment of the makers of sociology and chart their relevance to modern society.

The Problem of the State provides a new perspective on what the social and political sciences can contribute to understandings of the state and the ambivalent place it occupies in our collective affairs. Distinguishing two broad conceptual and methodological approaches to addressing the problem of how to study the state empirically rather than theoretically - the constitutionalist and constructionist positions - the author reviews the grounds and limits of both to reveal their common assumption: that it is up to the social and political sciences to define what the problem of the state is. Building on insights from Marx, Wittgenstein and Ethnomethodology, this book frees the study of the state from the limiting assumptions of common approaches and advocates a return of the problem to its proper environment, in social and political practice.

The Explanation of Behaviour was the first book written by the renowned philosopher Charles Taylor. A vitally important work of philosophical anthropology, it is a devastating criticism of the theory of behaviourism, a powerful explanatory approach in psychology and philosophy when Taylor's book was first published. However, Taylor has far more to offer than a simple critique of behaviourism. He argues that in order to properly understand human beings, we must grasp that they are embodied, minded creatures with purposes, plans and goals, something entirely lacking in reductionist, scientific explanations of human behaviour. Taylor's book is also prescient in according a central place to non-human animals, which like human beings are subject to needs, desires and emotions. However, because human beings have the unique ability to interpret and reflect on their own actions and purposes and declare them to others, Taylor argues that human experience differs to that of other animals. Furthermore, the fact that human beings are often directed by their purposes has a fundamental bearing on how we understand the social and moral world. Taylor's classic work is essential reading for those in philosophy and psychology as well as related areas such as sociology and religion. This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Preface by the author and a new Foreword by Alva Noe, setting the book in philosophical and historical context.

Living-With Wisdom explores the way in which ancient Greek models of philosophy as an attempt to live 'the good life' can and should be realised through the practice of permaculture. Following the thought of Plato and Aristotle, the author places the achievement of wisdom and fulfilment at the centre of the good life, identifying these with the achievement of a complex admixture of virtues, which are dependent on an appreciation of goodness itself. The book then examines the manner in which permaculture - or the practice of sustainable farming or ethical gardening - can provide us with the best opportunity to acquire this 'moral knowledge' through the close relationships we can have with other living beings and things. A study of the nature of wisdom and a means of 'living-with philosophy', Living-With Wisdom: Permaculture and Symbiotic Ethics reveals that it is by appreciating and sharing in the lives of other organisms that we engage with many dilemmas of life and death and have the opportunity to exercise the virtues. As such, it will appeal to scholars of philosophy, social theory and anthrozoology with interests in virtue ethics, environmental ethics, animal ethics and human-animal relations.

Economists occupy leading positions in many different sectors including central and private banks, multinational corporations, the state and the media, as well as serving as policy consultants on everything from health to the environment and security. Power and Influence of Economists explores the interconnected relationship between power, knowledge and influence which has led economics to be both a source and beneficiary of widespread power and influence. The contributors to this book explore the complex and diverse methods and channels that economists have used to exert and expand their influence from different disciplinary and national perspectives. Four different analytical views on the role of power and economics are taken: first, the role of economic expert discourses as power devices for the formation of influential expertise; second, the logics and modalities of governmentality that produce power/knowledge apparatuses between science and society; third, economists as involved in networks between academia, politics and the media; and forth, economics considered as a social field, including questions of legitimacy and unequal relations between economists based on the detention of various capitals. The volume includes case studies on a variety of national configurations of economics, such as the US, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Greece, Mexico and Brazil, as well as international spaces and organisations such as the IMF. This book provides innovative research perspectives for students and scholars of heterodox economics, cultural political economy, sociology of professions, network studies, and the social studies of power, discourse and knowledge. "The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9780367817084, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license."

Marilyn Strathern is among the most creative and celebrated contemporary anthropologists, and her work draws interest from across the humanities and social sciences. Redescribing Relations brings some of Strathern's most committed and renowned readers into conversation in her honour - especially on themes she has rarely engaged. The volume not only deepens our understanding of Strathern's work, it also offers models of how to extend her relational insights to new terrains. With a comprehensive introduction, a complete list of Strathern's publications and a historic interview published in English for the first time, this is an invaluable resource for Strathern's old and new interlocutors alike.

