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 Roman Williams
May 06, 2015
The potential of visual research methods in the sociology of religion is vast, but largely untapped. This comes as a surprise, however, given the visual, symbolic, and material nature of religion and spirituality. Evidence of religious faith and practice is materially present in everything from ...
Edited
By Luk van Langenhove
April 23, 2015
Rom Harré has pushed the boundaries of our thinking about people and societies and has challenged the orthodox philosophy of science and social psychology. His countless books and articles have inspired generations of scholars in philosophy, psychology, linguistics, cognitive science and social ...
By Mark Featherstone
April 23, 2015
In the 1850s the social and political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville spoke of ‘a virus of a new and unknown kind’ to explain the inexplicable failure of the French Revolution. This book uses Tocqueville’s idea of the virus to explore the fatal relationship between the concepts of utopia and ...
Edited
By Henk Flap, Beate Völker
April 09, 2015
The idea of a social capital research program has become increasingly significant within the social sciences. This collection of essays contributes to a theoretical integration as well as standardization of measurement instruments and co-ordination of empirical research on the significance of ...
By Judith R. Halasz
January 28, 2015
The iconoclastic ingenuity of bohemians, from Gerard de Nerval to Allen Ginsberg, continually captivates the popular imagination; the worlds of fashion, advertising, and even real estate all capitalize on the alternative appeal of bohemian style. Persistently overlooked, however, is bohemians' ...
By Hanna Katharina Göbel
December 22, 2014
How do urban ruins provoke their cultural revaluation? This book offers a unique sociological analysis about the social agencies of material culture and atmospheric knowledge of buildings in the making. It draws on ethnographic research in Berlin along the former Palace of the Republic, the E-Werk ...
Edited
By David Holmes
December 22, 2014
This book examines the interrelationship between telecommunications and tourism in shaping the nature of space, place and the urban at the end of the twentieth century. They discuss how these agents are instrumental in the production of homogenous world-spaces, and how these, in turn, presuppose ...
By Lauren Jade Martin
December 06, 2014
This book examines the United States as a destination for international consumers of assisted fertility services, including egg donation, surrogacy, and sex selection. Based on interviews conducted with fertility industry insiders who market their services to an international clientele in three of ...
By Robert Shanafelt, Nathan W. Pino
December 06, 2014
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, including "deviants" who are born evil and ...
Edited
By Maggie O'Neill, Brian Roberts, Andrew Sparkes
October 27, 2014
Rooted in a long and diverse genealogy, biographical approaches have developed from a focus upon a single story, a ‘life story’ and personal documents (e.g. diaries), to encompass (more routinely) autobiographical secondary and archival research and analysis - as well as multi-media, arts based ...
Edited
By Lee Marshall
November 10, 2014
The recording industry has been a major focus of interest for cultural commentators throughout the twenty-first century. As the first major content industry to have its production and distribution patterns radically disturbed by the internet, the recording industry’s content, attitudes and ...
By Bianca Freire-Medeiros
November 10, 2014
Touring Poverty addresses a highly controversial practice: the transformation of impoverished neighbourhoods into valued attractions for international tourists. In the megacities of the Global South, selected and idealized aspects of poverty are being turned into a tourist commodity for consumption...