Hierarchy within the educational setting is a topic underrepresented in the existing literature, yet an area rich with unique social characteristics and particular challenges. A Sociological Perspective on Hierarchies in Educational Institutions traces hierarchical origins, differentiating between their types and discussing related terms such as positioning, social stratification, and central root vs. rhizomatic structure to offer a comprehensive complex exploration. By presenting the circumstances under which hierarchies flourish or diminish, Einav Argaman provides illustrative examples for the ways in which inter- and intra-institutional hierarchies are constructed and displayed, and points to existing and future directions that hierarchies in educational institutions may take. Offering a step-by-step guide to identifying and changing hierarchical relationships in schools, colleges and universities, A Sociological Perspective on Hierarchies in Educational Institutions bridges the gap between theory and practice. Drawing together research from different perspectives without losing comprehensiveness, accuracy, and in-depth coverage of hierarchy and educational institutions, this work is a novel contribution to Organizational Studies. The interdisciplinary scope of Argaman's study spans across multiple academic fields, including education, sociology, organization studies, management, curriculum studies, linguistics, and architecture. It is an accessibly written resource for researchers, academics, and teaching.

Inspired by Bourdieu's thought, this book explores the notion of cultural capital, offering insights into its various definitions, its evolution and the critical theories that engage with it. Designed for use by students and teachers, it addresses the limitations and expansion of Bourdieu's theory of capital and power, considering the relationship between cultural, social and human capital, the distinctions between capital and capitalism, and the conflicts that exist among theories that have emerged in response to - or can be brought to bear on - Bourdieu's work. Engaging with the thought of Max Weber, Fernand Braudel, Daniel Bell, Herbert Marcuse, Jean Baudrillard, Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Gilles Lipovetsky, Cultural capital and Creative Communication represents the first book to develop a field of research and study that is devoted to cultural capital. Richly illustrated with empirical examples and offering assessment exercises, it will appeal not only to scholars and students of sociology, philosophy and social theory, but also to corporate communities who seek to develop training modules on the increase of their cultural capital.

This book looks at how sociological concepts that were first invented and applied to describe social inequality in Europe were also used to understand and explain inequality in the US. Hess analyzes changing uses of concepts and measurements of social inequality by looking at how some of the most prominent American sociologists have tried to conceptualize their own society while at the same time addressing the complex relationship between an assumed political equality and de facto social inequality.

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and freely available to read online Digital technologies have led to many important social and cultural changes worldwide, but they are also implicated in the facilitation of violence and abuse. While cybercriminality is often described as one of the greatest threats to nation states and global security, the wide range of interpersonal crimes comprising technology-facilitated violence and abuse (TFVA) - including, but not limited to, image-based sexual abuse, hate speech, online sexual harassment and cyberstalking - has received little attention. This handbook features theoretical, empirical, policy and legal analysis of TFVA from over 40 multidisciplinary scholars, practitioners, advocates, survivors and technologists from 17 countries. Addressing a spectrum of abuse perpetrated online, offline and through new technologies, the book sets TFVA in the context of intersecting underlying systemic drivers - including misogyny, racism, classism, colonialism, ableism, ageism, transphobia and homophobia - and discusses ways forward in effectively responding to TFVA. Adopting a holistic approach, it explores a host of issues relating to TFVA, including the nature and experience of harmful and criminal conduct; organisational responses; regulatory, legal and ethical concerns; corporate and social responsibility; justice for victims; bystander intervention; and cultural and social attitudes. The handbook's international, interdisciplinary and intersectoral nature affords opportunities for learning from common experiences, but it also emphasises the equality-affirming importance of avoiding one-size-fits-all analyses that fail to reflect rich and diverse experiences from around the world.

In our time of rampant inequality, imperial-capitalist plunder, violence and ecocide, when radical concepts from the past seem inadequate, how do researchers and students of ethnographic work decide what concepts to work with or renew?

Gillian Hart is a key thinker in radical political economy, geography, development studies, agrarian studies and Gramscian critique of postcolonial capitalism. In Ethnographies of Power each contributor engages her work and applies it to their own field of study.

A major contribution of this collection is the merging of theory with praxis, resulting in invaluable research tools for postgraduate students. These include applying 'gendered labour' practices among workers in South Africa, reading 'racial capitalism' through agrarian debates, using 'relational comparison' in an ethnography of schooling across Durban, reworking 'multiple socio-spatial trajectories' in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve, critiquing the notion of South Africa's 'second economy', revisiting 'development' processes and 'Development' discourses in US military contracting, reconsidering Gramsci's 'conjunctures' geographically, finding divergent 'articulations' in Cape Town land occupations, and exploring 'nationalism' as central to revaluing recyclables at a Soweto landfill.

