This book offers an original combination of cultural and narratological analysis with an empirical study of identity and political action. A powerful critique of rational choice theory, it also provides a solution to the historiographical puzzle of why Sweden intervened in The Thirty Years' War. Arguing that people act for reasons of identity, more fundamental than reasons of interest, Erik Ringmar shows the Swedish intervention to have been an attempt on behalf of Swedish leaders to gain recognition for themselves and their country.

Examines the racial and gender social movements of the 1960s in the context of the traditions from which they evolved.

Over the last two decades soccer has become a major institution within the popular culture of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel. They have attained disproportionate success in this field. Given their marginalisation from many areas of Israeli society as well as the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, such a prominent Arab presence highlights the tension between their Israeli citizenship and their belonging to the Palestinian people. Bringing together sociological, anthropological and historical approaches, Sorek examines how soccer can potentially be utilised by ethnic and national...

This compelling book, first published in 1996, is an exploration of the imaginary of perceptual control technologies at the beginning of the twenty-first century. William Bogard constructs a 'social science fiction' of how the revolution in simulation technology reconfigures and intensifies the role of surveillance in war, work, sexuality and private life, enabling forms of control which hyper realise our experience of time, space, agency and society itself. His is a critique of the imaginary in which control breaks free of its prior limits, an imaginary of unmediated perception with effects...

Lisa McCormick considers the history of classical music competitions and their role in society today by examining highlights and controversies.