This benchmark text provides an accessible yet critical introduction to the theory and application of communities of practice and their use in a diverse range of managerial and professional contexts, from education to human resource development. This book charts the development of the idea of communities of practice and explores the key relationship between learning and identity among: newcomers and 'old timers' male and female workers the low skilled and the high skilled professionals and managers adults and adolescents. Drawing on international empirical studies and adopting a multi-disciplinary approach, this book is useful reading for all students, researchers, practitioners and policy makers with an interest in work, employment, labour markets, learning, training or education.

This benchmark text provides an accessible yet critical introduction to the theory and application of communities of practice and their use in a diverse range of managerial and professional contexts, from education to human resource development.

This book charts the development of the idea of communities of practice and explores the key relationship between learning and identity among:

• newcomers and a ~old timersa (TM)
• male and female workers
• the low skilled and the high skilled
• professionals and managers
• adults and adolescents.

Drawing on international empirical studies and adopting a multi-disciplinary approach, this book is useful reading for all students, researchers, practitioners and policy makers with an interest in work, employment, labour markets, learning, training or education.

This insightful new study explores an emerging and growing interest in Sociology and Organization Studies which concerns the meanings and experiences of 'dirty' work. Based on a unique study of male street cleaners, refuse collectors, graffiti removers and butchers, and drawing on Bourdieu as a theoretical frame, it presents an 'embodied' understanding of 'dirty' work. Gender, Work and Occupation explores new avenues of workplace studies, highlighting how material conditions both support and constrain processes of occupation-based ideological constructions. Using original field research, the authors put forward a different agenda in terms of how we think about dirty work, and how we can explore and understand the 'lived experiences' of dirty workers.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. This book explores the interplay between the making of Elias as a sociologist and the development of his core ideas relating to figurations, interdependence, and civilising processes. Focusing on the relevance of Elias's work for current debates within sociology, the authors centrally consider his contributions to the sociology of knowledge and methodology. Dunning and Hughes locate the work of Elias within a discussion of the crisis of sociology as a subject, and compare his figurational approach with the approaches of three major figures in modern sociology: Anthony Giddens, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. This highly readable and engaging book will be essential reading for students and scholars of sociological theory and methods.

Some of the best horror writers have come together to create a thrilling read. Don't miss authors like Steven Marshall, S.E.Cox, Kerry A. Morgan, Matthew Leverton, and Daniel Fabiani, Staci Bolli, Jason Hughes; Chris Bartholomew and more

Moral Panics in the Contemporary World represents the best current theoretical and empirical work on the topic, taken from the international conference on moral panics held at Brunel University. The range of contributors, from established scholars to emerging ones in the field, and from a working journalist as well, helps to cover a wide range of moral panics, both old and new, and extend the geographical scope of moral panic analysis to previously underrepresented areas. Designed from the outset to comprise a coherent and integrated set of viewpoints which share a common engagement with critically exploring moral panics in the contemporary world, it contains case studies instantly recognisable and familiar to a student readership (drugs, alcohol, sexual abuse and racism). The collection brings a fresh approach to analysis and argument by testing and extending the concept of moral panic and analyzing a range of topics and geographical contexts, accurately reflecting the state-of-the-art moral panics research today.

This research tradition has arisen from a specific set of historical, disciplinary and institutional conditions. The very emergence of 'documentation' is predicated upon a set of long-term processes in which humans have developed the capacity to use symbols and store knowledge such that it can be exchanged and inter-generationally transmitted.Consisting of an impressive list of contributors, the four volumes discuss the history, development and current debates alive in the field, such as the biographical turn in social science, the theoretical underpinnings to using human documents in social research and the epistemological, substantive and practical concerns with the process of analyzing data from human documentary sources.Comprehensive, illuminating and dynamic, this collection will have appeal across all social science disciplines, especially sociology, social psychology, criminology, politics and international relations, management and business studies, human geography, media and communication studies Volume One: Human Documents: Perspectives and Approaches Volume Two: Analyzing Human Documents Volume Three: Human Documents in Social Research Volume Four: Archival Research and Data Re-Use

Moral Panics in the Contemporary World represents the best current theoretical and empirical work on the topic, taken from the international conference on moral panics held at Brunel University. The range of contributors, from established scholars to emerging ones in the field, and from a working journalist as well, helps to cover a wide range of moral panics, both old and new, and extend the geographical scope of moral panic analysis to previously underrepresented areas. Designed from the outset to comprise a coherent and integrated set of viewpoints which share a common engagement with critically exploring moral panics in the contemporary world, it contains case studies instantly recognisable and familiar to a student readership (drugs, alcohol, sexual abuse and racism). The collection brings a fresh approach to analysis and argument by testing and extending the concept of moral panic and analyzing a range of topics and geographical contexts, accurately reflecting the state-of-the-art moral panics research today.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. This book explores the interplay between the making of Elias as a sociologist and the development of his core ideas relating to figurations, interdependence, and civilising processes. Focusing on the relevance of Elias's work for current debates within sociology, the authors centrally consider his contributions to the sociology of knowledge and methodology. Dunning and Hughes locate the work of Elias within a discussion of the crisis of sociology as a subject, and compare his figurational approach with the approaches of three major figures in modern sociology: Anthony Giddens, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. This highly readable and engaging book will be essential reading for students and scholars of sociological theory and methods.

Why do people smoke? Taking a unique approach to this question, Jason Hughes moves beyond the usual focus on biological addiction that dominates news coverage and public health studies and invites us to reconsider how social and personal understandings of smoking crucially affect the way people experience it. "Learning to Smoke" examines the diverse sociological and cultural processes that have compelled people to smoke since the practice was first introduced to the West during the sixteenth century.
Hughes traces the transformations of tobacco and its use over time, from its role as a hallucinogen in Native American shamanistic ritual to its use as a prophylactic against the plague and a cure for cancer by early Europeans, and finally to the current view of smoking as a global pandemic. He then analyzes tobacco from the perspective of the individual user, exploring how its consumption relates to issues of identity and life changes. Comparing sociocultural and personal experiences, Hughes ultimately asks what the patterns of tobacco use mean for the clinical treatment of smokers and for public policy on smoking. Pointing the way, then, to a more learned and sophisticated understanding of tobacco use, this study will prove to be essential reading for anyone interested in the history of smoking and the sociology of addiction.