This book outlines key developments in understanding social harm by setting out its historical foundations and the discussions which have proliferated since. It examines various attempts to conceptualise social harm and highlights key sites of contestation in its relationship to criminology to argue that these act as the basis for an activist zemiology, one directed towards social change for social justice. The past two decades have seen a proliferation of debate related to social harm in and around criminology. From climate catastrophe and a focus on environmental harms, unprecedented deaths generating focus on border harms and the coronavirus pandemic revealing the horror of mass and arguably avoidable deaths across the globe, critical studies in social harm appear ever more pressing. Drawing on a range of international case studies of cultural, emotional, physical and economic harms, From Social Harm to Zemiology locates the study of social harm in an accessible fashion. In doing so it sets out how a zemiological lens can moves us beyond many of the problematic legacies of criminology. This book rejects criminologies which have disproportionately served to regulate intersectional groups, and which have arguably inflicted as much or more harm by bolstering the very ideologies of control in offering minor reforms that inadvertently expand and strengthen states and corporations. It does this by sketching out the contours, objects, methods and ontologies of a disciplinary framework which rejects commonplace assumptions of 'value freedom'. From Social Harm to Zemiology advocates social change in accordance with groups who are most disenfranchised, and thus often most socially harmed. An accessible and compelling read, this book is essential reading for all zemiologists, critical criminologists, and those engaged with criminological and social theory.

This Handbook is the first attempt to systematically examine, empirically and analytically, the contours of the third sector policy process in the European Union (EU). While scholarship on the social, economic and political contributions of organisations existing between the market and the state has proliferated in recent years, no sustained attention has previously been paid to how such organisations are collectively treated by, and respond to, public policy. The expert contributors examine the policy environment for, and evolving policy treatment of, the third sector in the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom from a comparative perspective. They also look at how the third sector relates to multi-level European policy processes, including the Open Method of Co-ordination, the Community Method, nationally-led 'partnership' approaches within an overall EU framework and the United Nations International Year of Volunteering; an initiative implemented in the EU but originating externally. Providing a rich and compelling examination of a crucially important aspect of policymaking, this unique Handbook will fill a major gap in the knowledge of both general policy analysts and specialists in third sector studies. Researchers and students in the overlapping fields of organised civil society, voluntary and third sector studies and the non-profit sector will also warmly welcome this important book.

The organization of individuals into networks and groups is of fundamental importance in many social and economic interactions. Examples range from networks of personal contacts used to obtain information about job opportunities to the formation of trading partnerships, alliances, cartels, and federations. Much of our understanding of how and why such networks and groups form, and the precise way in which the network or groups structure affects outcomes of social and economic interaction, is relatively new. This volume collects some of the central papers in this recent literature, which have made important progress on this topic.

This book provides a comprehensive and thorough interpretation of Beck's theory of the (world) risk society, from its original formulation up to his sudden death on New Year's Day 2015. Beck's entire body of work is divided into four interrelated phases, which are successively presented and discussed, namely: the original theory of risk society (from 1986 onwards); the theory of the world risk society (from 1996 onwards); the theory of cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitanization (from 1996 onwards); and the theory of 'metamorphosis', 'emancipatory catastrophism and 'global imagined risk communities' (2013-16). The book thus demonstrates how Beck's concept of the (world) risk society has given us a new language or a special lens that enables us to better understand contemporary society's complexity and its myriad of human-made uncertainties in terms of climate change, terrorist threats, global pandemics, economic crises, and migration crises.

Incorporating insights from political economy and behavioural psychology, this radical book provides an up-to-date account of the dilemmas facing social policy this decade: where did we go wrong, and what we can do about it? Ian Greener reconsiders one of the leading analyses by Jessop of the relationship between the economic and the political, combining it with insights from behavioural science. Covering the economy, healthcare, education and social security, detailed case studies show that the tensions and contradictions in present policy stem from the relationship between government and corporations and a resulting growth in inequality. The author presents a new, unified and effective framework to consider where social policy has come from, where it is now, and what what can we do about it? This book is ideal for those who want the bigger picture of politics and social policy, including advanced undergraduates and postgraduate students of social policy, welfare studies, politics, or other social science disciplines.

The Routledge Handbook of Social Work Theory provides an interdisciplinary and international introduction to social work theory. It presents an analytical review of the wide array of theoretical ideas that influence social work on a global scale. It sets the agenda for future trends within social work theory. Separated into four parts, this handbook examines important themes within the discourses on social work theory, as well as offering a critical evaluation of how theoretical ideas influence social work as a profession and in practice. It includes a diverse range of interdisciplinary topics, covering the aims and nature of social work, social work values and ethics, social work practice theories and the use of theory in different fields of practice. The contributors show how and why theory is so important to social work and analyze the impact these concepts have made on social intervention. Bringing together an international team of leading academics within the social work field and newer contributors close to practice, this handbook is essential reading for all those studying social work, as well as practitioners, policymakers and those involved in the associated fields of health and social care.

