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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social theory
In Jean Baudrillard and Radical Education Theory: Turning Right to Go Left, the authors argue that Baudrillard has been underappreciated in philosophical and theoretical work in education. They introduce him here as an important figure in radical thought who has something to add to theoretical lines of inquiry in education. The book does not offer an introduction to Baudrillard. Rather, his corpus is mined in order to describe how it functions as a counter to the code of education, rational thought, critical reason, etc. In effect, they establish that Baudrillard advocates for a counter-path to thinking that can shake us out of our ready-made thoughts and realize the radical potential for change.
This book is premised upon the assumption that the core purpose of universities is to create, preserve, transmit, validate, and find new applications for knowledge. It is written in the perspective of critical university studies, in which university governance processes should take ideas and discourse about ideas seriously, far more seriously than they are often taken within many of today's universities, since doing so is the key to achieving this purpose. Specifically, we assert that the best way for universities to take ideas seriously, and so to best achieve their purpose, is to consciously recognize and conserve the entire range of available ideas. Though the current emphasis upon factors such as student headcounts, increased efficiency and job creation are undoubtedly important, far more is at stake in universities than only these factors. From this premise, we deduce insights and arguments about academic freedom, as well as factors such as control and monitoring of the market place of ideas, the structure of information flows within universities, the role of language in university governance, and relationships between administrators, faculty members and students. We identify impediments to achieving the core purpose of universities, including the idea vetting systems of authoritarianism, corporatism, illiberalism, supernaturalism and political correctness. We elucidate how these impediments inhibit successful achievement of the core purpose of the university. In response to these impediments we prescribe relatively autonomous universities characterized by openness, transparency, dissent, and the maintenance of balance between conflicting perspectives, values, and interests.
The eighteenth-century Enlightenment saw the birth of an era which sought legitimacy not from the past but from the future. No longer would human beings invoke the authority of tradition; instead, modern societies emerging in the West justified themselves by their success at increasing, through the application of scientific knowledge, human control over the world. Ever since this notion of modernity was formulated it has provoked intense debate. In this wide-ranging historical introduction to social theory, Alex Callinicos explores the controversies over modernity and examines the connections between social theory and modern philosophy, political economy and evolutionary biology. He offers clear and accesssible treatments of the thought of Montesquieu, Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment, Hegel, Marx, Tocqueville, Maistre, Gobineau, Darwin, Spencer, Kautsky, Nietzsche, Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, Freud, Lukacs, Gramsci, Heidegger, Keynes, Hayek, Parsons, the Frankfurt School, Levi-Strauss, Althusser, Foucault, Habermas and Bourdieu, and concludes by surveying the state of contemporary social thought. A remarkably comprehensive and lucid primer, Social Theoryis essential reading for students of politics, sociology and social and political thought.
The Volume and Dynamics of International Migration provides a theoretical account of the causes, nature, and extent of the movement of international South-North migrants between affluent and poorer countries. The puzzle is: why are there so few international migrants out of most places? And why are there so many out of so few places? Only once migration out of a few places has started, do we see relatively more people moving. Mass mobility proceeds only when migrant networks turn local assets into transnational ones. The book also examines the reasons why many immigrants continue to keep ties to their places of origin, and why these ties do not hinder the adaptation of newcomers to immigration countries. These ties span immigration and emigration countries and form transnational social spaces, ranging from border-crossing families to refuges diasporas. Transnational social formations carry far-reaching implications for immigration adaptation, dual citizenship, and transnationalizing civil societites. The author provides an empirical grounding for his arguments by analysing the Turkish-German example.
The essays collected in The Peace of Nature and the Nature of Peace consider connections between ecology, environmental ethics, nonviolence, and philosophy of peace. Edited by Andrew Fiala, this book includes essays written by important scholars in the field of peace studies, pacifism, and nonviolence, including Michael Allen Fox, Andrew Fitz-Gibbon, Bill Gay, and others. Topics include: ecological consciousness and nonviolence, environmental activism and peace activism, the environmental impact of militarism, native and indigenous peoples and peace, food ethics and nonviolence, and other topics. The book should be of interest to scholars, students, and activists who are interested in the relationship between peace movements and environmentalism.
