This wide-ranging and accessible contribution to the study of risk, ecology and environment helps us to understand the politics of ecology and the place of social theory in making sense of environmental issues. The book provides insights into the complex dynamics of change in 'risk societies'.

Global Modernities is a sustained commentary on the international character of the most microcosmic practices. It demonstrates how the global increasingly informs the regional, so deconstructing ideas like the nation-state' and national sovereignty'. The spatialization of social theory, hybridization and bio-politics are among the critical issues discussed.

Suitable for students and scholars in social theory, sociology and anthropology, this title examines the mechanisms of stigmatisation, taboo and gossip, monopolisation of power, collective fantasy and we and they images which support and reinforce divisions in society.

Reading feminist theory as a complex imaginative achievement, Feminist Imagination considers feminist commitment through the interrogation of its philosophical, political and affective connections with the past, and especially with the race' trials of the twentieth century. The book looks at: the 'directionlessness' of contemporary feminist thought; the question of essentialism and embodiment; the racial tensions in the work of Simone de Beauvoir; the totalitarian character in Hannah Arendt; the 'mimetic Jew' and the concept of mimesis in the work of Judith Butler.

Vikki Bell provides a...

Presents a multidimensional, complex approach to sociological theory that focuses on culture. This title develops the theme of globalization in relation to the cultural turn, world-systems theory, the civilizing process, modernity and postmodernity, nostalgia politics and fundamentalism.

In this book leading international social scientists analyze the extent to which we are seeing a globalization of culture. Differing explanations are offered for trends towards global unification and their relation to an economic world-system.

Aims to provide an accessible but challenging introduction to Bourdieu's ideas. The issues developed include the sociology of culture, leisure and taste; the intrinsic reflexivity of social science; and the role of language in society and in social sciences.

This challenging volume reasserts the centrality of the body within social theory as a means to understanding the complex interrelations between nature, culture and society. The importance of a theoretical understanding of the body to social and cultural analysis of contemporary societies is demonstrated through specific case studies.

Developing a comparative analysis of the UK and US, the new Germany and Japan, Lash and Urry show how restructuration after organized capitalism has its basis in increasingly reflexive social actors and organizations. The consequence is not only the much-vaunted 'postmodern condition' but also a growth in reflexivity.

This study seeks to recast the social dynamic of postmodernity. It argues, in contrast to much contemporary thought defining this dynamic as the contraction of the social into the individual, that it is in fact a retreat into tribalism.