Social Science

The collection attempts to come to term with Robert Park’s legacy. As will become evident, the focus is largely though not entirely on the work rather than the man. Mary Jo Deegan makes use of aspects of Park’s biography to illustrate what she sees as his disavowal of developing sociology as a moral science in the interest of objectivity. The article by Martin Bulmer addresses how Park came to understand what it meant to “do sociology” and Raymond Lee sees Park’s inquisitiveness as the guiding thread linking his journalism and sociology. Lee contends that in terms of sociological research, inquisitiveness was channeled by a theoretical orientation that was open to mixed methods research.

Lonnie Athens and Donald Reitzes address theoretical concerns, particularly as they pertain to Park’s place in relation to the pragmatist tradition, the work of George Herbert Mead and the emergence of symbolic interactionism. Athens offers a systematic comparison of Mead and Park on social action, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of both positions. Reitzes contends that Park’s contribution to social psychology has heretofore been underappreciated, and sets out to rectify that relative neglect. Peter Kivisto, Chad Alan Goldberg and Vince Marotta address aspects of Park’s contribution to race and ethnic relations, reflecting the centrality of this theme to his body of work taken as a whole. Kivisto explores Park’s understanding of assimilation, which has come to be known as the “canonical theory of assimilation.” Goldberg’s chapter engages in a parallel undertaking by exploring Park’s concept of the marginal man and the subsequent career of this concept. Marotta begins by noting that Park’s links to journalism and his focus on empirical investigation led many subsequent commentators to overlook the theoretical sophistication of his work. In his contribution, Marotta compares Park to contemporary critical race theorists. Coline Ruwet analyzes the shifts in his thinking about the city over the course of a quarter century. Specifically, she identifies three stages in the evolution of Park’s thinking. Anthony Blasi rounds out the collection, addressing a topic usually not associated with Park: religion.

Taken as a whole, it will be evident that these articles embrace no singular response to Park, but rather a broad range of responses, generally appreciative but also critical. The goal of this book is not to make a case for or against Park, but rather to encourage readers to consider the virtue of rethinking—and rereading—this major figure in American sociology. If one is left with a sense that we actually still do not know enough about Park the person and Park the sociologist, but that getting to know him on both fronts is important, then this companion will have served its purpose. 

The publication of the National Atlas of Finland in 1899 marks the beginning of the era of the modern national atlas. It is a period that coincides neatly with the twentieth century. The modern national atlas mirrors and embodies some of the important themes of this turbulent century, including the complex connections between nation, state and territory, the rise of state-sponsored science; the growth of nation-states; the geography of biopolitics. 

Between 1900 and 2000, more than seventy countries produced a national atlas, an official or quasi-official rendering of the nation-state in maps and accompanying text. A useful working definition of a national atlas is “a generally comprehensive, officially sanctioned single-country atlas.” This book considers the reasons behind and characteristics of this state-sponsored cartographic explosion. The changing form of the national atlas provides an intriguing window into the connections between science, state, territory and power.

The primary material for this study is a close reading of thirty-seven of these national atlases from countries across the world. They represent a wide range of countries from rich to poor, progressive to regressive, and capitalist to communist. In total, these atlases provide a range of different state arrangements and national experiences. 

Seattle is one of the most politically progressive and economically dynamic cities in the contemporary United States, popularly known as the ‘Emerald City’ for its natural setting and environmental politics. This book explores a range of political, policy, and project efforts in Seattle and the wider region to mitigate and adapt to the formidable reality of global climate change. Developing a framework suggested originally by the Urban Climate Change Research Network, the book’s core analysis considers both tantalizing progress and tangible problems in Seattle’s climate action initiatives so far. The narrative explores how Seattle is integrating carbon mitigation with adaptation; advancing climate action networks; co-generating risk information; coordinating disaster risk reduction with climate change adaptation; and, most importantly, focusing on historically and geographically disadvantaged populations. 

Linking together past, present, and future, Climate Change and the Future of Seattle argues that Seattle in the 2020s is less an ‘Emerald City’ than an ‘Elite Emerald’. Income inequalities have grown while gentrification pressures have increased. Class structures have steadily shifted upwards, leaving the working poor and homeless especially vulnerable to climate change. Profoundly uncomfortable with this contradiction, local climate change efforts are shaped by mounting political concerns not only with mitigation-adaptation commitments and risk aversion policies to manage rising sea levels, warmer temperatures and more variable rainfall patterns, but also with reshaping a metropolitan space-economy that too often favors and consistently rewards the high-tech “cognitariat” over middle- and low-income households and communities of color. 

Ultimately, Seattle cannot become post-carbon if it is not also post-polarized, resilient if not also just. The lessons that Seattle learns in pursuit of more inclusive climate action will thus be of abiding interest to cities and metropolitan regions across the United States and all around the world.

The Inner World of Research is a book about the misery and joy of life as a researcher. It deals with essential but rarely spoken of topics in the everyday life of a researcher, focussing in particular on the role of emotions and social relations in research. It stretches from the individual researcher, to the ‘micro-cosmos’ of the research team and to the broader policy environment in which research takes place.

The book is to a large extent based on autobiographical material from the author’s long career as a leading social scientist. But it also derives from extended interviews with researchers from a variety of disciplines, and with authors, artists and musicians. It delves into the mysteries of creativity; the joys and frustrations of collaboration; and the role of fear, anger, and boredom in the life of a researcher. It is driven by a quiet fury about how research as a practice is so little understood and so poorly administrated and communicated.

Neither a standard research monograph nor a typical memoir or autobiography, The Inner World of Research belongs to the academic essay genre. It is a book based on the author’s frustrations, experiences and curiosity but all through written in dialogue with colleagues supported by adequate scholarship. It is personal and self-reflexive yet authoritative and offers significant insights into the heaven and hell of contemporary academic life in general. And in contrast to many other contemporary books on ‘the decline of the university’, this book is not only critical but also self-critical and constructive.

‘The Anthem Companion to Gabriel Tarde’ offers the best contemporary work on Gabriel Tarde, written by the best scholars currently working in this field. Original, authoritative and wide-ranging, the critical assessments of this volume will make it ideal for Tarde students and scholars alike.

‘Anthem Companions to Sociology’ offer authoritative and comprehensive assessments of major figures in the development of sociology from the last two centuries. Covering the major advancements in sociological thought, these companions offer critical evaluations of key figures in the American and European sociological tradition, and will provide students and scholars with both an in-depth assessment of the makers of sociology and chart their relevance to modern society.

Over the next decade, states will be carrying out large-scale registrations in alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which aim to provide more than one billion people around the world with evidentiary proof of their legal and, increasingly, digital existence. 'Legal Identity, Race and Belonging: From Citizen to Foreigner' is an important book which identifies a connection between the role of international actors, such as the World Bank and the United Nations, in promulgating the universal provision of legal identity and links these with arbitrary measures to restrict access to citizenship paperwork from (largely) Haitian-descended people born and living in the Dominican Republic. The book provides the definitive analysis of the events leading up to the controversial 2013 Constitutional Tribunal ruling that rendered the Dominican plaintiff Juliana Deguis Pierre stateless. Hayes de Kalaf illustrates how measures that purposely blocked people of Haitian ancestry from accessing their legal identity not only affected undocumented and stateless populations – persons living at the fringes of citizenship – but also had a major impact on documented people; Dominicans already in possession of a state-issued birth certificate, national identity card and/or passport. The book illustrates the complex and contradictory ways in which digital identity systems are experienced, thus challenging the assumption within current development policy that the provision of ID to everyone, everywhere will lead to the inclusion of all citizens.

Transnational migration studies has produced a wealth of literature on migrants’ economic, cultural, social and political practices and relationships across national borders. At least until recently, the primary focus of this literature was on younger adults, especially unskilled labour migrants from the Global South. In contrast, the question of how old age and different degrees of mobility relate to transnational practices and orientations was rarely addressed. Similarly, scholars looking at processes of aging only sporadically approached the lives of older people from a transnational vantage point.

Thus far, chiefly transnational family scholars have studied older peoples’ cross-border involvement. Studies in this field emphasize the complexities and consequences of older peoples’ situations in transnational family arrangements. However, empirical evidence of the prevalence and structuring features of older peoples’ family-related transnational practices remains scarce. Similarly, little is known about the relationship between age and specific stages in the life-course and the type and scope of older family members’ transnational engagement. Also, research on the association between different migration regimes and transnational family arrangements is scarce.

By asking how, why and to what extent do older Peruvians engage in transnational family ties and practices ‘Aging within Transnational Families’ seeks to enhance our knowledge about aging across borders. Drawing on the care circulation framework and the capacity and desire approach, it explores the motivations of older Peruvians’ transnational involvement as well as the factors influencing the scope and propensity of their cross-border practices. From a life course perspective, the book asks how age relates to older Peruvian migrants’ integration into the host society and engagement in the sending of remittances and visits of family members in Peru. Using a situated approach, a particular analytic focus is on the political and institutional contexts surrounding the older Peruvians’ transnational involvement.

Today, in an age of globalization, religion represents a potent force in the lives of billions of people worldwide. Yet when social theorists examine the impact of globalization on contemporary religious movements, they tend to focus on issues such as Islamic fundamentalism and threats to US or global security. This collection of essays takes a different approach, analyzing – with special reference to Asia – religion through lived experience. The key issues covered in the volume include: how religious impulses contribute to globalization; how religious groups and organizations repackage traditional beliefs for transcultural appeal; how religious adherents cope with external threats to identity; how new technologies are reshaping the nature of religious beliefs and images; and how local and global religious influences blend and/or clash. Far from religion being a subject of peripheral concern to globalization, the contributors demonstrate that from the most basic level of our interactions with the natural environment to the socio-political behavior of the “great religions” – and even to the profusion of folk and pop culture phenomena – the influence of religion upon globalization, and vice versa, is apparent at all levels.

Hermínio Martins was one of the key pioneers of the sociology of science and technology. He published extensively in Portuguese and was recognized for his academic contributions with an honorary doctorate at Lisbon (2006) and two Portuguese Medals of Honour. Following his retirement from the University of Oxford, he wrote prolifically in English on a wide range of topics that examined the ethical and societal consequences of the commoditization of the human body and mind. These essays are deep philosophical reflections on our contemporary world, and draw extensively and eclectically upon a wide range of theoretical influences including continental philosophy, history and psychology, to name but a few disciplines. ‘The Technocene’ is a selection of some of these insightful essays, made available to a global audience for the first time.

In this highly readable book, Doyle McCarthy covers some of the main ways that emotions have become important in our global societies. She explains that emotional culture is important for understanding today’s world, its markets, its politics and its mass media. To live today is to be emotionally intelligent in our relations and in our workplaces. In the modern age, global capitalism and mass media have shaped our emotions and made us more emotional. Public life has become a place where we search out emotional happenings: at shopping malls, concerts, sports events, memorials to death and disaster and in the pursuit of sports.

The book is written for those who are interested in theoretical debates as they relate to the field of Development Studies. It is aimed at academics and all those who work in the field of development, politicians, policy-makers and civil servants who need to familiarize themselves with key historical development debates, especially those relevant to Africa. The book takes an Afrocentric intellectual standpoint, grounded in the theory of Afrocentricity, in its interrogation of the idea and processes of development in Africa. It also adopts an historical approach in its interrogation of the idea of African development as a by-product of political deliberations. This book is about how the discourse of development as a field of study needs to be re-oriented towards African-based epistemologies to dismantle coloniality, in opposition to the historical embeddedness of development discourse in Eurocentrism.

This book contests the limitation of the modern African understanding of Africa’s journey with development to the period of the aftermath of World War II, to be specific, to President Harry S. Truman’s 1949 Point Four programme. Instead, the book argues that, that journey should be understood holistically. By this, I mean that Africa’s engagement with development did not begin with the politics of the Euro-North American political bloc – the story of African development must take into consideration Africa’s classical civilization, namely, the Nile Valley civilization and its contributions to human civilization. Such an approach provides a more holistic interrogation and casts light on how Africa’s history of greatness continues to be an inspiration even in modern times. Such an approach rejects the many reductionist lies and half-truths that undergird the modernist paradigm which seeks to portray African people as dependent beneficiaries of the colonial Euro-modernity framework. This framework has undermined the humanity of non-Western people in general, and Africans in particular. The book pursues the tradition of decolonial epistemic reflections grounded on Afrocentricity as its theoretical thrust to oppose discourses that are riddled with a racist agenda towards those in the Global South, especially in Africa to enable endogeneity. In the spirit of the pursuit for cognitive justice in the 21st century, this book argues that the discourse of development must be decolonized from hegemonic Eurocentric propaganda and needs to be framed from the viewpoint of those who have been seen as being on the receiving end, those projected as “backwards” from a Eurocentric perspective.

Population is a dangerous political category. It is not separable from the racist and class-based valorisation and devaluation of different lives. From contraceptive implant programmes for the Global South to right wing anti-immigration discourses, demographic interpretations of multiple global and local crises legitimise the states' grip on childbearing and mobility. The results are various dimensions of reproductive racism and restrictive border regimes. Meanwhile, global social inequalities and racial capitalist extractivism stay out of the game. 

The book explores how demographic knowledge production and states’ grip to the variable of population intertwine. It introduces the concept of a Malthusian matrix in order to understand how class-selective and racist hierarchies within population narratives are combined with gendered policies of reproductive bodies and behaviours. Another chapter unfolds the invisible assumptions underlying demographic projections, as these future narratives support powerful strategies of domination in the presence. 

Through the book various current dimensions of reproductive racism are demonstrated, distinguishing between the birth of desirable and undesirable people: an upward redistributive family policy in Germany is promoting births within the privileged middle classes. And international population programs revive targets in order to increase the use of long-acting contraceptives in the Global South, within a market-oriented setting of Big Pharma promotion. Reproductive racism is also effective in migration policy strategies: narratives about "migrant birth rates" circulate in ultra-right forces as well as among seemingly apolitical demographic policy consultancy. 

Finally, the book also reflects on the role of statehood in contested demographic politics and what theoretical instruments are needed in order to attack the demographic power-knowledge complex. The epilogue refers to the intersectional feminist concept of reproductive justice as an important tool and framework for anti-Malthusian resistance and alliances.

‘Managing Coral Reefs’ examines Indonesia’s and Malaysia’s pathways to implementing the international Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), focusing specifically on how regional and national policies in Southeast Asia have fared when implementing the Aichi Targets of the CBD. These targets include safeguarding ecosystems through protection and ensuring that benefits from ecosystems can be enjoyed by all. Kelly Heber Dunning examines CBD implementation through marine protected areas (MPAs) for corals reefs in Indonesia and Malaysia.

Coral reefs, along with mangroves and seagrass, provide stakeholders with livelihoods in fisheries and tourism; they are also efficient natural barriers against extreme weather and climate change–related hazards. While Indonesia uses a co-managed framework, whereby villages and governments share power, to implement its MPAs, Malaysia uses a top-down network of federally managed Marine Parks. Using mixed methods through interviews and surveys as well as coral reef ecology surveys conducted over a year of fieldwork, Dunning argues that co-managed systems are the current best practice for implementing the CBD’s Aichi Targets in tropical developing countries. Not only do they prevent ecosystems from many local forms of degradation, but they also are seen as more legitimate by local resource user stakeholders, allowing them more adaptive capacity to manage the ecosystems under conditions of uncertainty, as well as allowing for a more integrated form of management whereby ecological, economic, and social considerations can be made for management decisions. Centralized MPAs can mimic the successes of co-managed systems through better stakeholder engagement, possibly with greater socio-ecological success in the long run, due to their superior financial, administrative and organizational powers.

