Representations of Youth examines the various constructions of `youth' and `adolescence' in recent British and North American research. Mainstream and radical approaches have presented a series of `crises' about young people in relation to, among other things, unemployment, `teenage pregnancy' and `delinquency'. This book considers research in psychology, sociology, education, criminology and cultural studies in order to assess these accounts. T ...
This book provides an introduction to the work of Norbert Elias. It is the first systematic appraisal of two central themes of his thought – violence and civilization. Although Elias is best known for his theory of civilizing processes, this study highlights the crucial importance of the concept of decivilizing processes. Fletcher argues that while Elias did not develop a theory of decivilizing processes, such a theory is logically implied in hi ...
G. H. Mead is rightly considered to be one of sociology's founding fathers, yet to date there have been surprisingly few books devoted to his life and work. This book fills the gap by introducing Mead's ideas to a younger generation of social scientists. Beginning with a biographical account of the main events in Mead's career, Filipe Carreira da Silva provides a thorough examination of Mead's social theory of the self, the reception of his idea ...
Society is under siege – under attack on two fronts: from the global frontier-land where old structures and rules do not hold and new ones are slow to take shape, and from the fluid, undefined domain of life politics. The space between these two fronts, until recently ruled by the sovereign nation-state and identified by social scientists as ‘society' is ever more difficult to conceive of as a self-enclosed entity. And this confronts the establi ...
Re-Thinking Science presents an account of the dynamic relationship between society and science. Despite the mounting evidence of a much closer, interactive relationship between society and science, current debate still seems to turn on the need to maintain a 'line' to demarcate them. The view persists that there is a one-way communication flow from science to society – with scant attention given to the ways in which society communicates with sc ...
This wide-ranging and innovative book develops an original theory of the media and their impact on the modern world, from the emergence of printing to the most recent developments in the media industries. ...
Search engines have become a key part of our everyday lives. Yet while much has been written about how to use search engines and how they can be improved, there has been comparatively little exploration of what the social and cultural effects might be. Like all technologies, search engines exist within a larger political, cultural, and economic environment. This volume aims to redress this balance and to address crucial questions such as: * How ...
The literature on governmentality has had a major impact across the social sciences over the past decade, and much of this has drawn upon the pioneering work by Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose. This volume will bring together key papers from their work for the first time, including those that set out the basic frameworks, concepts and ethos of this approach to the analysis of political power and the state, and others that analyse specific domains ...
In this groundbreaking book, Akbar Ahmed, one of the world's leading authorities on Islam, who has worked in the Muslim world but lives in the West, explains what is going wrong in his society by referring to Islamic history and beliefs. Employing theological and anthropological perspectives, he attempts to answer the questions that people in the West are asking about Islam: «Why do they hate us?» «Is Islam compatible with democracy?» «Does Isla ...
