Diasporas and Diplomacy analyzes the exercise of British 'soft power' through the BBC's foreign language services, and the diplomatic role played by their diasporic broadcasters. The book offers the first historical and comparative analysis of the 'corporate cosmopolitanism' that has characterized the work of the BBC's international services since the inception of its Empire Service in 1932 - from radio to the Internet.

A series of empirically-grounded case studies, within a shared analytical framework, interrogate transformations in international...

Topologies of Power amounts to a radical departure in the way that power and space have been understood. It calls into question the very idea that power is simply extended across a given territory or network, and argues that power today has a new found 'reach'. Topological shifts have subtly altered the reach of power, enabling governments, corporations and NGOs alike to register their presence through quieter, less brash forms of power than domination or overt control. In a world in which proximity and distance increasingly play across one another, topology offers an insight into...

Consumer credit borrowing - using credit cards, store cards and personal loans - is an important and routine part of many of our lives. But what happens when these everyday forms of borrowing go 'bad', when people start to default on their loans and when they cannot, or will not, repay? It is this poorly understood, controversial, but central part of both the consumer credit industry and the lived experiences of an increasing number of people that this book explores.

Drawing on research from the interior of the debt collections industry, as well as debtors' own accounts and...

This edited collection explores the genesis of Bourdieu's classical book Distinction and its international career in contemporary Social Sciences. It includes contributions from contemporary sociologists from diverse countries who question the theoretical legacy of this book in various fields and national contexts. Invited authors review and exemplify current controversies concerning the theses promoted in Distinction in the sociology of culture, lifestyles, social classes and stratification, with a specific attention dedicated to the emerging forms of cultural capital and...

Comedy is currently enjoying unprecedented growth within the British culture industries. Defying the recent economic downturn, it has exploded into a booming billion-pound industry both on TV and on the live circuit. Despite this, academia has either ignored comedy or focused solely on analysing comedians or comic texts. This scholarship tends to assume that through analysing an artist s intentions or techniques, we can somehow understand what is and what isn t funny. But this poses a fundamental question "funny to whom"? How can we definitively discern how audiences react to comedy?

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Throughout history and in every geographical location, the rise and fall of industry, which impact the fate of large populations, are tied to the development and cultural entanglement of particular models that are articulated with political power. Models are understood as knowledge devices - expert, theoretical, practical and commonsense - that are embedded in cultural and social environments and designed through struggles at various scales.

This book results from the collaboration of an interdisciplinary team bringing together specialists in anthropology, geography, sociology,...

Pedagogy is often glossed as the 'art and science of teaching' but this focus typically ties it to the instructional practices of formalised schooling. Like the emerging work on 'public pedagogies', the notion of cultural pedagogies signals the importance of the pedagogic in realms other than institutionalised education, but goes beyond the notion of public pedagogies in two ways: it includes spaces which are not so public, and it includes an emphasis on material and non-human actors.

This collection foregrounds this broader understanding of pedagogy by framing enquiry...

The idea that research should become more interdisciplinary has become commonplace. According to influential commentators, the unprecedented complexity of problems such as climate change or the social implications of biomedicine demand interdisciplinary efforts integrating both the social and natural sciences. In this context, the question of whether a given knowledge practice is too disciplinary, or interdisciplinary, or not disciplinary enough has become an issue for governments, research policy makers and funding agencies. Interdisciplinarity, in short, has emerged as a key political...