Download or read book Twenty Lectures written by Jeffrey C. Alexander and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Social Theory written by Hans Joas and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-09 with total page 1088 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social theory is the theoretical core of the social sciences, clearly distinguishable from political theory and cultural analysis. This book offers a unique overview of the development of social theory from the end of the Second World War in 1945 to the present day. Spanning the literature in English, French and German, it provides an excellent background to the most important social theorists and theories in contemporary sociological thought, with crisp summaries of the main books, arguments and controversies. It also deals with newly emerging schools from rational choice to symbolic interactionism, with new ambitious approaches (Habermas, Luhmann, Giddens, Bourdieu), structuralism and antistructuralism, critical revisions of modernization theory, feminism and neopragmatism. Written by two of the world's leading sociologists and based on their extensive academic teaching, this unrivalled work is ideal both for students in the social sciences and humanities and for anyone interested in contemporary theoretical debates.
Download or read book Reassembling the Social written by Bruno Latour and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2007-09-06 with total page 813 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reassembling the Social is a fundamental challenge from one of the world's leading social theorists to how we understand society and the 'social'. Bruno Latour's contention is that the word 'social', as used by Social Scientists, has become laden with assumptions to the point where it has become misnomer. When the adjective is applied to a phenomenon, it is used to indicate a stablilized state of affairs, a bundle of ties that in due course may be used to account for another phenomenon. But Latour also finds the word used as if it described a type of material, in a comparable way to an adjective such as 'wooden' or 'steely'. Rather than simply indicating what is already assembled together, it is now used in a way that makes assumptions about the nature of what is assembled. It has become a word that designates two distinct things: a process of assembling; and a type of material, distinct from others. Latour shows why 'the social' cannot be thought of as a kind of material or domain, and disputes attempts to provide a 'social explanations' of other states of affairs. While these attempts have been productive (and probably necessary) in the past, the very success of the social sciences mean that they are largely no longer so. At the present stage it is no longer possible to inspect the precise constituents entering the social domain. Latour returns to the original meaning of 'the social' to redefine the notion, and allow it to trace connections again. It will then be possible to resume the traditional goal of the social sciences, but using more refined tools. Drawing on his extensive work examining the 'assemblages' of nature, Latour finds it necessary to scrutinize thoroughly the exact content of what is assembled under the umbrella of Society. This approach, a 'sociology of associations', has become known as Actor-Network-Theory, and this book is an essential introduction both for those seeking to understand Actor-Network Theory, or the ideas of one of its most influential proponents.
Download or read book Contemporary Sociological Thinkers and Theories written by Sandro Segre and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a comprehensive overview of the major theoretical perspectives in contemporary sociology, covering schools of thought or intellectual movements within the discipline, as well as the work of individual scholars. The author provides not only a rigorous exposition of each theory, but also an examination of the scholarly reception of the approach in question, considering both critical responses and defences in order to reach a balanced evaluation. Chapters cover the following theorists and perspectives: ¢ Alexander ¢ Bourdieu ¢ Ethnomethodology ¢ Exchange Theory ¢ Foucault ¢ Giddens ¢ Goffman ¢ Habermas ¢ Luhmann ¢ Merton ¢ Network and Social Capital Theory ¢ Parsons ¢ Rational Choice Theory ¢ Schutz and Phenomenalism ¢ Structuralism ¢ Symbolic Interactionism An accessible and informative treatment of the central approaches in sociology over the course of the last century, this volume marks a significant contribution to sociological theory and constitutes an essential addition to library collections in the areas of the history of sociology and contemporary social theory.
Download or read book An Introduction to Sociology written by Anthony Giddens and published by . This book was released on 2000-04-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Trauma written by Jeffrey C. Alexander and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-26 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book Jeffrey C. Alexander develops an original social theory of trauma and uses it to carry out a series of empirical investigations into social suffering around the globe. Alexander argues that traumas are not merely psychological but collective experiences, and that trauma work plays a key role in defining the origins and outcomes of critical social conflicts. He outlines a model of trauma work that relates interests of carrier groups, competing narrative identifications of victim and perpetrator, utopian and dystopian proposals for trauma resolution, the performative power of constructed events, and the distribution of organizational resources. Alexander explores these processes in richly textured case studies of cultural-trauma origins and effects, from the universalism of the Holocaust to the particularism of the Israeli right, from postcolonial battles over the Partition of India and Pakistan to the invisibility of the Rape of Nanjing in Maoist China. In a particularly controversial chapter, Alexander describes the idealizing discourse of globalization as a trauma-response to the Cold War. Contemporary societies have often been described as more concerned with the past than the future, more with tragedy than progress. In Trauma: A Social Theory, Alexander explains why.
