This book examines the different conceptions of the individual that have emerged in recent new approaches in economics, including behavioral economics, experimental economics, social preferences approaches, game theory, neuroeconomics, evolutionary and complexity economics, and the capability approach. These conceptions are classified according to whether they seek to revise the traditional atomist individual conception, put new emphasis on interaction and relations between individuals, account for individuals as evolving and self-organizing, and explain individuals in terms of capabilities. The method of analysis uses two identity criteria for distinguishing and re-identifying individuals to determine whether these different individual conceptions successfully identify individuals. Successful individual conceptions account for sub-personal and supra-personal bounds on single individual explanations. The former concerns the fragmentation of individuals into multiple selves; the latter concerns the dissolution of individuals into the social. The book develops an understanding of bounded individuality, seen as central to the defense of human rights.

This book considers the experience of enchantment in art. Considering the essential characteristics, dynamics and conditions of the experience of enchantment in relation to art, including liminality, it offers studies of different kinds of artistic experience and activity, including painting, music, fiction and poetry, before exploring the possibility of a life oriented to enchantment as the activity of art itself. With attention to the complex relationship between wonder in art and the programmatic disenchantment to which it is often subject, the author draws on the thought of a diverse range of philosophers, sociological theorists and artists, to offer an understanding of art through the idea of enchantment, and enchantment through art. An accessible study, richly illustrated with experience - both that of the author and others - Art and Enchantment will appeal to scholars and students of sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and anyone with interests in the nature of aesthetic experience.

This book presents Durkheim as an important political sociologist, inspired by and advocating socialism. Through a series of studies, it argues that Durkheim's normative vision, which can be called libertarian socialism, shaped his sociological critique and search for alternatives. With attention to the value of this political sociology as a means of understanding our contemporary world, the author asks us to look again at Durkheim. While Durkheim's legacy has often emphasised the supposed conservative elements and stability advocated in his thought, we can point to a different legacy, one of a radical sociology. In dialogue with the decolonial critique, this volume also asks 'was Durkheim white?' and in doing so shows how, as a Jew, he experienced significant racialisation in his lifetime. A new reading and a vital image of a 'political Durkheim', The Political Durkheim will appeal to scholars and students with interests in Durkheim, social theory and political sociology.

This book uses an interdisciplinary inter-mediational approach to reflect on the relational complexity of unsettlement as a predominant sensibility of the present epoque. The book tackles interrelated aspects of unsettlement including temporality, the disconcerting effects of the Anthropocene, the biomedical facets of unsettlement and the post-pandemic futures. It uses a chimeric approach combining essayistic and speculative fiction writing methods, negotiating rational, affective and imaginative ways of inquiry, and showing rather than merely explaining. The book poses questions, but gives no ready-made answers, and invites to think together on the unsettlement as a negatively global human condition that can be collectively made into a generative move of resurgence and refuturing. Contributing to critical reflections on the main features and sensibilities of the current epoque, the book will be of interest to scholars and undergraduate and graduate students, as well as the general public, interested in critical global and future perspectives, in decolonial research, gender studies and posthumanities.

True Believers and the Great Replacement explores the responses of segments of Western cultures who fear that changes in the racial, religious, and ethnic makeup of society threaten their way of life. The Great Replacement Theory (that suggests that the traditional character of Western society is being undermined by outsiders) is discussed. Analysed with reference to the Critical Race Theory and the 'Cancel Culture' movement, the author examines the anxieties and reactions of those who feel alienated by a world of rapid and disorienting change. Drawing upon the thought of Eric Hoffer and Emile Durkheim, these responses are discussed in terms of the concepts of Anomie and the True Believer in innovative and effective ways. Based on this analysis, strategic responses are suggested. The volume will appeal to scholars and practitioners involved with issues of race and ethnicity, business and social and cultural analysis.

Citizenship is increasingly the core concept by which human belonging is defined but do we really understand what it is? This book develops an evolutionist argument to challenge accepted ideas about citizenship and question how well it fits between political prescriptions for sociality and human nature.

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.

Democracy in the twenty-first century faces a number of major challenges, populism, neoliberalism and globalisation being three of the most prominent. This book examines such challenges by investigating how the conditions of democratic statehood have been altered at several key historical intervals since 1945. It demonstrates that the formal mechanisms of democratic statehood, such as elections, have always been complemented by civic, cultural, educational, socio-economic and constitutional institutions that mediate between citizens and state authority. Rearticulating critical theory with a contemporary focus, the book shows why a sociological approach is urgently needed to address conceptual deficits and explain how the formal mechanisms of democratic statehood need to be complemented and updated in new ways today. -- .

