This series presents cutting-edge developments and debates within the field of sociology. It provides a broad range of case studies and the latest theoretical perspectives, while covering a variety of topics, theories and issues from around the world. It is not confined to any particular school of thought.
Edited
By Margo DeMello
July 16, 2015
For thousands of years, in the myths and folktales of people around the world, animals have spoken in human tongues. Western and non-Western literary and folkloric traditions are filled with both speaking animals, some of whom even narrate or write their own autobiographies. Animals speak, famously...
By Cate Watson
June 24, 2015
While there have been many sociological and psychological studies of humor, few can claim to be funny. Humor may be regarded as a legitimate topic for social scientists, but in general, they present their research rather seriously. In academia, humor tends to be trivialized and dismissed. This is ...
Edited
By Mathieu Hilgers, Eric Mangez
June 23, 2015
Bourdieu’s theory of social fields is one of his key contributions to social sciences and humanities. However, it has never been subjected to genuine critical examination. This book fills that gap and offers a clear and wide-ranging introduction to the theory. It includes a critical discussion of ...
By David Radford
June 23, 2015
Religious Identity and Social Change offers a macro and micro analysis of the dynamics of rapid social and religious change occurring within the Muslim world. Drawing on rich ethnographic and quantitative research in Kyrgyzstan, Central Asia, David Radford provides theoretical insight into the...
By Luigi Berzano, Carlo Genova
June 04, 2015
Lifestyles and subcultures are tools through which people say – to themselves and to others – who they think they are, who they think they are similar to, and who they think they are different from. Lifestyles and subcultures are ways which people adopt to look at their own lives, and to try to ...
By Jürgen Gerhards, Holger Lengfeld
May 01, 2015
Since 2008, the European Union has been affected by one of the most severe crises in the history of Europe. This book builds on the work of Jürgen Habermas to answer the key question: is Europe strong enough to overcome the recent crisis? Arguing that recovery can only take place if the citizens of...
By Marisol Sandoval
May 21, 2015
The corporate and the social are crucial themes of our times. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, both individual lives and society were shaped by capitalist crisis and the rise of social media. But what marks the distinctively social character of "social media"? And how does it relate...
Edited
By Frane Adam, Hans Westlund
May 21, 2015
Innovation - the process of obtaining, understanding, applying, transforming, managing and transferring knowledge - is a result of human collaboration, but it has become an increasingly complex process, with a growing number of interacting parties involved. Lack of innovation is not necessarily ...
Edited
By Janet M. Wilmoth, Andrew S. London
May 21, 2015
This edited volume provides a comprehensive and critical review of what we know about military service and the life course, what we don’t know, and what we need to do to better understand the role of military service in shaping people's lives. It demonstrates that the military, like colleges and ...
Edited
By Regev Nathansohn, Dennis Zuev
May 21, 2015
This collection of original articles deals with two intertwined general questions: what is the visual sphere, and what are the means by which we can study it sociologically? These questions serve as the logic for dividing the book into two sections, the first ("Visualizing the Social, Sociologizing...
By Christopher S. Swader
May 21, 2015
Modern capitalism favors values that undermine our face-to-face bonds with friends and family members. Focusing on the post-communist world, and comparing it to more "developed" societies, this book reveals the mixed effects of capitalist culture on interpersonal relationships. While most observers...
By Tomas Marttila
May 21, 2015
This book provides an empirical study of the increasing importance of the concept of the entrepreneur in the context of the neoliberal cultural paradigm. Using the theoretical framework of the post-structural discourse theory and methods of qualitative discourse analysis, the book describes the ...