Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Sociology - General

Philosophers have been arguing about the meaning of well-being since the time of the Ancients. Participants in the contemporary debate about it include governments who promote it to encourage a work ethic, corporations who reconfigure it as a marketing strategy, "mindfulness" gurus who seek to realise it by retreating from the world, and Aristotelians who imagine it in the context of the good life or eudemonia. This book argues that none of these approaches enable us to understand fully the nature of well-being or what we have to do in order to realise a sustainable form of it.

In spite of the rapid increase in the number of gyms and the diversification of fitness practices within them, there has been a lack of empirically-based research that explores the embodied experiences of 'gym goers' and the fitness cultures that are constructed within these spaces. This fascinating new book offers a personal, interactive, ethnographic account of the multiplicity of contemporary gym practices, spaces and cultures. It argues that gym bodies are historically constructed, social, sensual, emotional and political; that experience intersects with multiple embodied identities;...

Streaming Music examines how the Internet has become integrated in contemporary music use, by focusing on streaming as a practice and a technology for music consumption. The backdrop to this enquiry is the digitization of society and culture, where the music industry has undergone profound disruptions, and where music streaming has altered listening modes and meanings of music in everyday life.

The objective of Streaming Music is to shed light on what these transformations mean for listeners, by looking at their adaptation in specific cultural contexts, but also...

Since the 1970s information sciences and new communication technologies have changed the ways we produce everything, from food and material goods to knowledge. These first steps in the Great Transformation are unlike earlier agricultural or industrial revolutions. This transformation will dramatically increase productivity while radically reducing demand for human labour across all skill levels. When work as we know it disappears, what will we educate for? How will we live? Will this change enlarge or further impoverish democracy? These are questions we need to address. If policy responses...

This book provides a comprehensive account of the work of Bernard Stiegler, one of the most influential living social and political philosophers of the twenty-first century. Focusing on Stiegler's thought on hyperindustrial society and the development of technological systems through which the social, economic and political life of human beings has been transformed, the author examines Stiegler's claim that the human species is 'originally technological' and that to understand the evolution of human society, we must first understand the interface between human beings and technology.