Download or read book Theory for the Working Sociologist written by Fabio Rojas and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-04 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theory for the Working Sociologist makes social theory easy to understand by revealing sociology's hidden playbook. Fabio Rojas argues that sociologists use four different theoretical "moves" when they try to explain the social world: how groups defend their status, how people strategically pursue their goals, how values and institutions support each other, and how people create their social reality. Rojas uses famous sociological studies to illustrate these four types of theory and show how students and researchers may apply them to their interests. The guiding light of the book is the concept of the "social mechanism," which clearly and succinctly links causes and effects in social life. Drawing on dozens of empirical studies that define modern sociology and focusing on the nuts and bolts of social explanation, Rojas reveals how areas of study within the field of sociology that at first glance seem dissimilar are, in fact, linked by shared theoretical underpinnings. In doing so, he elucidates classical and contemporary theory, and connects both to essential sociological findings made throughout the history of the field. Aimed at undergraduate students, graduate students, journalists, and interested general readers who want a more formal way to understand social life, Theory for the Working Sociologist presents the underlying themes of sociological thought using contemporary research and plain language.
Download or read book Classical Sociological Theory written by Craig Calhoun and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-01-17 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive collection of classical sociological theory is a definitive guide to the roots of sociology from its undisciplined beginnings to its current influence on contemporary sociological debate. Explores influential works of Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Mead, Simmel, Freud, Du Bois, Adorno, Marcuse, Parsons, and Merton Editorial introductions lend historical and intellectual perspective to the substantial readings Includes a new section with new readings on the immediate "pre-history" of sociological theory, including the Enlightenment and de Tocqueville Individual reading selections are updated throughout
Download or read book A Social Theory of Corruption written by Sudhir Chella Rajan and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-01 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A social theory of grand corruption from antiquity to the twenty-first century. In contemporary policy discourse, the notion of corruption is highly constricted, understood just as the pursuit of private gain while fulfilling a public duty. Its paradigmatic manifestations are bribery and extortion, placing the onus on individuals, typically bureaucrats. Sudhir Chella Rajan argues that this understanding ignores the true depths of corruption, which is properly seen as a foundation of social structures. Not just bribes but also caste, gender relations, and the reproduction of class are forms of corruption. Using South Asia as a case study, Rajan argues that syndromes of corruption can be identified by paying attention to social orders and the elites they support. From the breakup of the Harappan civilization in the second millennium BCE to the anticolonial movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, elites and their descendants made off with substantial material and symbolic gains for hundreds of years before their schemes unraveled. Rajan makes clear that this grander form of corruption is not limited to India or the annals of global history. Societal corruption is endemic, as tax cheats and complicit bankers squirrel away public money in offshore accounts, corporate titans buy political influence, and the rich ensure that their children live lavishly no matter how little they contribute. These elites use their privileged access to power to fix the rules of the game—legal structures and social norms—benefiting themselves, even while most ordinary people remain faithful to the rubrics of everyday life.
Download or read book Capitalism written by Anwar Shaikh and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-15 with total page 1019 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Orthodox economics operates within a hypothesized world of perfect competition in which perfect consumers and firms act to bring about supposedly optimal outcomes. The discrepancies between this model and the reality it claims to address are then attributed to particular imperfections in reality itself. Most heterodox economists seize on this fact and insist that the world is characterized by imperfect competition. But this only ties them to the notion of perfect competition, which remains as their point of departure and base of comparison. There is no imperfection without perfection. In Capitalism, Anwar Shaikh takes a different approach. He demonstrates that most of the central propositions of economic analysis can be derived without any reference to standard devices such as hyperrationality, optimization, perfect competition, perfect information, representative agents, or so-called rational expectations. This perspective allows him to look afresh at virtually all the elements of economic analysis: the laws of demand and supply, the determination of wage and profit rates, technological change, relative prices, interest rates, bond and equity prices, exchange rates, terms and balance of trade, growth, unemployment, inflation, and long booms culminating in recurrent general crises. In every case, Shaikh's innovative theory is applied to modern empirical patterns and contrasted with neoclassical, Keynesian, and Post-Keynesian approaches to the same issues. Shaikh's object of analysis is the economics of capitalism, and he explores the subject in this expansive light. This is how the classical economists, as well as Keynes and Kalecki, approached the issue. Anyone interested in capitalism and economics in general can gain a wealth of knowledge from this ground-breaking text.