Sociology is in crisis. While other disciplines have taken on board the revolutionary discoveries driven by evolutionary biology and psychology, genomics and behavioral genetics, and the neurosciences, sociology has ignored these advances and embraced a biophobia that threatens to drive the discipline into marginality. This book takes its place in a rich tradition of efforts to integrate sociological thinking into the world of the biological sciences that can be traced to the origins of the discipline, and that took on modern form beginning a generation ago in the works of thinkers such as E.O. Wilson, Richard Alexander, Joseph Lopreato, and Richard Machalek. It offers an accessible introduction to rethinking sociological science in consonance with these contemporary biological revolutions. From the standpoint of a biosociology rooted in the single most important scientific theory touching on human life, the Darwinian theory of natural selection, the book sketches an evolutionary social science that would enable us to properly attend to basic questions of human nature, human behavior, and human social organization. Individual chapters take on such topics as: The roots and nature of human sociality; the origins of morality in human social life and an evolutionary perspective on human interests, reciprocity, and altruism; the sex difference in our species and what it contributes to an explanation of sociological facts; the nature of stratification, status, and inequality in human evolutionary history; the question of race in our species; and the contribution evolutionary theory makes to explaining the origins and the importance of culture in human societies.

Sociology is in crisis. While other disciplines have taken on board the revolutionary discoveries driven by evolutionary biology and psychology, genomics and behavioral genetics, and the neurosciences, sociology has ignored these advances and embraced a biophobia that threatens to drive the discipline into marginality. This book takes its place in a rich tradition of efforts to integrate sociological thinking into the world of the biological sciences that can be traced to the origins of the discipline, and that took on modern form beginning a generation ago in the works of thinkers such as E.O. Wilson, Richard Alexander, Joseph Lopreato, and Richard Machalek. It offers an accessible introduction to rethinking sociological science in consonance with these contemporary biological revolutions. From the standpoint of a biosociology rooted in the single most important scientific theory touching on human life, the Darwinian theory of natural selection, the book sketches an evolutionary social science that would enable us to properly attend to basic questions of human nature, human behavior, and human social organization. Individual chapters take on such topics as: The roots and nature of human sociality; the origins of morality in human social life and an evolutionary perspective on human interests, reciprocity, and altruism; the sex difference in our species and what it contributes to an explanation of sociological facts; the nature of stratification, status, and inequality in human evolutionary history; the question of race in our species; and the contribution evolutionary theory makes to explaining the origins and the importance of culture in human societies.

Following the work of prominent object relations theorists, such as Fairbairn, Suttie and Winnicott, Gal Gerson explores the correlation between analytical theory and intellectual environment in two ways. He notes the impact that the British object relations school had on both psychology and wider culture, and suggests that the school's outlook involved more than a clinical choice. Gerson first interprets the object relations model as a political theory that completes a certain internal development within liberalism. He later outlines the relationship between the analytical theory and the historical setting in which it formed and took root. By engaging with these questions, Gerson demonstrates the deeper structure and implications of object relation theory for social philosophy. This allows him to answer questions such as: 'What kind of social arrangements do we endorse when we accept object relations theory as a fair description of mind?'; 'What beliefs about power, individuality, and household structure do we take in? What do we give up when doing so?'; and, lastly, 'What does it say about contemporary advanced societies that they have taken in much of the theory's content?' Proposing a novel rethinking of human nature, Individuality and Ideology in British Object Relations Theory provides much-needed insight into how this school of psychoanalytic theory has impacted contemporary social and political life.

Ideologies and identities are central to the organisation of political life and political conflict, yet most empirical studies tend to obscure their significance. This failure to take the politics of identity seriously arises from an absence of adequate theory and method. This 1996 study draws on both social theory and psychological (especially psychoanalytic) theory in an attempt to overcome these lacunae. First, it develops a novel theory and method for the analysis of ideology and identity. Second, it develops a detailed analysis of the politics of identity in Northern Ireland through focusing upon Unionist ideology and Unionist identities in crisis. The political conflict within Unionism is analysed through a consideration of the variety of unconscious rules drawn upon by political actors and citizens in the making of Northern Ireland's history of the late 1980s.