In this cutting edge collection authors examine risk thinking in a range of policy and practice contexts, including special needs education, digital exclusion, domestic violence and abuse, child protection and youth work. Four key interlinking themes emerge from the chapters. The first is how, within a neoliberal context, risk agendas can be used to justify and normalise the rationing and targeting of services. The second theme demonstrates that the use of such agendas can in themselves redefine what is constituted as social problems, and how they are understood and responded to in practice. Thirdly, it is clear welfare practice itself is being re-structured and re-theorised to adapt and conform to the new definitions and understandings that risk thinking has brought about. Finally, the fourth theme illustrates how the use of risk as a negative organising discourse is not inevitable but, in different contexts, can create positive outcomes for service users, practitioners and society.

This textbook offers students and practitioners an accessible introduction to strengths-based approaches in Social Work and Social Care practice. Covering the theory and research in support of these approaches, and packed full of case studies, the book will allow readers to develop a critical understanding of how strengths-based approaches work, and how they can be successfully applied in order to improve outcomes for people with lived experience. Covering the five main models of strengths-based practice, the text presents international research and evidence on the efficacy of each approach, enabling students and practitioners to apply the benefits in their own social work practice. The guide features the perspectives of people with lived experience throughout and includes the following key learning features: * case studies of best practice; * points for practice: succinct tips for practitioners and students on practice placement; * further reading list and resources; * glossary.

The Expression of Emotion collects cutting-edge essays on emotional expression written by leading philosophers, psychologists, and legal theorists. It highlights areas of interdisciplinary research interest, including facial expression, expressive action, and the role of both normativity and context in emotion perception. Whilst philosophical discussion of emotional expression has addressed the nature of expression and its relation to action theory, psychological work on the topic has focused on the specific mechanisms underpinning different facial expressions and their recognition. Further, work in both legal and political theory has had much to say about the normative role of emotional expressions, but would benefit from greater engagement with both psychological and philosophical research. In combining philosophical, psychological, and legal work on emotional expression, the present volume brings these distinct approaches into a productive conversation.

This book provides important philosophical insights concerning the kind of creatures we are such that we can experience something we understand as well-being, with these insights then being applied to various areas of social policy and welfare practice. The author defends what he calls The Ontology of Well-Being Thesis (TOWT), addressing ontological questions about the human condition, and how these questions are fundamental to issues concerning what we might know about human well-being and how we should promote it. Yet, surprisingly, these ontological questions are often side-lined in academic, political, and policy and practice based debates about well-being. Addressing these questions, head-on, six features of the human condition are identified via TOWT: human embodiment, finiteness, sociability, cognition, evaluation, and agency. The main argument of the thesis is that these features reveal the conflicting character of human experiences, which can, in turn, have a profound bearing on our experience of well-being. Notably, it is our conflicting experiences of time, emotion, and self-consciousness, which can potentially help us experience well-being in complex and multi-dimensional ways. The author then applies these insights to various social policies and welfare practices, concerning, for example, pensions, disability, bereavement counselling, social prescribing within health settings, the promotion of mental health, and co-production practices. This book is of importance to philosophers, social policy analysts, and welfare practitioners and is also relevant to the fields of psychology, sociology, politics, and the health sciences.

This book offers a critical introduction to trends and developments in contemporary criminological theory. Designed both as a companion to An Introduction to Criminological Theory - also by Roger Hopkins Burke and published by Routledge - and as a standalone advanced textbook, it develops themes introduced previously in more detail, incorporates new critical and radical concepts and explores cutting-edge advances in theory. Key topics include the following: * Constitutive, anarchist, green and species, bio-critical, cultural, abolitionist and convict criminologies * Globalization and organized crime * Southern theory * Critical race theory * Terrorism and state violence * Gender, feminism and masculinity * Ultra-realism * Radical moral communitarianism These key issues are discussed in the context of debates about the fragmentation of modernity and the postmodern condition; the rise of political populism, risk, surveillance and social control, and speculation about living in post-COVID-19 society and the future of neoliberalism. Written in a clear and direct style, this book will appeal to both undergraduate and postgraduate students of criminology, sociology and politics and is essential reading for advanced students of criminology looking for a way to engage with contemporary themes and concepts in theory.