Together, the chapters show how important the ongoing reworking of radical concepts is to ethnographic critiques of power.

Ethnographies of Power offers an invaluable toolkit for activists and scholars engaged in sharpening their critical concepts for social and environmental change towards a collective future.

Social robotics is a cutting edge research area gathering researchers and stakeholders from various disciplines and organizations. The transformational potential that these machines, in the form of, for example, caregiving, entertainment or partner robots, pose to our societies and to us as individuals seems to be limited by our technical limitations and phantasy alone. This collection contributes to the field of social robotics by exploring its boundaries from a philosophically informed standpoint. It constructively outlines central potentials and challenges and thereby also provides a stable fundament for further research of empirical, qualitative or methodological nature.

The defining feature of modern society is change - it never rests or provides its members or researchers the comfort and certainty of having attained an adequate understanding of its operations, how it functions, or where it is. Society in Flux: Two Centuries of Social Theory traces how tensions between order, process, structure and agency, and modes of analyzing them have evolved over the last two centuries. Understanding that modern society is perpetually in flux, albeit not across the board, but in different regards at different times, and in different locations or regions, this volume delves into three modes of theorizing: critical theory, classical theory, and systems theory - each representing a different level of reflexivity and a particular way of approaching modern societies. The authors discuss globally known theorists such as August Comte, Herbert Spencer, Karl Marx, Emil Lederer, Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, and Niklas Luhmann to present perspectives, analyses, and insights that refer to and are relevant in the social world today.

This book investigates the sociohistorical making of place and people in Copenhagen from around 1900 to the present day. Drawing inspiration from Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of social space and symbolic power, and from Loic Wacquant's hypothesis of advanced marginality and territorial stigmatisation, the book explores the genesis and development of the notorious neighbourhood of Copenhagen North West. As an extraordinary place, the North West provides an illustrative case of Danish welfare and urban history that questions the epitome on inclusive Copenhagen. Through detailed empirical analysis, the book spotlights three angles and entanglements of the social history of this area of Copenhagen: the production of socio-spatial constructions and authoritative categorisations of the neighbourhood, especially by the state and the media; the local social pedagogical interventions and symbolic boundary drawings by welfare agencies in the neighbourhood; and the residents' subjective experiences of place, social divisions and (dis)honour. In this way, The Making of Place and People in the Danish Metropolis analyses how social, symbolical, and spatial structures dynamically intertwine and contribute to the fashioning of divisions of inequality and marginality in the city over the course of some 125 years. It will appeal to scholars of sociology, urban studies, and urban history, with interests in social welfare.

Economists occupy leading positions in many different sectors including central and private banks, multinational corporations, the state and the media, as well as serving as policy consultants on everything from health to the environment and security. Power and Influence of Economists explores the interconnected relationship between power, knowledge and influence which has led economics to be both a source and beneficiary of widespread power and influence. The contributors to this book explore the complex and diverse methods and channels that economists have used to exert and expand their influence from different disciplinary and national perspectives. Four different analytical views on the role of power and economics are taken: first, the role of economic expert discourses as power devices for the formation of influential expertise; second, the logics and modalities of governmentality that produce power/knowledge apparatuses between science and society; third, economists as involved in networks between academia, politics and the media; and forth, economics considered as a social field, including questions of legitimacy and unequal relations between economists based on the detention of various capitals. The volume includes case studies on a variety of national configurations of economics, such as the US, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Greece, Mexico and Brazil, as well as international spaces and organisations such as the IMF. This book provides innovative research perspectives for students and scholars of heterodox economics, cultural political economy, sociology of professions, network studies, and the social studies of power, discourse and knowledge. "The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9780367817084, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license."

The Problem of the State provides a new perspective on what the social and political sciences can contribute to understandings of the state and the ambivalent place it occupies in our collective affairs. Distinguishing two broad conceptual and methodological approaches to addressing the problem of how to study the state empirically rather than theoretically - the constitutionalist and constructionist positions - the author reviews the grounds and limits of both to reveal their common assumption: that it is up to the social and political sciences to define what the problem of the state is. Building on insights from Marx, Wittgenstein and Ethnomethodology, this book frees the study of the state from the limiting assumptions of common approaches and advocates a return of the problem to its proper environment, in social and political practice.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003146698, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. This book explores the ways in which social relations are profoundly changing modern society, arguing that, constituting a reality of their own, social relations will ultimately lead to a new form of society: an aftermodern or relational society. Drawing on the thought of Simmel, it extends the idea that society consists essentially of social relations, in order to make sense of the operation of dichotomous forces in society and to examine the emergence of a "third" in the morphogenetic processes. Through a realist and critical relational sociology, which allows for the fact that human beings are both internal and external to social relations, and therefore to society, the author shows how we are moving towards a new, trans-modern society - one that calls into question the guiding ideas of Western modernity, such as the notion of linear progression, that science and technology are the decisive factors of human development, and that culture can entirely supplant nature. As such, it will appeal to sociologists, social theorists, economists, political scientists, and social philosophers with interests in relational thought, critical realism, and social transformation.