This book explores a variety of interconnected themes central to contemporary Marxist theory and its further development as a critical social theory. Championing the critique of political economy as a critical theory of society and rejecting Marxian economics as a contradiction in terms, it argues instead that economic categories are perverted social categories, before identifying the sheer unrest of life - the struggle to make ends meet - as the negative content of the reified system of economic objectivity. With class struggle recognised as the negative category of the cold society of capitalist wealth, which sees in humanity a living resource for economic progress, the author contends that the critique of class society finds its rational solution in the society of human purposes, that is, the classless society of communist individuals. A theoretically sophisticated engagement with Marxist thought, A Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion will appeal to scholars of social and political theory with interests in critical theory and post-capitalist imaginaries.

The human mind is best understood when it is studied in the context of meaningful and goal-oriented interactions between individuals and their environment. These internal and external activities help to shape the human consciousness and experience. Contemporary Approaches to Activity Theory: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Human Behavior is an opportunity to study the complex, socially-oriented contexts of humans by considering the entirety of our environments: cultures, motivations, signs and tools, and various activities. Highlighting strategies in design, educational and work practice, and methodological analysis, this book is an essential reference source for academicians, researchers, and students interested in gaining a thorough understanding of the interaction between humans and their environments.

Transcultural Flows of English and Education in Asian Contexts examines issues concerning the potential of English learning and teaching to go beyond the classroom and affect the multicultural realities of Asian societies. Asian societies often carry long histories and traditions that influence beliefs about identities,which are changing in our globalizing world. The authors in this volume explore the synthesis that occurs when culture is shared and re-constructed in different contexts. Specifically, the authors show how English is appropriated and refashioned through language and culture exchanges both inside and outside of traditional classrooms in East Asia (i.e., Japan, South Korea, China) and Southeast Asia (e.g.., Indonesia, Thailand). Inside the classroom, transcultural flows have the potential to result in take-up, exchange, appropriation, and refashioning of language and cultural practices that can generate transcultural realities outside the classroom. Understanding transcultural flows may also require understanding circumstances outside of the classroom-for instance, transcultural exchanges that lead to friendships and professional relationships; as companies embrace English and attempt to reach a global audience; as English facilitates access to global interaction in cyberspace; and as membership to nation states, recognition, and identity often confront the politics of English as a global language. For both teachers and students of English, the impact of transcultural connections reaches far beyond the teaching and learning experience. English connects people around the globe-even after students and teachers have finished their lessons or teachers have left the country. To examine the transcultural flows that result from English learning and teaching in Asia, this book addresses the following questions: What becomes of English when it is unmoored from local, national, and regional spaces and imaginatively reconceptualized? What are new forms of global consciousness and cultural competency? How is English rediscovered and reinvented in Asian countries where there are long traditions of cultural beliefs and language practices? How are teachers and students taking up and appropriating English inside and outside classrooms? How has English learning and teaching affected social, political, and business relationships? This book will be of interest to scholars in sociolinguistics, anthropology, and education.

Freedom in the Anthropocene illuminates the Anthropocene from the perspective of critical theory. The authors contextualize our current ecological predicament by focusing on the issues of history and freedom and how they relate to our present inability to render environmental threats and degradation recognizable and surmountable.

--A timely analysis of how to make democracies more administratively effective--and true to the intentions of democracy --The lead author is a distinguished political philosopher --Valuable assigned reading for advanced courses on social theory, political theory, public administration, democracy, political sociology, and more

Evolutionary Social Theory and Political Economy traces the origins, extension, marginalization and revival of evolutionary approaches to social theory from the Enlightenment through the beginning of the 21st century. It demonstrates how changes in understandings of social evolution corresponded to changes in definitions of Political Economy and how both reflected changes in the Philosophy of Science. This book is written for students and researchers alike in all the social sciences. Economists will benefit from understanding how ideas about evolution in Economics corresponded to ideas about evolution in other social sciences, and Social Scientists outside of Economics will benefit from understanding how Economics has related to their discipline.