We often hear that creative and intellectual innovation is the key to western economic renewal, that cognitive capitalism has succeeded in globalizing the mental-manual division of labour, and that old work – blue-collar, repetitive, de-skilled – is now consigned to the factories of the developing world. At the other end of the long production chains, the West relies increasingly on immaterial labour. From this perspective no rustbelt city can hope to regenerate, no developing nation can ascend to first-world status, without the ‘new oil’ of intellectual property. Workers in general are told to adapt to this transition, to remake themselves for the new economy. Rapid shifts in patterns of consumption, taste and technology can render jobs and skills obsolete in ways that defy the planning and foreclosures of Fordism.

Vocational fortunes depend not only on intellect and creativity but also on entrepreneurial acumen and vocational agility. New capitalism seeks to make a virtue of transience. It has taken up the counter-culture’s critique of the Fordist job-for-life, in order to persuade young people in particular that working life is (and should be) episodic and project-based. The precariat (Standing 2009) must embrace the idea of the improvised post-modern career - a wild vocational ride that unfolds like the levels of a video game. They must become labile labour: opportunistic, excitable, flexible, mobile and ready to flow without protest or friction into the spaces opened up by Post-Fordism. Those who resist or ignore this turbulence and cling to the goal of security are in effect sleepwalking towards redundancy.

‘The Creativity Hoax’ argues that creativity, the leitmotif of new capitalism, has become a key neo-liberal idiom for reorganizing work and working life in ways that erode communal bonds, loyalties and values and blur the boundaries between work and play, public and private. However, the creative economy remains a largely unrealized project, a fantasy of regeneration. Despite the inflated rhetoric of vocational fulfilment, much work performed in the West remains low-skilled and low-paid. Very few make a living exclusively from creative labour whether as employees, freelancers, or entrepreneurs. For the most part it is transnational cultural corporations that reap the patentable or copyrightable bounty, belying the egalitarian myths of the new economy. [NP] The challenge for capital has been to habituate the precariat to the condition of abeyance. In order to tolerate un/underemployment or jobs where skills and talents are underutilized (retail, hospitality or on the edges of creative industries), young workers need to be persuaded that vocational fulfilment and financial security are attainable. ‘The Creativity Hoax’ draws on extensive interview and observation research with creative aspirants – from technical, production and performance fields – who wrestle with the prospect and reality of poverty and unfulfilled ambition.

'Men and Masculinities in South India' aims to increase understanding of gender within South Asia and especially South Asian masculinities, a topic whose analysis and ethnographising in the region has had a very sketchy beginning and is ripe for more thorough examination. This is, in short, an almost empty field dominated so far by short articles and collections and the time is right for the first full-length ethnographic study of masculinities. This ground-breaking monograph covers a range of areas including work, cross-sex relationships, sexuality, men's friendships, religious practices and leisure. This book is especially concerned with issues arising from debates which broadly argue over the differences and merits of approaches to gender and identity - rooted in essentialism versus performativity. Questions about the tensions between essentialist and performative theories of self and gender are therefore highlighted throughout the book and explored in relation to various bodies of theory and to South Asian understandings of personhood.

This book looks at the Brazilian international cooperation in health with Mozambique under the South-South Cooperation (SSC) context. It explores the particularities, processes, and interests embedded in the cooperation between these two countries under the lenses of the field of Global Health Diplomacy (GHD). It seeks to understand the profile of each country as a global health actor. While also looking at the main security, economic and trade, and human rights interests of these countries.  It particularly focuses on their cooperation in the HIV/AIDS front. In that sense, this research counts with an in-depth analysis of the implementation of an ARV factory in Mozambique, Sociedade Mocambicana de Medicamentos (SMM).
This research is insightful for those interested in understanding the main aspects that influence decision-making in global health from a Global South perspective, looking at  HIV/AIDS and the establishment of the SSM in Mozambique, as a result of the SSC in health with Brazil. Furthermore, it provides a useful framework for researchers interested in understanding how health and foreign policy are related to each other in different contexts and power relations. 

Bangladesh is one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change – but it is also a country that is capable of coping. Far from being a victim, Bangladesh has lessons for activists, scientists, government and donor officials and concerned citizens who want to know what climate change looks like and how to respond to it.

This densely populated country feeds itself because it is in a rich delta. But that comes at the price of a volatile environment – three huge rivers bring floodwaters from the Himalayas and massive cyclones sweep up the Bay of Bengal. Once accurately described as a ‘basket case’ of hunger and disaster, its scientists and engineers, working with local communities, have transformed the country. Strong cyclone shelters and early warning systems now protect at-risk coastal people. Improved rice varieties and irrigation feed the nation and rapidly cut child malnutrition. Women's education has curbed population growth. Along with these changes have come measures to cope with the volatile environment.

Climate change makes the problems worse, with higher temperatures and rising sea levels, heavier rain and bigger floods and stronger cyclones. Bangladeshis know what the damaged climate change will bring. The government, researchers and communities are already adapting, raising land levels to match the rise in sea level, strengthening dykes to protect against floods, producing more adaptable rice varieties and improving disaster preparation. Bangladesh is a model of climate change adaptation and a lesson for those who continue to ignore global warming.

Bangladeshis have taken a leading role in international campaigning and negotiating, helping to convince industrialized countries to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Because it cannot wait for help from rich countries, Bangladesh has shouldered most of its adaptation costs. Will industrialized countries make the task harder – or will they help Bangladesh by reducing emissions and paying for the damage already done?

The key questions about today’s elites are easy to ask. How did a few spectacularly wealthy bankers and fund managers, whose magic money-tree crumbled to sawdust in 2008, get themselves bailed out with public funds that no health service or infrastructure commission could dream of? Why did democratically elected governments allow the ‘1%’, and those at even more exquisite decimal places, to flee further enriched from a market meltdown that would traditionally have culled their ‘capital’? Why, when voters in America, Europe and Asia turned against governments that had made them pay twice for corporate excess, did they rally behind dissenting members of the elite, rather than traditional anti-elitist parties? What enables the domination of politics and business by an unchosen few – skewing the distributions of power, wealth and status even further skywards – when such pyramids were meant to be flattened long ago by democratization, meritocratic selection and social mobility?

‘Greedy Elites’ derives answers from the latest empirical evidence on rising concentrations of economic and political power, allied to new theories of how elites maintain, apply and justify their ascent over the rest of the society. It traces contemporary turbulence to the membership and internal dynamics of elites – economic, political and social – and the way they manage their connections to the rest of society. The composition and conduct of decision-making ‘higher circles’ remains central to explaining how national and multilateral political arrangements remain stable for long periods, interspersed with phases of abrupt change. ‘Greedy Elites’ also sheds light on why the patterns of change are often common across countries that differ in strength of democracy and civil society, and why they typically raise fractions of the previous elite to greater prominence, despite mass protest aimed at bringing the whole elite down to earth. Sixty years after C. Wright Mills’s pioneering probe of the Power Elite in the US, ‘Greedy Elites’ offers new and internationally applicable ideas on the importance of frictions within the elite in sparking and steering wider social change; the shifting relationship between power and money within elites; the alternative ways in which elite fractions enrol ‘middle’ and ‘working’ class elements in their power struggles, and the typical developmental consequences of elites alternately forming and breaking up distributional class coalitions.

The Cultural Construction of Monstrous Children raises important questions at the heart of society and culture, and through an interdisciplinary, trans-cultural analysis, presents important findings on socio-cultural representations and embodiments of the child and childhood. At the start of the 21st century, new anxieties constellate around the child and childhood, while older concerns have re-emerged, mutated, and grown stronger. But as historical analysis shows, they have been ever-present concerns. This innovative and interdisciplinary collection of essays considers examples of monstrous children since the 16th century to the present, spanning real-life and popular culture. to exhibit the manifestation of the Western cultural anxiety around the problematic, anomalous child as naughty, dangerous, or just plain evil.

The linkage between children and horror, or horror-full children, would seem an almost natural connection to make given its popularity in contemporary horror films and novels. However, the intersection between the two categories has a long history going back beyond the more obvious Gothic reimaginings of the 19th century with its under-age ghostly terrors revealing that the idea of the ‘little horror’ is seemingly an inherent demarcation within society between adults and those that are viewed as ‘not adults’. 

However, as seen in this timely and innovative collection, the anomalous child can also be seen in a positive light, and that resistance to easy categorization can be embraced by wider society as a force for change as can be seen in the recent example of a problematic child/adolescence, Greta Thunberg, a singularly focused individual, who is 16 years-old at the time of writing, has consistently refused to act as desired by the adult society around her in pursuit of gaining recognition of the urgent need for action in regard to environmental change. The book takes an inter- and multidisciplinary approach, drawing upon fields as diverse as sociology, psychology, film, and literature, to study the role of the child and childhood within contemporary Western culture and to see the ways in which each discipline intersects and influences the other, as well as viewing all this through a historical lens.

The pace of socioeconomic transformation in India over the past two and a half decades has been formidable. This volume sheds light on key processes of gendered change by exploring how macro-structural processes of social transformation interface with everyday life-worlds to generate new contestations and contradictions that impinge directly on the everyday lives of ordinary Indian women, and on the relations between genders.

Through ethnographically grounded case studies, the contradictory and contested co-existence of discrepant gendered norms, values and visions in a society caught up in wider processes of sociopolitical change are portrayed. ‘Women, Gender and Everyday Social Transformation in India’ moves the debate on gender and transformation into the domain of everyday life to arrive at locally embedded and detailed, ethnographically informed analyses of gender relations in real-life contexts that foreground both subtle and not-so-subtle negotiations and contestations.

The chapters take the reader inside the university classroom as well as the NGO, the urban slum and the rural health clinic; they visit the Pentecostal church, the call centre and the beaches of Goa; they venture into the men’s rights group, the court room and the anti-land acquisition rally; they engage with Maoist writings and the ideology of neoliberal governance and they analyse the use of grinders, mixers, make-up, smart phones and solar photovoltaic mini-grids – to name but a few.

Youth Movements and Generational Politics, 19th–21st Centuries by Richard and Margaret Braungart is a collection of 19 of their previously published research articles on youthful political activism, generational conflict, and social change, from the first student movement in Germany in 1815 to the worldwide surge in youth movement activity in the 21st century. Representing more than 50 years of research, youth movements and generational politics are explored from historical, generational and global perspectives. These articles are theoretically grounded, empirically based, interdisciplinary and comparative. Exploring youth movements at individual, group, societal and international levels, a variety of methodological approaches for studying youth activism are illustrated in their research. In a concluding chapter, the Braungarts update youth movement activity in the 21st century and discuss how their previous research informs the new global increase in youthful mobilization over politics. The trends and changes in youth unrest and generational politics are assessed now and into the future.

The focus in the anthology is on young people's development and generational relations as a fundamental force for societal and political change. Drawing from both theory and research in sociology, social psychology, human development and history, the articles were chosen to help readers better understand young people by identifying their political attitudes and behavior and the commonalities they share in their movements for change. Based on an extensive survey of youth movements from 1815 to the 21st century, a number of articles identify the patterns and dynamics of youthful political behavior over time in each world region. It is hoped that by understanding youth movements in history, readers are better prepared to make sense of and respond to the expected global rise in youthful political unrest. Youth movements have toppled governments and revolutionized societies, always bringing with them the potential for greater democracy and societal reforms as well as injury, death and destruction.

Despite the rise in youth movement activity over the past 200 years and considerable discussion, media attention and research, it is difficult to formulate an accurate and balanced perspective on why young people mobilize during certain eras but not others, and why youthful political activism is often characterized by generational conflict and violence. Although there are excellent empirical studies on specific youth movements, the research tends to be fragmented into different disciplines and widely scattered among countries. As a collection, the articles selected for this anthology are interdisciplinary, comparative and provide a systematic study of the issues over which young people have mobilized. Common patterns of youth movement activity are identified from 1815 , and youth activism is examined from moral, ideological, generational and life-course development perspectives. Taking a variety of methodological approaches, the articles in this anthology demonstrate that to understand youth movements and generational politics in modern societies, it is necessary to appreciate (1) young people's developmental characteristics, needs and relationship to adults; (2) the historical and societal context in which they are coming of age; and (3) the reasons why youth are drawn to social change. The articles in this anthology address these issues.

This collection of original essays examines the complex historical relationships between religion, war and peace. Taking Tolstoy’s famous novel as its title, the book is divided into two sections. In the first, four chapters explore examples of religion and violence. These include a famous case of violence against Polish Jews by their neighbors, messianic movements in West Papua in response to external cultural and military threats, the American Protestant response to the violence of the Civil War and the ultimate defeat of the Confederate forces, and finally the religion and violence among Plains Indians within the framework of a sociological debate about “civilization.” The second section examines the Quaker doctrine of nonviolence and resistance to war taxes, the diverse attempts to understand the atomic bombing of Japan and the construction of a tourist industry around Hiroshima, the role of religious identity in the laws that influence sectarian tensions in Lebanon, and finally the notion of love in the countercultures of the 1960s that were inspired by Gandhi and Martin Luther King. In his introduction and conclusion, Bryan Turner, reflecting on the analysis of the futility of war in Tolstoy’s novel, looks at various explanations of the role of religion in political violence. These include the idea of a clash of civilizations, the tensions between majorities and minorities, the role of the state in promoting communal violence, and the struggle between different religious worldviews against a background of secularization. 

Immanuel Wallerstein (1930-2019) was one of the most influential yet controversial sociologists of the past half-century, known for both his central theoretical contribution of the “world-system” perspective and his wide-ranging empirical investigations into world capitalism, modernity, globalization, nationalism, development, Eurocentrism, anti-systemic movements and social change, among many other topics. Given Wallerstein’s recent passing – as well as his abiding call to “unthink” or “open” the orthodox social sciences – the time is ripe to reflect upon the depth and breadth of his legacy, and to examine the enduring relevance and acuity of his life and writings. The Anthem Companion to Immanuel Wallerstein offers an authoritative overview of Wallerstein’s contribution to political and historical sociology; critical and novel readings of central themes in Wallerstein’s work; and up-to-date assessments of debates regarding Wallerstein’s impact on the social sciences and humanities.

In the Companion, an international assembly of leading interpreters explore a wide range of Wallerstein’s work from a variety of sociological angles and situate his scholarly contributions in relation to contemporary world challenges. The contributions in this book place Wallerstein’s prolific output at the center of their analyses in order to elucidate both world-systems analysis as a theoretical and methodological approach, and the world-system itself as a complex sociological phenomenon. The chapters first explore the context and genesis of Wallerstein’s intellectual development, the central sociological, historical and political concepts Wallerstein devised and deployed to make sense of the modern world-system, and the key contributions he made to sociological analysis, before then taking up the question of how Wallerstein’s work can be critically utilized in light of new global challenges such as decolonization, gender inequality, climate change, pandemic capitalism, and the changing character of geopolitics in the 21st century world-system.

Overall, The Anthem Companion to Immanuel Wallerstein provides the most convenient and accessible guide to Wallerstein currently available for students, teachers, and researchers across the social sciences and humanities.

