Books in the Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society series

Deals with questions about how power and resistance operate in contemporary society. This title argues that critique must take place from within information flows, rather than from the safety of 'academic detachment' and that information is power. It presents the prospects of intellectual life in an age dominated by global flows of information.

`It is difficult to qualify excitement and enthusiasm for this book.... For those studying and teaching on the body... the book is an essential text....' - Sociology of Health and Illness`...enriches the conceptual arsenal for interdisciplinary analysis of political, social and cultural change...' - The American Journal of Sociology

Asks why we see some bodies as monstrous or vulnerable and examines what this tells us about ideas of bodily normality and bodily perfection. Drawing on feminist theories of the body, biomedical discourse and historical data, this title argues that the response to the monstrous body has always been ambivalent.

Drawing on long term empirical research into cultural practices, lifestyles and identities, this volume explores how far reaching global changes are articulated locally.

Shilling offers the most comprehensive overview of the field to date and an innovative framework for the analysis of embodiment, founded on a revised view of the relation of classical works to the body. Shilling believes the body should be read as a multi-dimensional medium for the constitution of society.

This delightful, thought-provoking book tackles head-on the assumption that laughter and humour are necessarily good in themselves. The author proposes a social theory that places humour central to social life. Billig argues that all cultures use ridicule as a disciplinary means to uphold norms of conduct and conventions of meaning.

Paul Virilio demonstrates how technology has made inertia the defining condition of modernity. An instantaneous present has replaced space and the sovereignty of territory - everything happens without the need to go anywhere.

Addressing a number of prominent sports and sport stars, this book demonstrates the economic and cultural factors that have contributed to the popularity of sport stars. It also examines issues such as race and gender, the impact of professionalization, growing media coverage, and the role of agents.

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.

'... a powerful piece of work that deserves to be read widely. It ranges across central concerns in the fields of social theory, political theory, and science studies and engages with the ideas of key classical and contemporary thinkers' - Barry Smart, Professor of Sociology, University of Portsmouth

An anthropological study of the gift, that relates giving to the institutions and social structures of modern life

This book investigates the aesthetic nature and purposes of computer culture in the contemporary world. It casts a cool eye on the claims of cybertopians, tracing the globalization of the new medium and enquiring into its effects on subjectivity and sociality.

In this discussion of the aesthetic in everyday life the aesthetic codes of advertising, architecture, the Internet and everyday images are used as examples of the disorientation which a multiplication of codes creates. Welsch proposes untangling the `aestheticization of everyday life' and replacing it by more meaningful and durable categories.

This book is a unique and agenda-setting interpretation of nature and ecology.

These challenging essays have their roots in the fertile convergence of feminism, sociology and cultural studies. Themes include the assessment of feminist theory, its transformations and ability to illuminate issues and practices. The complex relationship between objects of study, their political implications and their historical context is a recurring theme.

In this major work, Zygmunt Bauman classifies the meanings of culture. For Bauman, culture is a living, changing aspect of human interaction which must be understood and studied as a universal of human life. At the heart of his approach is the proposition that culture is inherently ambivalent.

Buci-Glucksmann explores the condition of modernity through the works of a number of writers and philosophers. She considers how figures such as Nietzsche, Adorno, Musil, Barthes and Lacan constitute a baroque paradigm, united by their allegorical style, their conflation of aesthetics with ethics and their subject matter.

This book challenges those contemporary sociologists who argue that the notion of 'society' is an outmoded basis for sociological analysis and instead revitalizes the idea that sociology is truly 'the study of society'. Mellor returns the human and religious aspects of social life to the centre of social theory.

Drawing on the work of Derrida, Foucault, Levinas and Ricouer, this book proposes that the question of postmodernity is inseparable from that of postcolonialism. It maps out a new geneaology of the birth of the modern and suggests a new way of grounding the idea of an emancipation of being.

Body Modification

Ranging over a rich variety of material from film and film literature, and encompassing a critical interrogation of traditional realist ethnographic and cinematic texts, this book highlights the extent to which the cinema has contributed to the rise of voyeurism throughout society.

Culture is big business. It is at the root of many urban regeneration schemes throughout the world. It is also one of the leaders of the post-Fordist economic revolution, yet the economy of culture is under-theorized and under-developed. In this wide-ranging and penetrating volume, the economic logi

Examines the train of social theory from the 19th century, through to the 'organization of modernity', in relation to ideas of social planning, and as contributors to the 'rationalistic revolution' of the 'golden age' of capitalism in the 1950s and 60s. This title looks at key concepts in the social sciences.

A local community study of tense relations between an established group and outsiders becomes a microcosm that illuminates a range of sociological configurations. The Established and the Outsiders examines the mechanisms of stigmatization, monopolization of power, collective fantasy and `we' and `they' images which support and reinforce divisions in society.

Dennis Smith offers a fascinating survey of Elias's life and writings and traces the growth of his reputation. He also illustrates how Elias's insights can be applied to understand Western modernity and social and political change, showing why Elias is so important to sociology.

A look at the strengths and weaknesses of cultural studies, providing a blend of performance and risk theory. It explores the need to erase the separation of "high" and "popular" culture studies, starting from the thesis that cultural studies has been too pre-occupied with popular culture.

Five Bodies offers an introduction to some of the most urgent contemporary concerns within the sociology of the body. This new edition has been substantially revised and updated to address today's issues of the body in modern life, community and politics.

Demonstrating that all notions of nature are entangled in different forms of social life, the text elaborates the ways in which the apparently natural world has been produced from within particular social practices. These are analyzed in terms of different senses, different times and the production of distinct spaces.

Presents a multidimensional, complex approach to sociological theory that focuses on culture. This title develops the theme of globalization in relation to the cultural turn, world-systems theory, the civilizing process, modernity and postmodernity, nostalgia politics and fundamentalism.