Search

Das Leitbild »Nachhaltigkeit« wirkt in nahezu alle gesellschaftlichen Felder hinein. Es prägt politische, ökonomische und wissenschaftliche Debatten ebenso wie Praktiken der Einzelnen und die Prozesse strukturellen Wandels. Der Begriff ist allgemein positiv besetzt - wird allerdings sehr verschieden verstanden, teils auch instrumentalisiert. Die Beiträge des Bandes versuchen Klarheit zu schaffen und befragen das Thema Nachhaltigkeit aus einer Vielzahl soziologischer Perspektiven: Welche sozialen Dynamiken sind mit Nachhaltigkeit verbunden und welche Diskurse? Sie thematisieren u.a. Mobilität, Arbeit, Religion und Zukunft und nehmen dabei unterschiedliche soziologische Theorien zum Ausgangspunkt. Mit Beiträgen von Frank Adloff, Thomas Barth, Katharina Block, Stefan Böschen, Nikolaus Buschmann, Sascha Dickel, Benjamin Görgen, Anna Henkel, Fabian Huber, Marc C. Hübscher, Jens Köhrsen, Sighard Neckel, Angela Pohlmann, Jedrzej Sulmowski und Björn Wendt.

Die Coronakrise wirkt als Seismograph der gegenwärtigen Gesellschaft. Die Widersprüche und Pathologien werden unmittelbar sichtbar und insbesondere die gesellschaftsprägende Kraft der Digitalisierung führt deutlich vor Augen, dass Gestaltung das Gebot der Stunde ist. Durch die Pandemie werden Verunsicherungen gesteigert, ökonomisch-soziale Verwerfungen verschärft und individuelle Enttäuschungen produziert. Der neue Blickwinkel kann aber auch positive Funktionen haben und den Diskurs zu sozialen Innovationen beleben. Hierzu gehört die Revitalisierung staatlicher Interventionen, die ebenfalls bei Transformationsprojekten wie der Energiewende oder den demografischen Herausforderungen gefordert ist. Die Pandemie kann so als Beschleuniger von Prozessen gesehen werden, die sich bereits im Wandel befinden. Hierzu zählt auch der Wertigkeitsverlust marktlicher Regulierungen. Die Zukunftsfähigkeit einer Gesellschaft wie auch wirtschaftliche Wertschöpfungen hängen von einerfunktionierenden staatlichen Infrastruktur und öffentlicher Daseinsvorsorge ab. Die Relevanz eines schützenden Staates und zivilgesellschaftlicher Organisationsformen, wie sie sich etwa in den solidarischen Hilfen manifestierten, sind als Narrative anerkannt. Deshalb dürften Neujustierungen der zentralen Steuerungsressourcen Zivilgesellschaft, Staat und Markt Auftrieb erfahren.

Transgression and Its Limits is a long overdue collection that reads the complex relationship between artistic transgressions and the limits of law and the subject. In mid-twentieth century theoretical understandings of transgressive culture, it is the existence of the limit that guarantees the possibility and success of the transgression. While the limit calls for obedience, it also tempts with the possibility of violation. To breach the limits of the acceptable is to simultaneously define them. However, this classical understanding of transgression may no longer apply under the conditions of post-modernity, late-capitalism, and the simulated or empty transgressions that this period of the simulacra encourages. Context becomes paramount in reading the myriad forms of transgression that encompass politics, aesthetics and the ethics of the obscene; while a range of theoretical perspectives are employed in order to elucidate the economies at work underneath the seemingly transgressive act. The essays selected include explorations of transgression in cinema, photography, art, law, music, philosophy, technology, and both classical and contemporary literature and drama. Professor Fred Botting's (co-author of Bataille and The Tarantinian Ethics) analysis of transgression from Bataille, to Baudrillard and Ballard compliments the collection's concerns about the status of transgression. Aside from fourteen critical essays on topics such as early-modern drama, George Bataille, J. G. Ballard, the female necrophilic, “torture-porn” cinema, and the art of Robert Mapplethorpe and Salvador Dali, there is also a new discussion of transgression between novelist Iain Banks and Professor Roderick Watson (Emeritus at the University of Stirling). With its focus on the paradoxical nature of the impulse to transgress, as well at its wide-ranging historical and artistic concerns, Transgression and Its Limits is a landmark book in a rapidly developing scholarly field.

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.What does it mean to be critical? When we are told that civilisation is facing extinction, does the idea of critique still hold any value? Today, more than ever, we seem to be critical of everything. Yet, paradoxically, our criticism exerts very little political influence. Taking this problematique as its starting point, this book reclaims the transformative potential of critique, challenging the common assumptions about criticality. It presents a counter-history of criticism, demonstrating how the modern notion of critical subjectivity embodies an imperative to the securitisation of the status quo. In elaborating on a range of contemporary critical (dis)positions, the book advocates new ways of thinking about critique and social change. Through this, it equips the reader with analytical tools useful for thinking the way out of our post-political predicament.This book is of relevance to anyone concerned with social change. Particularly, it will be of use to academics, postgraduates and advanced undergraduate students working in the areas of sociology, politics, philosophy and cultural studies.