This book examines China’s digital economy and its reach into the Asia-Pacific region, focusing on Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia and New Zealand. It shows how the Asia-Pacific region with an existing large Chinese diaspora is seen as a ‘cultural landing pad’ for Chinese content and ideas. In addition to these regional investigations, the authors trace China’s growing technological status as an innovative nation through four policy approaches: culture+, industry+, Internet+ and platform+. Other + characterizations include intelligent+ and social+. These + characterizations show how China is rejuvenating, drawing technological knowhow from the region, and adding to its cultural power.

Drawing on the political economy of the media, industry analysis, platform studies and cultural policy studies, the book shows that China's commercial digital platforms are increasingly recognized outside China and can disseminate Chinese culture more effectively than government-supported media. The authors provide a comprehensive analysis of how Chinese cultural and creative industries became digital, as well as investigating the key players and the leading platforms including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, TikTok, Baidu, iQiyi and Meituan. The book argues that China’s commercial digital platforms are increasingly recognized outside China and in many cases can disseminate Chinese culture more effectively than government-supported media, although this does not necessarily translate into influence. 

The sites chosen suggest that there is widespread ambivalence to China’s political messaging combined with an uneven reception of its popular culture. The book provides a critique of Western bias in soft power metrics and draws on empirical data to provide alternative readings.

The authors also analyse in detail Beijing’s changing policies towards the governance of culture, Internet technologies and digital platforms. The book illustrates how Chinese cultural power is extending overseas and the challenges of Chinese platforms, products and services in overcoming stereotyping and ‘threat’ perceptions.

‘Rethinking Cultural Resource Management in Southeast Asia’ explores the challenges facing efforts to protect Southeast Asia’s indigenous cultures and archaeological sites from the ravages of tourism and economic development. The tourism industry has long recognized the economic benefits of cultural resources, and in Southeast Asia many countries have already developed elements of their cultural heritage into tourist attractions. If not properly managed, the side effects of this development have the potential to be disastrous. As such, there is a now pressing need to create a coordinated study of the growing field of cultural resource management (CRM).

This volume develops a set of themes, including: tourism and its alternatives as CRM strategies; the mitigation of the effects of tourism and other developmental forces; site preservation, ranging from monuments to vernacular architecture, villages, and urban neighbourhoods; and legal issues facing resource management. Its essays discuss innovative approaches to CRM, and avoid the assumption that Euro-American solutions are applicable worldwide; in the Southeast Asian context, funding is often limited, whilst concepts of cultural resource ownership and governmental authority differ from those in the West.

The ultimate goal of CRM is sustainable management, but the convergence between development and preservation is often tense because it entails compromise and negotiation between parties with conflicting interests. The frequently cited concept of “sustainability” is therefore subject to differing interpretations, and conflicts between the short term and long term, local and global, and restoration and regeneration are perennial sources of dispute between stakeholders.

Southeast Asian cultures are thus under intense pressure on many fronts. What this volume seeks to illuminate is the need for effective management strategies to reduce the destructive potential of these conflicting interests: tourism in this region is highly dependent on cultural attractions, and proper management strategies would ensure that these cultural assets are preserved. In turn, this will allow these cultural resources to contribute significantly to the material wellbeing – and stability – of their respective societies.

This volume addresses a central problem of contemporary states, namely how to manage the eruption of public religions. While the liberal framework formerly regarded religion as simply a matter of private practice and conscience, in modern states religion has often come to challenge the so-called Westphalian model of church-state relations, and has brought into question many liberal notions of secularism and tolerance. There is much discussion about post-secular society in which religion has to be taken seriously in public affairs. This collection of case studies – looking at Turkey, Singapore, India, China, Britain, Europe and the United States – explores a number of examples in which the state exercises some degree of management of religion, thereby bringing into question the traditional separation of religion and state. This study also attempts to refine the notion of secularization by examining this process in terms of political arrangements (church-state relations) and the role of religion in everyday life. Ultimately, this study reveals that there is no uniform or standard pattern of secularization in modern societies.

Multiculturalism has been a topic of scholarly exploration for almost fifty years. Most recently, these explorations have sought to respond to growing public sentiment that the multicultural ideal, borne out of Western liberalism, has failed. Indeed, ‘multiculturalism is dead’ has been a popular catch cry in Anglo- and Western-European countries for the past decade. Significantly, the continued discussion about the success or otherwise of multiculturalism registers the topic as alive as ever (albeit in a mode of crisis) and one that shows no signs of disappearing.

There are currently two main scholarly approaches to the so-called crisis of multiculturalism. The first approach retains the importance of multiculturalism by inflating and promoting its positive attributes. The second approach problematizes multiculturalism by retexturing its meaning and attempting to reconnect its political/theoretical domain with its ordinary manifestations. In some instances, the second approach renounces the concept of multiculturalism altogether, positioning it as a past phenomenon. Both approaches frequently mirror broader trends in cultural studies and artistic domains by turning to ‘the everyday’, using on-the-ground experiences as a tool to redefine the meaning of multiculturalism. But what work is done in the name of the everyday? Is ‘the everyday’ really a sanctioned, authentic space where cultural difference exists beyond the State? These are questions that neither approach takes seriously nor appropriately addresses. 

This modern book addresses this oversight by taking the everyday of everyday multiculturalism to task and doing so via the increasingly popular and everyday medium: digital storytelling. The ‘digital’ is an important node of analysis, not only because it has so far been overlooked in studies of everyday multiculturalism, but because its immateriality often affords it a distance from critical analyses pertaining to material effects. This book forefronts the materiality of digital storytelling by closely considering how the genre enables racialization to manifest at the level of the body. How does the genre compel the creators of digital stories to embody and/or reject racialized structures associated with concepts of multiculturalism? What do these stories tell us about the way multiculturalism is mediated and, importantly, how it might be re-mediated?

As we enter an era of unprecedented global mobility, discussions pertaining to cultural difference and the systems used to negotiate it become more frequent and more complex. This book makes a timely intervention into these discussions to both consolidate and reimagine the rocky terrain of multiculturalism, providing a valuable resource for scholars in cultural studies, media and internet studies, and ethnic and race studies. Additionally, the book provides a foundation for rethinking digital narrative production pertaining to cultural difference, giving it a practical purpose for educators and digital practitioners alike.

When one organizes events over periods of years and gives them an appellation such as “Modernism,” the organization of facts is guided by concepts and values discerned throughout these periods, comparable facts sufficient to call it an “era,” or an “epoch,” or other terms that insist on the shared aspects of those years, regardless of differences seen as well over the span considered. One can call such an effort a “metahistory,” in that what is tracked is not merely human events that are political, economic, ideological, sociological, or other disciplinary descriptors, but an overview that critically links all the years under consideration. Even more, to have a “metahistory” is to discern how the people of eras, epochs, or the other organizational labels, thought. Human history is generated by choices, choices informed by intuitions and more intentional understandings. One of the aspects the book dwells upon in this “metahistory” of Modernism is the presence of “perspective,” how one sees in a time what is there to be addressed and dealt with. Perspectives can be poorly informed or in their very nature not adequate for a sufficient knowledge of what is addressed, even as one must as a human judge what faces one. To discern from evidence how one’s perspective configures an event is the “meta” of “metahistory”. Modernism, the epoch from 1648 to the Present, can be described among its tenets as a period where the notion of “objectivity” has been developed. This has occurred in every field of the emergent arts and sciences in these years. Post-modernism, as will be addressed, is a more critical modernism that has brought to light the idea of multiple perspectives of objectivity as a univocal perspective of ‘objectivity’. Other modernist ideas have expanded in all fields and the ideas of what is human consciousness, epistemologies of both a reflective and a pre-reflective consciousness (called by some the ‘unconscious’) have emerged in art, aesthetics, psychology, philosophy, the social sciences, as well as the neurosciences To have “meta” knowledge is this comprehension of the scope and benefits, yet limitations, of one’s “perspective” and that of others of a time. Only a historian interested in such perspectives can be called a “metahistorian.”

The book uses the concept of the “metaparadigm,” taken from Thomas Kuhn, to track the evolution of how in a period of time the problems of the existing disciplines of knowledge are articulated, and how inquiry methods are used to flesh out a solvable problem and effectively resolve it. The book details four phases that constitute the period of time in which a metaparadigm develops. The first phase is a new set of concepts that challenge the existing approach to knowledge in each discipline. The second phase is a systematic theory that will guide inquiry. The third phase is the actual practice of the discipline in solving problems, a phase that can conflict with the older approach or be congruent with it. The fourth phase integrates the older approaches in the new one, and thus expands in an augmented manner the discipline.

The four phases of each metaparadigm have certain durations. The initial three phases usually endure for about 30–40 years, and the fourth phase for over 50 years. These phases each recur in the next period of time; that is the next metaparadigmatic period. Four evolving metaparadigms are shown in Western thought in this book, tracking one or more disciplines in the social sciences, the humanities, and the natural sciences through each of the four phases of a metaparadigm, and the four metaparadigms that occur between 1648 and the present. 

This book examines contemporary globalization, its local impact and counter-reactions to it both thematically and epistemologically. The starting point is an outline of the distinguishing features of contemporary globalization, their (dis)continuities with historically earlier forms of long-distance connections, and their relevance to both recent and long-established sociological debates. Through a series of thematic case studies, Sociology in Times of Glocalization traces the methodological and conceptual innovations underway to capture the politically heterogeneous responses to our global interconnectedness, which are (re)shaping individual and collective self-understandings, localities, regions, nation-states, as well as diasporic communities at present. The discussion thereby also shows that multiple global ‘flows’, neo-nationalist as well as other forms of identity politics jointly constitute our era’s constitutive, if highly contradictory characteristics.

The book’s most distinguishing feature is to be found in its central analytical move. Having identified the building blocks of today’s complex, multi-dimensional and contradictory forms of ‘glocalization’, it approaches those epistemologically: that is, by asking how globalization and the various reactions to it can be approached, captured and understood sociologically. This requires nuanced methodological reflections on how social scientific claims to knowledge are generated in the specific contexts under investigation. Put differently, the book unfolds around two core-issues: first, the question as to what contemporary, ‘glocalizing’ realities entail; second, the yet more challenging, hitherto underexplored question as to how social scientists can recognize, depict and make sense of such historically novel realities and experiences.

Located in the interface between the thematic and the methodological, the book offers discussions of particular global flows and of specific reactions to them. The thematic foci in question pertain to localities affected by rapid infrastructural change; the economic realm and consumerism; experiences of migration; social change in urban settings; cultural practices such as street art that negotiate both global and local events and phenomena; and digital technology. The critical discussions offered underscore that contemporary globalization cannot be understood as merely a set of new structures of globally interconnected ‘nodes’. Instead, enduring, often deepening inequalities and ever more rigid exclusions, the fears and anxieties they generate, and the identity politics they give rise to, are all shown to be defining features of our world today. To develop these insights, the book draws on and critically synthesizes a range of existing social theory, relevant empirical studies and illustrations, and ongoing methodological debates.

‘Can We Live Forever?’ addresses the modern debate about the Life Extension Project that results from revolutions (actual and predicted) in bio-medicine, transplantation, cosmetic surgery, genetic counseling, stem cell research, cryonics, cloning and so forth that cumulatively promise to deliver eternal life or at least 'prolongevity'. In an engaging and thought-provoking work, the author traces the rise of the Life Extension Project and its claims against an intellectual background of recent analyses of 'waste', sustainable environments and complexity theory.

Although there has been much discussion of increasing life expectancy, this book looks at a range of additional issues: the religious implications of life extension; the psychological consequences, such as ennui; the negative global social and economic factors; the problems of intergenerational justice. The possible benefits and adverse consequences of living forever are fully explored in this illuminating text, offering substance to social scientists working on ageing and demographic change, philosophers interested in questions of continuity and identity, theologians concerned with secular changes in the life course, as well as the general reader.

‘The Anthem Companion to Robert Bellah’ is the first major collection of writings on the life and work of one of the foremost twentieth-century sociologists of religion. Bellah’s work was central in many fields: the sociology of Japanese religion, the relationships between sociology and the humanities, the relationship between American religion and politics, the cultures of modern individualism, and evolution and society. During an intellectual career which spanned six decades, Bellah occupied a central position within at least three major intellectual movements: structural-functionalism and modernization theory in the 1950s and the 1960s; interpretive social science, which he helped create in the early 1970s along with Clifford Geertz and Peter Berger; and the so-called Axial age revival of the late 1990s and early 2000s. More often than not, Bellah’s work was on the edge of social scientific research; his seminal work on civil religion in the early 1970s created a huge debate across disciplines which continues to this day; his co-authored book ‘Habits of the Heart’ (1985) was a bestseller and the object of sustained debate in the general public sphere; his last magnum opus ‘Religion in Human Evolution’, published at 84, was a monument to an extraordinary scholarly and intellectual career. [NP] The richness of Bellah’s work is the object of this collection of essays by top American and European scholars from the social sciences and humanities. Each essay has a double character: it introduces a single topic in an accessible and complete manner, and then presents a reflection on the viability and import of Bellah’s ideas for interpreting contemporary phenomena. Among the authors are some of Bellah’s students who became top scholars in their fields, as well as younger scholars. From a disciplinary point of view, the list includes sociologists (Gorski, Torpey, Boy, Guhin, Libeck), historians (Borovoy, Barshay) and philosophers (Tipton, Lequire) to reflect the diversity of Bellah’s work.

The purpose of the volume – as with the other volumes published in the Anthem Press ‘Companion to Sociology’ series – is to provide a comprehensive overview of Erving Goffman’s continued importance within the field of sociology and related social science disciplines. The book will engage with some of the major themes and continuing concerns of Goffman’s sociology. Chapters have been selected based on their scope and their thematic content covering significant aspects of Goffman’s life and work, and authors have been selected based on their longstanding interest in and extensive knowledge of Goffman’s work.

During Latin America’s China-led commodity boom, governments turned a blind eye to the inherent flaws in the region’s economic policy. Now that the commodity boom is coming to an end, those flaws cannot be ignored. High on the list of shortcomings is the fact that Latin American governments—and Chinese investors—largely fell short of mitigating the social and environmental impact of commodity-led growth.

China and Sustainable Development in Latin America documents the social and environmental impact of the China-led commodity boom in the region. Primary commodity exploitation—of petroleum, copper, iron ore, tin, soybeans and the like—are endemic to environmental degradation. The recent commodity boom exacerbated pressure on the region’s waterways and forests and accentuated threats to human health, biodiversity, global climate change and local livelihoods. China and Sustainable Development in Latin America also highlights important areas of innovation, like Chile’s solar energy sector, in which governments, communities and investors have worked together to harness the commodity boom for the benefit of the people and the planet.

It is imperative that Latin American governments put in place the necessary policies to ensure that economic activity in natural resource sectors is managed in an environmentally responsible and socially inclusive manner. China and Sustainable Development in Latin America aims to highlight the efforts that have borne fruit as well as the areas that still need attention. Without proper policies in place to make sustainable development part and parcel of economic decision-making, Latin America will continue to be plagued by commodity boom and bust cycles that accentuate social and environmental conflicts and are ultimately detrimental to long-term prosperity.

