Our culture is one that speaks rather than listens. From reality TV to political rallies, there is a clamour to be heard, to narrate, and to receive attention. It reduces 'reality' to revelation and voyeurism. The Art of Listening argues that this way of life is having severe and damaging consequences in a world that is increasingly globalized and interconnected. It addresses the question: how can we listen more carefully? Social and cultural theory is combined with real stories from the experiences of the desperate stowaways who hide in the undercarriages of jet planes in order to seek asylum, to the young working-class people who use tattooing to commemorate a lost love. The Art of Listening shows how sociology is in a unique position to record 'life passed in living' and to listen to complex experiences with humility and ethical care, providing a resource to understand the contemporary world while pointing to the possibility of a different kind of future.

Deploying a distinctive disaggregative approach to the study of 'religion', this volume shows that spiritual movements with extensive counterfactual beliefs have been much more creative than one might expect. Specifically, Wayne Hudson explores the creativity of six spiritual movements: the Baha'is, a Persian movement; Soka Gakkai, a Japanese movement; Ananda Marga and the Brahma Kumaris, two reformed Hindu movements; and two controversial American churches, The Church Universal and Triumphant and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Most of these movements have counterintuitive features that have led Western scholars making Enlightenment assumptions to dismiss them as irrational and/or inconsequential. However, this book reveals that these movements have responded to modernity in ways that are creative and practical, resulting in a wide range of social, educational and cultural initiatives. Building on research surrounding the ways in which spiritual movements engage in cultural productions, this book takes the international research in a new direction by exploring the utopian intentionality such cultural productions reveal.

Bringing together authors from two intellectual traditions that have, so far, generally developed independently of one another - critical theory and new materialism - this book addresses the fundamental differences and potential connections that exist between these two schools of thought. With a focus on some of the most pressing questions of contemporary philosophy and social theory - in particular, those concerning the status of long-standing and contested separations between matter and life, the biological and the symbolic, passivity and agency, affectivity and rationality - it shows that recent developments in both traditions point to important convergences between them and thus prepare the ground for a more direct confrontation and cross-fertilization. The first volume to promote a dialogue between critical theory and new materialism, this collection explores the implications for contemporary debates on ecology, gender, biopolitics, post-humanism, economics and aesthetics. As such, it will appeal to philosophers, social and political theorists, and sociologists with interests in contemporary critical theory and materialism.

Making Sense of Social Theory opens by carefully exploring what it means to follow the scientific method in a field like sociology. The book goes on to analyze sociology as a genuine science with a body of explanatory insights. Sociological theory is applied in ways that make its relevance and power apparent so that theory no longer stands divorced from real world research or practice. Making Sense of Social Theory clearly establishes the pertinence of sociology's great theoretical insights for all social science researchers and practitioners.

1. The concept of social harm is gaining in ground in Criminology as an alternative way of reconceptualizing crime within a wider context. This book offers a major intervention in taking stock of the field and suggesting ways forward. 2. This book would certainly be used as supplementary reading across a number of courses in criminological and social theory, as well as upper level courses on social problems and advanced criminological theory. 3. This book is multi-disciplinary, moving beyond criminology to consider liberal political economic theory and moral philosophy.

This book outlines and illustrates a new approach to intellectual history, the history of "concepts". In distinction to the study of more traditional units of analysis, (authors, texts, traditions, discourses), conceptual history stresses historical contexts, seeking to combine systematically the history of ideas and language with social history.

In this timely study, high profile researchers contribute to the burgeoning field of the social studies of childhood with original and often surprising perspectives and approaches. They demonstrate that far from being esoteric or negligible, childhood is part and parcel of the social fabric in both poor and affluent countries. With chapters on children's agency in small worlds and childhood's placement in large scale relationships, the book shows not only the variety of childhood(s), but also suggests that much is common in a generational context.