Using experimental surveys as a primary source, Kim and Kim compare a wide range of developed countries to assess the determinants of generalized social trust. With data from Belgium, France, Italy, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, the Netherlands, and the United States, Kim and Kim present a detailed picture of trust at the individual level, across different ethnic groups, and across different regions with economic and cultural distinctions. They focus on a range of concepts, including generalized trust and familism; causal relationships among cultural values, particularized trust, and institutional trust at the individual level; and relationships between culture, wealth, and governance at the macro-level. In doing so, they consolidate substantial quantitative data with rigorous theoretical analysis and advance our understanding of social trust and prosociality in general. A valuable resource for researchers and advanced students in political science, sociology, and social psychology around the world.

This book shows how Max Weber's perceptions of the social and political world he inhabited in Wilhelmine Germany were characterized by a nationalist commitment which coloured practically every aspect of his thought, including his social scientific writings and the formulations they expound. Exploring the consequences of Weber's ardent nationalism in a manner seldom acknowledged in existing scholarship, it considers the alignment of his commitment to liberalism and democracy with his devotion to the ideal of the German people as an ethno-racial community supported by a power-state, with the purpose of realizing the national interest of future generations of Germans. Through an analysis of a range of texts, the author contends that Weber's liberalism is not based on universalistic principles and that Weber considered the liberty he espoused to play an important role in securing the position of a political elite trained in parliamentary institutions, which are used to shape the citizenry in the pursuit of a patriotic commitment to an expansionist, imperial state. It will therefore appeal to scholars with interests in the history of sociology and classical social theory.

This edited book emerges from the observation that the current literatures on migration in China are constrained by a series of shortfalls, including a relative topical homogeneity centred on domestic labour migration; relatively narrowly conceived and institutionalist conceptions of migration and migrants, without adequate attention paid to the identities, agencies and everyday experiences of migrants; and finally a lack of engagement with theoretical models and paradigms in the broad discipline of migration studies. Assembling eight fine-grained research works engaging with a broad variety of migratory trajectories and experiences, this book addresses these shortfalls by: (1) investigating diverse forms of domestic and transnational migration in and to China; (2) problematising, rethinking and innovating well-established analytical tools and categories to move beyond their epistemological fixity and highlight their socially and dynamically constructed nature; and (3) underscoring the centrality of identity, subjectivity and everyday experiences, rather than mechanical causality between institutions and migration outcomes, to theoretical understandings of migration in China. It will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of Sociology, Politics, Human Geography, Social Work and Urban Studies. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

This book by one of Latin America's leading cultural theorists examines the place of the subject and the role of biographical and autobiographical genres in contemporary culture. Arfuch argues that the on-going proliferation of private and intimate stories - what she calls the 'biographical space' - can be seen as symptomatic of the impersonalizing dynamics of contemporary times. Autobiographical genres, however, harbour an intersubjective dimension. The 'I' who speaks wants to be heard by another, and the other who listens discovers in autobiography possible points of identification. Autobiographical genres, including those that border on fiction, therefore become spaces in which the singularity of experience opens onto the collective and its historicity in ways that allow us to reflect on the ethical, political, and aesthetic dimensions not only of self-representation but also of life itself. Opening up debate through juxtaposition and dialogue, Arfuch's own poetic writing moves freely from the Holocaust to Argentina's last dictatorship and its traumatic memories, and then to the troubled borderlands between Mexico and the United States to show how artists rescue shards of memory that would otherwise be relegated to the dustbin of history. In so doing, she makes us see not only how challenging it is to represent past traumas and violence but also how vitally necessary it is to do so as a political strategy for combating the tides of forgetting and for finding ways of being in common.

More-than-Human Sociology is a call for a bolder, more creative sociology. Olli Pyyhtinen argues that to make sociology responsive to life in the 21st century we need a new sociological imagination, one that addresses connectivity, understands the world in which we live as both a human and non-human world, and is sensitive to the multiple scales on which things exist. A fresh and innovative take on the promise of sociology, this book will appeal to scholars and students both within sociology and the social sciences more broadly.

What is economics fundamentally about? Some say 'money'. But that only applies, at a stretch, to macroeconomics. Others say 'incentivised choices'. Through a review of the history and methodology of economics, with special concentration on the past 60 years, the book shows why the second answer is more accurate. But this leads straight into another problem: psychologists study choices too. So how is economics different from psychology? The book explains this, by showing how economics is really about groups or populations of people. In clearly distinguishing economics from psychology, the book criticizes the current popular wave of behavioural economics, showing how many studies under that label confuse economics with psychology. But if economics is about structures of group response, then how is it different from sociology? The book shows how and why economics and sociology are currently converging, perhaps ultimately to form a single unified discipline fed by two distinct historical tributaries.