The volume is a comprehensive collection of essays on various aspects of Ferdinand Tönnies’s thought. Each of the essays has been written by a distinguished expert on Tönnies. The contributors include Niall Bond, Kenneth C. Bessant, David Inglis, Stefan Bertschi, Efraim Podoksik, William Stafford, Slavko Splichal and Mathieu Deflem. [NP] This companion is a major contribution to our understanding of one of Germany’s greatest social theorists and who was a major founder of sociology, a significant cultural critic, and an important political thinker. The essays contained in this volume are written in a clear style in order to be easily understood by non-specialists yet they are comprehensive enough to appeal to the specialist. The international collection of authors represents a range of disciplines, thus providing a fuller appreciation for the writings of Ferdinand Tönnies.

In the context of China’s ascendancy, the world watches and listens. China wants to project a soft power image. One channel for its soft power communication – about its success and international cooperation – is international broadcasting. ‘Chinese Television and Soft Power Communication in Australia’ discusses China’s soft power communication approach and investigates information handling between China and its targeted audiences in the eyes of key influencers – intermediate elites (public diplomacy policy elites in particular) in China and Australia. Drawing on the case of the state-owned broadcaster CGTN – viewed by China as an essential soft power tool for framing its voice – the book examines empirically the reception to China’s soft power messaging by Australian audiences and the factors underpinning its reception.

The book provides a holistic, systemic evaluation of China’s soft power messaging seen as part of its power portfolio and what this means to the world order. Through media frame analysis of CGTN’s framing of China’s most ambitious and comprehensive initiative – the Belt and Road Initiative – and interviews with intermediate elites in China and the typical case of a Western target audience in Australia, it presents an in-depth theoretical discussion of the mechanisms of China’s communication approach through a soft power lens. It also reflects on an exploration of journalistic operations within CGTN (with staff from several professional cultures) and a systemic test of how successful/unsuccessful China’s soft power message projection is in terms of congruence between projected and received frames, as a pivotal factor of its power status.

‘Ageing, Corporeality and Embodiment’ argues that both ageing as a unitary social process and agedness as a distinct social location have become fragmented. The book concentrates  on the emergence of a ‘new ageing’ mediated in part through the processes of ‘embodiment’.

The first section provides the main theoretical context for the book, with the first chapter outlining the new ‘sociology of the body’ and the second outlining the emergence of new ageing and its ‘re-orientation’ toward the body. The second section explores the relationship between new ageing and key aspects of embodied identity, namely gender, race, disability and sexuality. In each of these sections, the authors provide a brief historical perspective on the emergence of these embodied identities as social movements during the cultural ferment of the 1960s, and explore their subsequent confrontation, or avoidance of confrontation with, the issue of ageing.

The third section covers embodied practices, from sexual practice and its re-orientation toward age and ageing, to the embodied practices of ‘appearance management’, particularly those associated with cosmetics, clothing and fashion. Finally, the book considers ‘new enhancement technologies’ of the body, such as plastic surgery, with relation to ideas of ‘rejuvenation’. By focusing upon those embodied practices that are oriented toward age and ageing, and their place in expressing, maintaining or recreating other ‘pre-performed’ identities, the work allows a more embodied understanding of ageing and its diverse engagements within society to be realised.

This collection presents critical and action-oriented approaches to addressing food systems inequities across places, spaces, and scales. With case studies from around the globe, Radical Food Geographies explores interconnections between power structures and the social and ecological dynamics that bring food from the land and water to our plates. Through themes of scale, spatial imaginaries, and human and more-than-human relationships, the authors explore ongoing efforts to co-construct more equitable and sustainable food systems for all.

Advancing a radical food geographies praxis, the book reveals multiple forms of resistance and resurgence, and offers examples of co-creating food systems transformation through scholarship, action, and geography.

Raymond Aron is an exceptional figure among twentieth-century sociological and political thinkers. The book focuses on the sociological work of this author of the century, who analyzed his age both in its grand-scale political and socio-economic traits and in the complex social ramifications of its day-to-day life.

Aron experts from a total of seven countries examine Aron’s sociology in detail starting with his road from philosophy to sociology not least under the impression of the Great Depression and its aftermath, especially the rise of National Socialism in Germany. His epistemological studies on the limits of objective knowledge in history and the social sciences in which he moves away from Durkheim's approach and instead adopts Max Weber's sociology of understanding are analysed. This acknowledgment of the limits of knowledge laid the foundations for Aron’s liberalism and humanism. His sociology of industrial society as an economy of economic growth in its market economy and planned economy versions, its social stratification, his criticism of the Marxist concept of social class, the structure of the ruling elites and the pluralistic and one-party, totalitarian political regimes are presented, as is Aron's analysis of the dialectic of modern society between the idea of equality and the authority structures in the state and the economic process. This is accompanied by Aron's lifelong criticism of those intellectuals above all in the pluralist and liberal democracies who hope that a messianic ideology will abolish all social contradictions. Aron’s sociology of international relations in the age of industrial society and globalization, which for Aron brought about the dawn of universal history, complete the overview of Raymond Aron's sociological work.

With the Asian economic upsurge in the recent decades, diasporas have emerged as significant agencies of the cultural diplomacy of respective nation states. Two of the most significant diasporic communities, the Indians and the Chinese, have long histories of migration to different corners of the world with considerable visibilities in different geo-political demographies. They have created many different local sites of interaction between themselves and with the host communities, particularly in Southeast Asia. The emerging concepts of ‘knowledge economy’, ‘global capitalism’, new trends of entrepreneurship, and a gradual shift of the economic power to the East has brought about a revision of relationships between homeland, diasporas and the different host nation-states.

This interdisciplinary collection of essays offers a window onto the overseas Indian and Chinese communities in Asia. Contributors discuss the interactive role of the cultural and religious ‘other’, the diasporic absorption of local beliefs and customs, and the practical business networks and operational mechanisms unique to these communities.

Growing out of an international workshop organized by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore and the Centre of Asian Studies at the University of Hong Kong, this volume explores material, cultural and imaginative features of the immigrant communities and brings together these two important communities within a comparative framework, and offers an example for further cross-disciplinary comparative study of this type.

The book has an introduction outlining the conceptual framework that gives meaning to the six collected texts that follow. This framework derives from the work of Pierre Bourdieu. He stated that ‘everything is social,’ which means that all discourses have to be understood in their own terms (as ‘structured structures’) and in relation to the social conditions in which they developed (‘structuring structures’). As social individuals we are constrained by the structures defining our situation but we also have the capacity to alter those structures. With particular reference to the ‘field’ of politics, the Introduction considers theoretically the nature of the ‘presentation of self’ (Goffman) of citizens and the nature of parliamentary democracy as ‘presentation’ or ‘representation’ (as discussed in Habermas: The structural transformation of the public sphere).

The six main chapters reproduce texts written or spoken about politics at intervals in the period from 1960 until 2020. Brief introductions to each chapter will contextualise these texts both in terms of their significance in my developing awareness of political discourse and also in terms of the historically changing nature of the field of politics itself in the United Kingdom. Having an a-political upbringing, the author suggests that he gradually acquired a political competence but, equally, developed the view that the domination of political discourse has become exclusive and that there is now a need to reassert social relations in society and to recognize the extent to which political activity sustains the social control of a privileged minority.

The book has an Epilogue which considers some recent arguments about ‘populism’ and also reflects on the extent to which the ‘new normal’ heralded by some for a post-Covid future has the capacity to circumscribe the influence of politics. The author reflects on whether deployment of Bourdieu’s concept of ‘symbolic violence’ - the process by which the attitudes of the few are imposed on the many – might lead to the possible resurgence of social movements which are sceptical about political power. The author suggests that there may be a need for a new ‘quietism’ as advanced by Fénelon in the court of Louis XIV at the end of the 17th century and as considered by Richard Rorty in “Naturalism and quietism” in Philosophy as Cultural Politics, 2007. 

The overarching aim of “Structure, Agency, Biotechnology: The Case of the Rothamsted GM Wheat Trials” is to propose a way of filling the analytical gap found in the current literature by offering an original theoretical framework. This framework is able to assess both the content and context of the scientific field without resorting either to deterministic or to what theorists refer to as “conflationist strategies.” In order to demonstrate the heuristic value of the framework, the 2012 GM wheat field trials carried out by Rothamsted Research, often associated with the “second push” of agribiotech firms to bring Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) to the UK, areassessed, and key aspects of the experiment areunderscored. At the same time, the broader institutional arrangements, key ideological constructs and the social order are examined, and a reframing of the controversy which moves beyond the simplistic conceptualization of it being a case of science versus politics is suggested. The volume also proposes a clear set of guidelines, which stem from the methodological and theoretical deep structure of the suggested framework but do not demand prior theoretical knowledge, which can be used by a wider audience engaged with biotechnology. This audience can draw on the guidelines either for reasons of developing a critical understanding of particular situations or for initiating the process of sustained dialogue between involved parties. These two dimensions are of great significance for practical policy orientations.

Amidst cascading global financial and political crises of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries, scholars have turned for insight to the work of the radical American thinker, Thorstein Veblen. Inspired by an abundance of new research, social scientists from multiple disciplines have displayed a heightened appreciation for Veblen’s importance and value for contemporary social, economic and political studies. “The Anthem Companion to Thorstein Veblen,” edited with an introduction by Sidney Plotkin, is a stimulating addition to this new body of Veblen scholarship.

The essays in the first part consider Veblen’s method, philosophy and values. Sociologist Erkki Kilpinen peers deeply into Veblen’s highly original theory of action and its implications for a sociological understanding of “the instinct of workmanship.” In contrast, economist William Waller, building on contemporary work in evolutionary economics and psychology, urges a considerably more bio-psychological interpretation of Veblen’s instinct theory. Intellectual historians Rick Tilman and Kohl Glau, exploring the secular foundations of Veblen’s moral theory, furnish a sharp critique of recent efforts to wed Veblen with Catholic social thought. Challenging older understandings, Russell H. and Sylvia E. Bartley, careful students of Veblen’s biography, offer novel insights into the impact of Veblen’s education at Carlton College, while sociologist Stephan G. Mestrovic thoughtfully insists that Veblen unduly limited his affirmation of “idle curiosity” as a chief resource for learning to elite post graduate schools.

Contemporary applications of Veblen’s theory to studies of capitalism, social structure and politics are the focus of the contributions in the next part. Anthropologist John Kelly forcefully urges a reconsideration of Veblen’s critical theory as an inspiration for both students and activists in an age of capitalism “after post-modernism and post-coloniality.” Returning to Veblen’s most important early work, sociologist Ahmet Oncu skillfully weaves the theory of the leisure class into a rich and exciting re-interpretation of Turkey’s Ottoman ruling groups. Building on Veblen’s critical theory of absentee ownership and power, political scientist Sidney Plotkin analyzes Veblen’s embrace of local forms of political economic self-rule, but notes Veblen’s sense of the ideological ambiguity of popular resistance to centralized power. Finally, geographer Ross Mitchell applies the radical democratic potential of Veblen’s concept of “the masterless man” to an understanding of both the possibilities and limits of contemporary left movements. Throughout, the essays offer fresh material for ongoing reconsiderations of Thorstein Veblen as a major theoretical resource for the contemporary social sciences.

Television as a traditional medium has been changing for a number of years due to the development of a complex scenario characterized by the growing proliferation of platforms across which multiple forms of media are deeply interconnected. In this multi-modal environment, traditional and modern media platforms have started to combine, revolutionizing both the technology and the manner in which audiences engage with media content of interest. Indeed, the progressive digitization of media content and the fragmentation of television delivery and reception have been affecting the ways in which media are accessed and consumed to the point that the construction of textual boundaries has shifted from producers to media consumers.

The research in the book is structured as a comparative study between two distinct countries: Italy and New Zealand. These two countries have been chosen as reference contexts for the investigation of audiences’ consumption behaviors because they represent non-dominant media markets, both Anglophone and non-Anglophone, that remain to be properly studied and explored. Although they tend to be conflated in generic audience studies, national audiences represent strategic markets for the circulation of international fiction. In investigating the consumption modes that characterize the distribution of American television programs in these cultural contexts, the aim is to provide insights into the culturally specific similarities and differences that distinct audiences disclose in consuming the same texts. 

Game of Thrones and Mad Men have been selected as case studies because they are substantial examples of trans-media narratives that tell multiple stories over multiple platforms that together tell one big pervasive story, attracting audience engagement. The methods employed for gathering useful data for the comparative analysis were both quantitative and qualitative. The first phase of data collection consisted in the production of four online surveys: two in English for Game of Thrones and Mad Men, respectively, and two in Italian. The second phase of data production consisted of the organization of the focus group sessions in, respectively, the city of Milan (Italy) and city of Auckland (New Zealand).

Karl Mannheim is a classic of sociology. “The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim” helps us to accompany him in his open, experimental thinking, the generation of new questions, the recognition of thought experiments as well as the care for controlling evidence, and his negotiations with colleagues he encounters in his own searches. This is not simply to dismiss the elements brought together by earlier scholars into a challenging composite design, but there cannot be many authors recognized as classical who have characterized the work for which he/she is justly honored as a collection of experimental essays. Sociology of knowledge is a project, not a creed; and “Ideology and Utopia” is a documentation, not a scripture.

After a brief introductory overview of Karl Mannheim’s intellectual career, “The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim” offers fresh commentaries and explorations by an international and presently active group of scholars. As the institutionalized understanding of Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge project was so long shaped by the synthetic reading by the American sociologist Robert K. Merton—a classic in his own right––the companion opens with a careful exposition and critique of that authoritative interpretation. It is followed by a close reading of the considerations that led Mannheim to move beyond the neo-Kantian epistemology of his earlier training to the project of a sociological understanding of critical knowledge. Next to come is a series of studies that marked by perspectives derived from intellectual strategies developed since the breakdown of consensus on the approaches examined in the previous section. In their variety, the studies capture a number of perspectives opened up or expanded by an understanding of Mannheim’s undertaking. The key terms are familiar: self-reflexivity, praxeological sociology, neo-realism, and dramatistic readings of world-views. The angles of vision differ, but they agree in projecting new and important light on Mannheim’s efforts. At the end, attention is focused on some unfamiliar links between Mannheim’s work and current interests: a study of Mannheim’s influence on Hannah Arendt, who knew him as teacher in Heidelberg and Frankfurt; an inquiry into Mannheim’s political thought from the standpoint of contemporary democratic political theory; and an examination of Mannheim’s attention to the status of women and of the work done on these matters under his tutelage by a group of talented women students.

The idea of “The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim” is by no means to dismiss the work for which Mannheim has been best known, but it is to put that work in its particular context, as a multisided agenda rather than as a finished doctrine, to be accepted or rejected. The aim is to learn from Karl Mannheim.

This new study looks at the crucial role played by audiovisual media in Hindu cultural nationalism. The application of new media technology in the context of the construction of 'Indianness' by Hindutva's main political wing, the Bharatiya Janata Party (Party of the Indian People, BJP), is a fascinating example of in-house indoctrination and emotive mobilization that demands critical attention. At a time when public attention is focused on transnational, and mostly Islamicist, movements, 'Empowering Visions' argues that both transnationalism and nationalism have to be treated with equal attention, and to some extent ought to be seen as intertwined processes. This book is unique in its presentation and discussion of profound ethnographic data through interviews with a variety of spokesmen for the Hindutva movement. It also offers an in-depth analysis of visual and audiovisual material that has so far been unrecognized and unexplored in scholarly works.

