This book brings together a collection of emergent research that moves the debate on desistance beyond a general consideration of individual and social structural influences. The authors examine empirical developments which have implications for policy surrounding resettlement and re-offending, but also for punishment practices. Presenting thought-provoking theoretical advances and critiques, the editors challenge and enrich traditional understandings of desistance. A wide range of chapters explore how some criminal justice interventions hinder the desistance process, but also how alternative approaches may be more helpful in promoting and supporting desistance. Thorough and diverse, this book will be of great interest to scholars of criminology and criminal justice, social policy, sociology and psychology, and of special interest to researchers and practitioners working with (ex-)offenders.

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.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Television news is frequently disparaged by thoughtful commentators for its preoccupation with drama and spectacle at the expense of serious, in-depth, engagement with the critical issues it covers. Whilst insisting these charges possess more than a small dose of truth, Rob Stones argues for more emphasis to be placed on strengthening the capacities of audiences. Drawing from major traditions in social thought, and on academic media analysis, Stones provides the conceptual tools for audiences to bring greater sophistication to their interpretations, developing their capacity to think across items and genres. A detailed account of an episode of the Danish political drama, Borgen, reveals the extent to which its viewers already deploy similar concepts and skills in order to follow its storylines. Stones shows how audiences can refine these skills further and demonstrates their value with respect to a wide range of current affairs texts, including: Israeli settlers on the West Bank; the Rwandan genocide; the Egyptian 'revolution'; the Obama administration's immigration reform bill; the bases of Germany's economic success; the conflict between 'red shirts' and 'yellow shirts' in Thailand; China's diplomatic relations with Burma; and scandals of mistreatment within the UK and Swedish healthcare systems. The book shows that everyone's understanding of current affairs can be significantly enhanced by social theory. It will be relevant to students of sociology, politics, media studies and journalism at all levels.

This book analyses a unique leisure world that has been built around a newly emerging phenomenon known as urban exploration; the art of exploring human-made environments which are generally abandoned or hidden from sight of the public eye. Drawing on Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia, Bingham provides a detailed and critical investigation of urban exploration as a form of leisure that is about the coming together of drifting performers who, in their celebration of 'rebellion' and 'deviance', are determined to find a sense of meaning and belonging. The research considers the influence of consumer capitalism on urban explorers, and the wider social, economic and political context that shapes ideas of belonging and identity in the twenty-first century. By doing this, the book analyses urban exploration as an activity that has emerged in a time when human ideas about culture, individuality and community have transformed, and 'solid' modernity is gradually disintegrating around us. This multi and interdisciplinary work will appeal to people with an interest in 'abnormal' or 'deviant' leisure, as well as academics from sociology, anthropology, social geography, leisure studies, cultural studies, sport and recreation and tourism.

This book outlines the history and developments of interactionist social thought through a consideration of its key figures. Arranged chronologically, each chapter illustrates the impact that individual sociologists working within an interactionism framework have had on interactionism as perspective and on the discipline of sociology as such. It presents analyses of interactionist theorists from Georg Simmel through to Herbert Bulmer and Erving Goffman and onto the more recent contributions of Arlie R. Hochschild and Gary Alan Fine. Through an engagement with the latest scholarship this work shows that in a discipline often focused on macrosocial developments and large-scale structures, the interactionist perspective which privileges the study of human interaction has continued relevance. The broad scope of this book will make it an invaluable resource for scholars and students of sociology, social theory, cultural studies, media studies, social psychology, criminology and anthropology.

This edited volume highlights the work of ten forgotten and neglected social theorists in the hope of reinvigorating interest in their work and their potential contributions to the analysis of contemporary social issues. Each chapter includes a brief biographical sketch, an overview of the selected theorist's work and significance, and the relevance of their work to one or more contemporary social issues. While other similar texts tend to focus primarily on intellectual biography, our emphasis here is on the scholar's theories and their application to contemporary social issues. We provide a contextualization of each scholar's work, using present-day social issues or problems. Many of these individuals played a significant role in the development of sociology. Our hope is to provide a resource that will help re-integrate these marginalized social theorists, rescuing them from obscurity and elevating their status.

