This book explores the most important aspects of populism as a significant social phenomenon. It recapitulates the approaches to defining populism in the social sciences, singles out the most important concepts in the definition of populism, and presents them to the readership. Specific to this book is that it seeks to promote an approach that sees populism as a meta-ideology, that is, an ideology that uses other political ideologies instrumentally. In addition, the book Populism as Meta Ideology identifies the most important factors that have contributed to the growth of populism in recent times. Modernization, globalization, the crisis of political parties, and the transformation of the public sphere have been identified as such factors. A chapter is devoted to each of these factors in the book. The book concludes by examining the interaction between populism and liberal democracy, both theoretically and practically.

The diagnosis of 'Dyslexia' and the medical problematisation of reading difficulties were almost unknown one hundred years ago, yet today the British Dyslexia Association estimates that up to ten per cent of the UK population may have some form of dyslexia, with numbers in the United States estimated to be as high as twenty per cent. The Government of Reading investigates how this problematisation developed and how a diagnostic category was shaped in response to this.

This book presents a comprehensive, lucid, and accessible approach to environmental sociology. It traces the origins of environmental sociology and examines the realist-constructionist debate in ecology for a holistic exploration of the field. The volume: Presents a step-by-step systematic approach to the study of environmental sociology Includes case studies from Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas and introduces theoretical perspectives from Asia and Africa to provide a more comprehensive view of the field Has a separate section on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and climate change Discusses ecological movements in India and highlights environmental issues of the Global South A key text for undergraduates, postgraduates, and civil services aspirants, this book goes beyond western scholarship to include indigenous approaches to the field. It will be indispensable for students of sociology, climate change, environmental studies, and sustainable development.

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.

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.

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.

As our society confronts climate change, authoritarianism, and epidemics, what can examples from the past tell us about our present and future? How Worlds Collapse offers case studies of societies that either collapsed or overcame cataclysmic adversity. The authors of this volume find commonalities between past civilizations and our current society, tracing patterns, strategies, and early warning signs that can inform decision making today. While today's complex world presents unique challenges, many mechanisms, dynamics, and fundamental challenges to the foundations of civilization have been seen throughout history - highlighting essential lessons for the future.

As our society confronts climate change, authoritarianism, and epidemics, what can examples from the past tell us about our present and future? How Worlds Collapse offers case studies of societies that either collapsed or overcame cataclysmic adversity. The authors of this volume find commonalities between past civilizations and our current society, tracing patterns, strategies, and early warning signs that can inform decision making today. While today's complex world presents unique challenges, many mechanisms, dynamics, and fundamental challenges to the foundations of civilization have been seen throughout history - highlighting essential lessons for the future.

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.

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.

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.

When all that was solid melted into air... For decades, intellectuals from Benjamin to Bourdieu, Berman to Foucault, have been in thrall to this vision of the mid-nineteenth century. It shaped and underpinned their most influential thoughts, its legacy insinuated into institutionalized theories of culture. In this new book, that vision implodes, as if in a cultural supernova, its exceptionalism and limitations exposed. The story of modernity fades before a spectacle of linkages, stretching from and into the depths of history, the breadths of place. And, in a parallel substitution, the vast territories of the former Spanish Empire's thread through the narrative, rather than lurking on the peripheries, no longer just the fallen founders of modernity. Instead of modernity goes to the very heart of comparative cultural study: the question of what happens when intimate, dynamic connections are made over place and time, what it is to feel at home amid the lavish diversity of culture. This ambitious interdisciplinary book reconsiders foundational figures of the modern western canon, from Darwin to Cameron, Baudelaire to Whistler. It weaves together brain images from France, preserved insects from the Americas, glass in London, poetry from Argentina, paintings from Spain. Flaubert, Whitman, and Nietzsche find themselves with Hostos from Puerto Rico and Gorriti from Argentina. The flotsam and jetsam of history - optical toys from Madrid - sit with Melville and Marx. The book ranges over theoretical fields: trauma and sexuality studies, theories of visuality, the philosophy of sacrifice and intimacy, the thought of Wittgenstein. Instead of modernity is an adventure in the practice of comparative writing: resonances join suggestively over place and time, the textures of words, phrases and images combine to form moods. This book will be of interest to anyone concerned with the question of modernity and with the fate of cultural theory and comparison. -- .