In the field of literary and cultural studies, interest in nineteenth-century biology has been substantial for the last 20 years, yet the focus has been almost exclusively on evolutionary theory, neglecting other branches of nineteenth-century biology. This collection corrects that imbalance, shedding light on other discoveries in cell biology, physiology, neurology and virology. It examines the issue of authority in science, demonstrating the social 'embeddedness' of the natural sciences, and gender issues. It also shows how scientists and creative writers drew on a common imagination as well as narrative techniques and stylistic devices; indeed, often inspired by the same subjects. This important new book, including contributions from some of the most distinguished experts in the field, demonstrates that the relation between literature, culture and biology in the nineteenth century is far more complex than habitual references to Darwin would have us believe.

Understanding justice, for many, begins with questions of injustice. This volume pushes us to consider the extent to which our scholarly and everyday practices are, or can become, socially just. In this edited collection, international contributors reflect on what the practice of ‘justice’ means to them, and discuss how it animates and shapes their research across diverse fields from international relations to food systems, political economy, migration studies and criminology.

Giving insights into real life research practices for scholars at all levels, this book aids our understanding of how to employ and live justice through our work and daily lives.

The book consists of a volume of essays in honor of the outstanding sociologist, Edward A. Tiryakian; whose work has spanned a considerable number of countries, regions and topics. He has been highly influential, particularly in American and French sociology.

The contributors include such luminaries as Alan Sica, Bryan Turner, George Ritzer, John Simpson, Piotr Sztompka, Hans Joas, Roland Robertson and John Torpey.

The contributions range across the numerous works of Tiryakian. These include his relationship with the great scholar Pitirim Sorokin, his existentialist sociology, metasociology, his contribution to modernization theory, his important work on civilizations, and his mediation between European and American sociology. Other contributions include chapters on global studies, Max Weber, multiple modernities and the axial age and the work of Robert Bellah on human evolution.

In the past four or so decades, a significant amount of research efforts has been made to examine the rapid and constant social changes taking place in China and the dynamics behind the process, resulting in a rich research literature on a wide range of issues and aspects of China’s recent social transformations. However, most of the literature has largely focused on either the political, ideological and policy issues at the macro level or the various forms of spontaneous resistance and protest at the micro level. What has not been adequately analysed is how the majority of ordinary Chinese people has reacted to and influenced the many changes in society over a long time period. This analytical partiality has given an impression that China consists of only two opposing types of people: the oppressing ruling class and the angry oppressed adversaries, restricting our thinking and understanding of Chinese society, its dynamics and its changing trends to the perspectives of elites and their adversaries.

Drawing upon a new perspective of competitive social repositioning, and based on the evidence recorded in numerous recently published personal memories and other published accounts, as well as the evidence collected through in-depth interviews, this book seeks to re-analyse the ever-changing, but still under-researched, societal dynamics driving social transformations in China from 1964, when Mao Zedong publicly put forward and propagated his ‘Five-Requirements’ for selecting heirs to the Chinese communist cause, to 2000 when Jiang Zemin formulated his ‘Three-Represents’ theory to modify the ideological political thinking and practices of China’s ruling elites. Of course, Chinese society has not been evolving exactly in the way that Mao and Jiang anticipated. Instead, China has been driven by a high proportion of its aspirational citizens who have kept repositioning themselves in China’s shifting distribution patterns of social resources and changing social structure. This book analyses what had been driving the changes in the attitudes and behaviours of many everyday Chinese over time in recent decades, what characteristics of their preferences and choices were at different stages, and how their choices had resulted in the zig-zag patterns of China’s recent social change.

In ‘Consumption, Cities and States: Comparing Singapore with Asian and Western Cities’, Ann Brooks and Lionel Wee focus on the interrelationship of consumption, citizenship and the state in the context of globalization, calling for greater emphasis to be placed on the citizen as consumer. While it is widely recognized that citizenship is increasingly defined by ‘gradations of esteem’, where different kinds of rights and responsibilities accrue to different categories and subcategories of ‘citizens’, not enough analytical focus has been given to how the status of being a citizen impacts the individual’s consumption. The interface between citizen status and consumer activity is a crucial point of analysis in light of the neoliberal assertion that individuals and institutions perform at their best within a free market economy, and because of the state’s expectations regarding citizens’ rights and responsibilities as consumers not just as producers. In this remarkable comparative study, the authors examine these relationships across a number of cities in both Asia and the West.

Franz Neumann was a member of a generation that saw the end of the Kaiserreich and the beginnings of a democratic republic carried by the labor movement. In Neumann’s case, this involved a practical and professional commitment, first, to the trade union movement and, second, to the Social Democratic Party that gave it political articulation. For Neumann, to be a labor lawyer in the sense developed by his mentor, Hugo Sinzheimer, was to engage in a project to displace the law of property as the basic frame of human relations. The defeat of Weimar and the years of exile called many things into question for Neumann, but not the conjunction between a practical democratic project to establish social rights and an effort to find a rational strategy to explain the failures, and to orient a new course of conduct.

"Learning from Franz Neumann" pays special attention to Neumann’s efforts to break down the conventional divide between political theory and the empirical discipline of political science. Neumann was a remarkably effective teacher in the last years of his life, but he was also a gifted learner, whose negotiations with a series of forceful thinkers enabled him to work toward a promising intellectual strategy in political thinking.

This book presents the very first analysis of male homosexuality in modern rural Thailand that is based on sociological/anthropological research directly with 25 young same-sex attracted men. It explores changes in the way men view and describe their sexuality over time by interviewing them three times over a period of around 18 months. The men are followed during an important transition in their lives: the end of their high school years and the end (in most cases) of their life as a child with parents or extended family at a rural home. Nearly all decided to move to a city to continue their education or to find work. Some also had stints with sex work in one of Thailand’s well-known centers for prostitution. For nearly all men, this transition brought them into contact with new ideas about gender and sexuality, and many experienced an abrupt increase in their opportunities to have sex, leading to a readjustment of their moral universes. The young men in the study were still in the process of figuring out who they were/wanted to be, and many contradictions emerged in their narratives over the period of data collection. These contradictions, and the way they were resolved, presented an opportunity to critically explore the way the social structures in which these young men operate influence the way they think and explain their own sexual/gendered selves, and how changes in these social structures affect their sense of self.

A number of explanatory ‘lenses’ are used in the different book chapters that zoom in on different structuring/explanatory frameworks for making sense of gender and sexuality in Thai cultural contexts, as used and applied by the study participants. The first is Buddhism. Buddhist beliefs and traditional ideas about karma, fate, hierarchy, family, masculinity and femininity played important roles in the young men’s childhood understandings about homosexuality and same-sex relations–  especially in terms of their cause and morality. The second lens for understanding male homosexuality in Thailand is gender, where men are divided into feminine-oriented bottoms and masculine-oriented tops. A third lens is modernity/the desire to develop and grow, closely linked to Thailand’s globalizing economy and the increasing role of the Internet and social media. The Internet functioned as an important ‘playground’, a platform for trying-out different presentations of the self via Facebook and chat applications – and in many men this resulted in a rejection of their previous self-presentation as effeminate, which they gradually started to associate with being backwards, rural and ‘traditional’. The fourth lens is related to economy. Many of the young men in the study searched for romantic relationships based on complementarity and were looking for boyfriends who had something they did not have—money, a better position in society, or ‘wisdom’/the ability to guide. Most of the more effeminate men saw their sexuality as valuable, and several of the study participants described in this book – especially those coming from poor families – engaged in sex work and used their youth and beauty to find a wealthy long-term partner, in the hope of lifting their families out of poverty, towards a more prosperous future. The fifth lens is nationalism, or more specifically the concept of ‘being a good Thai’; gradually the young men learned that the Thai sense of self and the importance of performing one’s role as a ‘good’ son in public can be used as a strategy to cover-up private behaviors and desires. The sixth and final lens is family. Being ‘good’, respecting elders and elder siblings, financially supporting (grand-)parents, having good manners, meaning ‘acting appropriately in time and space’, gave the young men a way to retain the respect and support of elders and seniors, and determined how they dealt with (non-)disclosure of their sexuality to their families and others and explained their ability and desire to remain part of the mainstream of society. In the final chapter, a discussion about three critical concerns pertaining the health and wellbeing of same-sex attracted Thai men are discussed in the light of this proposed model: the ongoing HIV epidemic, mental health and LGBTI rights. 

Overall, this book presents significant new insights about the Thai sex/gender system, particularly on how it is affected by processes of globalization and the ascent of the Internet and mobile phones as tools for dating and romance.

Procreation, the forgotten basis of population dynamics, and its macrohistorical results, are at the center of this book seen through the lenses of world-system analysis in a nondogmatic way that includes the work started by Jack Goldstone on agrarian-bureaucratic states and their population cycles between 1250 and 1850. Procreation and Population presents population theories, especially those that give a proper place to the demand for labour, generally not considered by professional demographers. Criticizing the intellectual division of labour that separates demography from the unique historical social science that world-systems analysis is building up, the book shows that the commonplaces of the demographic discipline are just a self-celebratory view of Western industrial society.

Attentive to gender relations, the book brings importance to the very base of history (“the weight of number”, in the words of Fernand Braudel) and boldly tracks “the big picture” of population dynamics in times of postmodernist taboos on generalizations and on the search for the historical laws of human society. Complete with data, estimates and sources about the current population trends, this interdisciplinary effort sheds light on the historical paths leading to the current unprecedented numbers of humans on the globe: the forecasted and impossible perennial population growth would be just what capitalism needed to perpetuate its D-M-D spiral.

Although Islam and integration are frequently seen as antithetical concepts in much of Europe, the Muslims of the Indian sub-continent in the USA are an example of a population who have succeeded. This is in great measure due to their high levels of education and economic success, which make them one of the most prosperous minorities in America. Now brought into sharp focus by the events of 11 September 2001 in New York, this study examines the regrouping of the religious community and the reinvention of group identity in first and second-generation immigrants. By transplanting many of their institutions to the US (particularly in New York), Muslim immigrants succeeded in establishing their presence in the American landscape without arousing significant concern in the host community. This study emphasizes that in spite of the stereotypes attached to Islam – which are as loaded in America as in Europe, and periodically incite reactions from the Muslims – the religion of Islam can actually play a stabilizing role in the same way that other minority religions (notably Catholicism and Judaism and more recently Hinduism) have done, and that Islam does not seem to compromise the ability of immigrants to participate in American society.

Starting in the 1970s, the collective work of revision and rediscovery of a ‘new Durkheim’ has begun unveiling the richness of Durkheim’s sociology, freeing his legacy from the limits of previous interpretations. For some decades now, researchers have begun confronting and revising the traditional image of Durkheim as a sociologist who has a strong epistemological continuity with positivism, who is ideologically conservative and whose abstract functionalism often lacks a proper historical understanding of political institutions. 

What links the contributions in this Anthem Companion to Émile Durkheim is a shared conviction of the necessity of moving forward and contributing to a new phase characterized by a new vision of Durkheim’s theories. The contributions to this volume provide new insights into Durkheim’s classical texts and juxtapose them with the reconstruction of his lectures and lesser known writings to offer a wider understanding of his oeuvre. 

The Anthem Companion to Émile Durkheim intends to offer different practical attempts to build on Durkheim’s legacy and investigate the issues and controversies that characterise contemporary societies and thus contribute to develop further this path of critical enquiry into ‘classical sociology’.

‘Émile Durkheim and the Collective Consciousness of Society: A Study in Criminology’ challenges conventional thinking on the use of Durkheim’s key concept of the ‘collective consciousness of society’, and represents the first ever book-length treatment of this underexplored topic. Operating from both a criminological and sociological perspective, Kenneth Smith argues that Durkheim’s original concept must be sensitively revised and updated for its real relevance to come to the fore.

This study puts forward three major adjustments to Durkheim’s concept of the collective consciousness. It complicates the idea that the common and collective consciousness are interchangeable terms for the same phenomenon; it refutes the ‘disciplinary’ function of society as part of the concept of the common or collective consciousness; and it reveals the illusiveness of the supposed universal set of equally held ideas in a society, underlining the importance of geographical and generational variation.

This book challenges the notion of a ‘new’ India, not by dismissing it as an imagined India, but by engaging in the debate as to what constitutes the new. It acknowledges that India is changing remarkably, while also acknowledging that in the overzealous enthusiasm about the new India there is collective amnesia about the other, older India. The essays argue that the increasing consolidation of capitalist markets of commodity production and consumption has unleashed not only economic growth and social change, but also introduced new contradictions associated with market dynamics in the economic and social spheres such as agrarian crisis, slow growth of employment, and the persistence of low-caste exploitation.

The volume also investigates the emergent tensions in art, architecture, and citizenship. In transforming India into an IT valley with corporate campuses, appealing to a westernized audience of technology entrepreneurs, including non-resident Indians abroad, architecture arguably is not addressing India’s economic and social plight. Art too has taken a commercial turn by catering to the new middle classes spawned by the global and Indian technology revolution. The extraordinary economic values they command seem to jar with the grim economic and social polarization underway. The book unravels contemporary India in its complexities and uncovers some of the hidden tensions plaguing the country, and points to the significance of a widely shared development outcome as an alternative for social transformation.

This book concerns HIV prevention.  The authors argue that until the world focuses its attention on the social issues carried and revealed by AIDS, it is unlikely that HIV transmission will be eradicated or even significantly reduced. Currently we are witnessing the remedicalisation or the continuing biomedicalisation of HIV prevention, which began in earnest in 1996/7 after the development of successful HIV treatment. This biomedical trajectory continues with the increasing push to use HIV treatments as prevention, and it appears to have undermined what has been – at least in many countries – a successful prevention response.

This book’s argument is that at least until such time as biomedicine develops an effective prophylactic vaccine and a cure for HIV, the world must rely on the everyday responses of people and communities to combat the virus. Effective HIV prevention hinges on communities and the social practices forged by these communities that reduce the risk of HIV-transmission (primarily safe sexual and safe drug injection practices); people’s willingness to be identified as infected with HIV (HIV testing practices); and, for people living with HIV, people’s commitment to keeping AIDS at bay (HIV treatment practices).

Combating HIV also relies on governments to ensure access to HIV prevention tools, including condoms and sterile needles and syringes, as well as to biomedical prevention technologies including those derived from successful antiretroviral treatment (ART) – pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), microbicides and post exposure prophylaxis (PEP), and male circumcision.  It requires that governments develop robust health infrastructures to support and enable regular HIV testing and provide access to treatments for those living with HIV. Effective HIV prevention needs governments to adopt pragmatic policies that are not deflected by moralistic or conservative ideologies. Effective responses to HIV, on the part of communities, health professionals and governments are all underpinned by public discussion about sex, sexuality and drug use. More broadly, combating HIV depends on civil society resisting HIV stigma and discrimination against those infected and affected by HIV, and enabling people and communities to discuss sex, sexuality and drug use in ways that promote the development and adoption of safe sexual and drug injection practices.

This engaging two-volume study pursues a balance between theoretical and practical sociology. The authors are aware of the impasse often deliberately created by the self-conscious language of sociological theory. The primary concern of the applied sociologist is to adapt theoretical knowledge to actual human situations, using it to formulate social policy, investigate domestic and international social problems and create a pragmatic ‘sociology of possibility’.

Volume II, subtitled ‘Practising Perspectives’, provides workable guidelines for social scientists, policymakers, planners, administrators and social activists. The reader is also introduced to the sophisticated research methods employed in the social sciences. Emphasizing cross-cultural experiences and a global perspective, the essays study social problems using inductive and deductive approaches, measurable concepts and quantitative analysis. Modern crises precipitated by war, terrorism, anarchy and poverty are examined in practical and realistic terms.

