This innovative volume offers analytical and comparative insights into current socio-economic practices as well as an assessment of the overall economic globalization phenomenon. By looking at empirical case studies of different civilations and cultures, this volume assesses of intertwining of local socio-economic practices and global economic modernity.

Social inequality is a worldwide phenomenon. Globalization has exacerbated and alleviated inequality over the past twenty-five years. This volume offers analytical and comparative insights from current case studies of social inequality in more than ten countries within all the major regions of the world. Contributors provide an assessment of the overall social globalization phenomenon in the global world as well as an outlook of transformations of global social inequality in the future. This book will be a timely addition for students and scholars of globalization studies, social inequality, sociology, and cultural and social anthropology.

Renowned author Ulrike Schuerkens presents an in-depth exploration of social transformations and developments. Combining an international approach with up-to-date research, the book: Has dedicated chapters on contemporary topics including technology, new media, war and terror, political culture and inequality Includes an analysis of societal structures – inequality, globalization, transnationalism Contains learning features including: discussion questions, annotated further reading, chapter summaries and pointers to online resources to assist with study A must buy for students taking modules in social change, social inequality, social theory and globalization.

This book examines the surfer, one of the most significant and enduring archetypes in American popular culture. Lawler sets the surfer against the backdrop of the negative reactions to it by those groups responsible for enforcing the Puritan discipline, offering a fresh take on the relationship between commercial culture and counterculture.

How are the arts important in young people's lives? In Youth, Arts and Education, Anna Hickey-Moody explores how the arts are ways of belonging, resisting, being governed and being heard. Drawing on the thought of Gilles Deleuze, she develops the theory of affective pedagogy, which explains the process of learning that happens through aesthetics.

Globalization, immigration and economic crisis challenge the conceptions of nations, trans-national institutions and post-ethnic societies which are central topics in social sciences' discourses. This book examines in an interdisciplinary and international comparative way structures of national identity which are in conflict with or supporting multi-ethnic diversity and trans-national connectivity. The book’s first section seeks to clarify the concepts of national identity, nationalism, patriotism and cosmopolitism and to operationalize them consistently. The next section regards the diversity within national states and the consequences for the management of identity and intra-national integration. The third section focuses on external integration between different nations by searching for the "squaring of the circle" between the bonding with co-patriots and the critical reflection of one's own national perspective in relation to others. The last section explores to what extent and in which ways media use shapes collective identity.

The idea of ‘pornography’ is often employed to invoke titillation, anger, and disgust. Stigma and the Shaping of the Pornography Industry explores the effects that this stigmatized identity has on the pornography industry itself. From the video era to the emergence of the internet, to trade shows, white-collar workers, technological innovation, and industry-wide characteristics, this book looks beyond content production to explore how stigma has shaped the structures, practices, norms, and boundaries of the wider sector. By drawing on concepts such as dirty work, core-stigmatized industries, and outlaw innovation, this book offers rich insights into the ways in which stigma is socially constructed and managed, and the deep structural effects that it has on the industry.

This book analyzes the history of contemporary or 'new' music in the twentieth-century through the lens of the sociology of modern culture, linking the paradoxical aspects of twentieth-century music to the central processes in modern culture that are analyzed by sociology and social theory.

This book originates from a research project involving extensive collection and analysis of primary and secondary materials (scholarly literature, statistical data, and interviews with key actors) on global management and local resistances in all major world regions during the last years. It seeks to assess the overall management situation in the world, looking at the world as a social system where some countries act as winners of socioeconomic globalization, others as losers, and some as both. Offering analytical and comparative insights at the global level, this book will be useful for scholars, students, NGOs, and policy makers.

The dissolution of the communist system led to the creation of new states and the formation of new concepts of citizenship in the post-Soviet states of Central and Eastern Europe. The formation of national identity also occurred in the context of the process of increasing economic and political globalisation, particularly the widening of the European Union to include the central European post-socialist and Baltic States. Internationally, Russia sought to establish a new identity either as a European or as a Eurasian society and had to accommodate the interests of a wider Russian Diaspora in the ‘near abroad’. This book addresses how domestic elites (regional, political and economic) influenced the formation of national identities and the ways in which citizenship has been defined. A second component considers the external dimensions: the ways in which foreign elites influenced either directly or indirectly the concept of identity and the interaction with internal elites. The essays consider the role of the European Union in attempting to form a European identity. Moreover, the growing internationalisation of economies (privatisation, monetary harmonisation, dependence on trade) also had effects on the kind of ‘national identity’ sought by the new nation states as well as the defining by them of ‘the other’. The collection focuses on the interrelations between social identity, state and citizenship formation, and the role of elites in defining the content of concepts in different post-communist societies. This book was originally published as a special issue of Europe-Asia Studies.