Drawing on case studies from the global South, this book explores the politics of mediated citizenship in which citizens are represented to the state through third party intermediaries. The studies show that mediation is both widely practiced and multi-directional and that it has an important role to play in deepening democracy in the global South.

Until recently the subject of suffering and evil was neglected in the sociological world and is almost absent in Durkheimian studies as well. This book aims to fill the gap, with particular reference to the Durkheimian tradition, by exploring the different meanings that the concepts of evil and suffering have in Durkheim's works, together with the general role they play in his sociology. It then examines the meanings and roles of these concepts in relation to suffering and evil in other authors within the group of the Annee sociologique up until the beginning of World II. Finally, the Durkheimian legacy in its wider aspects is assessed, with particular reference to the importance of the Durkheimian categories in understanding and in conceptualizing contemporary forms of evil and suffering. W.S.F. Pickering was a founder member in 1991, and then General Secretary, of the British Centre for Durkheimian Studies in the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Oxford University. Since the 1970s he has written, edited and helped translate various books on Durkheim and his disciples. Massimo Rosati teaches the History of Sociology at the University of Salerno, Italy. His last book in Italian is Solidarieta e sacro (2002). He has published articles on Durkheim and Habermas in the Journal of Classical Sociology and in the Durkheimian Studies. He is the editor of the new Italian edition of Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life."

Any study of contemporary industrial societies must take into account the role of power, ideology and class, and the degree to which these determine the development of social structures. This book, first published in 1977 and based on a selection of eleven papers given at a conference of the British Sociological Association, focuses upon aspects of continuity and change in modern society, comparing and contrasting dimensions of class, cleavage and control in capitalist and socialist societies. This book is key reading for students of both sociology and business studies.

Today, all industrialized states are multinational. However, as Political Sociologist Feliks Gross points out, there remains considerable debate and experimentation on how to organize a multiethnic, democratic, and humane state. Gross examines various types of multiethnic states as well as their early origins and prospects for success. In the past, minorities were usually formed as a consequence of conquest or migration; minorities tended to have an inferior status, subordinated to the ruling, dominant ethnic class.

While Athens provides an early example of a state formed by alliance and association, the Romans advanced this concept when they extended to subjected peoples the status by means of citizenship. After the fall of Rome, citizenship continued in Italian and other continental cities. In England, subjectship associated with individual freedom had native roots. The American and French Revolutions revived and created the modern definition of citizenship. Along with Rome, however, only the United States provides an example of a successful multiethnic state of continental dimensions.

Professional practice is in crisis. The formal theoretical knowledge on which practitioners base their practice is often outstripped by rapid changes in the contexts of this practice. The unpredictability of workplace and broader contexts often renders existing traditional practices irrelevant or ineffective. How can practitioners develop new ways of working which are flexible and responsive? The reflective approach, whereby practitioners draw out their theories of action directly from their own practice, is becoming increasingly popular as a new approach which enables breakthroughs in practice impasses. Yet reflectivity is often difficult to teach and learn because it challenges traditional, often unquestioned, paradigms of knowledge development. Therefore, rather than simply arguing for a reflective approach, this book makes a unique contribution by actually modelling the use of the reflective approach in practice. Students, educators and practitioners are able to read illustrations of how individual social workers used a reflective process to break through specific dilemmas in their practice. Thus, they are enabled to understand a reflective approach by gaining in insight into their experience of it. Contributors to this volume come from Australia, the United Kingdom and North America. Their personal backgrounds are diverse. They report on seminal experiences in a wide range of settings, from community work in the Gorbals, to hospice care in Sydney, from child protection to work with addictions. The book will appeal to: .Trainers and managers in social work, social care and health .Social work students and trainees .Social work academics .Professional and vocational educators generally who are interested in gaining practical insights into the development of reflective understanding. Lindsey Napier is Senior Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Sydney. Jan Fook is Professor of Social Work, Deakin University, Geelong, Australia