Drawing on a wide range of social theory, as well as empirical inputs from studies of work, neighbourhoods, events, meeting places and online self-help groups, this book suggests that communal forms are constructed on the basis of communicative, material, biographic-cultural, practice-based, and situational layers. The concept of community has long provided an important point of departure for the discipline of sociology, with the conflicting conceptions of community before and into modernity embodied in Ferdinand Tönnies'Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft and in Emile Dürkheim's Mechanical and Organic Solidarity, providing the focus for debate. Other contributors have maintained an interest in communities as communions, interactional competencies, symbolic identification, tribal connection, and more recently communication. Drawing on such theoretical contributions, as well as empirical inputs, the authors develop a more nuanced concept of community, based on the notion that it is constructed from several different layers. This concept is then presented as a sociological toolbox with which to fuel approaches to examining societal challenges and change. Providing a fresh approach to a core sociological question that also has a wider societal relevance, Communal Forms will be of interest to scholars and students concerned with social issues, and for those with a more general interest in community, society and its development over time.

In The Rhythm of Modernization, Raül Tormos analyses the pace at which belief systems change across the developed world during the modernization process. It is often assumed that value change follows the slow rhythm of generational replacement. This book, however, reports trends that contradict this assumption in the field of values. Challenging Inglehart's modernization theory, the transition from traditional to modern values happens much quicker than predicted. Many “baby-boomers” who were church-going, morally conservative materialists when they were young, become unchurched and morally tolerant postmaterialists in their later years. Using surveys from multiple countries over many years, and applying cutting-edge statistical techniques, this book shows how citizens quickly adapt their belief systems to new circumstances throughout their lives.

The driving cultural force of that form of life we call ‘modern'is the desire to make the world controllable. Yet it is only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world – only then do we feel touched, moved and alive. A world that is fully known, in which everything has been planned and mastered, would be a dead world. Our lives are played out on the border between what we can control and that which lies outside our control. But because we late-modern human beings seek to make the world controllable, we tend to encounter the world as a series of objects that we have to conquer, master or exploit. And precisely because of this, ‘life,'the experience of feeling alive and truly encountering the world, always seems to elude us. This in turn leads to frustration, anger and even despair, which then manifest themselves in, among other things, acts of impotent political aggression. For Rosa, to encounter the world and achieve resonance with it requires us to be open to that which extends beyond our control. The outcome of this process cannot be predicted, and this is why moments of resonance are always concomitant with moments of uncontrollability. This short book – the sequel to Rosa's path-breaking work on social acceleration and resonance – will be of great interest students and scholars in sociology and the social sciences and to anyone concerned with the nature of modern social life.

The rise of Far Right populism poses major challenges for communities, exacerbating divisions, hate speech and hate crime. This book shows how communities and social justice movements can effectively tackle these issues, working together to mitigate their underlying causes and more immediate manifestations. Showing that community-based learning is integral to the development of strategies to promote more hopeful rather than more hateful futures, Mayo demonstrates how, through popular education and participatory action research, communities can develop their own understandings of their problems. Using case studies that illustrate education approaches in practice, she shows how communities can engineer democratic forms of social change.

This book uncovers how power operates around the world, and how it can be resisted or transformed through empowered collective action and social leadership. The stakes have never been higher. Recent years have seen a rapid escalation of inequalities, the rise of new global powers and corporate interests, increasing impunity of human rights violations, suppression of civil society, and a re-shaping of democratic processes by post-truth, populist and nationalist politics.Rather than looking at power through the lenses of agency or structure alone, this book views power and empowerment as complex and multidimensional societal processes, defined by pervasive social norms, conditions, constraints and opportunities. Bridging theory and practice, the book explores real-world applications using a selection of frameworks, tools, case studies, examples, resources and reflections from experience to support actors to analyse their positioning and align themselves with progressive social forces.Compiled with social change practitioners, students and scholars in mind, Power, Empowerment and Social Change is the perfect volume for anyone involved in politics, international development, sociology, human rights and environmental justice who is looking for fresh insights for transforming power in favour of relatively less powerful people.

The fourteen lectures and essays that make up this volume deal mainly, though not exclusively, with Africa, and among the topics discussed are land tenure, chieftainship,'clientship', messianic movement, witchcraft, and'race, tribalism and nationalism'.

The beginning of the 21st century is characterized by fundamental societal changes: in addition to changing demographics and the globalization of economic flows, the transformation of an industrial-Fordistic society to a non-industrial service society is significant. For more than twenty years, these large-scale trends and their inherent chances and risks have been the topic of vivid discussions in all the social sciences. Keywords are ‘risk-society', ‘post-industrial society', ‘knowledge-society'and ‘information-society'. The implications of these developments are also reflected in the challenge to the traditional, hegemonic and rational understanding of subjectivity. Against the background of these great social changes, several factors indicate that the forms of self-regulation or self-governance are also being transformed. A one-sided consideration of the homo economicus and its varieties would underestimate, for example, certain non-rational forms of self-perception and self-reflection, as well as non-rational practices of self-management and subjectivation. The aim of this anthology is to discuss the question, to what extent the relationship to oneself (its regulation with respect to its governance) and the relationship towards others in (post-)modern societies are being transformed. The perspective of Norbert Elias'process sociology as well as Michel Foucault's post-structural theory seem especially promising, as they appear to have been the first researchers consistently and convincingly analysing the ‘nature'of the individual by reflecting upon its long-term historical process of transformation. Both have different visions but similar concerns: they deal with structures of control that exist within society and within the individual.