The study of sport tourism is on the cusp of moving from a descriptive phase of research into an analytical phase. Consequently, many academics and graduate students are searching for theories upon which to ground their work. This book draws upon theories and concepts from sociology and anthropology (the socio-cultural perspective), sport and tourism studies, and business studies. One of the dangers of a new area of study is that the body of knowledge is built on a range of seemingly unrelated studies. By grounding work in a theoretical perspective, future work can be linked to, and contribute to building a cohesive understanding of various aspects of sport tourism. This book is an edited collection written by some of the top scholars working in a particular domain throughout the world, providing a compendium of theories and concepts that can be used to frame research on various aspects of sport tourism. This volume was previously published as a special issue of the journal Sport in the Global Society.

Current debates about experts are often polarized and based on mistaken assumptions, with expertise either defended or denigrated. Making Sense of Expertise instead proposes a conceptual framework for the study of expertise in order to facilitate a more nuanced understanding of the role of expertise in contemporary society. Too often different meanings of experts and expertise are implied without making them explicit. Grundmann's approach to expertise is based on a synthesis of approaches that exist in various fields of knowledge. The book aims at dispelling much of the confusion by offering a comprehensive and rigorous framework for the study of expertise. A series of in-depth case studies drawn from contemporary issues, including the climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, provide the empirical basis of the author's comprehensive approach. This thought-provoking book will be of great interests to students, instructors and researchers in a range of fields in the humanities, social sciences, and science and technology studies.

Capitalism and its Critics offers an accessible account of major theories of capitalism from the industrial revolution to the present day. The book provides a comprehensive account of the economic and social thought of key theorists from Adam Smith and Karl Marx to David Harvey and Thomas Piketty. Capitalism has long been the subject of passionate debate, and today such contestations are perhaps more timely than ever. For its advocates, capitalism brings democracy and freedom and is the cornerstone of modernity and of progress. For its critics, capitalism is based on the exploitation of labour and is responsible for the destruction of the environment as well as colonialism. Whether capitalism survives the century, or whether an alternative social system emerges, may very well determine the fate of humanity. Capitalism and its Critics gives a comprehensive critical analysis of the most important theorists of capitalism, including Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Polanyi, F.A. Hayek, J.M. Keynes, David Harvey, and Thomas Piketty. The book discusses some of the main debates about capitalism and considers alternatives in the twenty-first century. The 12 chapters are loosely chronologically organised around the main approaches and historical phases in the history of capitalism. Central themes of the book are the ideas of capitalist crisis and of tensions between democracy and capitalism in the making of modernity. A highly readable, informative and engaging text, Capitalism and its Critics is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding capitalism and its alternatives.

The emergence of queer ideas has unsettled other forms of exploring gender and sexuality, in particular feminism. In response, feminists have been significant critics of queer ideas. This book, through the contribution of important US and UK writers, seeks to explore the debates between feminist and queer theorizing in order to seek out interconnections between the two; they identify new directions in thinking about sexuality and gender that may emerge out of and at the interface.

A Social Theory of the Nation-State: the political forms of modernity beyond methodological nationalism, construes a novel and original social theory of the nation-state. It rejects nationalistic ways of thinking that take the nation-state for granted as much as globalist orthodoxy that speaks of its current and definitive decline. Its main aim is therefore to provide a renovated account of the nation-state's historical development and recent global challenges via an analysis of the writings of key social theorists. This reconstruction of the history of the nation-state into three periods: classical (K. Marx, M. Weber, E. Durkheim) modernist (T. Parsons, R. Aron, R. Bendix, B. Moore) contemporary (M. Mann, E. Hobsbawm, U. Beck, M. Castells, N. Luhmann, J. Habermas) For each phase, it introduces social theory's key views about the nation-state, its past, present and future. In so doing this book rejects methodological nationalism, the claim that the nation-state is the necessary representation of the modern society, because it misrepresents the nation-state's own problematic trajectory in modernity. And methodological nationalism is also rejected because it is unable to capture the richness of social theory's intellectual canon. Instead, via a strong conception of society and a subtler notion of the nation-state, A Social Theory of the Nation-State tries to account for the 'opacity of the nation-state in modernity'.