Methodological Concepts: A Critical Guide clarifies many key terms and issues in social research methodology. It outlines the conventional meanings of these terms, but also addresses their contentious character. The aim is to offer interpretations of them that provide a coherent conception of the nature of social science. This book is premised on the idea that more clarity about the meaning of major methodological concepts is essential, and that the disagreements which pervade the field must be addressed. Numerous key terms are discussed across 13 chapters, including 'methodology', 'method', 'inquiry', 'research', 'science', 'truth', 'fact', 'rigour', 'bias', 'objectivity', 'data', 'evidence', 'induction', 'deduction', 'abduction', 'understanding', 'explanation', 'reflexivity', 'triangulation', 'theory', and 'researcher integrity'. These concepts have been implicated in fundamental divisions among social scientists, exemplified by the 'paradigm wars' of the past few decades. The chapters of this book provide an overview of the various meanings given to these terms, whilst also offering distinctive interpretations designed to provide a sound basis for social research. Methodological Concepts: A Critical Guide will be of great use to any student or researcher working in the social sciences.

What can 'assemblage thinking' contribute to international theory? Assemblages have been invoked in several disciplines to make sense of the heterogeneity of the elements of society and the ways in which these are politically intertwined. Can parallel developments be prompted in IR?Reassembling International Theory investigates how the contemporary debates on assemblages in social theory can contribute to generating critical considerations on the connections and dissociation of political agency, physical world and international dynamics. It draws on a variety of international relations experiences and on conversations with key 'assemblage' theorists to tease out the theoretical and methodological implications, ontological and material dynamics, as well as the politics of assemblage thinking.Including contributions from Rita Abrahamsen, Roland Bleiker, Antoine Bousquet, Christian Bueger, David Chandler, Stephen Collier, Olaf Corry, Xavier Guillaume, Graham Harman, Debbie Lisle, Maximilian Mayer, Aihwa Ong, Mark Salter, Saskia Sassen, Peer Schouten, Nick Srnicek and Michael Williams, this text will appeal to scholars in International Relations, Political Sociology and Human Geography.

Veblen was an original thinker, responsible for introducing and popularising a host of important concepts and insights. He ignited controversy not only in economics, but also in sociology, history and political science. The number and quality of the responses to his work provide evidence of the novelty and explanatory power of his ideas. These comprehensive volumes will enable the reader to sample the broad spectrum of Veblen's thought and that of his critics and interpreters. They include critical appraisals of the corpus of his published work as well as reinterpretations of his life and influence on the social sciences particularly economics, political science and sociology. This authoritative collection includes reprints of materials previously published by leading scholars on nearly every aspect of Veblen's life and work. It will be invaluable to professional scholars and graduate students who wish to heighten their understanding of the alternatives to formalism in the social studies.

Poststructuralism and After provides a comprehensive, innovative and lucid account of contemporary poststructuralist theory, which probes its limits, explores rival theoretical approaches, and elaborates new concepts and logics. The book distils and articulates the basic philosophical assumptions and theoretical concepts of poststructuralism, but by building upon the work of Derrida, Foucault, Heidegger, Lacan, Laclau, Levi-Strauss, Marx, Saussure and Zižek it also provides a distinctive version of the poststructuralist project.The philosophy and theory of poststructuralism is presented through a critical engagement with the central problems of social and political theory. Such problems include the structure/agency dilemma; the problem of social order; the ongoing debates between positivists, interpretivists and realists about the role and character of social science; the relationship between the economy, the state and society; the complexities of identity/difference; and the role of power, domination and ideology. Empirical illustrations and case studies of selected social phenomena further illuminate the theoretical arguments displayed in this book.

This book explores the relationship between the changing nature of capitalism and the creation of the new worker. In a changing global economy, work - as the activity that structures individuals in capitalism both socially and psychologically - is being undermined. Combining a Gramscian critique of contemporary patterns of capitalist labour control with Lacanian psychoanalysis, Durand examines what kinds of human beings are emerging in and through modern work, or on its margins. Creating the New Worker will be of interest to students and scholars who engage in the sociology and psychology of work, economics, and labour.