The fact that Luc Boltanski is widely regarded as one of the most influential French sociologists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries should be reason enough for putting together a collection of essays concerned with the major intellectual contributions that he has made to the humanities and social sciences. Boltanski has emerged as the most prominent, and also most innovative, French sociologist since the death of Pierre Bourdieu in 2002. It is ironic that, despite both the magnitude and the originality of Boltanski’s oeuvre, one finds only few systematic commentaries, let alone edited books, on his work in the vast industry of contemporary sociological enquiry. The purpose of this volume is to fill this gap in the literature by creating opportunities for debate capable of representing the wide range of discussions that Boltanski’s writings have sparked amongst researchers in the humanities and social sciences over the past decades.

In Culture and Conflicts in Sierra Leone Mining: Strangers, Aliens, Spirits, the author uses Sierra Leone as a case study to contribute to the debates on the causes and nature of mineral resource conflicts in Africa. Many works focus on the political economy of more sensitive large-scale mining conflicts. This book integrates cultural conflict dimensions, primarily the clash between the centuries-old customary landlord-stranger land governance institution and state mining policies and laws governing extraction.

Extractive industries as outsiders or strangers with no land rights threaten centuries-old cultural norms of indigenous landlords in mining regions. The Sierra Leone colonial government facilitated a stranger hierarchy through crafting legislation that redefined autochthony, citizenship, and micro-cultural identities concerning the stranger. Such actions further exacerbated power imbalances in race, ethnicity, gender, age, and social class. This legacy persists in postcolonial Sierra Leone threatening sustainable development mainly based on mineral extraction. The book shows that these cultural conflicts challenge the effective development of the mining sector, including establishing artisanal mining as a viable complementary livelihood to agriculture for rural populations.

Rather than focus on the well-documented large-scale “blood diamond” war from 1991 to 2001 as other studies have done, the book examines the less-investigated, persistent culture-related conflicts that are historically integral to mineral extraction. Such conflicts impact the efficient flow of mineral commodity chains. The book uses a world-system notion of commodity chains characterized by unequal economic exchange and unequal ecological exchange. And it highlights, specifically, an unequal cultural exchange that impacts cultural heritage, including customary livelihoods, indigenous land rights, and sacred places, and favors a Western cultural universalism. Itexamines mining policies and laws of the government of Sierra Leone in a historical context to assess their efficacy by highlighting colonial relics that continue to thwart development efforts. Her work underscores the need for effective participation by vulnerable and marginalized communities in decision-making processes on matters important to their economic, environmental, and sociocultural sustainability.

The interdisciplinary work highlights how culture, history, environment, and society intertwine in the Sierra Leone mining industry and the effects of global, transnational, and local dynamics and interactions.

Contemporary understandings of inter-generational relations assume that the balance of power has shifted from adults towards children in recent years. The rise of children’s rights, the trend towards more child centred pedagogies and practices within schools and the incorporation of children within a global free market as consumers have all been interpreted as the loss of adult power and the consequent growth of kid power. 

This book critically examines these ideas and reframes the zero-sum conceptions of power implicit within these assumptions. It draws on Lukes’ three dimensions of power and Foucault’s theory of power and knowledge in advancing the view that kid power is inter-generational, multi-dimensional and distributed variably across the child population. The book illustrates this theory through selected themes, including children’s political activism with respect to climate change, the varied roles that children play within their families as mediators, the involvement of children in research and the rise of digital kid power. 

In a post-script, the theory of kid power within the current context of the global Covid-19 pandemic is examined. This final part of the book questions what the impact of the virus will be on the different manifestations of kid power and considers the implications of lockdowns and potential long-term social distancing measures for inequalities, inter-generational relations and our interpretation of kid power.

‘The Anthem Companion to Alexis de Tocqueville’ contains original interpretations of Tocqueville’s major writings on democracy and revolution as well as his lesser-known writings on colonies, prisons and minorities. The Introduction by Daniel Gordon discusses how Tocqueville was canonized during the Cold War and the need to reassess the place of Tocqueville’s voice in the conversation of post-Marxist social theory. Each chapter that follows compares Tocqueville’s ideas on a given subject with those of other major social theorists, including Bourdieu, Dahl, Du Bois, Foucault, Lévi-Strauss and Marx.

This comprehensive volume is based on the idea that Tocqueville was not merely a founder or precursor whose ideas have been absorbed into modern social science. The broad questions that Tocqueville raised, his comparative vision, and his unique vocabulary and style can inspire deeper thinking in the social sciences today.

This collection of eleven chapters, written by scholars who have frequently made Parsons’s ideas a central component of their work, is set in two parts. In Part I, consisting of chapters 1 through 6, a variety of issues that were of particular empirical and theoretical concern to Parsons at various points in his career are analyzed, critiqued and updated: German totalitarianism, political power in liberal democracies, the student protest movements on U.S. college campuses, the therapist–patient relationship in psychotherapy, the phenomenon of death and the reception of his ideas on the social system. Together these chapters point to some of Parsons’s interests in political and humanist matters, all of which, at one time or another, were—if not always tidily, at least satisfactorily—subsumed within and addressed by his general theory of action as it continued to develop. Thus, Nazism as a totalitarian social structure could be explained by the pattern variables, the notion of power became one of the generalized media of interchange, the expressiveness inherent in the 1960s campus unrest and in the therapeutic relationship was understood in terms of the AGIL schema and death was considered in connection with the telic order. 

Part II, which includes chapters 7 through 11, focuses on two interrelated themes that characterize the late phase of Parsons’s work: progressive evolution and the societal community. Beginning in the mid-1960s the process of evolution—both in its societal and cultural aspects—was given primary of place by Parsons in further explaining social differentiation and integration—but also, and more fundamentally, in dealing with the problem of social change. For Parsons, evolutionary development, with crucial cultural innovations taking place in the “seed-bed” societies of Israel and classical Greece, had culminated in modern society, which in the Western context brought about the industrial, democratic and education revolutions, and in the American context led to the development of an “institutionalized individualism” reinforced by the core value of “instrumental activism.” Both of these latter concepts are given extensive treatment in Parsons’s last book, the posthumously published American Society. Of special significance in this work is the notion of the societal community—particularly of the American variety—that Parsons contends contributes to internal integration though citizenship and the normatively defined obligations that citizenship engenders. In short, Part II demonstrates the importance that Parsons gave to modern civil society in general as well as to the exceptional status that he attributed to American society in particular.

Based on detailed ethnographic material, ‘New Lithuania in Old Hands’ analyzes the impact that European Union membership has had upon the country’s ageing small-scale farmers. Addressing the highly relevant themes of European Union enlargement and the ‘Return to Europe’, this book describes how Lithuania’s EU membership has been a far cry from the scenarios of wealth and overabundance once promised.

On the contrary, membership of the EU has in many instances resulted in a return to subsistence production, increased insecurity and a reinforcement of kinship obligations. Within the agrarian sector, such changes threaten to have a large impact upon the future of family structures, and in turn, the future of the farming demographic as a whole.

While political forces have attempted to create a ‘New Lithuania’ in light of Europe’s geopolitical agenda, it has been the country’s ageing ‘Soviet generation’ that has actually brought into effect the restructuring of the agricultural sector. Thus, instead of treating the European Union as an elite project and voicing the support of various other parts of the population, ‘New Lithuania in Old Hands’ shows how the broader parts of the rural population have been affected by and engaged in the processes of change that followed Lithuania’s accession to the EU.

Gender diversity and non-conformity are becoming increasingly visible within society. As more trans and non-binary service users ‘come out’ and trans populations age, practitioners and service providers working in health care, social care, welfare services and housing, will begin to see a growing number of older gender-diverse service users.

With contributions from trans and non-binary scholars and practitioners and those with lived experience, this book outlines what good care and support looks like for older trans and non-binary people. This book provides a range of reflective learning activities that can be used by educators, policy makers and practitioners in healthcare, social care, public and community services to develop their knowledge and skills to ensure their practice is affirmative and inclusive.

The first book published in Tsuut’ina—a critically endangered language—in over a century

With fewer than 150 speakers, Tsuut’ina is a critically endangered language. Isúh Áníi / As Grandmother Said brings together nine traditional narratives and historical accounts in the Tsuut’ina language, originally narrated by Elders Dátł’ìshí Ts’ìká Bessie Meguinis (1883–1987) and Ninàghá Tsìtł’á Willie Little Bear (1912–1989). At once an act of language preservation and a learning resource, each story is retold in Tsuut’ina by Dit’óní Didlíshí Dr. Bruce Starlight and is presented with English translations and a Tsuut’ina-to-English glossary.

The narratives included in this collection cover considerable ground, ranging from the creation of the world in the caring hands of Xàlítsa-tsii and his animal helpers, to accounts of separation, migration, and cross-cultural contact that mark major turning points in Tsuut’ina history, and to important cultural and ceremonial items and practices that the Tsuut’ina Nation maintains to this day.

These stories will be of lasting value to Tsuut’ina language learners and teachers, and will share the legacy of Elders Bessie Meguinis and Willie Little Bear with generations of Tsuut’ina to come.

Mills was a protean thinker. In a fast-paced career of some twenty years, he wrote on a stunning range of issues—from the sociology of knowledge and methods of the social sciences to social stratification, the concentration of political and economic power, the media and the formation and translation of culture, the politics of the Cold War, and the prospects for economic progress and democratization in developing countries. [NP] This companion responds to his major themes: the elite coordination of political and economic power; its consequences, initially for the US middle classes and subsequently for the Soviet Union, Eastern European, and Latin America; intellectuality, the media, and the constitution and transmission of culture; and the inferences he believed social scientists should draw from these matters—conclusions that he advocated with remarkable tenacity and in a rhetoric that was often pugnacious. [NP] Comprising interpretive, critical, and exploratory essays on Mills’s chief writings as well as his interventions in the political conflicts of his time, the contributors to this volume consider important aspects and implications of his thought that have been largely neglected in the literature on his writings, including questions on which the literature is virtually silent. This is an effort to follow the path of analysis and reflexive critique that Mills himself pursued: the authors attempt to read Mills as he expected to be understood, attending to his intentions, elucidating his positions, and assessing their promise as well as their limits—holding him to his own standards and assessing the extent to which he met them. In this respect, it is conceived in a Millsian spirit. 

The Anthem Companion to Everett Hughes is a comprehensive and updated critical discussion of Hughes’s contribution to sociology and his current legacy in the social sciences. A global team of scholars discusses issues such as the international circulation of Hughes’s work, his intellectual biography, his impact on current ethnographic research practices and the use in current research of such Hughesian concepts as master status, dirty work and bastard institutions. This companion is a useful reference for students of classical sociology, practitioners of ethnographic research and scholars of sociology in the Chicagoan tradition.

This book addresses a neglected aspect of the history of Britain’s centuries-long involvement with transatlantic slavery. For a half century after the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, individual Britons and British enterprises continued to own enslaved people and invest in slavery in Brazil. This study explores the material basis of this entanglement, in the context of British anti-slavery policy, to explain how the last vestiges of British slaveholding in the Americas were only extinguished by abolition in Brazil in 1888.

Based on extensive archival research on both sides of the Atlantic, this book provides the most complete survey of British slaveholding interests in Brazil. From extensive plantations and vast mining operations to the warehouses and workshops of individual merchants and artisans, slaveholding was a feature at all levels of the British community in Brazil. This book also looks beyond slaveholding in its direct form, to expose the entanglement of British merchant credit and banks with the illegal slave trade and slavery. As well as tracing the extent and diverse forms of entanglement, this book also provides analysis of the treatment of those enslaved by British masters and the strategies employed by British slaveholders to obfuscate, sanitise, and justify these practices to compatriots in anti-slavery Britain.
The book also examines how the proliferation of British slaveholding and other forms of entanglement squared with the explicitly anti-slavery foreign policy rhetoric of successive British governments during this period. This discussion pivots around a largely overlooked and little understood anti-slave trade law of 1843. An analysis of the parliamentary debates around this bill and crucially, attempts to implement its provisions in Brazil, shed light not only on practical difficulties of enforcing British law overseas, but an ambivalence both codified in legislation and embodied by British officials that ultimately facilitated the types of entanglement discussed throughout this study. Lastly, the book reflects on the varied legacies of this entanglement on both sides of the Atlantic.

Based on an extensive ethnographic study of television and audiences in class-divided Philippines, this is the first book to take a bottom-up approach in considering how people respond to images and narratives of suffering and poverty on television. Arguing for an anthropological ethics of media, this book challenges existing work in media studies and sociology that focuses solely on textual analysis and philosophical approaches to the question of representing vulnerable others. Current questions in media ethics, such as whether to portray sufferers as humane and empowered individuals or show them ‘at their worst’ have so far used textual and visual analyses to convey the researcher’s own moral position on the matter. In contrast, this book, inspired by the anthropology of moralities, accounts for the different interpretations and moral positions of audiences, who are positioned in various degrees of social and moral proximity to those they see and hear on television. Winner of the 2016 Philippine Social Science Council Excellence in Research Award.

Today, high-end inequality in America and peer countries is at Gilded Age levels. These matters are too important and complicated to be left just to economists. A broader sociological and humanistic approach is necessary. Great works of literature, such as those by the likes of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Edith Wharton, are among the resources that can help us to better understand high-end inequality’s broader, culturally contingent, ramifications – not just in the authors’ own eras but today.

Daniel Shaviro’s Literature and Inequality offers a unique and accessible interdisciplinary take on how a number of great and beloved works from the nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries help shed light on modern high-end inequality. In particular, Shaviro helps us to understand the relevance both of cultural differences between America and peer countries such as England and France, and of cultural commonalities between America’s First Gilded Age in the late-nineteenth century and its currently ongoing Second Gilded Age.

“Network Persistence and the Axis of Hierarchy” reimagines the very nature of social life starting from quite ordinary, even banal considerations, culminating in conclusions that challenge central, universally held tenets. The main argument shows how networks, modestly redefined as a strong, yet imperfect tendency for pairings to recur day after day, that is, stickiness, imply a singular axis of stratification. This is contrary to the nearly universal insistence that stratification is multidimensional. Reanalysis of three central mobility data sets strongly sustains the novel claim. Network concepts provide a supple base for analysis whereby order and regularity are firmly enforced in network neighborhoods by repetitive, often collective, action and mutual regulation but are not necessarily uniform or universal across locales. This provides new takes, often quite radical, on accounts of structure and order by authors such as Bourdieu, Collins and Parsons. The new formulation local rules but not necessarily global rules allows for a plural reality where varied theoretical ideals are possible and could occur but are not inevitable or universal. This tames the otherwise inevitable cacophony of competing foundational accounts whose claims to universality exclude some to much of what is claimed by rivals. Meanwhile, the potential lability of plural possibilities is sharply constrained by the overarching principal axis of stratification which is the joint condition of social life.

‘The Anthem Companion to Ernst Troeltsch’ is a collection of eight essays devoted to many aspects of Troeltsch’s thinking. Each of the contributors is a well-respected scholar who has written extensively on Ernst Troeltsch. This collection is, therefore, groundbreaking in two ways: it brings together scholars of the highest caliber and provides the first compilation of essays on Troeltsch’s thought in English.

