Social theory

Sociology is about society, but what about people?

This book, first published in 1979, examines the little-studied forerunners of the Russian revolutionary movement - the Russian section of the First International.

Social Surveys (1949) examines a host of fact-finding studies, dealing mainly with working class poverty, and the associated nature and problems.

Questions of home and belonging have never been more topical.

This book introduces the reader to the concept of functional synchronization and how it operates on very different levels in psychological and social systems - from the emergence of thought to the formation of social relations and the structure of societies.

In an increasingly ethnically diverse society, debates about migration, community, cultural difference and social interaction have never been more pressing.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Moral Panics offers a comprehensive assemblage of cutting-edge critical and theoretical perspectives on the concept of moral panic.

First published in 1998, Social Assessment Theory and Practice provides an innovative and comprehensive theoretical and practical basis for social assessment.

Modernist Radicalism and its Aftermath investigates the ways in which Marx, Durkheim, Althusser and Habermas are all drawn towards foundationalism, and offers a framework for the analysis of foundationalism in social theory.

This book departs from approaches to truth in social science and ideas in philosophy that connect truth to the ability of language to fulfil certain 'real-world' conditions of objectivity.

This book explains how the Columbia model of sociology, which was based on the methodology of P.

This book explores and explains the reasons why the idea of universal history, a form of teleological history which holds that all peoples are travelling along the same path and destined to end at the same point, persists in political thought.

Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek have become two of the dominant voices in contemporary philosophy and critical theory.

This book is rooted in an epistemological approach to sociology in which the boundaries between Western and non-Western sociologies are acknowledged and built on.

Offering a comprehensive overview of contemporary theoretical and programmatic issues in the fields of sustainability, culture, communication, development and social change, this book explores the relationship between communication and sustainability from a social change perspective.

Weber's Rationalism and Modern Society rediscovers Max Weber for the twenty-first century.

These two volumes present the most important recent developments in the institutional theory of culture and demonstrate their practical applications.

This volume outlines the methods appropriate to an English School understanding of international relations and their assumptions about how knowledge of the social is gained.

This book critically explores Global South perspectives, examining marginalised voices and issues whilst challenging the supremacy of Global North perspectives in literature.

Raising to the challenge of how to grasp such forms of inequalities that are mediated affectively, Affective Inequalities in Intimate Relationships focuses on subtle inequalities that are shaped in everyday affective encounters.

This book, first published in 1989, addresses an issue that stood at the centre of sociological concern - the changing character of industrial societies.

Examining how people alter or customize various dimensions of their temporal experience, this volume discovers how we resist external sources of temporal constraint or structure.

This book examines how, in response to crises, law tends to construct singular 'events' that obscure the underlying structural causes that any adequate response needs to acknowledge and address.

This book highlights how online networking offers potential for new forms of activist mobilizing, repertoires, participatory democracy, direct action, fundraising, and civic engagement.

Humanism is appealed to today whenever we want to tackle the conditions of dehumanization in the contemporary world.

The book is an attempt to bring together what are often seen as incommensurable scientific and philosophical positions.

The concept of 'mobility' has sparked lively academic debate in recent years.

In The Value of Comparison Peter van der Veer makes a compelling case for using comparative approaches in the study of society and for the need to resist the simplified civilization narratives popular in public discourse and some social theory.

Professor Duverger at last provides the student with an overall view of the methodology of the social sciences.

Anthony Cohen makes a distinct break with earlier approaches to the study of community, which treated the subject in largely structural terms.

By using a linguistic and anthropological framework, this pioneering book offers a natural history of intensity in the Anthropocene.

Subcultures have long captured the imagination of sociologists and the public alike.

A wide-ranging cultural history centered around the concepts of real estate, the family home, and the American dream, and how they evolved over the years, Home Ownership in America: A Socio-Cultural History of Housing in the United States traces narratives around home ownership from the 1920s to today.

Southern social movements have played an important role in shaping world history and politics.

While Georg Simmel is widely known, the impact of his work has been far from straightforward, with the ways in which his ideas have been taken up by later thinkers as complex and diverse as the ideas themselves.

Humanistic theory for more than the past 100 years is marked by extensive attention to practice and practices.

Encountering the Past within the Present: Modern Experiences of Time examines different encounters with the past from within the present - whether as commemoration, nostalgia, silence, ghostly haunting or combinations thereof.

This book focuses on the important work of Karl Mannheim by demonstrating how his theoretical conception of a reflexive sociology took shape as a collaborative empirical research programme.

In the face of complex, interwoven, planet-scale problems, many cite the need for more integrated knowledge-especially across the natural and social sciences.

This book examines the contribution social theory can make to understanding different human rights which operate in a variety of settings.

In our global, multicultural world, how we understand and relate to those who are different from us has become central to the politics of immigration in western societies.

The world is becoming more transnational.

In this book, first published in 1992, the author examines the polemic fought by German Social-Democratic Party leaders and intellectuals Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein against what they perceived to be misunderstandings of Marxism propagated by members of the Social-Democratic Federation (SDF) in England and by the socialist leader Wilhelm Liebknecht in Germany.

There is a saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, implying that beauty is subjective.

Individuumszentrierte Mensch-Computer-Interaktion gipfelt in Visionen wie denen der sogenannten "Companion-Systeme".

This book explores the role human rights law plays in the formation, and protection, of our personal identities.

This book examines contemporary urban sharing mobilities, such as shared and public forms of everyday urban mobility.

This volume advocates a shift from the social constructivism found in the work of Thomas Luckmann and Peter Berger, to a communicative constructivism that acknowledges communication as an embodied form of action in its own right, according to which social actors, in engaging in communicative action, construct a material social reality that guides, delimits, and enables actions.