This volume engages with post-humanist and transhumanist approaches to present an original exploration of the question of how humankind will fare in the face of artificial intelligence. With emerging technologies now widely assumed to be calling into question assumptions about human beings and their place within the world, and computational innovations of machine learning leading some to claim we are coming ever closer to the long-sought artificial general intelligence, it defends humanity with the argument that technological 'advances' introduced artificially into some humans do not annul their fundamental human qualities. Against the challenge presented by the possibility that advanced artificial intelligence will be fully capable of original thinking, creative self-development and moral judgement and therefore have claims to legal rights, the authors advance a form of 'essentialism' that justifies providing a 'decent minimum life' for all persons. As such, while the future of the human is in question, the authors show how dispensing with either the category itself or the underlying reality is a less plausible solution than is often assumed.

Based on a reading of contemporary philosophical arguments, this book accounts for how punishment has provided audiences with pleasure in different historical contexts. Watching tragedies, contemplating hell, attending executions, or imagining prisons have generated pleasure, according to contemporary observers, in ancient Greece, in medieval Catholic Europe, in the early-modern absolutist states, and in the post-1968 Western world. The pleasure was often judged morally problematic, and raised questions about which desires were satisfied, and what the enjoyment was like. This book offers a research synthesis that ties together existing work on the pleasure of punishment. It considers how the shared joys of punishment gradually disappeared from the public view at a precise historic conjuncture, and explores whether arguments about the carnivalesque character of cruelty can provide support for the continued existence of penal pleasure. Towards the end of this book, the reader will discover, if willing to go along and follow desire to places which are full of pain and suffering, that deeply entwined with the desire for punishment, there is also the desire for social justice. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, philosophy and all those interested in the pleasures of punishment.

The concept of risk is an outgrowth of our society's great concern about coping with the dangers of modern life. The Perception of Risk brings together the work of Paul Slovic, one of the world's leading analysts of risk, risk perception and risk management, to examine the gap between expert views of risk and public perceptions. Ordered chronologically, it allows the reader to see the evolution of our understanding of such perceptions, from early studies identifying public misconceptions of risk to recent work that recognizes the importance and legitimacy of equity, trust, power and other value-laden issues underlying public concern.

The idea of civilization recurs frequently in reflections on international politics. However, International Relations academic writings on civilization have failed to acknowledge the major 20th-century analysis that examined the processes through which Europeans came to regard themselves as uniquely civilized - Norbert Elias's On the Process of Civilization. This book provides a comprehensive exploration of the significance of Elias's reflections on civilization for International Relations. It explains the working principles of an Eliasian, or process-sociological, approach to civilization and the global order and demonstrates how the interdependencies between state-formation, colonialism and an emergent international society shaped the European 'civilizing process'.

Brian Leiter is widely recognized as the leading philosophical interpreter of the jurisprudence of American Legal Realism, as well as the most influential proponent of the relevance of the naturalistic turn in philosophy to the problems of legal philosophy. This volume collects newly revised versions of ten of his best-known essays, which set out his reinterpretation of the Legal Realists as prescient philosophical naturalists; critically engage with jurisprudential responses to Legal Realism, from legal positivism to Critical Legal Studies; connect the Realist program to the methodology debate in contemporary jurisprudence; and explore the general implications of a naturalistic world view for problems about the objectivity of law and morality. Leiter has supplied a lengthy new introductory essay, as well as postscripts to several of the essays, in which he responds to challenges to his interpretive and philosophical claims by academic lawyers and philosophers. This volume will be essential reading for anyone interested in jurisprudence, as well as for philosophers concerned with the consequences of naturalism in moral and legal philosophy.

A powerful customer community will help you to scale customer support, attract new customers, and gather indispensable feedback and knowledge. But how do you make it happen?

Build Your Community fuses proven principles from the world of psychology with user experience and design thinking into a foolproof approach helping you to:

Start from scratch and attract your first members.
Find and design the perfect platform for your community.
Keep members engaged, sharing expertise, and helping each other.
Create a magnetic community culture – unique from any other online destination.
Position you and your organisation at the center of your field.
Budget for your community with a detailed breakdown of costs and resources required.

