Polity Press - Böcker

Over the past thirty years, humanity has made a huge mistake. We handed over to big tech decisions that have allowed them to build what has become our "space of the world" the highly artificial space of social media platforms where much ...

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The new edition of this popular introduction explores the meaning of social deviance in contemporary society. It traces the path by which we create deviance: how we single out behavior, ideas, and appearances that differ from the norm, label them ...

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Health communication is key to promoting good population and individual health outcomes. As the field has developed, there is a growing need for a critical appraisal of the ideologies and theories underpinning health communication in order to ensu...

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Crime in an Insecure World investigates the alarming trend across Western societies of treating every imaginable source of harm as a crime. It locates this trend in the 21st century obsession with insecurity fostered by neo-liberal governments. It...

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The present ecological mutation has organized the whole political landscape for the last thirty years. This could explain the deadly cocktail of exploding inequalities, massive deregulation, and conversion of the dream of globalization into a nigh...

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Searching the internet for health information or using health apps on mobile devices has become part of our daily routine, yet can be just as disempowering as empowering. This engaging overview critically examines the theoretical underpinning of d...

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A spectre is haunting us: fear. We are constantly confronted with apocalyptic scenarios: pandemics, world war, the climate catastrophe. Images of the end of the world and the end of human civilization are conjured up with ever greater urgency. Anx...

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The pace of modern life is undoubtedly speeding up, yet this acceleration does not seem to have made us any happier or more content. If acceleration is the problem, then the solution, argues Hartmut Rosa in this major new work, lies in resonance. ...

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In this new book, Bauman examines how we have moved away from a 'heavy' and 'solid', hardware-focused modernity to a 'light' and 'liquid', software-based modernity. This passage, he argues, has brought profo...

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We live in a time of great uncertainty about the future. Those heady days of the late twentieth century, when the end of the Cold War seemed to be ushering in a new and more optimistic age, now seem like a distant memory. During the last couple of...

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In Southern Theory Raewyn Connell presents the case for a new world social science' - one that is inclusive of many voices - by arguing for a more democratic global recognition of social theory from societies outside the dominant European and...

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Since the end of the Cold War, conflict prevention and resolution, peacekeeping and peacebuilding have risen to the top of the international agenda. The fourth edition of this hugely popular text explains the key concepts, charts the development o...

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Global climate change poses an unprecedented challenge for governments across the world. Small wonder that many experts question whether democracies have the ability to cope with the causes and long-term consequences of a changing climate. Some ev...

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Everything is sad, wrote the Ancient poets. But is this sadness merely a human experience, projected onto the world, or is there a gloom attributable to the world itself? Could the universe be forever weeping the tears of things? In this series of...

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What role does religion play in modern societies? Is it merely an anachronism that hinders our economic growth? Is it a kind of superstition that people should be left to enjoy in private but should refrain from discussing in public? It is no secr...

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This leading, authoritative textbook has been carefully and substantially revised to provide the indispensable foundational resource for the sociology of work. The fourth edition has been transformed to combine unrivalled explanations of classic t...

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Subcultural phenomena continue to draw attention from many areas of contemporary society, including the news media, the marketing and fashion industries, concerned parents, religious, and other citizen groups, as well as academia. Research into th...

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It is commonly assumed that capitalism has created an a-emotional world dominated by bureaucratic rationality; that economic behavior conflicts with intimate, authentic relationships; that the public and private spheres are irremediably opposed to...

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Until recently, struggles for justice proceeded against the background of a taken-for-granted frame: the bounded territorial state. With that "Westphalian" picture of political space assumed by default, the scope of justice was rarely su...

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Disasters kill, maim, and generate increasingly large economic losses. But they do not wreak their damage equally across populations, and every disaster has social dimensions at its very core. This important book sheds light on the social conditio...

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The Fashioned Body provides a wide-ranging and original overview of fashion and dress from an historical and sociological perspective. Where once fashion was seen as marginal, it has now entered into core economic discourse focused around ideas ab...

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What we call growth today is in fact a tumorous growth, a cancerous proliferation which is disrupting the social organism. These tumours endlessly metastasize and grow with an inexplicable, deadly vitality. At a certain point this growth is no lon...

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Politicians invoke grand ideas: social justice, democracy, community, liberty, equality. But what do these ideas really mean? How can politicians across the political spectrum appeal to the same values? This fourth edition of Adam Swift's hig...

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Social life is in a constant process of change, and sociology can never stand still. As a result, contemporary sociology is a theoretically diverse enterprise, covering a huge range of subjects and drawing on a broad array of research methods. Cen...

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Existentialism: An Introduction has established itself as the most comprehensive and accessible book on the subject available. In this fully revised and expanded second edition, Kevin Aho draws on a wide range of existentialist thinkers from both ...

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No German painter evokes such strong emotions as Caspar David Friedrich: his evening skies remain icons of longing, his mountain vistas testaments to the grandeur of nature. He inspired Samuel Beckett to write Waiting for Godot and Walt Disney to ...

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Social theory needs to be completely rethought in a world of digital media and social media platforms driven by data processes. Fifty years after Berger and Luckmann published their classic text The Social Construction of Reality, two leading soci...

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In our busy and hurried lives, we are losing the ability to be inactive. Human existence becomes fully absorbed by activity even leisure, treated as a respite from work, becomes part of the same logic. Intense life today means first of all more pe...

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In times of entrenched social upheaval and multiple crises, we need the kind of social theory that is prepared to look at the big picture, analyze the broad developmental features of modern societies, their structural conditions and dynamics, and ...

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Culture, cultural difference, and cultural conflict always surround us. Cultural sociologists aim to understand their role across all aspects of social life by examining processes of meaning-making. In this crisp and accessible book, Lyn Spillman ...

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