Cet ouvrage explore et propose des analyses de processus parfois compliqués qui affectent les métiers et le gouvernement des collectifs. De quelle manière l'environnement bouscule-t-il les collectifs humains? Comment certaines professions (agriculteurs, acteurs du tourisme, professions médicales) se remettent-elles en question pour tenir compte de l'environnement? Quelles dynamiques de collectifs, de citoyens ou de territoires oeuvrent pour entrer en transition (agriculture urbaine, coopératives énergétiques, territoires en transition, offre locale de tourisme, mouvement de sobriété heureuse)? Quels imaginaires habitent ces collectifs et conduisent les scientifiques eux-mêmes à questionner leurs postures et collaborations?

The social and economic systems of any country are influenced by a range of factors including income and education. As such, it is vital to examine how these factors are creating opportunities to improve both the economy and the lives of people within these countries. Socio-Economic Development: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications provides a critical look at the process of social and economic transformation based on environmental and cultural factors including income, skills development, employment, and education. Highlighting a range of topics such as economics, social change, and e-governance, this multi-volume book is designed for policymakers, practitioners, city-development planners, academicians, government officials, and graduate-level students interested in emerging perspectives on socio-economic development.

This is the eBook of the printed book and may not include any media, website access codes, or print supplements that may come packaged with the bound book. For courses in Social Problems A straightforward approach that helps students see the relevance of social problems to their livesRevel™ Social Problems: A Down-to-Earth Approach presents clear analysis of the major social problems we face today, at home and abroad, with an emphasis on how these issues are relevant to students'lives. Utilizing a consistent chapter structure and approaching problematic issues from various sides, author Jim Henslin encourages critical thinking as he seeks to instill in students a lasting sociological perspective — one they will take out of the classroom and into their everyday lives. The 13th Edition offers thoroughly updated data as well as examples of contemporary social problems drawn from recent headlines in order to emphasize the relevance of the course to students'daily lives. Revel is Pearson's newest way of delivering our respected content. Fully digital and highly engaging, Revel replaces the textbook and gives students everything they need for the course. Informed by extensive research on how people read, think, and learn, Revel is an interactive learning environment that enables students to read, practice, and study in one continuous experience — for less than the cost of a traditional textbook. NOTE: Revel is a fully digital delivery of Pearson content. This ISBN is for the standalone Revel access card. In addition to this access card, you will need a course invite link, provided by your instructor, to register for and use Revel.

This is the eBook of the printed book and may not include any media, website access codes, or print supplements that may come packaged with the bound book. This print textbook is available for students to rent for their classes. The Pearson print rental program provides students with affordable access to learning materials, so they come to class ready to succeed. For courses in sociology of gender and sociology of women. Interdisciplinary look at women and gender issues Thinking about Women: Sociological Perspectives on Sex and Gender introduces you to gender and how it operates in society, providing a clear-headed assessment of how the lives of both women and men have changed over the years. The text explores the social construct of gender, its ubiquitousness in modern society, and, importantly, how it intersects with other social factors: race, class, sexuality, age, religion, nationality, and others. In the 11th Edition, a major focus is put on gender in major social institutions, including the economy and the criminal justice system.

Interfacing Ourselves consists of new work that examines digital life on three levels: individuals and digital identity; relationships routinely intertwining digital and physical connections; and broader institutional and societal realities that define the context of living in the digital age. A key focus is what it means in varied social arenas when most individuals live as co-present or multi-present—simultaneously engaged in digital and physical space—alone and with others. Topics include how: digital life contributes to well-being; individuals experience digital dependency; a smartphone is more than a smartphone; netiquette reveals social change; some online communities become prosocial salient havens while others reinforce social inequality; Millennials build intimacy; Latinx do familismo; and digital surveillance and big data redefine consumerism, advocacy, and civic engagement. Six chapters incorporate insights from hourly journals of Millennials undergoing a period of digital abstinence. Other chapters draw from surveys, digital auto-ethnography, content analysis, and other methods to explore digital life at the level of individual and interactive experience, and at a broader institutional and societal level. Ultimately, the book presents the need for living a mindful digital life by developing greater awareness as an individual, a social being, and a netizen and citizen.

'If you really want to set yourself free, you should read a book - preferably this one.'Observer In surrealist artist Paul Klee's The Twittering Machine, the bird-song of a diabolical machine acts as bait to lure humankind into a pit of damnation. Leading political writer and broadcaster Richard Seymour argues that this is a chilling metaphor for relationship with social media. Former social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction-machine. Like drug addicts, we are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share. We write to the machine as individuals, but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and frailties into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience.Through journalism, psychoanalytic reflection and interviews with users, developers, security experts and others, Seymour probes the human side of this machine, asking what we're getting out of it, and what we're getting into.

