Social theory Books

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...

Why acknowledging diverse eco-social relationships can help us overcome the political polarisation that undermines our ability to protect the environmentWhen we picture the ideal environmentalist, we likely have in mind someone who dedicates herself to...

This book presents an introduction to the concept of social inequality. It provides a theoretical and historical background to ways of approaching this topic and discusses classic and modern theories of stratification. After identifying the key concepts...

The Anthem Companion to Immanuel Wallerstein explores many of the topics central to Wallerstein's understanding of the modern world-system and offers a comprehensive guide to the full range of his work.Immanuel Wallerstein, one of the most influential...

It's easy to blame the difficulties theatre now faces on the longest shutdown of stages since the mid-seventeenth century. But these problems began some time before a global pandemic. Decades of free market ideas, ten years of austerity, and the slow...

Presents an authoritative assessment of Norbert Elias (18971990), recognising Elias as one of the major contributors to the development of sociological tradition in the past century.The book presents an authoritative assessment of Norbert Elias...

The Anthem Companion to Niklas Luhmann is a major contribution to analysing the work of one of the greatest social theorists of the twentieth century. This companion provides the latest scholarly interpretations of a thinker who revolutionised the...

Peter L. Berger (19292017) was among the most prominent sociologists of the past half century.He co-authored with Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, considered to be a modern classic of social science. His work on social theory, the...

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...

With contributions from authorities on four continents, this edited volume provides a comprehensive survey of the life and work of David Ricardo (17721823), a major contributor to the British classical school of political economy. After an editorial...

In the past four or so decades, a significant amount of research efforts has been made to examine the rapid and constant social changes in China.However, most of the literature has focused on either macro- or micro-level issues, and what has not been...

Every American is a descendant of either a Native American, and enslaved person, an immigrant, or a refugee. This book is devoted to the fourth category. The essays in this volume will study the concept of refuge as well as historical forced displacement...

The Anthem Companion to mile 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...

Robert K. Merton's sociological work spans several decades: 1920s (childhood), 1930s (anomie, science, unanticipated), 1940s (housing studies, mass communications, structural-functional analysis, professions, focus groups), 1950s (reference groups),...

While the alt right and post-truth attitudes render democracy fragile, so does professional journalism when it reports on the most vulnerable subjects in society but rarely addresses them as the imagined audience. A dialogical critique of divisions in...

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...

The Anthem Companion to Philip Selznick is a collection of essays by renowned authors on the preeminent sociologist, Philip Selznick (19192010). He is widely recognized for his major contributions to a number of fields, including general sociology,...

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...

A study of the subjectivist approach to understand economic and social phenomenaSubjectivism and Interpretative Methodology in Theory and Practice uses the subjectivist approach originated in Max Weber's interpretation method, Alfred Schutz's...

"Network Persistence and the Axis of Hierarchy" 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...

A reexamination of the relationship between people's location in the social order and their personality. In The Development of a Theory of Social Structure and Personality Melvin Kohn, a pioneer in the cross-national, comparative and...

A collection of original interpretations of Alexis de Toequeville's major and lesser-known writings.The Anthem Companion to Alexis de Tocqueville contains original interpretations of Tocqueveille's major writings on democracy and revolution as well as...

The first major collection of writings on the life and work of Robert N. Bellah."The Anthem Companion to Robert N. Bellah" is the first major collection of essays on the life and work of Robert N. Bellah (1927-2013), one of the foremost sociologists of...

An exploration of the problem of social order in modern German urban history. Hometown Hamburg explores the role of institutionalised historical continuity in the collapse of urban democracy in the Weimar Republic.'The publication of...

Regimes of Happiness is a comparative and historical analysis of how human societies have articulated and enacted distinctive notions of human fulfilment, determining divergent moral, ethical and religious traditions and incommensurate and...

'Post-truth' was Oxford Dictionaries 2016 word of the year. While the term was coined by its disparagers in the light of the Brexit and US presidential campaigns, the roots of post-truth lie deep in the history of Western social and political theory...