This book analyses the waves of protests, from spontaneous uprisings to well-organized forms of collective action, which have shaken European cities over the last decade. It shows how analysing these protests in connection with the structural context of neoliberal urbanism and its crises is more productive than standard explanations. Processes of neoliberalisation have caused deeply segregated urban landscapes defined by deepening social inequality, rising unemployment, racism, securitization of urban spaces and welfare state withdrawal, particularly from poor peripheral areas, where tensions between marginalized youth and police often manifest in public spaces. Challenging a conventional distinction made in research on protest, the book integrates a structural analysis of processes of large scale urban transformation with analyses of the relationship between 'riots' and social movement action in nine countries: France, Greece, England, Germany, Spain, Poland, Denmark, Sweden and Turkey.

This edited collection highlights the diversity and reach of global leisure studies and global leisure theory. It explores the impact of globalization on leisure, and the sites of resistance and accommodation found in local, virtual and global leisure spaces. Unlike any other collection on leisure studies, Global Leisure and the Struggle for a Better World is truly representative of the diversity of the large and growing leisure scholarship across the globe. It demonstrates how researchers in leisure studies and sociology of leisure are applying complex theory to their work, and how a new theory of global leisure is emerging.

This book analyses the legitimacy deficits in democratic welfare work using Habermas' theories of communicative action, law and morality. Based on their underlying intersubjective perspectives, legitimacy problems can be identified and corrected, e.g. lack of confidence, dignity, respect, broken expectations, ignorance or mistrust of its administration. In modern societies with their many different contexts, a mutual understanding of facts, norms and expressions has become even more important in order to act constructively in daily life. These needs have increased the tension between the individual and the system, which becomes especially evident when globalised and individualised service users ask for welfare services. Therefore, professionals must develop an ability to understand how these legitimacy problems arise and how they can be dealt with democratically. This book responds to these needs, and will be of interest to students, scholars and practitioners working across democratic welfare, social policy, social work, and sociology.

This book explores how public organizations and not-for-profit organizations (NPO) can be more collaborative, innovative and effective in solving social issues in both developing and developed countries. "Social innovation," led by social entrepreneurs and/or social enterprises, emerged in the late 1990s, and spread in 2000s. As the West faced management failures, demand increased for corporations to take on more social responsibility. Based on intensive research on social innovation processes at the municipal and the community level in Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan, the book analyses the factors that affected the most effective and efficient social innovations.

This book presents the concepts: the welfare system of universal integration and the welfare mode of universal integration. In this book, the author explores the foundation of fair baseline about the universal integration on the basis of critically inheriting the domestic and international social welfare theories, comprehensively explains the connotation, subject and application of fair baseline theory. It systematically discusses the theoretical basis, basic features, scientific evidence, system composition and operating mechanism, introduces the experience in the west and Asia about the construction of social welfare system, further investigates and understands the public needs about the social welfare, talks about the system design of the welfare system of universal integration and provides some realistic, individualized and operative suggestions for promoting the welfare system of universal integration.

This volume presents for the first time a collection of historically important papers written on the concept of rationality in the social sciences. In 1939-40, the famed Austrian economist Joseph A. Schumpeter and the famous sociologist Talcott Parsons convened a faculty seminar at Harvard University on the topic of rationality. The first part includes their essays as well as papers by the Austrian phenomenologist Alfred Schutz, the sociologist Wilbert Moore, and the economist Rainer Schickele. Several younger economists and sociologists with bright futures also participated, including Alex Gerschenkron, John Dunlop, Paul M. Sweezy, and Wassily W. Leontief, who was later awarded the Nobel Prize for developing input-output analysis. The second part presents essays and commentaries written by today's internationally noted social scientists and addressing the topic of rationality in social action from a broad range of perspectives. The book's third and final part shares the recently discovered correspondence between the seminar principals regarding the original but failed plan to publish its proceedings. It also includes letters, not previously published, between Richard Grathoff, Walter M. Sprondel and Talcott Parsons on the rationality seminar and the exchanges between Parsons and Schutz.