This book, first published in 1974, argues that the counter culture is not the outcome of alienation, but of opportunity, being the result of a new generational consciousness, an openness which has characterised industrial societies of the West since the 1950s. Its roots lie in economic expansion and population movement and growth, the same factors that are cited in the decline of religiousness.

This collection brings together Daniel Bell's best work in essay form. It deals with a variety of topics: technology and culture, religion and personal identity, intellectuals and their societies, and the uses and abuses of doctrines of social class. The Winding Passage demonstrates the author's continuing concern with the salient issues of our times, while its inspiration draws upon an older, humanistic sociological tradition.

En los capítulos de este libro analizan las complejidades de las relaciones entre derecho y sociedad, las formas en que se han concebido, y la manera en la que la ley y el derecho se han concretado en diferentes espacios y coyunturas históricas. Exploran quiénes han sido sus artífices y ejecutores, quiénes sus sujetos; cómo han servido para reconstruir cuerpos políticos, afianzar conquistas, construir imperios y dibujar los contornos del mercado; cuáles han sido sus alcances y límites en la solución de los problemas que hoy nos aquejan de manera más acuciante: las agresiones en contra de los derechos humanos, la corrupción y el deterioro ecológico.

The pace of modern life is undoubtedly speeding up, yet this acceleration does not seem to have made us any happier or more content. If acceleration is the problem, then the solution, argues Hartmut Rosa in this major new work, lies in “resonance.” The quality of a human life cannot be measured simply in terms of resources, options, and moments of happiness; instead, we must consider our relationship to, or resonance with, the world. Applying his theory of resonance to many domains of human activity, Rosa describes the full spectrum of ways in which we establish our relationship to the world, from the act of breathing to the adoption of culturally distinct worldviews. He then turns to the realms of concrete experience and action – family and politics, work and sports, religion and art – in which we as late modern subjects seek out resonance. This task is proving ever more difficult as modernity's logic of escalation is both cause and consequence of a distorted relationship to the world, at individual and collective levels. As Rosa shows, all the great crises of modern society – the environmental crisis, the crisis of democracy, the psychological crisis – can also be understood and analyzed in terms of resonance and our broken relationship to the world around us. Building on his now classic work on acceleration, Rosa's new book is a major new contribution to the theory of modernity, showing how our problematic relation to the world is at the crux of some of the most pressing issues we face today. This bold renewal of critical theory for our times will be of great interest to students and scholars across the social sciences and humanities.

Work, Love, and Learning in Utopia breathes new life into the age-old human preoccupation with how to create a happier society. With a fascinating mix of research from cross-cultural psychology, macro history, and evolutionary biology, the book gives new credibility to the advocacy of radical equality. The author, a psychological anthropologist, argues that the negative emotions of sadness, anger, and fear evolved in tandem with hierarchy, while happiness evolved separately and in connection to prosociality and compassion. The book covers a wide range of human concerns, from economics and education, to media and communication, to gender and sexuality. It breaks new boundaries with its scope, arguing that equality of love is as important and possible as is economic equality. Its argument is provocative yet practical, and each chapter ends with concrete proposals that invite dialogue with any student of policy. Written in an easily accessible style, this book will appeal to anyone who has ever puzzled over how our social world could be remade. In particular, it will be very useful to students and scholars of anthropology, sociology, and psychology.

Bringing together a decade's worth of AK Thompson's essays on the culture of revolt, Premonitions offers an engaged and engaging assessment of contemporary radical politics. Inspired by the writings of Walter Benjamin, Thompson combines scholarship and grassroots grit to address themes ranging from violence and representation to Romanticism and death. Whether uncovering the unrealized promise buried in mainstream cultural offerings or tracing an imperiled course toward the moment of reckoning, the essays in Premonitions are provocations set to spark debate and kindle fires in the night.

Ruptures brings together leading and emerging international anthropologists to explore the concept of ‘rupture'. Understood as radical and often forceful forms of discontinuity, rupture is the active ingredient of the current sense of a world in turmoil, lying at the heart of some of the most defining experiences of our time: the rise of populist politics, the corollary impulse towards protest and even revolutionary change, as well as moves towards violence and terror, and the responses these moves elicit. Rupture is addressed in selected ethnographic and historical contexts: images of the guillotine in the French revolution; reactions to Trump's election in the USA; the motivations of young Danes who join ISIS in Syria; ‘butterfly effect'activism among environmental anarchists in northern Europe; the experiences of political trauma and its ‘repair'through privately sponsored museums of Mao's revolution in China; people's experience of the devastating 2001 earthquake in Gujarat; the ‘inner'rupture of Protestant faith among Danish nationalist theologians; and the attempt to invent ex nihilo an alphabet for use in Christian prophetic movements in Congo and Angola. Ruptures takes in new directions broader intellectual debates about continuity and change. In particular, by thematising rupture as a radical, sometimes violent, and even brutal form of discontinuity, it adds a sharper critical edge to contemporary discourses, both in social theory and public debate and policy.