Richard Millington shares the strategies, principles and tactics he has used to help over 300 organisations to build communities over the past decade, including Apple, Facebook and SAP. If you wish to build a united, powerful online community, Build Your Community is your definitive guide.

This book takes the form of intellectual histories of eight major representative figures of the twentieth century, who inherited and responded to the spiritual problematic left by Nietzsche. With each figure offering very different ethical and spiritual positions, all shed light on what we mean when we talk confusedly around the topics of politics and religion. With portraits of Max Weber, Georg Lukacs, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, George Orwell and Hannah Arendt, the author explores the "latent" content of their worldview-the moral (or immoral) intention of their intellectual project. In each of the case studies, the aim is to move toward an understanding of their ultimate values, to get at their particular picture of the soul, as well as the implications of this vision for religion and politics. As such, The Politics of the Soul will appeal to scholars of sociology and social theory, religion, philosophy, political theory and cultural studies.

This book explores the dynamics of the "middle-class global rebellion" born of the frustration at declining living standards. Addressing narratives constructed by different social and political agents and groups, it examines contexts of social crisis in Latin America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania, understanding the middle classes as a set of complex and conflicting political relationships. With attention to the manner in which people create "situated habits", consolidating new expectations and desires through a concrete biography, it analyzes continuities and changes in classed self-perceptions based on performative use. With new perspectives, including historical and intersectional approaches, Middle Class Identities and Social Crisis transcends disciplinary boundaries to explore the hybridity of research methods and techniques and challenge established analytical frameworks. It will therefore appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in class and questions of class identity.

--Timely case studies offer deep analyses of vexing global problems. --Shows how world-system analysis can diagnose global challenges in a way that transcend the limits of other social science approaches. --Ideal reading in courses on world-system analysis, political sociology, and globalization

This companion explores ANT as an intellectual practice, tracking its movements and engagements with a wide range of other academic and activist projects. Showcasing the work of a diverse set of 'second generation' ANT scholars from around the world, it highlights the exciting depth and breadth of contemporary ANT and its future possibilities. The companion has 38 chapters, each answering a key question about ANT and its capacities. Early chapters explore ANT as an intellectual practice and highlight ANT's dialogues with other fields and key theorists. Others open critical, provocative discussions of its limitations. Later sections explore how ANT has been developed in a range of social scientific fields and how it has been used to explore a wide range of scales and sites. Chapters in the final section discuss ANT's involvement in 'real world' endeavours such as disability and environmental activism, and even running a Chilean hospital. Each chapter contains an overview of relevant work and introduces original examples and ideas from the authors' recent research. The chapters orient readers in rich, complex fields and can be read in any order or combination. Throughout the volume, authors mobilise ANT to explore and account for a range of exciting case studies: from wheelchair activism to parliamentary decision-making; from racial profiling to energy consumption monitoring; from queer sex to Korean cities. A comprehensive introduction by the editors explores the significance of ANT more broadly and provides an overview of the volume. The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory will be an inspiring and lively companion to academics and advanced undergraduates and postgraduates from across many disciplines across the social sciences, including Sociology, Geography, Politics and Urban Studies, Environmental Studies and STS, and anyone wishing to engage with ANT, to understand what it has already been used to do and to imagine what it might do in the future.

In this extraordinary work, Peter Alexander Meyers shows how the centerpiece of the Enlightenment--"society "as the symbol of collective human life and as the fundamental domain of human practice--was primarily composed and animated by its most ambivalent figure: Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Displaying this new "society" as an evolving field of interdependence, "Abandoned to Ourselves" traces the emergence and moral significance of dependence itself within Rousseau's encounters with a variety of discourses of order, including theology, natural philosophy, and music. Underpinning this whole scene we discover a modernizing conception of the human Will, one that runs far deeper than Rousseau's most famous trope, the "general Will." As "Abandoned to Ourselves" weaves together historical acuity with theoretical insight, readers will find here elements for a reconstructed sociology inclusive of things and persons and, as a consequence, a new foundation for contemporary political theory.

One of Marxism's chief failings is its dependence on trans-historical categories. Theorists such as Jürgen Habernas also fall short by restricting their critique to the cultural sphere. This book extends the reach of critical theory and its key idea of intersubjectivity to the economic system. The economy is a realm of morality that social movements influence in the course of their struggles.

This book will be the first text that critically synthesises and makes accessible Harvey's voluminous and influential literature. Authors are well placed to guide us through Harvey's large and complex theoretical corpus with careful contextualization and assessment, all in relatively accessible and clear prose. While there are many papers and chapters about Harvey's writings, most focus on one or other aspect of them and do not paint a more complete picture.