This study explores the meaning of working-class origin in the life and career of university graduates. Mick Matthys approaches social mobility as a trajectory construction in which different classes are integrated, and uses the notion of identity capital to interpret and discuss the meaning of the individual drive in social mobility.

"It is simply too much" is a common complaint of the modern age. This book looks at how people and institutions deal with overflow - of information, consumption or choices. The essays explore the ways in which notions of overflow - framed in terms of excess and abundance or their implicit opposites, scarcity and dearth - crop up in a number of contexts such as sociological and economic theory, management consulting, consumer studies, and the politics of everyday life. Chapters range from studies of overload at home, at work or in the world of cyber information; strategies of coping with...

Since the 1980s, Ulrich Beck has worked extensively on his theories of second modernity and the risk society. This book provides an extensive and thorough introduction to the German sociologist's collected works.

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...

Healthy Aging in Sociocultural Context examines two emerging trends facing countries throughout the world: population aging and population diversity. It makes a unique contribution to our understanding of these timely issues byexamining their implications for healthy aging, a topic of increasing importance to policy-makers, planners, researchers, families, and individuals of all ages. The book focuses on three countries that provide important examples of these emerging global trends - Japan, Sweden, and the United States. Japan and Sweden are at the forefront in terms of healthy life...

This text focuses on the rule of social capital in the process of innovation: the social networks and the norms; values and attitudes (such as trust) of the actors; social capital as both bonding and bridging links between actors; and social capital as a feature at all spatial levels, from the single inventor to the transnational corporation.

How are the arts important in young people s lives? Youth, Arts and Education offers a groundbreaking theory of arts education. Anna Hickey-Moody explores how the arts are ways of belonging, resisting, being governed and being heard.

Through examples from the United Kingdom and Australia, Anna Hickey-Moody shows the cultural significance of the kinds of learning that occur in and through arts. Drawing on the thought of Gilles Deleuze, she develops the theory of affective pedagogy, which explains the process of learning that happens through aesthetics.

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This book provides an empirical study of the increasing importance of the concept of the entrepreneur in the context of the neoliberal cultural paradigm. Using the theoretical framework of the post-structural discourse theory and methods of qualitative discourse analysis, the book describes the changes in political discourse that resulted in the increasing dominance of the figure of the entrepreneur after the late 1980s.