Global Ireland offers a concise synthesis of globalization's dramatic impact on Ireland. In the past fifteen years, Ireland has transformed from a sleepy and depressed European backwater to the 'emerald tiger', a country with a booming economy based on knowledge and high-tech industries. Not long ago it was one of the poorest and most traditional countries in Europe, yet now it is one of the wealthiest and most cosmopolitan. Using a number of case studies of Ireland's transition, Tom Inglis explains what this means for traditional Irish culture and society, and offers an incisive social...

Love is a dominant theme in Western popular culture. It has become central to the meaning of everyday life, propagated through the media and the market. Being in love has become idealized. With the demise of institutional religion in the West, love has become the dominant form of inner-worldly salvation. In Foucault s terms, it has become a key component in the arts of existence and the care of self: to have lived without loving is sinful.

In this highly accessible introduction to love of all kinds, Tom Inglis gives a clear, concise picture of how love shapes, and is shaped by, society....

The struggle to create and sustain meaning in our everyday lives is fought using cultural ingredients to spin the webs of meaning that keep us going. To help reveal the complexity and intricacy of the webs of meaning in which they are suspended, Tom Inglis interviewed one-hundred people in their native home of Ireland to discover what was most important and meaningful for them in their lives. Inglis believes language is a medium: there is never an exact correspondence between what is said and what is felt and understood. Using a variety of theoretical lenses developed within sociology and...

Are the Irish different and, if so, how and why? This book addresses this issue through twenty-three short essays about the nature of contemporary Irish culture and society and the transformations that have taken place over the last fifty years. The topics covered include the nature of Irish nationalism and capitalism, the Irish political elite, the differences in the Irish family, the nature of Irish Catholicism, the upsurge in immigration, the Irish diaspora, the Irish language, sport and music. The essays are written in a clear and accessible manner by scholars from within the human...

Are the Irish different and, if so, how and why? This book addresses this issue through twenty-three short essays about the nature of contemporary Irish culture and society and the transformations that have taken place over the last fifty years. The topics covered include the nature of Irish nationalism and capitalism, the Irish political elite, the differences in the Irish family, the nature of Irish Catholicism, the upsurge in immigration, the Irish diaspora, the Irish language, sport and music. The essays are written in a clear and accessible manner by scholars from within the human...

The struggle to create and sustain meaning in our everyday lives is fought using cultural ingredients to spin the webs of meaning that keep us going. To help reveal the complexity and intricacy of the webs of meaning in which they are suspended, Tom Inglis interviewed one-hundred people in their native home of Ireland to discover what was most important and meaningful for them in their lives. Inglis believes language is a medium: there is never an exact correspondence between what is said and what is felt and understood. Using a variety of theoretical lenses developed within sociology and...