Download or read book Regimes of Capital in the Post Digital Age written by Szymon Wróbel and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-06-02 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Regimes of Capital in the Post-Digital Age provides a view of the current state of capitalism, through the interrogation of key diagnoses offered by philosophers and social theorists. With attention to questions about the manner in which the advent of the information age has shaped capitalism, the implications of the post- digital age for social capital, and the possible forms of resistance to the problematic aspects of capitalism, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, philosophy, and social theory with interests in critical theory, capitalist society, and digital culture.

Download or read book The Not So Outrageous Idea of a Christian Sociology written by Joseph A. Scimecca and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-08-04 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a rationale for a Christian sociology, challenging the materialist epistemology of contemporary sociology, which provides only a limited understanding of social behavior. Developing a history of the origins of sociology that recognizes the centrality of Christianity to the discipline’s development, it considers the secularization thesis and questions surrounding positivism, scientism and postmodernism, as well as engaging with the work of a range of figures including Margaret Archer, Robert Bellah, Peter Berger, Hans Joas, Thomas Luckmann, David Martin, and Christian Smith. A critique of modern sociology, which argues that a Christian approach provides a better explanation than contemporary paradigms of the polarization occurring today in American society, The Not So Outrageous Idea of a Christian Sociology will appeal to scholars and students with interests in sociological theory, research methods and epistemology, and the sociology of religion.

Download or read book Alfred Schutz Phenomenology and the Renewal of Interpretive Social Science written by Besnik Pula and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-04-16 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, the historical social sciences have moved away from deterministic perspectives and increasingly embraced the interpretive analysis of historical process and social and political change. This shift has enriched the field but also led to a deadlock regarding the meaning and status of subjective knowledge. Cultural interpretivists struggle to incorporate subjective experience and the body into their understanding of social reality. In the early twentieth century, philosopher Alfred Schutz grappled with this very issue. Drawing on Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology and Max Weber’s historical sociology, Schutz pioneered the interpretive analysis of social life from an embodied perspective. However, the recent interpretivist turn, influenced by linguistic philosophies, discourse theory, and poststructuralism, has overlooked the insights of Schutz and other phenomenologists. This book revisits Schutz’s phenomenology and social theory, positioning them against contemporary problems in social theory and interpretive social science research. The book extends Schutz’s key concepts of relevance, symbol relations, theory of language, and lifeworld meaning structures. It outlines Schutz’s critical approach to the social distribution of knowledge and develops his nascent sociology and political economy of knowledge. This book will appeal to readers with interests in social theory, phenomenology, and the methods of interpretive social science, including historical sociology, cultural sociology, science and technology studies, political economy, and international relations.

Download or read book Communicative Reason written by Patrick O'Mahony and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-09-30 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book examines philosophical and sociological approaches within critical theory and more widely from the vantage point of communicative reason. It seeks to revitalize the sociological dimension of critical theory by advancing a critical sociology of reason. It does so fully in the knowledge that reason is a contentious concept in sociology and other disciplines. Nonetheless, building on Habermas’s original insight, it argues that an extensively modified version of communicative reason is indispensable. This modified approach will draw extensively from Peirce’s pragmatist semiotics and critical cognitive sociology. Such a focus has significant implications for meta-theoretical, theoretical-empirical, and methodological approaches in critical theory, critical sociology, and related disciplines. This book will be of interest to readers in the social sciences, humanities, and philosophy who value the importance of a social theory of a reasonable society for their disciplines and for increasingly essential interdisciplinary activities. The book will also appeal to many in critical theory and beyond who are interested in the cognitive foundations of normative orders, including unjust or pathological as well as actually or potentially just foundations. The book emphasizes both validity and critique within communicative reason and critical theory and accordingly presents a distinctive perspective on critical-reconstructive research.

Download or read book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism written by Shoshana Zuboff and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 683 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.

Download or read book The Cognitive Foundations of Classical Sociological Theory written by Ryan McVeigh and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cognitive Foundations of Classical Sociological Theory explores the role that understandings of mind and brain played in the development of sociological theory. It isolates five key authors in the classical tradition and comprehensively explores their oeuvres for moments where they reflect on, engage with, and build from topics related to cognition, placing their work in contact with research today to critically determine areas of relevance, refutation, or revision. Showing how understandings of mind, brain, and body grounded the production of early sociological thought, the book draws attention to the foundational role theories of cognition played in the emergence of sociology as a distinct field of study. With chapters on Comte, Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Mead, The Cognitive Foundations of Classical Sociological Theory constitutes a novel and timely engagement with canonical social theory, extending its application to contemporary social life. It will therefore appeal to scholars of sociology and psychology with interests in classical social theory, cognition, embodiment, and sociality.