Recent years have seen the rise of anti-politics as a political phenomenon. Beyond this new rejection of the political class there has long existed a deeper challenge to the political itself. Identifying the work of Derrida as 'a politics' and that of Baudrillard as 'transpolitics' this book charts convergences and divergences in their approaches.

When the Matrix trilogy was published in the mid-1980s, it introduced to mass culture a number of post-human tropes about the conscious machines that have haunted our collective imaginaries ever since. This volume explores the social representations and significance of technological developments - especially AI and human enhancement - that have started to transform our human agency. It uses these developments to revisit theories of the human mind and its essential characteristics: a first-person perspective, concerns and reflexivity. It looks at how the smart machines are used as agents of change in the basic institutions and organisations that hold contemporary societies together, for example in the family and the household, in commercial corporations, in health institutions or in the military. Its main purpose is to enrich the ongoing public discussion of the social and political implications of the smart machines by looking at the extent to which they further digitalise and bureaucratise the world, in particular by asking whether they are used to develop techno-totalitarian societies that corrode normativity and solidarity.

Social robotics is a cutting edge research area gathering researchers and stakeholders from various disciplines and organizations. The transformational potential that these machines, in the form of, for example, caregiving, entertainment or partner robots, pose to our societies and to us as individuals seems to be limited by our technical limitations and phantasy alone. This collection contributes to the field of social robotics by exploring its boundaries from a philosophically informed standpoint. It constructively outlines central potentials and challenges and thereby also provides a stable fundament for further research of empirical, qualitative or methodological nature.

Institutions are fundamental aspects for driving tourism and hospitality globally. They are the socio-economic "rules of the game" that serve to shape and constrain human and organisational interactions. This book is the first of its kind to provide a comprehensive overview of institutional theory in a tourism and hospitality context. The complexity and multiple scaled nature of the institutional environment plays a crucial role in the development and formation of tourism destinations, attractions, organisations, and businesses, as well as influencing the activities of individuals. Institutional theory therefore provides a means to understand the complexity and processes of change at different scales of analysis and provides insights into the organisational and political basis of tourism policy development and implementation. Chapters introduce and expand on institutional analysis in tourism and hospitality, institutional theory in the social sciences, methodological issues, and future directions in institutional analysis in tourism and hospitality, making use of case studies throughout. This book will appeal to students of tourism, hospitality, leisure, and events, as well as other social science disciplines. Providing a comprehensive overview of and guide to the application of institutional theory, this book will serve as a complete reference to institutional theory in a tourism and hospitality setting for years to come.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003108436, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. This book argues that the expansion of administrative activities in today's working life is driven not only by pressure from above, but also from below. The authors examine the inner dynamics of people-processing organizations-those formally working for clients, patients, or students-to uncover the hidden attractions of doing administrative work, despite all the complaints and laments about "too many meetings" or "too much paperwork." There is something appealing to those compelled to participate in today's constantly multiplying and expanding administration that defies popular framings of it as merely pressure from above. Hidden Attractions of Administration shows in detail the emotional attractiveness, moral conflicts, and almost magical features that administrative tasks often entail in today's organizations, supported by ethnographic studies consisting of over 200 qualitative interviews and participant observations from ten organizational settings and contexts across Sweden. The authors also question and complement explanations in administration-related research that have previously been taken for granted, arguing that it is a simplification to attribute all aspects of the change to New Public Management and instead taking into account what the classic sociologist Georg Simmel called an Eigendynamik: a self-reinforcing tendency that, under certain circumstances, needs only a nudge in an administrative direction to get going. By applying ethnography to issues of bureaucratization and meeting cultures and by drawing on findings in emotional sociology and social anthropology, this volume contributes to both the sociology of work and the study of human service organizations and will appeal to scholars and students working across both areas.

