Books in the Routledge Advances in Sociology series

In the 1850s, the social and political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville spoke of 'a virus of a new and unknown kind' to explain the inexplicable failure of the French Revolution. This book uses Tocqueville's idea of the virus to explore the fatal relationship between the concepts of utopia and dystopia in western social and political thought.

This book examines the social implications and impact of militarism in both the west and developing countries, exploring the effects of militarism and the military-industrial complex on education, the environment, popular culture, and systems of governance.

Irish Insanity 1800-2000 charts and explains the rise and demise of asylums and mental hospitals in Ireland between 1800 and 2000. It definitively demonstrates that Ireland had the highest level of asylum usage internationally, arguing that a combination of social forces, rather than an 'epidemic of Irish insanity', underpinned this pattern of institutionalisation.

Course research makes innovative contributions to understanding such challenges for policy as anti-social behaviour, the search for equity of access to resources, including education, training and skills development, and an ageing population. This book describes generation differences in impact of social and economic influences.

This innovative volume offers analytical and comparative insights into current socio-economic practices as well as an assessment of the overall economic globalization phenomenon. By looking at empirical case studies of different civilations and cultures, this volume assesses of intertwining of local socio-economic practices and global economic modernity.

This book brings together Russian and Western, eminent and younger scholars to provide a fresh and provocative approach to a variety of interrelated fields in Russian studies. It covers different dimensions of creative misunderstandings , hybrids, tensions and other modes of adaptation in the Russian culture from linguistics, cultural studies, and social sciences perspectives, and in doing so effectively overcomes the compartmentalism that still predominates in most text books.

This book examines the social implications and impact of militarism in both the west and developing countries, exploring the effects of militarism and the military-industrial complex on education, the environment, popular culture, and systems of governance.

The construction industry as a workplace is commonly seen as problematic for a number of reasons, including its worrying health and safety record, the instability of its workforce, and the poorly regulated nature of the sector. Ethnographic Research in the Construction Industry draws together in one volume a set of expert contributions which demonstrate how social science perspectives, rooted in ethnographic research on construction sites and with construction workers themselves, can generate fresh insights into the social, cultural and material ways that the industry and conditions of work in it are experienced and played out.

Civil society activism around issues of global justice has proliferated in Europe during the past two decades. Has such contestation and advocacy made a difference? This book examines whether and how the organizations, networks and campaigns involved have attained their policy objectives in the areas of debt relief, international trade, international taxation and corporate accountability. The analysis also considers the relationship between national and transnational activism. By comparing variations in the "activism-policy nexus" in France, Italy and the United Kingdom, it seeks to understand how such interaction and policy outcomes vary in different institutional and political contexts.

The recording industry has been a major focus of interest for cultural commentators throughout the twenty-first century. As the first major content industry to have its production and distribution patterns radically disturbed by the internet, the recording industry¿s content, attitudes and practices have regularly been under the microscope. This book attempts to offer a broader and less Anglocentric understanding of the recording industry. Seven detailed case studies of different national recording industries illustrate the idea that the recording industry is not one thing but is, rather, a series of recording industries, locally organised and locally focused, both structured by and structuring the international industry.

With contributions by leading researchers from many countries in Western Europe and North America, this book brings a new, transatlantic perspective to this growing field and establishes an important basis for further research in the area. It addresses several essential questions about Islamophobia.

Based on research conducted in three societies - the U.S., China, and Taiwan - this study aims to lend more systematic empirical rigour to Bourdieu's notion of social capital, uncovering stable and variant patterns of the production, processing, and returns to social capital, and exploring possible institutional contingencies in explaining variant patterns across societies.

This book contributes to the growing field of human-animal studies by examining the human impulse evidenced in blogs, social networking sites, video games, comic books, and animal welfare literature to ventriloquize the animal voice. Gathering scholars from a range of disciplines - anthropology, literature, history, religious studies, and women's studies - and engaging with the work of ethologists, primatologists, and animal behaviourists, the volume explores the ethical, epistemological, sociological, and anthropological implications of the phenomenon, asking not only what it tells us about how we see and know animals, but also what it tells us about how we construct and represent ourselves.

The author reviews main theories of nationalism and criticises their lack of elaboration on the role of 'Others' in nation formation. She develops a dynamic, relational perspective for the study of national theory.

This book originates from a comparative research project involving extensive collection and analysis of primary and secondary materials (scholarly literature, statistical data, and interviews with key actors) on socioeconomic outcomes of the global financial crisis in all major world regions during the last years. Offering analytical and comparative insights at the global level, as well as an assessment of the overall social globalization phenomenon, this book will be useful for scholars, students, NGOs, and policy makers.

This book provides theoretical and empirical discussion of migration, identity and Europeanisation. Contributions draw from disciplines such as historical sociology, discourse analyses and social psychology.

Provides insights on developments in post-traditional religiosity through studies of rave's Gnostic narratives of ascensionism and re-enchantment; explorations of the embodied spirituality and millennialist predispositions of dance culture; and investigations of transnational digital-art countercultures manifesting at diverse geographic locations.