Download or read book Being a Lived Body written by Tonino Griffero and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-12-29 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book begins with the distinction between the so-called lived body or felt body (Leib) and the physical body (Körper), tracing the conceptual history of this distinction through key figures in philosophical and social thoughts and articulating a theory of the lived body that draws on the New Phenomenology developed by Hermann Schmitz. An explanation of our being-in-the-world in terms of a felt-bodily communication with all perceived forms and their affective-bodily resonance in us, Being a Lived Body integrates and critically assesses the leading theories of embodiment while presenting a new approach to the body. It will, therefore, appeal to scholars of philosophy, social theory, and anthropology with interests in phenomenology and embodiment.

Download or read book The Digital Age and Its Discontents written by Matteo Stocchetti and published by Helsinki University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-11 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three decades into the ‘digital age’, the promises of emancipation of the digital ‘revolution’ in education are still unfulfilled. Furthermore, digitalization seems to generate new and unexpected challenges – for example, the unwarranted influence of digital monopolies, the radicalization of political communication, and the facilitation of mass surveillance, to name a few. This volume is a study of the downsides of digitalization and the re-organization of the social world that seems to be associated with it. In a critical perspective, technological development is not a natural but a social process: not autonomous from but very much dependent upon the interplay of forces and institutions in society. While influential forces seek to establish the idea that the practices of formal education should conform to technological change, here we support the view that education can challenge the capitalist appropriation of digital technology and, therefore, the nature and direction of change associated with it. This volume offers its readers intellectual prerequisites for critical engagement. It addresses themes such as Facebook’s response to its democratic discontents, the pedagogical implications of algorithmic knowledge and quantified self, as well as the impact of digitalization on academic profession. Finally, the book offers some elements to develop a vision of the role of education: what should be done in education to address the concerns that new communication technologies seem to pose more risks than opportunities for freedom and democracy.

Download or read book Revisiting Social Theory written by D.V. Kumar and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-04-08 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book revisits social theory with a view to highlighting certain essential features of ‘good’ social theory: its ability to raise certain questions, its explanatory power, its critical and reflexive interrogation of concepts, its search for objectivity, its concern to make sense of empirical data and its aim of projecting some degree of generality and abstraction. With particular attention to issues of nationalism, democracy, civil society, state, feminism, neoliberalism, minority rights, environment and North-East Indian society, it considers whether new and more relevant theoretical questions need to be asked. It will therefore appeal to scholars of social theory and political sociology with interests in new approaches to social theory and the development of local or ‘indigenous’ social thought.

Download or read book Social Theory and the Political Imaginary written by Craig Browne and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-12-01 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social Theory and the Political Imaginary: Practice, Critique and History is an innovative work of synthesis, critique, and analysis. It presages a social theory perspective that recognises the constitutive significance of the political imaginary in modernity. Social theory’s current dilemmas are explored through a series of interlinked asssessments of some of its recent substantial strands, specifically, Luc Boltanski’s pragmatism and the wider ‘practical turn’, the perspectives of multiple modernities and global modernity, the outlook of social and political imaginaries, and critical social theory. The political imaginary’s reconfigurations are evident in the tensions of global modernity and original social theory interpretations are advanced of landmark instances of twenty-first century social contestation: the Hong Kong protests conditioned by threats to civil freedoms and a lack of self-determination, the radical democratic practices of anti-austerity movements contesting capitalist globalisation’s injustices, and the inverted cosmopolitanism of the 2005 French Riots challenging the oppression and inequalities experienced by immigrant communities and marginalised youth. These incisive applications of social theory and complementary conceptual innovations illuminate the vicissitudes of social struggles, political forms, and theoretical perspectives. Similarly, reflection on the political imaginary is found to enable a necessary rethinking of the interrelationship of practice, critique and history.

Download or read book The World Computer written by Jonathan Beller and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-22 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The World Computer Jonathan Beller forcefully demonstrates that the history of commodification generates information itself. Out of the omnipresent calculus imposed by commodification, information emerges historically as a new money form. Investigating its subsequent financialization of daily life and colonization of semiotics, Beller situates the development of myriad systems for quantifying the value of people, objects, and affects as endemic to racial capitalism and computation. Built on oppression and genocide, capital and its technical result as computation manifest as racial formations, as do the machines and software of social mediation that feed racial capitalism and run on social difference. Algorithms, derived from for-profit management strategies, conscript all forms of expression—language, image, music, communication—into the calculus of capital such that even protest may turn a profit. Computational media function for the purpose of extraction rather than ameliorating global crises, and financialize every expressive act, converting each utterance into a wager. Repairing this ecology of exploitation, Beller contends, requires decolonizing information and money, and the scripting of futures wagered by the cultural legacies and claims of those in struggle.

Download or read book Against the Background of Social Reality written by Carmelo Lombardo and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-07 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first wide-ranging, organic analysis of the sociology of unmarkedness and taken-for-grantedness, this volume investigates the asymmetry between how we attend to the culturally emphasized features of social reality and ignore the culturally unmarked ones. Concerned with the structures of cultural invisibility, unconscious rules of irrelevance, automatic frames of meaning, and collective attention patterns, it brings together scholarship spanning sociology, anthropology, and social psychology, to cover various aspects of humdrum, unglamorous, nondescript, nothing-to-write-at-home-about social phenomena, developing the key assumptions, underpinnings, and implications of this field of study. As comprehensive analysis of unremarked features of our social existence, this book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in social theory and the sociology of everyday life.

