A critical inquiry into the relations of space, time and technology. Paul Virilio shows how technology has made inertia the defining condition of modernity. He argues that the real time of "action at a distance" through telecommunication has replaced the real space of immediate action. Everything now happens without the need to go anywhere. This ......
In a wide-ranging historical introduction to social theory, Alex Callinicos explores the controversies over modernity and examines the connections between social theory and modern philosophy, political economy and evolutionary biology since the Enlightenment.
Sociological Thought: Beyond Eurocentric Theory is designed to provide students of sociology with an alternative vision of social theory. In an exciting and original introduction to the book, Abdo provides an innovative critique of the Eurocentric and male-oriented nature of conventional sociological textbooks, and provides us with a new approach ......
This work explains what is understood by the term "new social movements", and provides a critical assessment of identity politics. It examines a range of issues including neo-tribalism associated with identity politics and alternative lifestyles, and challenges those who treat new social movements as instances of wider social change while often ignoring their more "local" and "dispersed" importance. The text questions what it means to adopt an identity that is organized around issues of expressivism and offers a series of non-reductionist ways of looking at identity politics. By analyzing expressive identities through issues of performance, spaces of identity and the "occasion", the author argues that the significance of identity politics and the changes it brings about within society are local, plural, situated adn topologically complex, challenging the still persistent singular idea of new social movements as historical agents of change.
Bakhtin and the Human Sciences demonstrates the abundance of ideas Bakhtin's thought offers to the human sciences, and reconsiders him as a social thinker, not just a literary theorist. The contributors hail from many disciplines and their essays' implications extend into other fields in the human sciences. The volume emphasizes Bakhtin's work on ......
`I recommend this book to all readers interested in thinking about the self; I am sure that anyone who reads it will come away with some new ideas' - Therapeutic Communities This critical and comprehensive examination of the relation of theory and identity discusses definitions of identity in classical social theory, modern social theory and psychoanalysis. The introduction is a critique of existing sociological accounts of identity, arguing that these are incurably cognitive, treating the people that they study as incapable of experiencing an internal life or internal space. The book then considers the implications of this in social theory and human practice.
This work presents a broadranging and critical overview of the many themes of social constructionism and its relevance to contemporary social and political issues. The work links the discourse of constructionism to the wider social and political world, and demonstrates that social science is enriched, not impoverished, by postmodernism. Leading ......
This text provides a thorough introduction to methods for detecting and describing cyclic patterns by clarifying key concepts and covering topics such as research design issues, preliminary data screening and identification and description of cycles.
This exciting and accessible guide to the discussions of truth in the social sciences can also be read as an account of the collapse of modernity, and the rise of new forms of thought which treat difference and ambivalence as positive values. Ross Abbinnett traces the debate on truth from the `objectifying powers' of Kant through more than 200 years of critique and reformulation to the unravelling of truth by Lyotard, Foucault and Derrida.