Social movements and popular struggle are a central part of today's world, but often neglected or misunderstood by media commentary as well as experts in other fields. In an age when struggles over climate change, women's rights, austerity politics, racism, warfare and surveillance are central to the future of our societies, we urgently need to understand social movements. Accessible, comprehensive and grounded in deep scholarship, Why Social Movements Matter explains social movements for a general educated readership, those interested in progressive politics and scholars and students in other fields. It shows how much social movements are part of our everyday lives, and how in many ways they have shaped the world we live in over centuries. It explores the relationship between social movements and the left, how movements develop and change, the complex relationship between movements and intellectual life, and delivers a powerful argument for rethinking how the social world is constructed. Drawing on three decades of experience, Why Social Movements Matter shows the real space for hope in a contested world.

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.

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.

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.

--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

--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

Human rights have been generally understood as juridical products, organizational outcomes or abstract principles that are realized through formal means such as passing laws, creating institutions or formulating ideals. In this book, Fuyuki Kurasawa argues that we must reverse this 'top-down' focus by examining how groups and persons struggling against global injustices construct and enact human rights through five transnational forms of ethico-political practice: bearing witness, forgiveness, foresight, aid and solidarity. From these, he develops a new perspective highlighting the difficult social labour that constitutes the substance of what global justice is and ought to be, thereby reframing the terms of debates about human rights and providing the outlines of a critical cosmopolitanism centred around emancipatory struggles for an alternative globalization.

This book explains and theorises the ways in which family policy instruments come to shape the routine care arrangements of young children. Drawing on interviews with close to a hundred parents from very different walks of life in urban and rural Romania, the book provides a rich account of the care arrangement transitions these parents experience during their children's first five years of life. The influence of family policies emerges as complex and uneven, affecting childcare decisions both directly and indirectly by contributing to the reproduction and legitimation of age-related hierarchies of care ideals. These cultural artefacts, reflective of both longstanding institutional legacies and recent policy innovations between 2006 and 2015, are the prism through which mothers and fathers from diverse backgrounds view and make decisions about their children's care. This unique volume will be of interest and value to students and scholars of childcare, its organisation and family policy, specifically in post-socialist contexts.

Immanuel Wallerstein is one of the most innovative social scientists of his generation. Past president of the International Sociological Association, he has had a major influence on the development of social thought throughout the world, and his books are translated into every major language. The Essential Wallerstein brings together for the first time the full range of his scholarship.This comprehensive collection of essays offers a unique overview of this seminal thinker's work, showing the development of his thought: from his groundbreaking research on contemporary African politics and social change, to his study of the modern world-system, to his current essays on the new structures of knowledge emerging from the crisis of the capitalist world-economy. His singular focus on the way in which change in one part of the globe affects the whole is all the more relevant as the world grows increasingly interdependent. The Essential Wallerstein is an ideal introduction to the extensive body of work from a thinker who helped introduce globally sensitive thinking to the field of social science. This is the first in a series of Readers bringing together the key works of major figures in the social sciences.

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.

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.

The Claims of Common Sense investigates the importance of ideas developed by Cambridge philosophers between the World Wars for the social sciences concerning common sense, vague concepts and ordinary language. John Coates examines the thought of Moore, Ramsey, Wittgenstein and Keynes, and traces their common drift away from early beliefs about the need for precise concepts and a canonical notation in analysis. He argues that Keynes borrowed from Wittgenstein and Ramsey their reappraisal of vague concepts, and developed the novel argument that when analysing something as complex as social reality, theory might be simplified by using concepts which lack sharp boundaries. Coates then contrasts this conclusion with the view shared by two contemporary philosophical paradigms - formal semantics and Continental post-structuralism - that the vagueness of ordinary language inevitably leads to interpretive indeterminacy. Developing a link between Cambridge philosophy and work on complexity, vague predicates and fuzzy logic, he argues that Wittgenstein's and Keynes's ideas on the economy of ordinary language present a mediating route for the social sciences between these philosophical paradigms.