Men & Masculinities is a new title in the Routledge Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Sociology. In five volumes, this set brings together canonical and cutting-edge material in the field to make sense of a rapidly expanding area of research.

The sociology of masculinity began to assume real significance from the late 1980s onwards, when it emerged out of the second wave of feminist research sweeping through American, European and Australasian universities at that time. In theoretical terms, scholars in the field primarily adopt sociological and...

In the modern world, social movements are one of the main ways that people try to control their lives and articulate their moral positions. From utopian and revolutionary efforts to start society anew to reactionary attempts to resist new technologies or trends, normal people often become embroiled in titanic struggles over the world’s future. These four volumes present major statements of how scholars have understood these movements over the past century. They are essential reading for anyone interested in social change, politics, and real people in action.

Each volume examines...

What is the nature of our current societies? Do we see a clash of civilizations, or the end of history? The advent of globalization, or the birth of the network society? Are we witnessing the emergence of a risk society, or the advent of the knowledge society? More fundamentally, is society an ideological construct that should be abandoned?

Coming into English from the Latin term societas via Old French societe, the etymology of society, in the sense of a system adopted by a group of co-existing individuals for mutually beneficial purposes, can be traced back at least to the...

Edited by a leading scholar in the field, this new title in the Routledge Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Sociology, is a four-volume collection of canonical and cutting-edge research on the intellectual origins and the development of ‘socal exclusion’, a critical concept in the social sciences in general and sociology in particular.

‘The information society’ refers to a constellation of developments arising from the growing use of communication technologies in the acquisition, storage, and processing of information, and the role of information in supporting the creation and exchange of knowledge. Research on information societies really began to take off in the 1970s when Daniel Bell wrote about ‘the information age’. While there were earlier works that focused on the growing importance of information in the economy, it was not until the mid-1990s and the spread of the Internet that this field of study...