After critiquing chaos, catastrophe, and complexity theories, showing their limitations in the contemporary era, Rich furthers the development of crisis theory and applies the crisis theory approach to biological and social evolution. Treating evolution in the context of crisis theory, he shows that as evolution is both genetic and social, social evolution is an extension of biological evolution. As physical evolution results from problem solving, social evolution develops from the solving of historically significant problems, bringing about, for instance, the post-World War II era of knowledge. In this context, Rich discusses the problems of our era, with an emphasis on the paradox of industrialization and its consequences for wealthy and poor nations alike. The paradox of industrialization is approached in terms of crisis theory and resolved.
A volume in International Social Studies Forum: The Series Series Editors Richard Diem, University of Texas at San Antonio and Jeff Passe, University of North Carolina, Charlotte This volume explores issues involved with teaching social theory to preservice teachers pursuing degrees through teacher education programs and experienced teachers and administrators pursuing graduate degrees. The contributors detail their experiences teaching theoretical perspectives regarding race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, power, and the construction of schools as an institution of the state. The editors and contributors hope to offer the beginning of a colleagial dialogue within the field of education (both inside and outside the academy) about the relevance and pedagogical issues associated with such material. Additionally, the contributors offer advice on missteps to avoid and provide success stories that give hope to those who also wish to engage in the practice of teaching theory to teachers.
The concept of "chaos", and chaos theory, though it is a field of study specifically in the field of mathematics with applications in physics, engineering, economics, management, and education, has also recently taken root in the social sciences. As a method of analyzing the way in which the digital age has connected society more than ever, chaos and complexity theory serves as a tactic to tie world events and cope with the information overload that is associated with heightened social connectivity. The Handbook of Research on Chaos and Complexity Theory in the Social Sciences explores the theories of chaos and complexity as applied to a variety of disciplines including political science, organizational and management science, economics, and education. Presenting diverse research-based perspectives on mathematical patterns in the world system, this publication is an essential reference source for scholars, researchers, mathematicians, social theorists, and graduate-level students in a variety of disciplines.
"This book is a significant contribution to . . . broad political
thought, one that should stimulate a great deal more." "His most innovative contribution is to fuse sociological theories of civil society with corporate law."--"Social Control and Law" The corporate mega-mergers of the 1980s and 1990s raise many troubling questions for social scientists and legal scholars. Do corporate globalism and the new, streamlined corporation help or hinder the development of civil society? Does the new power that increasingly deregulated businesses wield undermine the rights of citizens, or is this threat being exaggerated? Who has the authority to get things done in a corporation's name and who can be held legally responsible for a corporation's misbehavior? What role, if any, should the courts play in strengthening the rights of individuals who challenge the actions of big business? David Sciulli maps the legal limits of corporate power in our democratic society, and explores the role of the corporate judiciary in creating public policy. He argues that the judiciary must be more vigilant and act to curb corporate abuses. He demonstrates that when corporations exercise their private power in civil society, they are just as capable as the state of exercising it in ways that are dangerous, arbitrary, and challenge the basic institutional arrangements of society. Finally, Sciulli calls for sociologists to involve themselves more deeply in issues of corporate governance and commit their discipline to influencing the decisions of the courts.