First published in 1998, this volume asks: are new social classes in the making in eastern Europe? Are class issues withering away? How do different classes organize their lives, what kind of strategies do they adopt in East and West. Markku Kivinen brings Eastern Europe into the class debate. Recent sociological discussions have touched upon questions of class in Eastern Europe only very provisionally. On the other hand, old analyses of social stratification under conditions of'actually existed socialism'are no longer relevant in the current situation. This book analyses processes of class relations in Eastern Europe from new theoretical vantage-points, using up-to-date empirical data. Under socialism, power was said to be vested in the working class. However, there was a constant tension between the'holy proletariat'and the real life of the working class. Today, all political forces in Eastern Europe; leftist and liberal alike, are hankering for the middle class. This book explores the real processes in both East and West. This leads to more concrete political and even moral issues. The new'sacred middle class'is challenged. The contributors adopt several conceptual approaches and perspectives which enter into a fruitful exchange in this book.

Social Change in a Material World offers a new, practice theoretical account of social change and its explanation. Extending the author's earlier account of social life, and drawing on general ideas about events, processes, and change, the book conceptualizes social changes as configurations of significant differences in bundles of practices and material arrangements. Illustrated with examples from the history of bourbon distillation and the formation and evolution of digitally-mediated associations in contemporary life, the book argues that chains of activity combine with material events and processes to cause social changes. The book thereby stresses the significance of the material dimension of society for the constitution, determination, and explanation of social phenomena, as well as the types of space needed to understand them. The book also challenges the explanatory significance of such key phenomena as power, dependence, relations, mechanisms, and individual behavior. As such, it will appeal to sociologists, geographers, organization studies scholars, and others interested in social life and social change.

This book presents a method for creating a working model of society, using data systems and simulation techniques, that can be used for testing propositions of scientific and policy nature. The model is based on the example of New Zealand, but will be applicable to other countries. It is expected that collaborators in other countries can emulate this example with their data systems for teaching and policy purposes, producing a cross-national'collaboratory'. This enterprise will evolve with, and to a degree independently of, the book itself, with a supporting website as well as teaching and scientific initiatives. Readers of this text will, for the first time, have a simulation-based working model of society that can be interrogated for policy and substantive purposes. This book will appeal to researchers and professionals from various disciplines working within the social sciences, particularly on matters of demography and public policy.

Against the usual argument heard most frequently on the left, that there is no subject for a radical politics together with its form of political mobilization, there is – but in the absence of a radical leftist project, this subject has in the past transferred, and in many instances is still transferring, his/her support to the radical politics on offer from the other end of the ideological spectrum. The combination of on the one hand a globally expanding industrial reserve army, generating ever more intense competition in the labour markets of capitalism, and on the other the endorsement by many on the left not of class but rather of non-class identities espoused by the ‘new'populist postmodernism, has fuelled what can only be described as a perfect storm, politically speaking.

Szenezugehörigkeiten können als in stilspezifischen Praktiken sozial hervorgebrachte und sinnstiftende Gemeinsamkeiten des Handelns verstanden werden. Sie werden in den jeweiligen Stilbildungen über materielle Artefakte und deren Gebrauch, den Körper sowie mediale Ausdrucksformen angezeigt, inszeniert, stabilisiert und verbreitet. Wenngleich die Bedeutung von Artefakten, Körpern und Medien für Stilisierungsprozesse innerhalb der Jugendkultur- und Szeneforschung kontinuierlich hervorgehoben wird, so rückt die systematische Analyse der materiellen und medialen Dimensionen jugendkulturellen Handelns über die Deskription jeweiliger Stile hinaus nur selten in den Blickpunkt. Von dieser Beobachtung ausgehend soll mit diesem Band der Frage nachgegangen werden, mit welchen theoretischen und methodischen Perspektiven eine interdisziplinäre Jugendkultur- und Szeneforschung die materiellen und medialen Ausdrucksformen von Stilen adäquat verstehen kann. Der Band versammelt Beiträge, die sich der Bedeutung von Materialität und Medialität in Szenen aus historischer, sozial- und kulturwissenschaftlicher sowie psychologischer Perspektive widmen.Der InhaltJugendkulturtheoretische Perspektiven auf Medialität und Materialität • Stilbildungen über Medien • Stilbildungen über Artefakte • Stilbildungen über Körper Die HerausgeberTim Böder ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter der AG Jugend- und Schulforschung an der Universität Duisburg-Essen.Dr. Paul Eisewicht ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Institut für Soziologie an der Technischen Universität Dortmund.Prof. Dr. Günter Mey lehrt Entwicklungspsychologie und qualitative Forschung an der Hochschule Magdeburg-Stendal.Prof. Dr. Nicolle Pfaff ist Hochschullehrerin an der Fakultät für Bildungswissenschaften an der Universität Duisburg-Essen.

