Sociology books

Volume 37 of REA features eleven original articles organized in four different sections, each focusing on a specific, popular and significant theme in economic anthropology: production, exchange, vending, and tourism. The first section investigates the brewing (and selling) of homemade beer among Maragoli women in western Kenya, continuity and change in small-scale family farming in a rural part of Costa Rica, and theoretical models of the transitions to farming that marked the Neolithic Revolution. The second section, on exchange, opens with another archaeological examination—of relationships between long-distance exchange and the centralization of political power in Pre-Columbian America. This section also explores adaptations of the Ten Thousand Villages fair trade organization following the recent global recession, exchanges and “productive leisure” at North Market in Columbus, Ohio, and social values in flux over problems relating to exchange amidst conditions of scarcity in the Solomon Islands. The third section investigates the plight and adaptations of vendors in a southern Chinese city and on a Mexican beach, drawing attention to the effects of both national government policies and international trade agreements on their lives. The volume closes with a section that considers important and timely issues in tourism—the role of debt in commission-based relationships between showroom owners and tour guides in Agra, India, and risk, resilience, health, and government policy in Jamaica’s sex tourism industry.

This book is a rich exploration of the baby boomers - those coming of age in the sixties and now entering old age - the influences that have shaped how they perceive ageing appearance, how they define ageing and beauty, and the meaning of appearance, beauty, and identity. The book draws from a variety of sources from ageing research, history and gender studies and a diverse group of interviewees. The longevity revolution and shifting notions of identity coalesce as older women and men seek to find new modes of self-presentation as they age. Ageing is a profoundly embodied process, yet older people's concerns about appearance and beauty is perceived, by many, as trivial or a function of consumer society. Investigating notions of appearance and beauty as a core human concern, the author explores Western cultural notions of beauty. What then is beauty in old age? Is it even a possibility given the history of youth and aesthetic preference? The book seeks to bring forward ideas of age and beauty as defined by baby boomers, how they see themselves and how they are seen.

Becoming Digital examines the transition from the online world we have known to the Next Internet, which is emerging from the convergence of Cloud Computing, Big Data Analytics, and the Internet of Things. The Cloud stores and processes information in data centers; Big Data Analytics provide the tools to analyse and use it; and the Internet of Things connects sensor-equipped devices everywhere to communication networks that span the globe. These technologies make possible a post-Internet society filled with homes that think, machines that make decisions, drones that deliver packages or bombs, and robots that work for us, play with us, and take our jobs. The Next Internet promises a world where computers are everywhere, even inside our bodies, “coming alive” to make possible the unification of people and machines in what some call the Singularity. This timely book explores this potential as both a reality on the horizon and a myth that inspires a new religion of technology. It takes up the coming threats to a democratic, decentralized, and universal Internet and the potential to deepen the problems of commercial saturation, concentrated economic power, cyber-warfare, the erosion of privacy, and environmental degradation. On the other hand, it also shows how the Next Internet can help expand democracy, empowering people worldwide, providing for more of life’s necessities, and advancing social equality. But none of this will happen without concerted political and policy action. Becoming Digital points the way forward.

This book critically reviews existing digital divide research and challenges its core thesis, which posits unequal Internet access as a newly formed source of social disadvantage. The author begins by introducing the building blocks of the information society theory. The book goes on to present a systematic overview of digital divide research - its development, arguments attesting to the social gravity of the digital divide, and current findings on the uneven diffusion and use of the Internet. It evaluates the validity of the theories and concepts associated with digital divide research. The author offers an overview and re-examination of six presumptions and biases found in the prevailing approach to the digital divide. Given that Internet use has, in certain contexts, become an absolute necessity, an alternative approach is proposed, recognizing the indispensability of Internet use as context dependent. The book concludes with a consideration of the implications that this new perspective has for the information society theory and policies as well as for the role of social science in the informatization process.

Whilst scholarship has increasingly moved to consider mixedness and the experiences of mixed-race people, there has been a notable lack of attention to the specific experiences of mixed-race men. This is despite growing recognition of the particular ways race and gender intersect. By centring the accounts of Black mixed-race men in the United Kingdom and United States, this book offers a timely intervention that extends the theoretical terrain of race and ethnicity scholarship and of studies of gender and masculinities. As it treads new and important ground, this book draws upon theories of performativity and hybridity in order to understand how Black mixed-race men constitute and reconstitute complex and multiplicitous identities. ‘Post-racial’ conditions mean that Black mixed-race men engage in such processes in a context where the significance of race and racism is rendered invisible and denied. By introducing the theoretical concept of ‘post-racial’ resilience, this study strives to capture and celebrate the contemporary, creative and innovative ways in which Black mixed-race men refuse the fragmentation and erasure of their identities. As it does so, the author offers a corrective to popular representations that have too readily pathologized Black mixed-race men. Focusing on the everyday through a discussion of Black mixed-race men’s racial symbolism, experiences of racial microaggressions, and interactions with peers, Black Mixed-Race Men: Transatlanticity, Hybridity and Post-Racial Resilience offers an in-depth insight into a previously neglected area of scholarship.

