Social theory

This book is about the harnessing of social capital, formalized as village or community organizations, to guide and facilitate collective action for attaining poverty alleviation in particular and enhancing community well-being in general.

This festschrift commemorates the legacy of UK-based Portuguese sociologist Herminio Martins (1934-2015).

Since the structuralist debates of the 1970s the field of textual analysis has largely remained the preserve of literary theorists.

Exploring notions of the person through a wide range of anthropological literature, Cathrine Degnen analyses how personhood is built, affirmed, and maintained during various life stages and via multiple cultural forms and practices.

As a radical critique of theoretical sociological orthodoxy, The Dominant Ideology Thesis has generated controversy since first publication.

The Routledge Handbook for Global South Studies on Subjectivities provides a series of exemplary studies conjoining perspectives from Asian, African, and Latin American Studies on subjectivity in the Global South as a central category of social and cultural analysis.

The Politics of Intersectional Practice has been shortlisted for the 2025 BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize.

As a founder and managing director of Global Business Network, James Ogilvy helped develop the technique of scenario planning, which has become an integral part of strategic thinking in both business and government.

This introductory text combines study skills and research methods to provide students with an invaluable guide to the techniques, practical skills and methods of study that will enable them to achieve success in their academic courses and become effective 'students of society'.

A systematic and critical assessment of the work of Michael Mann, one of the most influential sociologists of recent decades.

A reinterpretation of world politics drawing on Chinese cultural and philosophical traditions to argue for a focus on relations amongst actors, rather than on the actors individually.

This volume, originally published in 1889 with this edition published in 1912, contains Carpenter's famous essays on civilisation and his theory that it is a disease of mankind that must be cured.

The field of composition theory has emerged as part of the intellectual turmoil and set of pedagogical debates which have beset higher education for the last four decades and is now revolutionizing the theory and praxis of higher education.

In recent decades, the historical social sciences have moved away from deterministic perspectives and increasingly embraced the interpretive analysis of historical process and social and political change.

The concepts of practice and institution are of longstanding importance across the social sciences.

Perspectivism: A Contribution to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences advances the philosophy of perspectivism, showing how its capacity to assess competing views of a particular concept by approaching them as different 'sides' of a multi-dimensional object supports a concept of 'adequate' rather than 'absolute' truth.

In the latter part of the C20th, a series of seminal books were written which examined Los Angeles by the likes of Reyner Banham, Mike Davis, Edward Soja, Allen Scott, Michael Dear, Frederick Jameson, Umberto Eco, Bernard-Henri Levy, and Jean Baudrillard which have been hugely influential in thinking about cities more broadly.

This third volume of Michael Mann''s analytical history of social power focuses on the interrelated development of capitalism, nation-states and empires.

China has been growing at over ten per cent annually since 1978, but this has only come to very widespread notice in the past decade.

Utopian thought and experimental approaches to societal organization have been rare in the last decades of planning and politics.

Although human lives towards the second half of the twentieth century became increasingly mediated by objects and artifacts and have depended heavily on the functioning of technical systems, materiality in a broad sense became relatively marginalized as a topic of research interest.

In this moving and thoughtful book, Kathleen Woodward explores the politics and poetics of the emotions, focusing on American culture since the 1960s.

This volume explores the potential of employing a relational paradigm for the purposes of interdisciplinary exchange.

Social theories of the new cosmopolitanism have called attention to the central importance of translation, in areas such as global democracy, human rights and social movements, but translation studies has not engaged systematically with theories of cosmopolitanism.

Public space, both literally and figuratively, is foundationally important to political life.

This book explores two themes in connection with contemporary capitalism: infrastructural capitalism as the most advanced phase of a modernity, of which the "e;workman"e; or homo faber is the embodiment, who exists within an infrastructure whose logic of connectivity is aimed at value extraction; and a landscape of ruins - in the form of symbolic misery, the Anthropocene and a process of refeudalisation - that the homo faber has been piling up around himself as a result.

This book assesses the value and relevance of the literature on complex systems to policy-making, contributing to both social theory and policy analysis.

We are often told that we are "e;living in an information society"e; or that we are "e;information workers.

Current research on social capital tends to focus on an economic reading of social relations.

The influential sociologist and social theorist Zygmunt Bauman was a prolific commentator on contemporary social life.

It has been over 60 years since David Riesman's most famous work The Lonely Crowd brought him international acclaim.

In this influential work, first published in English in 1963, Durkheim and Mauss claim that the individual mind is capable of classification and they seek the origin of the 'classificatory function' in society.

This volume provides a comprehensive account of the European Union's social role in the world, assessing the EU's ability to shape the social aspect of globalization from both law and political science perspectives.

In this engaging new book, Gerda Reith explores key theoretical concepts in the sociology of consumption.

This book critically engages the emerging field of global animal law from the perspective of an intersectional ethical framework.

Jean-Francois Lyotard is still considered to be the father of postmodernism.

In this book, Ibrahim employs Bourdieu's key concepts in order to explain the complex dynamics of social movements by detailing the key stages of development of, and ideological conflict between, 21st century British anti-capitalist organizations, and their interactions with wider social and political forces.

Craig Martin addresses the transgressive or deviant aspects of design: design that straddles the divide between the licit and illicit, the legal and illegal, in a variety of ways.

Seven decades since Indian Independence, education takes the centre stage in every major discussion on development, especially when we talk about social exclusion, Dalits and reservations today.

This book presents an innovative framework for conceptualising families as complex systems and for understanding and supporting positive change, adaptation and resilience.

Employing three methods of assessing meaning, this book demonstrates that the thousands of human identities in English coalesce into groups that are recognizable as role sets in the contemporary social institutions of economy, kinship, religion, polity, law, education, medicine, sport, and arts.

Economies of Death: Economic Logics of Killable Life and Grievable Death examines the economic logic involved in determining whose lives and deaths come to matter and why.

New Frontiers in Socialization

There is increasing academic interest in how Pierre Bourdieu's sociology can be applied to management and organization studies (MOS).

Durkheim is one of the founding fathers of modern sociology and a key figure in the development of social theory.