Social theory

The Penn School of Social Policy and Practice enjoys a reputation as Penn's social justice school, for its faculty actively strives to translate the highest ideals into workable programs that better people's lives.

How crime and security are governed has become a critical issue in criminology over the first quarter of the twenty-first century.

With contributions from experts in the field of sociology of law, this book provides an overview of current perspectives on socio-legal studies.

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

'In this remarkable collection of essays, Holton and Turner demonstrate that Parsonian sociology addresses the most central problems of our time - issues of sickness and health, power and inequality, the nature of capitalism and its possible alternatives.

By analyzing the relationship between lesbian and gay movements and the state, this ground-breaking book addresses two interconnected issues: to what extent is the lesbian and gay movement influenced by the state and, to a lesser extent, whether the lesbian and gay movement has somehow influenced the state, for instance by altering forms of sexual regulation.

While the need for effective action toward a greener and socially inclusive economy has long been evident, health promotion in the context of sustainable development has faltered.

Until today, Western, European sociology contributes to the social reality of colonial modernity, and gender knowledge is a paradigmatic example of it.

The history of European economic thought has long been written by those seeking to prove or disprove the truth-value of the theories they describe.

Learn about how we organise our society in The Sociology Book.

This edited collection brings together scholars who draw on phenomenological approaches to understand the experiences of young people growing up under contemporary conditions of globalization.

One of the strengths of this book is that it expresses occupational segregation from multidimensional viewpoints using correspondence analysis.

Drawn from years of archive material, this collection, first published in 1993, portrays the voices and experience of over sixty gay men from all walks of life.

This book consists of a single essay that speculates on the question what is housing?

On the Genealogy of Critique intervenes into both contemporary academic debates on critique, and today's mainstream criticism, by reflecting upon the relationship between criticality and social change in the age of post-politics.

The human life course is filled with and subject to a wide range of personal difficulties, many of which are shared by others.

This book examines the phenomenon of prime time soap operas on Indian television.

In the wake of an unparalleled housing crisis at the end of the Second World War, Glasgow Corporation rehoused the tens of thousands of private tenants who were living in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions in unimproved Victorian slums.

This 2002 book studies the impact of the mobile phone on contemporary society.

Many of us take for granted that what we perceive is a completely accurate representation of the world around us.

One of the main features of the contemporary environmental crisis is that no one has a clear idea of what is going on.

Drawing on a range of theorists and competing perspectives, this substantially updated and expanded second edition places social theory at the heart of social work pedagogy.

Showcasing fuzzy set theory, this book highlights the enormous potential of fuzzy logic in helping to analyse the complexity of a wide range of socio-economic patterns and behaviour.

The thoroughly revised and updated second edition of the Routledge Handbook of Cultural Sociology provides an unparalleled overview of sociological and related scholarship on the complex relations of culture to social structures and everyday life.

Two main criteria have guided the selection and presentation of the material for this text-book.

First published in 1985, this book provides a comprehensive reappraisal of the diverse Communist development strategies that shaped the twentieth century.

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

Science fiction is perhaps the most effective genre to explore the concerns of the present whilst reflecting on the possibilities of the future.

The concept of social capital refers to the ways in which people make use of their social networks in "e;getting ahead.

Connecting Practices develops a distinctive method of conceptualising significant trends and global issues including environmental sustainability and inequalities in wealth and health, arguing that these are outcomes of the ways in which social practices interact and combine across space and time.

The Origins of Criminological Theory offers a new sort of theory textbook, both in content and concept.

This handbook provides a comprehensive view of the field of the sociology of gender.

One of the key scientific challenges is the puzzle of human cooperation.

A comprehensive guide for management and social science researchers to achieve a deeper understanding of the nature of explanation.

This edited volume examines the critical issues of the 21st century through the prism of Ernest Gellner's work.

This book analyses some of the key problems explored in Paul Virilio's theorising on war and security.

Engaging with the idea that the world reveals not one, but many routes to modernity, this volume explores the role of religion in the emergence of multiple forms of modernity, which evolve according to specific cultural conditions and interpretations of the 'modern project'.

Photography as Social Transformation resituates the practices of photography within contemporary sociological thinking.

Crisis and Control explains how neoliberal transformations of political and economic systems are militarising the policing of protest, based on a compelling empirical study of police agencies and practices from 1995 until the present.

Originally published in 1985 The Role of Voluntary Organisations in Social Welfare considers the voluntary sector as a provider of social welfare.

In this colletion of essays the eminent social scientist, Dr.

Following on from Roy Bhaskar's first two books, A Realist Theory of Science and The Possibility of Naturalism, Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, establishes the conception of social science as explanatory-and thence emancipatory-critique.

This volume engages with the work of Heidegger to argue that the modern environmental crisis is fundamentally a crisis of understanding Life, resulting from the symbolic codification of the world from the Logos of Greek philosophy to the rationality of the modern world and resulting in a metaphysics that privileges ontological thinking on the "e;question of being"e; over the environmental question and the concern for the conditions of life.

In this volume Mayo discusses the Hawthorne experiments, relating the findings about human relations within the Hawthorne plant to the social environment in the surrounding Chicago area.

Die hier wieder zugänglich gemachte zweibändige Biographie Friedrich Engels‘ von Gustav Mayer gilt bis heute als bedeutendes Standardwerk.

A variety of theoretical approaches to the study of culture have emphasised the significance of the creation, maintenance, and the transgression of boundaries to identities - be they social, cultural, national or personal.

The following anthology delivers sound analysis to the theoretical classification of the current societal phenomenon - between innovative, world changing and yet disruptive technology, as well as societal and cultural transformation.