This book presents the latest perspectives and challenges within the interrelated fields of econophysics and sociophysics, which have emerged from the application of statistical physics to economics and sociology. Economic and financial markets appear to be in a permanent state of flux. Billions of agents interact with each other, giving rise to complex dynamics of economic quantities at the micro and macro levels. With the availability of huge data sets, researchers can address questions at a much more granular level than was previously possible. Fundamental questions regarding the aggregation of actions and information and the coordination, complexity, and evolution of economic and financial networks are currently receiving much attention in the econophysics research agenda. In parallel, the sociophysics literature has focused on large-scale social data and their interrelations. In this book, leading researchers from different communities - economists, sociologists, financial analysts, mathematicians, physicists, statisticians, and others - report on their recent work and their analyses of economic and social behavior.

What should be demanded -- in the name of the protection of liberty, equality, and stability -- of citizens? Since the seventeenth century, liberal thought has been interested in the rights of individuals and their capacity to engage as free equals in the political activity of their community. This volume presents new essays by writers including Jim Tully, Alan Patten, and Philippe van Parijs that offer a fresh perspective on citizenship. After two decades of strident individualism, the contributors argue that it is time to go beyond the standard concern of what can be ascribed to citizens.

A bright portrait of modern Africa that pushes back against harmful stereotypes to tell a more comprehensive story.

You already know these stereotypes. So often Africa is depicted simplistically as an arid red landscape of famines and safaris, uniquely plagued by poverty and strife.

In this funny and insightful book, Dipo Faloyin offers a much-needed corrective. He examines each country's colonial heritage, and explores a wide range of subjects, from chronicling urban life in Lagos and the lively West African rivalry over who makes the best Jollof rice, to the story of democracy in seven dictatorships and the dangers of stereotypes in popular culture.

By turns intimate and political, Africa Is Not A Country brings the story of the continent towards reality, celebrating the energy and fabric of its different cultures and communities in a way that has never been done before.

Perceptions of men as abusers, sexual predators, and deadbeat dads have become firmly entrenched in our culture. Schwartz aims to dispel some of these negative images by delving into the psychological dynamics that have caused them. Revealing the hard facts about how we view men and women in our society, this work explores why the gender war and political correctness continue to be part of our culture.

This work explores the psychological dynamics of the gender war and political correctness. Perceptions of men as abusers, sexual predators, and deadbeat dads have become firmly entrenched in our culture, Schwartz argues, based on bogus information and not on solid objective facts. Aiming to dispel some of these negative images by delving into the psychological dynamics that have caused them and revealing the hard facts about how we view men and women in our society, Schwartz questions the current gender war. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in the areas of psychology, women's and men's studies, social policy, child development, and family therapists.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Clare Saunders' book is an important contribution to the literature on social movements and environmentalism. Using the concept of 'environmental networks', it explores the extent to which social movement theory helps us understand how a broad range of environmental organizations interact. It considers the practicalities of social movement theories and it goes on to relate them to the practices of environmental networks. Theoretically and empirically rich, the book draws on extensive survey material with 144 UK environmental organizations, as diverse as not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) groups, reformists, conservationists and radicals; interviews with more than 40 key campaigners and extensive participant-observation, particularly in London. Focussing particularly on the crucial question of networking dynamics, the book reveals that there are broad ranging network links across the movements' spatial and ideological dimensions. Combined with inevitable ideological clashes and a degree of sectarian rivalry, these links helps produce vibrant environmental networks that together work to protect and/or preserve the environment. This book is an invaluable resource for anyone concerned with environmental issues, politics and movements.

