Illuminating Social Life

Illuminating Social Life
Author: Peter Kivisto
Publisher: Pine Forge Press
Total Pages: 457
Release: 2011
Genre: History
ISBN: 1412978157

Illuminating Social Life has enjoyed increasing popularity with each edition. It is the only book designed for undergraduate teaching that shows today's students how classical and contemporary social theories can be used to shed new light on such topics as the internet, the world of work, fast food restaurants, shopping malls, alcohol use, body building, sales and service, and new religious movements.A perfect complement for the sociological theory course, it offers 13 original essays by leading scholars in the field who are also experienced undergraduate theory teachers. Substantial introductions by the editor link the applied essays to a complete review of the classical and modern social theories used in the book.

Economy in Society

Economy in Society
Author: Jacek Tittenbrun
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 585
Release: 2011-07-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1443832359

This book offers an in-depth analysis of sociology, e.g. such classics as Weber, Parsons and Homans, and its adjacent social sciences with special reference to economics, including public choice theory, property rights theory, the Austrian school and others. This discussion submits many fresh observations; giving the theories under consideration their due, it at the same time exposes their flaws. In addition, the book contains a constructive programme of the research field in question, termed socio-economic structuralism, which involves many theoretical innovations, notions of ownership and class. This positive theory draws on, but is far from mimicking, achievements of the thinkers considered in the remaining parts of the book.

The Scientific Revolution Revisited

The Scientific Revolution Revisited
Author: Mikuláš Teich
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
Total Pages: 158
Release: 2015-04-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1783741228

The Scientific Revolution Revisited brings Mikuláš Teich back to the great movement of thought and action that transformed European science and society in the seventeenth century. Drawing on a lifetime of scholarly experience in six penetrating chapters, Teich examines the ways of investigating and understanding nature that matured during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, charting their progress towards science as we now know it and insisting on the essential interpenetration of such inquiry with its changing social environment. The Scientific Revolution was marked by the global expansion of trade by European powers and by interstate rivalries for a stake in the developing world market, in which advanced medieval China, remarkably, did not participate. It is in the wake of these happenings, in Teich's original retelling, that the Thirty Years War and the Scientific Revolution emerge as products of and factors in an uneven transition in European and world history: from natural philosophy to modern science, feudalism to capitalism, the late medieval to the early modern period. ??With a narrative that moves from pre-classical thought to the European institutionalisation of science – and a scope that embraces figures both lionised and neglected, such as Nicole Oresme, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, René Descartes, Thaddeus Hagecius, Johann Joachim Becher – The Scientific Revolution Revisited illuminates the social and intellectual sea changes that shaped the modern world.

Revisiting Institutionalism in Sociology

Revisiting Institutionalism in Sociology
Author: Seth Abrutyn
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2013-11-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134463561

There may not be a concept so central to sociology, yet so vaguely defined in its contemporary usages, than institution. In Revisiting Institutionalism in Sociology, Abrutyn takes an in-depth look at what institutions are by returning to some of the insights of classical theorists like Max Weber and Herbert Spencer, the functionalisms of Talcott Parsons and S.N. Eisenstadt, and the more recent evolutionary institutionalisms of Gerhard Lenski and Jonathan Turner. Returning to the idea that various levels of social reality shape societies, Abrutyn argues that institutions are macro-level structural and cultural spheres of action, exchange, and communication. They have emergent properties and dynamics that are not reducible to other levels of social reality. Rather than fall back on old functionalist solutions, Abrutyn offers an original and synthetic theory of institutions like religion or economy; the process by which they become autonomous, or distinct cultural spaces that shape the color and texture of action, exchange, and communication embedded within them; and how they gain or lose autonomy by theorizing about institutional entrepreneurship. Finally, Abrutyn lays bare the inner workings of institutions, including their ecology, the way structure and culture shape lower-levels of social reality, and how they develop unique patterns of stratification and inequality founded on their ecology, structure, and culture. Ultimately, Abrutyn offers a refreshing take on macrosociology that brings functionalist, conflict, and cultural sociologies together, while painting a new picture of how the seemingly invisible macro-world influences the choices humans make and the goals we set.

The Dream Revisited

The Dream Revisited
Author: Ingrid Ellen
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 643
Release: 2019-01-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0231545045

A half century after the Fair Housing Act, despite ongoing transformations of the geography of privilege and poverty, residential segregation by race and income continues to shape urban and suburban neighborhoods in the United States. Why do people live where they do? What explains segregation’s persistence? And why is addressing segregation so complicated? The Dream Revisited brings together a range of expert viewpoints on the causes and consequences of the nation’s separate and unequal living patterns. Leading scholars and practitioners, including civil rights advocates, affordable housing developers, elected officials, and fair housing lawyers, discuss the nature of and policy responses to residential segregation. Essays scrutinize the factors that sustain segregation, including persistent barriers to mobility and complex neighborhood preferences, and its consequences from health to home finance and from policing to politics. They debate how actively and in what ways the government should intervene in housing markets to foster integration. The book features timely analyses of issues such as school integration, mixed income housing, and responses to gentrification from a diversity of viewpoints. A probing examination of a deeply rooted problem, The Dream Revisited offers pressing insights into the changing face of urban inequality.

Disability Rights and Wrongs

Disability Rights and Wrongs
Author: Tom Shakespeare
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2006-12-05
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 1134277733

Over the last thirty years, the field of disability studies has emerged from the political activism of disabled people. In this challenging review of the field, leading disability academic and activist Tom Shakespeare argues that the social model theory has reached a dead end. Drawing on a critical realist perspective, Shakespeare promotes a pluralist, engaged and nuanced approach to disability. Key topics discussed include: dichotomies - the dangerous polarizations of medical model versus social model, impairment versus disability and disabled people versus non-disabled people identity - the drawbacks of the disability movement's emphasis on identity politics bioethics in disability - choices at the beginning and end of life and in the field of genetic and stem cell therapies care and social relationships - questions of intimacy and friendship. This stimulating and accessible book challenges orthodoxies in British disability studies, promoting a new conceptualization of disability and fresh research agenda. It is an invaluable resource for researchers and students in disability studies and sociology, as well as professionals, policy makers and activists.

Civil Society Revisited

Civil Society Revisited
Author: Kerstin Jacobsson
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2021-10-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1800732066

In much social scientific literature, Polish civil society has been portrayed as weak and passive. This volume offers a much-needed corrective, challenging this characterization on both theoretical and empirical grounds and suggesting new ways of conceptualizing civil society to better account for events on the ground as well as global trends such as neoliberalism, migration, and the renewal of nationalist ideologies. Focusing on forms of collective action that researchers have tended to overlook, the studies gathered here show how public discourse legitimizes certain claims and political actions as “true” civil society, while others are too often dismissed. Taken together, they critique a model of civil society that is ‘made from above’.

Everyday Sociology Reader

Everyday Sociology Reader
Author: Karen Sternheimer
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2020-04-15
Genre:
ISBN: 9780393419481

Innovative readings and blog posts show how sociology can help us understand everyday life.