Drawing inspiration from Pierre Bourdieu's social space theory, this book provides an unprecedent overview of class relations, covering topics such as class polarisation, cultural reproduction, political orientations, and globalisation. The book applies Bourdieusian social space approach to show how class boundaries have been maintained or transformed in different European countries. Based on quantiative data, it proposes a renewal of the analysis of distances, divides, and relations of domination between social classes, documenting objective and symbolic boundaries that form the basis of individuals' living and working conditions in 11 European countries. Focusing on transformations of wealth inequalities, education strategies, and European labour markets, the book examines the role of cultural, economic and social capital. It will be of interest to students and scholars across the social sciences, in particular to those studying social and wealth inequalities in a comparative perspective and Master's students in European studies.

The social sciences have seen a substantial increase in comparative and multi-sited ethnographic projects over the last three decades. Yet, at present, researchers seeking to design comparative field projects have few scholarly works detailing how comparison is conducted in divergent ethnographic approaches. In Beyond the Case, Corey M. Abramson and Neil Gong have gathered together several experts in field research to address these issues by showing how practitioners employing contemporary iterations of ethnographic traditions such as phenomenology, grounded theory, positivism, and interpretivism, use comparison in their works. The contributors connect the long history of comparative (and anti-comparative) ethnographic approaches to their contemporary uses. By honing in on how ethnographers render sites, groups, or cases analytically commensurable and comparable, Beyond the Case offers a new lens for examining the assumptions, payoffs, and potential drawbacks of different forms of comparative ethnography.

"Home Front" examines the gendered exploitation of labor in the household from a postmodern Marxian perspective. The authors of this volume use the anti-foundationalist Marxian economic theories first formulated by Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff to explore power, domination, and exploitation in the modern household.

"The Knowledge Book" is a unique interdisciplinary reference work for students and researchers concerned with the nature of knowledge. It is the first work of its kind to be organized on the assumption that whatever else knowledge might be, it is intrinsically social. The book consists of 42 alphabetically arranged entries on key concepts at the intersection of philosophy and sociology - what used to be called "sociology of knowledge" but is now increasingly called "social epistemology". The entries include concepts common to disciplines that in recent years have devoted more of their attention to knowledge: cultural studies, communication studies, information science, education, policy studies and business studies. Special attention is given to concepts from the emerging field of science and technology studies. Each entry presents a short, self-contained essay providing an overview of a concept and concludes with suggestions for further reading. All the entries are fully cross-referenced, allowing readers to both make connections and follow their own interests.

"Clumsy Solutions for a Complex World" is a powerful and original statement on why well-intended attempts to alleviate pressing social ills too often derail, and how effective, efficient and broadly acceptable solutions to social problems can be found. It takes its cue from the idea that our endlessly changing and complex social worlds consist of ceaseless interactions between four ways of organizing, justifying and perceiving social relations. Each time one of these perspectives is excluded from collective decision-making, governance failure inevitably results. Successful solutions are therefore creative combinations of four opposing ways of organizing and thinking.

Why are people who live in liberal welfare regimes reluctant to support welfare policy? And conversely, why are people who live in social democratic welfare regimes so keen to support it? These core questions lie at the heart of this intriguing book. By examining how different welfare regimes influence public support for welfare policy, the book explores the institutional settings of different regimes and how each produces its own support. While previous studies in this field have failed to link the macro-structure of welfare regimes and the micro-structure of welfare attitudes, this book redresses this problem by combining welfare regime theory and literature on deservingness criteria alongside empirical evidence from national and cross-national data. While recent trends in welfare state development such as cuts in benefit levels and increased use of targeting, combined with increased immigration, might very well influence our perceptions of the deservingness of the needy, this book provides a strong, convincing and provoking argument that challenges the micro-foundation of present comparative welfare state theory. The result is an important work for all studying and working in the fields of public policy and social welfare.