Three major social theories--mass society, pluralism, and bureaucracy--are often employed to interpret and explain modern societies. Although frequently invoked, the theories themselves are poorly understood. This book seeks to clarify the background, context, and major arguments of the theories, assess the claims and validity of each, provide expert commentary, and suggest avenues for further work in each area. Drawing on work in the humanities, history, sociology, economic history, and political science, Hamilton is able to provide readers with a clear, concise, and accurate overview of the adequacy of these theories as well as their empirical validity. Beginning with the mass society theory, Hamilton offers a systematic empirical assessment of its major tenets and its abundant shortcomings. While the validity of the mass society theory does not hold up, there is more support for pluralism, and Hamilton adeptly assesses its arguments while suggesting a more realistic and partitive reading of the theory. And while the image of an all-pervasive and growing bureaucracy seems to overwhelm society, Hamilton argues that the theory seriously misrepresents the character of modern life. Working through each of these theories using an integrated approach, the author concludes each assessment with suggestions for which elements of the theory should be retained, which should be reworked, and which should be discarded altogether.
The Marxism of Manuel Sacristan: From Communism to the New Social Movements offers a substantial selection of some the most significant writings on Marx, Marxism, and radical social theory by Manuel Sacristan, Spain's most important Marxist philosopher. Whether discussing Marx's intellectual development and philosophical views, exploring central issues in Marxist theory or analysing the challenge to contemporary Marxism from feminism, pacifism and environmentalism, Sacristan emerges in these pages as both a major Marx scholar and a formidable social theorist in his own right. The Marxism of Manuel Sacristan makes available in English for the first time many of the key texts by a brilliant, yet neglected, Marxist thinker.
Marks & Spencer is an institution synonymous with quality, reliability, and customer care. But do we associate it with "fashion"? Drawing on previously unpublished company archives, "Fashion for the People" considers the company's contribution to British--and, since the 1970s, international--fashion. The author discusses how, from the 1920s, Marks & Spencer brought fashion to the high street, offering well-designed clothing at affordable prices. She examines the unique ways in which the company has democratized fashion, arguing that its pioneering role in the development of new fabrics, the employment of designers as consultants and its marketing and promotional strategies have changed the ways in which we understand and consume fashion. Marks & Spencer is not just a stalwart of the British high street. As this book shows, it has also brought fashion to the masses.
This important text argues for a 'strong' notion of structuration theory in contrast to the seminal but more abstract and relatively under-developed project represented by Anthony Giddens's writings. Emphasis on the duality of structure is placed at the centre of the tradition. It is argued that the distinctive power of structuration theory lies in its potential to critically investigate a specific range of in situ questions. Structuration Theory produces a synthesis that draws on Giddens's work, on other versions of the structuration problematic, and on key empirical uses of the approach. The final chapters make use of extended case examples to illustrate the critical power of strong structuration.
This volume will examine the varied roles that women and children play in period of warfare, which in most cases deviate from their perceived role as noncombatants. Using social theory about the nature of sex, gender and age in thinking about vulnerabilities to different groups during warfare, this collection of studies focuses on the broader impacts of war both during warfare but also long after the conflict is over. The volume will show that during periods of violence and warfare, many suffer beyond those individuals directly involved in battle. From pre-Hispanic Peru to Ming dynasty Mongolia to the Civil War-era United States to the present, warfare has been and is a public health disaster, particularly for women and children. Individuals and populations suffer from displacement, sometimes permanently, due to loss of food and resources and an increased risk of contracting communicable diseases, which results from the poor conditions and tight spaces present in most refugee camps, ancient and modern. Bioarchaeology can provide a more nuanced lens through which to examine the effects of warfare on life, morbidity, and mortality, bringing individuals not traditionally considered by studies of warfare and prolonged violence into focus. Inclusion of these groups in discussions of warfare can increase our understanding of not only the biological but also the social meaning and costs of warfare.