In the editor’s Introduction Christopher Adair-Toteff provides a brief overview of Troeltsch’s life and works and then discusses his contributions to theology, sociology, philosophy and cultural criticism. Hans Joas concentrates on one of Troeltsch’s early programmatic texts and demonstrates its relevance for a historical-sociological understanding of religion today. Arie L. Molendijk introduces Troeltsch’s famous typology of “Church, Sect, Mysticism” and demonstrates that they were crucial for addressing the “intrinsic sociological idea of Christianity.” Mark D. Chapman focuses on Troeltsch as a “systematic theologian in the History of Religion School” and offers a detailed analysis of his approach to the structure of Christian dogmatic theology. Christian Polke examines Troeltsch’s notion of personality and reveals it to be the normative core of his philosophical and theological thinking. He shows how this is important for the development of a society which is founded upon value-experience and the ethos of responsibility. Lori Pearson focuses on Troeltsch’s uses of the concepts of “modernity” and “Protestantism” and demonstrates that he offers an understanding of the latter which reduces much of the alienating individuality of the former. Ulrich Schmiedel studies Troeltsch’s attempt to combine theological and sociological accounts of the history of Christianity in order to identify the religion. He argues that instead of providing a conceptual definition of Christianity, Troeltsch offers a performative one. Jeffrey Kinlaw concentrates on Troeltsch’s contention that normative authority is the central problem of religious pluralism and shows how this is an epistemological problem with extensive theological consequences. In the concluding chapter Adair-Toteff examines Troeltsch’s conception of historicism and shows how he tried to combat the relativism and negativity present in the writings of the proponents of this philosophy of history.

The eight essays in this volume reveal the depth and scope of Ernst Troeltsch’s thinking and demonstrate that he was not only a first-rate theologian but also a co-founder with Max Weber of the sociology of religion. They also help establish Troeltsch’s place as a major philosopher and a significant critic of modern culture.

‘Life Chances, Education and Social Movements’ explains the sociology of life chances, the opportunities and experiences of different generations in Australia, the United States and the UK, and how the differential distribution of life-enhancing opportunities affects our well-being. It is now four decades since the publication of Ralf Dahrendorf’s ‘Life Chances: Approaches to Social and Political Theory’ (1979), a surprisingly neglected work that has much to offer by way of explaining some of the social and political challenges of the present era. Dahrendorf’s life-chances theory is an expanded and innovative analysis of Max Weber’s original notion of ‘Lebenschancen’ and is used to support the theoretical and empirical arguments in Lyle Munro’s book. Dahrendorf defines life chances as a function of options (provisions and entitlements) and ligatures (networks that provide a sense of solidarity and belonging). For Dahrendorf, education is arguably the most important option individuals can utilise for improving their well-being and for overcoming social and economic disadvantages. While there are countless sociological accounts of inequality, Munro’s study takes a different and novel approach based on Dahrendorf’s model according to which education and social movements and their networks function to enhance the life chances of individuals and social groups respectively.

Munro emphasises the necessity of formal education and its transformative power in the lives of individuals; he stresses the importance of an individual’s life chances of achieving satisfactory levels of literacy, numeracy and oracy during a decade or more of formal schooling. While this might seem self-evident, the evidence in Australia indicates there is a disturbingly large number of students who leave school without these basic skills, the consequences of which are often dire.

At a broader level, ‘Life Chances, Education and Social Movements’ stresses the importance of education movements in improving the lives of disadvantaged social groups. This is a topic that rarely features in the social movement literature, as a content search of the leading journals in the field reveals. Education movements, including the controversial widening participation movement and the lifelong learning movement and its several subsidiaries, such as VET and adult education, are advocated as alternatives to university, which for many students has proven to be either out of reach, beyond their means or a costly mistake. Munro is critical of the widening participation movement whenever it privileges university learning at the expense of technical and vocational education.

The last part of the book focuses on five social movements that seek to sustain the lives of human and nonhuman animals. The first movement to be analysed is the social justice movement that campaigns against racism, sexism and classism, the much-studied trinity in the discipline of sociology. Followers of Peter Singer’s ‘Animal Liberation’ regard speciesism as the missing relative in race, gender and class relations and nonhuman animals as arguably the most vulnerable members of society. For an increasing number of movement theorists, speciesism – the prejudice and practice that posits the interests of members of one’s own species against the interests of members of other species – is seen as animal abuse, a social problem on a par with elder abuse, child abuse and the like.

The second movement against risks to our collective life chances seeks to protect human and nonhuman animals from some of the most dangerous developments confronting the planet such as climate change, environmental degradation, terrorism and nuclear war. Two of the most challenging risks to both people and animals – pandemics and climate change – and the link between them are discussed in some detail, since the link between human and nonhuman animals tends to be ignored by most commentators on ‘the risk society’.

Finally, student, worker and citizen movements are engaged in a quest to improve the lives of their constituents and more broadly as part of a proposed mass mobilisation against the corporate elites who are responsible for most of the social, economic and environmental problems we face in the current era. The book is predominantly about Australia, with comparative examples and case studies from the UK, Europe and the United States.

Marx in the Field is a unique edited collection illustrating the relevance of the Marxian method to study contemporary capitalism and the global development process. Essays in the collection bring Marx ‘to the field’ in three ways. They illustrate how Marxian categories can be concretely deployed for field research in the global economy, they analyse how these categories may be adapted during fieldwork and they discuss data collection methods supporting Marxian analysis. Crucially, many of the contributions expand the scope of Marxian analysis by combining its insights with those of other intellectual traditions, including radical feminisms, critical realism and postcolonial studies. The book defines the possibilities and challenges of fieldwork guided by Marxian analysis, including those emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The collection takes a global approach to the study of development and of contemporary capitalism. While some essays focus on themes and geographical areas of long-term concern for international development – like informal or rural poverty and work across South Asia, Southern and West Africa, or South America – others focus instead on actors benefitting from the development process - like regional exporters, larger farmers, and traders – or on unequal socio-economic outcomes across richer and emerging economies and regions – including Gulf countries, North America, Southern Europe, or Post-Soviet Central and Eastern Europe. Some essays explore global processes cutting across the world economy, connecting multiple regions, actors and inequalities.

While some of the contributions focus on classic Marxian tropes in the study of contemporary capitalism – like class, labour and working conditions, agrarian change, or global commodity chains and prices – others aim at demonstrating the relevance of the Marxian method beyond its traditional boundaries – for instance, for exploring the interplays between food, nutrition and poverty; the links between social reproduction, gender and homework; the features of migration and refugees regimes, tribal chieftaincy structures or prison labour; or the dynamics structuring global surrogacy. Overall, through the analysis of an extremely varied set of concrete settings and cases, this book illustrates the extraordinary insights we can gain by bringing Marx in the field.

By the late 1960s, Harold Garfinkel had coined the term “ethnomethodology” as a neologism for the field of study, the study of “people’s methods,” that his seminal collection of pioneering studies – Studies in Ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1967) – was to make public. Up to the present day, the field has developed, both diversifying and deepening its research interests.

The Anthem Companion to Harold Garfinkel brings together leading scholars and upcoming researchers in contemporary ethnomethodology to bring out the experimental character of Garfinkel’s legacy in the social sciences and beyond. Therefore, the Companion takes its cue from Garfinkel’s noted “breaching experiments,” enabling the reflexive investigation of “trust conditions” in situ, and asks how this research interest has been productively pursued and distinctively rearticulated, both within and beyond Garfinkel’s oeuvre. Whilst Garfinkel’s experimental legacy is often acknowledged, no systematic introduction to its distinctive outlook, tension-riddled diversification, and heuristic interest(s) is available to date. The Anthem Companion to Harold Garfinkel both fills and reflects upon that “gap in the literature,” thereby articulating ethnomethodology’s experimental outlook, if not recasting its current research directions. The Editors’ Introduction charts the experimental outlook of ethnomethodology, spanning Garfinkel’s early experiments with “trust” and his later experimental interventions (e.g., via “tutorial problems”). The Companion’s Contributions range from exegetical to experimental studies and spell out Garfinkel’s experimental legacy in depth and detail, whilst showcasing its multifaceted development in and beyond ethnomethodology.

The purpose of this research is to give a voice to nameless and countless stories that represent the personal lived experiences of Sub-Saharan African immigrants in the US. The authors believe that telling our own stories from our own perspectives is important and empowering because when others tell our stories there are omissions and misrepresentations and a lot of stereotyping. 

This book seeks to produce a more specific description of Sub-Saharan African immigration in the US by recording our reflections, experiences, and strategies of coping, as well as those of the participants. We hope that the insights gained from the research in this book will be used by immigrant communities, academic institutions, and governmental agencies in advocating for immigration policies that positively impact the lived experiences of Sub-Saharan African immigrants, and in planning support interventions. 

Their voices are heard as they narrate their experiences, which are presented in the book under major themes that emerged from the interviews. These include how and why Sub-Saharan Africans immigrate to the United States of America (USA), their perceptions before, during and after the process of immigration, the challenges they face as they adjust, adapt, and settle in the USA, and the coping strategies they devise. The authors argue that issues of identity and lack of platforms where they can express their concerns as Sub-Saharan African immigrants and be heard are lacking. The authors are also using a phenomenological qualitative approach of collecting and interpreting participants’ personal narratives and their lived experiences

This book responds to the some of the twenty-first century’s most assuming problems of our times: global warming, sub-national terrorism, natural resource depletion, and economic, environmental and financial crises. It finds short- and long-term solutions to these global woes by looking to the city as the fulcrum for introducing sustainability around the world. Beginning with an outline of a robust strategy of sustainable cities—or sustainable city-regions—that has emerged out of over two-and-a-half decades of theoretical and practical work, the authors show why these portentous problems can best be addressed at the local-regional scale. In the process, this book cuts through the received wisdom and popular misunderstandings about sustainability and peels away the conceptual fog and ideological confusion about the meaning of sustainability.

Drawing upon extensive fieldwork in North America, Europe and Asia, the authors examine both strong and weak examples of sustainable city approaches that validate their distinctive urban sustainability strategy. They discover keen insights and important lessons in these case studies for sustainability practice across the globe, whether in small towns in the US and Canada, large cities in Europe or tiny Chinese villages in Asia.  Their concluding chapter argues that only the road less travelled holds real promise of creating sustainable city-regions around the world guided by the toolkit of ecological and technological conviviality.

As recently as 2000, Hannah Arendt was considered an esoteric author within the fields of humanities and social science. Since that time, Arendt has moved from the fringes of intellectual discussion toward its center. A number of developments have driven this reappraisal: the renewed respectability of the concept of totalitarianism; the appearance of post-Nazi/Bolshevik genocidal movements in Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East; the reemergence of stateless people; and the revival of interest in civil/classical republicanism as a political alternative to liberalism and socialism. All of these events evoke Arendtian themes. The greater porousness between the humanities and social sciences in recent years, as a result of the impetus toward trans-disciplinary studies, has encouraged academics to move across intellectual borders. Arendt, a wide-ranging thinker with much to say about politics, society, science, history, aesthetics, philosophy and education, is a natural beneficiary of this process.

Extant compendiums of Arendt's work show a strong bias toward philosophy and political theory. In contrast, The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt is written principally by sociologists and authors with a keen interest in sociology and social theory. The result is a genuinely original contribution to Arendt studies. Written with the higher level undergraduate student in mind yet sufficiently challenging to engage readers well versed in her work, the book examines Arendt's most important books as they bear on modern social theories, issues and disputes. Her key conceptual distinctions – totalitarianism and dictatorship; labor, work, action; power and violence; thinking, willing and judging – are clarified. The controversies in which Arendt was caught up – notably over the 'banality of evil' epitomized by Adolf Eichmann – are explained. The result enables students to grasp a fully rounded understanding of Arendt's contribution to social inquiry. Written by a distinguished group of international scholars, the clear descriptions and stimulating interpretations of The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt bring Arendt's work into the forefront of sociological discussion.

Cultural Processes of Inequality: A Sociological Perspective shows how systematic inequality is produced and reproduced through mundane, often taken-for-granted practices of offering someone the benefit of the doubt and treating them in good faith or, alternatively, of withholding the benefit of the doubt and treating them in bad faith. This straightforward way of thinking about value and devaluation, privilege and discrimination, works across multiple forms of inequality and at social levels ranging from interpersonal interactions to large-scale institutions, while showcasing the importance of different levels and types of social power (decision-making power, cultural power and individual power).

Good-faith and bad-faith assumptions and practices intersect with moral inclusion and exclusion, processes by which certain people or groups of people are defined as deserving or undeserving of moral treatment, often with tragic consequences. Cultural Processes of Inequality covers ways in which good-faith and bad-faith assumptions and practices play out through moral alchemy, false equivalencies, self-fulfilling prophecies, positive and negative visibility and invisibility and the linking of social groups to definitions of social problems, providing contemporary U.S. examples of how these often-underutilized sociological concepts make sense of racism, sexism and heterosexism. The role of members of devalued groups in reproducing or struggling against their devaluation is also considered.

Cultural Processes of Inequality concludes with concrete actions individuals and groups can take to build a good-faith society and includes an appendix discussing key sociological concepts to make the book more useful to undergraduate students who have not previously taken a sociology course as well as discussion questions for students. Written for students in sociology classes and accessible to generally educated readers, Cultural Processes of Inequality sheds light on components of systematic inequality that too often go undiscussed even as they play a daily role in the injustice and the many harms of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and other forms of inequality.

The United States has by far the world’s largest population of incarcerated people. More than a million Americans are imprisoned; hundreds of thousands more are held in jails. This vast system has doled out punishment—particularly to people from marginalized groups—on an unfathomable scale. At the same time, it has manifestly failed to secure public safety, instead perpetuating inequalities and recidivism. Why does the United States see punishment as the main response to social harm, and what are the alternatives?

This book brings together essays by scholars, practitioners, activists, and writers, including incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, to explore the harms of this punitive approach. The chapters address a range of issues, from policing to prosecution, and from how people are treated in prison to the consequences of a criminal conviction. Together, they consider a common theme: We cannot reduce our dependence on mass incarceration until we confront our impulse to punish in ways that are excessive, often wildly disproportionate to the harm caused. Essays trace how a maze of local, state, and federal agencies have contributed to mass incarceration and deterred attempts at reform. They shed light on how the excesses of America’s criminal legal system are entwined with poverty, racism, and the legacy of slavery. A wide-ranging and powerful look at the failures of the status quo, Excessive Punishment also considers how to reimagine the justice system to support restoration instead of retribution.

Soon after the UK referendum in June 2016, sociologists and other social scientists began to evaluate the implications of the decision both for the UK and, more importantly, for the European Union, Europe and the world. Some of these consequences were immediately evident. The vote revealed cleavages across the UK on a regional and class basis, paralleled, for example, in the support in France for the extreme-right Front National versus the Socialist Party. In the UK, there has been a revival of a kind of class politics, in which working-class voters swing right rather than left. The regional divisions are hard to explain: the most deprived areas of the UK, which have benefited substantially from EU development aid, were often those most hostile to UK membership of the EU.

In the rest of Europe, the vote has opened up as a serious prospect what was previously only a pipe-dream of the political fringes: withdrawal from the EU itself. Although one can put this in the context of the Union’s failure to attract the support of enough voters in Norway and Switzerland for membership, the shock effect is incomparably greater. The UK was always a semi-detached member state, with opt-outs from Schengen and the euro, but it still carried substantial weight in the formation of EU policy. Although one of the immediate responses has been a rise in support for the EU across much of Europe, Brexit has massively strengthened the forces of (mostly right-wing) populist insurgent politics, adding withdrawal to the more local themes of migration and ‘islamization’ which play out in different variations across Europe.