This book provides a political, economic, and sociological investigation of how neoliberalism shapes 'working class capacities,' or the power of the working class to organize and struggle for its collective interests. Efe Can Gurcan and Berk Mete discuss the global importance of the labor question as it pertains to Turkey. They apply the main theoretical framework of the combined and uneven development of class capacities to Turkish trade unionism. They also address Turkey's recent history of neoliberalization and its repercussions for class capacities, as mediated by national regulations, conservative unionism, and Islamic social assistance networks. Finally, the authors explore how neoliberalism generates intra-class fragmentation through public regulatory mechanisms and cultural differentiation in the sphere of social unionism.

The contemporary world is one of contingency and risk. We face a range of social and political problems barely imaginable to previous generations. Here the technique of critical social theory is applied to some of the most challenging social and political questions of our time. 'Critical Turns in Critical Theory' brings together a diverse range of scholars to discuss a number of issues facing civil society at a regional and global level in recent years. The book explores new theories, critiques, analyses and practices to address debates about risk, responsibility, ethics, communication, the environment, science and technology, gender, identity, development and law. Loosely based on the seminal work of the critical social theorist Piet Strydom, 'Critical Turns in Critical Theory' offers a set of perspectives and critiques that reshape some traditional concepts of critical social theory and challenge the liberal consensus which dominates contemporary civil society.

This work looks at cross-cultural lives and identities in the multicultural landscape. It covers such topics as: lives in China along the Yangtze River and the Yellow River before, during and after the cultural revolution; cross-cultural lives in China and Canada; and more.

This book holds classical liberalism responsible for an American concept of beauty that centers upon women, wilderness, and machines. For each of the three beauty components, a cultural entrepreneur supremely sensitive to liberalism's survival agenda is introduced. P.T. Barnum's exhibition of Jenny Lind is a masterful combination of female elegance and female potency in the subsistence realm. John Muir's Yosemite Valley is surely exquisite, but only after a rigorous liberal education prepares for its experience. And Harley Earl's 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air is a dreamy expressionist sculpture, but with a practical 265 cubic inch V-8 underneath. Not that American beauty has been uniformly pragmatic. The 1950s are reconsidered for having temporarily facilitated a relaxation of the liberal survival priorities, and the creations of painter Jackson Pollock and jazz virtuoso Ornette Coleman are evaluated for their resistance to the pressures of pragmatism. The author concludes with a provocative speculation regarding a future liberal habitat where Emerson's admonition to attach stars to wagons is rescinded.

This volume explores the foundations of trust, and whether social and political trust have common roots. Contributions by noted scholars examine how we measure trust, the cultural and social psychological roots of trust, the foundations of political trust, and how trust concerns the law, the economy, elections, international relations, corruption, and cooperation, among myriad societal factors. The rich assortment of essays on these themes addresses questions such as: How does national identity shape trust, and how does trust form in developing countries and in new democracies? Are minority groups less trusting than the dominant group in a society? Do immigrants adapt to the trust levels of their host countries? Does group interaction build trust? Does the welfare state promote trust and, in turn, does trust lead to greater well-being and to better health outcomes? The Oxford Handbook of Social and Political Trust considers these and other questions of critical importance for current scholarly investigations of trust.

This book offers a novel interdisciplinary approach to interpret the emergence of the Basque-Spanish nationalist conflict. It incorporates into sociological analysis the understanding of law put forward by legal realism and legal pluralism to answer some of the most pressing problems encountered in historical research on this topic. It does so by carrying out a comparative historical analysis which focuses on the puzzle produced by the political trajectories of two traditionally considered Basque territories between 1841 and 1936: Navarre and Vascongadas - the precursor of today's Euskadi. Urasstabaso Ruiz argues that the historical and ideological trajectories of these territories need to be understood in relation to their local legal praxis and interpretations of law, which played a key role in how the authorities of these territories responded to the advent of modernisation. Overall, a fresh theoretical alternative is articulated, and the meaning of jurisdictional action is interpreted. Modern Societies and National Identities will appeal to academics interested in nationalism, the state and modernisation, particularly to those concerned with the Basque Country and the state of Spain.