Individualism and holism, the concepts embedded in the title of this book, represent two key theoretical perspectives that have for many decades steered and shaped sociological thought. For over a century these two interpretative perspectives have also divided sociological theory into two camps, accompanied by a band of scholars trying to bridge this dualism. According to American sociologist Jeffrey C. Alexander, individualist theories derive their appeal and strength from their underlying assumption that humans make decisions as individual, free, autonomous, and rationally and morally consistent beings. A related belief is that they are able to express these qualities in their actions regardless of the situation in society or what economic or moral conditions prevail. Holistic, or collectivist, theories, unlike individualism, assign primacy to social entities. This perspective is important because it creates the basic precondition through which entities can become the subject of deliberate sociological analysis. However, there is a price for fulfilling this precondition. The emphasis it places on the collective, and on larger entities, logically means that the individual will and free human decision-making tends to be lost from the field of view. This book argues that these two perspectives, individualist and holistic, form the central dilemma of sociological thought. It provides an extensive review and critique of contemporary sociological approaches to this antinomy and examines attempts that have been made to overcome it and unite them. Moreover, the book proposes a new approach to solving this dilemma via the concept of 'critical reconfigurationism', arguing that the resolution of this dilemma is vital not just for sociological theory but also for empirical social research.
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Winner of the 2015 David Easton Prize, awarded by the American Political Science Association (APSA) Global forces are eroding the ability of states to exert sovereign control over their populations, territories, and borders. Yet when dominated subjects across the world dream of freedom, they continue to conceive of it in sovereign terms. Sovereign freedom haunts the imagination of oppressed ethnic minorities, popular masses ruled by foreign powers or homegrown tyrants, indigenous peoples, and individuals chafing under customary or governmental restrictions. On Sovereignty and Other Political Delusions draws on political theory and on two case studies - the encounter between Anglo-American settlers and Native American tribes, and the search for Jewish sovereignty in Palestine - to probe the allure of the idea of sovereign freedom and its self-defeating logic. It concludes by shifting its sights from political to economic sovereign power and by pursuing intimations of non-sovereign freedom in the contemporary age.
Anthropologist Diane E. King has written about everyday life in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, which covers much of the area long known as Iraqi Kurdistan. Following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's Ba'thist Iraqi government by the United States and its allies in 2003, Kurdistan became a recognized part of the federal Iraqi system. The Region is now integrated through technology, media, and migration to the rest of the world. Focusing on household life in Kurdistan's towns and villages, King explores the ways that residents connect socially, particularly through patron-client relationships and as people belonging to gendered categories. She emphasizes that patrilineages (male ancestral lines) seem well adapted to the Middle Eastern modern stage and viceversa. The idea of patrilineal descent influences the meaning of refuge-seeking and migration as well as how identity and place are understood, how women and men interact, and how "politicking" is conducted. In the new Kurdistan, old values may be maintained, reformulated, or questioned. King offers a sensitive interpretation of the challenges resulting from the intersection of tradition with modernity. Honor killings still occur when males believe their female relatives have dishonored their families, and female genital cutting endures. Yet, this is a region where modern technology has spread and seemingly everyone has a mobile phone. Households may have a startling combination of illiterate older women and educated young women. New ideas about citizenship coexist with older forms of patronage. King is one of the very few scholars who conducted research in Iraq under extremely difficult conditions during the Saddam Hussein regime. How she was able to work in the midst of danger and in the wake of genocide is woven throughout the stories she tells. Kurdistan on the Global Stage serves as a lesson in field research as well as a valuable ethnography.
In the last three decades, the human body has gained increasing prominence in contemporary political debates, and it has become a central topic of modern social sciences and humanities. Modern technologies - such as organ transplants, stem-cell research, nanotechnology, cosmetic surgery and cryonics - have changed how we think about the body. In this collection of thirty original essays by leading figures in the field, these issues are explored across a number of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, including pragmatism, feminism, queer theory, post-modernism, post-humanism, cultural sociology, philosophy and anthropology. A wide range of case studies, which include cosmetics, diet, organ transplants, racial bodies, masculinity and sexuality, eating disorders, religion and the sacred body, and disability, are used to appraise these different perspectives. In addition, this Handbook explores various epistemological approaches to the basic question: what is a body? It also offers a strongly themed range of chapters on empirical topics that are organized around religion, medicine, gender, technology and consumption. It also contributes to the debate over the globalization of the body: how have military technology, modern medicine, sport and consumption led to this contemporary obsession with matters corporeal? The Handbook's clear, direct style will appeal to a wide undergraduate audience in the social sciences, particularly for those studying medical sociology, gender studies, sports studies, disability studies, social gerontology, or the sociology of religion. It will serve to consolidate the new field of body studies.