Brexit aims to trace the implications of the UK’s projected withdrawal from the EU, locating short-term political fluctuations in a broader historical and social context of the transformation of European and global society. It provides a forum for leading Eurosociologists (broadly defined), working inside and outside the UK, to rethink their analyses of the European project and its prospects, as well as to reflect on the likely implications for the UK.

Auguste Comte was a controversial but highly influential nineteenth-century figure, but his work and voluminous oeuvre were largely ignored, even in France, for most of the twentieth century. In the field of sociology, the science he claimed to have invented and the cornerstone of his positive philosophy, Comte became regarded more as an eccentric precursor to Durkheim than a real founder of the discipline, or even a significant contributor to its stock of ideas. Recently, however, Comte’s life and writings have begun to be searchingly re-examined together with the wider religious, social and political project of reform to which his intellectual labors were devoted. What has emerged is a much more complicated picture of his thought and its significance. ‘The Companion to Auguste Comte’ – with ten new critical essays by leading Comte scholars, sociologists, intellectual historians, social theorists and philosophers – contributes to this re-examination, providing a multi-faceted introduction to Comte’s thought and to current discussion about him.

Essays in the volume consider all the phases of Comte’s work, treat a wide range of key areas and provide a broad overview of those aspects most pertinent to sociology and related fields. Areas examined include: Comte’s philosophy of science, his concepts of the social and the political, the statics and dynamics of his sociology, positive religion, art and architecture, civic education and universities, gender and his culte de femmes, and his analyses of the ‘great crisis’, the metaphysical state and the coming positivist order.

Against views of Comte that minimize or distort his place in the modern intellectual tradition, a particular aim of the collection is to examine afresh the multifarious links of his thought and its legacy to other major figures and currents. These include Comte’s relation to the ‘second scientific revolution’, to conservative Catholic theology, to Durkheim and (post)classical socology, British Fabianism, (neo) liberalism and post-positivism, as well as to a host of figures from De Maistre, Saint-Simon, J. S Mill, Spencer, Eliot and Beatrice Webb to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Weber, Wagner, De Corbusier, Bourdieu and Foucault. The chapters move in emphasis from considerations of Comte’s context and formation, to influence and reception and finally to ways in which Comte’s long abandoned historical schema may hold renewed interest for understanding our own times.

Boundaries, borders and margins are related concepts and realities, and each of these can be conceptualized and organized in closed or open ways—with degrees of closure or openness. The logics of statis and closure, as well as cults of exclusivist and exclusionary sovereignty, are reflected and embodied in the closed xenophobic conceptualization and organization of boundaries, borders and margins. But, an open conceptualization of the borderlands, where mixing and hybridity take place at a rapid, even dizzying, pace, gives rise to Creolization—at the threshold of sovereignties, as something that can also be imagined.

At present, our border zones are spaces of anxiety-ridden security arrangements, violence and death. The existing politics of boundary maintenance is wedded to a cult of sovereignty at various levels, which produces bare lives, bodies and lands. We need the new art of border-crossing to bedefined by the notion of camaraderie and shared sovereignties and non-sovereignties. Border zones can also be zones of meetings, communication, transcendence and festive celebration of the limits of our identities. Thus, we need a new art and politics of boundary transmutation, transformation and transcendence, in the broadest possible sense, that entails the production of spatial, scalar, somatic, cognitive, affective and spiritual transitions.

Crossing Borders is a powerful theme and metaphor for all of us in the midst of COVID-19 (since 2020) and the current geopolitics of war that is hovering over Eurasia. We need these modes of knowing and being that shun violence; ontologies that are fluid and seeking instead of aggressive, self-certain, arrogant and violent. Amidst this chaos, we need new modes of knowing, or epistemologies, where knowing of, or about, the other is also a festive and artistic process of knowing with the other. We need an artistic ontological-epistemology of participation for a new art of border-crossing where the boundary between ontology and epistemology is continually redrawn with emergent negotiation and creativity.

The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001 saw the start of the so-called war on terror. The aim of ‘In the Name of Security – Secrecy, Surveillance and Journalism’is to assess the impact of surveillance and other security measures on in-depth public interest journalism. How has the global fear-driven security paradigm sparked by 11 September affected journalism? Moves by governments to expand the powers of intelligence and security organizations and legislate for the retention of personal data for several years have the potential to stall investigative journalism. Such journalism, with its focus on accountability and scrutiny of powerful interests in society, is a pillar of democracy.

Investigative journalism informs society by providing information that enables citizens to have input into democratic processes. But will whistleblowers acting in public interest in future contact reporters if they risk being exposed by state and corporate surveillance? Will journalists provide fearless coverage of security issues when they risk jail for reporting them?

At the core of ‘In the Name of Security – Secrecy, Surveillance and Journalism’ sits what the authors have labeled the ‘trust us dilemma’. Governments justify passing, at times, oppressive and far-reaching anti-terror laws to keep citizens safe from terror. By doing so governments are asking the public to trust their good intentions and the integrity of the security agencies. But how can the public decide to trust the government and its agencies if it does not have access to information on which to base its decision?

‘In the Name of Security – Secrecy, Surveillance and Journalism’ takes an internationally comparative approach using case studies from the powerful intelligence-sharing group known as the Five Eyes consisting of the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. Chapters assessing a selection of EU countries and some of the BRICS countries provide additional and important points of comparison to the English-speaking countries that make up the Five Eyes.

The core questions in the book are investigated and assessed in the disciplines of journalism studies, law and international relations. The topics covered include an overview and assessment of the latest technological developments allowing the mass surveillance of large populations including the use of drones (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles).

'The Anthem Companion to Pierre Bourdieu' provides an introduction to the French sociologist’s thought and an evaluation of the international significance of his work from a range of national perspectives. This volume assesses Bourdieu’s work as a product of his social situation in France and, more importantly, in relation to his experience as French Algeria gained its independence. The companion then proceeds to ask how the concepts he developed can legitimately be applied to other situations.

The volume is divided into two parts, with the first devoted to aspects of Bourdieu’s thought and the second discussing case-studies of the international deployment of his thought. The international list of contributors elaborate on the implications and consequences of Bourdieu’s phenomenological orientation; explore the meaning of ‘reflexivity’ in Bourdieu’s work offering, in the process, a comprehensive guide to relevant secondary literature; examine the validity of the ways in which Margaret Archer and Bernard Lahire have attempted to go beyond Bourdieu’s original formulations; and spell out the implications of Bourdieu’s thinking in relation to the possibility of an international social science. The contributors also provide a biometric analysis of the circulation of Bourdieu’s ideas within Europe and offer interpretations of Bourdieu’s work within their own national contexts rather than in terms of a shared discourse of international sociology.

“The Transformation of Capacity in International Development” examines the transformation of capacity as a concept within the global development agenda through an analysis of USAID projects and policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan between 1977 and 2017. It traces the evolution of donor discourses from the Cold War through the Global War on Terror, exposing the tensions within donor agendas between market, human rights and security-based narratives and discourses. As the global development agenda subsumes major areas of international debate defined by competing objectives, these tensions are absorbed, obscured and depoliticized with the transformation of capacity.

The transformation of capacity unveils donor approaches to building capacity as a form of statemaking, involving development projects as a tactic for building networks between centralized, national spaces (accessible and held accountable to the “international community” of states) and subnational environments harboring transnational militant threats to global security. Through an examination of the USAID example, this book exposes how the donor attempt to develop the capacity of “fragile” states and to manage transnational militancy reveals a fundamental struggle over the ownership and future of global governance and development.

As the US-led war in Afghanistan approaches 20 years, the failure of capacity development requires a fundamental reexamination of the priorities of the international community and development efforts in conflict zones. In exposing the transformation of capacity, the present volume contributes to our understanding of how human rights and security approaches to development have been obscured by the transformation of a popular concept within development. This transformation--involving shifts in policy and political agendas over time--reveals the fundamental tensions between donors and recipients as they work to build sustainable networks and institutions that ensure security, justice, greater access to opportunity and basic human rights of those caught in the crosshairs of global conflict. When we look at how the human rights agenda becomes warped in practice alongside the shifting tides of the global security objectives of the United States, we see the obscuring political power of major concepts of practice such as capacity. As scholars and practitioners consider the future direction of human rights approaches to development, this book informs alternative approaches to the failure of the status quo.

'The Anthem Companion to Georg Simmel' brings together new interpretations of the work of this sociologist and philosopher. It discusses how Simmel’s work is relevant, interesting and significant for advancing contemporary discussions and debates. Compared to the volumes of works on other sociological giants like Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx and Max Weber, the Anglophone secondary literature on Simmel has remained relatively scarce until recently.

The book addresses general questions on ‘social life in process’ that characterize the whole of Simmel’s work and also includes chapters that focus on specific issues. The primary concern in each chapter is not just to review Simmel’s ideas or provide accurate readings but often neglected readings but also to explore how Simmel offers a model for addressing various disciplinary concerns and examine the degree to which he continues to speak to the experience of the present.

The international scholars writing in this companion are contributors to an emerging new wave of Simmel scholarship. Included in the volume is Austin Harrington’s translation of selections from Simmel’s book on Goethe and a comprehensive list of Simmel’s work in English.

As a sequel to Archaeogaming: an Introduction to Archaeology in and of Video Games, the author focuses on the practical and applied side of the discipline, collecting recent digital fieldwork together in one place for the first time to share new methods in treating interactive digital built environments as sites for archaeological investigation. Fully executed examples of practical and applied archaeogaming include the necessity of a rapid archaeology of digital built environments, the creation of a Harris matrix for software stratigraphy, the ethnographic work behind a human civilization trapped in an unstable digital landscape, how to conduct photogrammetry and GIS mapping in procedurally generated space, and how to transform digital artifacts into printed three-dimensional objects. Additionally, the results of the 2014 Atari excavation in Alamogordo, New Mexico are summarized for the first time.

Why do people choose the life of an artist, and what happens when they find themselves barely scraping by? Why does New York City, even in an era of hypergentrification, still beckon to aspiring artists as a place to make art and remake yourself?

Art Monster takes readers to the margins of the professional art world, populated by unseen artists who make a living working behind the scenes in galleries and museums while making their own art to little acclaim. Writing in a style that is by turns direct and poetic, personal and lyrical, Marin Kosut reflects on the experience of dedicating your life to art and how the art world can crush you. She examines the push toward professionalization, the devaluing of artistic labor, and the devastating effects of gentrification on cultural life. Her nonlinear essays are linked by central themes—community, nostalgia, precarity, alienation, estrangement—that punctuate working artists’ lives. The book draws from ten years of fieldwork among artists and Kosut’s own experiences curating and cofounding artist-run spaces in Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Chinatown. At once ethnography, memoir, tirade, and love letter, Art Monster is a street-level meditation on the predicament of artists in the late capitalist metropolis.

Pierre Bourdieu is widely regarded as one of the most influential sociologists of his generation, and yet the reception of his work in different cultural contexts and academic disciplines has been varied and uneven. This volume maps out the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu in contemporary social and political thought from the standpoint of classical European sociology and from the broader perspective of transatlantic social science. It brings together contributions from prominent scholars in the field, providing a range of perspectives on the continuing relevance of Bourdieu’s oeuvre to substantive problems in social and political analysis.

The first set of essays traces the roots of Bourdieu’s thought in classical sociology by closely examining his intellectual connections with the writings of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim. The second set of essays is concerned with Bourdieu’s relation to modern social philosophy, in particular with regard to the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Norbert Elias, Theodor W. Adorno, and Axel Honneth. The third set of essays explores the relevance of Bourdieu’s writings to key issues in the contemporary social sciences, such as the continuous presence of religion, the transformative power of social movements, the emancipatory potential of language, the political legacy of 1968, the socio-historical significance of the rise of the public sphere, and the social consequences of the recent and ongoing global economic crisis. The volume also contains a major interview with Bourdieu that has not been previously translated into, let alone published in, English.

By bringing together contributions from international scholars, the volume aims to initiate a fruitful dialogue across different sociological traditions and thereby stimulate further debate on the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu in social and political thought.

Why is Robert K. Merton important? Many treatments of his work focus only on particular components whereas, in fact, his work is far wider and can be summarised for each of his decades of life and work: 1920s (childhood), 1930s (anomie, science, unanticipated consequences), 1940s (housing studies, mass communications, structural-functional analysis, professions, focus groups), 1950s (reference groups), 1960s (ambivalence), and later decades (structural analysis, sociological semantics, cultural sociology). 

Merton particularly contributed to sociology during a period when several specialties were being set up and yet his work spans both general and specialist sociologies. He is recognised as the father of anomie/strain theory; focus groups; sociology of science; role-set theory; analytical sociology; structural-functional analysis; ambivalence studies; and sociological semantics. Many commentaries on sociology lament the ways it has slumped into a wide range of threads with not much of a core holding it together. Merton’s work always endeavoured to keep the multifarious threads of sociology together, and we might usefully learn some of the ways he accomplished this. 

Merton stood at the junction of many other crossroads in sociology and moreover endeavoured to create bridges between these, but more importantly to help launch research programmes along some of these paths. His work links classical and modern sociology; American and European sociology; theory and research; philosophy of social science and applied sociology; pure academic sociology and applied sociology; cognitive and social; social sciences and humanities; and social sciences and science. This book examines and relates to each other. Because Merton’s work spanned so many paths not many sociologists were alert to the overall architecture of his work and perhaps its visibility thereby waned. His viability is relatively less because of an astute writing style. Several of the programmes he helped launch have continued since: for example, media studies, criminology, and science studies.  

Merton had a major effect on the baby boomer generation of sociology who joined the ranks of sociology at a time of great expansion of university positions across many developed countries. While other generations since have been less exposed to his work reading the book will provide many valuable insights.

Syria’s massive displacement (from 2012 onwards) is one of the largest, most complex and intractable humanitarian emergencies of today. More than 5.7 million Syrian refugees live mainly in cities and urban areas throughout the Middle East. Urban Displacement examines multiple dimensions of this crisis from political and socioeconomic predicaments to questions of social belonging, the complexity of the international, regional and national responses and how they affect urban spaces. The volume brings together experts in the field of forced migration studies and displacement in the Middle East and presents a range of in-depth ethnographic data, cross-sectional surveys and policy analyses.

The Anthem Companion to Max Weber is a study of the ideas and career of the German sociologist and founder of classical social theory. Including contributions by accomplished Weber scholars, this companion provides the latest scholarly interpretations of the sociologist’s vast body of socioeconomic and political writings which continue to inspire new scholarship and debate on global politics, comparative religion, social class relationships, social science methods and law and society. This book serves as a handy introduction for beginners and a tidy commentary for advanced scholars.

Policy development and implementation has a pivotal role in the youth justice system, profoundly impacting professionals and the children they work with. This imaginative book challenges limited explanations of policy-making as linear and government-dominated through original research into the practices, identities and relationships of a wide range of stakeholders working in multiple policy- making contexts in England and Wales.

The result is a detailed expert analysis of the contexts and mechanisms of youth justice policy-making. This book is key reading for researchers, professionals and students seeking effective understandings and responses to the long term social problem of youth offending.