Class affects not only our material wealth but our access to relationships and practices which we have reason to value, including the esteem or respect of others and hence our sense of self-worth. It determines the kind of people we become and our chances of living a fulfilling life. Applying concepts from moral philosophy and social theory to empirical studies of class, this accessible study demonstrates how people are valued in a context of the lottery of birth class, or forces having little to do with moral qualities or other merits.

With the rise of the New Right, the demise of state socialism, and the development of concerns over the nature of modernity, the reception of Marxist and radical theories of capitalist society has become, to say the least, skeptical. In this book Andrew Sayer rethinks and reformulates radical political economy.

The author argues that Marxist theories of capitalism must learn both from the problems of socialism and, more controversially, from liberalism. In a major critique of Marxist and post-Marxist political economy he argues that one of its central problems may be traced to...

A guide to critical realism and an assessment of its virtues in comparison with other traditions in social science. It criticizes reductionism and determinism in modernist social science, along with postmodernism, anti-essentialism and constructionism.

As capitalism develops and state socialism disintegrates, divisions of labor are being reorganized, with major implications for the distribution of power in society. Yet the concept of division of labor has been one of the most neglected in contemporary political economy and social theory. Compared to class, gender or markets, it has typically been treated as a rather indifferent concept, part of the backdrop rather than one of the key forces of the economy and society.

Dealing with the reworking of the division of labor in both practice and theory, and transcending the narrow...

Traditionally social science treated culture as a peripheral issue, but the last twenty years have witnessed a cultural turn throughout the social sciences. Culture is now at the core of debate.

Culture and Economy After the Cultural Turn examines the impact of the cultural turn for the social sciences in relation to the decline of interest in economic aspects of society. It presents a number of responses to the changing relationship between culture and economy, and to the way in which the cultural turn has sought to understand it. Contributors from a wide range of disciplines present...

Class affects not only our material wealth but our access to relationships and practices which we have reason to value, including the esteem or respect of others and hence our sense of self-worth. It determines the kind of people we become and our chances of living a fulfilling life. Applying concepts from moral philosophy and social theory to empirical studies of class, this accessible study demonstrates how people are valued in a context of the lottery of birth class, or forces having little to do with moral qualities or other merits.