In the past decade, Jeffrey Olick has established himself as one of the world's pre-eminent sociologists of memory (and, related to this, both cultural sociology and social theory). His recent book on memory in postwar Germany, In the House of the Hangman (University of Chicago Press, 2005) has garnered a great deal of acclaim. This book collects his best essays on a range of memory related issues and adds a couple of new ones. It is more conceptually expansive than his other work and will serve as a great introduction to this important theorist. In the past quarter century, the issue of memory has not only become an increasingly important analytical category for historians, sociologists and cultural theorists, it has become pervasive in popular culture as well. Part of this is a function of the enhanced role of both narrative and representation - the building blocks of memory, so to speak - across the social sciences and humanities. Just as importantly, though, there has also been an increasing acceptance of the notion that the past is no longer the province of professional historians alone. Additionally, acknowledging the importance of social memory has not only provided agency to ordinary people when it comes to understanding the past, it has made conflicting interpretations of the meaning of the past more fraught, particularly in light of the terrible events of the twentieth century.

Olick looks at how catastrophic, terrible pasts - Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa - are remembered, but he is particularly concerned with the role that memory plays in social structures. Memory can foster any number of things - social solidarity, nostalgia, civil war - but it always dependson both the nature of the past and the cultures doing the remembering. Prior to his studies of individual episodes, he fully develops his theory of memory and society, working through Bergson, Halbwachs, Elias, Bakhtin, and Bourdieu.

This is the first book to bring together a focus on governance with that on cultures of consumption. It asks about the changing place of the consumer as citizen in recent trends in governance, about the tensions between competing ideas and practices of consumerism, and about the active role of consumers in the construction of governance. The book seeks to expand the debate about consumers and governance and to raise the possibility of new conceptions and policy agendas.

What we consider to be healthy is shaped by society; we compare our own health with those around us and identify illness according to social norms. But how are these standards established and how do they change? Is health a personal trouble or a public issue? And can sociology allow us to develop a comprehensive analysis of the determinants of health?
This book examines how social theory shows us that health is not only shaped by our access to medical interventions, but also by power and inequality. From the personal experience of the unwell individual to the social, historical, cultural, and economic factors that affect national morbidity rates, the text looks at medical sociology from micro and macro levels. The chapters use examples from the most significant empirical work in the field to shed light on and challenge classical and contemporary social theory. In particular, the book looks at recent developments in medical sociology by specifically analyzing:
- Inequities based on income, gender, and racism
- The role of the pharmaceutical industry in shaping our ideas about disease
- Medical encounters and the medicalization of everyday life
- The structure of health care systems and health care reforms
"Health and Social Theory" is a concise, comprehensive and cutting edge account of medical sociology. It is essential critical reading for all scholars and students interested in the field.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Max Weber, central thinkers to the discussion of political legitimacy, represent two very different stages and forms of social theory: early modern political philosophy and classical sociology. In these studies, Dr Merquior describes and assesses their individual contributions to the understanding of the concept of political legitimacy. Dr Merquior compares Rousseau and Weber to a handful of other major theorists and highlights the contemporary prospects of the alternatives between democratic participation and bureaucratizm. This book was first published in 1980.

Breaking with prevailing scholarship, 'Deciphering the Global' relocates the terms of debate surrounding globalisation from the heights of global markets, states, and international corporations to the messier, more complex ground of the local, where broad globalisation trends are negotiatied in interesting and often unexpected ways.

This controversial book shows that there is more to economics than dry models and esoteric equations. By investigating the rise and fall of postwar Keynesianism and focusing on the experience of the United States, the author adopts an interdisciplinary approach to show that economics is rooted in the flesh and blood history of social conflict. This timely study concludes with a discussion of the viability of Keynesianism today, in the context of recurrent crisis in the global economy and the rise of new social movements.