This book challenges the myth that individualism necessarily weakens commitments to the common good. It examines environmental and other activist groups in which individualism sometimes enhances political commitment. Rather than criticize individualism and favor a return to "traditional" values, Paul Lichterman examines the untraditional, personalized politics of many recent social movements and invites us to rethink common understandings of commitment, community, and individualism in a post-traditional world.

This book considers the cultural and religious sources of contemporary psychoanalytic theories of the development of the self, and demonstrates that they are distinctively Western cultural constructions that tell a story in terms of a narrative pattern derived from biblical and Neoplatonic sources. Thus, religious themes and values still influence how modern psychologists make sense of the human condition, and Dr. Kirschner raises provocative questions about the status of psychoanalytic theories as knowledge and as science.

In this groundbreaking book, influential cultural sociologist Alberto Melucci delves deeper into questions about the self as both a psychological and sociocultural entity, particularly in the context of a global society for which information has become a basic resource. He accounts for the self as a site of highly subjective and intimate experiences, such as crying, laughing and loving, and in relation to social structural dynamics, through more impersonal experiences, such as the experience of time, and links of the self to politics.

This book provides a nontechnical account of the debate concerning human embryo research, concentrating on the British parliamentary debates of 1984-1990. It traces the debates' origins back to conflicts over abortion and moral reform in the 1960s, and examines reactions in the 1990s to sex selection and the use of eggs from human fetuses for research. Michael Mulkay shows how embryo research develops within a complex social environment, writing for anyone interested in the relationship between science-based assisted reproduction and society.

Images of starving children, bombed villages and mass graves brought to us by television in the comfort of our homes implicitly call on us to act. What can we do when the suffering we see is so distant and we feel powerless compared with the forces behind the suffering? Luc Boltanski examines the ways in which, since the end of the eighteenth century, spectators have tried to respond acceptably to what they have seen, and discusses whether there remains a place for pity in modern politics.

Screening the Los Angeles 'Riots' explores the meanings one news organization found in the landmark events of 1992, as well as those made by fifteen groups of viewers in the events' aftermath. Combining ethnographic and experimental research, Darnell M. Hunt explores how race shapes both the construction of television news and viewers' understandings of it. In the process, he engages with longstanding debates about the power of television to shape our thoughts versus our ability to resist.

Alberto Melucci brings an original perspective to research on collective action, emphasizing the role of culture and making telling connections with the experience of the individual in postmodern society. The focus is on the role of information in a world both fragmented and globalized, and topics addressed include political conflict, feminism, ecology, identity politics, power and inequality. The book builds on the author's Nomads of the Present (1989), and is a companion volume to The Playing Self (CUP, 1996).

This analysis of two hundred American and Canadian novels offers a new theory of national literatures, demonstrating that national canon formation occurs in tandem with nation-building. It accounts for cross-national differences and illuminates the historically constructed and symbolic nature of the relationship between literature and the nation-state. High-culture national literatures are selected as different from other novels; popular-culture bestsellers are mass market commodities for the largest, least differentiated audience.

This original and engaging book investigates American television viewing habits as a distinct cultural form. Based on an empirical study of the day-to-day use of television by working people, it develops a unique theoretical approach integrating cultural sociology, postmodernism and the literature of media effects to explore the way in which people give meaning to their viewing practices. Accessibly written and at the cutting edge of cultural studies and television research, this book is essential reading for students and academics in cultural studies, television research, media and...

This exciting new volume brings together seminal work by leading figures in what is emerging as a new and important intellectual tradition, relating them to other work in sociology and different disciplines. The book is divided into sections on Culture as Text and Code, The Production and Reception of Culture, and Culture in Action, each containing edited theoretical and empirical contributions that address the key debates in cultural sociology: the autonomy of culture, power and culture, structure and agency, and the concept of meaning.