Choice Award Outstanding Academic Title 2022Despite being repeatedly declared out of touch and outdated, Karl Marx's ideas have never mattered more. Marx Matters is an examination of how Marx remains more relevant than ever in dealing with contemporary...

Farewell to Work? presents the large process of capital's productive restructuring, triggered in the 1970s-a process with tendencies to both intellectualize labour power and increase the levels of the working class' precariousness on a global scale. This...

Andy Blunden's Hegel Marx & Vygotsky, Essays in Social Philosophy presents his novel approach to social theory in a series of essays. Blunden aims to use the cultural psychology of Lev Vygotsky and the Soviet Activity Theorists to renew Hegelian...

Taking an analytic and historical approach, this work develops and defends Althusserian critical theory. This theory, it is argued, produces knowledge of how a particular class of people, in a particular time, in a particular place, is dominated,...

In this incisive new study, Milan Zafirovski identifies and investigates the resurgence of capitalist dictatorship in contemporary society, especially after 2016. The book introduces the concept of capitalist dictatorship to the academic audience for the...

Constructing Social Research Objects is the third volume on theoretically driven methodology in the social sciences edited by Hkon Leiulfsrud and Peter Sohlberg. This essential new volume explains how to identify sociological research objects, and...

This volume offers a comprehensive introduction for activists, general readers, and specialists interested in the history and politics of revolutionary movements, uprisings, and revolts in the neoliberal era. As intertwined health and economic crises...

Following a remarkable epoch of greater dispersion of wealth and opportunity, we are inexorably returning towards a more feudal era marked by greater concentration of wealth and property, reduced upward mobility, demographic stagnation, and increased...

The works of F. G. Bailey (19242020) provide a seminal template for good ethnography. Central to this is Bailey's ability to conceptually connect the well-described micro-contexts of individual interactions to the macro-context of culture. Bailey's core...

De-centering queer theory seeks to reorient queer theory to a different conception of bodies and sexuality derived from Eastern European Marxism. The book articulates a contrast between the concept of the productive body, which draws its epistemology...

This book provides a concise overview of the social theoretical foundations of Critical Theory.The social-theoretical foundations of critical theory have crumbled. This is a result of the unchecked embrace of an aggressive variant of...

Surviving repression tells the story of the Muslim Brotherhood in the aftermath of the 2013 coup - the first book of its kind to analyse the movement's recent trajectories by showcasing the experiences of its individual members, analysing how their...

Refiguring childhood stages a series of encounters with biosocial power, which demarcates a specific zone of intensity within the more encompassing arena of biopower and biopolitics. Attentive to the contingency of childhood - the ways in which...

This book revisits the claim that a key dimension of cultural modernity - understood as a turn to the autonomy of the signs and the erasure of the 'face of man' - arose in the mid-nineteenth century. It presents an alternative to that obsession, focusing...

In Brexit Britain, talk of 'the economy' dominates; however, we know surprisingly little about how people understand this term. In the aftermath of the 2008 crash and decades of neoliberalism, how are understandings of 'the economy' changing, and is it...

Populism is a powerful force today, but its full scope has eluded the analytical tools of both orthodox and heterodox 'populism studies.' This book provides a valuable alternative perspective. It reconstructs in detail for the first...

Democracy in the twenty-first century faces a number of major challenges, populism, neoliberalism and globalisation being three of the most prominent. This book examines such challenges by investigating how the conditions of democratic statehood have...

Decolonizing Data yields valuable insights into the decolonisation of research methods by addressing and examining health inequalities from an anti-racist and anti-oppressive standpoint.Decolonizing Data explores how ongoing structures of colonisation...

From the perspective of Western modernity, humanity inhabits a disenchanted cosmos. Gods, spirits and ancestors have left us for a transcendent beyond, no longer living in our midst and being involved in all matters of everyday life from the trivial to...

An exploration of cuteness and its immense hold on us, from emojis and fluffy puppies to its more uncanny, subversive expressionsCuteness has taken the planet by storm. Global sensations Hello Kitty and Pokemon, the works of artists Takashi Murakami and...