Sociology Books

This ethnographic exploration of contemporary spaces of homelessness takes an expanded view of homeless space, threading together experiences of organizational spaces, routes taken through the city and the occupation of public space. Through...

Is it possible to create a collective European identity? In this volume, leading scholars assess the link between collective identity construction in Europe and the multiple memory discourses that intervene in this construction process. The authors...

The importance of the daily experience of new information and communication technologies is highlighted by this timely volume. The book is based on work carried out in the European Media Technology and Everyday Life Network and is structured round a...

This book provides an exciting, accessible and wide-ranging guide to the development of classical and contemporary Durkheimian thought. Jonathan Fish offers a re-reading of the writings of Emile Durkheim and Talcott Parsons on religion. He aims to move...

A major new resource book for academics and students of youth studies, this work offers a rare comparative review of a field which is often focused on the local or national situation. Drawing together authors from across the world, the book combines...

It has been half a century since the Geneva Refugee Convention came into place, but there is still no comparable international regime which provides for the increasing phenomenon of mobile economic migrants. At a time of global mobility, when migration...

Lifestyles have a history, and lifestyle media is fundamentally implicated in this history. This original volume examines issues of taste, media and lifestyle from the 1900s to 1970s, providing a wealth of empirical evidence and debate from varied...

Recent years have witnessed growing concerns about the disengagement of young people from conventional politics both in Britain and internationally. Their non-participation is often viewed as reflecting both a deeper political alienation and 'apathy'...

The influx of female migrants to Europe has posed challenges to established European feminist movements. In this book the author assesses the significance of female immigration to Italy and its impact on Italian feminism by analyzing the way in which...

Every week thousands of people in Europe and the USA consult psychic practitioners. Communication is crucial to the performance of psychic powers in a range of settings. Psychic practitioners use language to demonstrate their powers, whether they are...

There is a saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, implying that beauty is subjective. But can it be said that 'better looking' people have more social power? This book provides a fascinating insight into the social stratification of people...

Many people in the West or global North now live in a culture of 24/7 instant messaging, iPods and MP3s, streamed content, blogs, ubiquitous digital images and Facebook. But they are also surrounded by even more paper, books, telephone calls and material...

Journalism, Ethics and Society provides a comprehensive overview and critical analysis of debates within media ethics in relation to the purpose of news and journalism for society. It assesses how the meaning of news and journalism is central to a...

Advertising and Cultural Politics in Global Times traces daringly transgressive convergences between cultural politics and global advertising media. It engages with a range of interpolations between cultural politics and advertising technologies...

Re-crafting Rationalization contributes to debates relating to the public understanding of science, regarding the conceptualization of the relationship between 'science' and 'the public'. It challenges the prevailing science-centred or 'top-down'...

Through an in-depth case study of the black professional middle class in Oakland, this book provides an analysis of the experiences of black professionals in the workplace, community, and local politics. Brown shows how overlapping...

Call centers have come, in the last three decades, to define the interaction between corporations, governments, and other institutions and their respective customers, citizens, and members. The offshoring and outsourcing of call center employment, part...

Digitalization and computerization are now pervasive in science. This has deep consequences for our understanding of scientific knowledge and of the scientific process, and challenges longstanding assumptions and traditional frameworks of thinking of...

Multiple killings by serial or spree killers and the mass violence seen in war crimes and other atrocities have typically been understood as discrete category types, which can foster the view that there are fundamentally different kinds of human beings,...

This book explores the transition from the era of internationalization into the era of globalization of Japan by focusing on language and identity as its central themes. By taking an interdisciplinary approach covering education, cultural studies,...

Research in the humanities and social sciences thrives on critical reflections that unfold with each research project, not only in terms of knowledge created, but in whether chosen methodologies served their purpose.  Ethics forms the bulwark of any...

This book critically explores from a comparative international perspective the role medicine plays in constructing and managing natural and social risks, including those belonging to modern medical technology and expertise. Drawing together chapters...

Fifty years ago, familiar images of the lottery would have been strange, as no state lottery existed then. Few researchers have uncovered the obscure role lotteries play in the changing composition of American taxation. Even less is known about what role...

Vulnerability has traditionally been conceived as a dichotomised status, where an individual by reason of a personal characteristic is classified as vulnerable or not. However, vulnerability is not static, and most, if not all, people are vulnerable at...

