Both the force and the limitations of the globalizing forces operating in the world today can best be understood through an analysis of their concrete manifestations.

In recent years nationalism has emerged as one of the dominant issues of our time. In this lucid and balanced account, David McCrone lays out the key issues and debates around a subject which is too often obscured by polemic. Among topics covered are:
* classical and contemporary theories of nationalism
* nationalism and ethnicity
* nationalism and the nation state
* colonial and post-colonial nationalisms
* neo nationalism and post communist nationalism.

The Badlands of Modernity offers a wide ranging and original interpretation of modernity as it emerged during the eighteenth century through an analysis of some of the most important social spaces. Drawing on Foucault's analysis of heterotopia, or spaces of alternate ordering, the book argues that modernity originates through an interplay between ideas of utopia and heterotopia and heterotopic spatial practice.
The Palais Royal during the French Revolution, the masonic lodge and in its relationship to civil society and the public sphere and the early factories of the Industrial...

This classic study of Santayana was the first book to appear in the Arguments of the Philosophers series. Growing interest in the work of this important American philosopher has prompted this new edition of the book complete with a new preface by the author reassessing his own ideas about Santayana and reflecting the new interest in the philosopher's work. A select bibliography of works published about Santayana since the book's first appearance is also included.

The answer of course is both. In this lucid and subtle investigation, Sylvia Walby, one of the world's leading authorities on gender shows how undoubted increases in opportunity for women in Europe and America have been accompanid by new forms of inequality. She charts changes in women's employment, education and political representation and the complex relations between gender, class and ethnicity, between local conditions and global pressures which together determine the place of women both in the labour market and in the wider social, political and economic world of today.
An eagerly...

Still one of the most dreaded diseases to haunt our imaginations, cancer is more than an illness - it is a cultural phenomenon. People who have cancer are bombarded with competing explanations of their conditions: it is genetically inherited; it is environmentally produced; it is the result of their personality. This volume investigates how this disease is perceived, experienced and theorized in contemporary society. It explores changing beliefs about the causes of, and the cures for, cancer in both biomedicine and its increasingly popular alternative counterparts. Analyzing conventional and...

For most of the 20th century, modernity has been characterized by the formalization of social relations as face to face interactions are replaced by impersonal bureaucracy and finance. As we enter the new millennium, however, it becomes increasingly clear that it is only by stepping outside these formal structures that trust and co-operation can be created and social change achieved. In this book, the author argues that only the society that achieves an appropriate balance between the informality and formality of interaction will find itself in a position to move forward to further...

More than half of the published works of Theodor Adorno were devoted to his studies in music. As his reputation has grown in recent years, however, Adorno's work on music has remained a neglected area because of its musicological complexity. This account of Adorno's texts on music takes a sociological perspective. In non-technical language, Robert Witkin guides the reader through the complexities of Adorno's argument about the link between music and morality and between musical works and social structure. It was through these works more than any others that Adorno established the right of the...

This text presents a sociological analysis of the cultural phenomenon, the Taj Mahal. The author describes the conflicting narratives which surround the site; those which remain rooted in Western post-colonialism, viewing the monument as a symbol of love, of India and of splendid exuberance and those which challenge this ethnocentricity, for whom the Taj is the symbolic centre of Islamic power or a site of Moghul appropriation. It goes on to describe many of the tourist practices around the Taj as well as considering the notion of tourism in a wider context. It concludes with the idea of...