This open access book introduces the human development model to define disability and map its links with health and wellbeing, based on Sen's capability approach. The author uses panel survey data with internationally comparable questions on disability for Ethiopia, Malawi, Tanzania and Uganda. It presents evidence on the prevalence of disability and its strong and consistent association with multidimensional poverty, mortality, economic insecurity and deprivations in education, morbidity and employment. It shows that disability needs to be considered from multiple angles including aging, gender, health and poverty. Ultimately, this study makes a call for inclusion and prevention interventions as solutions to the deprivations associated with impairments and health conditions.

Dieser Band macht konkrete soziale Innovationen zum Gegenstand. Der Schwerpunkt liegt bei den Kommunen von Stadt und Land, sei es beim Carsharing oder bei der Bewältigung der zahlreichen Erscheinungsformen des demografischen Wandels, bei neuen Wohnformen oder Schulen als Innovationszentren. Der Band soll das Verstehen sozialer Innovationsprozesse erleichtern, für das Verhalten in solchen Prozessen qualifizieren und den Diskurs über die Rolle der Sozialwissenschaften in, für und bei sozialen Innovationsprozessen vor Ort befördern. Gezeigt wird, wie vielfältig involviert Sozialwissenschaft mit ihren Theorien und Methoden praktisch wird, wie sie soziale Veränderungsprozesse unterstützt, verbessert und bereichert; auch, wie sie ihr theoretisches Verständnis sozialer Prozesse und ihre methodische Kreativität an ihnen schärft; und, zu guter Letzt, wie SozialwissenschaftlerInnen selbst als wissenschaftliche Begleitung solcher Prozesse von deren Beobachtung und Analyse lernen, daranwachsen können. Der InhaltDiffusionsprozesse sozialer Innovationen beobachten und begleiten • Ökosysteme sozialer Innovation entdecken und entwickelnDie HerausgeberDr. Hans-Werner Franz ist Mitglied des Geschäftsführenden Vorstandes des BDS (Berufsverband Deutscher Soziologinnen und Soziologen) und Permanent Advisor of ESSI (European School of Social Innovation) mit Sitz in Wien.Dr. Christoph Kaletka ist Senior Researcher und Mitglied der Geschäftsführung der Sozialforschungsstelle, zentrale wissenschaftliche Einrichtung der TU Dortmund.

This book portrays how small, geographically dispersed, and progressive social change and social service organizations working within a coalition can influence national-level social policies. Based on extensive empirical research on two national organizations and their local affiliates, one focusing on affordable housing and the other working to protect lower-income communities, this book shows the ways in which professionally staffed organizations that coordinate coalitions come about, and describes their work to mobilize coalition members to lobby and advocate, providing information, analysis and instruction to facilitate such action and, in so doing, becoming the public voice for the social change efforts of coalitions. Advocacy for Social Change details the characteristics of these organizations that the author has labeled as focal catalytic coalition organizations and then provides numerous examples of campaigns led by them on affordable housing and economic justice; campaigns that illustrate tactics that other social change organizations can emulate. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology with interests in social problems, social action, political sociology, urban studies, community development and organizing while extending the literature on interest group lobbying.

In an era when rapid social change, the disappearance of traditional communities, the rise of political populism and the threat posed by radical religious movements makes it appear that ‘all that is solid melts into air', the classical sociological problem of how peaceable societies can be created and maintained assumes renewed urgency. Uncovering Social Life: Critical Perspectives from Sociology explores how contemporary institutional changes erode existing social relationships and identities but also create space for opposition to, or creative adaptation of, these broader shifts.Exploring the threats and opportunities associated with the contemporary age, this book identifies how sociology helps us understand the problems associated with social order and change before focusing on the most important institutional transformations to have occurred in: bodies and health; sex, gender and sexuality; employment; finance; the Internet and new social media; technology and artificial intelligence; religion; governance and terrorism. After a critical introduction placing these issues in their historical and sociological context, theoretical chapters analysing how sociology views the individual/society relationship, and the volatile processes endemic to the modern era, provide an innovative and comprehensive context for these explorations.This book provides a clear and engaging account of social life. Covering a broad range of sociological topics, the diverse chapters are united in a concern with three major themes: the growing complexity of the current era, and the ‘doubled'identities with which it is associated; the opportunities and constraints such developments pose to different groups; and the capacity of institutional changes to both erode existing social relationships, and create space for the emergence of new collective identities that oppose these structural shifts.

This book aims to bring a concern with cultural values and meanings closer to the study of the economic, political, jural, and religious change and development in the Sudan. It concentrates on sections of Sudanese society caught in the rapid changes of the 1970's.

This study critically discusses the thesis on the sociological vacuum formulated by Stefan Nowak. The author's aim is to refute the claim that the sociological vacuum is relevant for major social processes occurring in Poland. He presents the sociological vacuum in the context of the debate on micro and macro levels and discusses how the theory of fields and social network analysis is useful to reconcile the micro-macro divide. The book considers the uses of the sociological vacuum in explaining such phenomena as the Solidarność social movement, civil society, social capital, and democracy. In the empirical part, the author confronts the data on identifications with the data on relations and claims that the vacuum is not in the society but it in sociology.