Southern Africa, where most of these book chapters originate, has been identified as one of regions of the world most at risk of the consequences of environmental degradation and climate change. At the same time, it is still seeking ways to overcome the...

This book explores contemporary transformations of identities in a digitizing society across a range of domains of modern life. As digital technology and ICTs have come to pervade virtually all aspects of modern societies, the routine registration of...

This book analyzes in detail the main social, economic and special transformation of the city of São Paulo. In the last 30 years, São Paulo has become a more heterogeneous and less unequal city. Contrary to some expectations, the recent economic...

Contrary to what is suggested in media and popular discourses, Europe is neither a monolithic entity nor simply a collection of nation states. It is, rather, a union of millions of individuals who differ from one another in a variety of ways while also...

Following the defeat of Napoleon in 1814, an event that signalled an end to nearly fourteen years of French domination, Florence seemed to enter a new cultural 'golden age' and by 1824 was described as 'an Earthly Paradise' by the political and liberal...

Global economic recovery in the aftermath of the Great Recession has not been experienced equally: while the share of wealth owned by the richest 3% has grown, the share owned by the poorest 90% continues to decline, as reported by Oxfam in 2016...

Following the subprime lending crisis and the financial market crash of 2008-9, governments throughout Europe implemented a series of debt reduction measures collectively known as austerity. Across the continent, citizens and social movements mobilized...

The Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) ended a 20-year political battle over same-sex marriage in the USA. The ruling in favor of a constitutional right for gays and lesbians to marry reflected growing social acceptance and political...

Sporting mega-events habitually spawn protests from local groups discommoded by the building of new infrastructure, environmental lobbies contesting the long-term legacies of such events, and expressions of outrage at the expenditure of public funds on...

In our daily experiences, we feel, perceive, designate, invoke or comment on a plurality of beings: people, artifacts, technologies, institutions, projects, animals, divinities, emotions, cultures, ideologies or opinions that are part of our world. While...

The last few years have witnessed a remarkable resurgence of populist nationalism as indicated by Brexit, the Trump presidency and the rise of radical parties of the far right. Nationalist Responses to the Crises in Europe examines the drivers, methods...

The Routledge International Handbook of Sex Industry Research unites 45 contributions from researchers, sex workers, activists, and practitioners who live and work in 28 countries throughout the world.Focusing tightly on the contemporary state...

Home to close to 60 per cent of the world's population, Asia is the largest and by far the most populous continent. It is also extremely diverse, physically and culturally. Asian countries and regions have their own distinctive histories, cultural...

Primary elections have been used for the past century for most U.S. elective offices and their popularity is growing in other nations as well. In some circumstances, primaries ensure that citizens have a say in elections and test the skills of candidates...

It is said that movies have encroached upon social realities creating tourism enclaves based on distortions of history and heritage, or simulations that disregard both. What localities and nation-states value are discarded, suppressed, or modified beyond...

Current understandings of ageing and diversity are impoverished in three main ways. Firstly, with regards to thinking about what inequalities operate in later life there has been an excessive preoccupation with economic resources. On the other hand, less...

This book explores the influence which education and migration experiences have on women of Indian origin in Australia and the United Kingdom when (re)negotiating their identities.The intersections of migration and transnationalism are critically...

This interdisciplinary volume links dis/ability and agency by exploring LatDisCrit's theory and activist emancipatory practice. It uses the author's experiential and analytical views as a blind brown Latinx engaged scholar and activist from the global...

The first full-length treatment of cycling activism as a social movement, this book draws on social movement theory as a means to understand cycling activism and presents a series of case studies of collective action, in order to elaborate a theoretical...

This book investigates the sociohistorical making of place and people in Copenhagen from around 1900 to the present day. Drawing inspiration from Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of social space and symbolic power, and from Loïc Wacquant's hypothesis of...

Looking online for love proves to be a dangerous path. The hope for love and for a successful partnership of two people drove me to seek it. The constant questioning coming from Is this real? Or am I bringing myself into a dangerous game? goes through my...

Zygmunt Bauman was both an outsider of Western modernity and one of its foremost interpreters. He was an exemplary figure in twentieth-century intellectual work on exile who experienced both Nazi and Soviet forms of totalitarianism.The first work to draw...

One of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017) made reflection on culture a fundamental part of his academic work. He published a substantial number of papers...

Social scientists' autobiographies can yield insight into personal commitments to research agendas and the very project of social science itself. But despite the long history of life writing, sociologists have tended to view the practice with skepticism...