Download or read book Lectures on Probability Theory and Statistics written by Simon Tavaré and published by Springer. This book was released on 2004-01-30 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains lectures given at the 31st Probability Summer School in Saint-Flour (July 8-25, 2001). Simon Tavaré’s lectures serve as an introduction to the coalescent, and to inference for ancestral processes in population genetics. The stochastic computation methods described include rejection methods, importance sampling, Markov chain Monte Carlo, and approximate Bayesian methods. Ofer Zeitouni’s course on "Random Walks in Random Environment" presents systematically the tools that have been introduced to study the model. A fairly complete description of available results in dimension 1 is given. For higher dimension, the basic techniques and a discussion of some of the available results are provided. The contribution also includes an updated annotated bibliography and suggestions for further reading. Olivier Catoni's course appears separately.
Download or read book Lectures on Mathematical Theory of Extremum Problems written by I. V. Girsanov and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of this book, Igor' Vladimirovich Girsanov, was one of the first mathematicians to study general extremum problems and to realize the feasibility and desirability of a unified theory of extremal problems, based on a functional analytic approach. He actively advocated this view, and his special course, given at the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of the Moscow State University in 1963 and 1964, was apparently the first systematic exposition of a unified approach to the theory of extremal problems. This approach was based on the ideas of Dubovitskii and Milyutin [1]. The general theory of extremal problems has developed so intensely during the past few years that its basic concepts may now be considered finalized. Nevertheless, as yet the basic results of this new field of mathematics have not been presented in a form accessible to a wide range of readers. (The profound paper of Dubovitskii and Milyutin [2] can hardly be recommended for a first study of the theory, since, in particular, it does not contain proofs of the fundamental theorems. ) Girsanov's book fills this gap. It contains a systematic exposition of the general principles underlying the derivation of necessary and sufficient conditions for an extremum, in a wide variety of problems. Numerous applications are given to specific extremal problems. The main material is preceded by an introductory section in which all prerequisites from functional analysis are presented.
Download or read book Penal Theories and Institutions written by Michel Foucault and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-11-22 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “What characterizes the act of justice is not resort to a court and to judges; it is not the intervention of magistrates (even if they had to be simple mediators or arbitrators). What characterizes the juridical act, the process or the procedure in the broad sense, is the regulated development of a dispute. And the intervention of judges, their opinion or decision, is only ever an episode in this development. What defines the juridical order is the way in which one confronts one another, the way in which one struggles. The rule and the struggle, the rule in the struggle, this is the juridical.” - Michel Foucault Penal Theories and Institutions is the title Michel Foucault gave to the lectures he delivered at the Collège de France from November 1971 to March 1972. In these lectures Michel Foucault presents for the first time his approach to the question of power that will be the focus of his research up to the writing of Discipline and Punish (1975) and beyond. His analysis starts with a detailed account of Richelieu’s repression of the Nu-pieds revolt (1639-1640) and then goes on to show how the apparatus of power developed by the monarchy on this occasion breaks with the system of juridical and judicial institutions of the Middle Ages and opens out onto a “judicial State apparatus”, a “repressive system”, whose function is focused on the confinement of those who challenge its order. Michel Foucault systemizes the approach of a history of truth on the basis of the study of “juridico-political matrices” that he had begun in the previous year’s lectures (Lectures on the Will to Know) and which is at the heart of the notion of “knowledge-power”. In these lectures Foucault develops his theory of justice and penal law. The appearance of this volume marks the end of the publication of the series Foucault’s courses at the Collège de France (the first volume of which was published in 1997).