New Public Management has held a central position within public administration over the past few decades, complemented by various models promoting post-bureaucratic organization. But ‘traditional’ bureaucracy has not disappeared, and bureaucracy is in transition in the West and the rest of the world. Bureaucracies still fill crucial positions in modern societies, despite growing criticism of assumed inefficiencies and unlimited growth. This volume examines a range of issues related to bureaucracies in transition across Europe, with a particular focus on the Nordic region. Chapters examine a range of topics including a reinterpretation of Weber’s conception of bureaucracy; the historical development of institutions and organizational structures in Sweden and Greece; the myth of bureaucratic neutrality and the concept of ‘competent neutrality’; performance management systems; the anti-bureaucratic identities of senior civil servants; the role of experts and expertise in bureaucratic organizations; the impact of reform on public sector executives; the curbing of corruption in Scandinavian states; an interrogation of the Nordic administrative model; Supreme Audit Institutions; ‘street-level’ bureaucracy; and the establishment of an ‘ethics of office’ amongst Danish civil servants.

In this new volume of Studies in Symbolic Interaction Carl J. Couch’s (1925-1994) memoir The Romance of Discovery, which has lain unpublished for thirty years, is published in full for the first time. Couch, one of the co-founders of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, reflects on his work that influenced a generation of scholars and created a novel perspective known as the new Iowa School of Symbolic Interaction. His memoir describes the joy of establishing synergetic connections and the pain of the political struggles associated with the establishment of this school of thought. It offers a frank, proud yet humble, unapologetic description of a scholar’s journey, from a successful research to a founder of a school of thought. It provides a readable and valuable ‘moral tale’ of how research is not only a social act, but charged with political and conflictual dynamics as well. Edited and set in context by Michael A. Katovich, the volume also includes Couch’s unpublished essay ‘Forms of Social Processes’ which sets out a theory of his methodology. Friends and colleagues offer their personal reflections on their relationship with Couch, and the volume concludes with a unique selected bibliography on new Iowa School works.

This book examines childbirth and parenting in horror texts. By analysing new texts, and re-analysing commonly used texts with new feminist methodology, this study provides a unique contribution to the fields of gender and horror studies. Focusing on horror fiction and film, this book reviews textual treatments of birth and motherhood, and how they differ from representations of fatherhood. Motherhood and birth are represented as revolting in several ways. Mothers in horror do not fulfil their gender role, and the neglect of motherhood by a woman is deemed horrific because it is the antithesis of Western patriarchal ideals of female identity. These mothers are unforgiven. Bad fathers, in contrast, are given moments of restoration that allow audiences or readers to feel immediate sympathy for them. Examining conception, birth, motherhood and fathers, this work provides a unique exploration of the monstrous and the marginalized within the horror genre.

The armed forces of the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan are in dire need of reform to address a plethora of problems including inadequate training, low morale, poor public perception, and low recruitment numbers. This book uses the postmodern military model to measure how public perception of the military is influenced by self-identification in Taiwan, and it shows that the public has little confidence or trust in their military, even as they remain acutely aware of the threat posed by an increasingly belligerent China and its ever-growing People's Liberation Army. While there has been much analysis as to what strategies and weapons systems should be adopted by ROC defense planners, relatively little has been written on how to create a more relevant military within Taiwan society. Ultimately, this book addresses these matters and provides policymakers within the ROC government and military, as well as researchers of Asia Pacific security, with an understanding of the current relationship between military and society, to assist in the creation of a more accountable military.

In Contested Belonging: Spaces, Practices, Biographies contributions by well-known international scholars from different disciplines address the sites, practices, and narratives in which belonging is imagined, enacted and constrained, negotiated and contested. Belonging is viewed from the perspectives of both migrants and refugees in their host countries as well as from people who are ostensibly ‘at home’ and yet may experience various degrees of alienation in their countries of origin. The book focuses on three particular dimensions of belonging: belonging as space (neighbourhood, workplace, home), as practice (virtual, physical, cultural), and as biography (life stories, group narratives). What role do physical, digital, transnational and in-between spaces play and how are they used in order to create/contest belonging? Which practices do people engage in in order to gain/foster/invent a certain/new sense of belonging? What can the biographies and narratives of people reveal about their complicated and contested experiences of belonging? Contested Belonging: Spaces, Practices, Biographies convincingly shows how individual and collective struggles for belonging are not only associated with exclusion and ‘othering’, but also lead to surprising and inspiring forms of social action and transformation, suggesting that there may be more reason for hope than for despair.