Since its emergence in early 2020, the COVID-19 crisis has affected every part of the world. Well beyond its health effects, the pandemic has wrought major changes in people's everyday lives as they confront restrictions imposed by physical distancing and consequences such as loss of work, working or learning from home and reduced contact with family and friends. This edited collection covers a diverse range of experiences, practices and representations across international contexts and cultures (UK, Europe, North America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand). Together, these contributions offer a rich account of COVID society. They provide snapshots of what life was like for people in a variety of situations and locations living through the first months of the novel coronavirus crisis, including discussion not only of health-related experiences but also the impact on family, work, social life and leisure activities. The socio-material dimensions of quotidian practices are highlighted: death rituals, dating apps, online musical performances, fitness and exercise practices, the role of windows, healthcare work, parenting children learning at home, moving in public space as a blind person and many more diverse topics are explored. In doing so, the authors surface the feelings of strangeness and challenges to norms of practice that were part of many people's experiences, highlighting the profound affective responses that accompanied the disruption to usual cultural forms of sociality and ritual in the wake of the COVID outbreak and restrictions on movement. The authors show how social relationships and social institutions were suspended, re-invented or transformed while social differences were brought to the fore. At the macro level, the book includes localised and comparative analyses of political, health system and policy responses to the pandemic, and highlights the differences in representations and experiences of very different social groups, including people with disabilities, LGBTQI people, Dutch Muslim parents, healthcare workers in France and Australia, young adults living in northern Italy, performing artists and their audiences, exercisers in Australia and New Zealand, the Latin cultures of Spain and Italy, Asian-Americans and older people in Australia. This volume will appeal to undergraduates and postgraduates in sociology, cultural and media studies, medical humanities, anthropology, political science and cultural geography.

This is the first single-authored critical engagement with the major works of Zygmunt Bauman. Where previous books on Bauman have been exegetical, here an unwavering light is shone on key themes in the sociologist's work, exposing serious weaknesses in Bauman's interpretations of the Holocaust, Western modernity, consumerism, globalisation and the nature of sociology. The book shows how Eurocentrism, the neglect of issues of gender and a lack of awareness of the racism faced by Europe's non-white ethnic minorities seriously limit Bauman's analyses of Western societies. At the same time, it points to Bauman's repeated insistence on the need for sociologists to take a moral stance in favour of the world's poor and downtrodden as being his most valuable legacy. The book will be of great interest to sociologists. Its readability will be valued by undergraduates and postgraduates and it will attract a readership well beyond the discipline. -- .

This volume engages with post-humanist and transhumanist approaches to present an original exploration of the question of how humankind will fare in the face of artificial intelligence. With emerging technologies now widely assumed to be calling into question assumptions about human beings and their place within the world, and computational innovations of machine learning leading some to claim we are coming ever closer to the long-sought artificial general intelligence, it defends humanity with the argument that technological 'advances' introduced artificially into some humans do not annul their fundamental human qualities. Against the challenge presented by the possibility that advanced artificial intelligence will be fully capable of original thinking, creative self-development and moral judgement and therefore have claims to legal rights, the authors advance a form of 'essentialism' that justifies providing a 'decent minimum life' for all persons. As such, while the future of the human is in question, the authors show how dispensing with either the category itself or the underlying reality is a less plausible solution than is often assumed.

This book discusses how to develop green transitions which benefit, include and respect marginalised social groups. Diversity and Inclusion in Environmentalism explores the challenge of taking into account issues of equity and justice in the green transformation and shows that ignoring these issues risks exacerbating the gap between the rich and the poor, the marginalised and included, and undermining widespread support for climate change mitigation. Expert contributors provide evidence and analysis in relation to the thinking and practice that has prevented us from building a broad base of people who are willing and able to take the action necessary to successfully overcome the current ecological crises. Providing examples from a wide range of marginalised and/or oppressed groups including women, disabled people, Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) people and the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning and others (LGBTQ+) community, the authors demonstrate how the issues and concerns of these groups are often undervalued in environmental policy-making and environmental social movements. Overall, this book supports environmental academics and practitioners to choose and campaign for effective, equitable and widely supported environmental policy, thereby enabling a smoother transition to sustainability. This volume will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners of environmental justice, social and environmental policy, planning and environmental sociology.