This book examines the connection between central-local government relations and the transition of contemporary China, the urbanization process and social development. Based on empirical investigations and theoretical research, it argues that this is the key to understanding the transition of central-local government relations from the overall fiscal rationing system in the 1980s and the tax distribution system in the 1990s. The former system provided the incentive for local government to "set up a number of enterprises" and resulted in rapid local industrialization, while the latter system enabled the local governments to move from "operating the enterprises" to "operating the land and cities". The book analyzes two aspects of the profound impact of the change in central-local government relations on the behavior of local governments: land quota acquisition and urbanization, thus providing valuable insights into the economic and social development of contemporary China.
"... very helpful for its intended audience of both librarians and end users. Academic and large public libraries that provide or encourage electronic information retrieval will want this helpful aid". -- Booklist/Reference Books Bulletin This reference helps users find meaningful words for natural language computer searching of bibliographic and textual databases in the social and behavioral sciences.
Cultural anthropology is at a crossroads. Under the impact of postmodernist critiques, serious doubts have been raised about the scientific validity-indeed, the very viability-of the ethnographic enterprise. These doubts have been voiced most loudly in North America, where the field nonetheless still enjoys the broadest academic base, and attracts the largest number of practitioners. Over the last decade, a set of critical issues has increasingly engaged cultural anthropologists in heated debate. The first part of this volume includes a full-fledged discussion of these issues, offering suggestions for their constructive resolution. In spite of the disciplinary self-doubts engendered by postmodernism, the theory-building process in anthropology has not been abandoned. The second part of the volume presents a range of original theoretical statements by which American and Canadian anthropologists set the premises for disciplinary trends likely to shape anthropological practice for years to come. If, as it is prognosticated, the 21st century will see an explosion of interest in cultural anthropology, the models and ideas presented in this volume define the parameters of disciplinary expansion. North American cultural anthropology enters its second century on a wave of theoretical innovation and pragmatic translatability that may finally resolve the disciplinary contrast between analysis and application.
GROUPS: PROCESS AND PRACTICE, Cengage International Edition, 11th Edition, covers the group process from the initial to ending stages and includes practice information with specific groups. The text portrays the group counselor as both a person and a professional, addresses skills of group leadership -- including the co-leadership model-- and discusses the training of group counselors. Drawing on their extensive clinical experience in working with groups, Marianne, Gerald and Cindy Corey provide a realistic approach to the blending of theory with practice in group work. Offering up-to-date coverage of both the "what is" and the "how to" of group counseling, the 11th edition incorporates the latest research, ethical guidelines and practices to ensure student success in the classroom and beyond.
Transcending the widespread concerns about deteriorating moral values in American society, this collection focuses on the common values of American society. Through the perspectives of philosophers, historians, political scientists, theologians, anthropologists, economists, and scientists, this book examines American social values and discusses how they are applied in current areas of public interest. American democratic ideals are not simply rooted in the conventional structural and institutional elements of a democracy, such as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. American democracy, in fact, could not survive without a strong basis of social values that support community, tolerance, and cooperation. Since social values form the common bonds of society, and may not be supported by individual members, they are determined through a complex cultural, legal, and political process, as one of the contributors points out. The contributors to this book were assembled from a variety of disciplines and professions to examine social values and analyze their application in specific areas of current controversy. Through the perspectives of philosophy, anthropology, history, economics, political science, biomedical ethics, and religion, these discussions cover not only disciplinary perspectives but cover topics such as the environment, intergenerational interaction, social welfare policies, gender, and genetic engineering. |
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