Through nine ethnographic case-studies, Edges of Global Transformation explores situations where global transformations associated with neoliberalism meet local realities. The “edge” of transformation is characterized by uncertainty, as old patterns are consumed and new formed. The nine case studies from Africa, Europe and the Middle East shed light on how uncertainty plays an inevitable and essential role in the grey zone between macro-transformations and local responses. Despite the tremendous difference in precariousness between these cases, each contributor explores ways in which transformations are conceived and acted upon within the space of possibility that is opened and apprehended locally. The role of uncertainty as an active force is explored throughout the book. While in some cases, uncertainty has a clear restricting effect; other cases illustrate its potential as a productive force. As a contribution to understanding the dynamic of the local realities of global change, the book will be valuable reading for anyone interested in globalization and the neoliberal world order.

This book offers keen insight and useful lessons underscoring the value of practice to theory. Conceived by two anthropologists who lead consulting practices, McCabe and Briody selected contributors to explore how cultural change happens in a variety of consumer and organizational contexts. The 12 case studies illustrate the explanatory potential and the problem-solving strengths of assemblage theory, and the role of human agency in provoking cultural change. The case studies are compelling due to connections between the case narratives and graphics, and researcher engagement in the pragmatics of implementation—both of which shape and encourage learning. This volume will be markedly useful to practitioners engaged in research and implementation. It will also appeal to students and faculty in a variety of fields including anthropology, business management, marketing, sociology, cultural studies, and industrial design.

For courses in Introductory SociologyHelp students see how their world shapes them and how they in turn can shape the worldSociology: Structure and Change focuses on the relationship between social structure and agency, teaching students how the social structure of society influences individual lives and how individuals can exert agency to influence the social world. Throughout this fresh, contemporary approach to Introductory Sociology, author Jodie Lawston teaches students to become better sociological thinkers who can analyze how society shapes, molds, and has the power to influence people. Throughout each chapter, Lawston provides real-world examples of what others have done to engage in social change and then asks students to outline what they can do to become agents of change themselves. By focusing on the related themes of social structure and agency, Sociology: Structure and Change arms students with the sense that they can and will have a positive influence on the world.

This title was first published in 2000: This text focuses on developments in social work and its management. In doing so, it is of necessity multi-disciplinary: research and literature from the fields of management, organization and social policy, as well as social work, are drawn upon. The major theme of the book is change, which, paradoxically, appears to be the major constant. Change is everywhere and living with change is part of the'modern condition'. As the various transformations of social work are articulated, their influence becomes apparent. Each process will constitute a theme around which the content of this book is introduced. Although these processes are interdependent, each will be dealt with in turn.

This book assesses how theorists explained processes of change set in motion by the rise of capitalism. It situates them in the milieu in which they wrote. They were never neutral observers standing outside the conditions they were trying to explain. Their arguments were responses to those circumstances and to the views of others commentators, living and dead. Some repeated earlier views; others built on those perspectives; a few changed the way we think. While surveying earlier writers, the author's primary concerns are theorists who sought to explain industrialization, imperialism, and the consolidation of nation-states after 1840. Marx, Durkheim, and Weber still shape our understandings of the past, present, and future. Patterson focuses on explanations of the unsettled conditions that crystallized in the 1910s and still persist: the rise of socialist states, anti-colonial movements, prolonged economic crises, and almost continuous war. After 1945, theorists in capitalist countries, influenced by Cold War politics, saw social change in terms of economic growth, progress, and modernization; their contemporaries elsewhere wrote about underdevelopment, dependency, or uneven development. In the 1980s, theorists of postmodernity, neoliberalism, globalization, innovations in communications technologies, and post-socialism argued that they rendered earlier accounts insufficient. Others saw them as manifestations of a new imperialism, capitalist accumulation on a global scale, environmental crises, and nationalist populism.

This title was first published in 2000: This volume focuses on the influence of, and additionally explores the value adding contribution of, information systems and related technologies on the development of society and private and public sector enterprises. The chapters are stand-alone units representing the research work and thinking of the Cranfield School of Management. The initial chapters examine the impact of IS/IT on society and organizations. As the book progresses, attention is then given to exploring the effects of IS/IT on individuals within the information arena and more broadly within varying walks of life.

Based on rare oral data from women participants in the'Mau Mau'rebellion, this book chronicles changes in women's domestic reproduction, legal status, and gender roles that took place under colonial rule. The book links labour activism, cultural nationalism, and the more overtly political issues of land alienation, judicial control, and character

Why do people want what they want? Why does one person see the world as a place to control, while another feels controlled by the world? A useful theory of culture, the authors contend, should start with these questions, and the answers, given different historical conditions, should apply equally well to people of all times, places, and walks of life.Taking their cue from the pioneering work of anthropologist Mary Douglas, the authors of Cultural Theory have created a typology of five ways of life?egalitarianism, fatalism, individualism, hierarchy, and autonomy?to serve as an analytic tool in examining people, culture, and politics. They then show how cultural theorists can develop large numbers of falsifiable propositions.Drawing on parables, poetry, case studies, fiction, and the Great Books, the authors illustrate how cultural biases and social relationships interact in particular ways to yield life patterns that are viable, sustainable, and ultimately, changeable under certain conditions. Figures throughout the book show the dynamic quality of these ways of life and specifically illustrate the role of surprise in effecting small- and large-scale change.The authors compare Cultural Theory with the thought of master social theorists from Montesquieu to Stinchcombe and then reanalyze the classic works in the political culture tradition from Almond and Verba to Pye. Demonstrating that there is more to social life than hierarchy and individualism, the authors offer evidence from earlier studies showing that the addition of egalitarianism and fatalism facilitates cross-national comparisons.