This volume examines minimality in cooperation and shared agency from various angles. It features essays written by top scholars in the philosophy of mind and action. Taken together, the essays provide a genuine contribution to the contemporary joint action debate. The main accounts in this debate present sufficient rather than necessary or minimal criteria for there to be cooperation. Much discussion in the debate deals with robust rather than more attenuate and simple cases of cooperation or shared agency. Focusing on such minimal cases, however, may help to explain how cooperation comes into existence and how minimal cooperation interrelates with more complex cases of cooperation. The contributors discuss minimality in cooperation by focusing on particular aspects. For example, they consider how social roles might deliver minimal cooperation constraints or what the minimal contextual criteria are for cooperation to emerge. Readers will find the answers to these and other questions: What is minimally cooperative behavior? By what steps could full members of a society organized by conventions, norms and institutions be constructed from creatures with minimal social skills and cognitive abilities? What do we experience of actions when we act together with a purpose?

From twilight in the Himalayas to dream worlds in the Serbian state, this book provides a unique collection of anthropological and cross-cultural inquiry into the power of rhetorical tropes and their relevance to the formation and analysis of social thought and action through a series of ethnographic essays offering in-depth studies of the human imagination at work and play around the world.

There is an ideological war of words waging in America, one that speaks to a new fundamentalism rising not just within the American public, but across other ideologically-torn nations around the globe as well. At its heart is climate skepticism, an ideological watershed that has become a core belief for millions of people despite a large scientific consensus supporting the science of anthropogenic climate change. While many scholars have examined the role of lobbyists and conservative think tanks in fueling the climate skepticism movement, there has not yet been a systematic analysis of why the narrative itself has resonated so powerfully with the public. Pulling from science and technology studies, narrative and discourse theory, and public policy, The Power of Narrative examines the strength of climate skepticism as a story, offering a thoughtful analysis and comparison of anti-climate science narratives over time and across geographic boundaries. This book provides fresh insight into the rhetorical and semantic properties on both sides of the climate change debate that preclude dialogue around climate science, and proposes a means for moving beyond ideological entrenchment through language mediation, further ethnographic study, and research-informed teaching. The Power of Narrative culminates in the revelation of a parallel between narratives about climate skepticism and those in other issue areas (e.g., gun rights, immigration, health crises), exposing a genetic meta-narrative of public distrust and isolation. Ultimately, The Power of Narrative is not a book about climate change in itself: it is, instead, a book about how our society understands and interacts with science, how a social narrative becomes ideology, and how we can move beyond personal and political dogma to arrive at a sense of collective rapprochement.

This book focuses on the question of relationality. Despite the numerous motifs introduced to the discourse pertaining to Margaret S. Archer's concept, we notice that some often reappear. What frequently appears is the concept of agency, closely related to the matter of the subject's reflexivity. We also include papers that refer to methodological dilemmas. However, all collected texts directly consider the essence of the concept of the human person and society in reaction to the ontology of the person proposed by Archer. The common thread and horizon of these elaborations is Archer's concept and Pierpaolo Donati's relational sociology. Thus, this publication seeks to gain broader public and open new research perspectives in sociology.

Building from the level of individual interaction, this book intends to shed light on what the author terms "infrasocial power" and the relation between this individual-actor oriented level and public power. In overviewing the origins of power, the author allows for the disaggregation of the social fabric, thus making it possible to: 1) isolate the "sequence" in which the phenomenon of superordination and subordination materialises; 2) identify the institutional "instruments" which can be used to limit infrasocial power; 3) discriminate between a social position achieved through engagement with others (and what we are capable of doing for them) from one occupied by means of force and deception; 4) explain the birth and function of public power; and 5) analyze the consequences produced by different political regimes.

Digital Democracy, Social Media and Disinformation discusses some of the political, regulatory and technological issues which arise from the increased power of internet intermediaries (such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube) and the impact of the spread of digital disinformation, especially in the midst of a health pandemic. The volume provides a detailed account of the main areas surrounding digital democracy, disinformation and fake news, freedom of expression and post-truth politics. It addresses the major theoretical and regulatory concepts of digital democracy and the 'network society' before offering potential socio-political and technological solutions to the fight against disinformation and fake news. These solutions include self-regulation, rebuttals and myth-busting, news literacy, policy recommendations, awareness and communication strategies and the potential of recent technologies such as the blockchain and public interest algorithms to counter disinformation. After addressing what has currently been done to combat disinformation and fake news, the volume argues that digital disinformation needs to be identified as a multifaceted problem, one that requires multiple approaches to resolve. Governments, regulators, think tanks, the academy and technology providers need to take more steps to better shape the next internet with as little digital disinformation as possible by means of a regional analysis. In this context, two cases concerning Russia and Ukraine are presented regarding disinformation and the ways it was handled. Written in a clear and direct style, this volume will appeal to students and researchers within the social sciences, computer science, law and business studies, as well as policy makers engaged in combating what constitutes one of the most pressing issues of the digital age.