Download or read book Southern Theory written by RAEWYN. CONNELL and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-31 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Southern Theory presents the case for a radical re-thinking of social science and its relationships to knowledge, power and democracy on a world scale. Mainstream social science pictures the world as understood by the educated and affluent in Europe and North America. From Weber and Keynes to Friedman and Foucault, theorists from the global North dominate the imagination of social scientists, and the reading lists of students, all over the world. For most of modern history, the majority world has served social science only as a data mine. Yet the global South does produce knowledge and understanding of society. Through vivid accounts of critics and theorists, Raewyn Connell shows how social theory from the world periphery has power and relevance for understanding our changing world from al-Afghani at the dawn of modern social science, to Raul Prebisch in industrialising Latin America, Ali Shariati in revolutionary Iran, Paulin Hountondji in post-colonial Benin, Veena Das and Ashis Nandy in contemporary India, and many others. With clarity and verve, Southern Theory introduces readers to texts, ideas and debates that have emerged from Australia's Indigenous people, from Africa, Latin America, south and south-west Asia. It deals with modernisation, gender, race, class, cultural domination, neoliberalism, violence, trade, religion, identity, land, and the structure of knowledge itself. Southern Theory shows how this tremendous resource has been disregarded by mainstream social science. It explores the challenges of doing theory in the periphery, and considers the role Southern perspectives should have in a globally connected system of knowledge. Southern Theory draws on sociology, anthropology, history, psychology, economics, philosophy and cultural studies, with wide-ranging implications for social science in the 21st century.
Download or read book On the State written by Pierre Bourdieu and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-05-18 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the nature of the modern state? How did it come into being and what are the characteristics of this distinctive field of power that has come to play such a central role in the shaping of all spheres of social, political and economic life? In this major work the great sociologist Pierre Bourdieu addresses these fundamental questions. Modifying Max Weber’s famous definition, Bourdieu defines the state in terms of the monopoly of legitimate physical and symbolic violence, where the monopoly of symbolic violence is the condition for the possession and exercise of physical violence. The state can be reduced neither to an apparatus of power in the service of dominant groups nor to a neutral site where conflicting interests are played out: rather, it constitutes the form of collective belief that structures the whole of social life. The ‘collective fiction’ of the state Ð a fiction with very real effects - is at the same time the product of all struggles between different interests, what is at stake in these struggles, and their very foundation. While the question of the state runs through the whole of Bourdieu’s work, it was never the subject of a book designed to offer a unified theory. The lecture course presented here, to which Bourdieu devoted three years of his teaching at the Collège de France, fills this gap and provides the key that brings together the whole of his research in this field. This text also shows ‘another Bourdieu’, both more concrete and more pedagogic in that he presents his thinking in the process of its development. While revealing the illusions of ‘state thought’ designed to maintain belief in government being oriented in principle to the common good, he shows himself equally critical of an ‘anti-institutional mood’ that is all too ready to reduce the construction of the bureaucratic apparatus to the function of maintaining social order. At a time when financial crisis is facilitating the hasty dismantling of public services, with little regard for any notion of popular sovereignty, this book offers the critical instruments needed for a more lucid understanding of the wellsprings of domination.
Download or read book Sociological Theory for Digital Society written by Ori Schwarz and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "How to rethink social theory in our digital times"--
Download or read book Lectures on Risk Theory written by Klaus D. Schmidt and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1996 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "... Especially now, where from the side of mathematical finance interest is also shown for insurance-related products, a book like this one will definitely be instrumental in communicating the basic mathematical models to non-experts in insurance. I therefore welcome this book for its intended audience." P. Embrechts. Mathematical Reviews, Ann Arbor "... [The book] is useful as a detailed theoretical complement to one of the classical introductory texts on risk theory ...". M. Schweizer. Zentralblatt für Mathematik, Berlin "... The author's goals are clearly proclaimed at the outset, and they are pursued with persistence and integrity. The result is a book which is an integral whole, original in some respects, with interesting contributions. And no errors - not even a single misprint. I recommend it to every tutor of risk theory as a source of mathematically solid proofs and complete explorations of certain aspects of the subject." R. Norberg. Metrika, Heidelberg
