Piotr Sztompka presents a comprehensive theoretical account of trust as a fundamental component of human actions. Professor Sztompka's detailed and systematic study takes account of the rich evolving research on trust, and explains its meaning, foundations and functions. He illustrates and supports his claims with statistical data and his own impressive empirical study of trust, carried out in Poland after the collapse of communism. This conceptually creative and elegant work will be of interest to scholars and students of sociology, political science and social philosophy.

Piotr Sztompka presents a comprehensive theoretical account of trust as a fundamental component of human actions. Professor Sztompka's detailed and systematic study takes account of the rich evolving research on trust, and explains its meaning, foundations and functions. He illustrates and supports his claims with statistical data and his own impressive empirical study of trust, carried out in Poland after the collapse of communism. This conceptually creative and elegant work will be of interest to scholars and students of sociology, political science and social philosophy.

In Louis XIV's France, land took on new importance in politics and court life. A sequestered aristocracy promenaded in formal gardens while the military moved across the landscape, marking state boundaries with fortresses and refiguring the interior with canals and forests. Chandra Mukerji highlights the connections between the seemingly disparate activities of engineering and garden design, showing how the gardens at Versailles showcased French skills in using nature and art to design a distinctively French landscape and create a naturalized political territoriality.

Situated at the crossroads of feminism, queer theory, and poststructuralist debates around identity, this is not a book about Simone de Beauvoir, but, rather, a book that addresses the different ways in which she is constructed as an intelligible "self" by academics, biographers and the media. It shows how key Western concepts such as individuality constrain attempts to deconstruct the self and prevent bisexuality being understood as an identity. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari to see what this construction of bisexuality offers contemporary theories, it also critiques Foucault's work.

Since the early nineteenth century, African-Americans have turned to Black newspapers to monitor the mainstream media and to develop alternative interpretations of public events. Ronald Jacobs tells the stories of these newspapers--in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles--for the first time, comparing African-American and "mainstream" media coverage of racial crises such as the Watts riot, the beating of Rodney King, the Los Angeles uprisings and the O. J. Simpson trial. In an engaging yet scholarly style, Jacobs shows us why a strong African-American press is still needed today.

Since the early nineteenth century, African-Americans have turned to Black newspapers to monitor the mainstream media and to develop alternative interpretations of public events. Ronald Jacobs tells the stories of these newspapers--in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles--for the first time, comparing African-American and "mainstream" media coverage of racial crises such as the Watts riot, the beating of Rodney King, the Los Angeles uprisings and the O. J. Simpson trial. In an engaging yet scholarly style, Jacobs shows us why a strong African-American press is still needed today.

Situated at the crossroads of feminism, queer theory, and poststructuralist debates around identity, this is not a book about Simone de Beauvoir, but, rather, a book that addresses the different ways in which she is constructed as an intelligible "self" by academics, biographers and the media. It shows how key Western concepts such as individuality constrain attempts to deconstruct the self and prevent bisexuality being understood as an identity. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari to see what this construction of bisexuality offers contemporary theories, it also critiques Foucault's work.

Meyda Yegenoglu investigates the intersection between postcolonial and feminist criticism, via the Western fascination with the veiled women of the Orient. Linking representations of cultural and sexual difference, she shows the Oriental woman to have functioned as the veiled interior of Western identity. Her original and compelling argument calls into question dualistic conceptions of identity and difference, West and East, masculinist assumptions of Orientalism, and Western feminist discourses that seek to "liberate" the veiled woman.

This is a book about the role of culture in social change and the transition to democracy of post-Franco Spain. Since General Franco's death in 1975, Spanish political life has seen an extraordinarily quiescent "period of consensus," unique in its own history. Laura Desfor Edles takes a distinctively culturalist approach to this "strategy of consensus" and institutionalization of democracy, and uncovers the processes of symbolization and ritualization that characterize it.

This book is a major comparative analysis of fundamentalist movements in historical and cultural context, spanning revolutionary France, America and Japan, with an emphasis on the contemporary scene. Leading sociologist S. N. Eisenstadt examines the protofundamentalist movements that arose in the great "axial civilizations" in premodern times in order to illuminate the meaning of the global rise of fundamentalism that is shown to be an important current in modernity. The central theme of the book is the distinctively Jacobin features of fundamentalist movements and their ambivalent attitude...