Political sociology has often left the discussion of collective political behavior to those working within a social movement framework. The politics of inequality and social division invoke important questions for political sociology. Many argue that at the heart of political sociology is the study of power differences and social inequality. This volume focuses upon how politics influences the patterns of social stratification and how the various inequalities in society affect politics. Inequalities of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation are included at local, regional, national, and transnational levels. Several studies consider "hate groups" and victims of hate.
This collection of research serves as an example of aspects of social status, social class, and ideology connected to contemporary questions about "who wins" in struggles for civic, economic, and individual citizenship. Inequalities of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation are studied at local, regional, national and transnational levels. Several articles consider "hate groups" and victims of hate. The politics of inequality are discussed in enduring theoretical frameworks and emerging literatures related to political groups and associations, the order of law and the state, social movements, and terrorism and violence. The authors hope that this volume will stimulate further work in the political sociology of social inequality.

Published in Association with UNESCO "Each essay provides a detailed, well-written overview of the historical development and demographic growth of international migration in the region. These regional essays are miniature masterpieces, and the authors demonstrate encyclopedic knowledge of their subjects. Overall, the book has a far higher degree of thematic coherence and development than most anthologies on global migration....Highly recommended." . Choice International migration is high on the public and political agenda of many countries, as the movement of people raises concerns while often eluding states' attempts at regulation. In this context, the 'Migration Without Borders' scenario challenges conventional views on the need to control and restrict migration flows and brings a fresh perspective to contemporary debates. This book explores the analytical issues raised by 'open borders', in terms of ethics, human rights, economic development, politics, social cohesion and welfare, and provides in-depth empirical investigations of how free movement is addressed and governed in Europe, Africa, the Americas and Asia. By introducing and discussing the possibility of a right to mobility, it calls for an opening, not only of national borders, but also of the eyes and minds of all those interested in the future of international migration in a globalising world. Antoine Pecoud holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from Oxford University and has been affiliated to different research centers in the UK, Germany, and France. He now works for UNESCO's section on International Migration. Paul de Guchteneire is the Chief of UNESCO's Section on International Migration. He was previously director of the Steinmetz Archive for social science data in the Netherlands and President of the International Federation of Data Organizations.

This text provides an overview of the sociology of change and transition, exploring how global transformation processes impact on everyday life by examining a number of 'hot spots' of change in contemporary society: the city, the workplace, patterns of consumption, politics, broader areas and the environment. It engages with a range of theories and concepts, in order to investigate the interplay of continuity and change in contemporary society, and assesses their usefulness. It also speculates on the shape of emerging social orders.

In this detailed investigation of masculine gendered identity, first published in 1990, David Jackson uses his own personal history to look at the specific ways in which men become masculine . In doing so he examines, but also offers some positive challenges to, the assumed qualities and values of growing up manly . Jackson looks closely at the psychological and social forces active in his own development: relations with his father, violence at school, male banter and joking, sporting activities, boys comics, and sexual relations. The title is a deliberate blend between life story and critical commentary that makes use of some areas of post-structuralist theory to make visible the social and emotional processes that contribute to one man s life history. With an innovative theoretical approach, this reissue will be of particular value to those interested in the social, psychological and cultural forces that have gone into the historical shaping of men and masculinities. "

America today is a hypersexual society. Sexual discourse, erotica, and pornography are pervasive in the culture. Sexual materials, many times extending into erotica and pornography, are found in the consumer world, academia, sex therapy, the publishing world, mass media (especially radio, television and movies) and the Internet. The sexual materials found in all these areas of American society provoke relentless opposition by groups and individuals who want to repress or censor sexual materials. The combined effects of those who promote and produce sexual materials, and those who try to supress them, add up to a cacophony of sexual discourse.

New media, especially in relation to video gaming, now occupies a dominant position within popular culture. The book offers new and critical perspectives on computer game culture. It illustrates key debates in game studies and is a guide to complexity and diversity of the phenomenon.It maintains its originality in bringing together international experts from among social scientists, game designers, artists and literature scholars. Internationally renowned media and literature scholars, social scientists, game designers and artists explore the cultural potential of computer games in this rich anthology, which introduces the latest approaches in the central fields of game studies and provides an extensive survey of contemporary game culture.