Download or read book Capital and Ideology written by Thomas Piketty and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 1105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Bestseller An NPR Best Book of the Year The epic successor to one of the most important books of the century: at once a retelling of global history, a scathing critique of contemporary politics, and a bold proposal for a new and fairer economic system. Thomas Piketty’s bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century galvanized global debate about inequality. In this audacious follow-up, Piketty challenges us to revolutionize how we think about politics, ideology, and history. He exposes the ideas that have sustained inequality for the past millennium, reveals why the shallow politics of right and left are failing us today, and outlines the structure of a fairer economic system. Our economy, Piketty observes, is not a natural fact. Markets, profits, and capital are all historical constructs that depend on choices. Piketty explores the material and ideological interactions of conflicting social groups that have given us slavery, serfdom, colonialism, communism, and hypercapitalism, shaping the lives of billions. He concludes that the great driver of human progress over the centuries has been the struggle for equality and education and not, as often argued, the assertion of property rights or the pursuit of stability. The new era of extreme inequality that has derailed that progress since the 1980s, he shows, is partly a reaction against communism, but it is also the fruit of ignorance, intellectual specialization, and our drift toward the dead-end politics of identity. Once we understand this, we can begin to envision a more balanced approach to economics and politics. Piketty argues for a new “participatory” socialism, a system founded on an ideology of equality, social property, education, and the sharing of knowledge and power. Capital and Ideology is destined to be one of the indispensable books of our time, a work that will not only help us understand the world, but that will change it.

Download or read book Postdigital Ecopedagogies written by Petar Jandrić and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-06-08 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book conceptualizes ecopedagogies as forms of educational innovation and critique that emerge from, negotiate, debate, produce, resist, and/or overcome the shifting and expansive postdigital ecosystems of humans, machines, nonhuman animals, objects, stuff, and other forms of matter. Contemporary postdigital ecosystems are determined by a range of new bioinformational reconfigurations in areas including capitalism, imperialism, settler-colonialism, and ontological hierarchies more generally. Postdigital ecopedagogies name a condition, a question, and a call for experimentation to link pedagogical research and practice to challenges of our moment. They pose living, breathing, expanding, contracting, fluid, and spatial conditions and questions of our non-chronological present. This book presents analyses of that present from a wide spectrum of disciplines, including but not limited to education studies, philosophy, politics, sociology, arts, and architecture.

Download or read book Books in the Digital Age written by John B. Thompson and published by Polity. This book was released on 2005-03-25 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book publishing industry is going through a period of profound and turbulent change brought about in part by the digital revolution. What is the role of the book in an age preoccupied with computers and the internet? How has the book publishing industry been transformed by the economic and technological upheavals of recent years, and how is it likely to change in the future? This is the first major study of the book publishing industry in Britain and the United States for more than two decades. Thompson focuses on academic and higher education publishing and analyses the evolution of these sectors from 1980 to the present. He shows that each sector is characterized by its own distinctive ‘logic’ or dynamic of change, and that by reconstructing this logic we can understand the problems, challenges and opportunities faced by publishing firms today. He also shows that the digital revolution has had, and continues to have, a profound impact on the book publishing business, although the real impact of this revolution has little to do with the ebook scenarios imagined by many commentators. Books in the Digital Age will become a standard work on the publishing industry at the beginning of the 21st century. It will be of great interest to students taking courses in the sociology of culture, media and cultural studies, and publishing. It will also be of great value to professionals in the publishing industry, educators and policy makers, and to anyone interested in books and their future.

Download or read book After the Digital Tornado written by Kevin Werbach and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-23 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Networks powered by algorithms are pervasive. Major contemporary technology trends - Internet of Things, Big Data, Digital Platform Power, Blockchain, and the Algorithmic Society - are manifestations of this phenomenon. The internet, which once seemed an unambiguous benefit to society, is now the basis for invasions of privacy, massive concentrations of power, and wide-scale manipulation. The algorithmic networked world poses deep questions about power, freedom, fairness, and human agency. The influential 1997 Federal Communications Commission whitepaper “Digital Tornado” hailed the “endless spiral of connectivity” that would transform society, and today, little remains untouched by digital connectivity. Yet fundamental questions remain unresolved, and even more serious challenges have emerged. This important collection, which offers a reckoning and a foretelling, features leading technology scholars who explain the legal, business, ethical, technical, and public policy challenges of building pervasive networks and algorithms for the benefit of humanity. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Download or read book Capital in the Twenty First Century written by Thomas Piketty and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-14 with total page 817 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In this work the author analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality. He shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality--the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth--today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values if political action is not taken. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, the author says, and may do so again. This original work reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.