This second edition of the renowned Cultural Theory provides a systematic and accessible introduction to cultural theory, encapsulating a usually complex field in a concise and balanced overview.
This fully revised and expanded second edition provides a comprehensive tour of the major figures, themes, and debates in cultural theory, from Durkheim and Weber through to Foucault and Butler, and from charisma to consumption, but also introduces entirely new chapters on race and gender theory, and the body. Other new material includes treatments of thinkers such as Nietzsche, DuBois, and Eagleton, and considers important contemporary themes, including virtual reality and cosmopolitanism.
Internationally respected by students and teachers alike, the first edition of Cultural Theory has been translated into several languages and became legendary on campuses worldwide. This new, restructured edition, packed with special features for students and accompanied by a website, promises to be the most authoritative text of its kind.

Nothing really matters. All the things that we do not do, have or become in our lives can be important in shaping self-identity. From jobs turned down to great loves lost, secrets kept and truths untold, people missed and souls unborn, we understand ourselves through other, unlived lives that are imaginatively possible. This book explores the realm of negative social phenomena - no-things, no-bodies, non-events and no-where places - that lies behind the mirror of experience. Taking a symbolic interactionist perspective, the author argues that these objects are socially produced, emerging from and negotiated through our relationships with others. Nothing is interactively accomplished in two ways, through social acts of commission and omission. Existentialism and phenomenology encourage us to understand more deeply the subjective experience of nothing; this can be pursued through conscious meaning-making and reflexive self-awareness. The Social Life of Nothing is a thought-provoking book that will appeal to scholars across the social sciences, arts and humanities, but its message also resonates with the interested general reader.

Social capital is fundamentally concerned with resources in social relations. This Handbook brings together leading scholars from around the world to address important questions on the determinants, manifestations and consequences of social capital. Various mechanisms of formal and informal social involvement, its relationship with other forms of social exclusion and its role in civic, instrumental and expressive domains of our socio-economic and community lives are explored. This unique Handbook: * combines cutting-edge theory with appropriate data and methods * explores the mechanisms of formal and informal social involvement including the role of parental class and cultural influence, and the consequences for our personal and community lives * links social capital with other domains of social inequality such as cultural practice and philanthropic behaviour in an in-depth examination of the social stratification processes * conducts a thorough analysis of formal and informal social involvement, and bonding and bridging social ties on trust, tolerance, community cohesion, educational attainment, labour market position, quality of life and ethnic entrepreneurism * analyzes social capital as both an outcome and as a mediating variable at the micro, meso and macro levels. Accessible yet rigorous, this Handbook presents a challenge to both social capital researchers interested in explaining social inequality and to policy-makers with responsibility for designing effective measures for combating social exclusion. It will also be essential reading for students in sociology, political science, developmental economics and management studies. Contributors: N. Allum, R. Andersen, L. Becares, Y. Bian, F. Buscha, C. Cheng, R.R. Cote, D. Cutts, N. Demireva, F. Devine, J.K. Dhillon, L. Donato, B.H. Erickson, J. Fiel, J. Field, E. Fieldhouse, A. Gamoran, A. Garcia-Macias, D. Griffiths, A. Heath, X. Huang, P.S. Lambert, J. Laurence, Y. Li, M. Lubbers, J.L. Molina, J. Nazroo, J. Pampalona, R. Patulny, J. Rodriguez Menes, M. Savage, M. Shoji, P. Sturgis, E.M. Uslaner, H. Valenzuela-Garcia, P.-P. Verhaeghe, W. Wang, A. Warde, M. Western, L. Zhang, L. Zhang, W. Zhang

Developing directly from Fuller's recent book Humanity 2.0, this is the first book to seriously consider what a 'post-' or 'trans'-' human state of being might mean for who we think we are, how we live, what we believe and what we aim to be.

The Nexus of Practices: connections, constellations, practitioners brings leading theorists of practice together to provide a fresh set of theoretical impulses for the surge of practice-focused studies currently sweeping across the social disciplines. The book addresses key issues facing practice theory, expands practice theory's conceptual repertoire, and explores new empirical terrain. With each intellectual move, it generates further opportunities for social research. More specifically, the book's chapters offer new approaches to analysing connections within the nexus of practices, to exploring the dynamics and implications of the constellations that practices form, and to understanding people as practitioners that carry on practices. Topics examined include social change, language, power, affect, reflection, large social phenomena, and connectivity over time and space. Contributors thereby counter claims that practice theory cannot handle large phenomena and that it ignores people. The contributions also develop practice theoretical ideas in dialogue with other forms of social theory and in ways illustrated and informed by empirical cases and examples. The Nexus of Practices will quickly become an important point of reference for future practice-focused research in the social sciences.