This book provides the history and genealogy of an increasingly important subject: liminality. Coming to the fore in recent years in social and political theory and extending beyond is original use as developed within anthropology, liminality has come to denote spaces and moments in which the taken-for-granted order of the world ceases to exist and novel forms emerge, often in unpredictable ways. Liminality and the Modern offers a comprehensive introduction to this concept, discussing its development and laying out a conceptual and experiential framework for thinking about change in terms of liminality. Applying this framework to questions surrounding the implosion of 'non-spaces', the analysis of major historical periods and the study of political revolution, the book also explores its possible uses in social science research and its implications for our understanding of the uncertainty and contingency of the liquid structures of modern society. Shedding new light on a concept central to social thought, as well as its capacity for pushing social and political theory in new directions, this book will be of interest to scholars across the social sciences and philosophy working in fields such as social, political and anthropological theory, cultural studies, social and cultural geography, and historical anthropology and sociology.

We are at war. Human cultures are divided into two basic types, two antagonistic forces, one based on symbolic exchange, which is dual and reciprocal, and one based on money and sign exchange, which is totalising. Non-western societies can create genuinely symbolic, durable cultures. But the western world-system, based on a logic of empire, is designed to create an integrated and sealed reality, to snap tight around the world and its image. If the first is indestructible and the second is irresistible, who can win and what will victory look like? The answer may lie in the capacity for violence in the world-system itself, threatening that system from within with the purest of symbolic forms, the challenge of resistance. The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact is the summation of Baudrillard's work over twenty years. It is the essential analysis of the fundamental conflict of our time.

This book discloses a largely unnoticed dialogue between Muslim and Western social thought on the search for meaning and transcendence in the human sciences. The disclosure is accomplished by a comparative reading of contemporary Muslim debates on secular knowledge on the one hand, and of a foundational Western debate on the demise of metaphysics in the human sciences on the other hand. The comparative reading is grounded in a dialogical hermeneutic approach; that is, a hermeneutic approach to texts and cultural traditions that draws upon the work of Hans Georg Gadamer and also upon the insights of inter-religious dialogue.

The field of political demography - the politics of population change - is dramatically underrepresented in political science. At a time when demographic changes - aging in the rich world, youth bulges in the developing world, ethnic and religious shifts, migration, and urbanization - are waxing as never before, this neglect is especially glaring and starkly contrasts with the enormous interest coming from policymakers and the media.
"Ten years ago, demography] was hardly on the radar screen," remarks Richard Jackson and Neil Howe of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, two contributors to this volume. "Today," they continue, "it dominates almost any discussion of America's long-term fiscal, economic, or foreign-policy direction."
Demography is the most predictable of the social sciences: children born in the last five years will be the new workers, voters, soldiers, and potential insurgents of 2025 and the political elites of the 2050s. Whether in the West or the developing world, political scientists urgently need to understand the tectonics of demography in order to grasp the full context of today's political developments. This book begins to fill the gap from a global and historical perspective and with the hope that scholars and policymakers will take its insights on board to develop enlightened policies for our collective future.

This four volume work, originally published in the 1980s and out of print for some years, represents a major attempt to redirect the course of contemporary sociological thought. Jeffrey Alexander analyses the most general and fundamental elements of sociological thinking about action and order and their ramifications for empirical study. He insists that sociological thought need not choose between voluntary action and social constraint. The four volumes can be read independently of one another as each presents a distinctive theoretical argument in its own right. The first volume is directed at contemporary problems and controversies, not only in 'theory' but in the philosophy and sociology of science. The last three volumes make interpretations, confronting the individual theorists, and the secondary literature, on their own terms.

Since the legalisation of off-course cash betting in 1960, and the rise of varying forms of gambling, the British have come to be known as a nation of gamblers. Until this study was published in 1976, barely any evidence existed against which to assess the claim that gambling had become a major social problem. The authors present data drawn from area surveys carried out in Swansea, Sheffield, Wanstead and Woodford, and explore how well previous sociological theories of gambling agree with their findings, particular in connection with certain aspects of work and leisure. Examining different forms of gambling, including betting, bingo and gaming machines, the chapters consider how gambling choices vary between different social groups, and how much time and money is spent on them. With the internet making it easier than ever before to place bets, this title is especially relevant, and provides a systematic basis for an explanation of gambling in relation to social structure.