Did Adam and Eve act rationally in eating the fruit of the forbidden tree? That can seem to depend solely on whether they had found the best means to their ends, in the spirit of the "economic" theories of rationality. In these essays, culled in revised form from twenty-five years' work, Martin Hollis argues that social action cannot be understood by viewing human beings as abstract individuals with preferences in search of satisfaction, or by divorcing practical reason from questions of the rationality of norms, principles, practices and ends.

Originally published in 1979, Ideology and Cultural Production examines the contribution to the debate surrounding 'culture', 'ideology' and 'representation' in this collection of essays. Originally presented as papers at the 1978 British Sociological Conference on the theme of culture, the collection is tied together under the argument for a definition which emphasises the material and ideological conditions of cultural production. The volume discusses key issues, such as the break with 'super-structural theory', the question of economism and the argument between culturalism and structuralism, as well as the central debates of determinism and autonomy.

This book brings together key essays from the career of social theorist John O'Neill, including his uncollected later writings, focusing on embodiment to explore the different ways in which the body trope informs visions of familial, economic, personal, and communal life. Beginning with an exploration of O'Neill's work on the construction of the biobody and the ways in which corporeality is sutured into social systems through regimes of power and familial socialisation, the book then moves to concentrate on O'Neill's career-long studies of the productive body and the ways in which the working body is caught in and resists disciplinary systems that seek to rationalise natural functions and control social relations. The third section considers O'Neill's concern with the ancient, early modern, and psychoanalytic sources of the post-modern libidinal body, and a final section on the civic body focuses specifically on the ways in which principles of reciprocity and generosity exceed the capitalist, individualist body of (neo)liberal political theory. The volume also includes an interview with O'Neill addressing many of the key themes of his work, a biographical note with an autobiographical postscript, a select bibliography of O'Neill's many publications, and an extensive introduction by the editors. A challenging and innovative collection, Writing the Body Politic: A John O'Neill Reader will appeal to critical social theorists and sociologists with interests in the work of one of sociology's great critical readers of classical and contemporary texts.

Engaging with the wide sociological literature on emotions, this book explores the social representation of emotions, their management and their effects by making reference to creative sources. With a specific focus on literary narrative, including the works of figures such as Dante, Austen, Manzoni, Tolstoy and Kundera, the author draws out the capacity of literary works to describe and represent both the external aspects of social relations and the inner motivations of the involved actors. An interdisciplinary study that combines sociology, narratology, philosophy, historical analysis and literary criticism, Emotions through Literature invites us to re-think the role of emotions in sociological analysis, employing literary narratives to give plausible intellectual responses to the double nature of emotions, their being both individual and social.

Population is the most influential factor in social development and economic growth, especially in China. In this book, author Tian Xueyuan provides macro illustrations of the main issues confronting China's population and development in the 21st century and advises on facing population development challenges to sustainable future development. This book explores issues such as the relation between the change of population and consumption, how the age of the working population affects economic structure and transition when above or below the Lewis turning point, the impact of population aging on growth speed and the pension system, how to remove the urban- rural dual structure, how to reform exam- oriented education, and how to balance relations between population, resource, environment, and sustainable growth. The discussions on population- consumption relations, labor- economy relations, urbanization and rural- urban relations, and beyond provide insightful judgment on and prospects for China's future development. This book is helpful for international audiences to better understand China's population and development challenges and strategies.

As modern society's routine sequestration of death and grief is increasingly replaced by late-modern society's growing concern with existential issues and emotionality, this book explores grief as a social emotion, bringing together contributions from scholars across the social sciences and humanities to examine its social and cultural aspects. Thematically organised in order to consider the historical changes in our understanding of grief, literary treatments of grief, contemporary forms of grief and grief as a perspective from which to engage in critique of society, it provides insights into the sociality of grief and will appeal to scholars of sociology, social theory and cultural studies with interests in the emotions and social pathologies.