Social Mobility for the 21st Century addresses experiences of social mobility, and the detailed processes through which entrenched, intergenerationally transmitted privilege is reproduced. Contributions include (but are not limited to) family relationships, students'encounters with higher education, narratives of work careers, and ‘mobility identities'. The book intends to challenge both the framework of the more traditional approach, and the politicisation of mobility which casts ‘mobility'as a possession, a commodity or a character trait, and threatens to castigate the ‘non-mobile'as carrying a personal responsibility for their situation. This book presents critical analyses of routes into social mobility, the experience of social mobility, and the political and social implications of social mobility's ‘panacea'status. Drawing on the work of established scholars and more recent entrants, the chapters offer a fresh look at social mobility, opening up the topic to a wider readership among the profession and beyond, and stimulating further debate. This book will appeal to higher level students and scholars of sociology alike, as well as having a broad cross-disciplinary appeal.

These original articles relate to major themes in the comparative study of the dynamics of cultures, modernization, and social and political change. The authors, ranking scholars in their fields, provide fresh and important insights to the study of topics such as the interface of anthropological and sociological theory, the dynamics of Latin Americ

This book is intended to acquaint American historians, anthropologists, and sociologists with a discourse that questions the prioritizing of the temporal over the spatial-the historical over the geographical. Allan Pred argues that neither the study of history nor the execution of social or cultural analysis can be divorced from human-geographical

The future as a field of inquiry, debate or forecasts continues to flourish. However, this book differs from existing literature in several important ways. It is not another publication on future scenarios guided by a linear technological fix - nor is it simply a volume of new statistics on economic, demographic or geopolitical developments. Rather, Future Courses of Human Societies explores and builds a general framework for the long-term evolution of human societies.Drawing upon a wide range of insights from across the social and natural sciences, the authors of this title present original, exploratory methodological and analytical approaches to examining the future. Encouraging the reader to deepen their knowledge and encourage critical thinking, three themes are considered in their complexity and multi-dimensionality: technological innovations; future ‘progress'; and the critical aspect of organizing collective life in the future. Furthermore, in contrast to previous studies which have embraced a relatively short time-span, this text incorporates perspectives from the immediate to the distant future, extending to several centuries and even millennia.An interdisciplinary and internationally comprehensive volume, Future Courses of Human Societies is a key source for students and researchers interested in fields such as future studies, technology in society, interdisciplinary learnings on social and natural sciences and future economic and political evolutions.

Gibt es einen Zusammenhang zwischen zäher Alltagspraxis und großer Umwälzung? Unter welchen Bedingungen können kleine Veränderungen revolutionäre Ausmaße annehmen und an welche Grenzen stoßen sie? Eva von Redecker plädiert vor dem Panorama ausgewählter Literaturbeispiele dafür, dem Revolutionsbegriff eine neue Gestalt zu geben. Radikaler Wandel wird in diesem Buch sozialtheoretisch erschlossen und als langwieriger Übertragungsprozess verständlich, in dem Gegenstand und Antrieb der Veränderung in eins fallen: in Praxis.

Exploring Social Change provides a compelling analysis of theories that explain social change, innovation, social movements, and revolution, and concludes with reflections about how individuals do and should live in an uncertain and rapidly changing world. Written in a personal and clear manner, the authors provide definitions of key terms and analysis of theories and ideas from the study of social change.The seventh edition includes updated examples reflecting the social changes that have occurred in the world around us, including new discussions on the environmental and social landscapes, as well as updated methods and discussions that reflect that changing field of social change study.

The 2008 economic crisis called into question the sustainability of the individualistic consumer society. However, for better or for worse, this long-term crisis represents an opportunity for the creation of a new model of growth to reform capitalism, structurally as well as culturally.As a contribution to this debate, Social Generativity offers a much-needed and original conceptual synthesis, within a unique anthropological focus on the forms of selfhood sustained by the historical and economic conditions of the present day. Encompassing four years of interdisciplinary empirical research based primarily on a sample of social groups, organizations and firms in Italy, this volume redefines the notion of'Social Generativity'from its pyschological origin (as formulated by Erik Erikson) to that of a social action that can be implemented during daily life and in different spheres of existence. A critical analysis of contemporary capitalism, this volume will appeal to postgraduate students and policy makers interested in fields such as Organisational Studies, Anthropological Theory, Social Change, Economic Sociology, Public Affairs and Business Ethics.