First published in 1985, this book provides a comprehensive reappraisal of the diverse Communist development strategies that shaped the twentieth century. Robert Bideleux emphasises the appalling human and economic costs of the most widely adopted 'Stalinist' strategies of forced industrialisation and rural collectivisation. He also reconsiders the powerful arguments in favour of the most feasible and cost-effective alternatives to Stalinism, including 'village communisms' and 'market socialisms'. A highly readable and challenging study, this reissue will be of particular value to students with research interests in Development Studies, East European History and Politics.

The culture war is over. If you want it to be. It wasn’t even a culture war; it was a war on culture. A sustained attack, Dan Hicks argues, in the form of the weaponisation of civic museums, public art, and even universities — and one that has a deeper history than you might think.

Tracing the origins of contemporary conflicts over art, heritage, memory, and colonialism, Every Monument Will Fall joins the dots between the building of statues, the founding of academic disciplines like archaeology and anthropology, and the warehousing of stolen art and human skulls in museums — including the one in which he is a curator.

Part history, part biography, part excavation, the story runs from the Yorkshire wolds to the Crimean War, from southern Ireland to the frontline of the American Civil War, from the City of London to the University of Oxford — revealing enduring legacies of militarism, slavery, racism and white supremacy hardwired into the heart of our cultural institutions.

Every Monument Will Fall offers an urgent reappraisal of how we think about culture, and how to find hope, remembrance and reconciliation in the fragments of an unfinished violent past. Refusing to choose between pulling down every statue, or living in a past that we can never change, the book makes the case for allowing monuments of all kinds to fall once in a while, even those that are hard to see as monuments, rebuilding a memory culture that is in step with our times.

Disasters are part of the modern condition, a source of physical anxiety and existential angst, and they are increasing in frequency, cost and severity. Drawing on both disaster research and social theory, this book offers a critical examination of their causes, consequences and future avoidance.

An outstanding feature of this book is the broad range of the contributors, drawn from Europe, the Middle East and North America, testifying both to the range of Professor Agassi's interests and the geographical spread of his influence. Most contributors use Agassi's ideas as a springboard to engage in debate on issues, or offer a contribution in an area that interests him. In this volume contributors consider such questions as Agassi's philosophy of education, in practice as well as in theory; the impact of psychologism in philosophy; the origins of critical rationalism in the Bible; the debates in economics stimulated by the work of Popper and Agassi, and many other topics. Besides the special topics, the reader gains some sense of the fruitfulness of critical rationalism in the hands of Agassi's friends and colleagues.

The powerful individualist and subjectivist turn in anthropology - a turn that cannot be easily separated from larger political processes of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism - is one factor resulting in notions of the social and of society as becoming little else than empty shells of small or no analytical value. The essays presented here, all by leading anthropologists, take a variety of positions on the matter of the retreat of the social. All demonstrate that if anthropology and other social sciences are to fulfill the task of a critical understanding of the diverse realities in which we all must live, these disciplines will find it impossible to so do without a strong concept of the social.

First Published in 1988, this volume works towards a new understanding and exploration of the rise and development of modern society, taking its lead from two classical theorists, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. The key concept of this approach is the 'interpenetration' of different spheres of action. Richard Munch begins with an exploration of the points of convergence and divergence in the works of Durkheim and Weber. He then builds, from Durkheim, a new theory of social order as a complex set of ordering, dynamizing, identity-producing and goal-setting factors. Munch also constructs a new theory of personality development, based on Durkheim's view of the duality of human nature. He concludes by assessing weber's contribution to our understanding of how modern social order emerged, showing that the unique features of modern society emerged from the 'interpenetration' of cultural, political, communal and economic spheres in action.

This book, first published in 1973, explores the manner in which conceptions of deviancy arise and shows how the attitudes of non-deviants, of society and of authority, are as instrumental in forming these conceptions as the actions of the deviants themselves. Chapters include discussions on the definition of deviants and deviancy and the enforcement of the law, alongside a detailed introduction. This title will be of particular value to students and scholars with an interest in criminology and the sociology and psychology of deviancy.